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Page 14
Suddenly Oohoomisew ceased his beating and launched himself upward.
Like huge fans his powerful wings churned the air, and Baree felt
himself lifted suddenly from the earth. Still he held on--and in a
moment both bird and beast fell back with a thud.
Oohoomisew tried again. This time he was more successful, and he rose
fully six feet into the air with Baree. They fell again. A third time
the old outlaw fought to wing himself free of Baree's grip; and then,
exhausted, he lay with his giant wings outspread, hissing and cracking
his bill.
Under those wings Baree's mind worked with the swift instincts of the
killer. Suddenly he changed his hold, burying his fangs into the under
part of Oohoomisew's body. They sank into three inches of feathers.
Swift as Baree had been, Oohoomisew was equally swift to take advantage
of his opportunity. In an instant he had swooped upward. There was a
jerk, a rending of feathers from flesh--and Baree was alone on the
field of battle.
Baree had not killed, but he had conquered. His first great day--or
night--had come. The world was filled with a new promise for him, as
vast as the night itself. And after a moment he sat back on his
haunches, sniffing the air for his beaten enemy. Then, as if defying
the feathered monster to come back and fight to the end, he pointed his
sharp little muzzle up to the stars and sent forth his first babyish
wolf howl into the night.
CHAPTER 6
Baree's fight with Oohoomisew was good medicine for him. It not only
gave him great confidence in himself, but it also cleared the fever of
ugliness from his blood. He no longer snapped and snarled at things as
he went on through the night.
It was a wonderful night. The moon was straight overhead, and the sky
was filled with stars, so that in the open spaces the light was almost
like that of day, except that it was softer and more beautiful. It was
very still. There was no wind in the treetops, and it seemed to Baree
that the howl he had given must have echoed to the end of the world.
Now and then Baree heard a sound--and always he stopped, attentive and
listening. Far away he heard the long, soft mooing of a cow moose. He
heard a great splashing in the water of a small lake that he came to,
and once there came to him the sharp cracking of horn against horn--two
bucks settling a little difference of opinion a quarter of a mile away.
But it was always the wolf howl that made him sit and listen longest,
his heart beating with a strange impulse which he did not as yet
understand. It was the call of his breed, growing in him slowly but
insistently.
He was still a wanderer--pupamootao, the Indians call it. It is this
"wander spirit" that inspires for a time nearly every creature of the
wild as soon as it is able to care for itself--nature's scheme,
perhaps, for doing away with too close family relations and possibly
dangerous interbreeding. Baree, like the young wolf seeking new hunting
grounds, or the young fox discovering a new world, had no reason or
method in his wandering. He was simply "traveling"--going on. He wanted
something which he could not find. The wolf call brought it to him.
The stars and the moon filled Baree with a yearning for this something.
The distant sounds impinged upon him his great aloneness. And instinct
told him that only by questing could he find. It was not so much Kazan
and Gray Wolf that he missed now--not so much motherhood and home as it
was companionship. Now that he had fought the wolfish rage out of him
in his battle with Oohoomisew, the dog part of him had come into its
own again--the lovable half of him, the part that wanted to snuggle up
near something that was alive and friendly, small odds whether it wore
feathers or fur, was clawed or hoofed.
He was sore from the Willow's bullet, and he was sore from battle, and
toward dawn he lay down under a shelter of some alders at the edge of a
second small lake and rested until midday. Then he began questing in
the reeds and close to the pond lilies for food. He found a dead
jackfish, partly eaten by a mink, and finished it.
His wound was much less painful this afternoon, and by nightfall he
scarcely noticed it at all. Since his almost tragic end at the hands of
Nepeese, he had been traveling in a general northeasterly direction,
following instinctively the run of the waterways. But his progress had
been slow, and when darkness came again he was not more than eight or
ten miles from the hole into which he had fallen after the Willow had
shot him.
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