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
traveling 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. Tonight he had a fire, and in the event of his firewood
running out he had trees he could climb. His anxiety just now was
centered 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 sadden
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 traveled 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.