Kazan, the quarter-strain wolf-dog, lay at the end of a fine steel
chain, watching little Professor McGill mixing a pail of tallow and
bran. A dozen yards from him lay a big Dane, his huge jaws drooling in
anticipation of the unusual feast which McGill was preparing. The Dane
showed signs of pleasure when McGill approached him with a quart of the
mixture, and as he gulped it down the little man with the cold blue eyes
and the gray-blond hair stroked his back without fear. But his attitude
was different when he turned to Kazan. His movements were filled with
caution, and yet his eyes and his lips were smiling, and he gave the
wolf-dog no evidence of his fear, if it could be called fear.
The little professor was up in the north country for the Smithsonian
Institution and had spent a third of his life among dogs. He loved them,
and understood them. He had written a number of magazine articles on dog
intellect which had attracted wide attention among naturalists. It was
largely because he loved dogs, and understood them more than most men,
that he had bought Kazan and the big Dane on a night when Sandy
McTrigger and his partner had tried to get them to fight to the death in
a Red Gold City saloon. The refusal of the two splendid beasts to kill
each other for the pleasure of the three hundred men who had assembled
to witness the fight delighted the professor. He had already planned a
paper on the incident.
Sandy had told McGill the story of Kazan's capture, and of his wild
mate, Gray Wolf, and the professor had asked him a thousand questions.
But each day Kazan puzzled him more. No amount of kindness on his part
could bring a responsive gleam in Kazan's eyes. Not once did Kazan
signify a willingness to become friends. And yet he did not snarl at
McGill, or snap at his hands when they came within reach. Quite
frequently Sandy McTrigger came over to the little cabin where McGill
was staying, and three times Kazan leaped at the end of his chain to get
at him, and the wolf-dog's white fangs gleamed as long as Sandy was in
sight. Alone with McGill he became quiet.
Something told Kazan that McGill had come as a friend that night when he
and the big Dane stood shoulder to shoulder in the cage that had been
built for a slaughter pen. Away down in his brute heart he held McGill
apart from other men. He had no desire to harm him. He tolerated him,
but showed none of the growing affection of the huge Dane. It was this
fact that puzzled McGill. He had never before known a dog that he could
not make love him.
Today he placed the tallow and bran before Kazan, and the smile in his
face gave way to a look of perplexity. Kazan's lips had drawn suddenly
back. A fierce snarl rolled deep in his throat. The hair along his spine
stood up. His muscles twitched. Instinctively the professor turned.
Sandy McTrigger had come up quietly behind him. His brutal face wore a
grin as he looked at Kazan.
"It's a fool job--tryin' to make friends with him," he said. Then he
added, with a sudden interested gleam in his eyes, "When you startin'?"
"With the first frost," replied McGill. "It ought to come soon. I'm
going to join Sergeant Conroy and his party at Fond du Lac by the first
of October."
"And you're going up to Fond du Lac--alone?" queried Sandy. "Why don't
you take a man?"
The little professor laughed softly.
"Why?" he asked. "I've been through the Athabasca waterways a dozen
times, and know the trail as well as I know Broadway. Besides, I like to
be alone. And the work isn't too hard, with the currents all flowing to
the north and east."
Sandy was looking at the Dane, with his back to McGill. An exultant
gleam shot for an instant into his eyes.
"You're taking the dogs?"
"Yes."
Sandy lighted his pipe, and spoke like one strangely curious.
"Must cost a heap to take these trips o' yourn, don't it?"
"My last cost about seven thousand dollars. This will cost five," said
McGill.
"Gawd!" breathed Sandy. "An' you carry all that along with you! Ain't
you afraid--something might happen----"
The little professor was looking the other way now. The carelessness in
his face and manner changed. His blue eyes grew a shade darker. A hard
smile which Sandy did not see hovered about his lips for an instant.
Then he turned, laughing.
"I'm a very light sleeper," he said. "A footstep at night rouses me.
Even a man's breathing awakens me, when I make up my mind that I must be
on guard. And, besides,"--he drew from his pocket a blue-steel automatic
pistol,--"I know how to use _this._" He pointed to a knot in the wall of
the cabin. "Observe," he said. Five times he fired, at twenty paces, and
when Sandy went up to look at the knot he gave a gasp. There was one
jagged hole where the knot had been.
