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Kazan

by James Oliver Curwood · English · Gutenberg #10084 · 373,057 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Kazan

Author: James Oliver Curwood

Illustrator: Frank B. Hoffman
        Gayle Porter Hoskins


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10084]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10084

Credits: Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KAZAN ***




Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.





[Illustration: He heard Joan's voice]

KAZAN

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Author of
The Danger Trail, Etc.

Illustrated by
Gayle Hoskins and Frank Hoffman


1914




CONTENTS

    I. THE MIRACLE

   II. INTO THE NORTH

  III. McCREADY PAYS THE DEBT

   IV. FREE FROM BONDS

    V. THE FIGHT IN THE SNOW

   VI. JOAN

  VII. OUT OF THE BLIZZARD

 VIII. THE GREAT CHANGE

   IX. THE TRAGEDY ON SUN ROCK

    X. THE DAYS OF FIRE

   XI. ALWAYS TWO BY TWO

  XII. THE RED DEATH

 XIII. THE TRAIL OF HUNGER

  XIV. THE RIGHT OF FANG

   XV. A FIGHT UNDER THE STARS

  XVI. THE CALL

 XVII. HIS SON

XVIII. THE EDUCATION OF BA-REE

  XIX. THE USURPERS

   XX. A FEUD IN THE WILDERNESS

  XXI. A SHOT ON THE SAND-BAR

 XXII. SANDY'S METHOD

XXIII. PROFESSOR McGILL

 XXIV. ALONE IN DARKNESS

  XXV. THE LAST OF McTRIGGER

 XXVI. AN EMPTY WORLD

XXVII. THE CALL OF SUN ROCK




CHAPTER I

THE MIRACLE


Kazan lay mute and motionless, his gray nose between his forepaws, his
eyes half closed. A rock could have appeared scarcely less lifeless than
he; not a muscle twitched; not a hair moved; not an eyelid quivered. Yet
every drop of the wild blood in his splendid body was racing in a
ferment of excitement that Kazan had never before experienced; every
nerve and fiber of his wonderful muscles was tense as steel wire.
Quarter-strain wolf, three-quarters "husky," he had lived the four years
of his life in the wilderness. He had felt the pangs of starvation. He
knew what it meant to freeze. He had listened to the wailing winds of
the long Arctic night over the barrens. He had heard the thunder of the
torrent and the cataract, and had cowered under the mighty crash of the
storm. His throat and sides were scarred by battle, and his eyes were
red with the blister of the snows. He was called Kazan, the Wild Dog,
because he was a giant among his kind and as fearless, even, as the men
who drove him through the perils of a frozen world.

He had never known fear--until now. He had never felt in him before the
desire to _run_--not even on that terrible day in the forest when he had
fought and killed the big gray lynx. He did not know what it was that
frightened him, but he knew that he was in another world, and that many
things in it startled and alarmed him. It was his first glimpse of
civilization. He wished that his master would come back into the strange
room where he had left him. It was a room filled with hideous things.
There were great human faces on the wall, but they did not move or
speak, but stared at him in a way he had never seen people look before.
He remembered having looked on a master who lay very quiet and very cold
in the snow, and he had sat back on his haunches and wailed forth the
death song; but these people on the walls looked alive, and yet seemed
dead.

Suddenly Kazan lifted his ears a little. He heard steps, then low
voices. One of them was his master's voice. But the other--it sent a
little tremor through him! Once, so long ago that it must have been in
his puppyhood days, he seemed to have had a dream of a laugh that was
like the girl's laugh--a laugh that was all at once filled with a
wonderful happiness, the thrill of a wonderful love, and a sweetness
that made Kazan lift his head as they came in. He looked straight at
them, his red eyes gleaming. At once he knew that she must be dear to
his master, for his master's arm was about her. In the glow of the light
he saw that her hair was very bright, and that there was the color of
the crimson _bakneesh_ vine in her face and the blue of the _bakneesh_
flower in her shining eyes. Suddenly she saw him, and with a little cry
darted toward him.

"Stop!" shouted the man. "He's dangerous! Kazan--"

She was on her knees beside him, all fluffy and sweet and beautiful, her
eyes shining wonderfully, her hands about to touch him. Should he cringe
back? Should he snap? Was she one of the things on the wall, and his
enemy? Should he leap at her white throat? He saw the man running
forward, pale as death. Then her hand fell upon his head and the touch
sent a thrill through him that quivered in every nerve of his body. With
both hands she turned up his head. Her face was very close, and he heard
her say, almost sobbingly:

"And you are Kazan--dear old Kazan, my Kazan, my hero dog--who brought
him home to me when all the others had died! My Kazan--my hero!"

And then, miracle of miracles, her face was crushed down against him,
and he felt her sweet warm touch.

In those moments Kazan did not move. He scarcely breathed. It seemed a
long time before the girl lifted her face from him. And when she did,
there were tears in her blue eyes, and the man was standing above them,
his hands gripped tight, his jaws set.

"I never knew him to let any one touch him--with their naked hand," he
said in a tense wondering voice. "Move back quietly, Isobel. Good
heaven--look at that!"

Kazan whined softly, his bloodshot eyes on the girl's face. He wanted to
feel her hand again; he wanted to touch her face. Would they beat him
with a club, he wondered, if he _dared_! He meant no harm now. He would
kill for her. He cringed toward her, inch by inch, his eyes never
faltering. He heard what the man said--"Good heaven! Look at that!"--and
he shuddered. But no blow fell to drive him back. His cold muzzle
touched her filmy dress, and she looked at him, without moving, her wet
eyes blazing like stars.

"See!" she whispered. "See!"

Half an inch more--an inch, two inches, and he gave his big gray body a
hunch toward her. Now his muzzle traveled slowly upward--over her foot,
to her lap, and at last touched the warm little hand that lay there. His
eyes were still on her face: he saw a queer throbbing in her bare white
throat, and then a trembling of her lips as she looked up at the man
with a wonderful look. He, too, knelt down beside them, and put his arm
about the girl again, and patted the dog on his head. Kazan did not like
the man's touch. He mistrusted it, as nature had taught him to mistrust
the touch of all men's hands, but he permitted it because he saw that it
in some way pleased the girl.

"Kazan, old boy, you wouldn't hurt her, would you?" said his master
softly. "We both love her, don't we, boy? Can't help it, can we? And
she's ours, Kazan, all _ours_! She belongs to you and to me, and we're
going to take care of her all our lives, and if we ever have to we'll
fight for her like hell--won't we? Eh, Kazan, old boy?"

For a long time after they left him where he was lying on the rug,
Kazan's eyes did not leave the girl. He watched and listened--and all
the time there grew more and more in him the craving to creep up to them
and touch the girl's hand, or her dress, or her foot. After a time his
master said something, and with a little laugh the girl jumped up and
ran to a big, square, shining thing that stood crosswise in a corner,
and which had a row of white teeth longer than his own body. He had
wondered what those teeth were for. The girl's fingers touched them now,
and all the whispering of winds that he had ever heard, all the music of
the waterfalls and the rapids and the trilling of birds in spring-time,
could not equal the sounds they made. It was his first music. For a
moment it startled and frightened him, and then he felt the fright pass
away and a strange tingling in his body. He wanted to sit back on his
haunches and howl, as he had howled at the billion stars in the skies on
cold winter nights. But something kept him from doing that. It was the
girl. Slowly he began slinking toward her. He felt the eyes of the man
upon him, and stopped. Then a little more--inches at a time, with his
throat and jaw straight out along the floor! He was half-way to
her--half-way across the room--when the wonderful sounds grew very soft
and very low.

"Go on!" he heard the man urge in a low quick voice. "Go on! Don't
stop!"

The girl turned her head, saw Kazan cringing there on the floor, and
continued to play. The man was still looking, but his eyes could not
keep Kazan back now. He went nearer, still nearer, until at last his
outreaching muzzle touched her dress where it lay piled on the floor.
And then--he lay trembling, for she had begun to sing. He had heard a
Cree woman crooning in front of her tepee; he had heard the wild chant
of the caribou song--but he had never heard anything like this
wonderful sweetness that fell from the lips of the girl. He forgot his
master's presence now. Quietly, cringingly, so that she would not know,
he lifted his head. He saw her looking at him; there was something in
her wonderful eyes that gave him confidence, and he laid his head in her
lap. For the second time he felt the touch of a woman's hand, and he
closed his eyes with a long sighing breath. The music stopped. There
came a little fluttering sound above him, like a laugh and a sob in one.
He heard his master cough.

"I've always loved the old rascal--but I never thought he'd do that," he
said; and his voice sounded queer to Kazan.




CHAPTER II

INTO THE NORTH


Wonderful days followed for Kazan. He missed the forests and deep snows.
He missed the daily strife of keeping his team-mates in trace, the
yapping at his heels, the straight long pull over the open spaces and
the barrens. He missed the "Koosh--koosh--Hoo-yah!" of the driver, the
spiteful snap of his twenty-foot caribou-gut whip, and that yelping and
straining behind him that told him he had his followers in line. But
something had come to take the place of that which he missed. It was in
the room, in the air all about him, even when the girl or his master was
not near. Wherever she had been, he found the presence of that strange
thing that took away his loneliness. It was the woman scent, and
sometimes it made him whine softly when the girl herself was actually
with him. He was not lonely, nights, when he should have been out
howling at the stars. He was not lonely, because one night he prowled
about until he found a certain door, and when the girl opened that door
in the morning she found him curled up tight against it. She had reached
down and hugged him, the thick smother of her long hair falling all over
him in a delightful perfume; thereafter she placed a rug before the door
for him to sleep on. All through the long nights he knew that she was
just beyond the door, and he was content. Each day he thought less and
less of the wild places, and more of her.

Then there came the beginning of the change. There was a strange hurry
and excitement around him, and the girl paid less attention to him. He
grew uneasy. He sniffed the change in the air, and he began to study his
master's face. Then there came the morning, very early, when the babiche
collar and the iron chain were fastened to him again. Not until he had
followed his master out through the door and into the street did he
begin to understand. They were sending him away! He sat suddenly back on
his haunches and refused to budge.

"Come, Kazan," coaxed the man. "Come on, boy."

He hung back and showed his white fangs. He expected the lash of a whip
or the blow of a club, but neither came. His master laughed and took him
back to the house. When they left it again, the girl was with them and
walked with her hand touching his head. It was she who persuaded him to
leap up through a big dark hole into the still darker interior of a car,
and it was she who lured him to the darkest corner of all, where his
master fastened his chain. Then they went out, laughing like two
children. For hours after that, Kazan lay still and tense, listening to
the queer rumble of wheels under him. Several times those wheels
stopped, and he heard voices outside. At last he was sure that he heard
a familiar voice, and he strained at his chain and whined. The closed
door slid back. A man with a lantern climbed in, followed by his master.
He paid no attention to them, but glared out through the opening into
the gloom of night. He almost broke loose when he leaped down upon the
white snow, but when he saw no one there, he stood rigid, sniffing the
air. Over him were the stars he had howled at all his life, and about
him were the forests, black and silent, shutting them in like a wall.
Vainly he sought for that one scent that was missing, and Thorpe heard
the low note of grief in his shaggy throat. He took the lantern and held
it above his head, at the same time loosening his hold on the leash. At
that signal there came a voice from out of the night. It came from
behind them, and Kazan whirled so suddenly that the loosely held chain
slipped from the man's hand. He saw the glow of other lanterns. And
then, once more, the voice--

"Kaa-aa-zan!"

He was off like a bolt. Thorpe laughed to himself as he followed.

"The old pirate!" he chuckled.

When he came to the lantern-lighted space back of the caboose, Thorpe
found Kazan crouching down at a woman's feet. It was Thorpe's wife. She
smiled triumphantly at him as he came up out of the gloom.

"You've won!" he laughed, not unhappily. "I'd have wagered my last
dollar he wouldn't do that for any voice on earth. You've won! Kazan,
you brute, I've lost you!"

His face suddenly sobered as Isobel stooped to pick up the end of the
chain.

"He's yours, Issy," he added quickly, "but you must let me care for him
until--we _know_. Give me the chain. I won't trust him even now. He's a
wolf. I've seen him take an Indian's hand off at a single snap. I've
seen him tear out another dog's jugular in one leap. He's an outlaw--a
bad dog--in spite of the fact that he hung to me like a hero and brought
me out alive. I can't trust him. Give me the chain--"

He did not finish. With the snarl of a wild beast Kazan had leaped to
his feet. His lips drew up and bared his long fangs. His spine
stiffened, and with a sudden cry of warning, Thorpe dropped a hand to
the revolver at his belt.

Kazan paid no attention to him. Another form had approached out of the
night, and stood now in the circle of illumination made by the lanterns.
It was McCready, who was to accompany Thorpe and his young wife back to
the Red River camp, where Thorpe was in charge of the building of the
new Trans-continental. The man was straight, powerfully built and clean
shaven. His jaw was so square that it was brutal, and there was a glow
in his eyes that was almost like the passion in Kazan's as he looked at
Isobel.

Her red and white stocking-cap had slipped free of her head and was
hanging over her shoulder. The dull blaze of the lanterns shone in the
warm glow of her hair. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes, suddenly
turned to him, were as blue as the bluest _bakneesh_ flower and glowed
like diamonds. McCready shifted his gaze, and instantly her hand fell on
Kazan's head. For the first time the dog did not seem to feel her touch.
He still snarled at McCready, the rumbling menace in his throat growing
deeper. Thorpe's wife tugged at the chain.

"Down, Kazan--down!" she commanded.

At the sound of her voice he relaxed.

"Down!" she repeated, and her free hand fell on his head again. He slunk
to her feet. But his lips were still drawn back. Thorpe was watching
him. He wondered at the deadly venom that shot from the wolfish eyes,
and looked at McCready. The big guide had uncoiled his long dog-whip. A
strange look had come into his face. He was staring hard at Kazan.
Suddenly he leaned forward, with both hands on his knees, and for a
tense moment or two he seemed to forget that Isobel Thorpe's wonderful
blue eyes were looking at him.

"Hoo-koosh, Pedro--_charge_!"

That one word--_charge_--was taught only to the dogs in the service of
the Northwest Mounted Police. Kazan did not move. McCready straightened,
and quick as a shot sent the long lash of his whip curling out into the
night with a crack like a pistol report.

"Charge, Pedro--_charge_!"

The rumble in Kazan's throat deepened to a snarling growl, but not a
muscle of his body moved. McCready turned to Thorpe.

"I could have sworn that I knew that dog," he said. "If it's Pedro, he's
_bad_!"

Thorpe was taking the chain. Only the girl saw the look that came for an
instant into McCready's face. It made her shiver. A few minutes before,
when the train had first stopped at Les Pas, she had offered her hand
to this man and she had seen the same thing then. But even as she
shuddered she recalled the many things her husband had told her of the
forest people. She had grown to love them, to admire their big rough
manhood and loyal hearts, before he had brought her among them; and
suddenly she smiled at McCready, struggling to overcome that thrill of
fear and dislike.

"He doesn't like you," she laughed at him softly. "Won't you make
friends with him?"

She drew Kazan toward him, with Thorpe holding the end of the chain.
McCready came to her side as she bent over the dog. His back was to
Thorpe as he hunched down. Isobel's bowed head was within a foot of his
face. He could see the glow in her cheek and the pouting curve of her
mouth as she quieted the low rumbling in Kazan's throat. Thorpe stood
ready to pull back on the chain, but for a moment McCready was between
him and his wife, and he could not see McCready's face. The man's eyes
were not on Kazan. He was staring at the girl.

"You're brave," he said. "I don't dare do that. He would take off my
hand!"

He took the lantern from Thorpe and led the way to a narrow snow-path
branching off, from the track. Hidden back in the thick spruce was the
camp that Thorpe had left a fortnight before. There were two tents there
now in place of the one that he and his guide had used. A big fire was
burning in front of them. Close to the fire was a long sledge, and
fastened to trees just within the outer circle of firelight Kazan saw
the shadowy forms and gleaming eyes of his team-mates. He stood stiff
and motionless while Thorpe fastened him to a sledge. Once more he was
back in his forests--and in command. His mistress was laughing and
clapping her hands delightedly in the excitement of the strange and
wonderful life of which she had now become a part. Thorpe had thrown
back the flap of their tent, and she was entering ahead of him. She did
not look back. She spoke no word to him. He whined, and turned his red
eyes on McCready.

In the tent Thorpe was saying:

"I'm sorry old Jackpine wouldn't go back with us, Issy. He drove me
down, but for love or money I couldn't get him to return. He's a Mission
Indian, and I'd give a month's salary to have you see him handle the
dogs. I'm not sure about this man McCready. He's a queer chap, the
Company's agent here tells me, and knows the woods like a book. But dogs
don't like a stranger. Kazan isn't going to take to him worth a cent!"

Kazan heard the girl's voice, and stood rigid and motionless listening
to it. He did not hear or see McCready when he came up stealthily behind
him. The man's voice came as suddenly as a shot at his heels.

"_Pedro_!"

In an instant Kazan cringed as if touched by a lash.

"Got you that time--didn't I, you old devil!" whispered McCready, his
face strangely pale in the firelight. "Changed your name, eh? But I
_got_ you--didn't I?"




CHAPTER III

McCREADY PAYS THE DEBT


For a long time after he had uttered those words McCready sat in silence
beside the fire. Only for a moment or two at a time did his eyes leave
Kazan. After a little, when he was sure that Thorpe and Isobel had
retired for the night, he went into his own tent and returned with a
flask of whisky. During the next half-hour he drank frequently. Then he
went over and sat on the end of the sledge, just beyond the reach of
Kazan's chain.

"Got you, didn't I?" he repeated, the effect of the liquor beginning to
show in the glitter of his eyes. "Wonder who changed your name, Pedro.
And how the devil did _he_ come by you? Ho, ho, if you could only
talk--"

They heard Thorpe's voice inside the tent. It was followed by a low
girlish peal of laughter, and McCready jerked himself erect. His face
blazed suddenly red, and he rose to his feet, dropping the flask in his
coat pocket. Walking around the fire, he tiptoed cautiously to the
shadow of a tree close to the tent and stood there for many minutes
listening. His eyes burned with a fiery madness when he returned to the
sledge and Kazan. It was midnight before he went into his own tent.

In the warmth of the fire, Kazan's eyes slowly closed. He slumbered
uneasily, and his brain was filled with troubled pictures. At times he
was fighting, and his jaws snapped. At others he was straining at the
end of his chain, with McCready or his mistress just out of reach. He
felt the gentle touch of the girl's hand again and heard the wonderful
sweetness of her voice as she sang to him and his master, and his body
trembled and twitched with the thrills that had filled him that night.
And then the picture changed. He was running at the head of a splendid
team--six dogs of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police--and his master was
calling him Pedro! The scene shifted. They were in camp. His master was
young and smooth-faced and he helped from the sledge another man whose
hands were fastened in front of him by curious black rings. Again it was
later--and he was lying before a great fire. His master was sitting
opposite him, with his back to a tent, and as he looked, there came out
of the tent the man with the black rings--only now the rings were gone
and his hands were free, and in one of them he carried a heavy club. He
heard the terrible blow of the club as it fell on his master's head--and
the sound of it aroused him from his restless sleep.

He sprang to his feet, his spine stiffening and a snarl in his throat.
The fire had died down and the camp was in the darker gloom that
precedes dawn. Through that gloom Kazan saw McCready. Again he was
standing close to the tent of his mistress, and he knew now that this
was the man who had worn the black iron rings, and that it was he who
had beaten him with whip and club for many long days after he had killed
his master. McCready heard the menace in his throat and came back
quickly to the fire. He began to whistle and draw the half-burned logs
together, and as the fire blazed up afresh he shouted to awaken Thorp
and Isobel. In a few minutes Thorpe appeared at the tent-flap and his
wife followed him out. Her loose hair rippled in billows of gold about
her shoulders and she sat down on the sledge, close to Kazan, and began
brushing it. McCready came up behind her and fumbled among the packages
on the sledge. As if by accident one of his hands buried itself for an
instant in the rich tresses that flowed down her back. She did not at
first feel the caressing touch of his fingers, and Thorpe's back was
toward them.

Only Kazan saw the stealthy movement of the hand, the fondling clutch of
the fingers in her hair, and the mad passion burning in the eyes of the
man. Quicker than a lynx, the dog had leaped the length of his chain
across the sledge. McCready sprang back just in time, and as Kazan
reached the end of his chain he was jerked back so that his body struck
sidewise against the girl. Thorpe had turned in time to see the end of
the leap. He believed that Kazan had sprung at Isobel, and in his horror
no word or cry escaped his lips as he dragged her from where she had
half fallen over the sledge. He saw that she was not hurt, and he
reached for his revolver. It was in his holster in the tent. At his feet
was McCready's whip, and in the passion of the moment he seized it and
sprang upon Kazan. The dog crouched in the snow. He made no move to
escape or to attack. Only once in his life could he remember having
received a beating like that which Thorpe inflicted upon him now. But
not a whimper or a growl escaped him.

[Illustration: "Not another blow!"]

And then, suddenly, his mistress ran forward and caught the whip poised
above Thorpe's head.

"Not another blow!" she cried, and something in her voice held him from
striking. McCready did not hear what she said then, but a strange look
came into Thorpe's eyes, and without a word he followed his wife into
their tent.

