Below two stories that illustrate, at least as far as my experience goes, the philosophies of gratitude, generosity and goodwill of indigenous peoples in the Old North.

Without Words by Elliott Merrick.

First published in Scribner's Magazine in 1936

JAN MCKENZIE came over a knoll and stopped, head back, his rifle in one mitten, his ax in the other. Below him spread the river, ice-locked between the hills. A mile across, the birch bluffs were turning blue in the twilight.

   He was not given to poetic fancies, for that is not the way of a Scotch-Eskimo trapper alone in the middle of Labrador. Nevertheless, it touched him always, coming out to the river after days and nights in the spruces to the east, following brooks and nameless chains of lakes that didn't lead anywhere, plowing through willow tangles and up and down wooded hills. It gave him a feeling of spaciousness, like stepping out of doors to see the broad river again, sweeping out of sight between the hills. The river was a known thread that joined him to the nearest trapper fifty miles downstream. The river was the road to home and to his wife, Luce.

   It was nine weeks now since the day in September when his canoe and the others from Turner's Harbor had swung off from the wharf and begun the upstream battle. The crowd had waved, and the double-barreled shotguns split the air in the old-time farewell, Boomboom . . . and a pause to load . . . Boom, saying, "Good-by . . . Luck." Then the trappers floating on the river in their loaded canoes raised their guns and fired one answering shot, "Luck." They picked up their paddles and disappeared around the point, to be gone five months. Sometimes, even when they'd passed around the point, and the town was lost, they could still hear the guns, Boomboom . . . Boom, like a last calling. It gave a fellow something to remember way off here where you didn't hear anything much except your own voice.

   It would be pretty near three months yet before he'd be home with his fur to Luce, he was thinking as he scrambled down the bank and legged it along the ice for "the house." Tins cabin had a window, and a door with hinges, a good tight roof of birch bark, and, within, such luxuries as a sleeping bag, which his tiny log-tilts back in the woods had not.

   It was nearly dark when he got there, but not too dark to see in the cove the print of strange snowshoes. And by the point where the current flowed fast and the ice was thin, somebody had been chopping a water hole.

   "Hello," he called to the cabin.

   From the ridge came a silvery, mocking "hello," and faintly, seconds later, a distant hello across the river, the echo of the echo. Jan crossed the cove bent double, studying the tracks. There were three of them, a big pair of snowshoes and two smaller pairs. The smaller snowshoes had been dragging in a slick of firewood from alongshore — the women.

Jan threw off his bag and hurried into the cabin. Nobody made snowshoes of that pattern but Mathieu Susakashish, the Seven Islands Indian. Nobody but Mathieu knew this cabin was here. He and his wife and daughter had come last year and begged a little tea and sugar. Now they had been here again with their Indian idea that food belongs to anybody who is hungry. Dirty dogs! Where three fifty-pound bags of flour had been hanging, only two hung now. They had dripped candle grease onto his bunk and left his big meat kettle unwashed. He dove under the bunk and pulled out his food boxes. They'd made off with some of his split peas and a few of his beans, a handful of candles too. They had sliced a big chunk of salt pork neatly down the middle.

   In a frenzy of rage he ripped open his fur-bag. Every skin was there, and in addition, a black and shining otter skin lay crosswise on his bundles of mink and marten, fox and ermine. He held it up and blew the hair and felt its thickness and its length, stroking its blue-black luster. It was a prize, it would bring sixty dollars, perhaps. But the sight of it made him angrier than before.

   "So!" he muttered. "Mathieu thinks one miserable skin of fur pays me for my grub, eh?" He lit a candle, and his hand was trembling with rage. From now on he'd be half-hungry all the time, and hunting meat when he ought to be tending the trap line. He thought of his wife, and the blankets, and the windows, and the boat and nets and the new stove they needed at home. This was his whole year's earnings, these five months in the bush. And Mathieu thought he could steal the grub that made it possible, did he? He thought he could come every year and fit himself out, likely.

   Jan took his rifle and emptied the magazine. It was only one bag of flour—but still, there were men way off here in the country who'd died for lack of a cupful, yes, a spoonful. Slowly he reloaded with the soft-nosed cartridges he had always kept for caribou, heretofore. Would he tell Luce, would he ever be able to forget that somewhere back in the ridges, by some secret little lake that no one knew, he had shot three Indians and stuffed them through the ice? Didn't the Bible say, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?

