AN EMPTY WORLD
Mile after mile Kazan went on. For a time he was oppressed by the
shivering note of death that had come to him in Sandy McTrigger's cry,
and he slipped through the _banskians_ like a shadow, his ears
flattened, his tail trailing, his hindquarters betraying that curious
slinking quality of the wolf and dog stealing away from danger. Then he
came out upon a plain, and the stillness, the billion stars in the clear
vault of the sky, and the keen air that carried with it a breath of the
Arctic barrens made him alert and questioning. He faced the direction of
the wind. Somewhere off there, far to the south and west, was Gray Wolf.
For the first time in many weeks he sat back on his haunches and gave
the deep and vibrant call that echoed weirdly for miles about him. Back
in the _banskians_ the big Dane heard it, and whined. From over the
still body of Sandy McTrigger the little professor looked up with a
white tense face, and listened for a second cry. But instinct told Kazan
that to that first call there would be no answer, and now he struck out
swiftly, galloping mile after mile, as a dog follows the trail of its
master home. He did not turn hack to the lake, nor was his direction
toward Red Gold City. As straight as he might have followed a road
blazed by the hand of man he cut across the forty miles of plain and
swamp and forest and rocky ridge that lay between him and the McFarlane.
All that night he did not call again for Gray Wolf. With him reasoning
was a process brought about by habit--by precedent--and as Gray Wolf had
waited for him many times before he knew that she would be waiting for
him now near the sand-bar.
By dawn he had reached the river, within three miles of the sand-bar.
Scarcely was the sun up when he stood on the white strip of sand where
he and Gray Wolf had come down to drink. Expectantly and confidently he
looked about him for Gray Wolf, whining softly, and wagging his tail. He
began to search for her scent, but rains had washed even her footprints
from the clean sand. All that day he searched for her along the river
and out on the plain. He went to where they had killed their last
rabbit. He sniffed at the bushes where the poison baits had hung. Again
and again he sat back on his haunches and sent out his mating cry to
her. And slowly, as he did these things, nature was working in him that
miracle of the wild which the Crees have named the "spirit call." As it
had worked in Gray Wolf, so now it stirred the blood of Kazan. With the
going of the sun, and the sweeping about him of shadowy night, he turned
more and more to the south and east. His whole world was made up of the
trails over which he had hunted. Beyond those places he did not know
that there was such a thing as existence. And in that world, small in
his understanding of things, was Gray Wolf. He could not miss her. That
world, in his comprehension of it, ran from the McFarlane in a narrow
trail through the forests and over the plains to the little valley from
which the beavers had driven them. If Gray Wolf was not here--she was
there, and tirelessly he resumed his quest of her.
Not until the stars were fading out of the sky again, and gray day was
giving place to night, did exhaustion and hunger stop him. He killed a
rabbit, and for hours after he had feasted he lay close to his kill, and
slept. Then he went on.
The fourth night he came to the little valley between the two ridges,
and under the stars, more brilliant now in the chill clearness of the
early autumn nights, he followed the creek down into their old swamp
home. It was broad day when he reached the edge of the great beaver pond
that now completely surrounded the windfall under which Gray-Wolf's
second-born had come into the world. Broken Tooth and the other beavers
had wrought a big change in what had once been his home and Gray Wolf's,
and for many minutes Kazan stood silent and motionless at the edge of
the pond, sniffing the air heavy with the unpleasant odor of the
usurpers. Until now his spirit had remained unbroken. Footsore, with
thinned sides and gaunt head, he circled slowly through the swamp. All
that day he searched. And his crest lay flat now, and there was a hunted
look in the droop of his shoulders and in the shifting look of his
eyes. Gray Wolf was gone.
Slowly nature was impinging that fact upon him. She had passed out of
his world and out of his life, and he was filled with a loneliness and a
grief so great that the forest seemed strange, and the stillness of the
wild a thing that now oppressed and frightened him. Once more the dog in
him was mastering the wolf. With Gray Wolf he had possessed the world of
freedom. Without her, that world was so big and strange and empty that
it appalled him. Late in the afternoon he came upon a little pile of
crushed clamshells on the shore of the stream. He sniffed at
them--turned away--went back, and sniffed again. It was where Gray Wolf
had made a last feast in the swamp before continuing south. But the
scent she had left behind was not strong enough to tell Kazan, and for a
second time he turned away. That night he slunk under a log, and cried
himself to sleep. Deep in the night he grieved in his uneasy slumber,
like a child. And day after day, and night after night, Kazan remained a
slinking creature of the big swamp, mourning for the one creature that
had brought him out of chaos into light, who had filled his world for
him, and who, in going from him, had taken from this world even the
things that Gray Wolf had lost in her blindness.