by Brand, Max
“I did. That’s why I left you with Parade.”
“Why didn’t you kill her?” asked Gary. “They have the dogs, and the dogs still will know her scent. They ran her down before, and they’ll run her down again. That pack will trail and catch any wolf in the world except Frosty. You should have killed her, chief.”
Silver drew a long breath and shook his head ruefully.
“Perhaps I should,” he admitted. “But just then it seemed to me that she’d won a right to run a little longer beside Frosty. Gold mine or no gold mine — cattle killing or not — Frosty has some of the makings of a gentleman, Alec. Anyway, Barry Christian is the worst wolf of the lot!”
CHAPTER XXII
Surrounded
IT rained all of seven days. It rained as the sky can only in the mountains. The winds held steadily in the northwest, carrying vast masses of water vapor in toward the heights, where the currents were forced upward, the mist congealed to drops, and mile-deep clouds disgorged their contents swiftly, continuously.
The sound of the rivers increased all through the land. The forests were sodden. The grasses were pale. A million little rivulets, running day and night, carried yellow detritus down the slopes, and in the ravines the creeks were white with eager speed, and the rivers they joined kept thundering with increasing voices.
There was rain by day and rain by night. Only now and again was there a pause as the clouds broke up for an hour or more. The lowlands were flooded. Worst danger of all, now and then a cloudburst filled a number of upper ravines all in an hour, and sent the contents hurtling down into the narrows of some greater valley, a wall of water, a great bore that whittled the trees off the banks, shaved away the banks themselves, reached out casual hands here and there, and flicked cabins and all their contents into the basins of the streams.
But all through this bad weather Frosty was the happiest wolf in the Rocky Mountains. On the night when his mate was delivered from the second mortal peril of her life, he had heard her howl of freedom, of release, and of yearning, and he had come to her as to a star. After that he had marched straight across the mountains, passing right out of his known range into strange country. He had turned the next day and come back into his own country, to a point a full thirty miles away from his former abode with his mate. And on that day he had found a young and foolish deer in the higher hills, and he had taught his mate the delightful game of deer hunting.
Wolves do the trick by knowing the habits of a deer, which runs full speed for a certain length of time, and then, if not followed closely, turns off the trail sharply to one side or the other, and is apt to lie down and try to make itself invisible in the woods until it has regained its breath.
The trick consists in spotting the deer and then posting a hunter at either end of the approximate course in which it is expected that the venison will run. Frosty was an old master of the art, not because he had had help before in doing the thing, but because he more than once had studied the devices of others of his kind from some high place, and had waited until the kill before he descended to rob the victors of their prize.
There was nothing that Frosty liked so much as meat that had been warmed for him by the labors of others!
Now he had a mate faster than himself on foot, though not so enduring, and, though she had not his brains, she was at least a good pupil and a faithful follower. So he took her down the valley, posted her, returned to the deer, and gave the animal a good flying start toward the she-wolf. That deer ran through the valley three miles like a raging wind. At the end of the three miles Whisper sprang up.
She headed the deer right back up the valley, and the hunted beast, with not a doubt that it was the same wolf which, wing-footed, had managed to head her off, came hurling back up the valley, only to find big Frosty, fresh and well rested, all prepared for her.
She knew then that she had been tricked, and broke straight up the valley slope to get to new ground; but six miles of sprinting will kill the heart of even a strong deer; she lasted another five miles or so, with Frosty at her heels. Then he cut her down, called Whisper, and would not taste a morsel until Whisper had come running up and been received by his red laugh of welcome.
The deer was the beginning of a streak of good luck and astute hunting which kept their larder filled, and though Frosty kept thinking of the fat lowlands where the scent of game was crossed by the odor of man and steel, he refrained from leading his mate down on another expedition. Her eyes were still uneasy. In her sleep she moaned and twitched her legs, still fleeing from man in her dreams.
In the meantime, there was no sight, or sound, or smell of the dog pack that had caught her once before, but on the seventh day after her escape the keen ear of Frosty, which was always studying the sounds of the mountains and dissolving them into their component parts, detected the baying of dogs.
He knew the hateful chorus and leaped to his feet. His mate jumped to his side with her mane bristling. She held her head high, exactly like his, and then she made out the gloomy music in the distance once more.
Her red length of tongue hung out. She began to pant, and with her shifting, bright eyes she searched for shelter. There would not be much run in her this time. Terror would freeze up the strength of her limbs quickly; fear would constrict her breathing.
So Frosty headed for the best water hazard that he knew anything about.
Wolves don’t like water, but neither do dogs. Frosty headed straight for the Purchass River, whose valley splits the Blue Waters in a long knife stroke. What Frosty wanted to do was to enter the current and swim down it a considerable distance until he would reach a series of low sand bars that ran out from the farther shore. There he could land and wade ashore into thick brush.
Twice before this he had shaken off persistent hunters after his scalp by the same maneuver, and though he was not one to duplicate his measures in times of need, he felt assured that this was the trick to get Whisper away from the dogs with the least expenditure of effort.
