Baree-Son of Kazan

by Curwood, James Oliver

  It was quite evident that Wakayoo had caught scent of him in the air. Baree could hear him sniff—could hear his breathing—caught the starlight flashing in his reddish-brown eyes as they swung suspiciously toward the big boulder. If Baree could have known then that he—his insignificant little self—was making that monster actually nervous and uneasy, he would have given a yelp of joy. For Wakayoo, in spite of his size, was somewhat of a coward when it came to wolves. And Baree carried the wolf scent. It grew stronger in Wakayoo's nose; and just then, as if to increase whatever nervousness was growing in him, there came from out of the forest behind him a long and wailing howl.

  With an audible grunt, Wakayoo moved on. Wolves were pests, he argued. They wouldn't stand up and fight. They'd snap and yap at one's heels for hours at a time, and were always out of the way quicker than a wink when one turned on them. What was the use of hanging around where there were wolves, on a beautiful night like this? He lumbered on decisively. Baree could hear him splashing heavily through the water of the creek. Not until then did the wolf dog draw a full breath. It was almost a gasp.

  But the excitement was not over for the night. Baree had chosen his bed at a place where the animals came down to drink, and where they crossed from one of the creek forests to the other. Not long after the bear had disappeared he heard a heavy crunching in the sand, and hoofs rattling against stones, and a bull moose with a huge sweep of antlers passed through the open space in the moonlight. Baree stared with popping eyes, for if Wakayoo had weighed six hundred pounds, this gigantic creature whose legs were so long that it seemed to be walking on stilts weighed at least twice as much. A cow moose followed, and then a calf.

  The calf seemed all legs. It was too much for Baree, and he shoved himself farther and farther back under the rock until he lay wedged in like a sardine in a box. And there he lay until morning.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Baree ventured forth from under his rock at the beginning of the next day, he was a much older puppy than when he met Papayuchisew, the young owl, in his path near the old windfall. If experience can be made to take the place of age, he had aged a great deal in the last forty-eight hours. In fact, he had passed almost out of puppyhood. He awoke with a new and much broader conception of the world. It was a big place. It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf were not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit plot of sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one greatest instinct of beasts—the primal understanding that it is the strong that prey upon the weak—was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he quite naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size alone. Thus the bear was more terrible than Kazan, and the moose was more terrible than the bear.

  It was quite fortunate for Baree that this instinct did not go to the limit in the beginning and make him understand that his own breed—the wolf—was most feared of all the creatures, claw, hoof, and wing, of the forests. Otherwise, like the small boy who thinks he can swim before he has mastered a stroke, he might somewhere have jumped in beyond his depth and had his head chewed off.

  Very much alert, with the hair standing up along his spine, and a little growl in his throat, Baree smelled of the big footprints made by the bear and the moose. It was the bear scent that made him growl. He followed the tracks to the edge of the creek. After that he resumed his wandering, and also his hunt for food.

  For two hours he did not find a crayfish. Then he came out of the green timber into the edge of a burned-over country. Here everything was black. The stumps of the trees stood up like huge charred canes. It was a comparatively fresh "burn" of last autumn, and the ash was still soft under Baree's feet. Straight through this black region ran the creek, and over it hung a blue sky in which the sun was shining. It was quite inviting to Baree. The fox, the wolf, the moose, and the caribou would have turned back from the edge of this dead country. In another year it would be good hunting ground, but now it was lifeless. Even the owls would have found nothing to eat out there.

  It was the blue sky and the sun and the softness of the earth under his feet that lured Baree. It was pleasant to travel in after his painful experiences in the forest. He continued to follow the stream, though there was now little possibility of his finding anything to eat. The water had become sluggish and dark. The channel was choked with charred debris that had fallen into it when the forest had burned, and its shores were soft and muddy. After a time, when Baree stopped and looked about him, he could no longer see the green timber he had left. He was alone in that desolate wilderness of charred tree corpses. It was as still as death, too. Not the chirp of a bird broke the silence. In the soft ash he could not hear the fall of his own feet. But he was not frightened. There was the assurance of safety here.

