Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto
themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel
port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them,
suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps.
There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in
the silence, and--the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing
like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of
a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.
They made no sound as they tore, compact as a Zulu impi, over the
spotless white, because they had no trail to follow, only this huge
devil of a leader; and they had their work cut out to follow him, for
he was the longest-legged male wolf any of them had ever set eyes upon.
Straight as a twelve-inch shell the white wolf headed back to the
fallen trees and the bear's den. When he reached them, he stopped so
abruptly that the wolves behind him almost sat on their haunches in the
effort to pull up. Those that failed fell sideways under a rain of
wicked snaps from him, that followed one another quick as the stutter
of a machine-gun.
The pack did not stop--at least, not the flanks of it. They swept on
without a pause, out and round, like flood-water round a knoll, joined
at the far side, and--were still. As a maneuver, a military maneuver,
swift, unexpected, faultless, and silent, it was perfect.
For as long as a man takes to light a pipe there was dead silence,
broken only by the quick motor-like panting of the pack. And one
hundred and twenty-nine pairs of eyes regarded the fallen trees.
Then the white wolf, all alone, with hackles up, stepped forward and
leaped upon the trunk of the tree that was poised upon its fellow. He
ran lightly up it till he was exactly above the hollow formed by the
junction of the two trees, then stopped, looking down.
Half-a-dozen of the older and more cunning wolves followed him; the
pack surged forward until both trees became lined with a row of wolves,
without breaking the circle of the main pack outside, and then stopped.
All this in silence.
Then--but you could almost hear the trees breathe while he did it--the
white wolf yawned very deliberately, and whined, insolently and very
audibly.
The answer was instant.
Something rumbled within the den, deep down, like a geyser.
The white wolf whined again, and sprang aside just as the bear,
maddened with the pain of a .450-caliber rifle bullet in his stomach,
and seeking a sacrifice, hurled out of the dark and up over the
tree-trunk, striking, with appalling nail-strokes, right and left; and
the quickness of those strokes was only a less astonishment than the
agility of the wolves getting out of the way of them. But--but he had
come out to abolish one wolf, that bear; not one hundred and
twenty-nine.
The white wolf dropped without a sound upon the bear's great, broad
back. The half-dozen old wolves followed him like figures moved by a
single lever. The pack sucked in with the rush of a waterspout. The
bear vanished under a wave of fangs and tails, as a sinking boat
vanishes beneath the billows. And the rest was the most diabolical
devils' riot that ears ever heard.
The bear unwounded, even if he had been induced to come out at all,
might have fought his way home again; but the bear wounded and cut off
was a different matter. He battled as only a cornered bear can battle;
but the exertion of it gave the .450 bullet its chance, and he
died--horribly--as they die who are pulled down by the starving
wolf-pack, and that is not printable at all.
He took three wolves--smashed-in-heads and chests--with him to the
other world, that bear, and left three others well on the road there.
_All six_ followed him by the path he had gone when the pack had done
with him; but the losses might not improve the temper of the pack,
though they partially stayed the hunger of a few. And the white wolf
seemed to know that. Full devilish indeed was the cunning of that
brute.
Scarcely was the last bone cracked, scarcely the last wisp of skin
snapped up, than the white wolf, wet, and red and wringing over the
head, was away again, at full speed--and his full speed was a thing to
gasp over--with a wild and rousing howl that gave the pack no time to
ponder on its casualties.
This time also there was no trail, so the pack had full leisure to
concentrate all its energies upon the job in hand, or paw, I should
say--namely, galloping. No, racing would be the only word; for the
white wolf, knowing his kind, perhaps, gave the pack no leisure to grow
dangerous over its losses or its hunger. Only idleness gives time for
questions to be asked about leadership, and he kept them busy; and if
they wanted to keep up with him at all, they must needs extend
themselves to the full.
Soon he led them to a clearing running, straight as a railway cutting,
through the forest. Out in the clearing, he dropped his head, howled,
flung half round, and began to follow tracks; but the scent was enough
for him without the tracks. They were the footprints, the
sleigh-trail, and the hoofprints of the beaters, the hunters, and the
pack-horses, loaded with game from the hunt of the day that had just
gone.
