he caught the scent of human footprints which had passed that way, not
an hour agone. It urged him on, even when, in a cranny, he came upon a
contrivance of wood and iron which fairly reeked of human touch. The
thing reeked of something else—of an excessively dead chicken which lay
just beyond it in the cleft.
Too crafty to go past such a man-made and man-scented contrivance, yet
Whitefoot felt his mouth water at the ancient odour of the chicken. He
craved it beyond anything. Detouring the top of the ridge, he entered
the cleft from the other side. No visible object of man’s workmanship
checked him here or stood between him and the tempting food. Of course
the man-scent was as strong here as at the opposite end. But the morning
wind was shifting through the cleft, bearing the reek with it.
Cautiously the half-starved fox padded forward through the drift of dead
leaves toward the chicken which itself was half buried in leafage. His
jaws closed on it.
As he backed out with his treasure-trove, steel jaws closed on his left
forefoot.
An hour later, Rance Venner and Holt climbed the ridge to visit the
former’s newfangled patent fox-trap. In the centre of a patch of bloody
trampled snow lay a magnificent silver fox; moveless, his eyes rolled
back; his teeth curled away from his upper jaw. Limp and pitifully still
he lay.
Venner ran forward with a cry of joy and knelt to unfasten the trap jaws
from the lifeless creature’s paw.
“It’s our King Whitefoot II!” he exulted, laying the supine body in his
lap and smoothing the rumpled glory of pelt. “But I can’t figure why
he’s dead. Maybe the shock killed him, or else he broke a blood-vessel
in his brain trying to tear loose. He—”
The rambling conjecture ended in a hoot of pain. There was an
indescribably swift whirl of the inert black body. Rance Venner’s thumb
received a lightning bite from teeth which scraped sickeningly into its
very bone. Whitefoot was flying like mad for the nearest available
rock-cranny.
Venner once more was increasing his knowledge of fox-character. Apart
from enacting prodigies at digging and at climbing, it appeared now that
foxes, in emergency, understood to perfection the trick of playing dead.
Away flashed Whitefoot, his lacerated forepaw marring his speed not at
all. Jeffreys Holt was an old enough huntsman to act on sheer instinct.
Through no conscious volition of his own he whipped to his shoulder the
gun that had hung idle in his grasp while he watched Rance open the
trap. Taking snap aim, he pulled trigger.
Whitefoot did not stop at once his panic flight. He continued it for two
yards longer; rolling over and over like a mechanical toy, before
thumping against the rock-side, stone dead.
“There’s another good stunt we done, in getting that ol’ feller,”
remarked Holt, ten minutes later, as he and Venner made their way
downhill with their prize. “I’ll bet my share of his pelt he’s the fox
that’s been working the hencoops all along the valley, this winter. He’s
a whooping big cuss. And no common-size fox could ’a busted in the coop
doors like he did at a couple of places. Now that we got the fox, I
s’pose it’s up to us to get the wolf.”
“What wolf?” mumbled Venner, still sucking his bitten thumb.
“Why, the one the Grange reward is out for, of course,” answered Holt in
surprise at such ignorance. “First wolf that’s been in this section in
thutty years or more. He’s been at sheepfolds, all over. At hencoops,
too. First-off folks thought maybe it was a stray cur. But no dog c’d do
the smart wolf-stunts that feller’s done. Pizen-shy and trap-wise. It’s
a wolf, all right, all right.”
The store was jammed, for two hours or more, that evening, by folk who
came to stare at the wonder-fox. Next day and the next the whole
community was out in quest of the priceless vixen.
All the second day, after a night of successful forage, Ruff and
Pitchdark denned amid the rocks of their peak. At nightfall they fared
forth again, as usual. But as they were padding contentedly back to
their safe eyrie at grey dawn, Pitchdark failed to note a deadfall which
had been placed in a hillside gully three months earlier.
Going back and forth—always of course by different routes—during the
past three days, she and Ruff had scented and avoided a score of
shrewdly-laid traps scattered here and there. But this clumsy deadfall
had been in place since November, when a farm lad had set it and then
forgotten all about it. Rains and snow and winds had rubbed it clean of
any vestige of man-scent. It seemed nothing but a fallen log propped
against a tree-trunk.
By way of a short cut, Pitchdark ran under it.
There was a thump, followed at once by an astounded yell. The vixen,
flattened out, lay whimpering under the tumbled log.
