>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E02287  <<<

TITLE: NORTHERN LIGHTS, COMPLETE
AUTHOR: GILBERT PARKER
EBOOK: E02287 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

NORTHERN LIGHTS, Complete

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.

CONTENTS

Volume 1.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
BUCKMASTER'S BOY

Volume 2.
TO-MORROW
QU'APPELLE
THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE

Volume 3.
WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
GEORGE'S WIFE
MARCILE

Volume 4.
A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION

Volume 5.
THE ERROR OF THE DAY
THE WHISPERER
AS DEEP AS THE SEA

INTRODUCTION

This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generation
later than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditions
under which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with the
advent of the railway.  From that time forwards, with the rise of towns
and cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole life
lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness which
marked the days of Pierre.  When, in 1905, I visited the Far West again
after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern episode,
energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics which marked
the period just before the advent, and just after the advent, of the
railway were disappearing, I determined to write a series of stories
which would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold something of the
old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual, before it passed
entirely and was forgotten.  Therefore, from 1905 to 1909, I kept drawing
upon all those experiences of others, from the true tales that had been
told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson's Bay trappers and hunters, for
those incidents natural to the West which imagination could make true.
Something of the old atmosphere had gone, and there was a stir and a
murmur in all the West which broke that grim yet fascinating loneliness
of the time of Pierre.

Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, The
Stroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
of the earlier stories appears.  I believe I did well--at any rate for
myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
sixties onwards.  So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.

NOTE

The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
Far West.  The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--
of days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
fertile field of civilisation.  The remaining stories cover the period
passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car
first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the
farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and
humdrum occupation.

G. P.

Volume 1.

A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
BUCKMASTER'S BOY

A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS

"Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!" said Mitiahwe as she entered the
big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle.  "Hai-yai, I wish
it would last for ever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.

"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe.  See, the birds go south so
soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.

The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic mood
--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic future
of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she made some
quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious dance of
her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old woman
seated on a pile of deer-skins.

"It is morning, and the day will last for ever," she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering.  The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?

"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,"
Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the Swift
Wing.

"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice will
be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because of the
black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift Wing.

Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing's dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
"The hearts of cowards will freeze," she rejoined, "and to those that
will not see the sun the world will be dark," she added.  Then suddenly
she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
nest till her young white man came from "down East."  Her heart had leapt
up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to her
mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come along
to his lodge.

A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good it
was that she had become his wife--the young white man's wife, rather than
the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who had four
hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and sour days for
her.  Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the lodge, a
distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or twice he came
when her man was with her; but nothing could be done, for earth and air
and space were common to them all, and there was no offence in Breaking
Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived.  Yet it seemed as though
Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.  That was the impression
made upon all who saw him, and even old White Buffalo, the chief, shook
his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock, his son, staring at the big
lodge which was so full of happiness, and so full also of many luxuries
never before seen at a trading post on the Koonce River.  The father of
Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his three sons had been killed in
battle the chieftainship had come to White Buffalo, who was of the same
blood and family.  There were those who said that Mitiahwe should have
been chieftainess; but neither she nor her mother would ever listen to
this, and so White Buffalo, and the tribe loved Mitiahwe because of her
modesty and goodness.  She was even more to White Buffalo than Breaking
Rock, and he had been glad that Dingan the white man--Long Hand he was
called--had taken Mitiahwe for his woman.  Yet behind this gladness of
White Buffalo, and that of Swift Wing, and behind the silent watchfulness
of Breaking Rock, there was a thought which must ever come when a white
man mates with an Indian maid, without priest or preacher, or writing, or
book, or bond.

Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
man with his Indian wife.  They never saw anything but light in the eyes
of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as
she came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not
even after four years.

Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of
them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
till her man had come home again.  Then she had forgotten the unseen for
the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the
joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with
them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing
afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's
mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's
husband.  But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted
that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home,
as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing
to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days with
him.

She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making.  It was her
own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved woman
had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
Indian mind.

"Hai-yai," she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true.  You have

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 623483 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>