The Faith of Men(人们的信任)

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The Faith of Men

By Jack London

The Faith of Men

A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE

I wash my hands of him at the start. I cannot father his tales, nor will

I be responsible for them. I make these preliminary reservations, observe,

as a guard upon my own integrity. I possess a certain definite position in

a small way, also a wife; and for the good name of the community that

honours my existence with its approval, and for the sake of her posterity

and mine, I cannot take the chances I once did, nor foster probabilities

with the careless improvidence of youth. So, I repeat, I wash my hands

of him, this Nimrod, this mighty hunter, this homely, blue-eyed, freckle-

faced Thomas Stevens.

Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive

branches my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to be

generous. I shall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas Stevens, and,

further, I shall withhold my judgment. If it be asked why, I can only add

that judgment I have none. Long have I pondered, weighed, and

balanced, but never have my conclusions been twice the same--forsooth!

because Thomas Stevens is a greater man than I. If he have told truths,

well and good; if untruths, still well and good. For who can prove? or

who disprove? I eliminate myself from the proposition, while those of

little faith may do as I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and

discuss to his face the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate.

As to where he may be found? The directions are simple: anywhere

between 53 north latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on the other,

the likeliest hunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia and

farthermost Labrador. That he is there, somewhere, within that clearly

defined territory, I pledge the word of an honourable man whose

expectations entail straight speaking and right living.

Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we

first met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my camp

when I thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost post of

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civilization. At the sight of his human face, the first in weary months, I

could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms (and I am not by

any means a demonstrative man); but to him his visit seemed the most

casual thing under the sun. He just strolled into the light of my camp,

passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten trails, threw my

snowshoes the one way and a couple of dogs the other, and so made room

for himself by the fire. Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of soda

and to see if I had any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancient pipe,

loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your leave,

whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff was fairly

good. He sighed with the contentment of the just, and literally absorbed

the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and it did my smoker's heart

good to behold him.

Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No;

just sort of knocking round a bit. Had come up from the Great Slave

some time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country.

The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike,

and he was of a mind to run over for a peep. I noticed that he spoke of

the Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River--a

conceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the CHECHAQUAS

and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such a matter

of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him. He also had it in

view, he said, before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to make a little

run up Fort o' Good Hope way.

Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond

the Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when a

nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere in

particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such in terms of "trapsing"

and "a little run," it is fair time to rouse up and shake off the dream.

Wherefore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, the pine

boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera, the

frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and, above, a

great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-

The Faith of Men

west. I shivered. There is a magic in the Northland night, that steals in

on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are clutched and downed

before you are aware. Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying prone and

crossed where he had flung them. Also I had an eye to my tobacco pouch.

Half, at least, of its goodly store had vamosed. That settled it. Fancy had

not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man-- one

of those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like

a lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps. Oh, well, let his

moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together. Who

knows?--the mere sound of a fellow- creature's voice may bring all

straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game

and the ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost

Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He averred he knew the

haunts where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks

of the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the

Great Barrens on the musk-ox's winter trail.

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no

account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why it

was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by a

man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of the

great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending to the

levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this creature for its

hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a foot longer than those

of the other. This is mighty convenient, as will be reality admitted. So I

hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in the first person, present

tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it the necessary garnishings and

touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see the man stunned by the recital.

Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he

objected, denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's

inability to turn about and go the other way--had he done this, I say, I

could have taken him by the hand for the true sportsman that he was.

The Faith of Men

Not he. He sniffed, looked on me, and sniffed again; then gave my

tobacco due praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the

gear. It was a MUCLUC of the Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew

threads, and devoid of beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that

was remarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me of

walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore so

marvellous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles this hair was well-

nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush and snow; but around

the top and down the more sheltered back it was coarse, dirty black, and

very thick. I parted it with difficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur

that is common with northern animals, but found it in this case to be

absent. This, however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, the

tufts that had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and asked,

"Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"

I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I

answered candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the hair,

puzzled me.

"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of impressiveness,

"that came from a mammoth."

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my

unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth.

We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and

by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the

bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists. Our

explorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A

weakly breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what

you may know of the mammoth and his ways."

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook

by ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject in

hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, and

marshalled all my facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberian sand-

The Faith of Men

bars that abounded with ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the large

quantities of fossil ivory purchased from the Innuits by the Alaska

Commercial Company; and acknowledged having myself mined six- and

eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks. "All

fossils," I concluded, "found in the midst of debris deposited through

countless ages."

"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a

most confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water- melon.

Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves into

thinking that they are really raising or eating them, there are no such

things as extant water-melons?"

"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which was

puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth vegetable life in

lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations. Nowhere in the

North is the soil so prolific. Ergo, the mammoth cannot exist."

"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland,

for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, I

am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no longer

exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own right arm."

Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewood

at the dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.

Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and

requite me for my St. Elias bear.

"It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silence had

intervened. "I was in camp one day--"

"Where?" I interrupted.

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where

stretched a TERRA INCOGNITA into which vastness few men have

strayed and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch.

