Ballads of a Cheechako / by Robert W. Service [electronic text]

IV.

A wedge-faced man there was who ran along the river bank, Who stumbled through each drift and slough, and ever slipped and sank, And ever cursed his Maker's name, and ever "hooch" he drank.

He travelled like a hunted thing, hard harried, sore distrest; The old grandmother moon crept out from her cloud-quilted nest; The aged mountains mocked at him in their primeval rest.

Grim shadows diapered the snow; the air was strangely mild; The valley's girth was dumb with mirth, the laughter of the wild; The still, sardonic laughter of an ogre o'er a child.

The river writhed beneath the ice; it groaned like one in pain, And yawning chasms opened wide, and closed and yawned again; And sheets of silver heaved on high until they split in twain.

From out the road-house by the trail they saw a man afar Make for the narrow river-reach where the swift cross-currents are; Where, frail and worn, the ice is torn and the angry waters jar.

But they did not see him crash and sink into the icy flow; They did not see him clinging there, gripped by the undertow, Clawing with bleeding finger-nails at the jagged ice and snow.

They found a note beside the hole where he had stumbled in: "Here met his fate by evil luck a man who lived in sin, And to the one who loves me least I leave this black fox skin."

And strange it is; for, though they searched the river all around, No trace or sign of black fox skin was ever after found; Though one man said he saw the tread of hoofs deep in the ground.