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crouched down under the impending blow, his hair bristling, but his
teeth still keeping tight hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not
fall. The sapling remained bent above him. When he moved it moved, and
he growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it
remained still, and he concluded it was safer to continue remaining
still. Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
himself. She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed
and teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the
rabbit's head. At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no
more trouble, remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position
in which nature had intended it to grow. Then, between them, the
she-wolf and One Eye devoured the game which the mysterious sapling
had caught for them.
There were other runways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in
the air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading
the way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of
robbing snares- a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the
days to come.
CHAPTER TWO.
The Lair.
FOR TWO DAYS THE SHE-WOLF and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He
was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she
was loath to depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with
the report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a
tree trunk several inches from One Eye's head, they hesitated no more,
but went off on a long, swinging lope that put quick miles between
them and the danger.
They did not go far- a couple of days' journey. The she-wolf's
need to find the thing for which she searched had now become
imperative. She was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly.
Once, in the pursuit of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have
caught with ease, she gave over and lay down and rested. One Eye
came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with his muzzle she
snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over
backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her
teeth. Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become more
patient than ever and more solicitous.
And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few
miles up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the
Mackenzie, but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its
rocky bottom- a dead stream of solid white from source to mouth. The
she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when
she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank. She turned aside and
trotted over to it. The wear and tear of spring storms and melting
snows had under-washed the bank and in one place had made a small cave
out of a narrow fissure.
She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over
carefully. Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base
of the wall to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined
landscape. Returning to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth. For
a short three feet she was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened
and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter.
The roof barely cleared her head. It was dry and cosy. She inspected
it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in
the entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her
nose to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely
bunched feet, and around this point she circled several times; then,
with a tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her body in,
relaxed her legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance.
One Eye, with pointed, interested ears, laughed at her, and beyond,
outlined against the white light, she could see the brush of his
tail waving good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement,
laid their sharp points backward and down against the head for a
moment, while her mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out,
and in this way she expressed that she was pleased and satisfied.
One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept,
his sleep was fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the
bright world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow.
When he dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of
hidden trickles of running water, and he would rouse and listen
intently. The sun had come back, and all the awakening Northland world
was calling to him. Life was stirring. The feel of spring was in the
air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in
the trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.
He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get
up. He looked outside, and half a dozen snowbirds fluttered across his
field of vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate
again, and settled down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole
upon his hearing. Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with
his paw. Then he woke up. There, buzzing in the air at the tip of
his nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a full-grown mosquito, one
that had lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that had now been
thawed out by the sun. He could resist the call of the world no
longer. Besides, he was hungry.
He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But
she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright
sunshine to find the snow-surface soft underfoot and the traveling
difficult. He went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow,
shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline. He was gone eight
hours, and he came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had
started. He had found game, but he had not caught it. He had broken
through the melting snow-crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
Faint, strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by
his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously
inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he
received without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his
distance; but he remained interested in the other sounds- faint,
muffled sobbings and slubberings.
His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in
the entrance. When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair,
he again sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.
There was a new note in his mate's warning snarl. It was a jealous
note, and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance.
Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between her legs against the
length of her body, five strange little bundles of life, very
feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes that
did not open to the light. He was surprised. It was not the first time
in his long and successful life that this thing had happened. It had
happened many times, yet each time it was as fresh a surprise as
ever to him.
His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a
low growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near,
the growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own
experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her
instinct, which was the experience of all the mothers of wolves, there
lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their newborn, and
helpless progeny. It manifested itself as a fear strong within her,
that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he
had fathered.
But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from
all the fathers of wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.
It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural
thing in the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his
newborn family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail
whereby he lived.
Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going
off among the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left
fork, he came upon a fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent
that he crouched swiftly, and looked into the direction in which it
disappeared. Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork.
The footprint was much larger than the one his own feet made, and he
knew that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat for him.
Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
gnawing teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,
standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark.
One Eye approached carefully but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though
he had never met it so far north before; and never in his long life
had porcupine served him for a meal. But he had long since learned
that there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he
continued to draw near. There was never any telling what might happen,
for with live things events were somehow always happening differently.
The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp
needles in all directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had
once sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills,
and had the tail flick out suddenly in his face. One quill he had
carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a
rankling flame, until it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a
comfortable crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of
the line of the tail. Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There
was no telling. Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll.
There might be opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into
the tender, unguarded belly.
But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
motionless ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and
futilely in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time.
He continued up the right fork. The day wore long, and nothing
rewarded his hunt.
The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him.
He must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan.
He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the
slow-witted bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end
of his nose. Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he
struck it with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced
upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow
trying to rise in the air again. As his teeth crunched through the
tender flesh and fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he
remembered, and, turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying
the ptarmigan in his mouth.
A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared
to meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
sent him crouching swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a
large female lynx. She was crouching as he had crouched once that day,
in front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills. If he had been a
gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he
crept and circled around, and came up well to leeward of the silent,
motionless pair.
He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and
with eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he
watched the play of life before him- the waiting lynx and the
wait...
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