CHAPTER 18
No longer, as in the days of old, did the darkness of the forests holda fear for Baree. This night his hunt cry had risen to the stars andthe moon, and in that cry he had, for the first time, sent forth hisdefiance of night and space, his warning to all the wild, and hisacceptance of the Brotherhood. In that cry, and the answers that cameback to him, he sensed a new power--the final triumph of nature intelling him that the forests and the creatures they held were no longerto be feared, but that all things feared him. Off there, beyond thepale of the cabin and the influence of Nepeese, were all the thingsthat the wolf blood in him found now most desirable: companionship ofhis kind, the lure of adventure, the red, sweet blood of the chase--andmatehood. This last, after all, was the dominant mystery that wasurging him, and yet least of all did he understand it.
He ran straight into the darkness to the north and west, slinking lowunder the bushes, his tail drooping, his ears aslant--the wolf as thewolf runs on the night trail. The pack had swung due north, and wastraveling faster than he, so that at the end of half an hour he couldno longer hear it. But the lone wolf howl to the west was nearer, andthree times Baree gave answer to it.
At the end of an hour he heard the pack again, swinging southward.Pierrot would easily have understood. Their quarry had found safetybeyond water, or in a lake, and the muhekuns were on a fresh trail. Bythis time not more than a quarter of a mile of the forest separatedBaree from the lone wolf, but the lone wolf was also an old wolf, andwith the directness and precision of long experience, he swerved in thedirection of the hunters, compassing his trail so that he was headingfor a point half or three-quarters of a mile in advance of the pack.
This was a trick of the Brotherhood which Baree had yet to learn; andthe result of his ignorance, and lack of skill, was that twice withinthe next half-hour he found himself near to the pack without being ableto join it. Then came a long and final silence. The pack had pulleddown its kill, and in their feasting they made no sound.
The rest of the night Baree wandered alone, or at least until the moonwas well on the wane. He was a long way from the cabin, and his trailhad been an uncertain and twisting one, but he was no longer possessedwith the discomforting sensation of being lost. The last two or threemonths had been developing strongly in him the sense of orientation,that "sixth sense" which guides the pigeon unerringly on its way andtakes a bear straight as a bird might fly to its last year's denningplace.
Baree had not forgotten Nepeese. A dozen times he turned his head backand whined, and always he picked out accurately the direction in whichthe cabin lay. But he did not turn back. As the night lengthened, hissearch for that mysterious something which he had not found continued.His hunger, even with the fading-out of the moon and the coming of thegray dawn, was not sufficiently keen to make him hunt for food.
It was cold, and it seemed colder when the glow of the moon and starsdied out. Under his padded feet, especially in the open spaces, was athick white frost in which he left clearly at times the imprint of histoes and claws. He had traveled steadily for hours, a great many milesin all, and he was tired when the first light of the day came. And thenthere came the time when, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, hestopped like a shot in his tracks.
At last it had come--the meeting with that for which he had beenseeking. It was in a clearing, lighted by the cold dawn--a tinyamphitheater that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east. With herhead toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, hisscent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf. Bareehad not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim ofyoung balsams that fringed the clearing. It was then that he stopped,and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed tobreathe.
There was not a fortnight's difference in their age and yet Maheegunwas much the smaller of the two. Her body was as long, but she wasslimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of afox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a signof swiftness almost equal to the wind. She stood poised for flight evenas Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly herbody relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears losttheir alertness and dropped aslant.
Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft andbushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of hismasculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. Hewas within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from herand faced the east, where a faint penciling of red and gold washeralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around andpointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on hisfair acquaintance--as many a two-legged animal has done before him--histremendous importance in the world at large.
And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree's bluff worked asbeautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the airwith such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun's ears sprangalert, and she sniffed it with him. He turned his head from point topoint so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if notanxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction. Andwhen he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which shecould not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in herthroat, but smothered and low as a woman's exclamation when she is notquite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not. At this sound,which Baree's sharp ears caught, he swung up to her with a light andmincing step, and in another moment they were smelling noses.