  If he could only find something to eat! That was the master thought that possessed Baree. Instinct had not yet impressed upon him that this which he saw all about him was starvation. He went on, seeking hopefully for food. But at last, as the hours passed, hope began to die in him. The sun sank westward. The sky grew less blue; a low wind began to ride over the tops of the stubs, and now and then one of them fell with a startling crash.

  Baree could go no farther. An hour before dusk he lay down in the open, weak and starved. The sun disappeared behind the forest. The moon rolled up from the east. The sky glittered with stars—and all through the night Baree lay as if dead. When morning came, he dragged himself to the stream for a drink. With his last strength he went on. It was the wolf urging him—compelling him to struggle to the last for his life. The dog in him wanted to lie down and die. But the wolf spark in him burned stronger. In the end it won. Half a mile farther on he came again to the green timber.

  In the forests as well as in the great cities fate plays its changing and whimsical hand. If Baree had dragged himself into the timber half an hour later he would have died. He was too far gone now to hunt for crayfish or kill the weakest bird. But he came just as Sekoosew, the ermine, the most bloodthirsty little pirate of all the wild—was making a kill.

  That was fully a hundred yards from where Baree lay stretched out under a spruce, almost ready to give up the ghost. Sekoosew was a mighty hunter of his kind. His body was about seven inches long, with a tiny black-tipped tail appended to it, and he weighed perhaps five ounces. A baby's fingers could have encircled him anywhere between his four legs, and his little sharp-pointed head with its beady red eyes could slip easily through a hole an inch in diameter. For several centuries Sekoosew had helped to make history. It was he—when his pelt was worth a hundred dollars in king's gold—that lured the first shipload of gentlemen adventurers over the sea, with Prince Rupert at their head. It was little Sekoosew who was responsible for the forming of the great Hudson's Bay Company and the discovery of half a continent. For almost three centuries he had fought his fight for existence with the trapper. And now, though he was no longer worth his weight in yellow gold, he was the cleverest, the fiercest, and the most merciless of all the creatures that made up his world.

  As Baree lay under his tree, Sekoosew was creeping on his prey. His game was a big fat spruce hen standing under a thicket of black currant bushes. The ear of no living thing could have heard Sekoosew's movement. He was like a shadow—a gray dot here, a flash there, now hidden behind a stick no larger than a man's wrist, appearing for a moment, the next instant gone as completely as if he had not existed. Thus he approached from fifty feet to within three feet of the spruce hen. That was his favorite striking distance. Unerringly he launched himself at the drowsy partridge's throat, and his needlelike teeth sank through feathers into flesh.

  Sekoosew was prepared for what happened then. It always happened when he attacked Napanao, the wood partridge. Her wings were powerful, and her first instinct when he struck was always that of flight. She rose straight up now with a great thunder of wings. Sekoosew hung tight, his teeth buried deep in her throat, and his tiny, sharp claws clinging to her like hands. Through the air he whizzed with
her, biting deeper and deeper, until a hundred yards from where that terrible death thing had fastened to her throat, Napanao crashed again to earth.

  Where she fell was not ten feet from Baree. For a few moments he looked at the struggling mass of feathers in a daze, not quite comprehending that at last food was almost within his reach. Napanao was dying, but she still struggled convulsively with her wings. Baree rose stealthily, and after a moment in which he gathered all his remaining strength, he made a rush for her. His teeth sank into her breast—and not until then did he see Sekoosew. The ermine had raised his head from the death grip at the partridge's throat, and his savage little red eyes glared for a single instant into Baree's. Here was something too big to kill, and with an angry squeak the ermine was gone. Napanao's wings relaxed, and the throb went out of her body. She was dead. Baree hung on until he was sure. Then he began his feast.