"Kazan did not leap at me," she whispered, and she was trembling with a
sudden excitement. Her face was deathly white. "That man was behind me,"
she went on, clutching her husband by the arm. "I felt him touch me--and
then Kazan sprang. He wouldn't bite _me_. It's the _man_! There's
something--wrong--"

She was almost sobbing, and Thorpe drew her close in his arms.

"I hadn't thought before--but it's strange," he said. "Didn't McCready
say something about knowing the dog? It's possible. Perhaps he's had
Kazan before and abused him in a way that the dog has not forgotten.
To-morrow I'll find out. But until I know--will you promise to keep away
from Kazan?"

Isobel gave the promise. When they came out from the tent Kazan lifted
his great head. The stinging lash had closed one of his eyes and his
mouth was dripping blood. Isobel gave a low sob, but did not go near
him. Half blinded, he knew that his mistress had stopped his punishment,
and he whined softly, and wagged his thick tail in the snow.

Never had he felt so miserable as through the long hard hours of the day
that followed, when he broke the trail for his team-mates into the
North. One of his eyes was closed and filled with stinging fire, and his
body was sore from the blows of the caribou lash. But it was not
physical pain that gave the sullen droop to his head and robbed his body
of that keen quick alertness of the lead-dog--the commander of his
mates. It was his spirit. For the first time in his life, it was broken.
McCready had beaten him--long ago; his master had beaten him; and
during all this day their voices were fierce and vengeful in his ears.
But it was his mistress who hurt him most. She held aloof from him,
always beyond they reach of his leash; and when they stopped to rest,
and again in camp, she looked at him with strange and wondering eyes,
and did not speak. She, too, was ready to beat him. He believed that,
and so slunk away from her and crouched on his belly in the snow. With
him, a broken spirit meant a broken heart, and that night he lurked in
one of the deepest shadows about the camp-fire and grieved alone. None
knew that it was grief--unless it was the girl. She did not move toward
him. She did not speak to him. But she watched him closely--and studied
him hardest when he was looking at McCready.

Later, after Thorpe and his wife had gone into their tent, it began to
snow, and the effect of the snow upon McCready puzzled Kazan. The man
was restless, and he drank frequently from the flask that he had used
the night before. In the firelight his face grew redder and redder, and
Kazan could see the strange gleam of his teeth as he gazed at the tent
in which his mistress was sleeping. Again and again he went close to
that tent, and listened. Twice he heard movement. The last time, it was
the sound of Thorpe's deep breathing. McCready hurried back to the fire
and turned his face straight up to the sky. The snow was falling so
thickly that when he lowered his face he blinked and wiped his eyes.
Then he went out into the gloom and bent low over the trail they had
made a few hours before. It was almost obliterated by the falling snow.
Another hour and there would be no trail--nothing the next day to tell
whoever might pass that they had come this way. By morning it would
cover everything, even the fire, if he allowed it to die down. McCready
drank again, out in the darkness. Low words of an insane joy burst from
his lips. His head was hot with a drunken fire. His heart beat madly,
but scarcely more furiously than did Kazan's when the dog saw that
McCready was returning _with a club_! The club he placed on end against
a tree. Then he took a lantern from the sledge and lighted it. He
approached Thorpe's tent-flap, the lantern in his hand.

"Ho, Thorpe--Thorpe!" he called.

There was no answer. He could hear Thorpe breathing. He drew the flap
aside a little, and raised his voice.

"Thorpe!"

Still there was no movement inside, and he untied the flap strings and
thrust in his lantern. The light flashed on Isobel's golden head, and
McCready stared at it, his eyes burning like red coals, until he saw
that Thorpe was awakening. Quickly he dropped the flap and rustled it
from the outside.

"Ho, Thorpe!--Thorpe!" he called again.

This time Thorpe replied.

"Hello, McCready--is that you?"

McCready drew the flap back a little, and spoke in a low voice.

"Yes. Can you come out a minute? Something's happening out in the woods.
Don't wake up your wife!"

He drew back and waited. A minute later Thorpe came quietly out of the
tent. McCready pointed into the thick spruce.

"I'll swear there's some one nosing around the camp," he said. "I'm
certain that I saw a man out there a few minutes ago, when I went for a
log. It's a good night for stealing dogs. Here--you take the lantern! If
I wasn't clean fooled, we'll find a trail in the snow."

He gave Thorpe the lantern and picked up the heavy club. A growl rose in
Kazan's throat, but he choked it back. He wanted to snarl forth his
warning, to leap at the end of his leash, but he knew that if he did
that, they would return and beat him. So he lay still, trembling and
shivering, and whining softly. He watched them until they
disappeared--and then waited--listened. At last he heard the crunch of
snow. He was not surprised to see McCready come back alone. He had
expected him to return alone. For he knew what a club meant!

McCready's face was terrible now. It was like a beast's. He was hatless.
Kazan slunk deeper in his shadow at the low horrible laugh that fell
from his lips--for the man still held the club. In a moment he dropped
that, and approached the tent. He drew back the flap and peered in.
Thorpe's wife was sleeping, and as quietly as a cat he entered and hung
the lantern on a nail in the tent-pole. His movement did not awaken her,
and for a few moments he stood there, staring--staring.

Outside, crouching in the deep shadow, Kazan tried to fathom the meaning
of these strange things that were happening. Why had his master and
McCready gone out into the forest? Why had not his master returned? It
was his master, and not McCready, who belonged in that tent. Then why
was McCready there? He watched McCready as he entered, and suddenly the
dog was on his feet, his back tense and bristling, his limbs rigid. He
saw McCready's huge shadow on the canvas, and a moment later there came
a strange piercing cry. In the wild terror of that cry he recognized
_her_ voice--and he leaped toward the tent. The leash stopped him,
choking the snarl in his throat. He saw the shadows struggling now, and
there came cry after cry. She was calling to his master, and with his
master's name she was calling _him_!

"_Kazan_--_Kazan_--"

He leaped again, and was thrown upon his back. A second and a third
time he sprang the length of the leash into the night, and the babiche
cord about his neck cut into his flesh like a knife. He stopped for an
instant, gasping for breath. The shadows were still fighting. Now they
were upright! Now they were crumpling down! With a fierce snarl he flung
his whole weight once more at the end of the chain. There was a snap, as
the thong about his neck gave way.

In half a dozen bounds Kazan made the tent and rushed under the flap.
With a snarl he was at McCready's throat. The first snap of his powerful
jaws was death, but he did not know that. He knew only that his mistress
was there, and that he was fighting for her. There came one choking
gasping cry that ended with a terrible sob; it was McCready. The man
sank from his knees upon his back, and Kazan thrust his fangs deeper
into his enemy's throat; he felt the warm blood.

The dog's mistress was calling to him now. She was pulling at his shaggy
neck. But he would not loose his hold--not for a long time. When he did,
his mistress looked down once upon the man and covered her face with
her hands. Then she sank down upon the blankets. She was very still. Her
face and hands were cold, and Kazan muzzled them tenderly. Her eyes were
closed. He snuggled up close against her, with his ready jaws turned
toward the dead man. Why was she so still, he wondered?

A long time passed, and then she moved. Her eyes opened. Her hand
touched him.

Then he heard a step outside.

It was his master, and with that old thrill of fear--fear of the
club--he went swiftly to the door. Yes, there was his master in the
firelight--and in his hand he held the club. He was coming slowly,
almost falling at each step, and his face was red with blood. But he had
_the club_! He would beat him again--beat him terribly for hurting
McCready; so Kazan slipped quietly under the tent-flap and stole off
into the shadows. From out the gloom of the thick spruce he looked back,
and a low whine of love and grief rose and died softly in his throat.
They would beat him always now--after _that_. Even _she_ would beat him.
They would hunt him down, and beat him when they found him.

From out of the glow of the fire he turned his wolfish head to the
depths of the forest. There were no clubs or stinging lashes out in that
gloom. They would never find him there.

For another moment he wavered. And then, as silently as one of the wild
creatures whose blood was partly his, he stole away into the blackness
of the night.




CHAPTER IV

FREE FROM BONDS


There was a low moaning of the wind in the spruce-tops as Kazan slunk
off into the blackness and mystery of the forest. For hours he lay near
the camp, his red and blistered eyes gazing steadily at the tent wherein
the terrible thing had happened a little while before.

He knew now what death was. He could tell it farther than man. He could
smell it in the air. And he knew that there was death all about him, and
that he was the cause of it. He lay on his belly in the deep snow and
shivered, and the three-quarters of him that was dog whined in a
grief-stricken way, while the quarter that was wolf still revealed
itself menacingly in his fangs, and in the vengeful glare of his eyes.

Three times the man--his master--came out of the tent, and shouted
loudly, "Kazan--Kazan--Kazan!"

Three times the woman came with him. In the firelight Kazan could see
her shining hair streaming about her, as he had seen it in the tent,
when he had leaped up and killed the other man. In her blue eyes there
was the same wild terror, and her face was white as the snow. And the
second and third time, she too called, "Kazan--Kazan--Kazan!"--and all
that part of him that was dog, and not wolf, trembled joyously at the
sound of her voice, and he almost crept in to take his beating. But fear
of the club was the greater, and he held back, hour after hour, until
now it was silent again in the tent, and he could no longer see their
shadows, and the fire was dying down.

Cautiously he crept out from the thick gloom, working his way on his
belly toward the packed sledge, and what remained of the burned logs.
Beyond that sledge, hidden in the darkness of the trees, was the body of
the man he had killed, covered with a blanket. Thorpe, his master, had
dragged it there.

He lay down, with his nose to the warm coals and his eyes leveled
between his forepaws, straight at the closed tent-flap. He meant to
keep awake, to watch, to be ready to slink off into the forest at the
first movement there. But a warmth was rising from out of the gray ash
of the fire-bed, and his eyes closed. Twice--three times--he fought
himself back into watchfulness; but the last time his eyes came only
half open, and closed heavily again.

And now, in his sleep, he whined softly, and the splendid muscles of his
legs and shoulders twitched, and sudden shuddering ripples ran along his
tawny spine. Thorpe, who was in the tent, if he had seen him, would have
known that he was dreaming. And Thorpe's wife, whose golden head lay
close against his breast, and who shuddered and trembled now and then
even as Kazan was doing, would have known what he was dreaming about.

In his sleep he was leaping again at the end of his chain. His jaws
snapped like castanets of steel,--and the sound awakened him, and he
sprang to his feet, his spine as stiff as a brush, and his snarling
fangs bared like ivory knives. He had awakened just in time. There was
movement in the tent. His master was awake, and if he did not escape--

He sped swiftly into the thick spruce, and paused, flat and hidden, with
only his head showing from behind a tree. He knew that his master would
not spare him. Three times Thorpe had beaten him for snapping at
McCready. The last time he would have shot him if the girl had not saved
him. And now he had torn McCready's throat. He had taken the life from
him, and his master would not spare him. Even the woman could not save
him.

Kazan was sorry that his master had returned, dazed and bleeding, after
he had torn McCready's jugular. Then he would have had her always. She
would have loved him. She did love him. And he would have followed her,
and fought for her always, and died for her when the time came. But
Thorpe had come in from the forest again, and Kazan had slunk away
quickly--for Thorpe meant to him what all men meant to him now: the
club, the whip and the strange things that spat fire and death. And
now--

Thorpe had come out from the tent. It was approaching dawn, and in his
hand he held a rifle. A moment later the girl came out, and her hand
caught the man's arm. They looked toward the thing covered by the
blanket. Then she spoke to Thorpe and he suddenly straightened and
threw back his head.

"H-o-o-o-o--Kazan--Kazan--Kazan!" he called.

A shiver ran through Kazan. The man was trying to inveigle him back. He
had in his hand the thing that killed.

"Kazan--Kazan--Ka-a-a-a-zan!" he shouted again.

Kazan sneaked cautiously back from the tree. He knew that distance meant
nothing to the cold thing of death that Thorpe held in his hand. He
turned his head once, and whined softly, and for an instant a great
longing filled his reddened eyes as he saw the last of the girl.

He knew, now, that he was leaving her forever, and there was an ache in
his heart that had never been there before, a pain that was not of the
club or whip, of cold or hunger, but which was greater than them all,
and which filled him with a desire to throw back his head and cry out
his loneliness to the gray emptiness of the sky.

Back in the camp the girl's voice quivered.

"He is gone."

The man's strong voice choked a little.

"Yes, he is gone. _He knew_--and I didn't. I'd give--a year of my
life--if I hadn't whipped him yesterday and last night. He won't come
back."

Isobel Thorpe's hand tightened on his arm.

"He will!" she cried. "He won't leave me. He loved me, if he was savage
and terrible. And he knows that I love him. He'll come back--"

"Listen!"

From deep in the forest there came a long wailing howl, filled with a
plaintive sadness. It was Kazan's farewell to the woman.

After that cry Kazan sat for a long time on his haunches, sniffing the
new freedom of the air, and watching the deep black pits in the forest
about him, as they faded away before dawn. 'Now and then, since the day
the traders had first bought him and put him into sledge-traces away
over on the Mackenzie, he had often thought of this freedom longingly,
the wolf blood in him urging him to take it. But he had never quite
dared. It thrilled him now. There were no clubs here, no whips, none of
the man-beasts whom he had first learned to distrust, and then to hate.
It was his misfortune--that quarter-strain of wolf; and the clubs,
instead of subduing him, had added to the savagery that was born in him.
Men had been his worst enemies. They had beaten him time and again until
he was almost dead. They called him "bad," and stepped wide of him, and
never missed the chance to snap a whip over his back. His body was
covered with scars they had given him.

He had never felt kindness, or love, until the first night the woman had
put her warm little hand on his head, and had snuggled her face close
down to his, while Thorpe--her husband--had cried out in horror. He had
almost buried his fangs in her white flesh, but in an instant her gentle
touch, and her sweet voice, had sent through him that wonderful thrill
that was his first knowledge of love. And now it was a man who was
driving him from her, away from the hand that had never held a club or a
whip, and he growled as he trotted deeper into the forest.

He came to the edge of a swamp as day broke. For a time he had been
filled with a strange uneasiness, and light did not quite dispel it. At
last he was free of men. He could detect nothing that reminded him of
their hated presence in the air. But neither could he smell the presence
of other dogs, of the sledge, the fire, of companionship and food, and
so far back as he could remember they had always been a part of his
life.

Here it was very quiet. The swamp lay in a hollow between two
ridge-mountains, and the spruce and cedar grew low and thick--so thick
that there was almost no snow under them, and day was like twilight. Two
things he began to miss more than all others--food and company. Both the
wolf and the dog that was in him demanded the first, and that part of
him that was dog longed for the latter. To both desires the wolf blood
that was strong in him rose responsively. It told him that somewhere in
this silent world between the two ridges there was companionship, and
that all he had to do to find it was to sit back on his haunches, and
cry out his loneliness. More than once something trembled in his deep
chest, rose in his throat, and ended there in a whine. It was the wolf
howl, not yet quite born.

Food came more easily than voice. Toward midday he cornered a big white
rabbit under a log, and killed it. The warm flesh and blood was better
than frozen fish, or tallow and bran, and the feast he had gave him
confidence. That afternoon he chased many rabbits, and killed two more.
Until now, he had never known the delight of pursuing and killing at
will, even though he did not eat all he killed.

But there was no fight in the rabbits. They died too easily. They were
very sweet and tender to eat, when he was hungry, but the first thrill
of killing them passed away after a time. He wanted something bigger. He
no longer slunk along as if he were afraid, or as if he wanted to remain
hidden. He held his head up. His back bristled. His tail swung free and
bushy, like a wolf's. Every hair in his body quivered with the electric
energy of life and action. He traveled north and west. It was the call
of early days--the days away up on the Mackenzie. The Mackenzie was a
thousand miles away.

He came upon many trails in the snow that day, and sniffed the scents
left by the hoofs of moose and caribou, and the fur-padded feet of a
lynx. He followed a fox, and the trail led him to a place shut in by
tall spruce, where the snow was beaten down and reddened with blood.
There was an owl's head, feathers, wings and entrails lying here, and he
knew that there were other hunters abroad besides himself.

Toward evening he came upon tracks in the snow that were very much like
his own. They were quite fresh, and there was a warm scent about them
that made him whine, and filled him again with that desire to fall back
upon his haunches and send forth the wolf-cry. This desire grew stronger
in him as the shadows of night deepened in the forest. He had traveled
all day, but he was not tired. There was something about night, now that
there were no men near, that exhilarated him strangely. The wolf blood
in him ran swifter and swifter. To-night it was clear. The sky was
filled with stars. The moon rose. And at last he settled back in the
snow and turned his head straight up to the spruce-tops, and the wolf
came out of him in a long mournful cry which quivered through the still
night for miles.

For a long time he sat and listened after that howl. He had found
voice--a voice with a strange new note in it, and it gave him still
greater confidence. He had expected an answer, but none came. He had
traveled in the face of the wind, and as he howled, a bull moose crashed
through the scrub timber ahead of him, his horns rattling against the
trees like the tattoo of a clear birch club as he put distance between
himself and that cry.

Twice Kazan howled before he went on, and he found joy in the practise
of that new note. He came then to the foot of a rough ridge, and turned
up out of the swamp to the top of it. The stars and the moon were nearer
to him there, and on the other side of the ridge he looked down upon a
great sweeping plain, with a frozen lake glistening in the moonlight,
and a white river leading from it off into timber that was neither so
thick nor so black as that in the swamp.

And then every muscle in his body grew tense, and his blood leaped. From
far off in the plain there came a cry. It was _his_ cry--the wolf-cry.
His jaws snapped. His white fangs gleamed, and he growled deep in his
throat. He wanted to reply, but some strange instinct urged him not to.
That instinct of the wild was already becoming master of him. In the
air, in the whispering of the spruce-tops, in the moon and the stars
themselves, there breathed a spirit which told him that what he had
heard was the wolf-cry, but that it was not the wolf _call_.

The other came an hour later, clear and distinct, that same wailing howl
at the beginning--but ending in a staccato of quick sharp yelps that
stirred his blood at once into a fiery excitement that it had never
known before. The same instinct told him that this was the call--the
hunt-cry. It urged him to come quickly. A few moments later it came
again, and this time there was a reply from close down along the foot of
the ridge, and another from so far away that Kazan could scarcely hear
it. The hunt-pack was gathering for the night chase; but Kazan sat quiet
and trembling.

He was not afraid, but he was not ready to go. The ridge seemed to split
the world for him. Down there it was new, and strange, and without men.
From the other side something seemed pulling him back, and suddenly he
turned his head and gazed back through the moonlit space behind him, and
whined. It was the dog-whine now. The woman was back there. He could
hear her voice. He could feel the touch of her soft hand. He could see
the laughter in her face and eyes, the laughter that had made him warm
and happy. She was calling to him through the forests, and he was torn
between desire to answer that call, and desire to go down into the
plain. For he could also see many men waiting for him with clubs, and he
could hear the cracking of whips, and feel the sting of their lashes.

For a long time he remained on the top of the ridge that divided his
world. And then, at last, he turned and went down into the plain.

All that night he kept close to the hunt-pack, but never quite
approached it. This was fortunate for him. He still bore the scent of
traces, and of man. The pack would have torn him into pieces. The first
instinct of the wild is that of self-preservation. It may have been
this, a whisper back through the years of savage forebears, that made
Kazan roll in the snow now and then where the feet of the pack had trod
the thickest.

That night the pack killed a caribou on the edge of the lake, and
feasted until nearly dawn. Kazan hung in the face of the wind. The smell
of blood and of warm flesh tickled his nostrils, and his sharp ears
could catch the cracking of bones. But the instinct was stronger than
the temptation.

Not until broad day, when the pack had scattered far and wide over the
plain, did he go boldly to the scene of the kill. He found nothing but
an area of blood-reddened snow, covered with bones, entrails and torn
bits of tough hide. But it was enough, and he rolled in it, and buried
his nose in what was left, and remained all that day close to it,
saturating himself with the scent of it.

That night, when the moon and the stars came out again, he sat back with
fear and hesitation no longer in him, and announced himself to his new
comrades of the great plain.

The pack hunted again that night, or else it was a new pack that started
miles to the south, and came up with a doe caribou to the big frozen
lake. The night was almost as clear as day, and from the edge of the
forest Kazan first saw the caribou run out on the lake a third of a mile
away. The pack was about a dozen strong, and had already split into the
fatal horseshoe formation, the two leaders running almost abreast of the
kill, and slowly closing in.

With a sharp yelp Kazan darted out into the moonlight. He was directly
in the path of the fleeing doe, and bore down upon her with lightning
speed. Two hundred yards away the doe saw him, and swerved to the right,
and the leader on that side met her with open jaws. Kazan was in with
the second leader, and leaped at the doe's soft throat. In a snarling
mass the pack closed in from behind, and the doe went down, with Kazan
half under her body, his fangs sunk deep in her jugular. She lay heavily
on him, but he did not lose his hold. It was his first big kill. His
blood ran like fire. He snarled between his clamped teeth.

Not until the last quiver had left the body over him did he pull himself
out from under her chest and forelegs. He had killed a rabbit that day
and was not hungry. So he sat back in the snow and waited, while the
ravenous pack tore at the dead doe. After a little he came nearer, nosed
in between two of them, and was nipped for his intrusion.

