"London, Jack - A Relic of the Pliocene" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

human face, the first in weary 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 his
visit seemed the most casual thing under the sun. He just strolled into the
light of my camp, passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten
trails, threw my snowshoes the one way and a couple 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 see if I had any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancient pipe,
loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as a by your leave,
whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff was fairly good.
He sighed with the contentment of the just, and literally absorbed the smoke
from the crisping yellow flakes, and it did my smoker's heart good to behold
him.
Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; just sort of knocking
about. Had come up from the Great Slave some time since, and was thinking of
trapesing over into the Yukon. The Factor of Koshim had spoken about the
discoveries on the Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep. I
noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the
Reindeer River--a conceited custom the Old Timers employ against the chechaquos
and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such a matter of
course that there was 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 run up Fort
o' Good Hope way.
Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond the Circle,
in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when a nondescript
ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere in particular, to sit by
one's fire and discourse on such in terms of "trapesing" and "a little run", it
is fair time to rouse up and shake off the dream. Wherefore I looked about; saw
the fly, and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the
grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of
the light; and, above, a great streamer of the aurora bridging the zenith from
southeast to northwest. I shivered. There is a magic in the northland night,
that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are clutched and
downed before you are aware. Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying prone and
crossed where he had flung them. Also I had an eye on my tobacco pouch. Half, at
least, of its goodly store had vamoosed. 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 and wandering like a lost soul
through great vastnesses and unknown deeps. Oh well, let his moods slip on,
until, mayhap, he gathers his 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 marveled, for he talked of game and the ways
thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska, and the chamois
in the secret Rockies. He averred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo
still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of the caribou when they ran by the
hundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk ox's winter trail.
And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no 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 tale told me by a man who had dwelt in the land
too long to know better. It was of the great bear that hugs the steep slopes of