   There was bannock bread to bake and fur to be skinned. It was nearly midnight when he stoked up the stove and rolled in on the bunk for the last good sleep he expected to know for a while. At five o'clock in the starlight he was out on the river shore with a candle lantern made out of a baking-powder can, examining tracks. The polished, shallow trench which their two toboggans had left was so plain that a child could have followed it. Mathieu was ahead, taking long steps, hurrying. The two women were behind, hauling their toboggan in double harness, tandem-fashion. One of them fell and left the print of her knee going down the bank. Jan smiled as though he had seen it and heard her mutter.

   He followed their track across the river to the top of a draw between two bare hills. There in the sunrise he turned and looked back at the ice sparkling with frost in the soft golden light, spotted with long blue shadows of the hills. As he plunged downhill into the thick country to the north he had an ominous feeling that he was leaving something. Maybe Mathieu would ambush him; it would be an easy thing to do on a track like this. Would Mathieu guess that he was being chased?

   Jan studied the track, unconsciously noting every detail. Here in this book of the snow he might perhaps read Mathieu's thoughts, even a warning of an ambush. Indians were smart in the woods. Did he really think he could out-track an Indian hunter?

   "By the Lord Harry, I can have a try," he whispered to himself.

   Two mornings ago it was, that they passed through here under the firs, across that little brook. Two days was not much start for them. They had sleds and he had none. Mathieu had to break trail, while he had their hard frozen track to walk on. They had all their winter gear, their blankets and kettles, their tin stove and tent, traps, trout nets probably. He had nothing but the gamebag on his back, nine cakes of bread, tea and sugar, rifle and ax, a single blanket. The chances were he could travel twice as fast as they.

   He passed their first fire, where they had stopped to boil tea and had thrown the tea leaves on the embers. The tea leaves were frozen stiff.

   All day he swung on, parting the boughs where the spruces were thick, slipping through them as effortlessly as a weasel, trotting down all the hills with a tireless shuffle, trotting again where the way was level and open. Once he stopped for ten minutes to sit on a log and munch dry bread, light his pipe, and swing on. It was frosty, and the edges of his fur cap grew white with his breathing.

   Before sunset he had long passed their first night's camp. Through the semi-darkness of early twilight he pressed on, following the hardness of their track more by touch than by sight. In the starlight he made his fire and boiled tea in a ravine by a brook. Here and there a tree snapped with the frost. The brook murmured under the ice. On the western hill a horn owl was hooting.

   Every hour he woke with the cold, threw on more wood, turned over and slept again. Around three o'clock he woke and could not sleep again. He sat hunched in the blanket, looking into the fire thinking what a fool he was. He should be on the trap line, not here. He had not come up the river so far away to waste time chasing Indians around the hills. Already he was hungry and wished he had brought more food. It was too bad he couldn't just shoot Mathieu, but it would be no use to leave the women to wander around and starve. At the thought of actually squeezing the trigger and seeing them drop, he shuddered.

   By half past four he had boiled his tea and eaten, and was picking his way along the track again. He should have rested another hour, he knew; it was so slow in the darkness. But he could not rest, though he was tired. He wanted to get it over with. Probably they would not bleed much; it was so cold.                           

   The Indians were still heading northwest. Likely they were bound for the hundred-mile lake, Panchikamats, not far from the headwaters of streams that flowed into Hudson's Bay. Mathieu would feel safe there. And he would be, too. It was much farther than Jan could track him, with only three days' grub in the bag.

In the morning he passed their second night's camp. By noontime lie had come to the edge of a big, oval marsh that was about six miles wide at its narrowest. On its barren floor there were occasional clumps of dead slicks, juniper and fir, no higher than a man's head, the firs rotten and falling, the junipers gaunt and wind-carved. Compared to its bleak; dead savagery the greenwoods borders seemed sociable and friendly and snug. As the merciless northwest wind had stunted and killed the trees, so it could shrivel and kill a man if it caught him out there in a blizzard.

