It was a world of big, honest hearts kept warm within caribou
skins, of moccasined men whom endless solitude had taught to say little
and do much--a world of "Big Snows," as the Englishman had said, in which
Jan and all his people had come very close to the things which God
created. Without the steely gray flash of those mystery-lights over the
Arctic pole Jan would have been homesick; his soul would have withered
and died in anything but this wondrous land which he knew, with its
billion dazzling stars by night and its eye-blinding brilliancy by day.
For Jan, in a way, was fortunate. He had in him an infinitesimal measure
of the Cree, which made him understand what the winds sometimes whispered
in the pine-tops; and a part of him was French, which added jet to his
eyes and a twist to his tongue and made him susceptible to the beautiful,
and the rest was "just white"--the part of him that could be stirred into
such thoughts and visions as he was now thinking and dreaming of the
Englishman.
The "honor of the Beeg Snows" was a part of Jan's soul; it was his
religion, and the religion of those few others who lived with him four
hundred miles from a settlement, in a place where God's name could not be
spelled or written. It meant what civilization could not understand, and
the Englishman could not understand--freezing and slow starvation rather
than theft, and the living of the tenth commandment above all other
things.
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