Ruff was trotting along; a yard or so behind her. The fall of the log
had made him spring instinctively sideways. Now he went over to where
Pitchdark lay moaning and writhing. Tenderly he sniffed at her; then he
walked around the log and her pinioned body. In another second he was at
work clawing and shoving at the weight that imprisoned her.
The log was too light for its purpose. Also the boy who made and set the
trap was a novice. The end of the log had come to rest on a knot of wood
near the tree base. Ruff’s weight and applied strength set it a-rolling.
Off from the vixen it bumped; while she cried out again in agony.
Ruff turned to greet her as she should leap joyously to her feet. But
she did not leap. The impact of the falling log had injured her spine.
The best she could do was to crawl painfully along, stomach to the
ground; whining with pain at every step. Her hindlegs sagged useless.
Her forepaws made all the progress.
Yet she was a gallant sufferer. Keenly aware that she was in no
condition to face or flee any possible dangers of the open, she made
pluckily for the eyrie on the distant peak. The great collie slackened
his pace to hers. At a windfall, too high for her to clamber over, he
caught her gently by the nape of the neck with his mighty jaws and
scrambled over the impediment, carrying her with him.
Thus, at snail-pace, they made their way homeward; the collie close
beside his crippled chum; quivering from head to foot in distress as now
and then the pain forced from her a sharp outcry.
Dawn deepened into daylight. Up came the winter sun, shouldering its
sulky way through dun horizon mists. The day was on. And Ruff and
Pitchdark were not yet within a mile of their hiding place.
The last mile promised to be the worst mile; rising as it did, almost
precipice-like, to the summit; and strewn with boulder and rift. To the
light-footed pair, such a clamber had ever been childishly easy. Now it
threatened to be one long torment to the vixen.
No longer, since the accident, did they seek as usual to confuse or
obliterate their homeward trail. There was no question now of wasting a
step or of delaying the needful moment of safety.
Then, as they came to a ten-foot cliff, at the base of the peak’s last
stiff climb, they halted and looked miserably upward. Along the face of
this rock wall a narrow rudimentary trail ran, from bottom to top; a
widened rock-fissure. The fox and the collie were wont to take it almost
at a bound.
But now there was no question of bounding. Nor was the collie able to
navigate the tricky climb with Pitchdark suspended from his jaws. It was
not a matter of weight but of leverage and of balance. He had sense
enough to know that.
For the past half-mile he had been carrying the vixen, her helpless
hindlegs dragging along the ground. Very tenderly, by the nape of the
neck, he had borne her along. Yet the wrenching motion had forced cries
from her, so that once and again he had set her down and stared in
pitiful sorrow at her.
Now, Pitchdark took matters into her own hands. At the base of the cliff
was an alcove niche of rock, perhaps two feet deep and eighteen inches
wide; roofed over by a slant of half-fallen stone. It was bedded with
dead leaves. There were worse holes into which to crawl to die, than was
this natural den. Into it, painfully, wearily, the vixen dragged her
racked body. There she laid herself down on the leaf-couch; spent and in
torture. She had come to the end of her journey; though still a mile on
the hither side of the den where she and Ruff were wont to hide.
It was no hiding place, no safe refuge, this niche of rock wherein she
lay. But it was the best substitute. Panting, she settled down to bear
her anguish as best she might. Above her, at the opening of the niche,
stood the heartsick dog that loved her.
Puzzled, miserable, tormented, he stood there. At times he would bend
down to lick the sufferer, crooning softly to her. But she gave him
scant heed.
A rabbit scuttled across the snowy open space in front of the cliff.
With a dash, Ruff was after him. A few rods away the chase ended in a
reddened swirl of the snow. Back to Pitchdark trotted Ruff, the rabbit
in his mouth. He laid the offering in front of her. But she was past
eating or so much as noticing food.
Then, as he watched her, his deepset dark eyes sick with pity and grief,
he stiffened to attention; and his lip curled away from his curving
white teeth. The morning breeze bore to him a scent and a sound that had
but one meaning.
The scent was of dogs. The sound was of multiple baying.
Instinctively he glanced at the cliff-trail—the trail he could surmount
so quickly and easily, to the safety of the peak’s upper reaches. Then
his unhappy gaze fell on Pitchdark. The baying and the odour had reached
her even more keenly than it had reached Ruff. She read it aright; and
the realisation brought her out of the pain-daze into which she had
fallen. She tried to get to her feet. Failing, she fell to whimpering
softly.
