The Man Who Rocked the Earth by Arthur Cheney Train and Robert Williams Wood (great book club books .TXT) 📖

Old Edouard grunted.

"Vous êtes fou!" he muttered to his nephew, and drove his paddle deep into the water.

Day broke with staccato emphasis. The sun swung up out of Europe and burned down upon the canoe with a heat so equatorial in quality that Bennie discarded both his mackintosh and his sporting jacket. All signs of human life had disappeared from the distant banks of the river and the bow of the canoe faced a gray-blue flood emerging from a wilderness of scrubby trees. A few gulls flopped their way coast-ward, and at rare intervals a salmon leaped and slashed the slow-moving surface into a boiling circle; but for the rest their surroundings were as set, as immobile, as the painted scenery of a stage, save where the current swept the scattered promontories of the shore. But they moved steadily north. So wearied was Bennie with the unaccustomed light and fresh air that by ten o'clock he felt the day must be over, although the sun had not yet reached the zenith. Unexpectedly Marc and Edouard turned the canoe quietly into a shallow, and beached her on a spit of white sand. In three minutes Edouard had a small fire snapping, and handed Bennie a cup of tea. How wonderful it seemed—a genuine elixir! And then he felt the stab of a mosquito, and putting up his hand found it blotched with blood. And the black flies came also. Soon the professor was tramping up and down, waving his handkerchief and clutching wildly at the air. Then they pushed off again.

The sun dropped westward as they turned bend after bend, disclosing ever the same view beyond. Shadows of rocks and trees began to jut across the eddies. A great heron, as big as an ostrich, or so he seemed, arose awkwardly and flapped off, trailing yards of legs behind him. Then Bennie put on first his jacket and then his mackintosh. He realized that his hands were numb. The sun was now only a foot or so above the sky line.

This time it was Marc who grunted and thrust the canoe toward the river's edge with a sideways push. It grounded on a belt of sand and they dragged it ashore. Bennie, who had been looking forward to the night with vivid apprehension, now discovered to his great happiness that the chill was keeping away the black flies. Joyfully he assisted in gathering dry sticks, driving tent pegs, and picking reindeer moss for bedding. Then as darkness fell Edouard fried eggs and bacon, and with their boots off and their stockinged feet toasting to the blaze the three men ate as becomes men who have laboured fifteen hours in the open air. They drank tin cups of scalding tea, a pint at a time, and found it good; and they smoked their pipes with their backs propped against the tree trunks and found it heaven. Then as the stars came out and the woods behind them snapped with strange noises, Edouard took his pipe from his mouth.

"It's getting cold," said he. "The marionettes will dance to-night."

Bennie heard him as if across a great, yawning gulf. Even the firelight seemed hundreds of yards away. The little professor was "all in," and he sat with his chin dropped again to his chest, until he heard Marc exclaim:

"Voilà! Elles dansent!"

He raised his eyes. Just across the black, silent sweep of the river three giant prismatic searchlights were playing high toward the polestar, such searchlights as the gods might be using in some monstrous game. They wavered here and there, shifting and dodging, faded and sprang up again, till Bennie, dizzy, closed his eyes. The lights were still dancing in the north as he stumbled to his couch of moss.

"Toujour les marionettes!" whispered Marc gently, as he might to a child. "Bon soir, monsieur."

The tent was hot and dazzling white above his head when low voices, footsteps, and the clink of tin against iron aroused the professor from a profound coma. The guides had already loaded the canoe and were waiting for him. The sun was high. Apologetically he pulled on his boots, and stepping to the sand dashed the icy water into his face. His muscles groaned and rasped. His neck refused to respond to his desires with its accustomed elasticity. But he drank his tea and downed his scrambled eggs with an enthusiasm unknown in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Marc gave him a hand into the canoe and they were off. The day had begun.

The river narrowed somewhat and the shores grew more rocky. At noon they lunched on another sand-spit. At sunset they saw a caribou. Night came. "Always the marionettes." Thus passed nine days—like a dream to Bennie; and then came the first adventure.

It was about four o'clock on the afternoon of the tenth day of their trip up the Moisie when Marc suddenly stopped paddling and gazed intently shoreward. After a moment he said something in a low tone to Edouard, and they turned the canoe and drove it rapidly toward a small cove half hidden by rocks. Bennie, straining his eyes, could see nothing at first, but when the canoe was but ten yards from shore he caught sight of the motionless figure of a man, lying on his face with his head nearly in the water. Marc turned him over gently, but the limbs fell limp, one leg at a grotesque angle to the knee. Bennie saw instantly that it was broken. The Indian's face was white and drawn, no doubt with pain.

"Il est mort!" said Marc slowly, crossing himself.

Edouard shrugged his shoulders and fetched a small flask of brandy from the professor's sack. Forcing open the jaws, he poured a few drops into the man's mouth. The Indian choked and opened his eyes. Edouard grunted.

