As the Willow pulled the trigger of her rifle, Baree sprang into the
air. He felt the force of the bullet before he heard the report of the
gun. It lifted him off his feet, and then sent him rolling over and over
as if he had been struck a hideous blow with a club. For a flash he did
not feel pain. Then it ran through him like a knife of fire, and with
that pain the dog in him rose above the wolf, and he let out a wild
outcry of puppyish yapping as he rolled and twisted on the ground.
Pierrot and Nepeese had stepped from behind the balsams, the Willow’s
beautiful eyes shining with pride at the accuracy of her shot. Instantly
she caught her breath. Her brown fingers clutched at the barrel of her
rifle. The chuckle of satisfaction died on Pierrot’s lips as Baree’s
cries of pain filled the forest.
“_Uchi Moosis!_” gasped Nepeese, in her Cree.
Pierrot caught the rifle from her.
“_Diable!_ A dog—a puppy!” he cried.
He started on a run for Baree. But in their amazement they had lost a
few seconds and Baree’s dazed senses were returning. He saw them clearly
as they came across the open—a new kind of monster of the forests! With
a final wail he darted back into the deep shadows of the trees. It was
almost sunset, and he ran for the thick gloom of the heavy spruce near
the creek. He had shivered at sight of the bear and the moose, but for
the first time he now sensed the real meaning of danger. And it was
close after him. He could hear the crashing of the two-legged beasts in
pursuit; strange cries were almost at his heels—and then suddenly he
plunged without warning into a hole.
It was a shock to have the earth go out from under his feet like that,
but Baree did not yelp. The wolf was dominant in him again. It urged him
to remain where he was, making no move, no sound—scarcely breathing. The
voices were over him; the strange feet almost stumbled in the hole where
he lay. Looking out of his dark hiding-place, he could see one of his
enemies. It was Nepeese, the Willow. She was standing so that a last
glow of the day fell upon her face. Baree did not take his eyes from
her. Above his pain there rose in him a strange and thrilling
fascination. The girl put her two hands to her mouth and in a voice that
was soft and plaintive and amazingly comforting to his terrified little
heart, cried:
“_Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!_”
And then he heard another voice; and this voice, too, was far less
terrible than many sounds he had listened to in the forests.
“We cannot find him, Nepeese,” the voice was saying. “He has crawled off
to die. It is too bad. Come.”
Where Baree had stood in the edge of the open Pierrot paused and pointed
to a birch sapling that had been cut clean off by the Willow’s bullet.
Nepeese understood. The sapling, no larger than her thumb, had turned
her shot a trifle and had saved Baree from instant death.
She turned again, and called:
“_Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!_”
Her eyes were no longer filled with the thrill of slaughter.
“He would not understand that,” said Pierrot, leading the way across the
open. “He is wild—born of the wolves. Perhaps he was of Koomo’s
lead-bitch, who ran away to hunt with the packs last winter.”
“And he will die——”
“_Ayetun_—yes, he will die.”
But Baree had no idea of dying. He was too tough a youngster to be
shocked to death by a bullet passing through the soft flesh of his
fore-leg. That was what had happened. His leg was torn to the bone, but
the bone itself was untouched. He waited until the moon had risen before
he crawled out of his hole.
His leg had grown stiff then; it had stopped bleeding, but his whole
body was racked by a terrible pain. A dozen Papayuchisews, all holding
tight to his ears and nose, could not have hurt him more. Every time he
moved, a sharp twinge shot through him; and yet he persisted in moving.
Instinctively he felt that by travelling away from the hole he would get
away from danger. This was the best thing that could have happened to
him, for a little later a porcupine came wandering along, chattering to
itself in its foolish, good-humoured way, and fell with a fat thud into
the hole. Had Baree remained, he would have been so full of quills that
he must surely have died.
[Illustration: Nepeese, the trapper’s daughter, known to the forest men
as “The Willow,” who became a big factor in the life of the pup Baree.]
In another way the exercise of travel was good for Baree. It gave his
wound no opportunity to “set,” as Pierrot would have said, for in
reality his hurt was more painful than serious. For the first hundred
yards he hobbled along on three legs, and after that he found that he
could use his fourth by humouring it a great deal. He followed the creek
for a half-mile. Whenever a bit of brush touched his wound, he would
snap at it viciously, and instead of whimpering when he felt one of the
sharp twinges shooting through him, an angry little growl gathered in
his throat, and his teeth clicked. Now that he was out of the hole, the
effect of the Willow’s shot was stirring every drop of wolf-blood in his
body. In him there was a growing animosity—a feeling of rage not against
any one thing in particular, but against all things. It was not the
feeling with which he had fought Papayuchisew, the young owl. On this
night the dog in him had disappeared. An accumulation of misfortunes had
descended upon him, and out of these misfortunes—and his present
hurt—the wolf had risen savage and vengeful.
This was the first night Baree had travelled. He was, for the time,
unafraid of anything that might creep up on him out of the darkness. The
blackest shadows had lost their thrill. It was the first big fight
between the two natures that were born in him—the wolf and the dog—and
the dog was vanquished. Now and then he stopped to lick his wound, and
as he licked it he growled, as though for the hurt itself he held a
personal antagonism. If Pierrot could have seen and heard, he would have
understood very quickly, and he would have said: “Let him die. The club
will never take that devil out of him.”
In this humour Baree came, an hour later, out of the heavy timber of the
creek-bottom into the more open spaces of a small plain that ran along
the foot of a ridge. It was in this plain that Oohoomisew hunted.
Oohoomisew was a huge snow-owl. He was the patriarch among all the owls
of Pierrot’s trapping domain. He was so old that he was almost blind,
and therefore he never hunted as other owls hunted. He did not hide
himself in the black cover of spruce- and balsam-tops, or float softly
through the night, ready in an instant to swoop down upon his prey. His
eyesight was so poor that from a spruce-top he could not have seen a
rabbit at all, and he might have mistaken a fox for a mouse.
