Mile after mile Kazan went on. For a time he was oppressed by the
shivering note of death that had come to him in Sandy McTrigger's cry,
and he slipped through the Banksians like a shadow, his ears flattened,
his tail trailing, his hind quarters betraying that curious slinking
quality of the wolf and dog stealing away from danger. Then he came out
upon a plain, and the stillness, the billion stars in the clear vault of
the sky, and the keen air that carried with it a breath of the Arctic
barrens brought him alert and questing. He faced in the direction of the
wind. Somewhere off there, far to the south and west, was Gray Wolf. For
the first time in many weeks he sat back on his haunches and gave the
deep and vibrant call that echoed weirdly for miles about him. Back in
the Banksians the big Dane heard it, and whined. From over the still
body of Sandy McTrigger the little professor looked up with a white,
tense face, and listened for a second cry.
But to that first call instinct told Kazan that there would be no
answer, and now he struck out swiftly, galloping mile after mile, as a
dog follows the trail of its master home. He did not turn back to the
lake, nor was his direction toward Red Gold City. As straight as he
might have followed a road blazed by the hand of man, he cut across the
forty miles of plain and swamp and forest and rocky ridge that lay
between him and the McFarlane. All that night he did not call again for
Gray Wolf. With him, reasoning was a process brought about by habit--by
precedent, and as Gray Wolf had waited for him many times before, he
believed that she would be waiting for him now somewhere near the
sandbar.
By dawn he had reached the river, within three miles of the sandbar.
Scarcely was the sun up when he stood on the white strip of sand where
he and Gray Wolf had come down to drink. Expectantly and confidently he
looked about him for Gray Wolf, whining softly and wagging his tail. He
began to search for her scent, but rains had washed even her footprints
from the clean sand. All that day he searched for her along the river
and out on the plain. Again and again he sat back on his haunches and
sent out his mating cry to her.
And slowly, as he did these things, nature was working in him that
miracle of the wild which the Crees have named the "spirit call." As it
had worked in Gray Wolf, so now it stirred the blood of Kazan. With the
going of the sun, and the sweeping about him of shadowy night, he turned
more and more to the south and east. His whole world was made up of the
trails over which he had hunted. That world, in his comprehension of it,
ran from the McFarlane in a narrow trail through the forest and over the
plains to the little valley from which the beavers had driven them. If
Gray Wolf was not here--she was there, and tirelessly he resumed his
quest of her.
Not until the stars were fading out of the sky again, and gray day was
giving place to night, did exhaustion and hunger stop him. He killed a
rabbit, and for hours after he had feasted, he lay dose to his kill, and
slept. Then he went on.
The fourth night he came to the little valley between the two ridges,
and under the stars, more brilliant now in the chill clearness of the
early autumn nights, he followed the creek down into their old swamp
home. It was broad day when he reached the edge of the great beaver pond
that now completely surrounded the windfall under which Gray Wolf's
second-born had come into the world. Broken Tooth and the other beavers
had wrought a big change in what had once been his home and Gray Wolf's,
and for many minutes Kazan stood silent and motionless at the edge of
the pond, sniffing the air heavy with the unpleasant odor of the
usurpers.
Until now his spirit had remained unbroken. Footsore, with thinned sides
and gaunt head, he circled slowly through the swamp. All that day he
searched. And his crest lay flat now, and there was a hunted look in the
droop of his shoulders and in the shifting look in his eyes. Gray Wolf
was gone. Slowly nature was impinging that fact upon him. She had passed
out of his world and out of his life, and he was filled with a
loneliness and a grief so great that the forest seemed strange, and the
stillness of the wild a thing that now oppressed and frightened him.
Once more the dog in him was mastering the wolf. With Gray Wolf he had
possessed the world of freedom. Without her, that world was so big and
strange and empty that it appalled him.
That night he slunk under a log. Deep in the night he grieved in his
slumber, like a child. And day after day, and night after night, Kazan
remained a slinking creature of the big swamp, mourning for the one
creature that had brought him out of chaos into light, who had filled
his world for him, and who, in going from him, had taken from this world
even the things that Gray Wolf had lost in her blindness.