The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Golden Snare, by James Oliver Curwood

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Title: The Golden Snare

Author: James Oliver Curwood

Posting Date: August 11, 2009 [EBook #4515]
Release Date: October, 2003
First Posted: January 29, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE GOLDEN SNARE

BY

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

AUTHOR OF KAZAN, THE DANGER TRAIL, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE, THE
GRIZZLY KING, ETC.

JTABLE 10 26 1

THE GOLDEN SNARE

CHAPTER I

Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was, above
all other things, a creature of environment--and necessity, and of that
something else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and at
others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and
the girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too
much. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if he
really had what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it was
hidden--hidden to the forests and the wild things that had made him.

Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three
generations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of
Sixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a
canoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great Slave
and thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a number of
remarkable ethnological changes. The racial characteristics of the
world he is entering change swiftly. The thin-faced Chippewa with his
alert movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree,
with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racier
birchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; each
new tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, until
at last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place.
And the Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.
Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is still