Lost in the Barrens (13 page)

 

CHAPTER 21

A Welcome Discovery

T
HE LIGHT OF THE LATE DAWN WAS
creeping up the arctic sky as they set off. They had gone only a few yards when Jamie noticed that the fawn Otanak was not with them.

Jamie began calling the young deer, but his voice echoed eerily from the silent hills and there was no sound of small hoofs beating on the hard snow.

Awasin looked worried. “I don't like it,” he said. “After that storm the wolves will be starving, and he'd be easy pickings for them.”

“Let's track him,” Jamie said. Leaving the sled where it was, they picked up the rifle and began looking for the prints of little hoofs. These were not hard to find. Even
on the solidly drifted snow of the valley, the fawn's sharp hoofs had left clear marks.

The boys followed the trail to the westward, in the direction of Caribou Pasture, as they had come to call it. They had gone about a mile when several new sets of tracks appeared alongside those of the fawn. At the sight of these, Jamie felt his heart begin to beat painfully. The scratches in the snow were the marks made by the claws of wolves.

Without a word both boys began to run. They reached the esker and ran, gasping, up its steep slope, still following the trail.

The light was dim, but as they gained the crest they saw a sight they would never in their lives forget. Far up the valley a circle of dark forms moved on the snowy slope of a tiny hillock. As they stared, there came to their ears the long, lonely cry of a wolf, and it was instantly followed by a chorus of growls and short howls as the shadows seemed to flow and twist like currents in a dark and sullen river.

Jamie felt a sob catch in his throat. He did not need to hear Awasin's words to know that it was over.

“He's gone,” Awasin said, and the next instant the roar of the rifle reverberated from the hills about.

Like shadows still, the shapes upon the distant hillock seemed to fade into nothingness and vanish. The range was too far for a good shot, and Awasin did not feel justified in wasting any more of the precious ammunition. With Jamie at his side, he ran forward to the place where the wolves had made their kill. For a long moment they looked down at Otanak, then with unabashed tears in
their eyes they turned away and walked slowly back to the sled.

Rage and sorrow were mixed in Jamie's heart. Otanak had meant much to them, for he had helped immeasurably to dispel the great emptiness of the world they lived in. Jamie was not prepared for what Awasin had to say.

“Best forget about Otanak, Jamie,” Awasin said. “No use blaming the wolves. If anybody is to blame, it's us. It almost always happens when you take a wild animal and make a pet of it. Sometime or other it has to face up to what its wild brothers meet every day—and then it doesn't know enough to help itself. Sooner or later something like this was sure to happen.”

Jamie replied with bitterness, “All the same, I'd like to get a sight on those wolves. I'd make them pay for it!”

Awasin did not answer until they had picked up the pulling straps and were again moving slowly down the valley. Then he said, “Wolves have to eat. What difference is there between their killing the fawn and our killing a dozen does?”

Jamie had no answer for that, and as he thought about it he could see the justice in what Awasin said. His anger against the wolves faded, but he knew it would be many long months before he forgot the little fawn Otanak.

When they emerged on the plains the boys found that the Barrens had again changed its face. The ferocity of the gale had stripped the snow away from all the ridges and hills and piled it in the valleys where it was packed as hard as wood. It was so hard that their feet made no mark on it,
and the sled pulled as if it were on greasy ice. The cold was intense, but without wind, and it did not seriously affect the boys. The rising sun made the white world brilliant and almost pleasant.

Still depressed, the boys wasted no time at Stone Igloo Camp, but after laboriously chopping the hard snow away from a cache, they loaded the sled and were soon ready to set out for home. It was lunchtime then, so they pulled out some cold roast meat that they carried in their traveling bags under their parkas—where it would not freeze—and gulped it down. They had begun to move away when a flicker of movement caught Jamie's eye.

“What's that!” he cried sharply—for an instant memory of the mysterious tracks had flashed into his mind.

Awasin too had seen something, and he already had the rifle out of its skin case. The boys dropped to their knees, and knelt, with rapidly beating hearts, staring into the snowy wastes just west of camp. The flicker of movement came again and two shapes appeared silhouetted on a nearby ridge.

“Wolves!” Jamie muttered with a feeling of relief. Then, recalling Otanak, he reached over, grabbed the rifle, and was taking aim when Awasin stopped him.

“Wait!” the Indian boy whispered. “They don't look like wolves.”

The two animals were now in full view on the crest. They were certainly wolflike, but they did not seem quite big enough or quite the right shape for wolves.

Awasin's keen eyesight made out the difference. With tense excitement in his voice he said, “Those aren't wolves. They're
dogs!
”

Cautiously the boys stood up, while the animals remained motionless a few hundred feet away. Jamie was convinced. “They're dogs all right,” he answered, “but what a size! Half again as big as the Huskies down south.” He clutched Awasin's arm. “We've got to catch them,” he said urgently. “With those two we can have a team—and a chance to get away from here!”

Awasin nodded his head. “We have got to be careful not to scare them, though,” he said. “Most likely they've got lost from some Eskimo camp—they look like Eskimo dogs. If they've been lost long they must be nearly starved. Particularly after that blizzard.”

“They must have smelled our meat cache,” Jamie replied. “Let's see if they'll take food.”

He hurriedly chopped off some pieces of frozen meat from the sled load. Then, very slowly, they walked toward the two motionless animals. The dogs did not stir, and when the boys were fifty feet away they saw the black and white markings, big broad ears, and square ruffs of two magnificent Huskies. Magnificent they were—but very timid too.

Suddenly they both turned and bolted with their tails between their legs. They did not run far. One stumbled and fell down. It lay there, struggling weakly.

