Nomads of the North, James Oliver Curwood [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

of a rabbit he would not touch it, nor would he touch a rabbit frozen dead in a snare. From Le Beau's traps he took only the living things, chiefly birds and squirrels and the big web-footed snowshoe rabbits. And because a mink jumped at him once, and tore open his nose, he destroyed a number of minks so utterly that their pelts were spoiled. He found himself another windfall, but instinct taught him now never to go to it directly, but to approach it, and leave it, in a roundabout way.
Day and night Le Beau, the man-brute, plotted against him. He set many poison-baits. He killed a doe, and scattered strychnine in its entrails. He built deadfalls, and baited them with meat soaked in boiling fat. He made himself a "blind" of spruce and cedar boughs, and sat for long hours, watching with his rifle. And still Miki was the victor.
One day Miki found a huge fisher-cat in one of the traps. He had not forgotten the battle of long ago with Oochak, the other fisher-cat, or the whipping he had received. But there was no thought of vengeance in his heart on the early evening he became acquainted with Oochak the Second. Usually he was in his windfall at dusk, but this afternoon a great and devouring loneliness had held him on the trail. The spirit of Kuskayetum--the hand of the mating-god--was pressing heavily upon him; the consuming desire of flesh and blood for the companionship of other flesh and blood. It burned in his veins like a fever. It took away from him all thought of hunger or of the hunt. In his soul was a vast, unfilled yearning.
It was then that he came upon Oochak. Perhaps it was the same Oochak of months ago. If so, he had grown even as Miki had grown. He was splendid, with his long silken fur and his sleek body, and he was not struggling, but sat awaiting his fate without excitement. To Miki he looked warm and soft and comfortable. It made him think of Neewa, and the hundred and one nights they had slept together. His desire leapt out to Oochak. He whined softly as he advanced. He would make friends. Even with Oochak, his old enemy, he would lie down in peace and happiness, so great was the gnawing emptiness in his heart.
Oochak made no response, nor did he move, but sat furred up like a huge soft ball, watching Miki as he crept nearer on his belly. Something of the old puppishness came back into the dog. He wriggled and thumped his tail, and as he whined again he seemed to say.
"Let's forget the old trouble, Oochak. Let's be friends. I've got a fine windfall--and I'll kill you a rabbit."
And still Oochak did not move or make a sound. At last Miki could almost reach out with his forepaws and touch him. He dragged himself still nearer, and his tail thumped harder.
"And I'll get you out of the trap," he may have been saying. "It's the man-beast's trap--and I hate him."
And then, so suddenly that Miki had no chance to guard himself, Oochak sprang the length of the trap-chain and was at him. With teeth and razor-edged claws he tore deep gashes in Miki's nose. Even then the blood of battle rose slowly in him, and he might have retreated had not Oochak's teeth got a hold in his shoulder. With a roar he tried to shake himself free, but Oochak held on. Then his jaws snapped at the back of the fisher-cat's neck. When he was done Oochak was dead.
He slunk away, but in him there was no more the thrill of the victor. He had killed, but in killing he had found no joy. Upon him--the four-footed beast--had fallen at last the oppression of the thing that drives men mad. He stood in the heart of a vast world, and for him that world was empty. He was an outcast. His heart crying out for comradeship, he found that all things feared him or hated him. He was a pariah; a wanderer without a friend or a home. He did not reason these things but the gloom of them settled upon him like black night.
He did not return to his windfall. In a little open he sat on his haunches, listening to the night sounds, and watching the stars as they came out. There was an early moon, and as it came up over the forest, a great throbbing red disc that seemed filled with life, he howled mournfully in the face of it. He wandered out into a big burn a little later, and there the night was like day, so clear that his shadow followed him and all other things about him cast shadows, And then, all at once, he caught in the night wind a sound which he had heard many times before.
It came from far away, and it was like a whisper at first, an echo of strange voices riding on the wind, A hundred times he had heard that cry of the wolves. Since Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gashed his shoulder so fiercely away back in the days of his puppyhood he had evaded the path of that cry. He had learned, in a way, to hate it. But he could not wipe out entirely the thrill that came with that call of the blood. And to-night it rode over all his fear and hatred. Out there was COMPANY. Whence the cry came the wild brethren were running two by two, and three by three, and there was COMRADESHIP. His body quivered. An answering cry rose in his throat, dying away in a whine, and for an hour after that he heard no more of the wolf-cry in the wind. The pack had swung to the west--so far away that their voices were lost. And it passed-- with the moon straight over them--close to the shack of Pierrot, the halfbreed.
