The Grizzly King by James Oliver Curwood (read aloud books TXT) 📕

any of your kind? No, for you are self-appointed civilizers, working according to a certain code."
Ransom's weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a questioning look in Roscoe's eyes, as though he were striving to look through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision.
"If most of us believed as you believe," he said at last, "civilization would end. We would progress no farther."
"And this civilization," said Ransom, "can there not be too much of it? Was it any worse for God's first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand other men, than it is for civilization's sweat-shops to slay twenty thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars and the things you wear? Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn't it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial supremacy kills more people in a day than God's first people killed in a year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can we call it civilization any longer? This talk may all be bally rot, Roscoe. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is. There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures progress as God meant progress to be. I am saying this because I want you to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them. You may find up there the last chapter in life, as it was largely intended that life should be in the beginning of things. And I want you to understand it, because in your books you possess a power which should be well directed. When I received your last letter I hunted up the best man I knew as guide and companion for you--old Rameses, down at the Mission. He is called Rameses because he looks like the old boy himself. You said you wanted to learn Cree, and he'll teach it to you. He will teach you a lot of other things, and when you look at him, especially at night beside the campfire, you will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the first people."
Roscoe, at thirty-two, had not lost his boy's enthusiasm in life, in spite of the fact that he had studied too deeply, and had seen too much, and had begun fighting for existence while still in bare feet. From the beginning it seemed as though some grim monster of fate had hovered about him, making his path as rough as it could, and striking him down whenever the opportunity came. His own tremendous energy and ambition had carried him to the top.
He worked himself through college, and became a success in his way. But at no time could he remember real happiness. It had almost come to him, he thought, a year before--in the form of a girl; but this promise had passed like the others because, of a sudden, he found that she had shattered the most precious of all his ideals. So he picked himself up, and, encouraged by his virile optimism, began looking forward again. Bad luck had so worked its hand in the moulding of him that he had come to live chiefly in anticipation, and though this bad luck had played battledore and shuttlecock with him, the things which he anticipated were pleasant and beautiful. He believed that the human race was growing better, and that each year was bringing his ideals just so much nearer to realization. More than once he had told himself that he was living two or three centuries too soon. Ransom, his old college chum, had been the first to suggest that he was living some thousands of years too late.
He thought of this a great deal during the first pleasant weeks of the autumn, which he and old Rameses spent up in the Lac la Ronge and Reindeer Lake country. During this time he devoted himself almost entirely to the study of Cree under Rameses' tutelage, and the more he learned of it the more he saw the truth of what Ransom had told him once upon a time, that the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world. At the upper end of the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music. He had learned French in Paris, and had heard Italian in Rome, but never in his life had he heard words or voices so beautiful as those which fell from the red, full lips of the Cree girls. He thought more seriously than ever of what Ransom had said about the first people, and the beginning of things.
Late in October they swung westward through the Sissipuk and Burntwood water ways to Nelson House, and at this point Rameses returned homeward. Roscoe struck north, with two new guides, and on the eighteenth of November the first of the two great storms which made the year of 1907 one of the most tragic in the history of the far Northern people overtook them on Split Lake, thirty miles from a Hudson's Bay post. It was two weeks later before they reached this post, and here Roscoe was given the first of several warnings.
"This has been the worst autumn we've had for years," said the factor to him. "The Indians haven't caught half enough fish to carry them through, and this storm has ruined the early-snow hunting in which they usually get enough meat to last them until spring. We're stinting ourselves on our own supplies now, and farther north the Company will soon be on famine rations if the cold doesn't let up--and it won't. They won't want an extra mouth up there, so you'd better turn back. It's going to be a starvation winter."
But Roscoe, knowing as little as the rest of man-kind of the terrible famines of the northern people, which keep an area one-half as large as the whole of Europe down to a population of thirty thousand, went on. A famine, he argued, would give him greater opportunity for study.
Two weeks later he was at York Factory, and from there he continued to Fort Churchill, farther up on Hudson's Bay. By the time he reached this point, early in January, the famine of those few terrible weeks during which more than fifteen hundred people died of starvation had begun. From the Barren Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late in February the temperature did not rise above thirty degrees below zero, and remained for the most of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the wilderness reports of starvation came to the Company's posts. Traplines could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose, caribou, and even the furred animals had buried themselves under the snow. Indians and halfbreeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice Roscoe saw mothers who brought dead babies in their arms. One day a white trapper came in with his dogs and sledge, and on the sledge, wrapped in a bear skin, was his wife, who had died fifty miles back in the forest.
Late in January there came a sudden rise in the temperature, and Roscoe prepared to take advantage of the change to strike south and westward again, toward Nelson House. Dogs could not be had for love or money, so on the first of February he set out on snowshoes with an Indian guide and two weeks' supply of provisions. The fifth night, in the wild, Barren country west of the Etawney, his Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Roscoe investigated he found him half dead with a strange sickness. Roscoe thought of smallpox, the terrible plague that usually follows northern famine, and a shiver ran through him. He made the Indian's balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The temperature fell again, and the cold became intense. Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Roscoe knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game. But there was no life. Even the brush sparrows and snow hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that he might take what food was left, and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself. But the idea never got further than a first thought. He kept to his post, and each day spent half an hour in writing. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible day, the beginning of the second great storm of that winter. There was food for another twenty-four hours, and Roscoe packed it, together with his blankets and a little tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease. Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian's balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth--the plague-signal of the North.
Then he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that his one chance was to keep the wind at his back.
* * * * *
This was the beginning of the wonderful experience which Roscoe Cummins afterward described in his book "The First People and the Valley of Silent Men." He prepared another manuscript which for personal reasons was never published, the story of a dark-eyed girl of the First People--but this is to come. It has to do with the last tragic weeks of this winter of 1907, in which it was a toss-up between all things of flesh and blood in the Northland to see which would win--life or death--and in which a pair of dark eyes and a voice from the First People turned a sociologist into a possible Member of Parliament.
* * * * *
At the end of his first day's struggle Roscoe built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber, which was not much more than brush. If he had been an older hand he would have observed that this bit of timber, and every tree and bush that he had passed since noon, was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. It was a sign of the Great Barrens, and of the fierce storms that swept over them, destroying even the life of the trees. He cooked and ate his last food the following day, and went on. The small timber turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly. All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he