So old Oohoomisew, learning wisdom from experience, hunted from ambush.
He would squat on the ground, and for hours at a time he would remain
there without making a sound and scarcely moving a feather, waiting with
the patience of Job for something to eat to come his way. Now and then
he had made mistakes. Twice he had mistaken a lynx for a rabbit, and in
the second attack he had lost a foot, so that when he slumbered aloft
during the day he hung to his perch with one claw. Crippled, nearly
blind, and so old that he had long ago lost the tufts of feathers over
his ears, he was still a giant in strength, and when he was angry, one
could hear the snap of his beak twenty yards away.
For three nights he had been unlucky, and to-night he had been
particularly unfortunate. Two rabbits had come his way, and he had
lunged at each of them from his cover. The first he had missed entirely;
the second had left with him a mouthful of fur—and that was all. He was
ravenously hungry, and he was gritting his bill in his bad temper when
he heard Baree approaching.
Even if Baree could have seen under the dark bush ahead, and had
discovered Oohoomisew ready to dart from his ambush, it is not likely
that he would have gone very far aside. His own fighting blood was up.
He, too, was ready for war.
Very indistinctly Oohoomisew saw him at last, coming across the little
open which he was watching. He squatted down. His feathers ruffled up
until he was like a ball. His almost sightless eyes glowed like two
bluish pools of fire. Ten feet away, Baree stopped for a moment and
licked his wound. Oohoomisew waited cautiously. Again Baree advanced,
passing within six feet of the bush. With a swift hop and a sudden
thunder of his powerful wings the great owl was upon him.
This time Baree let out no cry of pain or of fright. The wolf is
_kipichi-mao_, as the Indians say. No hunter ever heard a trapped wolf
whine for mercy at the sting of a bullet or the beat of a club. He dies
with his fangs bared. To-night it was a wolf-whelp that Oohoomisew was
attacking, and not a dog-pup. The owl’s first rush keeled Baree over,
and for a moment he was smothered under the huge, outspread wings, while
Oohoomisew—pinioning him down—hopped for a claw-hold with his one good
foot, and struck fiercely with his beak.
One blow of that beak anywhere about the head would have settled for a
rabbit, but at the first thrust Oohoomisew discovered that it was not a
rabbit he was holding under his wings. A blood-curdling snarl answered
the blow, and Oohoomisew remembered the lynx, his lost foot, and his
narrow escape with his life. The old pirate might have beaten a retreat,
but Baree was no longer the puppyish Baree of that hour in which he had
fought young Papayuchisew. Experience and hardship had aged and
strengthened him; his jaws had passed quickly from the bone-licking to
the bone-cracking age—and before Oohoomisew could get away, if he was
thinking of flight at all, Baree’s fangs closed with a vicious snap on
his one good leg.
In the stillness of night there rose a still greater thunder of wings,
and for a few moments Baree closed his eyes to keep from being blinded
by Oohoomisew’s furious blows. But he hung on grimly, and as his teeth
met through the flesh of the old night-pirate’s leg, his angry snarl
carried defiance to Oohoomisew’s ears. Rare good fortune had given him
that grip on the leg, and Baree knew that triumph or defeat depended on
his ability to hold it. The old owl had no other claw to sink into him,
and it was impossible—caught as he was—for him to tear at Baree with his
beak. So he continued to beat that thunder of blows with his four-foot
wings.
The wings made a great tumult about Baree, but they did not hurt him. He
buried his fangs deeper. His snarls rose more fiercely as he got the
taste of Oohoomisew’s blood, and through him there surged more hotly the
desire to kill this monster of the night, as though in the death of this
creature he had the opportunity of avenging himself for all the hurts
and hardships that had befallen him since he lost his mother.
Oohoomisew had never felt a great fear until now. The lynx had snapped
at him but once—and was gone, leaving him crippled. But the lynx had not
snarled in that wolfish way, and it had not hung on. A thousand and one
nights Oohoomisew had listened to the wolf-howl. Instinct had told him
what it meant. He had seen the packs pass swiftly through the night, and
always when they passed he had kept in the deepest shadows. To him, as
for all other wild things, the wolf-howl stood for death. But until now,
with Baree’s fangs buried in his leg, he had never sensed fully the
wolf-fear. It had taken it years to enter into his slow, stupid head—but
now that it was there, it possessed him as no other thing had ever
possessed him in all his life.
Suddenly Oohoomisew ceased his beating and launched himself upward. Like
huge fans his powerful wings churned the air, and Baree felt himself
lifted suddenly from the earth. Still he held on—and in a moment both
bird and beast fell back with a thud.
Oohoomisew tried again. This time he was more successful, and he rose
fully six feet into the air with Baree. They fell again. A third time
the old outlaw fought to wing himself free of Baree’s grip; and then,
exhausted, he lay with his giant wings outspread, hissing and cracking
his bill.
Under those wings Baree’s mind worked with the swift instincts of the
killer. Suddenly he changed his hold, burying his fangs into the under
part of Oohoomisew’s body. They sank into three inches of feathers.
Swift as Baree had been, Oohoomisew was equally swift to take advantage
of his opportunity. In an instant he had swooped upward. There was a
jerk, a rending of feathers from flesh—and Baree was alone on the field
of battle.
Baree had not killed, but he had conquered. His first great day—or
night—had come. The world was filled with a new promise for him, as vast
as the night itself. And after a moment he sat back on his haunches,
sniffing the air for his beaten enemy; and then, as if defying the
feathered monster to come back and fight to the end, he pointed his
sharp little muzzle up to the stars and sent forth his first babyish
wolf-howl into the night.