|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 12
Above his pain there rose in him a strange and thrilling fascination.
The girl put her two hands to her mouth and in a voice that was soft
and plaintive and amazingly comforting to his terrified little heart,
cried:
"Uchimoo--Uchimoo--Uchimoo!"
And then he heard another voice; and this voice, too, was far less
terrible than many sounds he had listened to in the forests.
"We cannot find him, Nepeese," the voice was saying. "He has crawled
off to die. It is too bad. Come."
Where Baree had stood in the edge of the open Pierrot paused and
pointed to a birch sapling that had been cut clean off by the Willow's
bullet. Nepeese understood. The sapling, no larger than her thumb, had
turned her shot a trifle and had saved Baree from instant death. She
turned again, and called:
"Uchimoo--Uchimoo--Uchimoo!"
Her eyes were no longer filled with the thrill of slaughter.
"He would not understand that," said Pierrot, leading the way across
the open. "He is wild--born of the wolves. Perhaps he was of Koomo's
lead bitch, who ran away to hunt with the packs last winter."
"And he will die--"
"Ayetun--yes, he will die."
But Baree had no idea of dying. He was too tough a youngster to be
shocked to death by a bullet passing through the soft flesh of his
foreleg. That was what had happened. His leg was torn to the bone, but
the bone itself was untouched. He waited until the moon had risen
before he crawled out of his hole.
His leg had grown stiff, but it had stopped bleeding, though his whole
body was racked by a terrible pain. A dozen Papayuchisews, all holding
right to his ears and nose, could not have hurt him more. Every time he
moved, a sharp twinge shot through him; and yet he persisted in moving.
Instinctively he felt that by traveling away from the hole he would get
away from danger. This was the best thing that could have happened to
him, for a little later a porcupine came wandering along, chattering to
itself in its foolish, good-humored way, and fell with a fat thud into
the hole. Had Baree remained, he would have been so full of quills that
he must surely have died.
In another way the exercise of travel was good for Baree. It gave his
wound no opportunity to "set," as Pierrot would have said, for in
reality his hurt was more painful than serious. For the first hundred
yards he hobbled along on three legs, and after that he found that he
could use his fourth by humoring it a great deal. He followed the creek
for a half mile. Whenever a bit of brush touched his wound, he would
snap at it viciously, and instead of whimpering when he felt one of the
sharp twinges shooting through him, an angry little growl gathered in
his throat, and his teeth clicked. Now that he was out of the hole, the
effect of the Willow's shot was stirring every drop of wolf blood in
his body. In him there was a growing animosity--a feeling of rage not
against any one thing in particular, but against all things. It was not
the feeling with which he had fought Papayuchisew, the young owl. On
this night the dog in him had disappeared. An accumulation of
misfortunes had descended upon him, and out of these misfortunes--and
his present hurt--the wolf had risen savage and vengeful.
This was the first time Baree had traveled at night. He was, for the
time, unafraid of anything that might creep up on him out of the
darkness. The blackest shadows had lost their terror. It was the first
big fight between the two natures that were born in him--the wolf and
the dog--and the dog was vanquished. Now and then he stopped to lick
his wound, and as he licked it he growled, as though for the hurt
itself he held a personal antagonism. If Pierrot
could have seen and heard, he would have understood very quickly, and
he would have said: "Let him die. The club will never take that devil
out of him."
In this humor Baree came, an hour later, out of the heavy timber of the
creek bottom into the more open spaces of a small plain that ran along
the foot of a ridge. It was in this plain that Oohoomisew hunted.
Oohoomisew was a huge snow owl. He was the patriarch among all the owls
of Pierrot's trapping domain. He was so old that he was almost blind,
and therefore he never hunted as other owls hunted. He did not hide
himself in the black cover of spruce and balsam tops, or float softly
through the night, ready in an instant to swoop down upon his prey. His
eyesight was so poor that from a spruce top he could not have seen a
rabbit at all, and he might have mistaken a fox for a mouse.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|