As Kazan drew back, still hesitating to mix with his wild brothers, a
big gray form leaped out of the pack and drove straight for his throat.
He had just time to throw his shoulder to the attack, and for a moment
the two rolled over and over in the snow. They were up before the
excitement of sudden battle had drawn the pack from the feast. Slowly
they circled about each other, their white fangs bare, their yellowish
backs bristling like brushes. The fatal ring of wolves drew about the
fighters.

It was not new to Kazan. A dozen times he had sat in rings like this,
waiting for the final moment. More than once he had fought for his life
within the circle. It was the sledge-dog way of fighting. Unless man
interrupted with a club or a whip it always ended in death. Only one
fighter could come out alive. Sometimes both died. And there was no man
here--only that fatal cordon of waiting white-fanged demons, ready to
leap upon and tear to pieces the first of the fighters who was thrown
upon his side or back. Kazan was a stranger, but he did not fear those
that hemmed him in. The one great law of the pack would compel them to
be fair.

He kept his eyes only on the big gray leader who had challenged him.
Shoulder to shoulder they continued to circle. Where a few moments
before there had been the snapping of jaws and the rending of flesh
there was now silence. Soft-footed and soft-throated mongrel dogs from
the South would have snarled and growled, but Kazan and the wolf were
still, their ears laid forward instead of back, their tails free and
bushy.

Suddenly the wolf struck in with the swiftness of lightning, and his
jaws came together with the sharpness of steel striking steel. They
missed by an inch. In that same instant Kazan darted in to the side, and
like knives his teeth gashed the wolf's flank.

They circled again, their eyes growing redder, their lips drawn back
until they seemed to have disappeared. And then Kazan leaped for that
death-grip at the throat--and missed. It was only by an inch again, and
the wolf came back, as he had done, and laid open Kazan's flank so that
the blood ran down his leg and reddened the snow. The burn of that
flank-wound told Kazan that his enemy was old in the game of fighting.
He crouched low, his head straight out, and his throat close to the
snow. It was a trick Kazan had learned in puppyhood--to shield his
throat, and wait.

Twice the wolf circled about him, and Kazan pivoted slowly, his eyes
half closed. A second time the wolf leaped, and Kazan threw up his
terrible jaws, sure of that fatal grip just in front of the forelegs.
His teeth snapped on empty air. With the nimbleness of a cat the wolf
had gone completely over his back.

The trick had failed, and with a rumble of the dog-snarl in his throat,
Kazan reached the wolf in a single bound. They met breast to breast.
Their fangs clashed and with the whole weight of his body, Kazan flung
himself against the wolf's shoulders, cleared his jaws, and struck again
for the throat hold. It was another miss--by a hair's breadth--and
before he could recover, the wolf's teeth were buried in the back of
his neck.

For the first time in his life Kazan felt the terror and the pain of the
death-grip, and with a mighty effort he flung his head a little forward
and snapped blindly. His powerful jaws closed on the wolf's foreleg,
close to the body. There was a cracking of bone and a crunching of
flesh, and the circle of waiting wolves grew tense and alert. One or the
other of the fighters was sure to go down before the holds were broken,
and they but awaited that fatal fall as a signal to leap in to the
death.

Only the thickness of hair and hide on the back of Kazan's neck, and the
toughness of his muscles, saved him from that terrible fate of the
vanquished. The wolf's teeth sank deep, but not deep enough to reach the
vital spot, and suddenly Kazan put every ounce of strength in his limbs
to the effort, and flung himself up bodily from under his antagonist.
The grip on his neck relaxed, and with another rearing leap he tore
himself free.

As swift as a whip-lash he whirled on the broken-legged leader of the
pack and with the full rush and weight of his shoulders struck him
fairly in the side. More deadly than the throat-grip had Kazan sometimes
found the lunge when delivered at the right moment. It was deadly now.
The big gray wolf lost his feet, rolled upon his back for an instant,
and the pack rushed in, eager to rend the last of life from the leader
whose power had ceased to exist.

From out of that gray, snarling, bloody-lipped mass, Kazan drew back,
panting and bleeding. He was weak. There was a curious sickness in his
head. He wanted to lie down in the snow. But the old and infallible
instinct warned him not to betray that weakness. From out of the pack a
slim, lithe, gray she-wolf came up to him, and lay down in the snow
before him, and then rose swiftly and sniffed at his wounds.

She was young and strong and beautiful, but Kazan did not look at her.
Where the fight had been he was looking, at what little remained of the
old leader. The pack had returned to the feast. He heard again the
cracking of bones and the rending of flesh, and something told him that
hereafter all the wilderness would hear and recognize his voice, and
that when he sat back on his haunches and called to the moon and the
stars, those swift-footed hunters of the big plain would respond to it.
He circled twice about the caribou and the pack, and then trotted off to
the edge of the black spruce forest.

When he reached the shadows he looked back. Gray Wolf was following him.
She was only a few yards behind. And now she came up to him, a little
timidly, and she, too, looked back to the dark blotch of life out on the
lake. And as she stood there close beside him, Kazan sniffed at
something in the air that was not the scent of blood, nor the perfume of
the balsam and spruce. It was a thing that seemed to come to him from
the clear stars, the cloudless moon, the strange and beautiful quiet of
the night itself. And its presence seemed to be a part of Gray Wolf.

He looked at her, and he found Gray Wolf's eyes alert and questioning.
She was young--so young that she seemed scarcely to have passed out of
puppyhood. Her body was strong and slim and beautifully shaped. In the
moonlight the hair under her throat and along her back shone sleek and
soft. She whined at the red staring light in Kazan's eyes, and it was
not a puppy's whimper. Kazan moved toward her, and stood with his head
over her back, facing the pack. He felt her trembling against his chest.
He looked at the moon and the stars again, the mystery of Gray Wolf and
of the night throbbing in his blood.

Not much of his life had been spent at the posts. Most of it had been on
the trail--in the traces--and the spirit of the mating season had only
stirred him from afar. But it was very near now. Gray Wolf lifted her
head. Her soft muzzle touched the wound on his neck, and in the
gentleness of that touch, in the low sound in her throat, Kazan felt and
heard again that wonderful something that had come with the caress of
the woman's hand and the sound of her voice.

He turned, whining, his back bristling, his head high and defiant of the
wilderness which he faced. Gray Wolf trotted close at his side as they
entered into the gloom of the forest.




CHAPTER V

THE FIGHT IN THE SNOW


They found shelter that night under thick balsam, and when they lay down
on the soft carpet of needles which the snow had not covered, Gray Wolf
snuggled her warm body close to Kazan and licked his wounds. The day
broke with a velvety fall of snow, so white and thick that they could
not see a dozen leaps ahead of them in the open. It was quite warm, and
so still that the whole world seemed filled with only the flutter and
whisper of the snowflakes. Through this day Kazan and Gray Wolf traveled
side by side. Time and again he turned his head back to the ridge over
which he had come, and Gray Wolf could not understand the strange note
that trembled in his throat.

In the afternoon they returned to what was left of the caribou doe on
the lake. In the edge of the forest Gray Wolf hung back. She did not yet
know the meaning of poison-baits, deadfalls and traps, but the instinct
of numberless generations was in her veins, and it told her there was
danger in visiting a second time a thing that had grown cold in death.

Kazan had seen masters work about carcasses that the wolves had left. He
had seen them conceal traps cleverly, and roll little capsules of
strychnine in the fat of the entrails, and once he had put a foreleg in
a trap, and had experienced its sting and pain and deadly grip. But he
did not have Gray Wolf's fear. He urged her to accompany him to the
white hummocks on the ice, and at last she went with him and sank back
restlessly on her haunches, while he dug out the bones and pieces of
flesh that the snow had kept from freezing. But she would not eat, and
at last Kazan went and sat on his haunches at her side, and with her
looked at what he had dug out from under the snow. He sniffed the air.
He could not smell danger, but Gray Wolf told him that it might be
there.

She told him many other things in the days and nights that followed. The
third night Kazan himself gathered the hunt-pack and led in the chase.
Three times that month, before the moon left the skies, he led the
chase, and each time there was a kill. But as the snows began to grow
softer under his feet he found a greater and greater companionship in
Gray Wolf, and they hunted alone, living on the big white rabbits. In
all the world he had loved but two things, the girl with the shining
hair and the hands that had caressed him--and Gray Wolf.

He did not leave the big plain, and often He took his mate to the top of
the ridge, and he would try to tell her what he had left back there.
With the dark nights the call of the woman became so strong upon him
that he was filled with a longing to go back, and take Gray Wolf with
him.

Something happened very soon after that. They were crossing the open
plain one day when up on the face of the ridge Kazan saw something that
made his heart stand still. A man, with a dog-sledge and team, was
coming down into their world. The wind had not warned them, and suddenly
Kazan saw something glisten in the man's hands. He knew what it was. It
was the thing that spat fire and thunder, and killed.

He gave his warning to Gray Wolf, and they were off like the wind, side
by side. And then came the _sound_--and Kazan's hatred of men burst
forth in a snarl as he leaped. There was a queer humming over their
heads. The sound from behind came again, and this time Gray Wolf gave a
yelp of pain, and rolled over and over in the snow. She was on her feet
again in an instant, and Kazan dropped behind her, and ran there until
they reached the shelter of the timber. Gray Wolf lay down, and began
licking the wound in her shoulder. Kazan faced the ridge. The man was
taking up their trail. He stopped where Gray Wolf had fallen, and
examined the snow. Then he came on.

Kazan urged Gray Wolf to her feet, and they made for the thick swamp
close to the lake. All that day they kept in the face of the wind, and
when Gray Wolf lay down Kazan stole back over their trail, watching and
sniffing the air.

For days after that Gray Wolf ran lame, and when once they came upon the
remains of an old camp, Kazan's teeth were bared in snarling hatred of
the man-scent that had been left behind. Growing in him there was a
desire for vengeance--vengeance for his own hurts, and for Gray Wolf's.
He tried to nose out the man-trail under the cover of fresh snow, and
Gray Wolf circled around him anxiously, and tried to lure him deeper
into the forest. At last he followed her sullenly. There was a savage
redness in his eyes.

Three days later the new moon came. And on the fifth night Kazan struck
a trail. It was fresh--so fresh that he stopped as suddenly as though
struck by a bullet when he ran upon it, and stood with every muscle in
his body quivering, and his hair on end. It was a man-trail. There were
the marks of the sledge, the dogs' feet, and the snow-shoeprints of his
enemy.

Then he threw up his head to the stars, and from his throat there rolled
out over the wide plains the hunt-cry--the wild and savage call for the
pack. Never had he put the savagery in it that was there to-night. Again
and again he sent forth that call, and then there came an answer and
another and still another, until Gray Wolf herself sat back on her
haunches and added her voice to Kazan's, and far out on the plain a
white and haggard-faced man halted his exhausted dogs to listen, while a
voice said faintly from the sledge:

"The wolves, father. Are they coming--after us?"

The man was silent. He was not young. The moon shone in his long white
beard, and added grotesquely to the height of his tall gaunt figure. A
girl had raised her head from a bearskin pillow on the sleigh. Her dark
eyes were filled beautifully with the starlight. She was pale. Her hair
fell in a thick shining braid over her shoulder, and she was hugging
something tightly to her breast.

"They're on the trail of something--probably a deer," said the man,
looking at the breech of his rifle. "Don't worry, Jo. We'll stop at the
next bit of scrub and see if we can't find enough dry stuff for a
fire.--Wee-ah-h-h-h, boys! Koosh--koosh--" and he snapped his whip over
the backs of his team.

From the bundle at the girl's breast there came a small wailing cry. And
far back in the plain there answered it the scattered voice of the pack.

At last Kazan was on the trail of vengeance. He ran slowly at first,
with Gray Wolf close beside him, pausing every three or four hundred
yards to send forth the cry. A gray leaping form joined them from
behind. Another followed. Two came in from the side, and Kazan's
solitary howl gave place to the wild tongue of the pack. Numbers
grew, and with increasing number the pace became swifter.
Four--six--seven--ten--fourteen, by the time the more open and
wind-swept part of the plain was reached.

It was a strong pack, filled with old and fearless hunters. Gray Wolf
was the youngest, and she kept close to Kazan's shoulders. She could see
nothing of his red-shot eyes and dripping jaws, and would not have
understood if she had seen. But she could _feel_ and she was thrilled by
the spirit of that strange and mysterious savagery that had made Kazan
forget all things but hurt and death.

The pack made no sound. There was only the panting of breath and the
soft fall of many feet. They ran swiftly and close. And always Kazan was
a leap ahead, with Gray Wolf nosing his shoulder.

Never had he wanted to kill as he felt the desire in him to kill now.
For the first time he had no fear of man, no fear of the club, of the
whip, or of the thing that blazed forth fire and death. He ran more
swiftly, in order to overtake them and give them battle sooner. All of
the pent-up madness of four years of slavery and abuse at the hands of
men broke loose in thin red streams of fire in his veins, and when at
last he saw a moving blotch far out on the plain ahead of him, the cry
that came out of his throat was one that Gray Wolf did not understand.

Three hundred yards beyond that moving blotch was the thin line of
timber, and Kazan and his followers bore down swiftly. Half-way to the
timber they were almost upon it, and suddenly it stopped and became a
black and motionless shadow on the snow. From out of it there leaped
that lightning tongue of flame that Kazan had always dreaded, and he
heard the hissing song of the death-bee over his head. He did not mind
it now. He yelped sharply, and the wolves raced in until four of them
were neck-and-neck with him.

A second flash--and the death-bee drove from breast to tail of a huge
gray fighter close to Gray Wolf. A third--a fourth--a fifth spurt of
that fire from the black shadow, and Kazan himself felt a sudden swift
passing of a red-hot thing along his shoulder, where the man's last
bullet shaved off the hair and stung his flesh.

Three of the pack had gone down under the fire of the rifle, and half of
the others were swinging to the right and the left. But Kazan drove
straight ahead. Faithfully Gray Wolf followed him.

The sledge-dogs had been freed from their traces, and before he could
reach the man, whom he saw with his rifle held like a club in his hands,
Kazan was met by the fighting mass of them. He fought like a fiend, and
there was the strength and the fierceness of two mates in the mad
gnashing of Gray Wolf's fangs. Two of the wolves rushed in, and Kazan
heard the terrific, back-breaking thud of the rifle. To him it was the
_club_. He wanted to reach it. He wanted to reach the man who held it,
and he freed himself from the fighting mass of the dogs and sprang to
the sledge. For the first time he saw that there was something human on
the sledge, and in an instant he was upon it. He buried his jaws deep.
They sank in something soft and hairy, and he opened them for another
lunge. And then he heard the voice! It was _her voice_! Every muscle in
his body stood still. He became suddenly like flesh turned to lifeless
stone.

_Her voice_! The bear rug was thrown back and what had been hidden under
it he saw clearly now in the light of the moon and the stars. In him
instinct worked more swiftly than human brain could have given birth to
reason. It was not _she_. But the voice was the same, and the white
girlish face so close to his own blood-reddened eyes held in it that
same mystery that he had learned to love. And he saw now that which she
was clutching to her breast, and there came from it a strange thrilling
cry--and he knew that here on the sledge he had found not enmity and
death, but that from which he had been driven away in the other world
beyond the ridge.

In a flash he turned. He snapped at Gray Wolf's flank, and she dropped
away with a startled yelp. It had all happened in a moment, but the man
was almost down. Kazan leaped under his clubbed rifle and drove into the
face of what was left of the pack. His fangs cut like knives. If he had
fought like a demon against the dogs, he fought like ten demons now, and
the man--bleeding and ready to fall--staggered back to the sledge,
marveling at what was happening. For in Gray Wolf there was now the
instinct of matehood, and seeing Kazan tearing and righting the pack she
joined him in the struggle which she could not understand.

When it was over, Kazan and Gray Wolf were alone out on the plain. The
pack had slunk away into the night, and the same moon and stars that had
given to Kazan the first knowledge of his birthright told him now that
no longer would those wild brothers of the plains respond to his call
when he howled into the sky.

He was hurt. And Gray Wolf was hurt, but not so badly as Kazan. He was
torn and bleeding. One of his legs was terribly bitten. After a time he
saw a fire in the edge of the forest. The old call was strong upon him.
He wanted to crawl in to it, and feel the girl's hand on his head, as
he had felt that other hand in the world beyond the ridge. He would have
gone--and would have urged Gray Wolf to go with him--but the man was
there. He whined, and Gray Wolf thrust her warm muzzle against his neck.
Something told them both that they were outcasts, that the plains, and
the moon, and the stars were against them now, and they slunk into the
shelter and the gloom of the forest.

Kazan could not go far. He could still smell the camp when he lay down.
Gray Wolf snuggled close to him. Gently she soothed with her soft tongue
Kazan's bleeding wounds. And Kazan, lifting his head, whined softly to
the stars.




CHAPTER VI

JOAN


On the edge of the cedar and spruce forest old Pierre Radisson built the
fire. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds, where the fangs of the wolves
had reached to his flesh, and he felt in his breast that old and
terrible pain, of which no one knew the meaning but himself. He dragged
in log after log, piled them on the fire until the flames leaped tip to
the crisping needles of the limbs above, and heaped a supply close at
hand for use later in the night.

From the sledge Joan watched him, still wild-eyed and fearful, still
trembling. She was holding her baby close to her breast. Her long heavy
hair smothered her shoulders and arms in a dark lustrous veil that
glistened and rippled in the firelight when she moved. Her young face
was scarcely a woman's to-night, though she was a mother. She looked
like a child.

Old Pierre laughed as he threw down the last armful of fuel, and stood
breathing hard.

"It was close, _ma cheri_" he panted through his white beard. "We were
nearer to death out there on the plain than we will ever be again, I
hope. But we are comfortable now, and warm. Eh? You are no longer
afraid?"

He sat down beside his daughter, and gently pulled back the soft fur
that enveloped the bundle she held in her arms. He could see one pink
cheek of baby Joan. The eyes of Joan, the mother, were like stars.

"It was the baby who saved us," she whispered. "The dogs were being torn
to pieces by the wolves, and I saw them leaping upon you, when one of
them sprang to the sledge. At first I thought it was one of the dogs.
But it was a wolf. He tore once at us, and the bearskin saved us. He was
almost at my throat when baby cried, and then he stood there, his red
eyes a foot from us, and I could have sworn again that he was a dog. In
an instant he turned, and was fighting the wolves. I saw him leap upon
one that was almost at your throat."

"He _was_ a dog," said old Pierre, holding out his hands to the warmth.
"They often wander away from the posts, and join the wolves. I have had
dogs do that. _Ma cheri_, a dog is a dog all his life. Kicks, abuse,
even the wolves can not change him--for long. He was one of the pack. He
came with them--to kill. But when he found _us_--"

"He fought for us," breathed the girl. She gave him the bundle, and
stood up, straight and tall and slim in the firelight. "He fought for
us--and he was terribly hurt," she said. "I saw him drag himself away.
Father, if he is out there--dying--"

Pierre Radisson stood up. He coughed in a shuddering way, trying to
stifle the sound under his beard. The fleck of crimson that came to his
lips with the cough Joan did not see. She had seen nothing of it during
the six days they had been traveling up from the edge of civilization.
Because of that cough, and the stain that came with it, Pierre had made
more than ordinary haste.

"I have been thinking of that," he said. "He was badly hurt, and I do
not think he went far. Here--take little Joan and sit close to the fire
until I come back."

The moon and the stars were brilliant in the sky when he went out in the
plain. A short distance from the edge of the timber-line he stood for a
moment upon the spot where the wolves had overtaken them an hour before.
Not one of his four dogs had lived. The snow was red with their blood,
and their bodies lay stiff where they had fallen under the pack. Pierre
shuddered as he looked at them. If the wolves had not turned their first
mad attack upon the dogs, what would have become of himself, Joan and
the baby? He turned away, with another of those hollow coughs that
brought the blood to his lips.

A few yards to one side he found in the snow the trail of the strange
dog that had come with the wolves, and had turned against them in that
moment when all seemed lost. It was not a clean running trail. It was
more of a furrow in the snow, and Pierre Radisson followed it, expecting
to find the dog dead at the end of it.

In the sheltered spot to which he had dragged himself in the edge of the
forest Kazan lay for a long time after the fight, alert and watchful.
He felt no very great pain. But he had lost the power to stand upon his
legs. His flanks seemed paralyzed. Gray Wolf crouched close at his side,
sniffing the air. They could smell the camp, and Kazan could detect the
two things that were there--_man_ and _woman_. He knew that the girl was
there, where he could see the glow of the firelight through the spruce
and the cedars. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to drag himself close
in to the fire, and take Gray Wolf with him, and listen to her voice,
and feel the touch of her hand. But the man was there, and to him man
had always meant the club, the whip, pain, death.

Gray Wolf crouched close to his side, and whined softly as she urged
Kazan to flee deeper with her into the forest. At last she understood
that he could not move, and she ran nervously out into the plain, and
back again, until her footprints were thick in the trail she made. The
instincts of matehood were strong in her. It was she who first saw
Pierre Radisson coming over their trail, and she ran swiftly back to
Kazan and gave the warning.

