The Golden Snare Read online

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  THE GOLDEN SNARE

  BY

  JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

  AUTHOR OF KAZAN, THE DANGER TRAIL, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE, THEGRIZZLY KING, ETC.

  JTABLE 10 26 1

  THE GOLDEN SNARE

  CHAPTER I

  Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was, aboveall other things, a creature of environment--and necessity, and of thatsomething else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and atothers a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, andthe girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed toomuch. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if hereally had what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it washidden--hidden to the forests and the wild things that had made him.

  Bram's story started long before he was born, at least threegenerations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north ofSixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts acanoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great Slaveand thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a number ofremarkable ethnological changes. The racial characteristics of theworld he is entering change swiftly. The thin-faced Chippewa with hisalert movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree,with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racierbirchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; eachnew tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, untilat last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place.And the Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is stillbroader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human history callhim Eskimo.

  The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular point.There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of that hundredyear story which was to have its finality in Bram. But there were morein time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first with the Chippewa, andthen with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa Johnson blood, when at lastit reached the Eskimo, had in it also a strain of Chippewyan. It iscurious how the name itself lived. Johnson! One entered a tepee or acabin expecting to find there a white man, and was startled when hediscovered the truth.

  Bram, after nearly a century of this intermixing of bloods, was athrowback--a white man, so far as his skin and his hair and his eyeswent. In other physical ways he held to the type of his half-strainEskimo mother, except in size. He was six feet, and a giant instrength. His face was broad, his cheek-bones high, his lips thick, hisnose flat. And he was WHITE. That was the shocking thing about it all.Even his hair was a reddish blonde, wild and coarse and ragged like alion's mane, and his eyes were sometimes of a curious blue, and atothers--when he was angered--green like a cat's at night-time.

  No man knew Bram for a friend. He was a mystery. He never remained at apost longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for supplies, andit might be months or even years before he returned to that particularpost again. He was ceaselessly wandering. More or less the RoyalNorthwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and in many reports offaraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are the laconic words, "Wesaw Bram and his wolves traveling northward" or "Bram and his wolvespassed us"--always Bram AND HIS WOLVES. For two years the Police losttrack of him. That was when Bram was buried in the heart of the SulphurCountry east of the Great Bear. After that the Police kept an evencloser watch on him, waiting, and expecting something to happen. Andthen--the something came. Bram killed a man. He did it so neatly and soeasily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was welloff in flight before it was discovered that his victim was dead. Thenext tragedy followed quickly--a fortnight later, when Corporal Lee anda private from the Fort Churchill barracks closed in on him out on theedge of the Barren. Bram didn't fire a shot. They could hear his great,strange laugh when they were still a quarter of a mile away from him.Bram merely set loose his wolves. By a miracle Corporal Lee lived todrag himself to a half-breed's cabin, where he died a little later, andthe half-breed brought the story to Fort Churchill.

  After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he livedin those four or five years that followed would well be worth hispardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers ofa book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it. Alone. In all that timewithout a voice to talk to him. Not once appearing at a post for food.A loup-garou. An animal-man. A companion of wolves. By the end of thethird year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack. It was wolf,all wolf. From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty inhis pack. They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed.Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death, but thesewolf-beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they recognizedinstinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And Bram,monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they werebrother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate withthem, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were comradeshipand protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was meat in thecountry, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a caribou or amoose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram himself therewould always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he arrived. Fouryears of that! The Police would not believe it. They laughed at theoccasional rumors that drifted in from the far places; rumors that Bramhad been seen, and that his great voice had been heard rising above thehowl of his pack on still winter nights, and that half-breeds andIndians had come upon his trails, here and there--at widely divergentplaces. It was the French half-breed superstition of the chasse-galerethat chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere is a thing notto be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of creatures who havesold their souls to the devil for the power of navigating the air, andthere were those who swore with their hands on the crucifix of theVirgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram and his wolvespursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through the skies.

  So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram, meanwhile, keepinghimself from all human eyes, was becoming more and more each day likethe wolves who were his brothers. But the white blood in a man dieshard, and always there flickered in the heart of Bram's huge chest agreat yearning. It must at times have been worse than death--thatyearning to hear a human voice, to have a human creature to speak to,though never had he loved man or woman. Which brings us at last to thefinal tremendous climax in Bram's life--to the girl, and the other man.