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| THIS is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain: | |
| ‘Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane; | |
| Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore; | |
| Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core; | |
| Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat, | 5 |
| Sired of bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat. | |
| Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones; | |
| Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons; | |
| Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat; | |
| But the others—the misfits, the failures—I trample under my feet; | 10 |
| Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, | |
| Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters—Go! take back your spawn again. | |
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| ‘Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway; | |
| From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day; | |
| Hugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come: | 15 |
| Till he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept—the scum, | |
| The pallid pimp of the dead line, the enervate of the pen, | |
| One by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was—Men. | |
| One by one I dismayed them, frightened them sore with my glooms; | |
| One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms; | 20 |
| Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains, | |
| Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins; | |
| Burst with my winter upon them, searing for ever their sight, | |
| Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night; | |
| Staggering wild in the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, | 25 |
| Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow; | |
| Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, | |
| Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; | |
| Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, | |
| Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer; | 30 |
| Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam; | |
| Writing a cheque for a million, drivelling feebly of home; | |
| Lost like a louse in the burning … or else in the tented town | |
| Seeking a drunkard’s solace, sinking and sinking down; | |
| Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world, | 35 |
| Lost ’mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled; | |
| In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, | |
| Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all ablare; | |
| Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies | |
| In the hush of my mountained vastness, so natheless I suffer them thrive, | 40 |
| Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive. | |
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| ‘But the others, the men of my mettle, the men who would ’stablish my fame, | |
| Unto its ultimate issue, winning me honour, not shame; | |
| Searching my uttermost valleys, fighting each step as they go, | |
| Shooting the wrath of my rapids, scaling my ramparts of snow; | 45 |
| Ripping the guts of my mountains, looting the beds of my creeks, | |
| Them will I take to my bosom, and speak as a mother speaks. | |
| I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods; | |
| Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods. | |
| Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst, | 50 |
| Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first; | |
| Visioning camp-fires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn, | |
| Feeling my womb o’er-pregnant with the seethe of cities unborn. | |
| Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway, | |
| And I wait for the men who will win me—and I will not be won in a day; | 55 |
| And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave, and mild, | |
| But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child; | |
| Desperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat, | |
| Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat. | |
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| ‘Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and wearily wise, | 60 |
| With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes; | |
| Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day, | |
| When men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away; | |
| Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave— | |
| Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I stamp them into a grave. | 65 |
| Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, | |
| Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, | |
| Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, | |
| As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world.’ | |
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| This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; | 70 |
| That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive. | |
| Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, | |
| This is the Will of the Yukon—Lo! how she makes it plain! | |
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