Chapter II: A Housekeeping

"More to-morrow," the Master-Girl had said, but to-morrow has a knack of taking the bit in its teeth. When Dêh-Yān looked forth at the weather very early next morning she knew that her path was blocked. Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling from clouds which were creeping down the wooded shoulders of the foot-hills after powdering their bare polls with the first fall of autumn. The nine white giants which never changed were hidden, and the horrid, bitter, frozen river of ice which came winding down from the closed valley which we call the Lap of the Gods, bearing dirt and stones upon its cracked and dirty back, was hidden too.

The old chief sniffed more snow in the sky and bade strike the wigwams, the summer homes of his people. 'Twas ho, for their winter quarters, the range of southward-facing limestone caverns, a ten-fingers' march down-stream. Certain braves were sent on ahead to prospect and smoke out the hyænas which were pretty sure to have usurped possession.

Preparations began at once and the Master-Girl must make herself conspicuously useful and prominent in the flitting with whatever heart she set to it. As she worked and packed she thought hard and keenly as she had never thought before in her life. Hitherto her thoughts had been solely for her tribe, and upon topics upon which she could think aloud, but, now, and for the first time, she had thoughts for someone outside the circle which had enclosed her since she could first remember, and thoughts which must most carefully be kept to herself; yes, so rigorously that she gabbled loudly, as girls who work in company will when they fear the suspicion of having any private thoughts at all.

Before mid-day the march was begun, and the Master-Girl, still chatting loudly and thinking hard, must take her place on the trail, albeit with a very backward-looking heart. How was her man getting on?--This cold was bad for him, he had no bison-skin robe with him. A wife-hunter's kit is light, and no doubt the weather had been warmer when he left his people upon the other, the sunny side of the ranges. Another night of this would finish him. She had given him her word, too, and the Master-Girl was as truthful as girls went in those days, which means she didn't lie from choice, and had a natural pride in doing the thing which she had said she would do, even if it proved unexpectedly difficult.

Thus it befell that without committing herself to any specific plan the Master-Girl kept a definite end resolutely in view, even to the extent of selecting for her special burdens on the march certain articles which on another occasion she might have placed upon the back of one and another of her pupils.

The braves formed line and scouted for game ahead of the old men in the centre. The squaws and girls staggered slowly behind bowed beneath the property of the tribe, the accumulated gettings of a summer's hunting. There were also the household stuff and the babies.

So big were the flakes that progress was difficult from the first, and presently became impossible, the smaller and more heavily-laden girls could not be kept going. It was no use beating the stragglers. The old chief called a halt. When young things begin to get behind, someone will presently be missing. The braves, who had come upon bears' sign, might follow it up; but a camp must be pitched for the night at any rate, and the girls must drop their burdens and forth for firing before the snow covered all. Down went ill-secured bundles of skins, sheaves of assegais, wallets of jerked deer-meat, the miscellaneous lumber of a tribe of hunters, and out went the stick collectors; 'twas then or not at all.

A little girl near the edge of the covert saw the Master-Girl bending beneath a faggot, saw her drop it and run, heard her shriek "_Bear!_" There was a headlong race through swirling flakes over and under fallen trunks and laden boughs: five minutes later the last of the runners was safe in camp. The mother-squaws were scolding, counting, cackling, but where was Dêh-Yān? The hunters must be recalled, but were far ahead running a trail. By the time they were told of what had happened, and the pack had been lifted, the snow had covered all marks, indeed a good deal of property which had been thrown down in the confusion was temporarily lost. For the rest of the short dark day the braves cast forward up this gully and that glen, but it was upon their return that a hound scratched up from under a drift a skin wallet stiff and red. The finder of this grim relic brought it to the old chief in good faith. The elder looked, sniffed, snarled, "Fool!--this is not blood, but berry-juice!" whereat Gow-Loo, a somewhat jolter-headed young savage, slunk away cursing the lost girl and wishing the bear a good meal of her. Later he cursed her more bitterly still.

A hasty camp was pitched, ill-warmed, ill-lighted. The squaws huddled amid their shuddering children, the men never laid down their arms all night. A cannibal bear was the most terrible enemy known to the tribe; a taste for human flesh once acquired, and the fear of man once overcome, there was no knowing to what lengths such a beast might go. 'Twas opined to be no brown bear either, but a grizzly, or worse, a cave monster, one of the sort that even the lions feared, a brute that hung around the mammoth herd on its march, and occasionally cut off a calf. Nobody slept, and there was but one topic of conversation, the fate of Dêh-Yān.

