Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  He went on about his toilet with the most perfect care and indifference to the man approaching him. This time Cobalt determined to try a long cast. When he came within six steps, the beast yawned at him in the same horrible manner. That instant Cobalt made his cast. He flung with an underhand motion, which is the Mexican way, and the swiftest of all. The coil went out like a serpent striking, but it missed the Lightning Warrior. He had not leaped back or to the side. He simply jumped in, so that the rope flew over his head. As the lariat fell, Cobalt found himself unarmed, empty handed, with that massive killer crouching at his feet for the spring. What other man would have done what he did? He stepped straight forward, and the Lightning Warrior bounded lightly to the side. He approached again, and the snowy murderer fairly turned tail and fled across the wastes. The dog team saw him go, picked up heart, and sang a chorus of tardy defiance.

  Then Cobalt went back and sat down on his sled for a time. He was not feeling well. His hands were a trifle uncertain, and there was a slight sense of numbness about his knees. While he sat there, thinking of what he was attempting, he told himself that he was a fool. He thought back to Sylvia also.

  It was not only her beauty that drove him. It was also the memory of her dainty voice and her softly sneering ironies. Perhaps she was back there in Circle City, laughing at the idiot who had gone out into the wilderness because she chose to make a joke of him! But it was her wickedness which flavored her beauty. There was no other person like her. She stood apart from all the rest.

  After he had thought of her for a time, his strength and courage revived. He stood up, cut the dead leader from the harness, and drove on slowly. He knew that he was beginning a long duel. He was not prepared, however, for the full weight of the disaster which overtook him. His own relentless determination drove him on to court it.

  Two days out from Circle City, he had already lost a dog. Ten days later, his last one was gone. He was mushing ahead alone, pulling the sled with patient strength. Still the Lightning Warrior was following him! Just as he had followed Morrissey and almost destroyed the man on the verge of Circle City, so now he followed Cobalt. When his face was toward him, the beast dared not attack Cobalt.

  On the first day he had established a moral superiority, and the balance never shifted against him. But the danger would not come from the front. He would attack him from either side or, most probably, from the rear. If Cobalt could defend his back, his face was safe.

  Once, very tired, cold from a ripping wind, he built his fire and had it flaming when a sudden cramp of terror gripped the small of his back. He had heard, and he had seen, nothing of the Lightning Warrior all that day but, twitching around suddenly, he saw the monster in the act of leaping. Cobalt side-stepped. The big wolf twisted in the air and, striking the snow well beyond the fire, he was instantly gone among the brush again. That was a lesson for Cobalt.

  From that moment he lived as though he were surrounded by hostile Indians. One instant of lack of precaution and the teeth would be in his throat, and the beast would be drinking his blood. He kept to the woods most of the time. They were tenfold more perilous, in that they offered a chance for stalking to that werewolf. At the same time they might give him more chances to use the rope. In fact, in six weeks he cast the rope three times, including the first failure. Once the edge of the coil struck the monster between the eyes. But that was the closest Cobalt came to success.

  He decided that the rope was too light. It had to be heavier so that it could be thrown with speed, like a flexible metal cable. So he worked in strips of rawhide until the weight of the noose end of the rope was trebled. It was now like handling a mass of chain. The noose was stiffened, more likely to hold its form. As he practiced with the rope on stones and stumps, he told himself that he now had a half chance to succeed when next an opportunity came to him.

  For that opportunity he waited on the bank of a small salmon stream. He was glad of the fishing. His own supply of provisions was getting very low, but he worked at the fishing patiently, cleaned the big salmon, then cured them on racks above a fire. He accumulated far more food than he needed, because of the pleasure which he took in being merely occupied. The surplus he cached as high as practicable in trees.

  So the winter came, the river freezing to a stone. Still he waited there on the bank, and still the Lightning Warrior never left him! Once, before the long winter night began, in the dusk of the year, he had a sight of the loup-garouhunting. The thing amazed him and filled his mind like a nightmare for weeks thereafter. He had heard the long, deep hunting cry of the Lightning Warrior not far off, flying through the woods. As the noise approached very near, he went to see what he could find.