"Pretty good," he grinned; "most men couldn't do better'n that with a
rifle."
When Sandy left, McGill followed him with a suspicious gleam in his
eyes, and a curious smile on his lips. Then he turned to Kazan.
"Guess you've got him figgered out about right, old man," he laughed
softly. "I don't blame you very much for wanting to get him by the
throat. Perhaps----"
He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, and went into the cabin. Kazan
dropped his head between his paws, and lay still, with wide-open eyes.
It was early in September, and each night brought now the first chill
breaths of autumn. Kazan watched the last glow of the sun as it faded
out of the southern skies. Darkness always followed swiftly after that,
and with darkness came more fiercely his wild longing for freedom. For
Kazan was remembering.
Ever since that terrible day when the brute prospector, Sandy McTrigger,
had first beaten him sick and then chained him in the wake of his canoe
till every splendid muscle in his bruised body seemed bursting with pain
and he was choked with water, Kazan had never for one minute ceased to
remember and hate and mourn. He hated Sandy McTrigger with all the
hatred of a dog and a wolf, and he mourned for his blind mate, Gray
Wolf, with as much intensity as he hated. But with all the longing and
sorrow in him he could not know how much more awful their separation was
for his faithful mate.
Never had the terror and loneliness of blindness fallen upon Gray Wolf
as in the days that followed Kazan's capture. For hours after the shot,
she had crouched in the bush back from the river, waiting for him to
come to her. She had faith that he would come, as he had come a thousand
times before, and she lay close on her belly, sniffing the air, and
whining when it brought no scent of her mate. Day and night were alike
an endless chaos of darkness to her now, but she knew when the sun went
down. She sensed the first deepening shadows of evening, and she knew
that the stars were out, and that the river lay in moonlight. It was a
night to roam, and after a time she had moved restlessly about in a
small circle on the plain, and sent out her first inquiring call for
Kazan.
Up from the river came the pungent odor of smoke, and instinctively she
knew that it was this smoke, and the nearness of men, that was keeping
Kazan from her. But she went no nearer than that, first circle made by
her padded feet. Blindness had taught her to wait. Since the day of the
battle on the Sun Rock, when the lynx had destroyed her eyes, Kazan had
never failed her. Three times she called for him in the early night.
Then she made herself a nest under a Banksian shrub, and waited until
dawn.
Just as she knew when night blotted out the last glow of the sun, so
without seeing she knew when day came. Not until she felt the warmth of
the sun on her back did her anxiety overcome her caution. Slowly she
moved toward the river, sniffing the air, and whining. There was no
longer the smell of smoke in the air, and she could not catch the scent
of man. She followed her own trail back to the sand bar, and in the
fringe of thick bush overhanging the white shore of the stream she
stopped and listened.
After a little she scrambled down and went straight to the spot where
she and Kazan were drinking when Sandy's shot came. And there her nose
struck the sand still wet and thick with Kazan's blood. She sniffed the
trail of his body to the edge of the stream, where Sandy had dragged him
to the canoe. And then she came upon one of the two clubs that Sandy had
used to beat wounded Kazan into submission. It was covered with blood
and hair, and all at once Gray Wolf lay back on her haunches and turned
her blind face to the sky, and there rose from her throat a cry for
Kazan that drifted for miles on the wings of the south wind. Never had
Gray Wolf given quite that cry before. It was not the "call" that comes
with moonlit nights, and neither was it the hunt cry, nor the she-wolf's
yearning for matehood. It carried with it the lament of death. And after
that one cry Gray Wolf slunk back to the fringe of bush over the river,
and lay with her face turned to the stream.
A strange terror fell upon her. She had grown accustomed to darkness,
but never before had she been _alone_ in that darkness. Always there had
been the guardianship of Kazan's presence. She heard the clucking sound
of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound came to
her as if from out of another world. A ground-mouse rustled through the
grass close to her forepaws, and she snapped at it--and closed her teeth
on a rock. The muscles of her shoulders twitched tremulously, and she
shivered as if stricken by intense cold. She was terrified by the
darkness that shut out the world from her, and she pawed at her closed
eyes, as if she might open them to light.
