The Son of the Wolf quotes

The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work.

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity⁠—the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven’s artillery⁠—but the most stupendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence.

All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice.

Then he returned to Mason, who had fallen into a coma, and long after she was out of sight crouched by the fire, waiting, hoping, praying for his comrade to die.

It is not pleasant to be alone with painful thoughts in the White Silence.

The silence of gloom is merciful, shrouding one as with protection and breathing a thousand intangible sympathies; but the bright White Silence, clear and cold, under steely skies, is pitiless.

At high noon, the sun, without raising its rim above the southern horizon, threw a suggestion of fire athwart the heavens, then quickly drew it back. Malemute Kid roused and dragged himself to his comrade’s side. He cast one glance about him.

The White Silence seemed to sneer, and a great fear came upon him.

There was a sharp report; Mason swung into his aerial sepulcher; and Malemute Kid lashed the dogs into a wild gallop as he fled across the snow.

Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.

He has no conception of the subtle atmosphere exhaled by the sex feminine so long as he bathes in it;

For all the world, it was like a scene of olden time—a lady and her knight. Mackenzie drew her up full height and swept her red lips with his moustache—the, to her, foreign caress of the Wolf.

It was a meeting of the stone age and the steel; but she was none the less a woman, as her crimson cheeks and the luminous softness of her eyes attested.

There was a thrill of excitement in the air as Scruff Mackenzie, a bulky bundle under his arm, threw open the flap of Thling-Tinneh’s tent.

“So you see,” he concluded, “we do not actually take away their privilege of fighting; and yet I don’t believe they’ll fight when they see the beauty of the scheme.

Life’s a game and men the gamblers. They’ll stake their whole pile on the one chance in a thousand. Take away that one chance, and⁠—they won’t play.

”

“

Well, as yet, I haven’t found the answer.

”

Occasionally, the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip got the better of them, though they strove to wholly ignore each other during these mute periods.

And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God had ever come to create the other.

With little to do, time became an intolerable burden to them. This naturally made them still lazier. They sank into a physical lethargy which there was no escaping, and which made them rebel at the performance of the smallest chore.

But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled.

The Northland is the Northland, and men work out their souls by strange rules, which other men, who have not journeyed into far countries, cannot come to understand.

An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and fell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet when he got back. Home did not seem so very far away now. Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache.

Then Malemute Kid arose, cup in hand, and glanced at the greased-paper window, where the frost stood full three inches thick. “

A health to the man on trail this night; may his grub hold out; may his dogs keep their legs; may his matches never miss fire.

”

“It’s a cold night, boys—a bitter cold night,” was the irrelevant commencement of his defense. “You’ve all travelled trail, and know what that stands for.

Don’t jump a dog when he’s down.

You’ve only heard one side. A whiter man than Jack Westondale never ate from the same pot nor stretched blanket with you or me. Last fall he gave his whole cleanup, forty thousand, to Joe Castrell, to buy in on Dominion.

These things are familiar to us all, and those people who do them, or even question them too closely, are apt to lose a beautiful faith which is known as eternal fitness.

Edwin Bentham was a boy, thrust by mischance into a man’s body⁠—a boy who could complacently pluck a butterfly, wing from wing, or cower in abject terror before a lean, nervy fellow, not half his size.

He was a selfish crybaby, hidden behind a man’s mustache and stature, and glossed over with a skin-deep veneer of culture and conventionality. Yes;

To all of us such hours at some time come—that is, to us who are not too phlegmatic.

Some people are good, not from inherent love of virtue, but from sheer laziness.

But those of us who know weak moments may understand.

Even then, respecting, almost venerating their power, and pondering over it, he had yet to divine its secret essence—the honour and the law. And it was only by the cumulative evidence of years that he had finally come to understand.

Being an alien, when he did know he knew it better than the white man himself; being an Indian, he had achieved the impossible.

And of these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own people—a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee.

Each time a man fell it was with the firm belief that he would rise no more; yet he did rise, and again and again.

The flesh yielded, the will conquered; but each triumph was a tragedy.

The Indian with the frozen foot, no longer erect, crawled forward on hand and knee. He rarely rested, for he knew the penalty exacted by the frost. Even Mrs. Eppingwell’s lips were at last set in a stony smile, and her eyes, seeing, saw not.

