Back to Gods Country and Other Stories
Curwood, James Oliver, 1879-1927
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Back to Gods Country and Other Stories
Etext prepared by Dianne Bean, Prescott Valley, Arizona.
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY AND OTHER STORIES
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
CONTENTS
Back to God's Country
The Yellow-Back
The Fiddling Man
L'ange
The Case of Beauvais
The Other Man's Wife
The Strength of Men
The Match
The Honor of Her People
Bucky Severn
His First Penitent
Peter God
The Mouse
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up the
Frazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and the headwaters
of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-hunting population of
British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead of him. He was a
clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil in the collecting
of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look forty years into the
future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, that winter, he was in
reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that was to burn through four
decades before the explosion came.
With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked him up
somewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a horse. Tao was
the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the most powerful,
and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung was enormously
proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way--of Tao, the dog, and of
his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his knees when he let it
down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver, and therefore it was the
longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and the dog formed the
combination which set the forty-year fuse of romance and tragedy burning.
Shan Tung started for the El Dorados early in the winter, and Tao alone
pulled his sledge and outfit. It was no more than an ordinary task for
the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan Tung subserviently but with hidden
triumph passed outfit after outfit exhausted by the way. He had reached
Copper Creek Camp, which was boiling and frothing with the excitement of
gold-maddened men, and was congratulating himself that he would soon be
at the camps west of the Peace, when the thing happened. A drunken
Irishman, filled with a grim and unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan
Tung's wonderful cue and coveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of
excitement in which Shan Tung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet
through his heart, and the drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed
fifteen minutes later. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of
the men who pulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and as
he drifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a new
humor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As the seasons
passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of his progeny
behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until he was grown
old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one of these masters
turn south with him. Always it was north, north with the white man first,
north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan, until in the end the
dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimo igloo on the Great Bear.
But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Here and there, as the years
passed, one would find among the Eskimo trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired,
powerful-jawed giant that was alien to the arctic stock, and in these
occasional aliens ran the blood of Tao, the Dane.
Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at
Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dog who
was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full growth, was a
Back