Then Kazan caught the scent, and he saw the shadowy figure coming
through the starlight. He tried to drag himself back, but he could move
only by inches. The man came rapidly nearer. Kazan caught the glisten of
the rifle in his hand. He heard his hollow cough, and the tread of his
feet in the snow. Gray Wolf crouched shoulder to shoulder with him,
trembling and showing her teeth. When Pierre had approached within fifty
feet of them she slunk back into the deeper shadows of the spruce.

Kazan's fangs were bared menacingly when Pierre stopped and looked down
at him. With an effort he dragged himself to his feet, but fell back
into the snow again. The man leaned his rifle against a sapling and bent
over him fearlessly. With a fierce growl Kazan snapped at his extended
hands. To his surprise the man did not pick up a stick or a club. He
held out his hand again--cautiously--and spoke in a voice new to Kazan.
The dog snapped again, and growled.

The man persisted, talking to him all the time, and once his mittened
hand touched Kazan's head, and escaped before the jaws could reach it.
Again and again the man reached out his hand, and three times Kazan felt
the touch of it, and there was neither threat nor hurt in it. At last
Pierre turned away and went back over the trail.

When he was out of sight and hearing, Kazan whined, and the crest along
his spine flattened. He looked wistfully toward the glow of the fire.
The man had not hurt him, and the three-quarters of him that was dog
wanted to follow.

Gray Wolf came back, and stood with stiffly planted forefeet at his
side. She had never been this near to man before, except when the pack
had overtaken the sledge out on the plain. She could not understand.
Every instinct that was in her warned her that he was the most dangerous
of all things, more to be feared than the strongest beasts, the storms,
the floods, cold and starvation. And yet this man had not harmed her
mate. She sniffed at Kazan's back and head, where the mittened hand had
touched. Then she trotted back into the darkness again, for beyond the
edge of the forest she once more saw moving life.

The man was returning, and with him was the girl. Her voice was soft
and sweet, and there was about her the breath and sweetness of woman.
The man stood prepared, but not threatening.

"Be careful, Joan," he warned.

She dropped on her knees in the snow, just out of reach.

"Come, boy--come!" she said gently. She held out her hand. Kazan's
muscles twitched. He moved an inch--two inches toward her. There was the
old light in her eyes and face now, the love and gentleness he had known
once before, when another woman with shining hair and eyes had come into
his life. "Come!" she whispered as she saw him move, and she bent a
little, reached a little farther with her hand, and at last touched his
head.

Pierre knelt beside her. He was proffering something, and Kazan smelled
meat. But it was the girl's hand that made him tremble and shiver, and
when she drew back, urging him to follow her, he dragged himself
painfully a foot or two through the snow. Not until then did the girl
see his mangled leg. In an instant she had forgotten all caution, and
was down close at his side.

"He can't walk," she cried, a sudden tremble in her voice. "Look, _mon
père!_ Here is a terrible cut. We must carry him."

"I guessed that much," replied Radisson. "For that reason I brought the
blanket. _Mon Dieu_, listen to that!"

From the darkness of the forest there came a low wailing cry.

Kazan lifted his head and a trembling whine answered in his throat. It
was Gray Wolf calling to him.

It was a miracle that Pierre Radisson should put the blanket about
Kazan, and carry him in to the camp, without scratch or bite. It was
this miracle that he achieved, with Joan's arm resting on Kazan's shaggy
neck as she held one end of the blanket. They laid him down close to the
fire, and after a little it was the man again who brought warm water and
washed away the blood from the torn leg, and then put something on it
that was soft and warm and soothing, and finally bound a cloth about it.

All this Was strange and new to Kazan. Pierre's hand, as well as the
girl's, stroked his head. It was the man who brought him a gruel of meal
and tallow, and urged him to eat, while Joan sat with her chin in her
two hands, looking at the dog, and talking to him. After this, when he
was quite comfortable, and no longer afraid, he heard a strange small
cry from the furry bundle on the sledge that brought his head up with a
jerk.

Joan saw the movement, and heard the low answering whimper in his
throat. She turned quickly to the bundle, talking and cooing to it as
she took it in her arms, and then she pulled back the bearskin so that
Kazan could see. He had never seen a baby before, and Joan held it out
before him, so that he could look straight at it and see what a
wonderful creature it was. Its little pink face stared steadily at
Kazan. Its tiny fists reached out, and it made queer little sounds at
him, and then suddenly it kicked and screamed with delight and laughed.
At those sounds Kazan's whole body relaxed, and he dragged himself to
the girl's feet.

"See, he likes the baby!" she cried. "_Mon père_, we must give him a
name. What shall it be?"

"Wait till morning for that," replied the father. "It is late, Joan. Go
into the tent, and sleep. We have no dogs now, and will travel slowly.
So we must start early."

With her hand on the tent-flap, Joan, turned.

"He came with the wolves," she said. "Let us call him Wolf." With one
arm she was holding the little Joan. The other she stretched out to
Kazan. "Wolf! Wolf!" she called softly.

Kazan's eyes were on her. He knew that she was speaking to him, and he
drew himself a foot toward her.

"He knows it already!" she cried. "Good night, _mon père_."

For a long time after she had gone into the tent, old Pierre Radisson
sat on the edge of the sledge, facing the fire, with Kazan at his feet.
Suddenly the silence was broken again by Gray Wolf's lonely howl deep in
the forest. Kazan lifted his head and whined.

"She's calling for you, boy," said Pierre understandingly.

He coughed, and clutched a hand to his breast, where the pain seemed
rending him.

"Frost-bitten lung," he said, speaking straight at Kazan. "Got it early
in the winter, up at Fond du Lac. Hope we'll get home--in time--with the
kids."

In the loneliness and emptiness of the big northern wilderness one falls
into the habit of talking to one's self. But Kazan's head was alert, and
his eyes watchful, so Pierre spoke to him.

"We've got to get them home, and there's only you and me to do it," he
said, twisting his beard. Suddenly he clenched his fists.

His hollow racking cough convulsed him again.

"Home!" he panted, clutching his chest. "It's eighty miles straight
north--to the Churchill--and I pray to God we'll get there--with the
kids--before my lungs give out."

He rose to his feet, and staggered a little as he walked. There was a
collar about Kazan's neck, and he chained him to the sledge. After that
he dragged three or four small logs upon the fire, and went quietly into
the tent where Joan and the baby were already asleep. Several times
that night Kazan heard the distant voice of Gray Wolf calling for him,
but something told him that he must not answer it now. Toward dawn Gray
Wolf came close in to the camp, and for the first time Kazan replied to
her.

His howl awakened the man. He came out of the tent, peered for a few
moments up at the sky, built up the fire, and began to prepare
breakfast. He patted Kazan on the head, and gave him a chunk of meat.
Joan came out a few moments later, leaving the baby asleep in the tent.
She ran up and kissed Pierre, and then dropped down on her knees beside
Kazan, and talked to him almost as he had heard her talk to the baby.
When she jumped up to help her father, Kazan followed her, and when Joan
saw him standing firmly upon his legs she gave a cry of pleasure.

It was a strange journey that began into the North that day. Pierre
Radisson emptied the sledge of everything but the tent, blankets, food
and the furry nest for baby Joan. Then he harnessed himself in the
traces and dragged the sledge over the snow. He coughed incessantly.

"It's a cough I've had half the winter," lied Pierre, careful that Joan
saw no sign of blood on his lips or beard. "I'll keep in the cabin for a
week when we get home."

Even Kazan, with that strange beast knowledge which man, unable to
explain, calls instinct, knew that what he said was not the truth.
Perhaps it was largely because he had heard other men cough like this,
and that for generations his sledge-dog ancestors had heard men cough as
Radisson coughed--and had learned what followed it.

More than once he had scented death in tepees and cabins, which he had
not entered, and more than once he had sniffed at the mystery of death
that was not quite present, but near--just as he had caught at a
distance the subtle warning of storm and of fire. And that strange thing
seemed to be very near to him now, as he followed at the end of his
chain behind the sledge. It made him restless, and half a dozen times,
when the sledge stopped, he sniffed at the bit of humanity buried in the
bearskin. Each time that he did this Joan was quickly at his side, and
twice she patted his scarred and grizzled head until every drop of
blood in his body leaped riotously with a joy which his body did not
reveal.

This day the chief thing that he came to understand was that the little
creature on the sledge was very precious to the girl who stroked his
head and talked to him, and that it was very helpless. He learned, too,
that Joan was most delighted, and that her voice was softer and thrilled
him more deeply, when he paid attention to that little, warm, living
thing in the bearskin.

For a long time after they made camp Pierre Radisson sat beside the
fire. To-night he did not smoke. He stared straight into the flames.
When at last he rose to go into the tent with the girl and the baby, he
bent over Kazan and examined his hurt.

"You've got to work in the traces to-morrow, boy," he said. "We must
make the river by to-morrow night. If we don't--"

He did not finish. He was choking back one of those tearing coughs when
the tent-flap dropped behind him. Kazan lay stiff and alert, his eyes
filled with a strange anxiety. He did not like to see Radisson enter the
tent, for stronger than ever there hung that oppressive mystery in the
air about him, and it seemed to be a part of Pierre.

Three times that night he heard faithful Gray Wolf calling for him deep
in the forest, and each time he answered her. Toward dawn she came in
close to camp. Once he caught the scent of her when she circled around
in the wind, and he tugged and whined at the end of his chain, hoping
that she would come in and lie down at his side. But no sooner had
Radisson moved in the tent than Gray Wolf was gone. The man's face was
thinner, and his eyes were redder this morning. His cough was not so
loud or so rending. It was like a wheeze, as if something had given way
inside, and before the girl came out he clutched his hands often at his
throat. Joan's face whitened when she saw him. Anxiety gave way to fear
in her eyes. Pierre Radisson laughed when she flung her arms about him,
and coughed to prove that what he said was true.

"You see the cough is not so bad, my Joan," he said. "It is breaking up.
You can not have forgotten, _ma cheri_? It always leaves one red-eyed
and weak."

It was a cold bleak dark day that followed, and through it Kazan and
the man tugged at the fore of the sledge, with Joan following in the
trail behind. Kazan's wound no longer hurt him. He pulled steadily with
all his splendid strength, and the man never lashed him once, but patted
him with his mittened hand on head and back. The day grew steadily
darker and in the tops of the trees there was the low moaning of a
storm.

Darkness and the coming of the storm did not drive Pierre Radisson into
camp. "We must reach the river," he said to himself over and over again.
"We must reach the river--we must reach the river--" And he steadily
urged Kazan on to greater effort, while his own strength at the end of
the traces grew less.

It had begun to storm when Pierre stopped to build a fire at noon. The
snow fell straight down in a white deluge so thick that it hid the tree
trunks fifty yards away. Pierre laughed when Joan shivered and snuggled
close up to him with the baby in her arms. He waited only an hour, and
then fastened Kazan in the traces again, and buckled the straps once
more about his own waist. In the silent gloom that was almost night
Pierre carried his compass in his hand, and at last, late in the
afternoon, they came to a break in the timber-line, and ahead of them
lay a plain, across which Radisson pointed an exultant hand.

"There's the river, Joan," he said, his voice faint and husky. "We can
camp here now and wait for the storm to pass."

Under a thick clump of spruce he put up the tent, and then began
gathering fire-wood. Joan helped him. As soon as they had boiled coffee
and eaten a supper of meat and toasted biscuits, Joan went into the tent
and dropped exhausted on her thick bed of balsam boughs, wrapping
herself and the baby up close in the skins and blankets. To-night she
had no word for Kazan. And Pierre was glad that she was too tired to sit
beside the fire and talk. And yet--

Kazan's alert eyes saw Pierre start suddenly. He rose from his seat on
the sledge and went to the tent. He drew back the flap and thrust in his
head and shoulders.

"Asleep, Joan?" he asked.

"Almost, father. Won't you please come--soon?"

"After I smoke," he said. "Are you comfortable?"

"Yes, I'm so tired--and--sleepy--"

Pierre laughed softly. In the darkness he was gripping at his throat.

"We're almost home, Joan. That is our river out there--the Little
Beaver. If I should run away and leave you to-night you could follow it
right to our cabin. It's only forty miles. Do you hear?"

"Yes--I know--"

"Forty miles--straight down the river. You couldn't lose yourself, Joan.
Only you'd have to be careful of air-holes in the ice."

"Won't you come to bed, father? You're tired--and almost sick."

"Yes--after I smoke," he repeated. "Joan, will you keep reminding me
to-morrow of the air-holes? I might forget. You can always tell them,
for the snow and the crust over them are whiter than that on the rest of
the ice, and like a sponge. Will you remember--the airholes--"

"Yes-s-s-s--"

Pierre dropped the tent-flap and returned to the fire. He staggered as
he walked.

"Good night, boy," he said. "Guess I'd better go in with the kids. Two
days more--forty miles--two days--"

Kazan watched him as he entered the tent. He laid his weight against the
end of his chain until the collar shut off his wind. His legs and back
twitched. In that tent where Radisson had gone were Joan and the baby.
He knew that Pierre would not hurt them, but he knew also that with
Pierre Radisson something terrible and impending was hovering very near
to them. He wanted the man outside--by the fire--where he could lie
still, and watch him.

In the tent there was silence. Nearer to him than before came Gray
Wolf's cry. Each night she was calling earlier, and coming closer to the
camp. He wanted her very near to him to-night, but he did not even whine
in response. He dared not break that strange silence in the tent. He lay
still for a long time, tired and lame from the day's journey, but
sleepless. The fire burned lower; the wind in the tree-tops died away;
and the thick gray clouds rolled like a massive curtain from under the
skies. The stars began to glow white and metallic, and from far in the
North there came faintly a crisping moaning sound, like steel
sleigh-runners running over frosty snow--the mysterious monotone of the
Northern Lights. After that it grew steadily and swiftly colder.

To-night Gray Wolf did not compass herself by the direction of the wind.
She followed like a sneaking shadow over the trail Pierre Radisson had
made, and when Kazan heard her again, long after midnight, he lay with,
his head erect, and his body rigid, save for a curious twitching of his
muscles. There was a new note in Gray Wolf's voice, a wailing note in
which there was more than the mate-call. It was The Message. And at the
sound of it Kazan rose from out of his silence and his fear, and with
his head turned straight up to the sky he howled as the wild dogs of the
North howl before the tepees of masters who are newly dead.

Pierre Radisson was dead.




CHAPTER VII

OUT OF THE BLIZZARD


It was dawn when the baby snuggled close to Joan's warm breast and
awakened her with its cry of hunger. She opened her eyes, brushed back
the thick hair from her face, and could see where the shadowy form of
her father was lying at the other side of the tent. He was very quiet,
and she was pleased that he was still sleeping. She knew that the day
before he had been very near to exhaustion, and so for half an hour
longer she lay quiet, cooing softly to the baby Joan. Then she arose
cautiously, tucked the baby in the warm blankets and furs, put on her
heavier garments, and went outside.

By this time it was broad day, and she breathed a sigh of relief when
she saw that the storm had passed. It was bitterly cold. It seemed to
her that she had never known it to be so cold in all her life. The fire
was completely out. Kazan was huddled in a round ball, his nose tucked
under his body. He raised his head, shivering, as Joan came out. With
her heavily moccasined foot Joan scattered the ashes and charred sticks
where the fire had been. There was not a spark left. In returning to the
tent she stopped for a moment beside Kazan, and patted his shaggy head.

"Poor Wolf!" she said. "I wish I had given you one of the bearskins!"

She threw back the tent-flap and entered. For the first time she saw her
father's face in the light--and outside, Kazan heard the terrible
moaning cry that broke from her lips. No one could have looked at Pierre
Radisson's face once--and not have understood.

After that one agonizing cry, Joan flung herself upon her father's
breast, sobbing so softly that even Kazan's sharp ears heard no sound.
She remained there in her grief until every vital energy of womanhood
and motherhood in her girlish body was roused to action by the wailing
cry of baby Joan. Then she sprang to her feet and ran out through the
tent opening. Kazan tugged at the end of his chain to meet her, but she
saw nothing of him now. The terror of the wilderness is greater than
that of death, and in an instant it had fallen upon Joan. It was not
because of fear for herself. It was the baby. The wailing cries from the
tent pierced her like knife-thrusts.

And then, all at once, there came to her what old Pierre had said the
night before--his words about the river, the air-holes, the home forty
miles away. "_You couldn't lose yourself, Joan_" He had guessed what
might happen.

She bundled the baby deep in the furs and returned to the fire-bed. Her
one thought now was that they must have fire. She made a little pile of
birch-bark, covered it with half-burned bits of wood, and went into the
tent for the matches. Pierre Radisson carried them in a water-proof box
in a pocket of his bearskin coat. She sobbed as she kneeled beside him
again, and obtained the box. As the fire flared up she added other bits
of wood, and then some of the larger pieces that Pierre had dragged into
camp. The fire gave her courage. Forty miles--and the river led to their
home! She must make that, with the baby and Wolf. For the first time
she turned to him, and spoke his name as she put her hand on his head.
After that she gave him a chunk of meat which she thawed out over the
fire, and melted the snow for tea. She was not hungry, but she recalled
how her father had made her eat four or five times a day, so she forced
herself to make a breakfast of a biscuit, a shred of meat and as much
hot tea as she could drink.

The terrible hour she dreaded followed that. She wrapped blankets
closely about her father's body, and tied them with babiche cord. After
that she piled all the furs and blankets that remained on the sledge
close to the fire, and snuggled baby Joan deep down in them. Pulling
down the tent was a task. The ropes were stiff and frozen, and when she
had finished, one of her hands was bleeding. She piled the tent on the
sledge, and then, half, covering her face, turned and looked back.

Pierre Radisson lay on his balsam bed, with nothing over him now but the
gray sky and the spruce-tops. Kazan stood stiff-legged and sniffed the
air. His spine bristled when Joan went back slowly and kneeled beside
the blanket-wrapped object. When she returned to him her face was white
and tense, and now there was a strange and terrible look in her eyes as
she stared out across the barren. She put him in the traces, and
fastened about her slender waist the strap that Pierre had used. Thus
they struck out for the river, floundering knee-deep in the freshly
fallen and drifted snow. Half-way Joan stumbled in a drift and fell, her
loose hair flying in a shimmering veil over the snow. With a mighty pull
Kazan was at her side, and his cold muzzle touched her face as she drew
herself to her feet. For a moment Joan took his shaggy head between her
two hands.

"Wolf!" she moaned. "Oh, Wolf!"

She went on, her breath coming pantingly now, even from her brief
exertion. The snow was not so deep on the ice of the river. But a wind
was rising. It came from the north and east, straight in her face, and
Joan bowed her head as she pulled with Kazan. Half a mile down the river
she stopped, and no longer could she repress the hopelessness that rose
to her lips in a sobbing choking cry. Forty miles! She clutched her
hands at her breast, and stood breathing like one who had been beaten,
her back to the wind. The baby was quiet. Joan went back and peered down
under the furs, and what she saw there spurred her on again almost
fiercely. Twice she stumbled to her knees in the drifts during the next
quarter of a mile.

After that there was a stretch of wind-swept ice, and Kazan pulled the
sledge alone. Joan walked at his side. There was a pain in her chest. A
thousand needles seemed pricking her face, and suddenly she remembered
the thermometer. She exposed it for a time on the top of the tent. When
she looked at it a few minutes later it was thirty degrees below zero.
Forty miles! And her father had told her that she could make it--and
could not lose herself! But she did not know that even her father would
have been afraid to face the north that day, with the temperature at
thirty below, and a moaning wind bringing the first warning of a
blizzard.

The timber was far behind her now. Ahead there was nothing but the
pitiless barren, and the timber beyond that was hidden by the gray gloom
of the day. If there had been trees, Joan's heart would not have choked
so with terror. But there was nothing--nothing but that gray ghostly
gloom, with the rim of the sky touching the earth a mile away.

The snow grew heavy under her feet again. Always she was watching for
those treacherous, frost-coated traps in the ice her father had spoken
of. But she found now that all the ice and snow looked alike to her, and
that there was a growing pain back of her eyes. It was the intense cold.

The river widened into a small lake, and here the wind struck her in the
face with such force that her weight was taken from the strap, and Kazan
dragged the sledge alone. A few inches of snow impeded her as much as a
foot had done before. Little by little she dropped back. Kazan forged to
her side, every ounce of his magnificent strength in the traces. By the
time they were on the river channel again, Joan was at the back of the
sledge, following in the trail made by Kazan. She was powerless to help
him. She felt more and more the leaden weight of her legs. There was but
one hope--and that was the forest. If they did not reach it soon, within
half an hour, she would be able to go no farther. Over and over again
she moaned a prayer for her baby as she struggled on. She fell in the
snow-drifts. Kazan and the sledge became only a dark blotch to her. And
then, all at once, she saw that they were leaving her. They were not
more than twenty feet ahead of her--but the blotch seemed to be a vast
distance away. Every bit of life and strength in her body was now bent
upon reaching the sledge--and baby Joan.

It seemed an interminable time before she gained. With the sledge only
six feet ahead of her she struggled for what seemed to her to be an hour
before she could reach out and touch it. With a moan she flung herself
forward, and fell upon it. She no longer heard the wailing of the storm.
She no longer felt discomfort. With her face in the furs under which
baby Joan was buried, there came to her with swiftness and joy a vision
of warmth and home. And then the vision faded away, and was followed by
deep night.