  There in a clearing he found the white monster, stalking in a swift circle around one of the biggest lynxes that Cobalt had ever seen. It did not seem possible that a wolf could undertake to make a stand against a full-grown lynx, with its equipment of needle fangs and knife-like claws. The wolf was attacking, but the manner of the attack was strange. There was no sudden rush in. The Lightning Warrior circled and circled, keeping just on the horizon of the cat’s leaping distance. The lynx turned slowly, by jerks, to face the danger, always tensed, always ready for the bound whose striking speed must make up for its lack of weight. Still the wolf circled until the lynx, turning its head, seemed to look for an opportunity to escape. The Lightning Warrior, marking that movement, slid in closer. The lynx bristled with head close to the ground, ready to spring, but still the wolf was not ready.

  For twenty minutes Cobalt, frozen with interest, watched the drama and gradually understood. The wild cat had the fighting power of an explosive, but its prodigious frenzy of strength could not endure with patience under any strain. Its moment for battle already was passing. Its nerves were crumbling. It was ready to flee. It dipped its head and licked at the snow. Its tufted ears flickered. Suddenly the Lightning Warrior struck. He had been going on his steady round for so long that even the cat who watched the scene was totally unprepared, and the big wild cat seemed hypnotized. It appeared to Cobalt that the lynx made not a single effort to save itself. The lobo simply caught it by the back of the neck and broke the spine.

  Cobalt could remember, with a bitter spirit, how the great beast had stalked him and his dog team, day after day, and reaped a red harvest. The creature was made of blood lust. Now he stood above the prey for a moment, gazing about it, ready to scent any suspicious smells upon the wind. Failing in this, he prepared to eat, and this was the moment when Cobalt gathered his rope, prepared his noose, and began to slide out from his place of covert to make another effort.

  VI. MAN AND BEAST

  BEASTS OF PREY, if they are wise, eat with the nose upwind, so that the invisible telegraph of the senses will inform them of dangers approaching. Their trouble in so doing is that crafty enemies may then stalk upwind to approach them. Their rear guard must be simply an occasional glance behind them. Beyond this it is their sharp hearing and, beyond all else, the aura of nervous apprehension that puts out tentacles to a distance around the beasts of prey and the preyed upon.

  Cobalt knew the manners of the wild well enough. He was amazed to see the Lightning Warrior reverse the procedure. He actually turned his back upwind, letting his nostrils gather their priceless tidings at a distinct disadvantage. It seemed that he despised the approach of any open foe. It was only the crafty approach from the rear that he wished to guard against.

  The cunning of this procedure was instantly evident to Cobalt. If he came out of his covert and went down the wind, the Lightning Warrior was reasonably sure to smell him. If he came from the front, the beast was even more sure to see him. There was only one course which seemed at all feasible to him and that was to come out of covert, as he had done, and stalk toward the lobo. The slightest turn of the white brute’s head would betray him, of course, but Cobalt could not overlook any opportunity, however small. He issued from the cover which had shielded him and went up on the quarter of the lobo.


  How I wish that I could have been there to see that dead lynx stretched out on the snow, still warm and quivering as the wolf devoured the body half living and drank the blood, and the man coming from the dark of the trees, looking like a hunting animal, also, his eyes burning with the same red light. He went with his teeth set and, through them, he breathed out a prayer at every step until he found himself within throwing distance. He could not believe it. He doubted his luck with a passion of hope. Of what was to come, even should he settle the noose on the head of the monster, he did not even think, but on he went, a step, another, bringing himself closer to surety in the cast, gripping and re-gripping the strands of his rope, wondering if the cold would have stuck the noose and kept it from running. Then he saw the white killer stiffen suddenly, though its muzzle was still fastened in the kill.

