[Previous page]...d hard obstruction on
the end of his tender nose. This hurt. And after several such
adventures, he left the walls alone. Without thinking about it, he
accepted this disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his
father, as milk and half-digested meat were peculiarities of his
mother.
In fact, the gray cub was not given to thinking- at least, to the
kind of thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet
his conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men.
He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and
wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was
never disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was
sufficient for him. Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the
backwall a few times he accepted that he would not disappear into
walls. In the same way he accepted that his father could disappear
into walls. But he was not in the least disturbed by desire to find
out the reason for the difference between his father and himself.
Logic and physics were no part of his mental make-up.
Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine.
There came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the
milk no longer came from his mother's breast. At first, the cubs
whimpered and cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long
before they were reduced to a coma of hunger. There were no more spats
and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while
the adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The cubs
slept, while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but
little in the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The
she-wolf, too, left her litter and went out in search of meat. In
the first days after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed
several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares;
but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of the streams,
the Indian camp had moved away, and that source of supply was closed
to him.
When the gray cub came back to life and again took interest in the
far white wall, he found that the population of his world had been
reduced. Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he
grew stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the
sister no longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body
rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late
for her. She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin
in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
Then there came a time when the gray cub no longer saw his father
appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was
no way by which she could tell what she had seen to the gray cub.
Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived
the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had
found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There
were many signs of the battle that had been fought, and of the
lynx's withdrawal to her lair after having won the victory. Before she
went away, the she-wolf had found this lair, but the signs told her
that the lynx was inside, and she had not dared to venture in.
After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For
she knew that in the lynx's lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew
the lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter.
It was all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting
and bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a
lone wolf to encounter a lynx- especially when the lynx was known to
have a litter of hungry kittens at her back.
But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
to come when the she-wolf, for her gray cub's sake, would venture
the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx's wrath.
CHAPTER FOUR.
The Wall of the World.
BY THE TIME HIS MOTHER began leaving the cave on hunting
expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his
approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many
times impressed on him by his mother's nose and paw, but in him the
instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he
encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It
had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand
thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One
Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down
through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!-
that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for
pottage.
So the gray cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which
fear was made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of
life. For he had already learned that there were such restrictions.
Hunger he had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had
felt restriction. The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp
nudge of his mother's nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger
unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was
not freedom in the world, that to life there were limitations and
restraints. These limitations and restraints were law. To be
obedient to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
He did not reason the question out in this man-fashion. He merely
classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.
And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and
the remunerations of life.
Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother,
and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing,
fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a
white wall of light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of
the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept very
quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and
strove for noise.
Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He
did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all
a-tremble with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the
contents of the cave. The cub knew only that the sniff was strange,
a something unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible- for the
unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the making of
fear.
The hair bristled up on the gray cub's back, but it bristled
silently. How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a
thing at which to bristle? It was not born of any knowledge of his,
yet it was the visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for
which, in his own life, there was no accounting. But fear was
accompanied by another instinct- that of concealment. The cub was in a
frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen,
petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead. His mother, coming
home, growled as she smelt the wolverine's track, and bounded into the
cave and licked and nozzled him with undue vehemence of affection. And
the cub felt that somehow he had escaped a great hurt.
But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of
which was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But
growth demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep
away from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is forever destined
to make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that
was rising within him- rising with every mouthful of meat he
swallowed, with every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and
obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled
and sprawled toward the entrance.
Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
seemed to recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided
with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him.
The substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light.
And as condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he
entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance
that composed it.
It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever
the light grew brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove
him on. Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave. The
wall, inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back
before him to an immeasurable distance. The light had become painfully
bright. He was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made dizzy by this
abrupt and tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes were
adjusting themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet
the increased distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped
beyond his vision. He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a
remarkable remoteness. Also, its appearance had changed. It was now
a variegated wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream,
the opposing mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that
out-towered the mountain.
A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown.
He crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He
was very much afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips
wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl.
Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole
wide world.
Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he
forgot to snarl. Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear
had been routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of
curiosity. He began to notice near objects- an open portion of the
stream that flashed in the sun, the blasted pine tree that stood at
the base of the slope, and the slope itself, that ran right up to
him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on which he
crouched.
Now the gray cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had
never experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was.
So he stepped boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on
the cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward. The earth struck him a
harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp. Then he began rolling
down the slope, over and over. He was in a panic of terror. The
unknown had caught him at last. It had gripped savagely hold of him
and was about to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now
routed by fear, and he ki-yi'd like any frightened puppy.
The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
yelped and ki-yi'd unceasingly. This was a different proposition
from crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside.
Now the unknown had caught tight hold of him. Silence would do no
good. Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.
But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.
Here the cub lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave
one last agonized yelp and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and
quite as a matter of course, as though in his life he had already made
a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick away that dry clay that
soiled him.
After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man
of the earth who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall
of the world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he
was without hurt. But the first man on Mars would have experienced
less unfamiliarity that did he. Without any antecedent knowledge,
without any warning whatever that such existed, he found hi...
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