[Previous page]...ing porcupine, each intent on life; and, such was the
curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in the eating
of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not
eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf, crouching in the covert, played
his part, too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of
Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way of
life.
Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of
quills might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have
been frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead, yet all
three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost
painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than
they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
Something was happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its
enemy had gone away. Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball
of impregnable armor. It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened.
One Eye, watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling
of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was
spreading itself like a repast before him.
Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
enemy. In that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of
light. The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement. Had the
porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into
it as it was withdrawn.
Everything had happened at once- the blow, the counter-blow, the
squeal of agony from the porcupine, the big cat's squall of sudden
hurt and astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his
ears up, his tail straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx's
bad temper got the best of her. She sprang savagely at the thing
that had hurt her. But the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with
disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection,
flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt
and astonishment. Then she fell to backing away and sneezing, her nose
bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her
nose with her paws, trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into
the snow, and rubbed it against twigs and branches, all the time
leaping about, ahead, sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and
fright.
She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her
antics, and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And
even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair
along his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight
up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible
squall. Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every
leap she made.
It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and
died out that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as
though all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and
ready to pierce the soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his
approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It
had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite the old
compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that. It had been
ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.
One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed
and tasted and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger
increased mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his
caution. He waited. He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated
its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little
squeals. In a little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were
drooping and that a great quivering had set up. The quivering came
to an end suddenly. There was a final clash of the long teeth. Then
all the quills drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no
more.
With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine
to its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had
happened. It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment,
then took a careful grip with his teeth and started off down the
stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head
turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He
recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted back to where
he had left the ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew
clearly what was to be done, and this he did by promptly eating the
ptarmigan. Then he returned and took up his burden.
When he dragged the result of his day's hunt into the cave, the
she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked
him on the neck. But the next instant she was warning him away from
the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more
apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her
progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf father should,
and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had
brought into the world.
CHAPTER THREE.
The Gray Cub.
HE WAS DIFFERENT FROM his brothers and sisters. Their hair already
betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
while he alone, in this particular, took after his father. He was
the one little gray cub of the litter. He had bred true to the
straight wolf-stock- in fact, he had bred true, physically, to old One
Eye himself, with but a single exception, and that was that he had two
eyes to his father's one.
The gray cub's eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see
with steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had
felt, tasted, and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two
sisters very well. He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward
way, and even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer
rasping noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into
a passion. And long before his eyes had opened, he had learned by
touch, taste, and smell to know his mother- a fount of warmth and
liquid food and tenderness. She possessed a gentle, caressing tongue
that soothed him when it passed over his soft little body, and that
impelled him to snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in
sleeping; but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for
longer periods of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite
well. His world was gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no
other world. It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to
adjust themselves to any other light. His world was very small. Its
limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge of the
wide world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow confines of
his existence.
But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
from the rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.
He had discovered that it was different from the other walls long
before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions. It had
been an irresistible attraction before even his eyes opened and looked
upon it. The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes
and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, spark-like flashes,
warm-colored and strangely pleasing. The life of his body, and of
every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward
this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the
cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.
Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them
crawl toward the dark corners of the backwall. The light drew them
as if they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them
demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their little
puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a
vine. Later on, when each developed individuality and became
personally conscious of impulsions and desires, the attraction of
the light increased. They were always crawling and sprawling toward
it, and being driven back from it by their mother.
It was in this way that the gray cub learned other attributes of his
mother than the soft, soothing tongue. In his insistent crawling
toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp
nudge administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down
or rolled him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he
learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not
incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk,
by dodging and by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were
the results of his first generalizations upon the world. Before that
he had recoiled automatically from hurt, as he had crawled
automatically toward the light. After that he recoiled from hurt
because he knew that it was hurt.
He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was
to be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly
upon meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life was
milk transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his
eyes had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat
meat- meat half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five
growing cubs that already made too great demand upon her breast.
But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a
louder rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more
terrible than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of
rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he
that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and
growled through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that
caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the
mouth of the cave.
The fascination of the light for the gray cub increased from day
to day. He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward
the cave's entrance, and was perpetually being driven back. Only he
did not know it for an entrance. He did not know anything about
entrances- passages whereby one goes from one place to another
place. He did not know any other place, much less of a way to get
there. So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall- a wall of light.
As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of
his world. It attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always
striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within
him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was
within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was
predestined to tread. But he himself did not know anything about it.
He did not know there was any outside at all.
There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he
had already come to recognize his father as the one other dweller in
the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and
was a bringer of meat)- his father had a way of walking right into the
white far wall and disappearing. The gray cub could not understand
this. Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he
had approached the other walls, and encountere...
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