For a moment the pack, even _that_ pack, his pack, the pack of the
White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, checked a little, shied, and were
dumb. They were used to his leading them upon some hectic
murder-raids, but never one quite so blatant as this.
Quickly, however, the real pain in their empty stomachs got the better
of them, and they swept round and began to follow--half-a-dozen here
and there--with whimpers. And then, the excitement spreading, they all
rushed in, and breaking out, with a blood-curdling rush, into the
full-throated chorus, "Yi-yi-i-ki-yi!" of the wolf-pack in full cry--an
M.F.H. who had never heard wolves might have mistaken it for the music
of a pack of hounds if he had listened to it from a distance--they
swept on after the vanishing white brush of their leader, like some
great, hurrying, dark cloud-shadow, up the trail.
Anon, going always at their tireless wolf-lope that no beast in the
world can outdistance in the end, they came to a village. Some of the
beaters lived at this village, and had remained there. The wolves
swept on and round the miserable place--some actually raced through the
snowed-up street--and took up the continued trail on the other side.
Anon they came to an open plain, where the trail split, many of the
beaters that were left striking away to another village where they
lived; but the white wolf tore straight on along the main trail, the
trail of the hunters, the attendants, and the pack-horses. And the
shadows of the wolves in the moonlight kept pace with them all that
terrible way.
The plain looked flat, but was gently undulating, like some gigantic
ocean petrified; so that, in due time, the pack, still giving tongue
wildly and terribly, saw before them, far, far ahead, a procession of
dots straggling along over the endless, unbroken white. And instantly
their music shut off as if at the wave of an invisible hand.
Then, as the quarry ran from scent to view, they raced. All their
long, loose, nickel-steel-limbed, tireless gallop before had been
nothing to their flying speed now. The taint of the blood of the
slaughtered game from the chase was in their sensitive nostrils. It
was like the sight of rare wines to a drunkard. Shift! Say, but the
way those long-legged demons ate up the distance between them and their
prey was awe-inspiring. It was uncanny. It was almost magic. It was
awful.
Then things happened, as you might say, with some rapidity.
Three shots rang out in the silence--three shots in quick succession.
They were fired at the wolves by the only man in the group who had an
efficient rifle, but were really meant to recall the sleighs with the
sportsmen _and_ the rifles, which had gone on.
The wolves spread out into a long line; the ends of the line crept
forward swiftly on either hand, and the whole pack raced to the attack
in the formation of a Zulu impi--in the shape of a pair of horns, that
is. When the points of the horns got on the far side of their "prey,"
they rushed together, and turned inwards, still at full gallop.
At this juncture the sleighs came back--at the gallop, too.
Four .450-caliber Express rifle bullets, one .375-caliber magazine and
one .315-caliber magazine bullet, arriving among the wolves in quick
succession produced no confusion. Not a wolf stopped. Each beast
continued its tireless gallop, swerving and dispersing as it raced, and
without uttering a sound, till, almost before you could realize what
had happened at all, there was a dwindling crescent of gray specks in
the background, and four or five other gray shapes--two kicking--lying
about in the foreground.
But--and this is where we come in--neither there in the distant
snow-haze nor close in by the crowding hunting-party was the white wolf.
He had been last on view far in advance of, and heading, the point of
the right-hand horn of the swiftly encircling pack--his usual place, by
the way--but from the moment the returning sleighs hove in sight, and
the bar-like gleam of the moonlight could be seen upon the ready
rifle-barrels--he had seen that, too, and knew its meaning--he had
been--nowhere.
Now, before the encircling horns of the pack closed round, one of the
pack-horses, maddened with fear, had stampeded and got clear away.
That horse was galloping now madly across the plain, hidden from view
by a gentle swell of ground, and--the white wolf was racing alongside
of it; and away behind--for few could keep up with the tremendous speed
of the white wolf--another, and an ordinary gray wolf was gliding in
their tracks. That was a female wolf, who more than once before had
found it a profitable investment to keep her eye upon the doings of the
great white leader.