When the sun rose, half an hour later, it found them still in the smallclearing on the side of the ridge, with a deep fringe of forest underthem, and beyond that a wide, timbered plain which looked like aghostly shroud in its mantle of frost. Up over this came the first redglow of the day, filling the clearing with a warmth that grew more andmore comfortable as the sun crept higher.
Neither Baree nor Maheegun were inclined to move for a while, and foran hour or two they lay basking in a cup of the slope, looking downwith questing and wide-awake eyes upon the wooded plain that stretchedaway under them like a great sea.
Maheegun, too, had sought the hunt pack, and like Baree had failed tocatch it. They were tired, a little discouraged for the time, andhungry--but still alive with the fine thrill of anticipation, andrestlessly sensitive to the new and mysterious consciousness ofcompanionship. Half a dozen times Baree got up and nosed about Maheegunas she lay in the sun, whining to her softly and touching her soft coatwith his muzzle, but for a long time she paid little attention to him.At last she followed him. All that day they wandered and restedtogether. Once more the night came.
It was without moon or stars. Gray masses of clouds swept slowly downout of the north and east, and in the treetops there was scarcely awhisper of wind as night gathered in. The snow began to fall at dusk,thickly, heavily, without a breath of sound. It was not cold, but itwas still--so still that Baree and Maheegun traveled only a few yardsat a time, and then stopped to listen. In this way all the nightprowlers of the forest were traveling, if they were moving at all. Itwas the first of the Big Snow.
To the flesh-eating wild things of the forests, clawed and winged, theBig Snow was the beginning of the winter carnival of slaughter andfeasting, of wild adventure in the long nights, of merciless warfare onthe frozen trails. The days of breeding, of motherhood--the peace ofspring and summer--were over. Out of the sky came the wakening of theNorthland, the call of all flesh-eating creatures to the long hunt, andin the first thrill of it living things were moving but little thisnight, and that watchfully and with suspicion. Youth made it all new toBaree and Maheegun. Their blood ran swiftly; their feet fell softly;their ears were attuned to catch the slightest sounds.
In this first of the Big Snow they felt the exciting pulse of a newlife. It lured them on. It invited them to adventure into the whitemystery of the silent storm; and inspired by that restlessness of youthand its desires, they went on.
The snow grew deeper under their feet. In the open spaces they
wadedthrough it to their knees, and it continued to fall in a vast whitecloud that descended steadily out of the sky. It was near midnight whenit stopped. The clouds drifted away from under the stars and the moon,and for a long time Baree and Maheegun stood without moving, lookingdown from the bald crest of a ridge upon a wonderful world.
Never had they been able to see so far, except in the light of day.Under them was a plain. They could make out forests, lone trees thatstood up like shadows out of the snow, a stream--stillunfrozen--shimmering like glass with the flicker of firelight on it.Toward this stream Baree led the way. He no longer thought of Nepeese,and he whined with pent-up happiness as he stopped halfway down andturned to muzzle Maheegun. He wanted to roll in the snow and friskabout with his companion; he wanted to bark, to put up his head andhowl as he had howled at the Red Moon back at the cabin.
Something held him from doing any of these things. Perhaps it wasMaheegun's demeanor. She accepted his attentions rigidly. Once or twiceshe had seemed almost frightened; twice Baree had heard the sharpclicking of her teeth. The previous night, and all through tonight'sstorm, their companionship had grown more intimate, but now there wastaking its place a mysterious aloofness on the part of Maheegun.Pierrot could have explained. With moon and stars above him, Baree,like the night, had undergone a transformation which even the sunlightof day had not made in him before. His coat was like polished jet.Every hair in his body glistened black. BLACK! That was it. And Naturewas trying to tell Maheegun that of all the creatures hated by herkind, the creature which they feared and hated most was black. With herit was not experience, but instinct--telling her of the age-old feudbetween the gray wolf and the black bear. And Baree's coat, in themoonlight and the snow, was blacker than Wakayoo's had ever been in thefish-fattening days of May. Until they struck the broad openings of theplain, the young she-wolf had followed Baree without hesitation; nowthere was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, andtwice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.
