Baree was on his feet, rigid as hewn rock, when Carvel came out of the
tent, and for a few moments Carvel stood in silence, watching him
closely. Would the dog respond to the call of the pack? Did he belong to
them? Would he go—now? The wolves were drawing nearer. They were not
circling, as a caribou or a deer would have circled, but were travelling
straight—dead straight for their camp. The significance of this fact was
easily understood by Carvel. All that afternoon Baree’s feet had left a
blood-smell in their trail, and the wolves had struck the trail in the
deep forest, where the falling snow had not covered it. Carvel was not
alarmed. More than once in his five years of wandering between the
Arctic and the Height of Land he had played the game with the wolves.
Once he had almost lost, but that was out in the open Barren. To-night
he had a fire, and in the event of his firewood running out he had trees
he could climb. His anxiety just now was centred in Baree. So he said,
making his voice quite casual,
“You aren’t going, are you, old chap?”
If Baree heard him he gave no evidence of it. But Carvel, still watching
him closely, saw that the hair along his spine had risen like a brush,
and then he heard—growing slowly in Baree’s throat—a snarl of ferocious
hatred. It was the sort of snarl that had held back the Factor from Lac
Bain, and Carvel, opening the breech of his gun to see that all was
right, chuckled happily. Baree may have heard the chuckle. Perhaps it
meant something to him, for he turned his head suddenly and with
flattened ears looked at his companion.
The wolves were silent now. Carvel knew what that meant, and he was
tensely alert. In the stillness the click of the safety on his rifle
sounded with metallic sharpness. For many minutes they heard nothing but
the crack of the fire. Suddenly Baree’s muscles seemed to snap. He
sprang back, and faced the quarter behind Carvel, his head level with
his shoulders, his inch-long fangs gleaming as he snarled into the black
caverns of the forest beyond the rim of firelight. Carvel had turned
like a shot. It was almost frightening—what he saw. A pair of eyes
burning with greenish fire, and then another pair, and after that so
many of them that he could not have counted them. He gave a sudden gasp.
They were like cat-eyes, only much larger. Some of them, catching the
firelight fully, were red as coals, others flashed blue and green—living
things without bodies. With a swift glance he took in the black circle
of the forest. They were out there, too; they were on all sides of them,
but where he had seen them first they were thickest. In these first few
seconds he had forgotten Baree, awed almost to stupefaction by that
monster-eyed cordon of death that hemmed them in. There were
fifty—perhaps a hundred wolves out there, afraid of nothing in all this
savage world but fire. They had come up without the sound of a padded
foot or a broken twig. If it had been later, and they had been asleep,
and the fire out——
He shuddered, and for a moment the thought got the better of his nerves.
He had not intended to shoot except from necessity, but all at once his
rifle came to his shoulder and he sent a stream of fire out where the
eyes were thickest. Baree knew what the shots meant, and filled with the
mad desire to get at the throat of one of his enemies he dashed in their
direction. Carvel gave a startled yell as he went. He saw the flash of
Baree’s body, saw it swallowed up in the gloom, and in that same instant
heard the deadly clash of fangs and the impact of bodies. A wild thrill
shot through him. The dog had charged alone—and the wolves had waited.
There could be but one end. His four-footed comrade had gone straight
into the jaws of death!
He could hear the ravening snap of those jaws out in the darkness. It
was sickening. His hand went to the Colt .45 at his belt, and he thrust
his empty rifle butt downward into the snow. With the big automatic
before his eyes he plunged out into the darkness, and from his lips
there issued a wild yelling that could have been heard a mile away. With
the yelling a steady stream of fire spat from the Colt into the mass of
fighting beasts. There were eight shots in the automatic, and not until
the plunger clicked with metallic emptiness did Carvel cease his yelling
and retreat into the firelight. He listened, breathing deeply. He no
longer saw eyes in the darkness, nor did he hear the movement of bodies.
The suddenness and ferocity of his attack had driven back the
wolf-horde. But the dog! He caught his breath, and strained his eyes. A
shadow was dragging itself into the circle of light. It was Baree.