It was soon noised about that the “Russian Princess” was not Freda Moloof.

Interest deepened. Here was a fresh enigma.

They knew Freda though they could not find her, but here was somebody they had found and did not know. Even the women could not place her, and they knew every good dancer in the camp.

All of a night the men toiled at the paddles, and the women cast out the waves which threw in upon us, and we fought with the storm.

The salt spray froze upon my mother’s breast till her breath passed with the passing of the tide. But I⁠—I raised my voice with the wind and the storm, and lived.

“Akatan, which is in the Aleutians; Akatan, beyond Chignik, beyond Kardalak, beyond Unimak. As I say, we dwelt in Akatan, which lies in the midst of the sea on the edge of the world.

“Akatan, which is in the Aleutians; Akatan, beyond Chignik, beyond Kardalak, beyond Unimak. As I say, we dwelt in Akatan, which lies in the midst of the sea on the edge of the world.

We farmed the salt seas for the fish, the seal, and the otter; and our homes shouldered about one another on the rocky strip between the rim of the forest and the yellow beach where our kayaks lay.

We were not many, and the world was very small. There were strange lands to the east—islands like Akatan; so we thought all the world was islands and did not mind.

We farmed the salt seas for the fish, the seal, and the otter; and our homes shouldered about one another on the rocky strip between the rim of the forest and the yellow beach where our kayaks lay.

We were not many, and the world was very small.

There were strange lands to the east—islands like Akatan; so we thought all the world was islands and did not mind.

I thought of these things day by day, and when I grew to a stripling I came to ask why this should be so. And they answered, ‘We do not know, but that in such way your fathers did.’

And I marveled that those which were to come should fight the battles of those that were gone, and in it I could see no right.

But the people said it must be, and I was only a stripling.

And I was made weak like a newborn child, and my legs would no more stand under me.

Unga screamed, and she laid hold of the things of the house with her hands, till they fell all about us as he dragged her to the door.

Then he took her in his great arms, and when she tore at his yellow hair laughed with a sound like that of the big bull seal in the rut.

but I said never a word, waiting till the time of the full moon, when I put fish and oil in my kayak and went away to the east.

I saw many islands and many people, and I, who had lived on the edge, saw that the world was very large.

I talked by signs; but they had not seen a schooner nor a man with the mane of a sea lion, and they pointed always to the east. And I slept in queer places, and ate odd things, and met strange faces.

where the harvests lay rich on the plains; and where great cities were fat with men that lived like women, with false words in their mouths and their hearts black with the lust of gold.

And all the while my people of Akatan hunted and fished, and were happy in the thought that the world was small.

“But the look in the eyes of Unga coming home from the fishing was with me always, and I knew I would find her when the time was met.

“

So I drifted, like those little fish which raise a sail to the wind but cannot steer.

But my eyes and my ears were open always, and I went among men who travelled much, for I knew they had but to see those I sought to remember.

… all said he treated her like a queen, and many marveled as to what breed of woman she was for there was other blood in her veins, and she was different from the women of Akatan, and no one knew her for what she was.

Aye, she was a queen; but I was a chief, and the son of a chief, and I had paid for her an untold price of skin and boat and bead.

“But why so many words? I was a sailorman, and knew the way of the ships on the seas. I followed to England, and then to other countries. Sometimes I heard of them by word of mouth, sometimes I read of them in the papers;

As I say, the way was long and the trail unpacked. Sometimes, in a day’s toil, we made no more than eight miles, or ten, and at night we slept like dead men.

And never once did they dream that I was Naass, head man of Akatan, the righter of wrongs.

“We now made smaller caches, and in the nighttime it was a small matter to go back on the trail we had broken and change them in such way that one might deem the wolverines the thieves.

a third had been mauled by a baldface grizzly; a fourth had hunted for game and starved—and so it went, and they had been loath to leave the gold, and had died by the side of it in one way or another.

And the worthless gold they had gathered yellowed the floor of the cabin like in a dream.

“But his soul was steady, and his head clear, this man I had led thus far. ‘We have nothing to eat,’ he said, ‘and we will only look upon this gold, and see whence it comes and how much there be.