An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of thewest the tonguing of the wolf pack. It was not far distant, probablynot more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quickyapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that thelong-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose,and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegunlaid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.
The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight putBaree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was runningblindly, favored by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes thepack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chaseswung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not halfa dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brushdirectly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow withtheir braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribouburst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yardsfrom where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as itdisappeared. And then came the pack.
At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree's heart leaped foran instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had runaway from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. Heno longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf--allwolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and thepassion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after thepack.
Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her. Inthe excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to haveher at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of oneof the gray monsters of the pack. Half a minute later a new hunterswept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that athird. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his newcompanions. He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snapof their jaws as they ran--and in the golden moonlight ahead of him thesound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls inits race for life.
It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always. He had joined itnaturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush.There had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had givenhim in the open, and no hostility. He belonged with these slim,swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped andhis blood ran hot as the smell of the caribou grew heavier, and thesound of its crashing body nearer.
It seemed to him they were almost at its heels when they swept into anopen plain, a stretch of barren without a tree or a shrub, brilliant inthe light of the stars and moon. Across its unbroken carpet of snowsped the caribou a spare hundred yards ahead of the pack. Now the twoleading hunters no longer followed directly in the trail, but shot outat an angle, one to the right and the other to the left of the pursued,and like well-trained soldiers the pack split in halves and spread outfan shape in the final charge.
The two ends of the fan forged ahead and closed in, until the leaderswere running almost abreast of the caribou, with fifty or sixty feetseparating them from the pursued. Thus, adroitly and swiftly, withdeadly precision, the pack had formed a horseshoe cordon of fangs fromwhich there was but one course of flight--straight ahead. For thecaribou to swerve half a degree to the right or left meant death. Itwas the duty of the leaders to draw in the ends of the horseshoe now,until one or both of them could make the fatal lunge for thehamstrings. After that it would be a simple matter. The pack wouldclose in over the caribou like an inundation.
Baree had found his place in the lower rim of the horseshoe, so that hewas fairly well in the rear when the climax came. The plain made asudden dip. Straight ahead was the gleam of water--water shimmeringsoftly in the starglow, and the sight of it sent a final great spurt ofblood through the caribou's bursting heart. Forty seconds would tellthe story--forty seconds of a last spurt for life, of a finaltremendous effort to escape death. Baree felt the sudden thrill ofthese moments, and he forged ahead with the others in that lower rim ofthe horseshoe as one of the leading wolves made a lunge for the youngbull's hamstring. It was a clean miss. A second wolf darted in. Andthis one also missed.
There was no time for others to take their place. From the broken endof the horseshoe Baree heard the caribou's heavy plunge into water.When Baree joined the pack, a maddened, mouth-frothing, snarling horde,Napamoos, the young bull, was well out in the river and swimmingsteadily for the opposite shore.
It was then that Baree found himself at the side of Maheegun. She waspanting; her red tongue hung from her open jaws. But at his presenceshe brought her fangs together with a snap and slunk from him into theheart of the wind-run and disappointed pack. The wolves were in an uglytemper, but Baree did not sense the fact. Nepeese had trained him totake to water like an otter, and he did not understand why this narrowriver should stop them as it had. He ran down to the water and stoodbelly deep in it, facing for an instant the horde of savage beastsabove him, wondering why they did not follow. And he was black--BLACK.He came among them again, and for the first time they noticed him.
The restless movements of the waters ceased now. A new and wonderinginterest held them rigid. Fangs closed sharply. A little in the openBaree saw Maheegun, with a big gray wolf standing near her. He went toher again, and this time she remained with flattened ears until he wassniffing her neck. And then, with a vicious snarl, she snapped at him.Her teeth sank deep in the soft flesh of his shoulder, and at theunexpectedness and pain of her attack, he let out a yelp. The nextinstant the big gray wolf was at him.