Once she peered up, questioningly, at Ruff. The big collie was standing
in front of the niche, shielding it with his strong body. His head was
high and his eye had the look of eagles. Gone from his expression was
the furtiveness of the wild. In this crisis he was all collie. The sun
blazed on his flaming red-gold coat and his snowy mass of ruff and
frill. Every muscle was tense. Every faculty was alert.
Zeb Harlow knew nothing about fox-hunting. Indeed, he knew little enough
about anything. But at the store conclave, the preceding night, his
fancy had been fired by tales of the silver foxhunt. He had an
inspiration.
Before daybreak he was abroad; gun in hand. Going from one sleeping
neighbour’s to another’s, he loosed and took along with him no fewer
than five chained foxhounds.
The dogs all knew him well enough to let him handle them. There was not
one of the five that would not have followed anybody who carried a gun.
So his one-man hunt was organised. He and the five hounds made for the
ridge where, two days before, Whitefoot had been caught.
From reading nature-faked tales of rattlesnakes, Zeb argued that the
slain fox’s mate would be haunting the scene of her spouse’s death. It
was a pretty theory; as pretty as it was asinine. Like many another
wholly idiotic premise it led to large results—of a sort.
As Zeb was traversing a wooded gully on the way to the ridge, the
foremost hound gave tongue. The pack had come to the spot where
Pitchdark had been crippled. From that point a blind mongrel puppy could
have followed the pungent trail.
Oblivious of Harlow, for whom they had all a dog’s amusedly tolerant
contempt for an inefficient human leader, the quintet swept away on the
track. Zeb made shift to follow as best he could. Not being a woodsman,
his progress was slow.
Up the gully they roared and out into the hillside birch woods beyond
and thence to the patch of broken ground over which Ruff had carried
Pitchdark so tenderly. The scent was rankly strong now. It was
breast-high. No longer was there need to work with nostrils to earth.
The dragging hindfeet of the vixen were easier to follow than an
aniseseed lure.
Out into the cleared space they swung—the clearing with the ten-foot
cliff behind it. There, not fifty yards in front of them, clearly
visible between the braced legs of a shimmering gold-and-white collie on
guard at the niche opening, crouched their prey.
Deliriously they rushed to the kill.
The kill was there. But so was the killer.
Perhaps there are two foxhounds on earth which together can down a
normal collie. Assuredly there is no one foxhound that can hope to
achieve the deed. Most assuredly such a hound was not the half-breed
black-and-yellow leader of that impromptu pack.
The black-and-yellow made for the niche, a clean dozen lengths ahead of
his nearest follower. Blind to all but the lust of slaughter, he dived
between the braced legs of the movelessly-waiting collie, and struck for
the cowering vixen.
Ruff drove downward at him as the hound dived. The collie’s terrible
jaws clamped shut behind the base of the leader’s skull. The aim, made
accurate by a thousand snaps at fleeing rabbits and rising birds, was
flawless. The jaws had been strengthened past normal by the daily
grinding of bony food.
Ruff tossed high his head. The black-and-yellow was flung in air and
fell back amid his onrushing fellows; his neck broken, his spinal cord
severed.
But that was Ruff’s last opportunity for individual fighting. The four
following hounds were upon him; in one solid battling mass. Noting their
leader’s fate they did not make the error of trying to jostle past to
the vixen. Instead, they sought to clear the way by flinging themselves
ravenously on her solitary guard.
The rest was horror.
There was no scope for scientific fighting or for craft. The four
fastened upon the collie, in murderous unison. They might more wisely
have fastened upon a hornet-nest.
Down, under their avalanche of weight went Ruff; battling as he fell.
But a collie down is not a collie beaten. As he fell, he slashed to the
bone the nearest gaunt shoulder. By the time he had struck ground on his
back, he lunged upward for one flying spotted hindleg that chanced to
flounder nearest to his jaws. The fighting tricks of his long-ago wolf
ancestors came to him in his hour of stress. Catching the leg midway
between hock and body he gave a sidewise wrench to it that wellnigh
heaved off the pack that piled upon him. The possessor of the spotted
hindleg screeched aloud and gave back, tumbling out of the ruck with a
fractured and useless limb.
Up from the tangle of fighting hounds arose Ruff, his golden coat
a-smear with blood. High he reared above the surrounding heads.