The trail was dim and wind-scoured. A mile out and there was nothing but the dully shining spots the sleds had polished; two miles out and Mathieu was veering off to the cast, deviating now from his northwest course.

The marks petered out entirely, heading, at the last, straight east. If Mathieu were really heading northwest, the blue notch at the marsh's far end was the natural way for him. Then why, in the middle of the marsh, did he swing off for the steep ridges to the east?

Jan trotted about in a circle, slapping his mittens to­gether and pounding the toes that were aching in his moccasin. The drifting snow slid by like sand, rising in little eddies as the wind rose.

He stopped and stood with his back to the wind, leaning against it. Mathieu, he figured, wanted to go through the blue notch, but it was too plain. He knew his track could be picked up there first thing. So he cut off in the middle of the marsh, thinking there'd be no mark of it left. Mathieu had just made a little circle-round, and was now right on down the valley. With the women haul­ing sleds, they couldn't gel along in those hills- They'd have to strike the valley.

Jan picked up his gamebag and trotted off toward the now-invisible notch. Lord Hairy, he was hungry. In the wind he felt like singing; the wind drowned sound, sang a song of its own, saved a man from feeling that the miles of quiet woods were listening. He roared in a strong baritone:

Oh we seen the strangest sights of far-off lands,

And we conquered stormy winds and stinging foam,

But the be-e-est is to see the chee-eery lights of ho-o-ome.

The drift had obscured the shores now, and he was as though alone in the middle of a white sea, snow above, below, and on all sides. But he did not think of it. The wind was compass enough for him and had been since boyhood.

He clasped his gun and ax in the crook of one elbow, put his curled mitts up around his mouth, and imitated a mouth organ, hunching up his shoulders and swinging his body, dancing on his snowshoes in the gale.

At dusk, miles beyond the blue notch, he picked up the Indians' track again. He glowed with the warmth of a hunter's pride. They'd never get away now; they were doomed, unless it snowed.

A mile farther on they had camped, and there he camped too. There was still a faint warmth in the depths of their ashes. But the sight of a bundle lashed in the low branches of a spruce made him pause. It was a hairy cari­bou skin, a big trout net, and a heavy iron Dutch oven. So, they were lightening loads, were they? They knew they were being tracked then. How did they know?

Jan sat on the fir brush of their tent site and thought about it. They didn't know, they couldn't know. Mathieu was just playing safe, that was all, announcing, if he should be followed, that he was still a-drivin'er for all he was worth, bluffing a pursuer, trying to say, "I know I am being followed" — just in case he should be followed. Mathieu would go on for a week, get his women set in a good camp, then circle back, hunting as he came, and pick up his stuff again.

That's what you think, Mathieu.

That night he ate another half a bannock, only half when he could so easily have eaten three whole ones. What a fool he was to have traveled so light. If, by some mischance, he didn't catch them now, he'd be stranded off here with nothing to eat.

Rolled in his blanket and their caribou robe, he had the best sleep yet. It was risky. He had his gun beside him. For why couldn't Mathieu come back tonight as well as in a week? All about was the ring of darkness; here was the firelight. What a perfect mark to shoot at. Yes, but Mathieu wouldn't shoot him. Why, Mathieu's father used to camp on the shore at Turner's Harbor in the summertime years ago. Mathieu's cousin used to wrestle with Jan by the hour, and Mathieu himself had been in the foot races they ran on the beach by the blue, cool bay long ago.

He sat and poked at the fire. Mathieu wouldn't shoot you, he was thinking, but you'd shoot Mathieu. Mathieu would steal his grub, but he wouldn't steal Mathieu's grub. Head in hands, he rocked to and fro, bewildered and hating this mental tangle. Oh, if Mathieu only hadn't come along at all; if only Mathieu hadn't taken a whole bag of flour, he would be so glad for Mathieu.

He settled it this way: if Mathieu wants to come along and shoot me tonight, let him, that's good luck for Mathieu; but if Mathieu doesn't, maybe Mathieu will get shot himself tomorrow night.

The stars paled and the east grayed the same as on other mornings. Jan did not set out until there was a little light. It would be so easy for Mathieu to wait hidden by the track.                       