So he jogged overland with her. On the high verge of the Purchass ravine he paused and looked over the ragged mountains through which they had just come, and listened to the hateful singing of the dog pack far away. Then he took Whisper zigzagging down the side of the canyon to the flat ground beside the water.
The stream was high. It had swollen to such a degree that it was eating away the banks on both sides. Even as he watched, he saw a young willow tree topple, sink, and then whirl away down the creek.
That was a bad sign. When things whirled in running water it meant that there are undertows, cross-currents, all sorts of things that will pull down a wolf, no matter how strong a swimmer he may be. Frosty had almost drowned one day in water that to the casual eye seemed almost perfectly calm. That had taught him to watch with care the movement of anything that floated on the face of a stream before he ventured into it.
It had been his plan to take to the water almost at once, so as to make a greater gap between the point where he entered the creek and the place at which he left it.
Now he hesitated so long that at last he heard the cry of the dog pack open on the heights above him. That started him forward again.
He decided that he would run down around the bend where the creek was joined by two small tributaries and swelled out, at certain seasons of the year, into quite a river. So he headed forward with Whisper and turned the bend.
He was troubled even before he came in sight of the new picture. The air trembled with noises such as he had never heard in this valley before. Was it merely sound that worked on him, or was there really a slight shuddering of the rocks over which he ran?
Then he ran around the bend and had full view of a very strange picture indeed. The whole place was so changed that he could hardly recognize it. It filled him with fear to find such alteration. It was like dreaming a thing small and finding it big. The creek he had seen much swollen above its usual size, but it was nothing compared with the two tributaries which here join
ed the main channel. They came bounding out of their ravines like endless chains of wild horses, throwing heads and manes, and neighing all together on a deep note of thunder.
Seven days of steady rain had turned the trick. And still there were great black clouds to the northwest sweeping down to hide the tops of the mountains, pouring continual floods out of the sky. To carry away those floods the courses of the creeks hardly sufficed. They were crowded. Old banks had been ripped away. Still the throats of the creeks were gorged. The booming and the dashing noises were something hardly to be believed.
And the shallows where Frosty had trusted that he could land? Well, there was a good, big, fat-sided island below the junction a little distance, and now that island had been whittled away until it lifted a transparent streak of foliage only. Frosty could look right through the brush and the trees to the bright frothing of the water beyond.
But the noise was worse than the alteration of the scene. The noise stunned him. However, it was no time for hesitation now. If he could not use the river as a water hazard, he would have to foot it down the valley as fast as he could run, and then cut back up the slope as soon as the sheer rock cliffs diminished to angles that he could climb. There was a cave that tunneled through half a mile of darkness in the bosom of Thunder Mountain, and offered one small exit on the other side of the peak. He would take Whisper there. In the narrows of the dark passage he could fight off the dogs for a time, at least, and after Whisper was rested, he could go on again with her.
However, he was already very troubled as he turned down the stream once more, and it was then that danger rose up and struck against his eyes close by. For issuing out of a side pass a mile down the canyon came two riders, the sun flashing on their naked rifles!
Frosty bared his teeth in a snarl as he understood. They had divined, with their crafty human brains, that he was heading across country toward the valley of the Purchass. Therefore they had divided their forces. The dog pack, which was now sending its cry right down the ravine toward the fugitives, had stuck close to the scent. The two riders had taken horse and rifle by a short way to the lower valley, hoping to head off the fugitives.
And they had done it! On one side Frosty had the high, sheer face of the rock wall of the valley. Behind him came the dogs. Before him rode the riflemen.
On the other side there was the deadly rush and swirling of the water!
But the other three things meant certain death. The water was the least terrible choice of all. He hunched his shoulder against Whisper and forced her toward the brink of the stream. She flashed about at him, her eyes green with dangerous light, but in a moment she understood, and obediently, but trembling, stepped down into the stream.
The water was not very cold — but what force it had! It was tugging and pulling as though in anger before Frosty was knee-deep. However, it had to be endured. He stuck out his head and hurled himself forward in a long skimming dive. The water closed over him. A trick of the current started him rolling. He came up, thoroughly soaked, half blinded, and saw Whisper still tumbling and struggling in the same cross-catch of the water.
Now she righted, saw him, and tried to swim to him, with panic in her eyes. The currents caught her and thrust her away. She began to struggle blindly. So Frosty headed deliberately toward her, though she was closer to the shore; and up that shore came two riders, rifles ready, gesticulating. And from the head of the ravine ran the dog pack.
Well, those hunters would never get their dogs into such water as this — not even when the prey was in full sight!
Whisper, when Frosty was close to her, mastered her panic once more and struck out more steadily. They inched away from the bank. Sometimes the riffles of the water covered their heads. Sometimes the currents would catch at them and throw them bodily forward at great speed. Sometimes they tried to dodge as shooting logs, the wreckage from forest far back in the mountains, slid past them. Sometimes those logs were rolling rapidly. Sometimes the currents started Frosty rolling, too.
