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Updated: May 10, 2025
Three minutes later Baree came to the blind end of the canyon a wall of rock that rose straight up like the curve of a dish. Feasting on fish and long hours of sleep had fattened him, and he was half winded as he sought vainly for an exit. He was at the far end of the dishlike curve of rock, without a bush or a clump of grass to hide him, when Pierrot and Nepeese saw him again.
Nepeese was in the open, crying the name she had given him "OOKIMOW JEEM OOKIMOW JEEM OOKIMOW JEEM " She was standing there white and slim, her eyes with the blaze of the stars in them, and when she saw Carvel she flung out her arms to him, still crying: "Ookimow Jeem Oo-oo, Ookimow Jeem " In the tepee he heard the rage of a beast, the moaning cries of a man.
She dropped on her hands and knees and then lowered herself flat on the ground and began crawling into the hollow under the boulder. Baree had moved. With the back of his head flattened against the rock, he had heard something which Nepeese had not heard. He had felt a slow and growing pressure, and from this pressure he had dragged himself slowly and the pressure still followed.
Those eyes full of dancing witches! How he would take pleasure in taming them very soon now! He followed Pierrot outside. In his exultation he no longer felt the smart of Baree's teeth. "I will show you my new cariole that I have made for winter, m'sieu," said Pierrot as the door closed behind them. Half an hour later Nepeese came out of the cabin.
There could be no escape for Nepeese. It was a wonderful scheme, so easy of accomplishment, so inevitable in its outcome. And all the time Pierrot would think he was away to the east on a mission! He ate his breakfast before dawn, and was on the trail before it was yet light. Purposely he struck due east, so that in coming up from the south and west Pierrot would not strike his sledge tracks.
When McTaggart had run along the edge of the chasm, Baree had squatted himself in the trodden plot of snow where Nepeese had last stood, his body stiffened and his forefeet braced as he looked down. He had seen her take the leap. Many times that summer he had followed her in her daring dives into the deep, quiet water of the pool. But this was a tremendous distance.
"But where did Baree go, mon pere?" Nepeese cried. Impelled by the wild alarm of the Willow's terrible cries and the sight of Pierrot dashing madly toward him from the dead body of Wakayoo, Baree did not stop running until it seemed as though his lungs could not draw another breath. When he stopped, he was well out of the canyon and headed for the beaver pond.
Under her hand Nepeese felt the stiffening of his body, and in a moment of uncanny stillness she heard the sharp, uneasy click of his teeth. Then the rain fell. It was not like other rains Baree had known. It was an inundation sweeping down out of the blackness of the skies. Within five minutes the interior of the balsam shelter was a shower bath.
The appalling thing, after all, was not that both Pierrot and Nepeese were dead, but that his dream was shattered. It was not that Nepeese was dead, but that he had lost her. This was his vital disappointment. The other thing his crime it was easy to destroy all traces of that. It was not sentiment that made him dig Pierrot's grave close to the princess mother's under the tall spruce.
When he darted out, straight up the canyon, Nepeese was not a dozen yards behind him, and he saw Pierrot almost at her side. The Willow gave a cry. "Mana mana there he is!" She caught her breath, and darted into a copse of young balsams where Baree had disappeared.
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