One boy, indeed, the boy whom she had spanked the day before, stuck to it that she had outrun him whilst making for camp, had passed him running silently and running wide, but none believed him, for he was not a truthful boy, nor did his tale obtain a moment's credence from the fact that next morning certain assegais, axes and skins were missing. Such losses are incidental to a panic when women and girls run and cry out and drop things; they would be found, if and when the snow melted. But the snow did not melt.

So, a day later, the Little Moons trailed down in close order to their winter quarters, leaving their summer camp under a robe of new snow. The fate of the First Governess added a delicious piquancy to the nightly tremors of the children whom she had whipped. The women regretted, grumbled and speculated without a misgiving, but a doubt remained in the mind of a certain young brave, which doubt he later imparted to a couple of his comrades, who turned it over silently in their minds.

* * * * *

The man with the broken leg had made a poor night of it. He had finished the jerked deer-meat and was ravenously hungry, sickeningly, dreadfully hungry, and quite desperately cold. He had been telling himself all night between the brief naps permitted him by the various pains, cramps and gnawings which assailed him, that this girl could not return, yet, all through, something within him kept the spark of hope alight. A dark, thick, long-delayed morning, with eddying flakes as big as beech-leaves, put that spark out. Such weather he knew would break up the summer camp at once. The girl, who, under other circumstances, might conceivably have paid him a single surreptitious visit, would be tied to her burden and to the line of march; every hour would lengthen the distance between them. No, it was all up ... he must die ... and this dying was very slow work ... and abominably painful.... He wished the braves of her tribe had found him.... He would have shown those dirty Little Moons how a Sun-Disc man could stand fire. Ugh!--he was a fool to have given the creature a second thought--a mere Little Moon woman, useful perhaps when properly trained, but one of a backward tribe that ate snake (think, snake!) and plumed their axes with owls' feathers.

The contempt and hatred felt by a savage for a man of another totem and habits is almost inconceivably bitter, nearly as fierce and irrational as the loathing entertained by an Orangeman for a Papist, or a Wee Free for a United.

So the broken-legged man sate and shuddered involuntarily, for he was true to stock, and made no more moan about his condition and prospects than does a trapped wolf. He had gone over his chances and appraised and laid the last of them down--worthless! But, there was one which he had given not a thought to--the ardent strength of a woman's first passion.

"_Man, I am come._"

His dim eyes opened very slowly. 'Twas no dream, she was there, dark bronze-red with exertion and exhaling warmth. She was burdened too; he marvelled dully how she had got such a bundle down that rock-face. A bison-robe was drawn under him, another laid over him: he was fed again, and again he revived, but more slowly, for this time he was far gone with cold and exhaustion. He had not spoken. She was gone. He wondered. Then the mouth of the cave was darkened once more, and she was back with something, a small sheaf of assegais, two axes, and a dozen flake-knives. A second absence and a second return revealed her in another character, for there lay her fire-sticks, and scrapers, yes, and more skins, a housekeeping!

The man's eyes were clear by this time. "What will the Little Moons say to this?" he asked, his brown cheek bulging with food.

The girl frowned and plucked at the hair of her kilt. "I am dead. A bear got me at our first camp. Oh, I did it well! We were out for wood; the snow was falling thickly; I laid a trail of my things up a side glen, mittens, wallet, and an old kaross, then I cried _Bear!_ and sprinted back to camp, picked up these things (none of mine--no scent for the pack--am I a child?) and doubled on our trail across the open where tracks were many. If a hound opens on my line they will whip him off for running heel!--But there was no padding me after the first minute--the snow saw to that!" She grinned. "Neither spoor nor scent!--And while they are casting forward on a false line, I am here,--with you!" Her eyes shone, her voice, hard and hunter-like at first, fell softly and almost shyly at the end.

Here again, as at their first interview, the man's intelligence followed the girl's speech laggingly. Her people and his had been separated for many generations by mutual distrust and mountains. Intertribal trade did not exist, nor peaceful communication, but internecine wife-stealing had kept alive a common glossary. When she had passed to another subject he recalled something strange in her story: "the pack," she had said, she had referred to "a hound" ("good wolf" was her word--Pŭl-Yūn knew bad wolves only). He did not interrupt his meal and her recital at the time with questions, but learnt later that the Master-Girl's people, more backward than his in most respects, had recently domesticated wolf-whelps.

The man touched the skins wistfully, he hardly understood as yet.

"But a bear would not eat bison-robe and hatchets. When you go back to camp--" he began, feeling his way towards the incredible.

"I am not going back to camp," said Dêh-Yān, in a whisper. "This is my camp."

The broken-legged man sucked in both lips and stared, but his eyes kindled and smiled. "It seems that I am to get my wife after all," he said softly.

