to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the
liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out
of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude
not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness
and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put
mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains
that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad
caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness
is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a
bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,
but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the
hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant’s bed all the horrors of this
world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a
man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The
skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal
futileness and of eternal hate.
When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he
was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out
the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him
because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal
treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle
with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear
water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before
autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and
hard until it blisters and cracks open.
So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful
stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They
said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous
horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood
trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused
himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical
courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the
horse’s hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing
embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay
there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson
went over the next morning at four o’clock to go with him to the
