ALONE IN DARKNESS
Never had the terror and loneliness of blindness fallen upon Gray Wolf
as in the days that followed the shooting of Kazan and his capture by
Sandy McTrigger. For hours after the shot she crouched in the bush back
from the river, waiting for him to come to her. She had faith that he
would come, as he had come a thousand times before, and she lay close on
her belly, sniffing the air, and whining when it brought no scent of her
mate. Day and night were alike an endless chaos of darkness to her now,
but she knew when the sun went down. She sensed the first deepening
shadows of evening, and she knew that the stars were out, and that the
river lay in moonlight. It was a night to roam, and after a time she
moved restlessly about in a small circle on the plain, and sent out her
first inquiring call for Kazan. Up from the river came the pungent odor
of smoke, and instinctively she knew that it was this smoke, and the
nearness of man, that was keeping Kazan from her. But she went no nearer
than that first circle made by her padded feet. Blindness had taught her
to wait. Since the day of the battle on the Sun Rock, when the lynx had
destroyed her eyes, Kazan had never failed her. Three times she called
for him in the early night. Then she made herself a nest under a
_banskian_ shrub, and waited until dawn.
Just how she knew when night blotted out the last glow of the sun, so
without seeing she knew when day came. Not until she felt the warmth of
the sun on her back did her anxiety overcome her caution. Slowly she
moved toward the river, sniffing the air and whining. There was no
longer the smell of smoke in the air, and she could not catch the scent
of man. She followed her own trail back to the sand-bar, and in the
fringe of thick bush overhanging the white shore of the stream she
stopped and listened. After a little she scrambled down and went
straight to the spot where she and Kazan were drinking when the shot
came. And there her nose struck the sand still wet and thick with
Kazan's blood. She knew it was the blood of her mate, for the scent of
him was all about her in the sand, mingled with the man-smell of Sandy
McTrigger. She sniffed the trail of his body to the edge of the stream,
where Sandy had dragged him to the canoe. She found the fallen tree to
which he had been tied. And then she came upon one of the two clubs that
Sandy had used to beat wounded Kazan into submissiveness. It was covered
with blood and hair, and all at once Gray Wolf lay back on her haunches
and turned her blind face to the sky, and there rose from her throat a
cry for Kazan that drifted for miles on the wings of the south wind.
Never had Gray Wolf given quite that cry before. It was not the "call"
that comes with the moonlit nights, and neither was it the hunt-cry, nor
the she-wolf's yearning for matehood. It carried with it the lament of
death. And after that one cry Gray Wolf slunk back to the fringe of bush
over the river, and lay with her face turned to the stream.
A strange terror fell upon her. She had grown accustomed to darkness,
but never before had she been _alone_ in that darkness. Always there
had been the guardianship of Kazan's presence. She heard the clucking
sound of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound
came to her as if from out of another world. A ground-mouse rustled
through the grass close to her forepaws, and she snapped at it, and
closed her teeth on a rock. The muscles of her shoulders twitched
tremulously and she shivered as if stricken by intense cold. She was
terrified by the darkness that shut out the world from her, and she
pawed at her closed eyes, as if she might open them to light. Early in
the afternoon she wandered back on the plain. It was different. It
frightened her, and soon she returned to the beach, and snuggled down
under the tree where Kazan had lain. She was not so frightened here. The
smell of Kazan was strong about her. For an hour she lay motionless,
with her head resting on the club clotted with his hair and blood. Night
found her still there. And when the moon and the stars came out she
crawled back into the pit in the white sand that Kazan's body had made
under the tree.
With dawn she went down to the edge of the stream to drink. She could
not see that the day was almost as dark as night, and that the
gray-black sky was a chaos of slumbering storm. But she could smell the
presence of it in the thick air, and could _feel_ the forked flashes of
lightning that rolled up with the dense pall from the south and west.
The distant rumbling of thunder grew louder, and she huddled herself
again under the tree. For hours the storm crashed over her, and the rain
fell in a deluge. When it had finished she slunk out from her shelter
like a thing beaten. Vainly she sought for one last scent of Kazan. The
club was washed clean. Again the sand was white where Kazan's blood had
reddened it. Even under the tree there was no sign of him left.
Until now only the terror of being alone in the pit of darkness that
enveloped her had oppressed Gray Wolf. With afternoon came hunger. It
was this hunger that drew her from the sand-bar, and she wandered back
into the plain. A dozen times she scented game, and each time it evaded
her. Even a ground-mouse that she cornered under a root, and dug out
with her paws, escaped her fangs.
Thirty-six hours before this Kazan and Gray Wolf had left a half of
their last kill a mile of two farther back on the plain. The kill was
one of the big barren rabbits, and Gray Wolf turned in its direction.
She did not require sight to find it. In her was developed to its finest
point that sixth sense of the animal kingdom, the sense of orientation,
and as straight as a pigeon might have winged its flight she cut through
the bush to the spot where they had cached the rabbit. A white fox had
been there ahead of her, and she found only scattered bits of hair and
fur. What the fox had left the moose-birds and bush-jays had carried
away. Hungrily Gray Wolf turned back to the river.
That night she slept again where Kazan had lain, and three times she
called for him without answer. A heavy dew fell, and it drenched the
last vestige of her mate's scent out of the sand. But still through the
day that followed, and the day that followed that, blind Gray Wolf clung
to the narrow rim of white sand. On the fourth day her hunger reached a
point where she gnawed the bark from willow bushes. It was on this day
that she made a discovery. She was drinking, when her sensitive nose
touched something in the water's edge that was smooth, and bore a faint
odor of flesh. It was one of the big northern river clams. She pawed it
ashore, sniffing at the hard shell. Then she crunched it between her
teeth. She had never tasted sweeter meat than that which she found
inside, and she began hunting for other clams. She found many of them,
and ate until she was no longer hungry. For three days more she remained
on the bar.
And then, one night, the call came to her. It set her quivering with a
strange new excitement--something that may have been a new hope, and in
the moonlight she trotted nervously up and down the shining strip of
sand, facing now the north, and now the south, and then the east and the
west--her head flung up, listening, as if in the soft wind of the night
she was trying to locate the whispering lure of a wonderful voice. And
whatever it was that came to her came from out of the south and east.
Off there--across the barren, far beyond the outer edge of the northern
timber-line--was _home_. And off there, in her brute way, she reasoned
that she must find Kazan. The call did not come from their old windfall
home in the swamp. It came from beyond that, and in a flashing vision
there rose through her blindness a picture of the towering Sun Rock, of
the winding trail that led to it, and the cabin on the plain. It was
there that blindness had come to her. It was there that day had ended,
and eternal night had begun. And it was there that she had mothered her
first-born. Nature had registered these things so that they could never
be wiped out of her memory, and when the call came it was from the
sunlit world where she had last known light and life and had last seen
the moon and the stars in the blue night of the skies.
And to that call she responded, leaving the river and its food behind
her--straight out into the face of darkness and starvation, no longer
fearing death or the emptiness of the world she could not see; for ahead
of her, two hundred miles away, she could see the Sun Rock, the winding
trail, the nest of her first-born between the two big rocks--_and
Kazan_!