The Master-Girl brought to the point--the point for which she had been scheming and working for the past day and night, was already modern woman enough to cover her mouth with her hand and shiver. After all then, she would belong to this man, not he to her; her captive had caught her, and thus soon!--Well, it was to be, she had no retreat open to her, and--and--he was gloriously beautiful, and--and--so gentle! She nodded assent, her hand still over her mouth. The young people's eyes met. It meant marriage.

"It is well," said the man. "We will--live!"--his eyes shone--"for a little while, perhaps. But, who knows? The Gods of your hills may be kind to us. They have been kind to us so far, and have covered my hiding-place and your tracks with the ptarmigan's feathers. Let us praise them! I do not know their names. As for the God of my tribe, She is hidden. She must wait. I will greet Her when next She shows me Her face. Meanwhile, be our time together long or short, I will sing my wedding-song."

He sate as erect as he was able, staying himself upon his palms and, filling his chest, began to chant trumpet-lipped the hymn of his people, the one reserved for such occasions. Its exact terms are, perhaps fortunately, irrecoverable. It was even then of an immemorial antiquity (nothing changes more slowly than the wedding custom of a primitive people), this was an archaic survival, sanctioned by use and wont and age; there were words and idioms in it which were wholly foreign to the girl--imbedded fragments of the long-dead River-drift men's gabble, frog-like guttural cluckings of tongue and the tonsil mingled with newer and nobler speech, vocables truly human and musical. The girl listened and panted and glowed, tingling to the tips of her toes. This was life!--Life!--If, by any hap, she were tracked, caught and dragged back to her tribe to suffer the frightful penalty reserved for a girl who so far forgot herself as to "steal her man"--as their speech had it (a phrase still used by our peasantry)--well, she would grin it out to the very last. She had lived!

How shall we picture the youngsters? Were they handsome? According to modern canons--no. High in the cheek, narrow and low in the brow, and something heavy in the jaw, one fancies; strongly outlined sketches of the race to come after. Comely enough though, in one another's eyes--oh (a detail this, but worth preserving), stalwart exceedingly--he a good seven feet in height by our measure, and the Master-Girl six feet three.

Suddenly in mid-chant the singer's eyes rolled inward, his lip was drawn up from the teeth and he was sinking back. She caught and cherished him to warmth and comfort. He was splendidly plucky, but weak.

So passed the first day of these young people's housekeeping. The girl got some kindling in before the light went, and made fire, and watched the night out beside her sleeping patient. The First Nurse. Before dawn she recognised and prostrated herself to the crescent moon, her totem, to whom she gave credit for her successful elopement, and to whose mercy she committed her husband and herself.

The next day he was better. Dêh-Yān found herself able to leave her new treasure. It was hard, but business is business, and the girl was as practical as she was enthusiastic.

"It has stopped. I go to hunt--for us."

"The fall is too young," he objected. "Nothing will be afoot yet--no spoor."

"You shall see," said the girl. "At least I can be getting more wood."

At the edge of the covert below the face Dêh-Yān, moving slowly and with eyes all around her, saw a something tiny and black moving upon the whiteness, the jetty tail-tip of an ermine in his winter pelage. Pursing her lips she gave the shrill, small squeal of a leveret in difficulties, and was presently looking into the face of the eager little robber who had raced to her lure. Her throwing-stick broke his back. Dêh-Yān was not fond of stoat, no one is, but meat is meat; she cut out the gland and pouched him. Observing that his muzzle was bloody, she worked his line to heel, and coming upon the hole he had just left, dug down to a family party of hedgehogs laid up for their winter sleep in beech leaves, each as fat as butter, and only one of them sucked. Here, with economy, was meat for three days at a pinch. She returned to the cave silently pleased with herself to meet the silent approval of her man.

For the rest of the day she accumulated firewood. Her man should be warm.

At night Pŭl-Yūn, as he bade her call him, groaned in sleep. By daylight his wife would examine his hurt. The limb was sufficiently wasted to show the overlapping of the bones. It was a simple fracture of the fibula, and the muscle was enfeebled enough to tempt her to put into practice the woman's lore learnt of the old chiefs head-wife.

"Hold to the rock--hard--I shall pull." He braced himself, she drew with slow power and felt the limb give, then, venting pent breath, relaxed and heard the broken ends of the bone cluck neighbourly as they came to a renewed understanding.

"Now, lie upon your sound side, and the leg will keep its shape."

Her man took breath, for the operation had hurt him abominably, albeit he had not let the least little moan. "O woman, what talk is this?--It is a moon-and-a-half of a matter before broken leg-bone knits strongly; how am I to keep it in one shape so long?--when I am sleeping, say? Wah! You are very clever, but I shall break it again before morning."