She saw the white wolf leap, beheld his wrenching side-stroke at the
terrified horse's throat, heard the horse scream, and watched it bound
forward. Followed another leap of the relentless giant white shape;
the horse seemed to stumble in full gallop, and next instant came down
headlong. The rest was a whirl of snow, flying hoofs, and a horrible
worrying sound. Then all settled down, and as she tore up she found
the white wolf feeding ravenously against time, bolting his meal as
only the wild members of the dog tribe, hyenas, and vultures can. She
was starving, that she-wolf, but she halted upon her hams, such was the
reputation of the white leader; but when he failed to snarl at her,
she, too, fell to, and bolted her meal like a crazy thing.
Directly he had fed enough the white wolf flung round upon his heels,
and, with a single quick whimper, was gone, streaking over the plain
away from the hunters, away from the scattered, discomfited pack; away,
away, as he had never galloped before. But, then, before he had always
been the hunter. This time, if he knew anything of "Pack Law" and the
temper of the pack over this bad defeat and heavy loss, coming on top
of the bad bear "break"--this time, I say, it was he who was, or, at
any rate, might be, the hunted. And he had reasons--very sound and
private reasons--why he must not meet even one wolf of the pack in
combat. Wherefore he streaked, stretched flat, and doubled into a bow,
his shadow chasing him, and the she-wolf--afraid to be left
alone--chasing his shadow.
Very often before the white wolf had caused the pack to run into
dangerous and decimating trouble, but always with a feed at the end.
He had never before sold them a pup, as the saying is, like this one.
Moreover, he felt that his slaying of the horse secretly--and they were
bound to scent out and read that--would not improve matters. Wherefore
he guessed that, after years of restless rule, it was about time to
quit, and he quitted. But unfortunately there is only one thing harder
than becoming leader of a big wolf-pack, and that is, ceasing to be
leader and--live.
Five miles over the desolate waste of white--and what is five miles, or
ten, or fifteen, to a desperate wolf?--the two beasts ran into a
river--literally into a river. Ice stretched far out from the bank,
yet the river was so wide that they could scarce see the opposite bank.
They could see the grinding, growling ice-blocks floating all round
them which they plunged in, however, and they could feel the icy bite
of the water--water that would stop the action of a man's heart.
But the white wolf did not attempt to swim to the opposite bank, or
mean to. He made a detour, and landed upon the same side he had
started from. He did that three times, the she-wolf always following
faithfully, because she had now become too frightened to stay alone and
do anything else; and then he started upon another mad gallop of miles,
but this time along the bank of the great river.
Finally he stopped and stared out over the ice, the thick water, and
the gnashing pack-ice. Far away, it seemed, through the snow-haze, he
could see a wooded height, an immense island, round which the river
looped in two great arms.
He knew the spot--trust him.
No beast in its senses would try to swim the long distance across to
that island, but from time to time a hunted deer had made the attempt,
and a few of those that tried it had survived the ordeal and populated
the island. More than once, in heavy snow, the white wolf himself, at
the head of his pack, had hunted a deer down to that very spot, and had
watched its head fade across the water into the distance. Once he had
started to follow; but the pack had turned back, and he at length after
them, snarling at their heels. Now he knew how long the swim looked
from the deer's point of view.
It was an ugly proposition. But--he turned his head in the stillness,
broken only by the multitudinous voices of the ice, and heard a far,
far distant multitudinous murmur, and that was no ice, and it settled
him. It was the united voice of the pack _on his trail_!
He paused, ran up and down, gave an odd, little, deeply expressive
whine, like a puppy afraid to take its first bath, plunged in with a
rush, and struck out. Soon he was out upon a piece of drift ice,
shaking himself, and began leaping from one lump of floating ice to
another. It was tricky, slippery, slidy work, and a fall might mean a
broken leg or a crushed skull; but anything was better than dissolving
like mincemeat in the jaws of the slavering pack.
Once, when a long way out, he looked back, and beheld the she-wolf,
whining piteously as if she were being thrashed--and wolves are dumb
beasts when "up against it"--following him.
