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Page 45
An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the
west the tonguing of the wolf pack. It was not far distant, probably
not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick
yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the
long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose,
and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegun
laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.
The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put
Baree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was running
blindly, favored by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes the
pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase
swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half
a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush
directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with
their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou
burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards
from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it
disappeared. And then came the pack.
At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree's heart leaped for
an instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run
away from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. He
no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf--all
wolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the
passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the
pack.
Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her. In
the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have
her at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one
of the gray monsters of the pack. Half a minute later a new hunter
swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a
third. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new
companions. He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap
of their jaws as they ran--and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the
sound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in
its race for life.
It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always. He had joined it
naturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush.
There had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had given
him in the open, and no hostility. He belonged with these slim,
swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped and
his blood ran hot as the smell of the caribou grew heavier, and the
sound of its crashing body nearer.
It seemed to him they were almost at its heels when they swept into an
open plain, a stretch of barren without a tree or a shrub, brilliant in
the light of the stars and moon. Across its unbroken carpet of snow
sped the caribou a spare hundred yards ahead of the pack. Now the two
leading hunters no longer followed directly in the trail, but shot out
at an angle, one to the right and the other to the left of the pursued,
and like well-trained soldiers the pack split in halves and spread out
fan shape in the final charge.
The two ends of the fan forged ahead and closed in, until the leaders
were running almost abreast of the caribou, with fifty or sixty feet
separating them from the pursued. Thus, adroitly and swiftly, with
deadly precision, the pack had formed a horseshoe cordon of fangs from
which there was but one course of flight--straight ahead. For the
caribou to swerve half a degree to the right or left meant death. It
was the duty of the leaders to draw in the ends of the horseshoe now,
until one or both of them could make the fatal lunge for the
hamstrings. After that it would be a simple matter. The pack would
close in over the caribou like an inundation.
Baree had found his place in the lower rim of the horseshoe, so that he
was fairly well in the rear when the climax came. The plain made a
sudden dip. Straight ahead was the gleam of water--water shimmering
softly in the starglow, and the sight of it sent a final great spurt of
blood through the caribou's bursting heart. Forty seconds would tell
the story--forty seconds of a last spurt for life, of a final
tremendous effort to escape death. Baree felt the sudden thrill of
these moments, and he forged ahead with the others in that lower rim of
the horseshoe as one of the leading wolves made a lunge for the young
bull's hamstring. It was a clean miss. A second wolf darted in. And
this one also missed.
There was no time for others to take their place. From the broken end
of the horseshoe Baree heard the caribou's heavy plunge into water.
When Baree joined the pack, a maddened, mouth-frothing, snarling horde,
Napamoos, the young bull, was well out in the river and swimming
steadily for the opposite shore.
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