The Tales of the North: Jack London's Edition - 78 Short Stories in One Edition. Джек ЛондонЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Grit of Women

      A wolfish head, wistful-eyed and frost-rimed, thrust aside the tent-flaps.

      “Hi! Chook! Siwash! Chook, you limb of Satan!” chorused the protesting inmates. Bettles rapped the dog sharply with a tin plate, and it withdrew hastily. Louis Savoy refastened the flaps, kicked a frying-pan over against the bottom, and warmed his hands. It was very cold without. Forty-eight hours gone, the spirit thermometer had burst at sixty-eight below, and since that time it had grown steadily and bitterly colder. There was no telling when the snap would end. And it is poor policy, unless the gods will it, to venture far from a stove at such times, or to increase the quantity of cold atmosphere one must breathe. Men sometimes do it, and sometimes they chill their lungs. This leads up to a dry, hacking cough, noticeably irritable when bacon is being fried. After that, somewhere along in the spring or summer, a hole is burned in the frozen muck. Into this a man’s carcass is dumped, covered over with moss, and left with the assurance that it will rise on the crack of Doom, wholly and frigidly intact. For those of little faith, sceptical of material integration on that fateful day, no fitter country than the Klondike can be recommended to die in. But it is not to be inferred from this that it is a fit country for living purposes.

      It was very cold without, but it was not over-warm within. The only article which might be designated furniture was the stove, and for this the men were frank in displaying their preference. Upon half of the floor pine boughs had been cast; above this were spread the sleeping-furs, beneath lay the winter’s snowfall. The remainder of the floor was moccasin-packed snow, littered with pots and pans and the general impedimenta of an Arctic camp. The stove was red and roaring hot, but only a bare three feet away lay a block of ice, as sharp-edged and dry as when first quarried from the creek bottom. The pressure of the outside cold forced the inner heat upward. Just above the stove, where the pipe penetrated the roof, was a tiny circle of dry canvas; next, with the pipe always as centre, a circle of steaming canvas; next a damp and moisture-exuding ring; and finally, the rest of the tent, sidewalls and top, coated with a half-inch of dry, white, crystal-encrusted frost.

      “Oh! OH! OH!” A young fellow, lying asleep in the furs, bearded and wan and weary, raised a moan of pain, and without waking increased the pitch and intensity of his anguish. His body half-lifted from the blankets, and quivered and shrank spasmodically, as though drawing away from a bed of nettles.

      “Roll’m over!” ordered Bettles. “He’s crampin’.”

      And thereat, with pitiless goodwill, he was pitched upon and rolled and thumped and pounded by half-a-dozen willing comrades.

      “Damn the trail,” he muttered softly, as he threw off the robes and sat up. “I’ve run across country, played quarter three seasons hand-running, and hardened myself in all manner of ways; and then I pilgrim it into this Godforsaken land and find myself an effeminate Athenian without the simplest rudiments of manhood!” He hunched up to the fire and rolled a cigarette. “Oh, I’m not whining. I can take my medicine all right, all right; but I’m just decently ashamed of myself, that’s all. Here I am, on top of a dirty thirty miles, as knocked up and stiff and sore as a pink-tea degenerate after a five-mile walk on a country turn-pike. Bah! It makes me sick! Got a match?” “Don’t git the tantrums, youngster.” Bettles passed over the required fire-stick and waxed patriarchal. “Ye’ve gotter ‘low some for the breakin’-in. Sufferin’ cracky! don’t I recollect the first time I hit the trail! Stiff? I’ve seen the time it’d take me ten minutes to git my mouth from the waterhole an’ come to my feet—every jint crackin’ an’ kickin’ fit to kill. Cramp? In sech knots it’d take the camp half a day to untangle me. You’re all right, for a cub, any ye’ve the true sperrit. Come this day year, you’ll walk all us old bucks into the ground any time. An’ best in your favor, you hain’t got that streak of fat in your make-up which has sent many a husky man to the bosom of Abraham afore his right and proper time.”

      “Streak of fat?”

      “Yep. Comes along of bulk. ‘T ain’t the big men as is the best when it comes to the trail.”

      “Never heard of it.”

      “Never heered of it, eh? Well, it’s a dead straight, open-an’-shut fact, an’ no gittin’ round. Bulk’s all well enough for a mighty big effort, but ‘thout stayin’ powers it ain’t worth a continental whoop; an’ stayin’ powers an’ bulk ain’t runnin’ mates. Takes the small, wiry fellows when it comes to gittin’ right down an’ hangin’ on like a lean-jowled dog to a bone. Why, hell’s fire, the big men they ain’t in it!”

      “By gar!” broke in Louis Savoy, “dat is no, vot you call, josh! I know one mans, so vaire beeg like ze buffalo. Wit him, on ze Sulphur Creek stampede, go one small mans, Lon McFane. You know dat Lon McFane, dat leetle Irisher wit ze red hair and ze grin. An’ dey walk an’ walk an’ walk, all ze day long an’ ze night long. And beeg mans, him become vaire tired, an’ lay down mooch in ze snow. And leetle mans keek beeg mans, an’ him cry like, vot you call—ah! vot you call ze kid. And leetle mans keek an’ keek an’ keek, an’ bime by, long time, long way, keek beeg mans into my cabin. Tree days ‘fore him crawl out my blankets. Nevaire I see beeg squaw like him. No nevaire. Him haf vot you call ze streak of fat. You bet.”

      “But there was Axel Gunderson,” Prince spoke up. The great Scandinavian, with the tragic events which shadowed his passing, had made a deep mark on the mining engineer. “He lies up there, somewhere.” He swept his hand in the vague direction of the mysterious east.

      “Biggest man that ever turned his heels to Salt Water, or run a moose down with sheer grit,” supplemented Bettles; “but he’s the prove-the-rule exception. Look at his woman, Unga,—tip the scales at a hundred an’ ten, clean meat an’ nary ounce to spare. She’d bank grit ‘gainst his for all there was in him, an’ see him, an’ go him better if it was possible. Nothing over the earth, or in it, or under it, she wouldn’t ‘a’ done.”

      “But she loved him,” objected the engineer.

      “‘T ain’t that. It—”

      “Look you, brothers,” broke in Sitka Charley from his seat on the grub-box. “Ye have spoken of the streak of fat that runs in big men’s muscles, of the grit of women and the love, and ye have spoken fair; but I have in mind things which happened when the land was young and the fires of men apart as the stars. It was then I had concern with a big man, and a streak of fat, and a woman. And the woman was small; but her heart was greater than the beef-heart of the man, and she had grit. And we traveled a weary trail, even to the Salt Water, and the cold was bitter, the snow deep, the hunger great. And the woman’s love was a mighty love—no more can man say than this.”

      He paused, and with the hatchet broke pieces of ice from the large chunk beside him. These he threw into the gold pan on the stove, where the drinking-water thawed. The men drew up closer, and he of the cramps sought greater comfort vainly for his stiffened body.

      “Brothers, my blood is red with Siwash, but my heart is white. To the faults of my fathers I owe the one, to the virtues of my friends the other. A great truth came to me when I was yet a boy. I learned that to your kind and you was given the earth; that the Siwash could not withstand you, and like the caribou and the bear, must perish in the cold. So I came into the warm and sat among you, by your fires, and behold, I became one of you, I have seen much in my time. I have known strange things, and bucked big, on big trails, with men of many breeds. And because of these things, I measure deeds after your manner, and judge men, and think thoughts. Wherefore, when I speak harshly of one of your own kind, I know you will not take it amiss; and when I speak high