Carvel ran to him, put his arms under his shoulders, and brought him to
the fire.
For a long time after that there was a questioning light in Carvel’s
eyes. He reloaded his guns, put fresh fuel on the fire, and from his
pack dug out strips of cloth with which he bandaged three or four of the
deepest cuts in Baree’s legs. And a dozen times he asked, in a wondering
sort of way,
“Now what the deuce made you do that, old chap? What have _you_ got
against the wolves?”
All that night he did not sleep, but watched.
* * * * *
Their experience with the wolves broke down the last bit of uncertainty
that might have existed between the man and the dog. For days after
that, as they travelled slowly north and west, Carvel nursed Baree as he
might have cared for a sick child. Because of the dog’s hurts, he made
only a few miles a day. Baree understood, and in him there grew stronger
and stronger a great love for the man whose hands were as gentle as the
Willow’s and whose voice warmed him with the thrill of an immeasurable
comradeship. He no longer feared him or had a suspicion of him. And
Carvel, on his part, was observing things. The vast emptiness of the
world about them, and their aloneness, gave him the opportunity of
pondering over unimportant details, and he found himself each day
watching Baree a little more closely. He made at last a discovery which
interested him deeply. Always, when they halted on the trail, Baree
would turn his face to the south; when they were in camp it was from the
south that he nosed the wind most frequently. This was quite natural.
Carvel thought, for his old hunting-grounds were back there. But as the
days passed he began to notice other things. Now and then, looking off
into the far country from which they had come, Baree would whine softly,
and on that day he would be filled with a great restlessness. He gave no
evidence of wanting to leave Carvel, but more and more Carvel came to
understand that some mysterious call was coming to him from out of the
south.
It was the wanderer’s intention to swing over into the country of the
Great Slave, a good eight hundred miles to the north and west, before
the mush-snows came. From there, when the waters opened in springtime,
he planned to travel by canoe westward to the Mackenzie and ultimately
to the mountains of British Columbia. These plans were changed in
February. They were caught in a great storm in the Wholdaia Lake
country, and when their fortunes looked darkest Carvel stumbled on a
cabin in the heart of a deep spruce forest, and in this cabin there was
a dead man. He had been dead for many days, and was frozen stiff. Carvel
chopped a hole in the earth and buried him.
The cabin was a treasure trove to Carvel and Baree, and especially to
the man. It evidently possessed no other owner than the one who had
died; it was comfortable and stocked with provisions; and more than
that, its owner had made a splendid catch of fur before the frost bit
his lungs, and he died. Carvel went over them carefully and joyously.
They were worth a thousand dollars at any post, and he could see no
reason why they did not belong to him now. Within a week he had blazed
out the dead man’s snow-covered trap-line and was trapping on his own
account.
This was two hundred miles north and west of the Gray Loon, and soon
Carvel observed that Baree did not face directly south in those moments
when the strange call came to him, but south and east. And now, with
each day that passed, the sun rose higher in the sky; it grew warmer;
the snow softened underfoot, and in the air was the tremulous and
growing throb of spring. With these things came the old yearning to
Baree; the heart-thrilling call of the lonely graves back on the Gray
Loon, of the burned cabin, the abandoned tepee beyond the pool—and of
Nepeese. In his sleep he saw visions of things. He heard again the low,
sweet voice of the Willow, felt the touch of her hand, was at play with
her once more in the dark shades of the forest—and Carvel would sit and
watch him as he dreamed, trying to read the meaning of what he saw and
heard.
In April Carvel shouldered his furs up to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
post at Lac la Biche, which was still farther north. Baree accompanied
him halfway, and then—at sundown Carvel returned to the cabin and found
him there. He was so overjoyed that he caught the dog’s head in his arms
and hugged it. They lived in the cabin until May. The buds were swelling
then, and the smell of growing things had begun to rise up out of the
earth.
Then Carvel found the first of the early Blue Flowers.
That night he packed up.
“It’s time to travel,” he announced to Baree. “And I’ve sort of changed
my mind. We’re going back—there.”
And he pointed south.