They had rounded the bend. The two riflemen were riding the bank, watching. It was strange that the shooting had not started!
It seemed certain that Frosty could not reach the head of the almost washed-out island. He would have to strike it somewhere on the flank.
Then he found a streak of white water that rushed him straight down past the entire length of the island and left him floundering, very tired and breathless, in the middle of the stream below the island. He knew that he could not swim back to either shore from that position. But there was one sudden hope that appeared before his eyes. Right down the stream, a half mile away, loomed the broad forehead of another island, rather close to the left bank. He might be able to make that point.
But another sight stunned and bewildered him a moment later. For on the left bank of the stream he saw two riders, and one of them sat on the back of a horse that shone like a statue of gold. Frosty was hemmed in on either side, before and behind. He felt that he had come at last to the day of his death.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Voice of Man
DESPAIR made Frosty stop swimming for a moment, and his mate, in that interval, moved past him with a steady stroke. She swam well, very well. She seemed to be less paralyzed with panic, when she was in the water, than she had been on the dry land. Frosty took heart at once and drew level with her.
Guns were firing across the river. Bullets were chipping, now, at the water through which he progressed, as though the men of the dog pack realized that there was some ghost of a chance that Frosty might reach the island and escape through the brush and the trees.
Other guns fired from the opposite bank, though none of those bullets struck the water.
Then the gunfire continued, but not a single slug of lead touched Frosty or the river water about him.
He discovered, when he raised his head for a glance around, that the men and the horses and the dogs all had disappeared behind shrubs or rocks on both sides of the river. The firing continued — but not at Frosty. Was it possible that the men were shooting at one another?
The brain of Frosty could not quite understand. But what he did understand was that though his body and his struggling legs were very tired, it no longer seemed impossible to reach the island. Despair left him. If he had had to swim the distance, he would have been lost, he knew, but his swimming was only a small assistance to the strong current that drove him straight on toward the island. It was not big. It was very low of land. It was covered with straggling brush and a few small trees. But to Frosty it looked finer than any delightful hunting lands that ever he had traveled in his life.
The shooting, whirling current that continually rolled him under was now a blessing. He was willing to submit to its buffeting, for it was throwing him toward his goal.
His mate had begun to tire badly. Now and again she turned her head slowly toward him, her body slewing around a little. But there was not far to travel. The water shoaled suddenly away. Before them the current was curling against rocks and some half-drowned shrubs. As the firm bottom came under his feet, Frosty found himself so tired that he could hardly lift his weight. The water seemed a familiar and helpful element now, and the air was hostile, giving no support whatever.
The she-wolf could hardly support herself. She went forward, wabbling and staggering, as bullets, in a sudden flight, sang through the air about them, bit the water, crackled through the brush, thudded against the rocks. The men from the dog pack had opened fire again!
Whisper got into the safety of the low brush. Frosty leaped after her, gathering his strength desperately for the effort. It was while he was in the air that a bullet from Barry Christian’s rifle struck him. The slug went right through his hind quarters. He fell forward, sprawling.
There was not much pain. There was only a numbness, and his hind legs would not obey his will. They would not move. He lay in the brush bewildered. He turned his head and snapped at the air as though at a fly.
Whisper came
up to him, whimpering, smelled his blood, drew back, and sat down to howl.
Then the pain began.
It started with the wound and ran down in cold electric shudderings to his hind toes. It thrust upward in hot gripings into his entrails. He knew as well as a man could have known that something ought to be done, but he could not tell what.
He wanted darkness, quiet, the stillness of a cave. So he dragged himself forward, working hard with his forelegs and pulling the weight of his body after him. He worked himself in this fashion through the brush and up a rise to the top of the only small eminence of land on the island.
Through gaps in the brush and the trees he could see the river on both sides of him. The water was running with a great, foaming rush toward the side of the river from which he had swum. On the other side the extent of the river was almost as great, but it seemed shallower, and the currents did not thrust with such boiling force. That was the side of the man with the golden horse, the man who had been twice so close to Frosty that by closing his eyes and shrinking his sensitive nostrils a little the wolf could remember him perfectly.
Whisper came and licked one of the wounds. She stood back, shaking her head like a doctor that gives up a case. For the blood kept on welling out. Frosty half closed his eyes and sniffed at the wound in his turn. The blood kept on coming. It had a hot smell. He knew the scent of his own blood, and that scent was sickening to him. It brought cold fear into his heart.
He lay still. His heart was beating rapidly, shaking his body against the ground. And the pain was terrible. It ate at his nerves, corroded his strength and courage, made him want to howl the death song. But he kept the voice back. He had learned the value of silence.
He kept his eyes shut. He wanted darkness, and felt that in the black of the night everything might be well for him.
Then Whisper came, with a snarl humming in the back of her throat. She was stiff on her toes, her mane ruffing up; she looked exactly as though she were going to attack him, but then he followed the direction in which her head pointed, and he was able to see, through the brush, that the golden stallion had been ridden down into the river. It was swimming with powerful strokes toward the island, and the man was with it.