GOMPOSH, THE WISE ONE
The moons went by and the moons went by. The slow moons slipped into
each other and were tied into bundles, a summer and a winter to each
bundle, and so made up the years.
Shasta did not know anything about that measuring of time, nor that
people talked of growing older out there in the world. All he knew
was that there were day and night, and that the great lights came and
went in the heavens, stepping very slowly upon gold and silver feet.
But he knew when the loon, the great northern diver, cried forlornly
in the night, that the long cold was at hand, and that he would have
to stay in the cave to keep himself from freezing to death. And then
it was that Nitka and Shoomoo exerted all their arts to keep the
man-cub alive; and when the small game grew scarce, and the caribou
hunting began, many and many a chunk of venison the little Shasta
devoured, and throve marvellously upon the uncooked meat. The meat
made him warm, and kept the rich blood at full beat in his veins; and
that he might be the warmer when he slept, he scooped a hole in the
side of the cave, filling it with dry grass and leaves and a lining
of fur and feathers torn from the outside of his meat. He learnt
this nest-making from the homes of the wild creatures he discovered
in his ramblings in the early spring and summer; for everything you
learnt then seemed somehow to be in preparation for the grim time of
the winter, when the blizzard howled from the north, and even the
wolves, and the caribou they hunted, had to flee before the blast.
It was after many summers and winters had been tied together in
bundles that one bright September morning Shasta left the cave and
made for a tall rock, overlooking the gorge of the stream. When he
reached it, he squatted down and watched what might happen below. No
one saw him there--the little brown thing on the rock; and no one
minded him, which was even more important, because he perched above
the level of the run-ways, and of the creatures whose noses are
always asking questions of the lower air.
But some one whom Shasta did not know, and who was wiser than all the
other wise folk of the forest, was also out for a walk that wonderful
autumn morning, and on soft and padded feet came softly down the
mountain slopes above Shasta's airy perch. And this was Gomposh, the
old black bear.
Gomposh was very old and of a wonderful blackness. When he walked
out in the sun the light upon his fur rippled in silver waves. As
for his years, not even Goohooperay, the white owl, could tell you
how many they were, much less Gomposh himself.
It was not any sound Gomposh made that told Shasta of his presence,
but suddenly, without any warning to his eyes, or ears, or nose,
Shasta _knew_. And this was owing to that unexplained sixth sense
which the wild animals possess, and which Shasta, after his long
dwelling among them, shared to a remarkable degree. He turned round
all of a sudden, and there, not fifty feet away, stood Gomposh the
Old in all the wonder of his black, black fur.
For the first moment Shasta felt afraid. Here was another
bear--smaller, indeed, than the grizzly, but none the less a bear!
And now, if the black bear meant mischief, escape was impossible
because the rock was too steep for any foothold on the outer face of
it, and between its inner side and the open mountain stood the bear.
Then, in some odd way which he did not understand, the fear passed,
and he knew that this time he was in no danger at all, and that the
newcomer with the black robe would do him no harm.
Gomposh waited for a while, observing Shasta with his little wise
eyes and making notes of him inside his big wise head. Then, very
deliberately and slowly, he came down the slope towards Shasta and
sat down on his haunches before him on the rock. For a minute or two
neither of them spoke, except in that secret language of eye and nose
which makes unnecessary so much of the jabber that we humans call
speech. But presently Shasta began to ask questions in wolf-language
and Gomposh made answers in the same. And the sense of what they
said was as follows, though the actual words were not our human words
at all, but deeper and sweeter in the meaning of them, and much
nearer to the truth.
[Illustration: VERY DELIBERATELY AND SLOWLY, HE CAME DOWN THE SLOPE
TOWARDS SHASTA AND SAT DOWN ON HIS HAUNCHES]
"Shall we be brothers, you and I?" Shasta asked, a little timidly,
for he was feeling shy. Gomposh looked at him kindly out of his
little pig-like eyes.
"We _are_ brothers," he said. "I am old Gomposh, brother to all the
forest folk."
"_I_ am brother to the wolves," Shasta replied.
"You will find yourself brother to many strange folk before you are
much older," Gomposh said, and when he had finished he gave a slow
wag with his head.
"Who are the folk?" Shasta asked wonderingly.