Kazan stopped in the trail. He came back then and sat down upon his
haunches beside her, waiting for her to move and speak. But she was
very still. He thrust his nose into her loose hair. A whine rose in his
throat, and suddenly he raised his head and sniffed in the face of the
wind. Something came to him with that wind. He muzzled Joan again, hut
she did not stir. Then he went forward, and stood in his traces, ready
for the pull, and looked hack at her. Still she did not move or speak,
and Kazan's whine gave place to a sharp excited bark.

The strange thing in the wind came to him stronger for a moment. He
began to pull. The sledge-runners had frozen to the snow, and it took
every ounce of his strength to free them. Twice during the next five
minutes he stopped and sniffed the air. The third time that he halted,
in a drift of snow, he returned to Joan's side again, and whined to
awaken her. Then he tugged again at the end of his traces, and foot by
foot he dragged the sledge through the drift. Beyond the drift there was
a stretch of clear ice, and here Kazan rested. During a lull in the wind
the scent came to him stronger than before.

At the end of the clear ice was a narrow break in the shore, where a
creek ran into the main stream. If Joan had been conscious she would
have urged him straight ahead. But Kazan turned into the break, and for
ten minutes he struggled through the snow without a rest, whining more
and more frequently, until at last the whine broke into a joyous bark.
Ahead of him, close to the creek, was a small cabin. Smoke was rising
out of the chimney. It was the scent of smoke that had come to him in
the wind. A hard level slope reached to the cabin door, and with the
last strength that was in him Kazan dragged his burden up that. Then he
settled himself back beside Joan, lifted his shaggy head to the dark sky
and howled.

A moment later the door opened. A man came out. Kazan's reddened,
snow-shot eyes followed him watchfully as he ran to the sledge. He heard
his startled exclamation as he bent over Joan. In another lull of the
wind there came from out of the mass of furs on the sledge the wailing,
half-smothered voice of baby Joan.

A deep sigh of relief heaved up from Kazan's chest. He was exhausted.
His strength was gone. His feet were torn and bleeding. But the voice
of baby Joan filled him with a strange happiness, and he lay down in his
traces, while the man carried Joan and the baby into the life and warmth
of the cabin.

A few minutes later the man reappeared. He was not old, like Pierre
Radisson. He came close to Kazan, and looked down at him.

"My God," he said. "And you did that--_alone!_"

He bent down fearlessly, unfastened him from the traces, and led him
toward the cabin door. Kazan hesitated but once--almost on the
threshold. He turned his head, swift and alert. From out of the moaning
and wailing of the storm it seemed to him that for a moment he had heard
the voice of Gray Wolf.

Then the cabin door closed behind him.

Back in a shadowy corner of the cabin he lay, while the man prepared
something over a hot stove for Joan. It was a long time before Joan rose
from the cot on which the man had placed her. After that Kazan heard her
sobbing; and then the man made her eat, and for a time they talked. Then
the stranger hung up a big blanket in front of the bunk, and sat down
close to the stove. Quietly Kazan slipped along the wall, and crept
under the bunk. For a long time he could hear the sobbing breath of the
girl. Then all was still.

The next morning he slipped out through the door when the man opened it,
and sped swiftly into the forest. Half a mile away he found the trail of
Gray Wolf, and called to her. From the frozen river came her reply, and
he went to her.

Vainly Gray Wolf tried to lure him back into their old haunts--away from
the cabin and the scent of man. Late that morning the man harnessed his
dogs, and from the fringe of the forest Kazan saw him tuck Joan and the
baby among the furs on the sledge, as old Pierre had done. All that day
he followed in the trail of the team, with Gray Wolf slinking behind
him. They traveled until dark; and then, under the stars and the moon
that had followed the storm, the man still urged on his team. It was
deep in the night when they came to another cabin, and the man beat upon
the door. A light, the opening of the door, the joyous welcome of a
man's voice, Joan's sobbing cry--Kazan heard these from the shadows in
which he was hidden, and then slipped back to Gray Wolf.

In the days and weeks that followed Joan's home-coming the lure of the
cabin and of the woman's hand held Kazan. As he had tolerated Pierre, so
now he tolerated the younger man who lived with Joan and the baby. He
knew that the man was very dear to Joan, and that the baby was very dear
to him, as it was to the girl. It was not until the third day that Joan
succeeded in coaxing him into the cabin--and that was the day on which
the man returned with the dead and frozen body of Pierre. It was Joan's
husband who first found the name on the collar he wore, and they began
calling him Kazan.

Half a mile away, at the summit of a huge mass of rock which the Indians
called the Sun Rock, he and Gray Wolf had found a home; and from here
they went down to their hunts on the plain, and often the girl's voice
reached up to them, calling, "_Kazan! Kazan! Kazan_!"

Through all the long winter Kazan hovered thus between the lure of Joan
and the cabin--and Gray Wolf.

Then came Spring--and the Great Change.




CHAPTER VIII

THE GREAT CHANGE


The rocks, the ridges and the valleys were taking on a warmer glow. The
poplar buds were ready to burst. The scent of balsam and of spruce grew
heavier in the air each day, and all through the wilderness, in plain
and forest, there was the rippling murmur of the spring floods finding
their way to Hudson's Bay. In that great bay there was the rumble and
crash of the ice fields thundering down in the early break-up through
the Roes Welcome--the doorway to the Arctic, and for that reason there
still came with the April wind an occasional sharp breath of winter.

Kazan had sheltered himself against that wind. Not a breath of air
stirred in the sunny spot the wolf-dog had chosen for himself. He was
more comfortable than he had been at any time during the six months of
terrible winter--and as he slept he dreamed.

Gray Wolf, his wild mate, lay near him, flat on her belly, her forepaws
reaching out, her eyes and nostrils as keen and alert as the smell of
man could make them. For there was that smell of man, as well as of
balsam and spruce, in the warm spring air. She gazed anxiously and
sometimes steadily, at Kazan as he slept. Her own gray spine stiffened
when she saw the tawny hair along Kazan's back bristle at some dream
vision. She whined softly as his upper lip snarled back, showing his
long white fangs. But for the most part Kazan lay quiet, save for the
muscular twitchings of legs, shoulders and muzzle, which always tell
when a dog is dreaming; and as he dreamed there came to the door of the
cabin out on the plain a blue-eyed girl-woman, with a big brown braid
over her shoulder, who called through the cup of her hands, "Kazan,
Kazan, Kazan!"

The voice reached faintly to the top of the Sun Rock, and Gray Wolf
flattened her ears. Kazan stirred, and in another instant he was awake
and on his feet. He leaped to an outcropping ledge, sniffing the air and
looking far out over the plain that lay below them.

Over the plain the woman's voice came to them again, and Kazan ran to
the edge of the rock and whined. Gray Wolf stepped softly to his side
and laid her muzzle on his shoulder. She had grown to know what the
Voice meant. Day and night she feared it, more than she feared the scent
or sound of man.

Since she had given up the pack and her old life for Kazan, the Voice
had become Gray Wolf's greatest enemy, and she hated it. It took Kazan
from her. And wherever it went, Kazan followed.

Night after night it robbed her of her mate, and left her to wander
alone under the stars and the moon, keeping faithfully to her
loneliness, and never once responding with her own tongue to the
hunt-calls of her wild brothers and sisters in the forests and out on
the plains. Usually she would snarl at the Voice, and sometimes nip
Kazan lightly to show her displeasure. But to-day, as the Voice came a
third time, she slunk back into the darkness of a fissure between two
rocks, and Kazan saw only the fiery glow of her eyes.

Kazan ran nervously to the trail their feet had worn up to the top of
the Sun Rock, and stood undecided. All day, and yesterday, he had been
uneasy and disturbed. Whatever it was that stirred him seemed to be in
the air, for he could not see it or hear it or scent it. But he could
_feel_ it. He went to the fissure and sniffed at Gray Wolf. Usually she
whined coaxingly. But her response to-day was to draw back her lips
until he could see her white fangs.

A fourth tune the Voice came to them faintly, and she snapped fiercely
at some unseen thing in the darkness between the two rocks. Kazan went
again to the trail, still hesitating. Then he began to go down. It was a
narrow winding trail, worn only by the pads and claws of animals, for
the Sun Rock was a huge crag that rose almost sheer up for a hundred
feet above the tops of the spruce and balsam, its bald crest catching
the first gleams of the sun in the morning and the last glow of it in
the evening. Gray Wolf had first led Kazan to the security of the
retreat at the top of the rock.

When he reached the bottom he no longer hesitated, but darted swiftly in
the direction of the cabin. Because of that instinct of the wild that
was still in him, he always approached the cabin with caution. He never
gave warning, and for a moment Joan was startled when she looked up from
her baby and saw Kazan's shaggy head and shoulders in the open door. The
baby struggled and kicked in her delight, and held out her two hands
with cooing cries to Kazan. Joan, too, held out a hand.

"Kazan!" she cried softly. "Come in, Kazan!"

Slowly the wild red light in Kazan's eyes softened. He put a forefoot on
the sill, and stood there, while the girl urged him again. Suddenly his
legs seemed to sink a little under him, his tail drooped and he slunk in
with that doggish air of having committed a crime. The creatures he
loved were in the cabin, but the cabin itself he hated. He hated all
cabins, for they all breathed of the club and the whip and bondage. Like
all sledge-dogs he preferred the open snow for a bed, and the
spruce-tops for shelter.

Joan dropped her hand to his head, and at its touch there thrilled
through him that strange joy that was his reward for leaving Gray Wolf
and the wild. Slowly he raised his head until his black muzzle rested on
her lap, and he closed his eyes while that wonderful little creature
that mystified him so--the baby--prodded him with her tiny feet, and
pulled his tawny hair. He loved these baby-maulings even more than the
touch of Joan's hand.

Motionless, sphinx-like, undemonstrative in every muscle of his body,
Kazan stood, scarcely breathing. More than once this lack of
demonstration had urged Joan's husband to warn her. But the wolf that
was in Kazan, his wild aloofness, even his mating with Gray Wolf had
made her love him more. She understood, and had faith in him.

In the days of the last snow Kazan had proved himself. A neighboring
trapper had run over with his team, and the baby Joan had toddled up to
one of the big huskies. There was a fierce snap of jaws, a scream of
horror from Joan, a shout from the men as they leaped toward the pack.
But Kazan was ahead of them all. In a gray streak that traveled with the
speed of a bullet he was at the big husky's throat. When they pulled him
off, the husky was dead. Joan thought of that now, as the baby kicked
and tousled Kazan's head.

"Good old Kazan," she cried softly, putting her face down close to him.
"We're glad you came, Kazan, for we're going to be alone to-night--baby
and I. Daddy's gone to the post, and you must care for us while he's
away."

She tickled his nose with the end of her long shining braid. This always
delighted the baby, for in spite of his stoicism Kazan had to sniff and
sometimes to sneeze, and twig his ears. And it pleased him, too. He
loved the sweet scent of Joan's hair.

"And you'd fight for us, if you had to, wouldn't you?" she went on. Then
she rose quietly. "I must close the door," she said. "I don't want you
to go away again to-day, Kazan. You must stay with us."

Kazan went off to his corner, and lay down. Just as there had been some
strange thing at the top of the Sun Rock to disturb him that day, so now
there was a mystery that disturbed him in the cabin. He sniffed the air,
trying to fathom its secret. Whatever it was, it seemed to make his
mistress different, too. And she was digging out all sorts of odds and
ends of things about the cabin, and doing them up in packages. Late that
night, before she went to bed, Joan came and snuggled her hand close
down beside him for a few moments.

"We're going away," she whispered, and there was a curious tremble that
was almost a sob in her voice. "We're going home, Kazan. We're going
away down where his people live--where they have churches, and cities,
and music, and all the beautiful things in the world. And we're going to
take _you_, Kazan!"

Kazan didn't understand. But he was happy at having the woman so near to
him, and talking to him. At these times he forgot Gray Wolf. The dog
that was in him surged over his quarter-strain of wildness, and the
woman and the baby alone filled his world. But after Joan had gone to
her bed, and all was quiet in the cabin, his old uneasiness returned. He
rose to his feet and moved stealthily about the cabin, sniffing at the
walls, the door and the things his mistress had done into packages. A
low whine rose in his throat. Joan, half asleep, heard it, and murmured:
"Be quiet, Kazan. Go to sleep--go to sleep--"

Long after that, Kazan stood rigid in the center of the room, listening,
trembling. And faintly he heard, far away, the wailing cry of, Gray
Wolf. But to-night it was not the cry of loneliness. It sent a thrill
through him. He ran to the door, and whined, but Joan was deep in
slumber and did not hear him. Once more he heard the cry, and only once.
Then the night grew still. He crouched down near the door.

Joan found him there, still watchful, still listening, when she awoke in
the early morning. She came to open the door for him, and in a moment he
was gone. His feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth as he sped in the
direction of the Sun Rock. Across the plain he could see the cap of it
already painted with a golden glow.

He came to the narrow winding trail, and wormed his way up it swiftly.

Gray Wolf was not at the top to greet him. But he could smell her, and
the scent of that other thing was strong in the air. His muscles
tightened; his legs grew tense. Deep down in his chest there began the
low rumble of a growl. He knew now what that strange thing was that had
haunted him, and made him uneasy. It was _life_. Something that lived
and breathed had invaded the home which he and Gray Wolf had chosen. He
bared his long fangs, and a snarl of defiance drew back his lips.
Stiff-legged, prepared to spring, his neck and head reaching out, he
approached the two rocks between which Gray Wolf had crept the night
before. She was still there. And with her was _something else_. After a
moment the tenseness left Kazan's body. His bristling crest drooped
until it lay flat. His ears shot forward, and he put his head and
shoulders between the two rocks, and whined softly. And Gray Wolf
whined. Slowly Kazan backed out, and faced the rising sun. Then he lay
down, so that his body shielded I the entrance to the chamber between
the rocks.

Gray Wolf was a mother.




CHAPTER IX

THE TRAGEDY ON SUN ROCK


All that day Kazan guarded the top of the Sun Rock. Fate, and the fear
and brutality of masters, had heretofore kept him from fatherhood, and
he was puzzled. Something told him now that he belonged to the Sun Rock,
and not to the cabin. The call that came to him from over the plain was
not so strong. At dusk Gray Wolf came out from her retreat, and slunk to
his side, whimpering, and nipped gently at his shaggy neck. It was the
old instinct of his fathers that made him respond by caressing Gray
Wolf's face with his tongue. Then Gray Wolf's jaws opened, and she
laughed in short panting breaths, as if she had been hard run. She was
happy, and as they heard a little snuffling sound from between the
rocks, Kazan wagged his tail, and Gray Wolf darted back to her young.

The babyish cry and its effect upon Gray Wolf taught Kazan his first
lesson in fatherhood. Instinct again told him that Gray Wolf could not
go down to the hunt with him now--that she must stay at the top of the
Sun Rock. So when the moon rose he went down alone, and toward dawn
returned with a big white rabbit between his jaws. It was the wild in
him that made him do this, and Gray Wolf ate ravenously. Then he knew
that each night hereafter he must hunt for Gray Wolf--and the little
whimpering creatures hidden between the two rocks.

The next day, and still the next, he did not go to the cabin, though he
heard the voices of both the man and the woman calling him. On the fifth
he went down, and Joan and the baby were so glad that the woman hugged
him, and the baby kicked and laughed and screamed at him, while the man
stood by cautiously, watching their demonstrations with a gleam of
disapprobation in his eyes.

"I'm afraid of him," he told Joan for the hundredth time. "That's the
wolf-gleam in his eyes. He's of a treacherous breed. Sometimes I wish
we'd never brought him home."

"If we hadn't--where would the baby--have gone?" Joan reminded him, a
little catch in her voice.

"I had almost forgotten that," said her husband. "Kazan, you old devil,
I guess I love you, too." He laid his hand caressingly on Kazan's head.
"Wonder how he'll take to life down there?" he asked. "He has always
been used to the forests. It'll seem mighty strange."

"And so--have I--always been used to the forests," whispered Joan. "I
guess that's why I love Kazan--next to you and the baby. Kazan--dear old
Kazan!"

This time Kazan felt and scented more of that mysterious change in the
cabin. Joan and her husband talked incessantly of their plans when they
were together; and when the man was away Joan talked to the baby, and to
him. And each time that he came down to the cabin during the week that
followed, he grew more and more restless, until at last the man noticed
the change in him.

"I believe he knows," he said to Joan one evening. "I believe he knows
we're preparing to leave." Then he added: "The river was rising again
to-day. It will be another week before we can start, perhaps longer."

That same night the moon flooded the top of the Sun Rock with a golden
light, and out into the glow of it came Gray Wolf, with her three little
whelps toddling behind her. There was much about these soft little balls
that tumbled about him and snuggled in his tawny coat that reminded
Kazan of the baby. At times they made the same queer, soft little
sounds, and they staggered about on their four little legs just as
helplessly as baby Joan made her way about on two. He did not fondle
them, as Gray Wolf did, but the touch of them, and their babyish
whimperings, filled him with a kind of pleasure that he had never
experienced before.

The moon was straight above them, and the night was almost as bright as
day, when he went down again to hunt for Gray Wolf. At the foot of the
rock a big white rabbit popped up ahead of him, and he gave chase. For
half a mile he pursued, until the wolf instinct in him rose over the
dog, and he gave up the futile race. A deer he might have overtaken, but
small game the wolf must hunt as the fox hunts it, and he began to slip
through the thickets slowly and as quietly as a shadow. He was a mile
from the Sun Rock when two quick leaps put Gray Wolf's supper between
his jaws. He trotted back slowly, dropping the big seven-pound snow-shoe
hare now and then to rest.

When he came to the narrow trail that led to the top of the Sun Rock he
stopped. In that trail was the warm scent of strange feet. The rabbit
fell from his jaws. Every hair in his body was suddenly electrified into
life. What he scented was not the scent of a rabbit, a marten or a
porcupine. Fang and claw had climbed the path ahead of him. And then,
coming faintly to him from the top of the rock, he heard sounds which
sent him up with a terrible whining cry. When he reached the summit he
saw in the white moonlight a scene that stopped him for a single moment.
Close to the edge of the sheer fall to the rocks, fifty feet below, Gray
Wolf was engaged in a death-struggle with a huge gray lynx. She was
down--and under, and from her there came a sudden sharp terrible cry of
pain.

Kazan flew across the rock. His attack was the swift silent assault of
the wolf, combined with the greater courage, the fury and the strategy
of the husky. Another husky would have died in that first attack. But
the lynx was not a dog or a wolf. It was "Mow-lee, the swift," as the
Sarcees had named it--the quickest creature in the wilderness. Kazan's
inch-long fangs should have sunk deep in its jugular. But in a
fractional part of a second the lynx had thrown itself back like a huge
soft ball, and Kazan's teeth buried themselves in the flesh of its neck
instead of the jugular. And Kazan was not now fighting the fangs of a
wolf in the pack, or of another husky. He was fighting claws--claws that
ripped like twenty razor-edged knives, and which even a jugular hold
could not stop.

Once he had fought a lynx in a trap, and he had not forgotten the lesson
the battle had taught him. He fought to pull the lynx _down_, instead of
forcing it on its back, as he would have done with another dog or a
wolf. He knew that when on its back the fierce cat was most dangerous.
One rip of its powerful hindfeet could disembowel him.

Behind him he heard Gray Wolf sobbing and crying, and he knew that she
was terribly hurt. He was filled with the rage and strength of two dogs,
and his teeth met through the flesh and hide of the cat's throat. But
the big lynx escaped death by half an inch. It would take a fresh grip
to reach the jugular, and suddenly Kazan made the deadly lunge. There
was an instant's freedom for the lynx, and in that moment it flung
itself back, and Kazan gripped at its throat--_on top_.

The cat's claws ripped through his flesh, cutting open his side--a
little too high to kill. Another stroke and they would have cut to his
vitals. But they had struggled close to the edge of the rock wall, and
suddenly, without a snarl or a cry, they rolled over. It was fifty or
sixty feet to the rocks of the ledge below, and even as they pitched
over and over in the fall, Kazan's teeth sank deeper. They struck with
terrific force, Kazan uppermost. The shock sent him half a dozen feet
from his enemy. He was up like a flash, dizzy, snarling, on the
defensive. The lynx lay limp and motionless where it had fallen. Kazan
came nearer, still prepared, and sniffed cautiously. Something told him
that the fight was over. He turned and dragged himself slowly along the
ledge to the trail, and returned to Gray Wolf.

Gray Wolf was no longer in the moonlight. Close to the two rocks lay the
limp and lifeless little bodies of the three pups. The lynx had torn
them to pieces. With a whine of grief Kazan approached the two boulders
and thrust his head between them. Gray Wolf was there, crying to herself
in that terrible sobbing way. He went in, and began to lick her bleeding
shoulders and head. All the rest of that night she whimpered with pain.
With dawn she dragged herself out to the lifeless little bodies on the
rock.