She, too, had heard that wild, terrifying, implacable music of the
wolf-pack following them; and although I, personally, doubt if they
would have touched her--unless it was the other she-wolves that did
it--she seemed to have been smitten by panic, and to prefer the deep
sea, or the river, rather, to that pack of maddened devils.
And so, slipping, sliding, splashing, swimming, scrambling, the white
wolf, after the most appalling struggle of his life, managed somehow,
blindly in the end, with sobbing breath and pounding sides, to make
that terrible passage, and collapse as he landed in a stiff white heap,
the water frozen in icicles upon his body as he landed.
For a long time he did not move, and it began to seem as if he had
burst his heart. But at last he dragged himself to his feet and turned
drunkenly--to find the she-wolf lying at his side.
Thoughts came back slowly; but at length he shook himself, and stood
erect at his full, immense height. He had given the wolf-pack
something tricky in the way of trails to unravel, but he knew what he
had taught them too well to build too much on that. And he was right,
for presently, from far, far across the water, came the unutterably
terrible baying clamor of the pack, moving swiftly along--then it
stopped.
For a long while he waited after that, straining ears and eyes out over
the moving ice, and the water, and the night that was there; but
nothing could he see, and nothing more he heard except at last, far
away, one last, long, lonely, ghastlily lonesome howl--the howl of
defeat.
Then it seemed--but truly it may only have been a trick of the
moonlight as he snarled, revealing his white fangs under his
wickedly-curled-back lip--it seemed, I say, that the White Wolf of the
Frozen Waste grinned. And good reason had he to grin, for the life of
the white wolf had been nothing more nor less than one long, bad, bold,
blustering, bullying _bluff_! What's that? Yes, sirs--bluff! And in
this wise.
Firstly, his extraordinarily long legs gave him a height out of all
proportion to his real hulk; secondly, his abnormally long and woolly
coat gave him an apparent bulk which was out of all proportion to fact;
thirdly, his actual bulk was really scarcely larger than that of any
very large wolf; and, fourthly--but this concerned him only now--he was
really quite an old wolf; one long past his prime, one quite unable to
face any really full-grown fine young wolf, one retaining only his
matchless speed by reason of his abnormally long legs, and his
leadership by terrific and cleverly acted ferocity on the strength of
his apparent giant dimensions. That was all, but it was enough; wasn't
it, boys? Would you care to have changed places with the old rascal,
and played that bluff out against _those_ odds, in _that_ company, for
years as he had done? I _don't_ think. No, nor I, either. It was
some gamble, that. What?
At last the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste turned, with an insolent
flourish of his brush, and trotted up the bank on the heels of the
she-wolf, who had come to life again and preceded him into the dense
tangle of the woods, which swallowed him up, him and his darned bluff,
utterly.
XV
FATE AND THE FEARFUL
We are the little folks--we!
Too little to love or to hate.--RUDYABD KIPLING.
No one ever accused him of not being all there. The job was to see
what was there.
A tiny alderman of the red bank-vole people, whose tunnels marched with
the road through the wood, taking the afternoon sun--a slanting copper
net, it was--at his own front-door under the root of the Scots fir, was
aware of a flicker at a hole's mouth. He looked again, and saw the
mouth of that hole was empty. He blinked his star-bright eyes in his
fat, furry, little square head, after the manner of one who thought he
had been dreaming. But catch a bank-vole dreaming! Besides, how about
the squirrel overhead? He was hanging over a branch where the flicker
had been, swearing fit to slit his lungs, and old squirrel wasn't much
given to make mistakes, as a rule.
The bank vole turned back into his hole, knowing the law against taking
chances in the wild, and the first stride fetched him up short in
violent collision with another bank-vole--otherwise red-backed
field-mouse, if you like--coming the other way.
The blow, full on the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to
have done. It cast him clean over backwards out of his own front-door,
where he fell down the bank, and was received, all his little short
paws scrambling for a hold, by a thistle, and would have told all the
world, with a thin, high squeak, what he had sat on, if the squeak had
not frozen between his chisel teeth.
There had shot out of the hole, and back, a Thing. It might have been
the thick end of a whip-lash or a spring, and, like a spring, as it
recoiled it coiled, and was still.