Again caught unexpectedly, Baree went down with the wolf's fangs at histhroat. But in him was the blood of Kazan, the flesh and bone and sinewof Kazan, and for the first time in his life he fought as Kazan foughton that terrible day at the top of the Sun Rock. He was young; he hadyet to learn the cleverness and the strategy of the veteran. But hisjaws were like the iron clamps with which Pierrot set his bear traps,and in his heart was sudden and blinding rage,
a desire to kill thatrose above all sense of pain or fear.
That fight, if it had been fair, would have been a victory for Baree,even in his youth and inexperience. In fairness the pack should havewaited. It was a law of the pack to wait--until one was done for. ButBaree was black. He was a stranger, an interloper, a creature whom theynoticed now in a moment when their blood was hot with the rage anddisappointment of killers who had missed their prey. A second wolfsprang in, striking Baree treacherously from the flank. And while hewas in the snow, his jaws crushing the foreleg of his first foe, thepack was on him en masse.
Such an attack on the young caribou bull would have meant death in lessthan a minute. Every fang would have found its hold. Baree, by thefortunate circumstance that he was under his first two assailants andprotected by their bodies, was saved from being torn instantly intopieces. He knew that he was fighting for his life. Over him the hordeof beasts rolled and twisted and snarled. He felt the burning pain ofteeth sinking into his flesh. He was smothered; a hundred knives seemedcutting him into pieces; yet no sound--not a whimper or a cry--camefrom him now in the horror and hopelessness of it all.
It would have ended in another half-minute had the struggle not been atthe very edge of the bank. Undermined by the erosion of the springfloods, a section of this bank suddenly gave way, and with it wentBaree and half the pack. In a flash Baree thought of the water and theescaping caribou. For a bare instant the cave-in had set him free ofthe pack, and in that space he gave a single leap over the gray backsof his enemies into the deep water of the stream. Close behind him halfa dozen jaws snapped shut on empty air. As it had saved the caribou, sothis strip of water shimmering in the glow of the moon and stars hadsaved Baree.
The stream was not more than a hundred feet in width, but it cost Bareeclose to a losing struggle to get across it. Until he dragged himselfout on the opposite shore, the extent of his injuries was not impressedupon him fully. One hind leg, for the time, was useless. His forwardleft shoulder was laid open to the bone. His head and body were tornand cut; and as he dragged himself slowly away from the stream, thetrail he left in the snow was a red path of blood. It trickled from hispanting jaws, between which his tongue was bleeding. It ran down hislegs and flanks and belly, and it dripped from his ears, one of whichwas slit clean for two inches as though cut with a knife. His instinctswere dazed, his perception of things clouded as if by a veil drawnclose over his eyes. He did not hear, a few minutes later, the howlingof the disappointed wolf horde on the other side of the river, and heno longer sensed the existence of moon or stars. Half dead, he draggedhimself on until by chance he came to a clump of dwarf spruce. Intothis he struggled, and then he dropped exhausted.
All that night and until noon the next day Baree lay without moving.The fever burned in his blood. It flamed high and swift toward death;then it ebbed slowly, and life conquered. At noon he came forth. He wasweak, and he wobbled on his legs. His hind leg still dragged, and hewas racked with pain. But it was a splendid day. The sun was warm; thesnow was thawing; the sky was like a great blue sea; and the floods oflife coursed warmly again through Baree's veins. But now, for all time,his desires were changed, and his great quest at an end.
A red ferocity grew in Baree's eyes as he snarled in the direction oflast night's fight with the wolves. They were no longer his people.They were no longer of his blood. Never again could the hunt call lurehim or the voice of the pack rouse the old longing. In him there was athing newborn, an undying hatred for the wolf, a hatred that was togrow in him until it became like a disease in his vitals, a thing everpresent and insistent, demanding vengeance on their kind. Last night hehad gone to them a comrade. Today he was an outcast. Cut and maimed,bearing with him scars for all time, he had learned his lesson of thewilderness. Tomorrow, and the next day, and for days after that withoutnumber, he would remember the lesson well.