And then Kazan saw the terrible work of the lynx. For Gray Wolf was
blind--not for a day or a night, but blind for all time. A gloom that no
sun could break had become her shroud. And perhaps again it was that
instinct of animal creation, which often is more wonderful than man's
reason, that told Kazan what had happened. For he knew now that she was
helpless--more helpless than the little creatures that had gamboled in
the moonlight a few hours before. He remained close beside her all
that day.

[Illustration: Kazan gripped at its throat]

Vainly that day did Joan call for Kazan. Her voice rose to the Sun Rock,
and Gray Wolf's head snuggled closer to Kazan, and Kazan's ears dropped
back, and he licked her wounds. Late in the afternoon Kazan left Gray
Wolf long enough to run to the bottom of the trail and bring up the
snow-shoe rabbit. Gray Wolf muzzled the fur and flesh, but would not
eat. Still a little later Kazan urged her to follow him to the trail. He
no longer wanted to stay at the top of the Sun Rock, and he no longer
wanted Gray Wolf to stay there. Step by step he drew her down the
winding path away from her dead puppies. She would move only when he was
very near her--so near that she could touch his scarred flank with her
nose.

They came at last to the point in the trail where they had to leap down
a distance of three or four feet from the edge of a rock, and here Kazan
saw how utterly helpless Gray Wolf had become. She whined, and crouched
twenty times before she dared make the spring, and then she jumped
stiff-legged, and fell in a heap at Kazan's feet. After this Kazan did
not have to urge her so hard, for the fall impinged on her the fact that
she was safe only when her muzzle touched her mate's flank. She followed
him obediently when they reached the plain, trotting with her
foreshoulder to his hip.

Kazan was heading for a thicket in the creek bottom half a mile away,
and a dozen times in that short distance Gray Wolf stumbled and fell.
And each time that she fell Kazan learned a little more of the
limitations of blindness. Once he sprang off in pursuit of a rabbit, but
he had not taken twenty leaps when he stopped and looked back. Gray Wolf
had not moved an inch. She stood motionless, sniffing the air--waiting
for him! For a full minute Kazan stood, also waiting. Then he returned
to her. Ever after this he returned to the point where he had left Gray
Wolf, knowing that he would find her there.

All that day they remained in the thicket. In the afternoon he visited
the cabin. Joan and her husband were there, and both saw at once
Kazan's torn side and his lacerated head and shoulders.

"Pretty near a finish fight for him," said the man, after he had
examined him. "It was either a lynx or a bear. Another wolf could not do
that."

For half an hour Joan worked over him, talking to him all the time, and
fondling him with her soft hands. She bathed his wounds in warm water,
and then covered them with a healing salve, and Kazan was filled again
with that old restful desire to remain with her always, and never to go
back into the forests. For an hour she let him lie on the edge of her
dress, with his nose touching her foot, while she worked on baby things.
Then she rose to prepare supper, and Kazan got up--a little wearily--and
went to the door. Gray Wolf and the gloom of the night were calling him,
and he answered that call with a slouch of his shoulders and a drooping
head. Its old thrill was gone. He watched his chance, and went out
through the door. The moon had risen when he rejoined Gray Wolf. She
greeted his return with a low whine of joy, and muzzled him with her
blind face. In her helplessness she looked happier than Kazan in all his
strength.

From now on, during the days that followed, it was a last great fight
between blind and faithful Gray Wolf and the woman. If Joan had known of
what lay in the thicket, if she could once have seen the poor creature
to whom Kazan was now all life--the sun, the stars, the moon, and
food--she would have helped Gray Wolf. But as it was she tried to lure
Kazan more and more to the cabin, and slowly she won.

At last the great day came, eight days after the fight on the Sun Rock.
Kazan had taken Gray Wolf to a wooded point on the river two days
before, and there he had left her the preceding night when he went to
the cabin. This time a stout babiche thong was tied to the collar round
his neck, and he was fastened to a staple in the log wall. Joan and her
husband were up before it was light next day. The sun was just rising
when they all went out, the man carrying the baby, and Joan leading him.
Joan turned and locked the cabin door, and Kazan heard a sob in her
throat as they followed the man down to the river. The big canoe was
packed and waiting. Joan got in first, with the baby. Then, still
holding the babiche thong, she drew Kazan up close to her, so that he
lay with his weight against her.

The sun fell warmly on Kazan's back as they shoved off, and he closed
his eyes, and rested his head on Joan's lap. Her hand fell softly on his
shoulder. He heard again that sound which the man could not hear, the
broken sob in her throat, as the canoe moved slowly down to the wooded
point.

Joan waved her hand back at the cabin, just disappearing behind the
trees.

"Good-by!" she cried sadly. "Good-by--" And then she buried her face
close down to Kazan and the baby, and sobbed.

The man stopped paddling.

"You're not sorry--Joan?" he asked.

They were drifting past the point now, and the scent of Gray Wolf came
to Kazan's nostrils, rousing him, and bringing a low whine from his
throat.

"You're not sorry--we're going?" Joan shook her head.

"No," she replied. "Only I've--always lived here--in the forests--and
they're--home!"

The point with its white finger of sand, was behind them now. And Kazan
was standing rigid, facing it. The man called to him, and Joan lifted
her head. She, too, saw the point, and suddenly the babiche leash
slipped from her fingers, and a strange light leaped into her blue eyes
as she saw what stood at the end of that white tip of sand. It was Gray
Wolf. Her blind eyes were turned toward Kazan. At last Gray Wolf, the
faithful, understood. Scent told her what her eyes could not see. Kazan
and the man-smell were together. And they were going--going--going--

"Look!" whispered Joan.

The man turned. Gray Wolf's forefeet were in the water. And now, as the
canoe drifted farther and farther away, she settled back on her
haunches, raised her head to the sun which she could not see and gave
her last long wailing cry for Kazan.

The canoe lurched. A tawny body shot through the air--and Kazan was
gone.

The man reached forward for his rifle. Joan's hand stopped him. Her
face was white.

"Let him go back to her! Let him go--let him go!" she cried. "It is his
place--with her."

And Kazan reaching the shore, shook the water from his shaggy hair, and
looked for the last time toward the woman. The canoe was drifting slowly
around the first bend. A moment more and it had disappeared. Gray Wolf
had won.




CHAPTER X

THE DAYS OF FIRE


From the night of the terrible fight with the big gray lynx on the top
of the Sun Rock, Kazan remembered less and less vividly the old days
when he had been a sledge-dog, and the leader of a pack. He would never
quite forget them, and always there would stand out certain memories
from among the rest, like fires cutting the blackness of night. But as
man dates events from his birth, his marriage, his freedom from a
bondage, or some foundation-step in his career, so all things seemed to
Kazan to begin with two tragedies which had followed one fast upon the
other after the birth of Gray Wolf's pups.

The first was the fight on the Sun Rock, when the big gray lynx had
blinded his beautiful wolf mate for all time, and had torn her pups into
pieces. He in turn had killed the lynx. But Gray Wolf was still blind.
Vengeance had not been able to give her sight. She could no longer hunt
with him, as they had hunted with the wild wolf-packs out on the plain,
and in the dark forests. So at thought of that night he always snarled,
and his lips curled back to reveal his inch-long fangs.

The other tragedy was the going of Joan, her baby and her husband.
Something more infallible than reason told Kazan that they would not
come back. Brightest of all the pictures that remained with him was that
of the sunny morning when the woman and the baby he loved, and the man
he endured because of them, had gone away in the canoe, and often he
would go to the point, and gaze longingly down-stream, where he had
leaped from the canoe to return to his blind mate.

So Kazan's life seemed now to be made up chiefly of three things: his
hatred of everything that bore the scent or mark of the lynx, his
grieving for Joan and the baby, and Gray Wolf. It was natural that the
strongest passion in him should be his hatred of the lynx, for not only
Gray Wolf's blindness and the death of the pups, but even the loss of
the woman and the baby he laid to that fatal struggle on the Sun Rock.
From that hour he became the deadliest enemy of the lynx tribe. Wherever
he struck the scent of the big gray cat he was turned into a snarling
demon, and his hatred grew day by day, as he became more completely a
part of the wild.

He found that Gray Wolf was more necessary to him now than she had ever
been since the day she had left the wolf-pack for him. He was
three-quarters dog, and the dog-part of him demanded companionship.
There was only Gray Wolf to give him that now. They were alone.
Civilization was four hundred miles south of them. The nearest Hudson's
Bay post was sixty miles to the west. Often, in the days of the woman
and the baby, Gray Wolf had spent her nights alone out in the forest,
waiting and calling for Kazan. Now it was Kazan who was lonely and
uneasy when he was away from her side.

In her blindness Gray Wolf could no longer hunt with her mate. But
gradually a new code of understanding grew up between them, and through
her blindness they learned many things that they had not known before.
By early summer Gray Wolf could travel with Kazan, if he did not move
too swiftly. She ran at his flank, with her shoulder or muzzle touching
him, and Kazan learned not to leap, but to trot. Very quickly he found
that he must choose the easiest trails for Gray Wolf's feet. When they
came to a space to be bridged by a leap, he would muzzle Gray Wolf and
whine, and she would stand with ears alert--listening. Then Kazan would
take the leap, and she understood the distance she had to cover. She
always over-leaped, which was a good fault.

In another way, and one that was destined to serve them many times in
the future, she became of greater help than ever to Kazan. Scent and
hearing entirely took the place of sight. Each day developed these
senses more and more, and at the same time there developed between them
the dumb language whereby she could impress upon Kazan what she had
discovered by scent or sound. It became a curious habit of Kazan's
always to look at Gray Wolf when they stopped to listen, or to scent the
air.

After the fight on the Sun Rock, Kazan had taken his blind mate to a
thick clump of spruce and balsam in the river-bottom, where they
remained until early summer. Every day for weeks Kazan went to the cabin
where Joan and the baby--and the man--had been. For a long time he went
hopefully, looking each day or night to see some sign of life there. But
the door was never open. The boards and saplings at the windows always
remained. Never a spiral of smoke rose from the clay chimney. Grass and
vines began to grow in the path. And fainter and fainter grew that scent
which Kazan could still find about it--the scent of man, of the woman,
the baby.

One day he found a little baby moccasin under one of the closed windows.
It was old, and worn out, and blackened by snow and rain, but he lay
down beside it, and remained there for a long time, while the baby
Joan--a thousand miles away--was playing with the strange toys of
civilization. Then he returned to Gray Wolf among the spruce and balsam.

The cabin was the one place to which Gray Wolf would not follow him. At
all other times she was at his side. Now that she had become accustomed
to blindness, she even accompanied him on his hunts, until he struck
game, and began the chase. Then she would wait for him. Kazan usually
hunted the big snow-shoe rabbits. But one night he ran down and killed a
young doe. The kill was too heavy to drag to Gray Wolf, so he returned
to where she was waiting for him and guided her to the feast. In many
ways they became more and more inseparable as the summer lengthened,
until at last, through all the wilderness, their footprints were always
two by two and never one by one.

Then came the great fire.

Gray Wolf caught the scent of it when it was still two days to the west.
The sun that night went down in a lurid cloud. The moon, drifting into
the west, became blood red. When it dropped behind the wilderness in
this manner, the Indians called it the Bleeding Moon, and the air was
filled with omens.

All the next day Gray Wolf was nervous, and toward noon Kazan caught in
the air the warning that she had sensed many hours ahead of him.
Steadily the scent grew stronger, and by the middle of the afternoon the
sun was veiled by a film of smoke.

The flight of the wild things from the triangle of forest between the
junctions of the Pipestone and Cree Rivers would have begun then, but
the wind shifted. It was a fatal shift. The fire was raging from the
west and south. Then the wind swept straight eastward, carrying the
smoke with it, and during this breathing spell all the wild creatures in
the triangle between the two rivers waited. This gave the fire time to
sweep completely, across the base of the forest triangle, cutting off
the last trails of escape.

Then the wind shifted again, and the fire swept north. The head of the
triangle became a death-trap. All through the night the southern sky was
filled with a lurid glow, and by morning the heat and smoke and ash were
suffocating.

Panic-striken, Kazan searched vainly for a means of escape. Not for an
instant did he leave Gray Wolf. It would have been easy for him to swim
across either of the two streams, for he was three-quarters dog. But at
the first touch of water on her paws, Gray Wolf drew back, shrinking.
Like all her breed, she would face fire and death before water. Kazan
urged. A dozen times he leaped in, and swam out into the stream. But
Gray Wolf would come no farther than she could wade.

They could hear the distant murmuring roar of the fire now. Ahead of it
came the wild things. Moose, caribou and deer plunged into the water of
the streams and swam to the safety of the opposite side. Out upon a
white finger of sand lumbered a big black bear with two cubs, and even
the cubs took to the water, and swam across easily. Kazan watched them,
and whined to Gray Wolf.

And then out upon that white finger of sand came other things that
dreaded the water as Gray Wolf dreaded it: a big fat porcupine, a sleek
little marten, a fisher-cat that sniffed the air and wailed like a
child. Those things that could not or would not swim outnumbered the
others three to one. Hundreds of little ermine scurried along the shore
like rats, their squeaking little voices sounding incessantly; foxes ran
swiftly along the banks, seeking a tree or a windfall that might bridge
the water for them; the lynx snarled and faced the fire; and Gray
Wolf's own tribe--the wolves--dared take no deeper step than she.

Dripping and panting, and half choked by heat and smoke, Kazan came to
Gray Wolf's side. There was but one refuge left near them, and that was
the sand-bar. It reached out for fifty feet into the stream. Quickly he
led his blind mate toward it. As they came through the low bush to the
river-bed, something stopped them both. To their nostrils had come the
scent of a deadlier enemy than fire. A lynx had taken possession of the
sand-bar, and was crouching at the end of it. Three porcupines had
dragged themselves into the edge of the water, and lay there like balls,
their quills alert and quivering. A fisher-cat was snarling at the lynx.
And the lynx, with ears laid back, watched Kazan and Gray Wolf as they
began the invasion of the sand-bar.

Faithful Gray Wolf was full of fight, and she sprang shoulder to
shoulder with Kazan, her fangs bared. With an angry snap, Kazan drove
her back, and she stood quivering and whining while he advanced.
Light-footed, his pointed ears forward, no menace or threat in his
attitude, he advanced. It was the deadly advance of the husky trained
in battle, skilled in the art of killing. A man from civilization would
have said that the dog was approaching the lynx with friendly
intentions. But the lynx understood. It was the old feud of many
generations--made deadlier now by Kazan's memory of that night at the
top of the Sun Rock.

Instinct told the fisher-cat what was coming, and it crouched low and
flat; the porcupines, scolding like little children at the presence of
enemies and the thickening clouds of smoke, thrust their quills still
more erect. The lynx lay on its belly, like a cat, its hindquarters
twitching, and gathered for the spring. Kazan's feet seemed scarcely to
touch the sand as he circled lightly around it. The lynx pivoted as he
circled, and then it shot in a round snarling ball over the eight feet
of space that separated them.

Kazan did not leap aside. He made no effort to escape the attack, but
met it fairly with the full force of his shoulders, as sledge-dog meets
sledge-dog. He was ten pounds heavier than the lynx, and for a moment
the big loose-jointed cat with its twenty knife-like claws was thrown
on its side. Like a flash Kazan took advantage of the moment, and drove
for the back of the cat's neck.

In that same moment blind Gray Wolf leaped in with a snarling cry, and
fighting under Kazan's belly, she fastened her jaws in one of the cat's
hindlegs. The bone snapped. The lynx, twice outweighed, leaped backward,
dragging both Kazan and Gray Wolf. It fell back down on one of the
porcupines, and a hundred quills drove into its body. Another leap and
it was free--fleeing into the face of the smoke. Kazan did not pursue.
Gray Wolf came to his side and licked his neck, where fresh blood was
crimsoning his tawny hide. The fisher-cat lay as if dead, watching them
with fierce little black eyes. The porcupines continued to chatter, as
if begging for mercy. And then a thick black suffocating pall of smoke
drove low over the sand-bar and with it came air that was furnace-hot.

At the uttermost end of the sand-bar Kazan and Gray Wolf rolled
themselves into balls and thrust their heads under their bodies. The
fire was very near now. The roar of it was like that of a great
cataract, with now and then a louder crash of falling trees. The air
was filled with ash and burning sparks, and twice Kazan drew forth his
head to snap at blazing embers that fell upon and seared him like hot
irons.

Close along the edge of the stream grew thick green bush, and when the
fire reached this, it burned more slowly, and the heat grew less. Still,
it was a long time before Kazan and Gray Wolf could draw forth their
heads and breathe more freely. Then they found that the finger of sand
reaching out into the river had saved them. Everywhere in that triangle
between the two rivers the world had turned black, and was hot
underfoot.

The smoke cleared away. The wind changed again, and swung down cool and
fresh from the west and north. The fisher-cat was the first to move
cautiously back to the forests that had been, but the porcupines were
still rolled into balls when Gray Wolf and Kazan left the sand-bar. They
began to travel up-stream, and before night came, their feet were sore
from hot ash and burning embers.

The moon was strange and foreboding that night, like a spatter of blood
in the sky, and through the long silent hours there was not even the
hoot of an owl to give a sign that life still existed where yesterday
had been a paradise of wild things. Kazan knew that there was nothing to
hunt, and they continued to travel all that night. With dawn they struck
a narrow swamp along the edge of the stream. Here beavers had built a
dam, and they were able to cross over into the green country on the
opposite side. For another day and another night they traveled westward,
and this brought them into the thick country of swamp and timber along
the Waterfound.

And as Kazan and Gray Wolf came from the west, there came from the
Hudson's Bay post to the east a slim dark-faced French half-breed by the
name of Henri Loti, the most famous lynx hunter in all the Hudson's Bay
country. He was prospecting for "signs," and he found them in abundance
along the Waterfound. It was a game paradise, and the snow-shoe rabbit
abounded in thousands. As a consequence, the lynxes were thick, and
Henri built his trapping shack, and then returned to the post to wait
until the first snows fell, when he would come back with his team,
supplies and traps.

And up from the south, at this same time, there was slowly working his
way by canoe and trail a young university zoologist who was gathering
material for a book on _The Reasoning of the Wild_. His name was Paul
Weyman, and he had made arrangements to spend a part of the winter with
Henri Loti, the half-breed. He brought with him plenty of paper, a
camera and the photograph of a girl. His only weapon was a pocket-knife.

And meanwhile Kazan and Gray Wolf found the home they were seeking in a
thick swamp five or six miles from the cabin that Henri Loti had built.




CHAPTER XI

ALWAYS TWO BY TWO


It was January when a guide from the post brought Paul Weyman to Henri
Loti's cabin on the Waterfound. He was a man of thirty-two or three,
full of the red-blooded life that made Henri like him at once. If this
had not been the case, the first few days in the cabin might have been
unpleasant, for Henri was in bad humor. He told Weyman about it their
first night, as they were smoking pipes alongside the redly glowing box
stove.

"It is damn strange," said Henri. "I have lost seven lynx in the traps,
torn to pieces like they were no more than rabbits that the foxes had
killed. No thing--not even bear--have ever tackled lynx in a trap
before. It is the first time I ever see it. And they are torn up so bad
they are not worth one half dollar at the post. Seven!--that is over two
hundred dollar I have lost! There are two wolves who do it. Two--I know
it by the tracks--always two--an'--never one. They follow my trap-line
an' eat the rabbits I catch. They leave the fisher-cat, an' the mink,
an' the ermine, an' the marten; but the lynx--_sacré_ an' damn!--they
jump on him an' pull the fur from him like you pull the wild cotton
balls from the burn-bush! I have tried strychnine in deer fat, an' I
have set traps and deadfalls, but I can not catch them. They will drive
me out unless I get them, for I have taken only five good lynx, an' they
have destroyed seven."

This roused Weyman. He was one of that growing number of thoughtful men
who believe that man's egoism, as a race, blinds him to many of the more
wonderful facts of creation. He had thrown down the gantlet, and with a
logic that had gained him a nation-wide hearing, to those who believed
that man was the only living creature who could reason, and that common
sense and cleverness when displayed by any other breathing thing were
merely instinct. The facts behind Henri's tale of woe struck him as
important, and until midnight they talked about the two strange wolves.

"There is one big wolf an' one smaller," said Henri. "An' it is always
the big wolf who goes in an' fights the lynx. I see that by the snow.
While he's fighting, the smaller wolf makes many tracks in the snow just
out of reach, an' then when the lynx is down, or dead, it jumps in an'
helps tear it into pieces. All that I know by the snow. Only once have I
seen where the smaller one went in an' fought with the other, an' then
there was blood all about that was not lynx blood; I trailed the devils
a mile by the dripping."

During the two weeks that followed, Weyman found much to add to the
material of his book. Not a day passed that somewhere along Henri's
trap-line they did not see the trails of the two wolves, and Weyman
observed that--as Henri had told him--the footprints were always two by
two, and never one by one. On the third day they came to a trap that had
held a lynx, and at sight of what remained Henri cursed in both French
and English until he was purple in the face. The lynx had been torn
until its pelt was practically worthless.

Weyman saw where the smaller wolf had waited on its haunches, while its
companion had killed the lynx. He did not tell Henri all he thought. But
the days that followed convinced him more and more that he had found the
most dramatic exemplification of his theory. Back of this mysterious
tragedy of the trap-line there was a _reason_.

