A Relic of the Pliocene
I wash my hands of him at the start. I cannot father his tales,nor will I be responsible for them. I make these preliminaryreservations, observe, as a guard upon my own integrity. I possessa certain definite position in a small way, also a wife; and forthe good name of the community that honours my existence with itsapproval, and for the sake of her posterity and mine, I cannot takethe chances I once did, nor foster probabilities with the carelessimprovidence of youth. So, I repeat, I wash my hands of him, thisNimrod, this mighty hunter, this homely, blue-eyed, freckle-facedThomas Stevens.Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olivebranches my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford tobe generous. I shall not criticize the tales told me by ThomasStevens, and, further, I shall withhold my judgment. If it beasked why, I can only add that judgment I have none. Long have Ipondered, weighed, and balanced, but never have my conclusions beentwice the same--forsooth! because Thomas Stevens is a greater manthan I. If he have told truths, well and good; if untruths, stillwell and good. For who can prove? or who disprove? I eliminatemyself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do asI have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to hisface the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate.As to where he may be found? The directions are simple: anywherebetween 53 north latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, onthe other, the likeliest hunting grounds that lie between the eastcoast of Siberia and farthermost Labrador. That he is there,somewhere, within that clearly defined territory, I pledge the wordof an honourable man whose expectations entail straight speakingand right living.Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when wefirst met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into mycamp when I thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermostpost of civilization. At the sight of his human face, the first inweary months, I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms(and I am not by any means a demonstrative man); but to him hisvisit seemed the most casual thing under the sun. He just strolledinto the light of my camp, passed the time of day after the customof men on beaten trails, threw my snowshoes the one way and acouple of dogs the other, and so made room for himself by the fire.Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of soda and to see if Ihad any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancient pipe, loadedit with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your leave,whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff wasfairly good. He sighed with the contentment of the just, andliterally absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, andit did my smoker's heart good to behold him.Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; justsort of knocking round a bit. Had come up from the Great Slavesome time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukoncountry. The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries onthe Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep. Inoticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular,calling it the Reindeer River--a conceited custom that the OldTimers employ against the CHECHAQUAS and all tenderfeet in general.But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course, that therewas no sting, and I forgave him. He also had it in view, he said,before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to make a little runup Fort o' Good Hope way.Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over andbeyond the Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod;and when a nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, fromnowhere in particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on suchin terms of "trapsing" and "a little run," it is fair time to rouseup and shake off the dream. Wherefore I looked about me; saw thefly and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs;saw the grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogscircling on the edge of the light; and, above, a great streamer ofthe aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-west. Ishivered. There is a magic in the Northland night, that steals inon one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are clutched anddowned before you are aware. Then I looked to the snowshoes, lyingprone and crossed where he had flung them. Also I had an eye to mytobacco pouch. Half, at least, of its goodly store had vamosed.That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all.Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--one of those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings andwandering like a lost soul through great vastnesses and unknowndeeps. Oh, well, let his moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathershis tangled wits together. Who knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-creature's voice may bring all straight again.So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked ofgame and the ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf ofwesternmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies. Heaverred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo still roamed;that he had hung on the flanks of the caribou when they ran by thehundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk-ox'swinter trail.And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but byno account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth.Why it was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a taletold to me by a man who had dwelt in the land too long to knowbetter. It was of the great bear that hugs the steep slopes of StElias, never descending to the levels of the gentler inclines. NowGod so constituted this creature for its hillside habitat that thelegs of one side are all of a foot longer than those of the other.This is mighty convenient, as will be reality admitted. So Ihunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in the first person,present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it the necessarygarnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see theman stunned by the recital.Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had heobjected, denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of theanimal's inability to turn about and go the other way--had he donethis, I say, I could have taken him by the hand for the truesportsman that he was. Not he. He sniffed, looked on me, andsniffed again; then gave my tobacco due praise, thrust one footinto my lap, and bade me examine the gear. It was a MUCLUC of theInnuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads, and devoid ofbeads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that wasremarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it remindedme of walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrusever bore so marvellous a growth of hair. On the side and anklesthis hair was well-nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrushand snow; but around the top and down the more sheltered back itwas coarse, dirty black, and very thick. I parted it withdifficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur that is common withnorthern animals, but found it in this case to be absent. This,however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, the tufts thathad survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down andasked, "Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," Ianswered candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of thehair, puzzled me."That," he said, and said without the slightest hint ofimpressiveness, "that came from a mammoth.""Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of myunbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from theearth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we haveunearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit tomelt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that noliving specimen exists. Our explorers--"At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! Aweakly breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man,what you may know of the mammoth and his ways."Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited myhook by ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on thesubject in hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal wasprehistoric, and marshalled all my facts in support of this. Imentioned the Siberian sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammothbones; spoke of the large quantities of fossil ivory purchased fromthe Innuits by the Alaska Commercial Company; and acknowledgedhaving myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravelof the Klondike creeks. "All fossils," I concluded, "found in themidst of debris deposited through countless ages.""I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had amost confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-melon. Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselvesinto thinking that they are really raising or eating them, thereare no such things as extant water-melons?""But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, whichwas puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forthvegetable life in lavish abundance to support so monstrouscreations. Nowhere in the North is the soil so prolific. Ergo,the mammoth cannot exist.""I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland,for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the sametime, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth nolonger exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my ownright arm."Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewoodat the dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth andrequite me for my St. Elias bear."It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silencehad intervened. "I was in camp one day--""Where?" I interrupted.He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, wherestretched a TERRA INCOGNITA into which vastness few men havestrayed and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch.Klooch was as handsome a little KAMOOKS as ever whined betwixt thetraces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-blood Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her,and with understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the HudsonBay stock. I tell you, O man, she was a corker combination. Andnow, on this day I have in mind, she was brought to pup through apure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and long of limb, with big lungsand no end of staying powers. Say! Was there ever the like? Itwas a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look forward tobig things."As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safelydelivered. I was squatting on my hams over the litter--sevensturdy, blind little beggars--when from behind came a bray oftrumpets and crash of brass. There was a rush, like the wind-squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and I was midway to myfeet when knocked flat on my face. At the same instant I heardKlooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted your fistin his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I twistedmy head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the bluesky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain offlesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of theopen. I caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big ingirth as my body, standing out straight behind. The next secondonly a tremendous hole remained in the thicket, though I couldstill hear the sounds as of a tornado dying quickly away,underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees snapping and crashing."I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground withthe muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrelout of line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then Ilooked for the slut, and--and what do you suppose?"I shook my head."May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left ofher! Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, allgone. Where she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression inthe soft earth, all of a yard in diameter, and around the edges afew scattered hairs."I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, andglanced at Nimrod."The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and itstusks scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe,myself, at the time, for all that it had just happened. But if mysenses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in thebrush. And there was--or, rather, there was not--Klooch and thepups. O man, it makes me hot all over now when I think of itKlooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new race! And a rampaging,ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood, wiping them, rootand branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder that theblood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed thehand-axe and took the trail?""The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture."The hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twentyfeet--"Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn'tit kill you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's thetime I've laughed about it since, but at the time it was nolaughing matter, I was that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch.Think of it, O man! A brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrightedbreed, and wiped out before ever it opened its eyes or took out itsintention papers! Well, so be it. Life's full of disappointments,and rightly so. Meat is best after a famine, and a bed soft aftera hard trail."As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, andhung to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back towardthe head, I was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, Imight as well stop long enough to explain a couple of points. Upthereabouts, in the midst of the mountains, is an almighty curiousformation. There is no end of little valleys, each like the othermuch as peas in a pod, and all neatly tucked away with straight,rocky walls rising on all sides. And at the lower ends are alwayssmall openings where the drainage or glaciers must have broken out.The only way in is through these mouths, and they are all small,and some smaller than others. As to grub--you've slushed around onthe rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way, mostlikely, seeing as you're a traveller. And you know how stuff growsthere--big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that's the way it waswith those valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses andsuch things in patches higher than your head. Rain three days outof four during the summer months; and food in them for a thousandmammoths, to say nothing of small game for man."But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got windedand gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me