The girl thought hard, sitting at the entrance of the cave and studying the curve of the young moon just visible, afloat in the darkening blue, her people's totem and her own, and her favourite object among the heavenly host. "O Moon, Little Moon, teach me to medicine my man!" she murmured. "Here are not the things which we of your people use in such a case. This cave-floor is hard rock, I cannot drive little pegs to keep the limb in place, nor while this frost holds can I dig clay to make a mould to hold it firm. What shall I do for him, O Little Moon?"

And, behold it came, a Thought, an Expedient, bright and wonderfully simple, and perfectly novel and practicable. Arising without a word, she fetched six straight hazel wands, and, having wound the limb carefully in a deer's hide, bound it within a cradle of splints. 'Twas new practice, she had never seen nor heard of such work before, nor had her man, but he let her have her way with him, for he was not only very weak and weary, but the fellow saw that he had fallen into the hands of a wise woman. We, too, are by way of recognising that here was that rare and invaluable creature, a born inventor. Such are of altogether incalculable value to the race. And, bethink you, how seldom do they appear. Our own age, verily an age of miracles, is altogether exceptional; never in the whole course of man's history has there been such a time. Dimly one descries a period, the so-called Second Dynasty, when the Egyptian brain, then young and new and plastic, scintillated once in a century or so, admirable inventions, the wedge, the lever, inclined plane, wheel-and-axle, but who invented anything since until our own day?--Gunpowder and printing, the arch, and steel, the mariner's compass, you'll remind me, and what else in the course of six thousand years? Within the memory of living men if an Oxford don wanted light in haste he had recourse to flint and steel and an oil lamp. If he wished to reach London in haste a good horse was his best servant. Rameses the Great would have done no otherwise in either emergency. Most of earth's greatest men have harboured an inexplicable prejudice against inventors, the Greek philosophers, for instance; even the greatest generals in history would trust nothing that was new, Alexander, Hannibal, Marlborough conquered with the ordinary weapons of their day; Wellington distrusted the rocket and preferred Brown Bess to the rifle, Napoleon (fortunately for Liberty and England), sneered at inventions and had a nickname for inventors.

No, not only the practice of invention, but the very theory of it is modern: the mere idea that there is anything that _can_ be discovered (without mortal sin) is of yesterday. Your ancient inventor investigated at the risk of his life, and published his invention in terror. However obvious and useful it might chance to be, if it hit a vested interest, or offended a priest, the man would be burned for having commerced with the devil.

So with the lowest savages; not the filthiest of their foods, the most objectionable of their customs, or the silliest and clumsiest of their tools or weapons, but is bound up in some way with their religion, and protected from innovation by its sanctions. Did not Mumbo Jumbo give them the throwing-stick in the days before the Moon began to chase his sister the Sun?--Who so presumptuous then as to suggest any improvement upon the throwing-stick, the divinely-inspired throwing-stick? Let him be skinned alive and eaten, says Mumbo Jumbo, and let the best and tenderest of his chops be the portion of me, Rum Tum, the High Priest of Mumbo Jumbo.

Thus hampered, man's intelligence moves slowly, and racial advance has not been precipitate in Korea, say, or Spain. Among the Little Moons the very possibility of inventing anything had been long forgotten. From his childhood to his death each member of the tribe moved in a web of routine, and did what he did at stated times because it was the custom of the community. There was never any change, improvement was impossible, for the corpus of the law which regulated his life and bound him hand and foot, resided in the retentive memories of the oldest and most pig-headed of his people, themselves brought up in a similar environment and mentally incapable of breaking away from it in any one smallest particular.

Hence this departure from practice in the matter of treating a broken leg filled the man's bosom with wonder too deep for words. He found himself encumbered with novel feelings, feelings for which he had no suitable vocabulary. When a young brave went on a wife-hunt it was not to be supposed that he should respect or reverence the dejected and sulky captive whom he drove home before him. That in the course of years their mutual relations might improve, that some regard for the mother of his sons, some admiration even for her capacity and judgment might arise was possible, but at the first her lot was a sorry one; she stood for the proof of her captor's strength, courage and address; his slave, no more.

But, Dêh-Yān stood for nothing of the kind. And what she did stand for Pŭl-Yūn was at a loss to explain to himself. Having nothing to do, he watched her about the cave and marvelled at her--also at himself and at something which was going on inside him.