He walked with his cap on the side, exposing one ear, and when that ear began to freeze he tilted his cap and uncovered the other. Every mile he stopped and listened, mouth open, holding his breath. Late in the forenoon as he stood examining a small valley thick with willows and boulders, he was conscious from the corner of his eye that a tuft of snow was slipping down the face of a gray boulder off to the left. Was somebody behind there? He turned and ran, dodging through the trees. Skirting the end of the willows, he stealthily approached the trail farther on. No, no one had been there. It must have been a willow twig brushing the rock in the breeze. Here were the three prints, just the three prints, Mathieu's almost indistin­guishable under the women's and the sleds'. The women had given up hauling tandem. They took turns single, and when they changed places Mathieu didn't wait for them. They had to run a little to catch up, poor things. Luce could never have hauled like that.

As he tramped, he got to thinking of the otter skin Mathieu had left. It was funny the way Indian hunters would take food. They'd been hunters for so many ages they thought a bag of flour, like a caribou, was anybody's who needed it. But they wouldn't steal fur. Indians! They were like a necessary evil, they were like children. It would be better if they did steal fur and left the grub alone. They could pack grub as well as anybody, but they were too lazy. They let the trappers wear themselves to skin and bone struggling up the river in a canoe loaded to the gun­wales, risking their lives for it in the white rapids, lugging their loads up The Great 'Bank, a mile long and steeper than the bridge of Satan's own nose, breaking their backs for it across twelve miles of swamps and brooks and slip­pery rocks on the Grand Portage where the tumplines pulled their hair out by the roots and they carried till their eyes turned black and their trembling knees sagged under them. And then—then the Indians came along and helped themselves as though flour were worth no more up here than down on the bay shore.

They won't help themselves to my grub, Jan thought grimly. Someday I'll come back to the house maybe and find it cleaned right out. And what about me, living on jay's legs and moss till I fall in the snow and die?

The sky was growing deeper gray, darkness coming early. The air was chill with a suspicion of dampness. Come a big batch of snow to cover their track and make the walking back heavy, he'd be in a fine fix with no food. He smelled the wind, and it smelled like snow. Before dark it began to fall, and at dark he still had not caught them. Must be getting weak, he thought ruefully. He'd set some rabbit snares tonight. Or maybe he'd get a partridge. And maybe he wouldn't.

He stood on the shore of a little lake and leaned against a tree, uncertain. With the new snow and the dark, there was only the barest sign of the track now. By morning it would be gone. What was that sharp smell?

He threw back his head and sniffed. Wood smoke! He had caught them. Let the snow pelt down, let it snow six feet in the night; he had caught them and they couldn't get away.

Strange, though, that they should camp before the snow got thick. An hour more and they would have been safe. Well, Mathieu had made his last mistake this time.

Over a knoll in a thick clump of firs Jan built a small fire to boil the kettle. He was ravenous, and weary to the bone. They were camped, they would keep till he got ready for them. And they couldn't smell his smoke with the wind this way.

He ate the last of his bannock, drank four cups of tea, and smoked his pipe to the last dregs. Then he left his bag and ax, took his rifle, and stole out across the dark lake. It was black as ink, and the new snow was like cotton wool to muffle his steps. Just back from the far shore he saw their dome-shaped meetchwop glimmering. They were burning a candle in there, one of his own probably.

He crept up closer on his belly, foot by foot. The two sleds were stuck up against a tree; there was the chopping block, the ax, the chips. Snowshoes were hanging from a limb, the two small pairs. The women inside were bak­ing bread. He could hear the frying pan scrape on the tin stove. They were talking in their soft, musical voices, more like a brook under the ice than like human talk. They weren't hardly human anyway. But he could not bring himself to walk into the tent and shoot them in cold blood. Better get Mathieu first. But where were the big snowshoes—where was Mathieu? Behind that black tree there with his rifle cocked?

He lay silent, scarcely breathing, ears stretched for the slightest sound. There were only the wind and the fall­ing snow and the women's voices and the scraping pan.

Fifteen minutes, a half-hour, he lay thus.