mydander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace ofmind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, thatthat stood for SKOOKUM MAMOOK PUKAPUK--excuse Chinook, I mean therewas a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was verynarrow, and the walls steep. High up on one side was one of thosebig pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some call them, weighingall of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. I hit back forcamp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past, and gotmy ammunition. It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed; soI opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touchedit off with slow fuse. Wasn't much of a charge, but the oldboulder tilted up lazily and dropped down into place, with justspace enough to let the creek drain nicely. Now I had him.""But how did you have him?" I queried. "Who ever heard of a mankilling a mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, withanything else?""O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with aslight manifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what ofKlooch and the gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this notnew and most unusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it.Listen, and you shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happenedin the youth of the world when cavemen rounded up the kill withhand-axe of stone. Such would have served me as well. Now is itnot a fact that man can outwalk the dog or horse? That he can wearthem out with the intelligence of his endurance?"I nodded."Well?"The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue."My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed.There was no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth,and I had him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered likea fiend, pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valleythree times before I knocked off for supper. Don't you see? Arace-course! A man and a mammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon,and stars to referee!"It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that's nobeaver dream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on theinner circle, eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, andsnatching winks of sleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate attimes and turn. Then I'd head for soft ground where the creekspread out, and lay anathema upon him and his ancestry, and darehim to come on. But he was too wise to bog in a mud puddle. Oncehe pinned me in against the walls, and I crawled back into a deepcrevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me with his trunk, I'dbelt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit tosplit my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had me and didn'thave me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man's fool. Heknew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he made uphis mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn'tfigured on the commissary. There was neither grub nor water aroundthat spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege.He'd stand before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me andflapping mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then thethirst would come on him and he'd ramp round and roar till theearth shook, calling me every name he could lay tongue to. Thiswas to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I wassufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and try to make asneak for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almost there--onlya couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and backhe'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. AfterI'd done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed histactics. Grasped the time element, you see. Without a word ofwarning, away he'd go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming toget there and back before I ran away. Finally, after cursing memost horribly, he raised the siege and deliberately stalked off tothe water-hole."That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but afterthat the hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round,like a six days' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased. My clotheswent to rags and tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at lastI ran naked as a son of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe inone hand and a cobble in the other. In fact, I never stopped, savefor peeps of sleep in the crannies and ledges of the cliffs. Asfor the bull, he got perceptibly thinner and thinner--must havelost several tons at least--and as nervous as a schoolmarm on thewrong side of matrimony. When I'd come up with him and yell, orlain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like a skittish coltand tremble all over. Then he'd pull out on the run, tail andtrunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing,and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful. A mostimmoral beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer."But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering andcrying like a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quiveringjelly-mountain of misery. He'd get attacks of palpitation of theheart, and stagger around like a drunken man, and fall down andbark his shins. And then he'd cry, but always on the run. O man,the gods themselves would have wept with him, and you yourself orany other man. It was pitiful, and there was so I much of it, butI only hardened my heart and hit up the pace. At last I wore himclean out, and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry,and thirsty. When I found he wouldn't budge, I hamstrung him, andspent the better part of the day wading into him with the hand-axe,he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to shut himoff. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man couldsling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably. Barringthe fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was faireating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasteda man a twelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself.""And where is this valley?" I askedHe waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said:"Your tobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in mypouch, but I shall carry the recollection of it until I die. Intoken of my appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on yourown feet, I will present to you these muclucs. They commemorateKlooch and the seven blind little beggars. They are also souvenirsof an unparalleled event in history, namely, the destruction of theoldest breed of animal on earth, and the youngest. And their chiefvirtue lies in that they will never wear out."Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe,gripped my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow.Concerning this tale, for which I have already disclaimedresponsibility, I would recommend those of little faith to make avisit to the Smithsonian Institute. If they bring the requisitecredentials and do not come in vacation time, they will undoubtedlygain an audience with Professor Dolvidson. The muclucs are in hispossession, and he will verify, not the manner in which they wereobtained, but the material of which they are composed. When hestates that they are made from the skin of the mammoth, thescientific world accepts his verdict. What more would you have?
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