Why did the two wolves not destroy the fisher-cat, the ermine and the
marten? Why was their feud with the lynx alone?

Weyman was strangely thrilled. He was a lover of wild things, and for
that reason he never carried a gun. And when he saw Henri placing
poison-baits for the two marauders, he shuddered, and when, day after
day, he saw that these poison-baits were untouched, he rejoiced.
Something in his own nature went out in sympathy to the heroic outlaw of
the trap-line who never failed to give battle to the lynx. Nights in the
cabin he wrote down his thoughts and discoveries of the day. One night
he turned suddenly on Henri.

"Henri, doesn't it ever make you sorry to kill so many wild things?" he
asked.

Henri stared and shook his head.

"I kill t'ousand an' t'ousand," he said. "I kill t'ousand more."

"And there are twenty thousand others just like you in this northern
quarter of the continent--all killing, killing for hundreds of years
back, and yet you can't kill out wild life. The war of Man and the
Beast, you might call it. And, if you could return five hundred years
from now, Henri, you'd still find wild life here. Nearly all the rest of
the world is changing, but you can't change these almost impenetrable
thousands of square miles of ridges and swamps and forests. The
railroads won't come here, and I, for one, thank God for that. Take all
the great prairies to the west, for instance. Why, the old buffalo
trails are still there, plain as day--and yet, towns and cities are
growing up everywhere. Did you ever hear of North Battleford?"

"Is she near Montreal or Quebec?" Henri asked.

Weyman smiled, and drew a photograph from his pocket. It was the picture
of a girl.

"No. It's far to the west, in Saskatchewan. Seven years ago I used to
go up there every year, to shoot prairie chickens, coyotes and elk.
There wasn't any North Battleford then--just the glorious prairie,
hundreds and hundreds of square miles of it. There was a single shack on
the Saskatchewan River, where North Battleford now stands, and I used to
stay there. In that shack there was a little girl, twelve years old. We
used to go out hunting together--for I used to kill things in those
days. And the little girl would cry sometimes when I killed, and I'd
laugh at her.

"Then a railroad came, and then another, and they joined near the shack,
and all at once a town sprang up. Seven years ago there was only the
shack there, Henri. Two years ago there were eighteen hundred people.
This year, when I came through, there were five thousand, and two years
from now there'll be ten thousand.

"On the ground where that shack stood are three banks, with a capital of
forty million dollars; you can see the glow of the electric lights of
the city twenty miles away. It has a hundred-thousand dollar college, a
high school, the provincial asylum, a fire department, two clubs, a
board of trade, and it's going to have a street-car line within two
years. Think of that--all where the coyotes howled a few years ago!

"People are coming in so fast that they can't keep a census. Five years
from now there'll be a city of twenty thousand where the old shack
stood. And the little girl in that shack, Henri--she's a young lady now,
and her people are--well, rich. I don't care about that. The chief thing
is that she is going to marry me in the spring. Because of her I stopped
killing things when she was only sixteen. The last thing I killed was a
prairie wolf, and it had young. Eileen kept the little puppy. She's got
it now--tamed. That's why above all other wild things I love the wolves.
And I hope these two leave your trap-line safe."

Henri was staring at him. Weyman gave him the picture. It was of a
sweet-faced girl, with deep pure eyes, and there came a twitch at the
corners of Henri's mouth as he looked at it.

"My Iowaka died t'ree year ago," he said. "She too loved the wild
thing. But them wolf--damn! They drive me out if I can not kill them!"
He put fresh fuel into the stove, and prepared for bed.

One day the big idea came to Henri.

Weyman was with him when they struck fresh signs of lynx. There was a
great windfall ten or fifteen feet high, and in one place the logs had
formed a sort of cavern, with almost solid walls on three sides. The
snow was beaten down by tracks, and the fur of rabbit was scattered
about. Henri was jubilant.

"We got heem--sure!" he said.

He built the bait-house, set a trap and looked about him shrewdly. Then
he explained his scheme to Weyman. If the lynx was caught, and the two
wolves came to destroy it, the fight would take place in that shelter
under the windfall, and the marauders would have to pass through the
opening. So Henri set five smaller traps, concealing them skilfully
under leaves and moss and snow, and all were far enough away from the
bait-house so that the trapped lynx could not spring them in his
struggles.

"When they fight, wolf jump this way an' that--an' sure get in," said
Henri. "He miss one, two, t'ree--but he sure get in trap somewhere."

That same morning a light snow fell, making the work more complete, for
it covered up all footprints and buried the telltale scent of man. That
night Kazan and Gray Wolf passed within a hundred feet of the windfall,
and Gray Wolf's keen scent detected something strange and disquieting in
the air. She informed Kazan by pressing her shoulder against his, and
they swung off at right angles, keeping to windward of the trap-line.

For two days and three cold starlit nights nothing happened at the
windfall. Henri understood, and explained to Weyman. The lynx was a
hunter, like himself, and also had its hunt-line, which it covered about
once a week. On the fifth night the lynx returned, went to the windfall,
was lured straight to the bait, and the sharp-toothed steel trap closed
relentlessly over its right hindfoot. Kazan and Gray Wolf were traveling
a quarter of a mile deeper in the forest when they heard the clanking of
the steel chain as the lynx fought; to free itself. Ten minutes later
they stood in the door of the windfall cavern.

It was a white clear night, so filled with brilliant stars that Henri
himself could have hunted by the light of them. The lynx had exhausted
itself, and lay crouching on its belly as Kazan and Gray Wolf appeared.
As usual, Gray Wolf held back while Kazan began the battle. In the first
or second of these fights on the trap-line, Kazan would probably have
been disemboweled or had his jugular vein cut open, had the fierce cats
been free. They were more than his match in open fight, though the
biggest of them fell ten pounds under his weight. Chance had saved him
on the Sun Rock. Gray Wolf and the porcupine had both added to the
defeat of the lynx on the sand-bar. And along Henri's hunting line it
was the trap that was his ally. Even with his enemy thus shackled he
took big chances. And he took bigger chances than ever with the lynx
under the windfall.

The cat was an old warrior, six or seven years old. His claws were an
inch and a quarter long, and curved like simitars. His forefeet and his
left hindfoot were free, and as Kazan advanced, he drew back, so that
the trap-chain was slack under his body. Here Kazan could not follow his
old tactics of circling about his trapped foe, until it had become
tangled in the chain, or had so shortened and twisted it that there was
no chance for a leap. He had to attack face to face, and suddenly he
lunged in. They met shoulder to shoulder. Kazan's fangs snapped at the
other's throat, and missed. Before he could strike again, the lynx flung
out its free hindfoot, and even Gray Wolf heard the ripping sound that
it made. With a snarl Kazan was flung back, his shoulder torn to the
bone.

Then it was that one of Henri's hidden traps saved him from a second
attack--and death. Steel jaws snapped over one of his forefeet, and when
he leaped, the chain stopped him. Once or twice before, blind Gray Wolf
had leaped in, when she knew that Kazan was in great danger. For an
instant she forgot her caution now, and as she heard Kazan's snarl of
pain, she sprang in under the windfall. Five traps Henri had hidden in
the space in front of the bait-house, and Gray Wolf's feet found two of
these. She fell on her side, snapping and snarling. In his struggles
Kazan sprung the remaining two traps. One of them missed. The fifth, and
last, caught him by a hindfoot.

This was a little past midnight. From then until morning the earth and
snow under the windfall were torn up by the struggles of the wolf, the
dog and the lynx to regain their freedom. And when morning came, all
three were exhausted, and lay on their sides, panting and with bleeding
jaws, waiting for the coming of man--and death.

Henri and Weyman were out early. When they struck off the main line
toward the windfall, Henri pointed to the tracks of Kazan and Gray Wolf,
and his dark face lighted up with pleasure and excitement. When they
reached the shelter under the mass of fallen timber, both stood
speechless for a moment, astounded by what they saw. Even Henri had seen
nothing like this before--two wolves and a lynx, all in traps, and
almost within reach of one another's fangs. But surprise could not long
delay the business of Henri's hunter's instinct. The wolves lay first in
his path, and he was raising his rifle to put a steel-capped bullet
through the base of Kazan's brain, when Weyman caught him eagerly by the
arm. Weyman was staring. His fingers dug into Henri's flesh. His eyes
had caught a glimpse of the steel-studded collar about Kazan's neck.

"Wait!" he cried. "It's not a wolf. It's a dog!"

Henri lowered his rifle, staring at the collar. Weyman's eyes shot to
Gray Wolf. She was facing them, snarling, her white fangs bared to the
foes she could not see. Her blind eyes were closed. Where there should
have been eyes there was only hair, and an exclamation broke from
Weyman's lips.

"Look!" he commanded of Henri. "What in the name of heaven--"

"One is dog--wild dog that has run to the wolves," said Henri. "And the
other is--wolf."

"And _blind_!" gasped Weyman.

"_Oui_, blind, m'sieur," added Henri, falling partly into French in his
amazement. He was raising his rifle again. Weyman seized it firmly.

[Illustration: "Wait! it's not a wolf!"]

"Don't kill them, Henri," he said. "Give them to me--alive. Figure up
the value of the lynx they have destroyed, and add to that the wolf
bounty, and I will pay. Alive, they are worth to me a great deal. My
God, a dog--and a blind wolf--_mates_!"

He still held Henri's rifle, and Henri was staring at him, as if he did
not yet quite understand.

Weyman continued speaking, his eyes and face blazing.

"A dog--and a blind wolf--_mates_!" he repeated. "It is wonderful,
Henri. Down there, they will say I have gone beyond _reason_, when my
book comes out. But I shall have proof. I shall take twenty photographs
here, before you kill the lynx. I shall keep the dog and the wolf alive.
And I shall pay you, Henri, a hundred dollars apiece for the two. May I
have them?"

Henri nodded. He held his rifle in readiness, while Weyman unpacked his
camera and got to work. Snarling fangs greeted the click of the
camera-shutter--the fangs of wolf and lynx. But Kazan lay cringing, not
through fear, but because he still recognized the mastery of man. And
when he had finished with his pictures, Weyman approached almost within
reach of him, and spoke even more kindly to him than the man who had
lived back in the deserted cabin.

Henri shot the lynx, and when Kazan understood this, he tore at the end
of his trap-chains and snarled at the writhing body of his forest enemy.
By means of a pole and a babiche noose, Kazan was brought out from under
the windfall and taken to Henri's cabin. The two men then returned with
a thick sack and more babiche, and blind Gray Wolf, still fettered by
the traps, was made prisoner. All the rest of that day Weyman and Henri
worked to build a stout cage of saplings, and when it was finished, the
two prisoners were placed in it.

Before the dog was put in with Gray Wolf, Weyman closely examined the
worn and tooth-marked collar about his neck.

On the brass plate he found engraved the one word, "Kazan," and with a
strange thrill made note of it in his diary.

After this Weyman often remained at the cabin when Henri went out on the
trap-line. After the second day he dared to put his hand between the
sapling bars and touch Kazan, and the next day Kazan accepted a piece of
raw moose meat from his hand. But at his approach, Gray Wolf would
always hide under the pile of balsam in the corner of their prison. The
instinct of generations and perhaps of centuries had taught her that man
was her deadliest enemy. And yet, this man did not hurt her, and Kazan
was not afraid of him. She was frightened at first; then puzzled, and a
growing curiosity followed that. Occasionally, after the third day, she
would thrust her blind face out of the balsam and sniff the air when
Weyman was at the cage, making friends with Kazan. But she would not
eat. Weyman noted that, and each day he tempted her with the choicest
morsels of deer and moose fat. Five days--six--seven passed, and she had
not taken a mouthful. Weyman could count her ribs.

"She die," Henri told him on the seventh night. "She starve before she
eat in that cage. She want the forest, the wild kill, the fresh blood.
She two--t'ree year old--too old to make civilize."

Henri went to bed at the usual hour, but Weyman was troubled, and sat
up late. He wrote a long letter to the sweet-faced girl at North
Battleford, and then he turned out the light, and painted visions of her
in the red glow of the fire. He saw her again for that first time when
he camped in the little shack where the fifth city of Saskatchewan now
stood--with her blue eyes, the big shining braid, and the fresh glow of
the prairies in her cheeks. She had hated him--yes, actually hated him,
because he loved to kill. He laughed softly as he thought of that. She
had changed him--wonderfully.

He rose, opened the door, softly, and went out. Instinctively his eyes
turned westward. The sky was a blaze of stars. In their light he could
see the cage, and he stood, watching and listening. A sound came to him.
It was Gray Wolf gnawing at the sapling bars of her prison. A moment
later there came a low sobbing whine, and he knew that it was Kazan
crying for his freedom.

Leaning against the side of the cabin was an ax. Weyman seized it, and
his lips smiled silently. He was thrilled by a strange happiness, and a
thousand miles away in that city on the Saskatchewan he could feel
another spirit rejoicing with him. He moved toward the cage. A dozen
blows, and two of the sapling bars were knocked out. Then Weyman drew
back. Gray Wolf found the opening first, and she slipped out into the
starlight like a shadow. But she did not flee. Out in the open space she
waited for Kazan, and for a moment the two stood there, looking at the
cabin. Then they set off into freedom, Gray Wolf's shoulder at Kazan's
flank.

Weyman breathed deeply.

"Two by two--always two by two, until death finds one of them," he
whispered.




CHAPTER XII

THE RED DEATH


Kazan and Gray Wolf wandered northward into the Fond du Lac country, and
were there when Jacques, a Hudson Bay Company's runner, came up to the
post from the south with the first authentic news of the dread
plague--the smallpox. For weeks there had been rumors on all sides. And
rumor grew into rumor. From the east, the south and the west they
multiplied, until on all sides the Paul Reveres of the wilderness were
carrying word that _La Mort Rouge_--the Red Death--was at their heels,
and the chill of a great fear swept like a shivering wind from the edge
of civilization to the bay. Nineteen years before these same rumors had
come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of
it still remained with the forest people, for a thousand unmarked
graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters
of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the
toll it demanded.

Now and then in their wanderings Kazan and Gray Wolf had come upon the
little mounds that covered the dead. Instinct--something that was
infinitely beyond the comprehension of man--made them _feel_ the
presence of death about them, perhaps smell it in the air. Gray Wolf's
wild blood and her blindness gave her an immense advantage over Kazan
when it came to detecting those mysteries of the air and the earth which
the eyes were not made to see. Each day that had followed that terrible
moonlit night on the Sun Rock, when the lynx had blinded her, had added
to the infallibility of her two chief senses--hearing and scent. And it
was she who discovered the presence of the plague first, just as she had
scented the great forest fire hours before Kazan had found it in the
air.

Kazan had lured her back to a trap-line. The trail they found was old.
It had not been traveled for many days. In a trap they found a rabbit,
but it had been dead a long time. In another there was the carcass of a
fox, torn into bits by the owls. Most of the traps were sprung. Others
were covered with snow. Kazan, with his three-quarters strain of dog,
ran over the trail from trap to trap, intent only on something
alive--meat to devour. Gray Wolf, in her blindness, scented _death_. It
shivered in the tree-tops above her. She found it in every trap-house
they came to--death--_man death_. It grew stronger and stronger, and
she whined, and nipped Kazan's flank. And Kazan went on. Gray Wolf
followed him to the edge of the clearing in which Loti's cabin stood,
and then she sat back on her haunches, raised her blind face to the gray
sky, and gave a long and wailing cry. In that moment the bristles began
to stand up along Kazan's spine. Once, long ago, he had howled before
the tepee of a master who was newly dead, and he settled back on his
haunches, and gave the death-cry with Gray Wolf. He, too, scented it
now. Death was in the cabin, and over the cabin there stood a sapling
pole, and at the end of the pole there fluttered a strip of red cotton
rag--the warning flag of the plague from Athabasca to the bay. This man,
like a hundred other heroes of the North, had run up the warning before
he laid himself down to die. And that same night, in the cold light of
the moon, Kazan and Gray Wolf swung northward into the country of the
Fond du Lac.

There preceded them a messenger from the post on Reindeer Lake, who was
passing up the warning that had come from Nelson House and the country
to the southeast.

"There's smallpox on the Nelson," the messenger informed Williams, at
Fond du Lac, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. God only
knows what it is doing to the Bay Indians, but we hear it is wiping out
the Chippewas between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same
day with his winded dogs. "I'm off to carry word to the Reveillon people
to the west," he explained.

Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's
servants and his majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare
themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thin face turned
as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill
factor.

"It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can
make."

He read the paper aloud to the men at Fond du Lac, and every available
man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory.
There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out
was a roll of red cotton cloth--rolls that were ominous of death, lurid
signals of pestilence and horror, whose touch sent shuddering chills
through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people.
Kazan and Gray Wolf struck the trail of one of these sledges on the Gray
Beaver, and followed it for half a mile. The next day, farther to the
west, they struck another, and on the fourth day still a third. The last
trail was fresh, and Gray Wolf drew back from it as if stung, her fangs
snarling. On the wind there came to them the pungent odor of smoke. They
cut at right angles to the trail, Gray Wolf leaping clear of the marks
in the snow, and climbed to the cap of a ridge. To windward of them, and
down in the plain, a cabin was burning. A team of huskies and a man were
disappearing in the spruce forest. Deep down in his throat Kazan gave a
rumbling whine. Gray Wolf stood as rigid as a rock. In the cabin a
plague-dead man was burning. It was the law of the North. And the
mystery of the funeral pyre came again to Kazan and Gray Wolf. This time
they did not howl, but slunk down into the farther plain, and did not
stop that day until they had buried themselves deep in a dry and
sheltered swamp ten miles to the north.

After this they followed the days and weeks which marked the winter of
nineteen hundred and ten as one of the most terrible in all the history
of the Northland--a single month in which wild life as well as human
hung in the balance, and when cold, starvation and plague wrote a
chapter in the lives of the forest people which will not be forgotten
for generations to come.

In the swamp Kazan and Gray Wolf found a home under a windfall. It was a
small comfortable nest, shut in entirely from the snow and wind. Gray
Wolf took possession of it immediately. She flattened herself out on her
belly, and panted to show Kazan her contentment and satisfaction. Nature
again kept Kazan close at her side. A vision came to him, unreal and
dream-like, of that wonderful night under the stars--ages and ages ago,
it seemed--when he had fought the leader of the wolf-pack, and young
Gray Wolf had crept to his side after his victory and had given herself
to him for mate. But this mating season there was no running after the
doe or the caribou, or mingling with the wild pack. They lived chiefly
on rabbit and spruce partridge, because of Gray Wolf's blindness. Kazan
could hunt those alone. The hair had now grown over Gray Wolf's
sightless eyes. She had ceased to grieve, to rub her eyes with her paws,
to whine for the sunlight, the golden moon and the stars. Slowly she
began to forget that she had ever seen those things. She could now run
more swiftly at Kazan's flank. Scent and hearing had become wonderfully
keen. She could wind a caribou two miles distant, and the presence of
man she could pick up at an even greater distance. On a still night she
had heard the splash of a trout half a mile away. And as these two
things--scent and hearing--became more and more developed in her, those
same senses became less active in Kazan.

He began to depend upon Gray Wolf. She would point out the hiding-place
of a partridge fifty yards from their trail. In their hunts she became
the leader--until game was found. And as Kazan learned to trust to her
in the hunt, so he began just as instinctively to heed her warnings. If
Gray Wolf reasoned, it was to the effect that without Kazan she would
die. She had tried hard now and then to catch a partridge, or a rabbit,
but she had always failed. Kazan meant life to her. And--if she
reasoned--it was to make herself indispensable to her mate. Blindness
had made her different than she would otherwise have been. Again nature
promised motherhood to her. But she did not--as she would have done in
the open, and with sight--hold more and more aloof from Kazan as the
days passed. It was her habit, spring, summer and winter, to snuggle
close to Kazan and lie with her beautiful head resting on his neck or
back. If Kazan snarled at her she did not snap back, but slunk down as
though struck a blow. With her warm tongue she would lick away the ice
that froze to the long hair between Kazan's toes. For days after he had
run a sliver in his paw she nursed his foot. Blindness had made Kazan
absolutely necessary to her existence--and now, in a different way, she
became more and more necessary to Kazan. They were happy in their swamp
home. There was plenty of small game about them, and it was warm under
the windfall. Rarely did they go beyond the limits of the swamp to hunt.
Out on the more distant plains and the barren ridges they occasionally
heard the cry of the wolf-pack on the trail of meat, but it no longer
thrilled them with a desire to join in the chase.