In Pierrot's cabin was a white man, on his way to Fort O' God. He saw that Pierrot crossed himself, and muttered.
"It is the mad pack," explained Pierrot then. "M'sieu, they have been KESKWAO since the beginning of the new moon. In them are the spirits of devils."
He opened the cabin door a little, so that the mad cry of the beasts came to them plainly. When he closed it there was in his eyes a look of strange fear.
"Now and then wolves go like that--KESKWAO (stark mad)--in the dead of winter," he shuddered. "Three days ago there were twenty of them, m'sieu, for I saw them with my own eyes, and counted their tracks in the snow. Since then they been murdered and torn into strings by the others of the pack. Listen to them ravin'! Can you tell me why, m'sieu? Can you tell me why wolves sometimes go mad in the heart of winter when there is no heat or rotten meat to turn them sick? NON? But I can tell you. They are the loups- garous; in their bodies ride the spirits of devils, and there they will ride until the bodies die. For the wolves that go mad in the deep snows always die, m'sieu. That is the strange part of it. THEY DIE!"
And then it was, swinging eastward from the cabin of Pierrot, that the mad wolves of Jackson's Knee came into the country of the big swamp wherein trees bore the Double-X blaze of Jacques Le Beau's axe. There were fourteen of them running in the moonlight. What it is that now and then drives a wolf-pack mad in the dead of winter no man yet has wholly learned. Possibly it begins with a "bad" wolf; just as a "bad" sledge-dog, nipping and biting his fellows, will spread his distemper among them until the team becomes an ugly, quarrelsome horde. Such a dog the wise driver kills--or turns loose.
The wolves that bore down upon Le Beau's country were red-eyed and thin. Their bodies were covered with gashes, and the mouths of some frothed blood. They did not run as wolves run for meat. They were a sinister and suspicious lot, with a sneaking droop to their haunches, and their cry was not the deep-throated cry of the hunt- pack but a ravening clamour that seemed to have no leadership or cause. Scarcely was the sound of their tongues gone beyond the hearing of Pierrot's ears than one of the thin gray beasts rubbed against the shoulder of another, and the second turned with the swiftness of a snake, like the "bad" dog of the traces, and struck his fangs deep into the first wolf's flesh. Could Pierrot have seen, he would have understood then how the four he had found had come to their end.
Swift as the snap of a whip-lash the fight between the two was on. The other twelve of the pack stopped. They came back, circling in cautiously and grimly silent about their fighting comrades. They ranged themselves in a ring, as men gather about a fistic battle; and there they waited, their jaws drooling, their fangs clicking, a low and eager whining smothered in their throats. And then the thing happened. One of the fighting wolves went down. He was on his back--and the end came. The twelve wolves were upon him as one, and, like those Pierrot had seen, he was torn to pieces, and his flesh devoured. After that the thirteen went on deeper into Le Beau's country.
Miki heard them again, after that hour's interval of silence. Farther and farther he had wandered from the forest. He had crossed the "burn," and was in the open plain, with the rough ridges cutting through and the big river at the edge of it. It was not so gloomy out here, and his loneliness weighed upon him less heavily than in the deep timber.
And across this plain came the voice of the wolves.
He did not move away from it to-night. He waited, silhouetted against the vivid starlight at the crest of a rocky knoll, and the top of this knoll was so small that another could not have stood beside him without their shoulders touching. On all sides of him the plain swept away in the white light of the stars and moon; never had the desire to respond to the wild brethren urged itself upon him more fiercely than now. He flung back his head, until his black-tipped muzzle pointed up to the stars, and the voice rolled out of his throat. But it was only half a howl. Even then, oppressed by his great loneliness, there gripped him that something instinctive which warned him against betrayal. After that he remained quiet, and as the wolves drew nearer his body grew tense, his muscles hardened, and in his throat there was the low whispering of a snarl instead of a howl. He sensed danger. He had caught, in the voice of the wolves, the ravening note that had made Pierrot cross himself and mutter of the loups-garous, and he crouched down on his belly at the top of the rocky mound.
Then he saw them. They were sweeping like dark and swiftly moving shadows between him and the forest. Suddenly they stopped, and for a few moments no sound came from them as they packed themselves closely on the scent of his fresh trail in the snow. And then they surged in his direction; this time there was a still fiercer madness in the wild cry that rose from their throats. In a dozen seconds they were at the mound. They swept around it and past it, all save one--a huge gray brute who shot up the hillock straight at the prey the others had not yet seen. There was a snarl in Miki's throat as he