Early in the afternoon, she wandered back on the plain. It was
different. It frightened her, and soon she returned to the beach, and
snuggled down under the tree where Kazan had lain. She was not so
frightened here. The smell of Kazan was strong about her. For an hour
she lay motionless, with her head resting on the club clotted with his
hair and blood. Night found her still there. And when the moon and stars
came out she crawled back into the pit in the white sand that Kazan's
body had made under the tree.
With dawn she went down to the edge of the stream to drink. She could
not see that the day was almost as dark as night, and that the
gray-black sky was a chaos of slumbering storm. But she could smell the
presence of it in the thick air, and could _feel_ the forked flashes of
lightning that rolled up with the dense pall from the south and west.
The distant rumbling of thunder grew louder, and she huddled herself
again under the tree. For hours the storm crashed over her, and the rain
fell in a deluge. When it had finished, she slunk out from her shelter,
like a thing beaten. Vainly she sought for one last scent of Kazan. The
club was washed clean. Again the sand was white where Kazan's blood had
reddened it. Even under the tree there was no sign of him left.
Until now only the terror of being alone in the pit of darkness that
enveloped her had oppressed Gray Wolf. With afternoon came hunger. It
was this hunger that drew her from the sandbar, and she wandered back
into the plain. A dozen times she scented game, and each time it evaded
her. Even a ground-mouse that she cornered under a root escaped her
fangs.
That night she slept again where Kazan had lain, and three times she
called for him without answer. But still through the day that followed,
and the day that followed that, blind Gray Wolf clung to the narrow rim
of white sand. On the fourth day her hunger reached a point where she
gnawed the bark from willow bushes. It was on this day that she made a
discovery. She was drinking, when her sensitive nose touched something
in the water's edge that was smooth, and bore a faint fleshy odor. It
was one of the big northern river clams. She pawed it ashore, sniffing
at the hard shell. Then she crunched it between her teeth. She had never
tasted sweeter meat than that which she found inside, and she began
hunting for other clams. She found many of them, and ate until she was
no longer hungry.
For three days more Gray Wolf remained on the bar. And then, one night
the Call came to her. It set her quivering with a strange, new
excitement--something that may have been a new hope--and in the
moonlight she trotted nervously up and down the shining strip of sand,
facing now the north, and now the south, and then the east and the
west--her head flung up, listening, as if in the soft wind of the night
she was trying to locate the whispering lure of a wonderful voice. And
whatever it was that came to her, came from out of the south and east.
Off there--across the barren, far beyond the outer edge of the northern
timber line--was home. And off there, in her brute way, she reasoned
that she must find Kazan.
The Call did not come from their old windfall home in the swamp. It came
from beyond that, and in a flashing vision there rose through her
blindness a picture of the towering Sun Rock, of the winding trail that
led to it, and the cabin on the plain where the man and the woman and
the baby lived. It was there that blindness had come to her. It was
there that day had ended, and eternal night had begun. And it was there
that she had given birth to her first-born. Nature had registered these
things so that they could never be wiped out of her memory.
And to that Call she responded, leaving the river and its food behind
her--straight out into the face of darkness and starvation, no longer
fearing death or the emptiness of the world she could not see; for ahead
of her, two hundred miles away, she could see the Sun Rock, the winding
trail, the nest of her first-born between the two big rocks--_and
Kazan!_
And sixty miles farther north Kazan, night after night, gnawed at his
steel chain. Night after night he had watched the stars, and the moon,
and had listened for Gray Wolf's call, while the big Dane lay sleeping.
Tonight it was colder than usual, and the keen tang of the wind that
came fresh from the west stirred him strangely. It set his blood afire
with what the Indians call the Frost Hunger. Lethargic summer was gone
and the sharp-winded days and nights of hunting were at hand. He wanted
to leap out into freedom and run until he was exhausted, with Gray Wolf
at his side. He knew that Gray Wolf was off there--where the stars hung
low in the clear sky--and that she was waiting.
All that night he was restless--more restless than he had been at any
time before. Once, in the far distance, he heard a cry that he thought
was the cry of Gray Wolf, and his answer roused McGill from deep sleep.
It was dawn, and the little professor dressed himself and came out of
the cabin. With satisfaction he noted the exhilarating snap in the air.