"Ah!" Gomposh said, looking even wiser than before. He looked so
tremendously full of knowledge that Shasta felt very small and
ignorant indeed.
"There are the lynxes and the foxes to begin with," Gomposh said
after a pause. But Shasta shook his head.
"No," he said. "They are not brothers. We have no kinship with
them, we of the wolves."
Gomposh looked at him for a minute or two without speaking, and
Shasta felt uncomfortable.
"It is not for you to say who are not brothers," Gomposh said
gravely. "You are not a wolf!"
Shasta blinked his eyes at that. It was the first time any one had
told him that he was not a wolf.
"But I am!" he said. "Nitka and Shoomoo and the brothers--we are all
of the wolf blood. I have many brothers," he added, as if to make
the matter clearer. "They are all out in the world."
"I am aware of that," Gomposh said; "but many brothers do not make
you different from what you are."
Shasta could not think of an answer to that, so he was silent for a
little time, while something which began to be a question grew big
within his head.
"If I am not a wolf, what am I?" he asked at last.
"You will find that out later on," Gomposh said with aggravating
calmness. "At present it is enough for you to know what you are not."
"But I don't know it," Shasta said bravely, because he was not going
to give way weakly before a bear, if he were never so old, and never
so wise. "How do you know that I am not a wolf?"
Gomposh blinked and did not answer for a moment or two. He was taken
by surprise, and was just a little shocked. In all his long
experience, reaching over many years, no one had ever questioned his
wisdom before, nor asked him how he knew. The man-cub was very
impudent. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, with
one cuff of his big black paw, to teach the man-cub manners, and send
him spinning from the rock. But although Gomposh had a great idea of
his own importance, he had also a kind heart, and there was something
in him which went out tenderly towards the little naked cub, impudent
though he was. So he contented himself with being very stiff and
stand-offish when he spoke again.
"I have eyes," he said. "I have also a nose. You are not wolf to my
eyes, and you are only half wolf to my nose."
This was a knock-down blow to Shasta, and he didn't know what to say.
"I am sorry if I don't smell nice," he said lamely after a while.
"I didn't remark that you didn't smell nice," Gomposh said. "Smell
is a thing for everybody to decide on for himself.
"What is the smell in me that isn't wolf?" Shasta asked.
"That you will know later," Gomposh replied.
"But when?" Shasta asked. "Today, or tomorrow, or when the moon is
full?"
"That I do not tell you," Gomposh said. "When the time comes, you
will know."
And that was all Shasta could get out of him. Gomposh either
couldn't or wouldn't say more, and when he had sat for a little while
longer he got up and slowly walked away.
Shasta watched him disappear into the chaparral thicket to the left,
and heard him for some time afterwards as he knocked the rotten logs
to pieces in his search for grubs.
For a long, long while Shasta sat where he was and gazed down the
gorge. An odd feeling that was almost unhappiness was in his head
and his stomach, and the feeling went rolling over and over inside
him and knocking itself against the corners of his brain. "Not a
wolf! Not a wolf!" the feeling kept rapping out. Then, if he was
not a wolf, what was he? he asked himself. His memory, groping
backwards into the dim beginnings of his life, worked hard to uncover
the secret of what he really was; but, try as he would, he could
remember nothing but the den and the wolf life that had its centre
there, and the happenings of the mountain and of the forest, and the
ways of their folk.
There was nothing else--no shapes of tall beings that carried bows in
their fore-paws and walked always on their hind legs--nothing that
told him of his Indian birth.
The morning slipped into the afternoon, and still Shasta sat
motionless, humped upon the rock. His eyes were down the gorge, or
on the opposite ridge where the tops of the spruces were jagged
against the sky. Down below him, on the old run-ways that had
threaded the thickets since the beginning of the world, the creatures
came and went. Shasta knew them each by sight. He had known them
all his life. Yet now, as their familiar forms came noiselessly like
shadows over the grass, he had a peculiar feeling of being separated
from them by the new knowledge that, somehow, he was of another
world. When the thin smell of the twilight came drifting through the
trees, then, and not till then, Shasta slipped down noiselessly from
his rock and stole homewards to the den.
But in the dark the odd feeling was still questioning: "If I am not a
wolf, what am I?"