An Odyssey of the North
Summary
A half-dead Inuit guide crawls out of the white darkness into Cal Galbraith’s log-hewn Klondike cabin, clutching sixty owed ounces of gold and a vendetta that has crossed tundra, sea, and the Siberian salt pits. Through Naass’s cracked lips spills a saga of ancient blood-feud: two ship-wrecked sailor clans whose last scions—Naass and Unga—are betrothed to end the quarrel at a potlatch wedding, only to have the bride abducted by the swaggering explorer Axel Gunderson. Naass’s pursuit becomes a geodesic arc of obsession: sealing grounds, czarist prison hulks, chain-gang quarries, storm-lashed decks, and finally the Yukon’s implacable winter. Promising a phantom mother-lode, he lures the Gundersons deep into the cordillera, sabotages every chance of return, and starves the lovers into a glacial tableau of slow death. When Axel expires and Unga spurns salvation, Naass discovers vengeance is only another kind of hunger, emptier than the wind howling over the passes. He tosses Galbraith the blood-weighted poke of dust and stares into the fire, a man unmoored from both love and hate.
Synopsis
To Cal Galbraith's cabin in the Klondike, one winter night, comes a starving, frost-bitten figure. Cal recognizes it as Naass, an Esquimau dog-driver, to whom he had lent sixty ounces of gold dust that he might buy release from the service, and who thereupon had left for a prospecting trip with Axel Gunderson and his wife many weeks before. Crouching by the fire, Naass tells his story. We see the feud in the Esquimau village between the descendants of two shipwrecked sailors, which terminates at the wedding plotlach of the last of the two lines, Naass and Unga. We see Axel carry Unga off to his ship, where he later wins her love and marries her. Knowing nothing of this, but always remembering the last appeal in Unga's eyes. Naass follows as best he can. From city to city he journeys, till a clue carries him to the sealing grounds. With Axel's ship in sight. Naass' ship is captured by Russians in waters forbidden to sealers, and he is sent to Siberia. Not even the horrors of the salt mines and the knout daunt him and he escapes, to make his way hack through Alaska to San Francisco. There he learns that Axel and Unga had left the day before for the Klondike, but at least he has a definite clue and a bait to trap Axel with in the shape of a map leading to a wonderful mine in the unknown mountains of interior Alaska, given him by a dying prospector, so with renewed courage he starts out again. At Dawson the long search is ended, but they do not remember one who had paid for Unga's love an untold price, and he easily persuades them to go with him in search of the mine in the mountains. The odyssey is over, the never-forgotten appeal in Unga's eyes will now be answered, and Axel is in his power. He destroys the caches for the return trip, kills the dogs, and watches with the exultation of the just avenger Axel's slow death from starvation and frost. Then when death has come to Axel and is very near himself and Unga, he reveals his identity, "I am Naass, the last of the blood, as you are the last of the blood." To his bewilderment, Unga laughs wildly, then denouncing him in a passionate outburst, throws herself beside the dead body of her husband and refuses to leave him. "But upon me there lay your debt, which would not let me rest. I repay." And giving Cal a bag of gold, taken from the far mountains, Naass turns again to the fire.