  The time had come. Like a flung stone that heavy rope shot straight from his hand. The Lightning Warrior, while the flying danger was still in the air, was already under way. He would have escaped at the first bound, his leap was so sudden and directed so far to the side, but the snow failed to hold under him. It had been moistened by the blood of the lynx at this spot. It was his own murdering ways that tripped him up, and so the lower rim of the noose struck him on the beautiful white fur of his shoulder and the upper rim of the noose flicked forward over his head.

  The second bound followed before the man could pull up the rope; but luck was against the Lightning Warrior. His second jump merely served to whip the noose tight so that it bound his throat with a throttling force. Still in mid-air the lunge of his powerful body thrust him against the stiffened rope which held him like a rod, the hands of Cobalt holding that rod like iron. I wonder what Cobalt felt at that moment when for the first time he achieved, not his quest, but an actual contact with the prey for which he had been questing so long?

  He shouted, still through his teeth, and the sound of his shout was like the whining snarl of the lobo as he tumbled in the snow, snapping at the elusive thinness of the rope. Cobalt gave the lariat a little play, enough to allow him to throw loops in rapid succession as he ran in, attempting to entangle the legs of the brute. But the Lightning Warrior was up in another moment and, instead of fleeing, he followed better tactics and drove straight at the throat of the man. Cobalt met it as he would have met a charge from another man under those circumstances with a hard-driven fist. All that he had to aim at was a narrow frame around a vast expanse of red where the teeth glistened. He felt them already sinking into the throat at which they were aimed. Then he struck, a little to the side of the gaping mouth, a little beneath the glimmer of the evil eyes. By the grace of his cool brain and his accurate eye, his fist found lodgment at the base of the animal’s jaw.

  Even a bull must have gone down when that sledge-hammer stroke fairly met the mark. The bull would have gone down stunned. The Lightning Warrior was flung backward, head over heels, by the irresistible shock. He tumbled in the snow with his four legs, for the moment, thrusting upward.

  Cobalt noosed two of those legs in a flying loop of the rope and, by a happy chance, one of them was a foreleg and one a hind leg. Then the Lightning Warrior went mad. The two legs which remained untethered were on opposite sides of the body and, therefore, the lobo was able at intervals to maintain his balance. He began to roll and leap in the snow. He came like an otter, wallowing on his stomach like a galloping seal, dashing himself toward Cobalt, but the strain of the noose began to choke him. In the wildness of the wolf’s fury Cobalt heard clearly the snapping of a bone. An instant later the Lightning Warrior had partially brained himself against a tree trunk.

  He lay still. A bit of wind got through the trees and fluttered the downy white fur, deep and rich, while Cobalt came up slowly and stared down at his quarry. He saw the fluff of snow near the nostrils of the brute stirring. By that he guessed that the animal still lived. He saw a foreleg crooked in the snow. By that he guessed that this was the broken bone. He leaned over and laid his hand on the shoulder of the wolf. Under the deep blanket of the fur he could feel the muscle, hard as iron and still tensed like strung cords.

  Then Cobalt laughed silently. It is a horrible thing to think of that silent laughter under the dark of those trees. But he laughed, for in staring down at the Lightning Warrior, he had conceived another thought. He started to carry out the plan at once. In a sense, I suppose, that a more grotesque or brutal plan was never formed. Nevertheless, he went ahead with it. He muzzled the beast with a length of the rope. Then he made splints out of straight twigs and bound them firmly around the leg, first padding the joints with moss as he well knew how to do. The wolf roused up and made one more effort to get at Cobalt with his teeth, but found that it was hopeless. So he lay with a certain patience. He raised his great, wise head and looked the man in the face with an unflinching and deathless hatred and, the man, looking up from the splinting of the broken leg, answered that look with a sneer.

  When he was ready, he lifted the bulk of the wolf in his arms. He could have carried a greater burden, but he was amazed by the bulk of this thing, for he knew the limits inside of which a wolf is supposed to range. Then the fact that the long-hunted prize was actually in his arms started him laughing again. As he laughed, he felt the wolf shuddering with hate against his breast, and Cobalt laughed still louder, until the icy corridors of that forest rang with his mirth.