  With murder in his heart, Sekoosew hovered near, whisking here and there but never coming nearer than half a dozen feet from Baree. His eyes were redder than ever. Now and then he emitted a sharp little squeak of rage. Never had he been so angry in all his life! To have a fat partridge stolen from him like this was an imposition he had never suffered before. He wanted to dart in and fasten his teeth in Baree's jugular. But he was too good a general to make the attempt, too good a Napoleon to jump deliberately to his Waterloo. An owl he would have fought. He might even have given battle to his big brother—and his deadliest enemy—the mink. But in Baree he recognized the wolf breed, and he vented his spite at a distance. After a time his good sense returned, and he went off on another hunt.

  Baree ate a third of the partridge, and the remaining two thirds he cached very carefully at the foot of the big spruce. Then he hurried down to the creek for a drink. The world looked very different to him now. After all, one's capacity for happiness depends largely on how deeply one has suffered. One's hard luck and misfortune form the measuring stick for future good luck and fortune. So it was with Baree. Forty-eight hours ago a full stomach would not have made him a tenth part as happy as he was now. Then his greatest longing was for his mother. Since then a still greater yearning had come into his life—for food. In a way it was fortunate for him that he had almost died of exhaustion and starvation, for his experience had helped to make a man of him—or a wolf dog, just as you are of a mind to put it. He would miss his mother for a long time. But he would never miss her again as he had missed her yesterday and the day before.

  That afternoon Baree took a long nap close to his cache. Then he uncovered the partridge and ate his supper. When his fourth night alone came, he did not hide himself as he had done on the three preceding nights. He was strangely and curiously alert. Under the moon and the stars he prowled in the edge of the forest and out on the burn. He listened with a new kind of thrill to the faraway cry of a wolf pack on the hunt. He listened to the ghostly whoo-whoo-whoo of the owls without shivering. Sounds and silences were beginning to hold a new and significant note for him.

  For another day and night Baree remained in the vicinity of his cache. When the last bone was picked, he moved on. He now entered a country where subsistence was no longer a perilous problem for him. It was a lynx country, and where there are lynx, there are also a great many rabbits. When the rabbits thin out, the lynx emigrate to better hunting grounds. As the snowshoe rabbit breeds all the summer through, Baree found himself in a land of plenty. It was not difficult for him to catch and kill the young rabbits. For a week he prospered and grew bigger and stronger each day. But all the time, stirred by that seeking, wanderlust spirit—still hoping to find the old home and his mother—he traveled into the north and east.

  And this was straight into the trapping country of Pierrot, the half-breed.

  Pierrot, until two years ago, had believed himself to be one of the most fortunate men in the big wilderness. That was before La Mort Rouge—the Red Death—came. He was half French, and he had married a Cree chief's daughter, and in their log cabin on the Gray Loon they had lived for many years in great prosperity and happiness. Pierrot was proud of three things in this wild world of his. He was immensely proud of Wyola, his royal-blooded wife. He was proud of his daughter; and he was proud of his reputation as a hunter. Until the Red Death came, life was quite complete for him. It was then—two years ago—that the smallpox killed his princess wife. He still lived in the little cabin on the Gray Loon, but he was a different Pierrot. The heart was sick in him. It would have died, had it not been for Nepeese, his daughter. His wife had named her Nepeese, which means the Willow.

  Nepeese had grown up like the willow, slender as a reed, with all her mother's wild beauty, and with a little of the French thrown in. She was sixteen, with great, dark, wonderful eyes, and hair so beautiful that an agent from Montreal passing that way had once tried to buy it. It fell in two shining braids, each as big as a man's wrist, almost to her knees. "Non, M'sieu," Pierrot had said, a cold glitter in his eyes as he saw what was in the agent's face. "It is not for barter."

  Two days after Baree had entered his trapping ground, Pierrot came in from the forests with a troubled look in his face.

  "Something is killing off the young beavers," he explained to Nepeese, speaking to her in French. "It is a lynx or a wolf. Tomorrow—" He shrugged his thin shoulders, and smiled at her.

