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Page 3
A new terror held Baree rooted there. In an instant the whole world had
changed. It was a flood of sunlight. Everywhere he looked he could see
strange things. But it was the sun that frightened him most. It was his
first impression of fire, and it made his eyes smart. He would have
slunk back into the friendly gloom of the windfall, but at this moment
Gray Wolf came around the end of a great log, followed by Kazan. She
muzzled Baree joyously, and Kazan in a most doglike fashion wagged his
tail. This mark of the dog was to be a part of Baree. Half wolf, he
would always wag his tail. He tried to wag it now. Perhaps Kazan saw
the effort, for he emitted a muffled yelp of approbation as he sat back
on his haunches.
Or he might have been saying to Gray Wolf:
"Well, we've got the little rascal out of that windfall at last,
haven't we?"
For Baree it had been a great day. He had discovered his father--and
the world.
CHAPTER 2
And it was a wonderful world--a world of vast silence, empty of
everything but the creatures of the wild. The nearest Hudson's Bay post
was a hundred miles away, and the first town of civilization was a
straight three hundred to the south. Two years before, Tusoo, the Cree
trapper, had called this his domain. It had come down to him, as was
the law of the forests, through generations of forefathers. But Tusoo
had been the last of his worn-out family; he had died of smallpox, and
his wife and his children had died with him. Since then no human foot
had taken up his trails. The lynx had multiplied. The moose and caribou
had gone unhunted by man. The beaver had built their
homes--undisturbed. The tracks of the black bear were as thick as the
tracks of the deer farther south. And where once the deadfalls and
poison baits of Tusoo had kept the wolves thinned down, there was no
longer a menace for these mohekuns of the wilderness.
Following the sun of this first wonderful day came the moon and the
stars of Baree's first real night. It was a splendid night, and with it
a full red moon sailed up over the forests, flooding the earth with a
new kind of light, softer and more beautiful to Baree. The wolf was
strong in him, and he was restless. He had slept that day in the warmth
of the sun, but he could not sleep in this glow of the moon. He nosed
uneasily about Gray Wolf, who lay flat on her belly, her beautiful head
alert, listening yearningly to the night sounds, and for the tonguing
of Kazan, who had slunk away like a shadow to hunt.
Half a dozen times, as Baree wandered about near the windfall, he heard
a soft whir over his head, and once or twice he saw gray shadows
floating swiftly through the air. They were the big northern owls
swooping down to investigate him, and if he had been a rabbit instead
of a wolf dog whelp, his first night under the moon and stars would
have been his last; for unlike Wapoos, the rabbit, he was not cautious.
Gray Wolf did not watch him closely. Instinct told her that in these
forests there was no great danger for Baree except at the hands of man.
In his veins ran the blood of the wolf. He was a hunter of all other
wild creatures, but no other creature, either winged or fanged, hunted
him.
In a way Baree sensed this. He was not afraid of the owls. He was not
afraid of the strange bloodcurdling cries they made in the black spruce
tops. But once fear entered into him, and he scurried back to his
mother. It was when one of the winged hunters of the air swooped down
on a snowshoe rabbit, and the squealing agony of the doomed creature
set his heart thumping like a little hammer. He felt in those cries the
nearness of that one ever-present tragedy of the wild--death. He felt
it again that night when, snuggled close to Gray Wolf, he listened to
the fierce outcry of a wolf pack that was close on the heels of a young
caribou bull. And the meaning of it all, and the wild thrill of it all,
came home to him early in the gray dawn when Kazan returned, holding
between his jaws a huge rabbit that was still kicking and squirming
with life.
This rabbit was the climax in the first chapter of Baree's education.
It was as if Gray Wolf and Kazan had planned it all out, so that he
might receive his first instruction in the art of killing. When Kazan
had dropped it, Baree approached the big hare cautiously. The back of
Wapoos, the rabbit, was broken. His round eyes were glazed, and he had
ceased to feel pain. But to Baree, as he dug his tiny teeth into the
heavy fur under Wapoos's throat, the hare was very much alive. The
teeth did not go through into the flesh. With puppyish fierceness Baree
hung on. He thought that he was killing. He could feel the dying
convulsions of Wapoos. He could hear the last gasping breaths leaving
the warm body, and he snarled and tugged until finally he fell back
with a mouthful of fur. When he returned to the attack, Wapoos was
quite dead, and Baree continued to bite and snarl until Gray Wolf came
with her sharp fangs and tore the rabbit to pieces. After that followed
the feast.
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