A WOLF
When the campers awoke, the fog was beginning to lift and a gentle wind
was blowing from the northwest. The lake seemed to be quiet, but Ganawa
suggested that they walk along a game trail to the southwest corner of
the island, where they could have a look over the open water, which was
not sheltered by being in the lee of the island. Here an unexpected
sight met the eyes of the white boys. Past the rocky point of the
island was sweeping a wild sea; at least that was the impression
produced in the minds of the white boys by the ceaselessly rolling,
swishing, breaking, splashing and pounding waves that kept rolling on
and on from the great open sea to the northwest and were ever crowding,
crowding in upon the shore and the islands of the southeastern part of
the lake over a stretch of open water of some two hundred miles.
“Ugh, look at them smash against the shore!” Ray exclaimed to Bruce.
“You will see, Bruce, some day they will eat up the whole island.”
Ganawa, however, was not at all excited by the dashing and breaking
waves. With a far-away gaze he stood and looked out upon the restless
sea, and Bruce wondered where the thoughts of the old hunter were
roaming. Perhaps he was thinking of Hamogeesik. Or was he trying to
work out in his mind the best route, where they might search with some
probability of finding a trace of Bruce’s lost white friend? Bruce
himself felt utterly helpless and hopeless in this sublime great
wilderness of lake, islands, rocky shores, and grand sweeping wooded
hills, over which the silent forest stretched clear to Hudson Bay and
the Arctic regions.
“If I had known,” he said to himself as he was standing alone under a
weather-beaten spruce and looking out over the waves, “I never should
have had the nerve to come out to this region and try to find anything
or anybody; but I should have expected to lose everything, including my
life. On Lake George and Lake Champlain out east, one can see shores
and water and woods, and everything has an end; but here everything
stretches away into an endless vast; the lake, the shore, the hills and
forest, and I suppose the rivers will do the same if we ever begin to
explore them.”
While Ganawa and Bruce had each been busy with his own thoughts, Ray,
after the manner of a young boy, had seen all that Ganawa and Bruce had
seen; but upon him the grand sublime scene had a different effect. He
drank it all in, and his young mind was eager for more new impressions.
The past and the future did not worry him; he was living in the
present.
The sun was out by this time, the white gulls were sailing and
screaming near shore, and from the thickets came the whistle of
white-throats and the wild melody of the hermit-thrushes, but in the
sunshine now the songs were much more vigorous and vibrant than they
had been in the fog yesterday.
“My father,” asked Ray, “are we going to travel to-day?” On being told
that the lake was too rough for a canoe, Ray asked if he might run
about for a while on the game trails and along the shore. The sun was
out now, he assured Bruce, so he would not get lost again.
Neither Ganawa nor Bruce objected, and Ray started out along an old
moose or caribou trail. He did not expect to see any of this big game,
because Ganawa had told the white lads that all the large animals leave
the islands near the coast before the ice breaks up in spring. One
thing, however, Ray did not know, the visit of the strange animal to
the tepee during the preceding night. If he had known of that strange
beast, he would have been afraid to go exploring by himself.
He followed briskly a somewhat dim trail that led northward near the
west coast of the island, where waves and wind exerted their greatest
force and where the island has for several thousand years received the
most severe battering of the waves.
Ray followed this trail for the same reason that animals and men of all
ages have followed trails; because it is so much easier to travel along
a trail than to cut across the brush. The footing on a trail is much
more secure than it is across brush, roots, and rocks, and one does not
have to watch his direction so carefully.
Ray had walked, whistling and singing, about a mile, when the trail
turned a little away from the coast to an almost bare area of several
acres. At the end of this open space Ray saw something that for a
moment almost made his blood freeze.
On a big bare rock stood a wolf looking at him. Ray’s first impulse was
to turn and run; but he was too scared to run. He knew that if the wolf
followed him he would soon overtake him. So in sheer desperation and
make-believe courage Ray stepped up on a rock, swung his arms over his
head and yelled. But this wolf did not do what wolves are supposed to
do when they see a man in summer. He did not run, but he stood right
there, and he even wagged his tail, and Ray could see that he had a big
bushy tail.
And then before Ray’s very eyes, the wolf on the rock became
transformed. He suddenly lost the appearance of a wild wolf of the
Great Lakes country, and took on the shape and almost the color of a
creature with which Ray had often roamed the hills of Vermont, and Ray
had cried bitterly when Bruce had insisted that Ray could not take him
along.
Ray dropped the club he had picked up and for a moment he stood
spellbound. Then he called: “Shep! Come here, Shep! Come here!” And he
ran toward the animal. The animal also came bounding toward the boy.
The boy threw his arms around him, and the animal, as if mad with joy,
danced around the lad, and jumped up on him and almost knocked him over
in his unrestrained expression of joy.
“Come on, Shep, you go home with me.” The boy spoke as if he were
talking to a human being. “Don’t you get lost again. You stay right
with me. You are going with us. If they won’t let you go with us, I
shall stay right here on the island with you, and Ganawa and Bruce can
go alone and hunt up their man.”
And then the boy started back on the trail, the dog following close on
his heels, as if the two had been friends for years.