Even more carefully the boys walked forward again. The fallen dog made a supreme effort and scrambled to its feet.
It seemed too weak to run, but it was prepared to defend itself. It turned up its lips and snarled at the approaching boys.

“Good dog,” Jamie said soothingly, “good fellow. Come on, boy, have some grub.”

“That's close enough,” Awasin said warningly. “If we scare them now we'll never see them again. Drop the meat and come back to the sled.”

A few minutes later the boys sat on the sled and watched while the two dogs cautiously approached the meat and finally flung themselves on it with ravenous appetites. Frozen as it was, they gulped it down in seconds. One of them raised its head and took a long steady look at the boys; then both dogs turned and walked away to vanish beyond the drifts.

“They're going away!” Jamie cried.

“Don't worry,” Awasin soothed him. “We'll head for home now, and I'm certain those dogs will follow, though we won't see a trace of them. They know they can get food from us now.”

It was well after sunset when the boys unpacked the sled beside the little cabin.

While Jamie started dinner, Awasin took a bag of meat scraps and walked down the valley. On the way back he dropped bits of meat every few yards. He saw no sign of the dogs, but he was sure they were somewhere near.

That night as the boys lay in their sleeping robes Awasin sat up, his ears straining. From somewhere near came the indistinct sound of an animal snuffling. He whis
pered, “I told you so, Jamie! In a week's time we'll be driving a dog team!”

During the next two days they caught only fleeting glimpses of the beasts, but each morning the meat left on the doorstep had vanished. On the third morning Jamie opened the cabin door before dawn, and a sudden scurrying told him that the dogs had spent part of the night curled up in the little log porch the boys had built to keep the snow out of the house.

Now Jamie had an idea, and when he had explained it Awasin enthusiastically helped put it into action. They spent an hour making a frame of spruce saplings that would fit the entrance to the porch. They hinged this at the top with strips of rawhide, then swung it outward and supported it on a slim pole set in the snow. A long piece of
babiche
ran from this pole through a slit in the cabin door, and was tied to a peg on the inside wall. The whole affair was really only a large box trap set so that the boys could trip it from the cabin and catch the dogs in the outer porch.

That night they baited their trap with several whitefish, then they sat silently and waited. An hour passed before they heard faint noises in the porch. Jamie tiptoed to the wall peg and untied the strip of
babiche
. Tensely he waited until chewing sounds told him that the dogs were occupied with their supper.

A sudden jerk on the line, and the spruce door fell with a great bang. Instantly pandemonium broke loose in the porch.

“Light the lamp!” Jamie yelled.

When the cabin was illuminated once more they looked at one another with broad smiles on their faces. “Well, we got them!” Jamie said happily.

Awasin's smile slowly faded and left him looking a little foolish. “But what do we do now?” he asked.

The look of dismay on Jamie's face as he realized what Awasin meant was so funny Awasin couldn't help chuckling. They had thought only of catching the dogs—not of what would follow. The dogs were in the porch and the boys could not get out except by passing through the porch themselves.

“This is a mess,” Jamie said ruefully. “Guess I was too smart. How are we going to get out of here without opening that door?”

“No way,” Awasin replied. “All we can do is open the door and hope for the best. But wait—I'll make a couple of rawhide nooses and if we're lucky we can slip them over the dogs' heads. If we're lucky!”

When the nooses were ready, Awasin stationed himself by the fire with a noose in one hand and a chunk of spruce in the other for a club. Jamie raised the wooden latch of the door, swung it open a few inches, and jumped behind it.

The two dogs were throwing themselves about the tiny porch like mad things, and neither boy could guess what the Huskies would do when they saw the door opened.

What happened was—silence. All movement ceased and there was not a sound while long seconds passed and
the boys waited nervously. At last Jamie peered around the edge of the doorway.

The dogs were crouched together, huddled into one big ball of fur from which four eyes gleamed fearfully. As Jamie peered at them he heard a whine—a sound about as ferocious as a fox terrier pup might make.

“They don't act dangerous!” Awasin said a little shakily. “Let's leave the door open wide and see if we can make friends with them.”

For the next hour they coaxed the dogs with pieces of cooked meat and with gentle words. At last one Husky crawled a few feet forward on its belly. Its ears were flat against its broad head, and it was fawning abjectly.

Jamie threw it a scrap of meat, and after a moment the dog gulped it down. Then its huge and bushy tail wagged almost imperceptibly.

That was the turning point. The rest was only a matter of time. By midnight both dogs had left the porch and crawled timidly into the cabin, where they ate themselves into repletion. Gratefully the boys closed the door—for the cabin had become as cold as an icehouse—and heaped up the fire. When they went to bed the dogs were curled up in a corner, cocking an eye occasionally at the boys in case of danger.

During the whole of the next day neither boy made any effort to touch the dogs. After supper Awasin turned his hand to whittling some arrows from a bunch of straight willow sticks brought up from Stone Igloo Camp. Jamie squatted by the fire sewing himself a new pair of deer-
hide mitts. It was warm and comfortable and quiet in the cabin.

Engrossed in his job, Jamie forgot about the dogs. Suddenly he felt a cold nose touching the nape of his neck.

At the same moment Awasin said quietly, “Sit still, Jamie—he's sniffing you!”

It was the longest minute Jamie had ever lived. At every instant he expected to feel those long white fangs. But what he felt instead was a hot, wet lick as the Husky ran its tongue over his ear. Cautiously Jamie turned his head. The big dog was standing behind him, its great tail waving slowly back and forth. It looked at him out of huge yellow eyes, then with a sigh lay down, curled up, and put its nose under its tail. It was content. It had found not only food and a home—but a master as well.