"La jeunesse pense qu'elle sait tout!" he remarked scornfully.

Thus they found Nichicun, without whom Bennie might never have accomplished the object of his quest. It took three days to nurse the half-dead and altogether starved Montagnais back to life, but he received the tenderest care. Marc shot a young caribou and gave him the blood to drink, and made a ragout to put the flesh back on his bones. Meanwhile the professor slept long hours on the moss and took a much-needed rest; and by degrees they learned from Nichicun the story of his misfortune—the story that forms a part of the chronicle of the expedition, which can be read at the Smithsonian Institution.

He was a Montagnais, he said, with a line of traps to the northeast of the Height of Land, and last winter he had had very bad luck indeed. There had been less and less in his traps and he had seen no caribou. So he had taken his wife, who was sick, and had gone over into the Nascopee country for food, and there his wife had died. He had made up his mind very late in the season to come down to Moisie and make his mass and get a new wife, and start a fresh line of traps in the autumn. All the other Montagnais had descended the river in their canoes long before, so he was alone. His provisions had given out and he saw no caribou. He began to think he would surely starve to death. And then one evening, on the point just above their present camp, he had seen a caribou and shot it, but he had been too weak to take good aim and had only broken its shoulder. It lay kicking among the boulders, pushing itself along by its hind legs, and he had feared that it would escape. In his haste to reach it he had slipped on a wet rock and fallen and broken his leg. In spite of the pain he had crawled on, and then had taken place a wild, terrible fight for life between the dying man and the dying beast.

He could not remember all that had occurred—he had been kicked, gored, and bitten; but finally he had got a grip on its throat and slashed it with his knife. Then, lying there on the ground beside it, he drank its blood and cut off the raw flesh in strips for food. Finally one day he had crawled to the river for water and had fainted.

The professor and his guides made for the Indian a hut of rocks and bark, and threw a great pile of moss into the corner of it for him to lie on. They carved a splint for his leg and bound it up, and cut a huge heap of firewood for him, smoking caribou meat and hanging it up in the hut. Somebody would come up river and find him, or if not, the three men would pick him up on their return. For this was right and the law of the woods. But never a word of particular interest to Prof. Bennie Hooker did Nichicun speak until the night before their departure, although the reason and manner of his speaking were natural enough. It happened as follows: but first it should be said that the Nascopees are an ignorant and barbarous tribe, dirty and treacherous, upon whom the Montagnais look down with contempt and scorn. They do not even wear civilized clothes, and their ways are not the ways of les bons sauvages. They have no priests; they do not come to the coast; and the Montagnais will not mingle with them. Thus it bespoke the hunger of Nichicun that he was willing to go into their country.

As he sat round the fire with Marc and Edouard on that last night, Nichicun spoke his mind of the Nascopees, and Marc translated freely for Bennie's edification.

No, the injured Montagnais told them, the Nascopees were not nice; they were dirty. They ate decayed food and they never went to mass. Moreover, they were half-witted. While he was there they were all planning to migrate for the most absurd reason—what do you suppose? Magic! They claimed the end of the world was coming! Of course it was coming some time. But they said now, right away. But why? Because the marionettes were dancing so much. And they had seen the Father of the Marionettes floating in the sky and making thunder! Fools! But the strangest thing of all, they said they could hunt no longer, for they were afraid to cross something—an iron serpent that stung with fire if you touched it, and killed you! What foolishness! An iron serpent! But he had asked them and they had sworn on the holy cross that it was true.

Bennie listened with a chill creeping up his spine. But it would never do to hint what this disclosure meant to him. Between puffs of his pipe he asked casual, careless questions of Nichicun. These Nascopees, for instance, how far off might their land be? And where did they assert this extraordinary serpent of iron to be? Were there rivers in the Nascopee country? Did white men ever go there? All these things the wounded Montagnais told him. It appeared, moreover, that the Rassini River was near the Nascopee territory, and that it flowed into the Moisie only seven miles above the camp. All that night the marionettes danced in Bennie's brain.

Next morning they propped Nichicun on his bed of moss, laid a rifle and a box of matches beside him, and bade him farewell. At the mouth of the Rassini River Prof. Bennie Hooker held up his hand and announced that he was going to the Nascopee country. The canoe halted abruptly. Old Edouard declared that they had been engaged only to go to the big cache, and that their present trip was merely by way of a little excursion to see the river. They had no supplies for such a journey, no proper amount of ammunition. No, they would deposit the professor on the nearest sandbar if he wished, but they were going back.

Bennie arose unsteadily in the canoe and dug into his pocket, producing a roll of gold coin. Two hundred and fifty dollars he promised them if they would take him to the nearest tribe of Nascopees; five hundred if they could find the Iron Serpent.

"Bien!" exclaimed both Indians without a moment's hesitation, and the canoe plunged forward up the Rassini.

Once more a dreamlike succession of brilliant, frosty days; once more the star-studded sky in which always the marionettes danced. And then at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence.