Produced by Al Haines
THE CALL OF THE NORTH
Beyond the butternut, beyond the maple, beyond the white pine and the red, beyond the oak, the cedar, and the beech, beyond even the white and yellow birches lies a Land, and in that Land the shadows fall crimson across the snow.
THE CALL OF THE NORTH
Being a Dramatized Version of
CONJURORS HOUSE
A Romance of the Free Forest
BY
Stewart Edward White
AUTHOR OF THE WESTERNERS,THE BLAZED TRAIL,ETC.
THE CALL OF THE NORTH
Chapter One
The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her backcrouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her ininterminable journey, day after day, league on league intoremoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden saveby the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about thelittle settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch andpoplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos ofbowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing differentfor many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England feltits frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, todrop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer asix-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles struggled down thewaters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band ofred-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs acrossthe ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all.
Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the verypathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came theIndians to trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter poststo rest, came the ship from England bringing the articles of use orornament she had ordered a full year before. Within a short timeall were gone, into the wilderness, into the great unknown world.The snow fell; the river and the bay froze. Strange men from theNorth glided silently to the Factor's door, bearing the meat andpelts of the seal. Bitter iron cold shackled the northland, theabode of desolation. Armies of caribou drifted by, ghostly underthe aurora, moose, lordly and scornful, stalked majestically alongthe shore; wolves howled invisible, or trotted dog-like inorganized packs along the river banks. Day and night the iceartillery thundered. Night and day the fireplaces roared defianceto a frost they could not subdue, while the people of desolationcrouched beneath the tyranny of winter.
Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, theMoose roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot byfoot to the very dooryard of her father's house. Strange spiritswere abroad at night, howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning invoices of ice and flood. Her Indian nurse told her of them all—ofMannabosho, the good; of Nenaubosho the evil—in her lispingOjibway dialect that sounded like the softer voices of the forest.
At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eagerblossoming of the land into new leaves, lush grasses, an abandon ofsweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, a thousand singingbirds sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph.Overhead shone the hot sun of the Northern summer.
From the wilderness came the brigades bearing their pelts, thehardy traders of the winter posts, striking hot the imaginationthrough the mysterious and lonely allurement of their