He was freezing, he couldn't lie there all night. Inch by inch, he crawled away. Silent as a shadow, he went back across the lake. There was danger everywhere now, every time he moved a muscle. He could feel it all around him, feel a prickling in his scalp and a supernatural cer­tainty that as he was stalking Mathieu, Mathieu was stalk­ing him. Cautiously, with long waits, he approached his camp. The fire was out. His fingers touched the gamebag, and drew back. Something was there, something that shouldn't be! Something was wrong. Chills went up and down his spine. He whirled toward a deeper patch of shadow, knowing with the certainty of panic that gunfire would belch from that shadow and blind him. His eyes roamed round in his head in the darkness and he waited, turned to stone.

There was no sound. Nothing but the soft hiss of the snowflakes drifting down.

Then he smelled it. Bread, new-baked bread, sweet as life to his nostrils. He drew off his mitten and touched the gamebag again. His fingers counted them—seven crusty bannock cakes, still warm.

"Mathieu," he whispered to the engulfing darkness. There was no answer. He struck a match and looked at the cakes. He bit one, and shook his head, ashamed. All his muscles sagged as he slumped into the snow and took a deep, deep breath—the first, it seemed, in many days.

Everything was different now. Noisily he crashed down a big tree for his night's fire. He was sticking up a lean-to by the fireplace, he was chilled by the night's cold, not by the cold horror of that other unthinkable job. Lord, he'd rather Mathieu plugged him full of holes than to take a sight on Mathieu. It was like waking up from a nightmare. He had half a mind to go across the lake now and ask Mathieu's woman to sew up the tear in his britches, and have a good sleep in the Indians' warm tent. How they would giggle and talk with their black eyes!

But he was too ashamed. Mathieu was a better man than he was, that was all—smarter in the woods and more forgiving. I wouldn't forgive Mathieu, he mused, for tak­ing a bag of flour, but he forgives me for trying to kill him. All the time the snow's coming down and he only had to go on a little piece farther tonight to lose me. He knows that, but he takes a chance and sneaks back to feed me, me that's chasing him to kill him. Mathieu don't want I should starve going back to the river. Mathieu—he don't want us to part unfriendly.

Lord, it beat all. If ever he told this to Luce she'd say he was the head liar out of all the liars on the whole river.

He finished one of the fragrant, tender bread cakes and lay down with his back to the fire. It was a long time since he'd felt so happy. Wonderful strange too, how much he and Mathieu had said to each other without words, way off here, never meeting, eating each other's grub.

Toward morning the snow stopped. Just after sunrise the Indian family broke camp and climbed the hill up from the shore. Jan, watching from the opposite hill across the lake, saw them silhouetted, three dark figures on the bare ridge. He pointed his gun at a tree top and let go greeting. Boomboom . . . Boom. He saw the two women, startled, duck behind their sled.

But Mathieu stood erect against the brightening sky. He raised his rifle and fired one answering shot.

So they stood for a moment, on opposite hills, with upraised hand. Good-by. Luck.

. . .

V.K. Arseniev from Dersu the Trapper

It was time to feed the horses. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to lie down in the shade of a big cedar, and dropped off to sleep at once. In a couple of hours Olentiev awakened me and I looked around. I saw Dersu splitting firewood and collecting birch bark and stacking it all in the hut.

I thought at first that he wanted to burn it down, and started dissuading him from the idea. Instead of replying, he asked me for a pinch of salt and a handful of rice. I was interested to see what he was going to do with it, so told the men to give him some. The Gold carefully rolled up some matches in birch bark, and the salt and rice, each separately, in rolls of birch bark, and hung it all inside the hut. He then started packing his own things.

“You’ll probably be coming back here one of these days, I suppose?” I asked him.

He shook his head, so I then asked him for whom he was leaving the matches, salt, and rice.

“Some other man, he come,” answered Dersu, “He find dry wood, he find matches, he find food, not die.”

 I well remember how struck I was by this. It was wonderful, I thought, that the Gold should bother his head about an unknown man whom he never would see, and who would never know who had left him the provisions. I thought how my men, on leaving a bivouac, always burnt up all the bark left at the fire. They did it out of no ill-will, but simply for amusement, to see the blaze, and I never used to stop them from doing so. And here was this savage far more thoughtful for others than I. . Why is it that among town-dwellers this forethought for the interests of others has completely disappeared, though no doubt it was once there?