by Max Brand
The instant he was gone they swung about and started desperately for the shore that they had just left. There was no ploy in their effort. With ears flattened, they struggled forward, each casting off a strong bow wave from its shoulders. One of them, caught from beneath, was jerked under. It bobbed up again, snorting, gasping, shaking its head. This was the central wolf. Its companions diverged to either side, swimming more furiously than ever, so that their mighty shoulders came well up from the top of the water. All its speed did not avail the right-hand monster. It, in turn, was caught from beneath and rolled under, and, as it rose, the boy rose, also, and swam like a glimmering fish after the third wolf. His reaching hand was at the tail of the latter when the wolf’s feet touched bottom, and out upon the grass it scrambled, the boy after it. All three of the lobos were in the meadow now, and they went for the boy in unison.
Play? It might be called play in a world of Titans. To Ranger it looked like a very near imitation of battle. Their knife-like teeth the wolves did not use, but they wielded their solid shoulders like clubs. They strove to knock the legs from under the lad, sliding in with deft, dodging movements. And he, in turn, tried to catch them off balance and tumble them over. Again they shot into the air and tried to knock him flat with a blow delivered against his shoulder or chest. They flung themselves at him like football players; all four were often one stumbling, gasping, panting mass. But finally they had their way. The legs of the boy shot into the air. He landed with an audible thump, and the wolves jumped back from the prostrate master.
With their open mouths, their lolling red tongues, their wrinkling eyes, they appeared to be laughing silently in pleasure at their feat.
And the boy, for his part, rose slowly and shook his head to get the mist out of it. For that had been a stunning fall. He went to the edge of the pool again, rinsed off his body, and then whipped away the water with the edge of his palm.
But Ranger was still wondering. Three wolves had put him down. How many men would have been needed for the same task?
Now the youngster wrung the water from his hair. Now he stepped into his clothes. And in a moment he was fully clad. He was buckling on the knife belt and the knife when Ranger stepped from behind the tree.
Animal or man, he could stand it no longer. He had to accost the stranger. So out he came, into the blinding brightness of the meadow. The lad turned toward him without haste. And there seemed to be nothing hostile in his expression.
“Here you are,” he said. “I didn’t know that you were in this part of the wood.”
Ranger breathed a sigh of relief. Afterward he felt like laughing at himself, but at the moment there was almost a sense of wonder that the lad, for all his human shape, could actually speak.
Chapter Twelve
Ranged before their master, the three wolves eyed the stranger with anything but tolerance. The one upon the left, the great, black-maned tyrant of the lot, shrank a little toward the ground and began a stealthy advance.
“I came down to see who was living here,” explained Ranger as carelessly as he could. “I got a string of traps up there on the face of those hills, and I saw your cattle in the fields and the smoke coming up here. So I came down to see you and have a yarn. It’s been a spell without much talking to folks.”
“I knew that you had come down,” said the other. He snapped his fingers; the black-maned wolf shrank suddenly back.
“You knew that I had come down?” echoed Ranger. “How did you know that?”
The other pointed, and as Ranger hastily turned, he saw behind him a pair of timber wolves standing at the edge of the shadows cast by the big pines. One of them was the same full-grown lobo he had seen before trailing through the woods. The other looked like a yearling.
“Hold on,” said Ranger. “You mean that one of these came and told you?”
“Not in so many words,” said the other, smiling a little. “But I knew that it was a man, and I guessed that the man would be you.”
“Well,” said Ranger, “I dunno that I follow that. The fact is that I’ve never been on your place before, so how could you guess that I was myself . . . if you follow my drift?”
“Certainly,” said the boy. “But we’ve seen your camp smoke in the hills. And that youngster came back with trap marks on his hind leg.”
He pointed to the yearling, and suddenly Ranger remembered the gray, pointed head of the timber wolf he had caught and turned loose. A scalp wound and swelling between the ears told where the butt stroke had fallen.
“And they came and told you that I was in the wood?” asked the trapper.
“They came and told me perfectly clearly that a man was in the wood, and the youngster was a little mean about it. So I guessed that he’d recognized the scent of the man who had clubbed him.”
A chill went up the spine of Ranger. “A dog-gone’ wonder that they didn’t jump me,” he declared.
“They don’t jump people,” said the boy.
“Don’t they?” asked Ranger. “Unless they’re ordered, maybe?”
The other started a little. “What makes you say that?” he asked. And his steady blue eyes grew for a moment half dangerous, so brightly were they lighted.
Ranger scratched his head. But it seemed to him better to come out with the truth as much as he dared to speak of it. So he said: “Well, I saw a pair of thugs come out of the hills to your place . . . and I saw them when they left it, and they looked as though the wolves had a taste of both of ’em.”
“A pair of cattle thieves,” said the boy carelessly. “We don’t believe in keeping guns on our place, so we have to have some means of protecting ourselves. You haven’t told me your name.”
“My name is Bill Ranger. A lot of people call me Lefty,” said the trapper.
“My name is Oliver Crosson,” said the boy.
They shook hands.
And as quickly as their hands parted, Oliver Crosson stepped lightly back, as a dog steps back to get a sufficient distance for attack or defense when a strange dog is near. One could not have called it fear, but rather a semi-barbarous readiness to be on guard.
Ranger had an odd feeling at the moment, for, when seen at a distance in action, Oliver Crosson had appeared big enough—powerful enough, certainly—to deserve the attention of any half dozen of his peers when it came to troublemaking. But when he stepped up close for the handshaking, he seemed shorter and slenderer than the average man.
“I’d like to ask you two things,” said young Crosson.