The bank-vole saw. Most entirely did he see, and felt no joy in the
seeing, either. Indeed, there was no room for mistake in the zigzag
black chain down the back, in the unspeakably cruel, fixed stare of the
glassy, lidless eyes, in the short head and flat cranium of the true
viper--viper, adder, or whatever you like to call the calamity without
legs, whose other name is death.
Now, bank-voles know all about vipers. They have to; they die, else.
They die anyway; but no matter, for they are small and very many.
Also, vipers know all about voles, field and bank; they specialize in
'em!
But our bank-vole knew all about the "freezing" game, too, and he
"froze." My word, how that little beggar was still, so utterly bereft
of movement that a fly settled upon him--about the first and the last
that would, I should judge! And if a learned native had come along the
road at that moment--on tiptoe, of course--he would have said the viper
had hypnotized friend vole with fear. Hypnotize your grandmother! But
you may take it from me that serpent thing was playing his game, too.
He was "freezing" to induce the quarry to move and give himself away,
because, since the vole was motionless, he had no idea where the little
fellow was, although he seemed to be looking straight at him--in that
execrable way snakes have of seeming to look straight at everything.
You think it was a battle of patience? W-e-ll, maybe. Maybe, too, it
was a battle of nerves. I like to think so, anyway, for that
snake-servant of the Devil had none, and the bank-vole had; and the
bank-voices broke under the awful tension--or seemed to--and the
bank-vole broke the terrifying spell. Also, he broke the silence.
Away down the ditch he went, bouncing like a tiny ball of dark
thistle-down, all in and out among the vegetation, which, worse luck
for him, the ditch being under the accursed shadow of the firs, was
scanty. And as he galloped he squeaked three times--like a little
needle stabbing the late afternoon silence, it was.
His removal was one kind of quick dodge in the art of quitting; that of
the viper another, and a very beastly one. The crawling thing was not
much more than one-tenth of a second after the poor bank-vole in
getting under way, and the rest was a--was a--oh, anything you please!
I call it a sliding flicker that you rather "felt" than saw. Also, the
thing rustled horribly, and Fact can say what she likes. I swear it
shot along quite flat, crawling, not undulating; but, ough! what a
lightning, footless, legless crawl! No wonder the poor little devil of
a bank-vole squeaked! The wonder was he didn't faint on the spot, for
he knew what was coming.
Up the bank he pattered, and into that, to him, great subterranean
highway which seems to be conjointly kept up and used by all the
mysterious little four-footed tribes of the field, and which runs the
length of practically every bank and hedgerow. The place was dark and
cool and echoing, and bare as the palm of your hand, and far cleaner
than many palms. It might have been cleaned out that very day by a
fairy vacuum-cleaner; but it hadn't. It was always like that, clean as
the proverbial new pin. Heaven alone knows who did the "charing"
there, but those little furry tribes might have given lessons on health
in trench warfare, I reckon, at a guinea a time--and cheap at that.
They had found out that dirt meant disease, you bet.
Down that tunnel drummed the bank-vole, seeking to foul his trail with
just any other creature; and, the highway being, as I have said, a sort
of public affair, he met first a mouse gone astray, then a mole asleep,
then a long-tailed wood-mouse, then a short-tailed field-vole, then a
shrew about as big as your little finger. But they must have heard the
scrape of the snake's scales down that echoing tunnel following hard
behind, for they avoided our bank-vole like the plague, and dived up
one or other of the thousand and one side-tunnels, which opened on to
the main one, too quickly for the viper to catch them.
Then the poor, little, panting bank-vole found himself once more in the
open. His beady eyes shone like microscopic stars as lie paused in a
copper bar of setting sunlight and looked about for a refuge. It
seemed, by the piston-like throb of the whole body, that his heart
would burst and slay him out of hand before the hated snake could, if
he did not jolly soon find one.
Then a hedge caught his eye, and he climbed it, being a good acrobat in
his spare time. Beyond, however, bringing down upon himself the pecks
of several birds, he did no good, for it seemed that, whithersoever he
could go, the snake could follow, and--help!--the flat, terrible head
was not a yard from him now.