He wet his fingers and held them above his head, chuckling when he found
the wind had swung into the north. He went to Kazan, and talked to him.
Among other things he said: "This'll put the black flies to sleep,
Kazan. A day or two more of it and we'll start."
Five days later McGill led first the Dane, and then Kazan, to a packed
canoe. Sandy McTrigger saw them off, and Kazan watched for a chance to
leap at him. Sandy kept his distance, and McGill watched the two with a
thought that set the blood running swiftly behind the mask of his
careless smile. They had slipped a mile downstream when he leaned over
and laid a fearless hand on Kazan's head. Something in the touch of that
hand, and in the professor's voice, kept Kazan from a desire to snap at
him. He tolerated the friendship with expressionless eyes and a
motionless body.
"I was beginning to fear I wouldn't have much sleep, old boy," chuckled
McGill ambiguously, "but I guess I can take a nap now and then with you
along!"
For three days the journey continued without mishap along the shore of
Lake Athabasca. On the fourth night McGill pitched his tent in a clump
of Banksian pine a hundred yards back from the water. All that day the
wind had come steadily from behind them, and for at least a half of the
day the professor had been watching Kazan closely. From the west there
had now and then come a scent that stirred Kazan uneasily. Since noon he
had sniffed that wind. Twice McGill had heard him growling deep in his
throat, and once, when the scent had come stronger than usual, he had
bared his fangs, and the bristles stood up along his spine.
For an hour after striking camp the professor did not build a lire, but
sat looking up the shore of the lake through his hunting glass. It was
dusk when he returned to where he had put up his tent and chained the
dogs. For a few moments he stood unobserved, looking at the wolf-dog.
Kazan was still uneasy. He lay _facing_ the west. McGill made note of
this, for the big Dane lay behind Kazan--to the east.
Behind a rock McGill built a very small fire, and prepared supper. After
this he went into the tent, and when he came out he carried a blanket
under his arm. He chuckled as he stood for a moment over Kazan.
"We're not going to sleep in there tonight, old boy," he said. "I don't
like what you've found in the west wind." He laughed and buried himself
in a clump of stunted Banksians thirty paces from the tent. Here he
rolled himself in his blanket, and went to sleep.
It was a quiet, starlit night, and hours afterward Kazan dropped his
nose between his forepaws and drowsed. It was the snap of a twig that
roused him. The sound did not awaken the sluggish Dane, but instantly
Kazan's head was alert, his keen nostrils sniffing the air. What he had
smelled all day was heavy about him now.
Slowly, from out of the Banksians behind the tent, there came a figure.
It was not that of the professor. It approached cautiously, with lowered
head and hunched shoulders, and the starlight revealed the murderous
face of Sandy McTrigger. Kazan crouched low. He laid his head flat
between his forepaws. His long fangs gleamed. But he made no sound that
betrayed his concealment under a thick Banksian shrub. Step by step
Sandy approached, and at last he reached the flap of the tent. He did
not carry a club or a whip in his hand now. In the place of either of
those was the glitter of steel. At the door to the tent he paused, and
peered in, his back to Kazan.
Silently, swiftly--the wolf now, in every movement--Kazan came to his
feet. He forgot the chain that held him. Ten feet away stood the enemy
he hated above all others he had ever known. Every ounce of strength in
his splendid body gathered itself for the spring. And then he leaped.
This time the chain did not pull him back, almost neck-broken. Age and
the elements had weakened the leather collar he had worn since the days
of his slavery in the traces, and it gave way with a snap. Sandy turned,
and in a second leap Kazan's fangs sank into the flesh of his arm. With
a startled cry the man fell, and as they rolled over on the ground the
big Dane's deep voice rolled out in thunderous alarm.
In the fall Kazan's hold was broken. In an instant he was on his feet,
ready for another attack. And then the change came. He was _free._ The
collar was gone from his neck. The forest, the stars, the whispering
wind were all about him. _Here_ were men, and off there was--Gray Wolf!
His ears dropped, and he turned swiftly, and slipped like a shadow back
into the glorious freedom of his world.
A hundred yards away something stopped him for an instant. It was not
the big Dane's voice, but the sharp _crack--crack--crack_ of the little
professor's automatic. And above that sound there rose the voice of
Sandy McTrigger in a weird and terrible cry.