Slashing, tearing, dodging, wheeling, he fought clear of his mangled
foes.
For an instant, as they gathered their force for a new charge at this
tigerlike adversary, the great collie stood clear of them all. A single
bound would have carried him to the cliff trail. Thence, to its top
would have been a climb of less than half a second. At the summit he
could have fought back an army of dogs or he could have made his escape
to the fastnesses beyond. Never was there a foxhound that could keep
pace with a racing collie.
The coast was clear, if only for an instant. There was time—just
time—for the leap. Ruff made the leap.
But he did not make it in the direction of the inviting trail. Instead,
he sprang back again in front of the trembling vixen as she crouched in
her niche.
A fox would have fled. So would any creature of the wild. But no longer
was Ruff a creature of the wild. In his supreme moment he was all
collie.
Whirling to face his oncoming enemies he took his stand. And there the
charge of the hounds crashed into him.
By footwork, by dodging, by leading his foes into a chase where they
should string out, he could have conquered them. But this he dared not
do. He knew well what must befall Pitchdark the moment he should leave
the niche unguarded. So he stood where he was; and went down once more
under the rush.
There were but three opponents atop him, this time. The spotted hound
was out of the fight, with a crunched leg and a craven heart. Nor were
any of the three others unmarked by slash or nip or tear.
Now, as Ruff fell he pulled one of the three down with him; his awful
fangs busy at the hound’s throat. A second of the trio rolled over with
them; the forequarters of his inverted body sprawled within the niche.
While he bit and roared at the fast-rolling Ruff, the vixen saw her
chance. Darting her head forward, she set her needle teeth deep in the
hound’s throat. Instantly, seared by the hurt, he was atop her; ripping
away at her unprotected back; tearing it to ribbons. But, with death
upon her and the rear half of her paralysed, she did not abate the
merciless grinding at the hound’s throat. Presently, the needle teeth
found their goal.
Ruff was up again; one of his assailants gasping out his life beneath
him; the other with Pitchdark clinging in death to his throat. Torn and
bleeding and panting as he was, Ruff flew at the fourth dog; the only
one of the five still in fighting condition.
Before that one-to-one onset the mongrel hound’s heart went back on him.
He turned and fled; but not before Ruff’s madly twisting jaws had lamed
him for life.
The battle was fought and won. Of the five hounds, one lay dead; two
more were dying, a fourth was lying helpless with a crunched hindleg.
The fifth was in limping flight.
The young collie staggered, then righted himself. Crossing to Pitchdark,
he bent painfully down and licked her face—the face whose teeth were
locked in her oppressor’s throat.
Never now would that glorious pelt sell for hundreds of dollars; or even
for hundreds of cents. The dying hound had seen to that. So had the dog
now limping away. This latter had taken advantage of Ruff’s
preoccupation with his two fellows, as they rolled in the snow, to tear
destructively at the silken coat as the vixen’s teeth were finding their
way to his comrade’s jugular.
Crooning, licking, Ruff sought to make his loved little foster-mother
awaken. Then he lifted his head and wheeled wearily about to face a new
intruder.
Across the snow toward him was clumping a slack-faced man who gripped in
both hands a cocked gun and who was shouting foolishly in his
excitement. Zeb Harlow had caught up to the hunt at last.
Ruff had not been so near to any human since he was a fortnight old. The
carefully-taught lessons of Pitchdark warned him to turn and flee. The
cliff trail was still open to him. But into the brain that was once
again all collie there seeped a queer sensation the big dog could not
analyse.
His dear little comrade was dead. Without her the old life would be
empty. His was the collie heritage—the stark need for comradeship;
coupled with the unconscious craving to be owned by man and to give his
devotion to man, his god.
Still unable to analyse his own unwonted feelings, Ruff bent again and
licked Pitchdark’s dead face. Then, hesitant, he took a step toward the
stormily advancing Harlow. He took another irresolute step; paused again
and wagged his plumy tail.
“Attacked me, he did!” bragged Zeb Harlow, that night at the store.
“Come straight for me, like he was going to eat me alive. But I stopped
him, all right, all right. I stood my ground. After the second step he
took, I let him have both bar’ls. You saw for yourselves what he looked
like after he tried to tackle ME.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO: The Coming of Lad
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
TWO: The Coming of Lad
In the mile-away village of Hampton, there had been a veritable epidemic
of burglaries—ranging from the theft of a brand-new ash-can from the
steps of the Methodist chapel to the ravaging of Mrs. Blauvelt’s whole
lineful of clothes, on a washday dusk.
