C
HAPTER
2.
T
HE
L
AIR
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 underwashed 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 cosey. She inspected it with
painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the entrance
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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 snow-birds 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 heating. 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 under foot and the travelling 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
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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 new-born 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 new-born family and by trotting out
and away on the meat-trail whereby he lived.
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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 in 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 along, 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
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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 waiting 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 balls 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.
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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 armour. 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, and 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
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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
defiant 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
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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.
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