And in her, though he did not know it. The first passage of their eyes had begun it, but much had happened since. She had touched him. She had handled, lifted, supported him--given him exquisite pain (as she knew by intuition), fed him, rubbed his cold stiff limbs back to warmth and suppleness. Needless to say that this girl had never had occasion to deal thus with a man-creature of her own age hitherto. What she had done, she had done with a steady and purposeful hand, but now it was over, she found herself shaking as if from cold. Yet she was not cold. What was it?--Dêh-Yān could put no name to this novel experience, and whilst she thought upon it, seated as far from her patient as the limits of the cave permitted (for the revulsive fit was upon her) it came over her with a horrid clearness how near she had been to handing this delightful, troublesome, beautiful, helpless, bewilderingly strange creature-comrade of hers over to the braves of her tribe. With a momentary gleam of insight, she saw him as he might have been at the stake. The sight wrung her heart. "Ooh!"--she groaned, and clapped a hand over her mouth. Then, with a second gleam of prescience, she saw herself in a like predicament--as yet might be her fate--and laughed!

"What are you laughing at?" her man was asking weakly.

"I was thinking that I must get to my hunting--we cannot live long upon a stoat and a walletful of hedgehogs. Also I am thinking we must have skins for leggings and mittens," smiled the girl, lying glibly to conceal feelings of which she was half ashamed.

The frost had not given, and wild-life, hunger-nipped, was getting over the first paralysing fear of making tracks. The big game, elephants and bison, would have moved down-stream for the winter, and lion would have followed them, and bear laid up to sleep off his fat. She knew as much. The edge of the covert was printed thickly with slot of hare, badger, fox and marten. She could see that chamois and stone-buck had come down, but chamois and stone-buck were kittle cattle. There were the broad pads of a big tom-lynx. The girl looked them over narrowly, and knew them from wolf by the sign of hair upon the soles of the feet. She dreaded lynx, but meat she must have. There among the tangle of creeping pine (the _Pinus pumulus_ which makes such desperately hard going) was the well-beaten run of capercaillie. Dêh-Yān followed it into the scrub as far as a fallen spruce and set that log with twenty springes of deer-sinew, then, fetching a circle, she beat the covert with some small outcry back towards her nooses, and with results. The master-cock, a great black-bearded tyrant, twice as big as his wives, had got a hairy leg into trouble but had broken away, but not before six youngsters and hens, hastening to their lord's assistance, had been themselves ensnared.

"Good!" said the man when the huntress panted up the cliff face carrying an almost throttling necklace of heavy birds, "we have food for days. Give that covert a rest, Dêh-Yān. Also I have another reason. Listen. I dreamed of a hare whilst you were away. Danger is near."

Without a word, weary as she was, the girl left the cave and ascended the rock face, climbing slowly and very carefully, keeping to the bare exposures lest she should leave incriminating sign, and ensconcing herself in a juniper bush, spied far and long over the white expanse.

The dream had already come true. There, below her and more than four miles away by our measurement, three tiny black specks moved slowly across a snow-field between two dark belts of wood.

The girl watched with a hardening mouth, bending upon these crawling black specks the wonderful, long-sighted eyes of a savage. Nearer they came and nearer, she made out and named each. There was Low-Mah, there was Pongu, and, worst of all, there was the detested Gow-Loo, a brave whom she most particularly disliked, and with whose property she had accordingly made free when she left the tribe.

Plainly the man had missed his axes and spears, had revisited the camp where they had last been seen and had not found them. Pongu in like manner had missed his bison-robes, and Low-Mah certain deer-skins, properties which if cast away by girls in a panic-stricken rush would have lain where they fell. Each had his dog with him, and having failed in finding what they sought at the site of the snow-camp, were casting up the glen with a certain air of grim determination which the watcher did not like.

They had reasoned the matter out and had ceased to believe in that bear, albeit, just what had induced an unmarried girl to break away from her tribe and make a winter-hunting of her own was beyond them. It was a matter which needed clearing up.

There must be no fire for her man that day, nor next day, nor for a handful of days. Dêh-Yān spied from her bush, her patient from his cave, and once heard the three hunters pass below him. A sprinkle of fresh snow had covered the girl's tracks, or this story would never have been written, but they had lit upon one of her springes and were justly scandalised. Her motive in absconding was still a mystery, but such conduct was outrageous. They would see the matter out, and were curious in devising punishments for the truant.

But next day the girl beheld them in full flight down the glen before an angry bear.

This was to exchange one danger for another. It might well be that the dream portended this. Wolf the dwellers in the cave did not fear, for no wolf could climb so steep a face, but wherever a man can go on rocks a grizzly can go.

Dêh-Yān told her fears to her husband, who bade block the cave-mouth with big stones and let a spear be always beside him. Poor defence, but better than none; his arms were regaining flesh.