Up the Valley and down it, from Tuxedo to Ridgewood, there had been a
half-score robberies of a very different order—depredations wrought,
manifestly, by professionals; thieves whose motor cars served the
twentieth century purpose of such historic steeds as Dick Turpin’s Black
Bess and Jack Shepard’s Ranter. These thefts were in the line of jewelry
and the like; and were as daringly wrought as were the modest local
operators’ raids on ash-can and laundry.
It is the easiest thing in the world to stir humankind’s ever-tense
burglar-nerves into hysterical jangling. In house after house, for miles
of the peaceful North Jersey region, old pistols were cleaned and
loaded; window fastenings and door-locks were inspected and new
hiding-places found for portable family treasures.
Across the lake from the village, and down the Valley from a dozen
country homes, seeped the tide of precautions. And it swirled at last
around the Place,—a thirty-acre homestead, isolated and sweet, whose
grounds ran from highway to lake; and whose wisteria-clad grey house
drowsed among big oaks midway between road and water; a furlong or more
distant from either.
The Place’s family dog,—a pointer,—had died, rich in years and honour.
And the new peril of burglary made it highly needful to choose a
successor for him.
The Master talked of buying a whalebone-and-steel-and-snow bull terrier,
or a more formidable if more greedy Great Dane. But the Mistress wanted
a collie. So they compromised by getting the collie.
He reached the Place in a crampy and smelly crate; preceded by a long
envelope containing an intricate and imposing pedigree. The
burglary-preventing problem seemed solved.
But when the crate was opened and its occupant stepped gravely forth, on
the Place’s veranda, the problem was revived.
All the Master and the Mistress had known about the newcomer,—apart from
his price and his lofty lineage,—was that his breeder had named him
“Lad.”
From these meagre facts they had somehow built up a picture of a huge
and grimly ferocious animal that should be a terror to all intruders and
that might in time be induced to make friends with the Place’s
vouched-for occupants. In view of this, they had had a stout kennel made
and to it they had affixed with double staples a chain strong enough to
restrain a bull.
(It may as well be said here that never in all the sixteen years of his
beautiful life did Lad occupy that or any other kennel nor wear that or
any other chain.)
Even the crate which brought the new dog to the Place failed somehow to
destroy the illusion of size and fierceness. But, the moment the crate
door was opened the delusion was wrecked by Lad himself.
Out on to the porch he walked. The ramshackle crate behind him had a
ridiculous air of a chrysalis from which some bright thing had departed.
For a shaft of sunlight was shimmering athwart the veranda floor. And
into the middle of the warm bar of radiance Laddie stepped,—and stood.
His fluffy puppy-coat of wavy mahogany-and-white caught a million
sunbeams, reflecting them back in tawny-orange glints and in a dazzle as
of snow. His forepaws were absurdly small, even for a puppy’s. Above
them the ridging of the stocky leg-bones gave as clear promise of mighty
size and strength as did the amazingly deep little chest and square
shoulders.
Here one day would stand a giant among dogs, powerful as a timber-wolf,
lithe as a cat, as dangerous to foes as an angry tiger; a dog without
fear or treachery; a dog of uncanny brain and great lovingly loyal heart
and, withal, a dancing sense of fun. A dog with a soul.
All this, any canine physiologist might have read from the compact
frame, the proud head-carriage, the smoulder in the deep-set sorrowful
dark eyes. To the casual observer, he was but a beautiful and appealing
and wonderfully cuddleable bunch of puppyhood.
Lad’s dark eyes swept the porch, the soft swelling green of the lawn,
the flash of fire-blue lake among the trees below. Then, he deigned to
look at the group of humans at one side of him. Gravely, impersonally,
he surveyed them; not at all cowed or strange in his new surroundings;
courteously inquisitive as to the twist of luck that had set him down
here and as to the people who, presumably, were to be his future
companions.
Perhaps the stout little heart quivered just a bit, if memory went back
to his home kennel and to the rowdy throng of brothers and sisters and,
most of all, to the soft furry mother against whose side he had nestled
every night since he was born. But if so, Lad was too valiant to show
homesickness by so much as a whimper. And, assuredly, this House of
Peace was infinitely better than the miserable crate wherein he had
spent twenty horrible and jouncing and smelly and noisy hours.