One day they struck farther than usual to the west. They left the swamp,
crossed a plain over which a fire had swept the preceding year, climbed
a ridge, and descended into a second plain. At the bottom Gray Wolf
stopped and sniffed the air. At these times Kazan always watched her,
waiting eagerly and nervously if the scent was too faint for him to
catch. But to-day he caught the edge of it, and he knew why Gray Wolf's
ears flattened, and her hindquarters drooped. The scent of game would
have made her rigid and alert. But it was not the game smell. It was
human, and Gray Wolf slunk behind Kazan and whined. For several minutes
they stood without moving or making a sound, and then Kazan led the way
on. Less than three hundred yards away they came to a thick clump of
scrub spruce, and almost ran into a snow-smothered tepee. It was
abandoned. Life and fire had not been there for a long time. But from
the tepee had come the man-smell. With legs rigid and his spine
quivering Kazan approached the opening to the tepee. He looked in. In
the middle of the tepee, lying on the charred embers of a fire, lay a
ragged blanket--and in the blanket was wrapped the body of a little
Indian child. Kazan could see the tiny moccasined feet. But so long had
death been there that he could scarcely smell the presence of it. He
drew back, and saw Gray Wolf cautiously nosing about a long and
peculiarly shaped hummock in the snow. She had traveled about it three
times, but never approaching nearer than a man could have reached with a
rifle barrel. At the end of her third circle she sat down on her
haunches, and Kazan went close to the hummock and sniffed. Under that
bulge in the snow, as well as in the tepee, there was death. They slunk
away, their ears flattened and their tails drooping until they trailed
the snow, and did not stop until they reached their swamp home. Even
there Gray Wolf still sniffed the horror of the plague, and her muscles
twitched and shivered as she lay close at Kazan's side.

That night the big white moon had around its edge a crimson rim. It
meant cold--intense cold. Always the plague came in the days of greatest
cold--the lower the temperature the more terrible its havoc. It grew
steadily colder that night, and the increased chill penetrated to the
heart of the windfall, and drew Kazan and Gray Wolf closer together.
With dawn, which came at about eight o'clock, Kazan and his blind mate
sallied forth into the day. It was fifty degrees below zero. About them
the trees cracked with reports like pistol-shots. In the thickest spruce
the partridges were humped into round balls of feathers. The snow-shoe
rabbits had burrowed deep under the snow or to the heart of the heaviest
windfalls. Kazan and Gray Wolf found few fresh trails, and after an
hour of fruitless hunting they returned to their lair. Kazan, dog-like,
had buried the half of a rabbit two or three days before, and they dug
this out of the snow and ate the frozen flesh.

All that day it grew colder--steadily colder. The night that followed
was cloudless, with a white moon and brilliant stars. The temperature
had fallen another ten degrees, and nothing was moving. Traps were never
sprung on such nights, for even the furred things--the mink, and the
ermine, and the lynx--lay snug in the holes and the nests they had found
for themselves. An increasing hunger was not strong enough to drive
Kazan and Gray Wolf from their windfall. The next day there was no break
in the terrible cold, and toward noon Kazan set out on a hunt for meat,
leaving Gray Wolf in the windfall. Being three-quarters dog, food was
more necessary to Kazan than to his mate. Nature has fitted the
wolf-breed for famine, and in ordinary temperature Gray Wolf could have
lived for a fortnight without food. At sixty degrees below zero she
could exist a week, perhaps ten days. Only thirty hours had passed
sinee they had devoured the last of the frozen rabbit, and she was quite
satisfied to remain in their snug retreat.

But Kazan was hungry. He began to hunt in the face of the wind,
traveling toward the burned plain. He nosed about every windfall that he
came to, and investigated the thickets. A thin shot-like snow had
fallen, and in this--from the windfall to the burn--he found but a
single trail, and that was the trail of an ermine. Under a windfall he
caught the warm scent of a rabbit, but the rabbit was as safe from him
there as were the partridges in the trees, and after an hour of futile
digging and gnawing he gave up his effort to reach it. For three hours
he had hunted when he returned to Gray Wolf. He was exhausted. While
Gray Wolf, with the instinct of the wild, had saved her own strength and
energy, Kazan had been burning up his reserve forces, and was hungrier
than ever.

The moon rose clear and brilliant in the sky again that night, and Kazan
set out once more on the hunt. He urged Gray Wolf to accompany him,
whining for her outside the windfall--returning for her twice--but
Gray Wolf laid her ears aslant and refused to move. The temperature had
now fallen to sixty-five or seventy degrees below zero, and with it
there came from the north an increasing wind, making the night one in
which human life could not have existed for an hour. By midnight Kazan
was back under the windfall. The wind grew stronger. It began to wail in
mournful dirges over the swamp, and then it burst in fierce shrieking
volleys, with intervals of quiet between. These were the first warnings
from the great barrens that lay between the last lines of timber and the
Arctic. With morning the storm burst in all its fury from out of the
north, and Gray Wolf and Kazan lay close together and shivered as they
listened to the roar of it over the windfall. Once Kazan thrust his head
and shoulders out from the shelter of the fallen trees, but the storm
drove him back. Everything that possessed life had sought shelter,
according to its way and instinct. The furred creatures like the mink
and the ermine were safest, for during the warmer hunting days they were
of the kind that cached meat. The wolves and the foxes had sought out
the windfalls, and the rocks. Winged things, with the exception of the
owls, who were a tenth part body and nine-tenths feathers, burrowed
under snow-drifts or found shelter in thick spruce. To the hoofed and
horned animals the storm meant greatest havoc. The deer, the caribou and
the moose could not crawl under windfalls or creep between rocks. The
best they could do was to lie down in the lee of a drift, and allow
themselves to be covered deep with the protecting snow. Even then they
could not keep their shelter long, for they had to _eat_. For eighteen
hours out of the twenty-four the moose had to feed to keep himself alive
during the winter. His big stomach demanded quantity, and it took him
most of his time to nibble from the tops of bushes the two or three
bushels he needed a day. The caribou required almost as much--the deer
least of the three.

And the storm kept up that day, and the next, and still a third--three
days and three nights--and the third day and night there came with it a
stinging, shot-like snow that fell two feet deep on the level, and in
drifts of eight and ten. It was the "heavy snow" of the Indians--the
snow that lay like lead on the earth, and under which partridges and
rabbits were smothered in thousands.

On the fourth day after the beginning of the storm Kazan and Gray Wolf
issued forth from the windfall. There was no longer a wind--no more
falling snow. The whole world lay under a blanket of unbroken white, and
it was intensely cold.

The plague had worked its havoc with men. Now had come the days of
famine and death for the wild things.




CHAPTER XIII

THE TRAIL OF HUNGER


Kazan and Gray Wolf had been a hundred and forty hours without food. To
Gray Wolf this meant acute discomfort, a growing weakness. To Kazan it
was starvation. Six days and six nights of fasting had drawn in their
ribs and put deep hollows in front of their hindquarters. Kazan's eyes
were red, and they narrowed to slits as he looked forth into the day.
Gray Wolf followed him this time when he went out on the hard snow.
Eagerly and hopefully they began the hunt in the bitter cold. They swung
around the edge of the windfall, where there had always been rabbits.
There were no tracks now, and no scent. They continued in a horseshoe
circle through the swamp, and the only scent they caught was that of a
snow-owl perched up in a spruce. They came to the burn and turned back,
hunting the opposite side of the swamp. On this side there was a ridge.
They climbed the ridge, and from the cap of it looked out over a world
that was barren of life. Ceaselessly Gray Wolf sniffed the air, but she
gave no signal to Kazan. On the top of the ridge Kazan stood panting.
His endurance was gone. On their return through the swamp he stumbled
over an obstacle which he tried to clear with a jump. Hungrier and
weaker, they returned to the windfall. The night that followed was
clear, and brilliant with stars. They hunted the swamp again. Nothing
was moving--save one other creature, and that was a fox. Instinct told
them that it was futile to follow him.

It was then that the old thought of the cabin returned to Kazan. Two
things the cabin had always meant to him--warmth and food. And far
beyond the ridge was the cabin, where he and Gray Wolf had howled at the
scent of death. He did not think of man--or of that mystery which he had
howled at. He thought only of the cabin, and the cabin had always meant
food. He set off in a straight line for the ridge, and Gray Wolf
followed. They crossed the ridge and the burn beyond, and entered the
edge of a second swamp. Kazan was hunting listlessly now. His head hung
low. His bushy tail dragged in the snow. He was intent on the
cabin--only the cabin. It was his last hope. But Gray Wolf was still
alert, taking in the wind, and lifting her head whenever Kazan stopped
to snuffle his chilled nose in the snow. At last it came--the scent!
Kazan had moved on, but he stopped when he found that Gray Wolf was not
following. All the strength that was in his starved body revealed itself
in a sudden rigid tenseness as he looked at his mate. Her forefeet were
planted firmly to the east; her slim gray head was reaching out for the
scent; her body trembled.

Then--suddenly--they heard a sound, and with a whining cry Kazan set out
in its direction, with Gray Wolf at his flank. The scent grew stronger
and stronger in Gray Wolf's nostrils, and soon it came to Kazan. It was
not the scent of a rabbit or a partridge. It was big game. They
approached cautiously, keeping full in the wind. The swamp grew
thicker, the spruce more dense, and now--from a hundred yards ahead of
them--there came a crashing of locked and battling horns. Ten seconds
more they climbed over a snowdrift, and Kazan stopped and dropped flat
on his belly. Gray Wolf crouched close at his side, her blind eyes
turned to what she could smell but could not see.

Fifty yards from them a number of moose had gathered for shelter in the
thick spruce. They had eaten clear a space an acre in extent. The trees
were cropped bare as high as they could reach, and the snow was beaten
hard under their feet. There were six animals in the acre, two of them
bulls--and these bulls were fighting, while three cows and a yearling
were huddled in a group watching the mighty duel. Just before the storm
a young bull, sleek, three-quarters grown, and with the small compact
antlers of a four-year-old, had led the three cows and the yearling to
this sheltered spot among the spruce. Until last night he had been
master of the herd. During the night the older bull had invaded his
dominion. The invader was four times as old as the young bull. He was
half again as heavy. His huge palmate horns, knotted and irregular--but
massive--spoke of age. A warrior of a hundred fights, he had not
hesitated to give battle in his effort to rob the younger bull of his
home and family. Three times they had fought since dawn, and the
hard-trodden snow was red with blood. The smell of it came to Kazan's
and Gray Wolf's nostrils. Kazan sniffed hungrily. Queer sounds rolled up
and down in Gray Wolf's throat, and she licked her jaws.

For a moment the two fighters drew a few yards apart, and stood with
lowered heads. The old bull had not yet won victory. The younger bull
represented youth and endurance; in the older bull those things were
pitted against craft, greater weight, maturer strength--and a head and
horns that were like a battering ram. But in that great hulk of the
older bull there was one other thing--age. His huge sides were panting.
His nostrils were as wide as bells. Then, as if some invisible spirit of
the arena had given the signal, the animals came together again. The
crash of their horns could have been heard half a mile away, and under
twelve hundred pounds of flesh and bone the younger hull went plunging
back upon his haunches. Then was when youth displayed itself. In an
instant he was up, and locking horns with his adversary. Twenty times he
had done this, and each attack had seemed filled with increasing
strength. And now, as if realizing that the last moments of the last
fight had come, he twisted the old bull's neck and fought as he had
never fought before. Kazan and Gray Wolf both heard the sharp crack that
followed--as if a dry stick had been stepped upon and broken. It was
February, and the hoofed animals were already beginning to shed their
horns--especially the older bulls, whose palmate growths drop first.
This fact gave victory to the younger bull in the blood-stained arena a
few yards from Gray Wolf and Kazan. From its socket in the old bull's
skull one of his huge antlers broke with that sharp snapping sound, and
in another moment four inches of stiletto-like horn buried itself back
of his foreleg. In an instant all hope and courage left him, and he
swung backward yard by yard, with the younger bull prodding his neck and
shoulders until blood dripped from him in little streams. At the edge
of the clearing he flung himself free and crashed off into the forest.

The younger bull did not pursue. He tossed his head, and stood for a few
moments with heaving sides and dilated nostrils, facing in the direction
his vanquished foe had taken. Then he turned, and trotted back to the
still motionless cows and yearling.

Kazan and Gray Wolf were quivering. Gray Wolf slunk back from the edge
of the clearing, and Kazan followed. No longer were they interested in
the cows and the young bull. From that clearing they had seen meat
driven forth--meat that was beaten in fight, and bleeding. Every
instinct of the wild pack returned to Gray Wolf now--and in Kazan the
mad desire to taste the blood he smelled. Swiftly they turned toward the
blood-stained trail of the old bull, and when they came to it they found
it spattered red. Kazan's jaws dripped as the hot scent drove the blood
like veins of fire through his weakened body. His eyes were reddened by
starvation, and in them there was a light now that they had never known
even in the days of the wolf-pack.

He set off swiftly, almost forgetful of Gray Wolf. But his mate no
longer required his flank for guidance. With her nose close to the trail
she ran--ran as she had run in the long and thrilling hunts before
blindness came. Half a mile from the spruce thicket they came upon the
old bull. He had sought shelter behind a clump of balsam, and he stood
over a growing pool of blood in the snow. He was still breathing hard.
His massive head, grotesque now with its one antler, was drooping.
Flecks of blood dropped from his distended nostrils. Even then, with the
old bull weakened by starvation, exhaustion and loss of blood, a
wolf-pack would have hung back before attacking. Where they would have
hesitated, Kazan leaped in with a snarling cry. For an instant his fangs
sunk into the thick hide of the bull's throat. Then he was flung
back--twenty feet. Hunger gnawing at his vitals robbed him of all
caution, and he sprang to the attack again--full at the bull's
front--while Gray Wolf crept up unseen behind, seeking in her blindness
the vulnerable part which nature had not taught Kazan to find.

This time Kazan was caught fairly on the broad palmate leaf of the
bull's antler, and he was flung back again, half stunned. In that same
moment Gray Wolf's long white teeth cut like knives through one of the
bull's rope-like hamstrings. For thirty seconds she kept the hold, while
the bull plunged wildly in his efforts to trample her underfoot. Kazan
was quick to learn, still quicker to be guided by Gray Wolf, and he
leaped in again, snapping for a hold on the bulging cord just above the
knee. He missed, and as he lunged forward on his shoulders Gray Wolf was
flung off. But she had accomplished her purpose. Beaten in open battle
with one of his kind, and now attacked by a still deadlier foe, the old
bull began to retreat. As he went, one hip sank under him at every step.
The tendon of his left leg was bitten half through.

Without being able to see, Gray Wolf seemed to realize what had
happened. Again she was the pack-wolf--with all the old wolf strategy.
Twice flung back by the old bull's horn, Kazan knew better than to
attack openly again. Gray Wolf trotted after the bull, but he remained
behind for a moment to lick up hungrily mouthfuls of the blood-soaked
snow. Then he followed, and ran close against Gray Wolf's side, fifty
yards behind the bull. There was more blood in the trail now--a thin red
ribbon of it. Fifteen minutes later the bull stopped again, and faced
about, his great head lowered. His eyes were red. There was a droop to
his neck and shoulders that spoke no longer of the unconquerable
fighting spirit that had been a part of him for nearly a score of years.
No longer was he lord of the wilderness about him; no longer was there
defiance in the poise of his splendid head, or the flash of eager fire
in his bloodshot eyes. His breath came with a gasping sound that was
growing more and more distinct. A hunter would have known what it meant.
The stiletto-point of the younger bull's antler had gone home, and the
old bull's lungs were failing him. More than once Gray Wolf had heard
that sound in the early days of her hunting with the pack, and she
understood. Slowly she began to circle about the wounded monarch at a
distance of about twenty yards. Kazan kept at her side.

Once--twice--twenty times they made that slow circle, and with each turn
they made the old bull turned, and his breath grew heavier and his head
drooped lower. Noon came, and was followed by the more intense cold of
the last half of the day. Twenty circles became a hundred--two
hundred--and more. Under Gray Wolf's and Kazan's feet the snow grew hard
in the path they made. Under the old bull's widespread hoofs the snow
was no longer white--but red. A thousand times before this unseen
tragedy of the wilderness had been enacted. It was an epoch of that life
where life itself means the survival of the fittest, where to live means
to kill, and to die means to perpetuate life. At last, in that steady
and deadly circling of Gray Wolf and Kazan, there came a time when the
old bull did not turn--then a second, a third and a fourth time, and
Gray Wolf seemed to know. With Kazan she drew back from the hard-beaten
trail, and they flattened themselves on their bellies under a dwarf
spruce--and waited. For many minutes the bull stood motionless, his
hamstrung quarter sinking lower and lower. And then with a deep
blood-choked gasp he sank down.

For a long time Kazan and Gray Wolf did not move, and when at last they
returned to the beaten trail the bull's heavy head was resting on the
snow. Again they began to circle, and now the circle narrowed foot by
foot, until only ten yards--then nine--then eight--separated them from
their prey. The bull attempted to rise, and failed. Gray Wolf heard the
effort. She heard him sink back and suddenly she leaped in swiftly and
silently from behind. Her sharp fangs buried themselves in the bull's
nostrils, and with the first instinct of the husky, Kazan sprang for a
throat hold. This time he was not flung off. It was Gray Wolf's terrible
hold that gave him time to tear through the half-inch hide, and to bury
his teeth deeper and deeper, until at last they reached the jugular. A
gush of warm blood spurted into his face. But he did not let go. Just as
he had held to the jugular of his first buck on that moonlight night a
long time ago, so he held to the old bull now. It was Gray Wolf who
unclamped his jaws. She drew back, sniffing the air, listening. Then,
slowly, she raised her head, and through the frozen and starving
wilderness there went her wailing triumphant cry--the call to meat.

For them the days of famine had passed.




CHAPTER XIV

THE RIGHT OF FANG


After the fight Kazan lay down exhausted in the blood-stained snow,
while faithful Gray Wolf, still filled with the endurance of her wild
wolf breed, tore fiercely at the thick skin on the bull's neck to lay
open the red flesh. When she had done this she did not eat, but ran to
Kazan's side and whined softly as she muzzled him with her nose. After
that they feasted, crouching side by side at the bull's neck and tearing
at the warm sweet flesh.

The last pale light of the northern day was fading swiftly into night
when they drew back, gorged until there were no longer hollows in their
sides. The faint wind died away. The clouds that had hung in the sky
during the day drifted eastward, and the moon shone brilliant and clear.
For an hour the night continued to grow lighter. To the brilliance of
the moon and the stars there was added now the pale fires of the aurora
borealis, shivering and flashing over the Pole.

Its hissing crackling monotone, like the creaking of steel
sledge-runners on frost-filled snow, came faintly to the ears of Kazan
and Gray Wolf.

As yet they had not gone a hundred yards from the dead bull, and at the
first sound of that strange mystery in the northern skies they stopped
and listened to it, alert and suspicious. Then they laid their ears
aslant and trotted slowly back to the meat they had killed. Instinct
told them that it was theirs only by right of fang. They had fought to
kill it. And it was in the law of the wild that they would have to fight
to keep it. In good hunting days they would have gone on and wandered
under the moon and the stars. But long days and nights of starvation had
taught them something different now.

On that clear and stormless night following the days of plague and
famine, a hundred thousand hungry creatures came out from their retreats
to hunt for food. For eighteen hundred miles east and west and a
thousand miles north and south, slim gaunt-bellied creatures hunted
under the moon and the stars. Something told Kazan and Gray Wolf that
this hunt was on, and never for an instant did they cease their
vigilance. At last they lay down at the edge of the spruce thicket, and
waited. Gray Wolf muzzled Kazan gently with her blind face. The uneasy
whine in her throat was a warning to him. Then she sniffed the air, and
listened--sniffed and listened.

Suddenly every muscle in their bodies grew rigid. Something living had
passed near them, something that they could not see or hear, and
scarcely scent. It came again, as mysterious as a shadow, and then out
of the air there floated down as silently as a huge snowflake a great
white owl. Kazan saw the hungry winged creature settle on the bull's
shoulder. Like a flash he was out from his cover, Gray Wolf a yard
behind him. With an angry snarl he lunged at the white robber, and his
jaws snapped on empty air. His leap carried him clean over the bull. He
turned, but the owl was gone.

Nearly all of his old strength had returned to him now. He trotted about
the bull, the hair along his spine bristling like a brush, his eyes
wide and menacing. He snarled at the still air. His jaws clicked, and he
sat back on his haunches and faced the blood-stained trail that the
moose had left before he died. Again that instinct as infallible as
reason told him that danger would come from there.

Like a red ribbon the trail ran back through the wilderness. The little
swift-moving ermine were everywhere this night, looking like white rats
as they dodged about in the moonlight. They were first to find the
trail, and with all the ferocity of their blood-eating nature followed
it with quick exciting leaps. A fox caught the scent of it a quarter of
a mile to windward, and came nearer. From out of a deep windfall a
beady-eyed, thin-bellied fisher-cat came forth, and stopped with his
feet in the crimson ribbon.

It was the fisher-cat that brought Kazan out; from under his cover of
spruce again. In the moonlight there was a sharp quick fight, a snarling
and scratching, a cat-like yowl of pain, and the fisher forgot his
hunger in flight. Kazan returned to Gray Wolf with a lacerated and
bleeding nose. Gray Wolf licked it sympathetically, while Kazan stood
rigid and listening.

The fox swung swiftly away with the wind, warned by the sounds of
conflict. He was not a fighter, but a murderer who killed from behind,
and a little later he leaped upon an owl and tore it into bits for the
half-pound of flesh within the mass of feathers.

But nothing could drive back those little white outlaws of the
wilderness--the ermine. They would have stolen between the feet of man
to get at the warm flesh and blood of the freshly killed bull. Kazan
hunted them savagely. They were too quick for him, more like elusive
flashes in the moonlight than things of life. They burrowed under the
old bull's body and fed while he raved and filled his mouth with snow.
Gray Wolf sat placidly on her haunches. The little ermine 

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