Klooch was as handsome a little KAMOOKS as ever whined betwixt the

traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full- blood

Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her, and with

understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson Bay stock. I

The Faith of Men

tell you, O man, she was a corker combination. And now, on this day I

have in mind, she was brought to pup through a pure wild wolf of the

woods--grey, and long of limb, with big lungs and no end of staying

powers. Say! Was there ever the like? It was a new breed of dog I

had started, and I could look forward to big things.

"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely delivered.

I was squatting on my hams over the litter--seven sturdy, blind little

beggars--when from behind came a bray of trumpets and crash of brass.

There was a rush, like the wind- squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and

I was midway to my feet when knocked flat on my face. At the same

instant I heard Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted

your fist in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I twisted

my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the blue

sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain of flesh was

just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the open. I caught a

rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in girth as my body, standing out

straight behind. The next second only a tremendous hole remained in the

thicket, though I could still hear the sounds as of a tornado dying quickly

away, underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees snapping and crashing.

"I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with the

muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel out of line,

and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I looked for the slut, and--

and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head.

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of her!

Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all gone. Where she

had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in the soft earth, all of a yard

in diameter, and around the edges a few scattered hairs."

I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and glanced

at Nimrod.

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its

tusks scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe, myself, at the

time, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me,

The Faith of Men

there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was--or,

rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot all

over now when I think of it Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a

new race! And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second

flood, wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you

wonder that the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I

grabbed the hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture.

"The hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't

it kill you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the time I've

laughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I was that

danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch. Think of it, O man! A brand-

new, unclassified, uncopyrighted breed, and wiped out before ever it

opened its eyes or took out its intention papers! Well, so be it. Life's

full of disappointments, and rightly so. Meat is best after a famine, and a

bed soft after a hard trail.

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and

hung to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward the

head, I was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I might as

well stop long enough to explain a couple of points. Up thereabouts, in

the midst of the mountains, is an almighty curious formation. There is no

end of little valleys, each like the other much as peas in a pod, and all

neatly tucked away with straight, rocky walls rising on all sides. And at

the lower ends are always small openings where the drainage or glaciers

must have broken out. The only way in is through these mouths, and they

are all small, and some smaller than others. As to grub--you've slushed

around on the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way,

most likely, seeing as you're a traveller. And you know how stuff grows

there--big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that's the way it was with those

valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and such things in

patches higher than your head. Rain three days out of four during the

summer months; and food in them for a thousand mammoths, to say

The Faith of Men

nothing of small game for man.

"But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded

and gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my

dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till

I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for

SKOOKUM MAMOOK PUKAPUK--excuse Chinook, I mean there was

a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was very narrow, and

the walls steep. High up on one side was one of those big pivot rocks, or

balancing rocks, as some call them, weighing all of a couple of hundred

tons. Just the thing. I hit back for camp, keeping an eye open so the

bull couldn't slip past, and got my ammunition. It wasn't worth anything

with the rifle smashed; so I opened the shells, planted the powder under

the rock, and touched it off with slow fuse. Wasn't much of a charge, but

the old boulder tilted up lazily and dropped down into place, with just

space enough to let the creek drain nicely. Now I had him."

"But how did you have him?" I queried. "Who ever heard of a man

killing a mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, with anything

else?"

"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a slight

manifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what of Klooch and

the gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this not new and most

unusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it. Listen, and you

shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened in the youth of the

world when cavemen rounded up the kill with hand-axe of stone. Such

would have served me as well. Now is it not a fact that man can outwalk

the dog or horse? That he can wear them out with the intelligence of his

endurance?"

I nodded.

"Well?"

The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue.

"My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed.

There was no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and

I had him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend,

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pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times

before I knocked off for supper. Don't you see? A race-course! A man

and a mammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon, and stars to referee!

"It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that's no beaver

dream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the inner circle,

eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of

sleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate at times and turn. Then I'd

head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathema upon

him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on. But he was too wise to

bog in a mud puddle. Once he pinned me in against the walls, and I

crawled back into a deep crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me

with his trunk, I'd belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking

fit to split my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had me and didn't

have me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man's fool. He

knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he made up his

mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn't figured on

the commissary. There was neither grub nor water around that spot, so

on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege. He'd stand before the

opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and flapping mosquitoes away

with his big blanket ears. Then the thirst would come on him and he'd

ramp round and roar till the earth shook, calling me every name he could

lay tongue to. This was to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I

was sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and try to make a sneak

for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almost there--only a couple of

hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and back he'd come,

lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After I'd done this a few

times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his tactics. Grasped the time

element, you see. Without a word of warning, away he'd go, tearing for

the water like mad, scheming to get there and back before I ran away.

Finally, after cursing me most horribly, he raised the siege and deliberately

stalked off to the water-hole.

"That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but after that

the hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round, like a six

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摘要：

TheFaithofMen1TheFaithofMenByJackLondonTheFaithofMen2ARELICOFTHEPLIOCENEIwashmyhandsofhimatthestart.Icannotfatherhistales,norwillIberesponsibleforthem.Imakethesepreliminaryreservations,observe,asaguarduponmyownintegrity.Ipossessacertaindefinitepositioninasmallway,alsoawife;andforthegoodnameofthecomm...

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