  "We will go on the hunt," laughed Nepeese happily, in her soft Cree.

  When Pierrot smiled at her like that, and began with "Tomorrow," it always meant that she might go with him on the adventure he was contemplating.

  Still another day later, at the end of the afternoon, Baree crossed the Gray Loon on a bridge of driftwood that had wedged between two trees. This was to the north. Just beyond the driftwood bridge there was a small clearing, and on the edge of it Baree paused to enjoy the last of the setting sun. As he stood motionless and listening, his tail drooping low, his ears alert, his sharp-pointed nose sniffing the new country to the north, there was not a pair of eyes in the forest that would not have taken him for a young wolf.

  From behind a clump of young balsams, a hundred yards away, Pierrot and Nepeese had watched him come over the driftwood bridge. Now was the time, and Pierrot leveled his rifle. It was not until then that Nepeese touched his arm softly. Her breath came a little excitedly as she whispered:

  "Nootawe, let me shoot. I can kill him!"

  With a low chuckle Pierrot gave the gun to her. He counted the whelp as already dead. For Nepeese, at that distance, could send a bullet into an inch square nine times out of ten. And Nepeese, aiming carefully at Baree, pressed steadily with her brown forefinger upon the trigger.

  CHAPTER 5

  As the Willow pulled the trigger of her rifle, Baree sprang into the air. He felt the force of the bullet before he heard the report of the gun. It lifted him off his feet, and then sent him rolling over and over as if he had been struck a hideous blow with a club. For a flash he did not feel pain. Then it ran through him like a knife of fire, and with that pain the dog in him rose above the wolf, and he let out a wild outcry of puppyish yapping as he rolled and twisted on the ground.

  Pierrot and Nepeese had stepped from behind the balsams, the Willow's beautiful eyes shining with pride at the accuracy of her shot. Instantly she caught her breath. Her brown fingers clutched at the barrel of her rifle. The chuckle of satisfaction died on Pierrot's lips as Baree's cries of pain filled the forest.

  "Uchi moosis!" gasped Nepeese, in her Cree.

  Pierrot caught the rifle from her.

  "Diable! A dog—a puppy!" he cried.

  He started on a run for Baree. But in their amazement they had lost a few seconds and Baree's dazed senses were returning. He saw them clearly as they came across the open—a new kind of monster of the forests! With a final wail he darted back into the deep shadows of the trees. It was almost sunset, and he ran for the thick gloom of the heavy spruce near the creek. He had shivered at sight of the bear and the moose, but for the first time he now sensed the real meaning of danger. And
it was close after him. He could hear the crashing of the two-legged beasts in pursuit; strange cries were almost at his heels—and then suddenly he plunged without warning into a hole.

  It was a shock to have the earth go out from under his feet like that, but Baree did not yelp. The wolf was dominant in him again. It urged him to remain where he was, making no move, no sound—scarcely breathing. The voices were over him; the strange feet almost stumbled in the hole where he lay. Looking out of his dark hiding place, he could see one of his enemies. It was Nepeese, the Willow. She was standing so that a last glow of the day fell upon her face. Baree did not take his eyes from her.

  Above his pain there rose in him a strange and thrilling fascination. The girl put her two hands to her mouth and in a voice that was soft and plaintive and amazingly comforting to his terrified little heart, cried:

  "Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!"

  And then he heard another voice; and this voice, too, was far less terrible than many sounds he had listened to in the forests.

  "We cannot find him, Nepeese," the voice was saying. "He has crawled off to die. It is too bad. Come."

  Where Baree had stood in the edge of the open Pierrot paused and pointed to a birch sapling that had been cut clean off by the Willow's bullet. Nepeese understood. The sapling, no larger than her thumb, had turned her shot a trifle and had saved Baree from instant death. She turned again, and called:

  "Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!"

  Her eyes were no longer filled with the thrill of slaughter.