  He got the wolf to his camp by the river, and there he nursed him back to soundness. He nursed him with the devotion of a priest to a convert or a parent to a child. But in all the devotion of Cobalt there was no affection. He remembered the dead dogs of his team. They were half-wild beasts, but they were his. He had chosen them, trained them. They were his pride, and every one of them had come to his hand willingly, without fear.

  When he saw the red eyes of the Lightning Warrior fixed steadily upon him with the fire never dying down in them, he would sit for long minutes, concentrating his will upon the brute, until at last the animal’s eyes could endure no longer against that human will, and the lobo would look away. From day to day the contest was waged with the same bitterness, until in the end the Lightning Warrior knew that he was totally defeated.

  VII. THE RETURN

  TO DESCRIBE THE hunting of the Lightning Warrior is a simple thing, but one has to remember that an entire year was cut out of the life of Cobalt. At the end of that time in the warmth of the year, when the sun was at its height and the mosquitoes were blackening the flats and the yellow Yukon was rolling unbarred by ice toward the sea, Cobalt came back. I had come in from the mines on some sort of business, I forget what, and there were enough others, what with newcomers and the rest, to fill the saloon when Cobalt opened the door and waved to us. He looked about the same, only a little blacker of skin from the long, bitter weathering that he had gone through. Of course, he was in rags that even an Indian might have scorned, but Cobalt often looked like that when he came in from a long trek. He had been in our minds for a year and, when he stepped back inside that door, he had not been forgotten. It showed the vast force in him that even an arctic year of starving, laboring, hoping, groaning had not shut him from our thoughts.

  When he opened the door and stepped inside, with the flash of the sun behind him, a shout went up. Some people had said that he must be dead, that the wolf had got him before this. But to most of us he seemed a deathless thing, like a waterfall which may be frozen up for a time but which most of the year will be dashing and smashing at the rocks. I remember that there was a cheechako at that moment handling the bent iron bar that had been taken down from the wall for his curious eyes. In the midst of his futile efforts, he saw that ragged man in the door not a very big man, certainly not a handsome man yet the cheechako knew when he set eyes upon him.

  “It’s Cobalt!” whispered the cheechako, grinning like a happy child and straining at the bar.

  Cobalt came with that light step of his, like the step of a man about to break into a run, and we surged toward him. But we stop
ped, like a wave that founders on a bar, recoiling suddenly. For behind Cobalt came the Lightning Warrior! Yes, striding in like a king, more glorious, more beautiful than ever, came the Lightning Warrior, holding his head high as a king ought to hold it and making himself blind to the poor, pitiful humans around him whom he despised. Mind you, there was no lead rope on him. There was no muzzle on him, either. All that he wore in token of being subdued was a pack fitted snugly upon his back. The Lightning Warrior was being used as a pack dog! How can I put down what I, for one, felt about this thing? It seemed that the entire universe had been reversed. For there was the primitive mind of the wilderness, the savage hunter, turned into a domestic servant.

  After a moment we began to recover a little at the sight of Cobalt resting his heel on the footrail and calling for drinks. He set them up for the house, and we took the glasses in forgetful fingers and stared not at the red stain in the liquor but at the red stain in the eyes of the wolf. We could see him closely enough now to make out the color of the eyes. It was the whites of them which were red-stained, but the eyes themselves were blue, a pale, clear blue, a strange color to find in the eyes of a wolf, almost as strange as the snowy purity of the coat itself.

  “Come up,” said Cobalt. “Come up closer, old-timer!”

  He made a quick motion with his hand, and the wolf glided up under it. He did not shrink. Neither did he wag his tail nor snarl. Nor did a softer light appear in his eyes, but all at once every man in that room knew that the beast hated Cobalt with an entire and a deathless hatred. That made the miracle complete. There was no muzzle over those teeth which, at a stroke, could have cut half through the leg of a man or broken his neck at the nape. Yet Cobalt dared to walk freely forward with this menace behind him. Without a rope to control him, the Lightning Warrior followed at the heels of his master like a dog, though he could have turned and disappeared in a moment in the brush, to be free again forever.