“Fire away,” said Ranger.
“Why did you turn that wolf loose once you had it safely in your trap?”
“Well,” said Ranger, puzzled, “I don’t exactly know.”
“You know that there’s a bounty on scalps?”
“Yes. I know that.”
“Then what made you turn it loose?”
Ranger sighed. “Fact is,” he responded, “that after I got into these here hills and on the way up to them I saw wolves do things that I wouldn’t’ve believed. I’ve seen wolves that stood their ground and watched me go by them ten feet away without budging, and me with a rifle in my hands. I dunno how it was. I got a sort of a queer feeling about ’em. And I’d seen you run that puma into the brush with your wolf pack.”
“Well?” said the boy coldly.
It occurred to Ranger that the best way was to stick as closely to the truth as possible. The youngster was not exactly hostile, but he impressed the trapper as cold lightning, likely to strike at any given moment. And when he struck, the blow would be remembered all the rest of a man’s life.
“Well,” said Ranger, “I’ll tell you. I didn’t know whether there were such things as werewolves or not. You’ll say that I’m a fool, I guess. But somehow I thought my scalp would be a lot safer if I turned that young wolf loose.”
He looked up from his explanation and found the cold, blue eyes of the boy fixed steadily upon him.
Then Crosson nodded. “I can understand, in a sen
se, the way you must have felt,” he said. “It seemed a bit weird to you?”
“Weird?” said Ranger with an honest outbreak of emotion. “I’ll tell you something. It seemed so dog-gone’ weird to me that I couldn’t sleep good at night. I’ve been worried ever since I came up here, and that was one reason that I decided to put in half a day and come over here and have a look at you folks.”
Crosson nodded again. “I can understand that,” he said. “But I can’t answer for the second question I want to ask you.”
“Well, try me,” said Ranger.
“What made you want to come to this part of the country, anyway?”
“Why, down there at Tuckerville,” said Ranger, “they told me there was more game here to the square mile than any place in the mountains.”
“There’s a good deal of game.” Crosson nodded. “Some on four feet. Some on two. Did they tell you that, also?”
“They told me that. Sure they did.”
“But that didn’t stop you?”
“Why, I’ve been around a good bit. I don’t mind rough going,” said the trapper. “I wanted to be out where I could fill my traps, and this is certainly the country for that.”
“A long haul back to town, since you’ve lost your burro.”
He knew that, also. Ranger began to sweat a little. It seemed that this youth had a sort of omniscient eye, and that he was playing with Ranger as with a double dealer.
“Yeah. A wolf chopped open the throat of that poor little burro. But I could likely get a horse or another burro off your ranch.”
“We don’t sell our horses,” said the boy. “We raise them.”
“Hold on. You mean that? How d’you make money?”
“We don’t make much. We don’t need much. Now and then my father drives a few head of cattle down to Tuckerville. That’s all. But I wonder at seeing a trapper head away on such a long trail. Not for fine furs . . . just trash like red foxes and coyotes and such stuff!”
It was time for Ranger to scratch his head again. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “The thing of it is that I’ve been away from God’s country for a long time. I’ve been away up in Alaska, where there’s nothing but wind and snow.” He hoped that the fair white land would forgive that slander. How greatly, at that moment, did his heart yearn to be back in the white wilderness rather than in this green pleasant meadow, talking to a wolf-man.
“And gold?” suggested Oliver Crosson.
“Yeah. You work all year for it and spend it all on one Friday night. That’s the kind of gold that you get in Alaska. You do the finding and the saloonkeepers, they chip it out.” Another blasphemy, he felt. Somewhere in that northern land there was a fortune waiting for him, he was sure. And one day he would go back and find it.
Crosson was smiling a little. “I don’t know much about it,” he admitted. “I’ve heard very little. However, I don’t see what Alaska has to do with putting you here. Can you explain that . . . if you feel like talking that much?”
“Why, no,” said Ranger. He saw that the time to lie had come, and lie he must, with unction. “You turn an eye around you. What more would a man want than a place like this?” he said.
“It’s pleasant.” The boy nodded.
“It’s more’n that. It’s a place for a man to die in.”
“I suppose that men will die here one day,” said the boy, and he looked about him toward the noble trees with a certain darkness in his eye. Plainly all was not well within the spirit and the mind of young Oliver Crosson. He shrugged his shoulders. “And you wanted to get out into a soft, easy country?” he asked.
“Not soft and easy,” answered Ranger, dodging a trap. “But a country where I could make my own place, and not be worried about a lot of real-estate dealers coming along and opening up new farming tracts all at once. I wanted a country where there’d be green grass and big trees, and a chance to be alone. So I heard a lot about this, and I came up from Tuckerville to have a look at it.”
The boy looked steadily, grimly upon him, and there was a glimmering, dubious light in his eye. Nothing could be plainer than that he doubted all that he had heard. “Well,” he said at last, “suppose that you come along with me to the house? My father’d like to talk to you, I know.”
“All right. Let’s start along,” said Ranger.
But his cheerful voice belied his spirit. He felt that he was walking into a trap from which there would be no escape.
Chapter Thirteen
They walked on through the quiet woods briskly. Ranger would have been glad to talk on the way, but the head of the boy was turned straightforwardly, and his expression was so sternly forbidding that all subjects for talk immediately fled from the mind of the trapper.
Presently he was vaguely aware of a branch bending slowly above his head, and he looked up to find a long bough, upon which stood a great mountain lion. He leaped back with a gasp.
“That’s nothing,” said Oliver Crosson. “That’s only one of the pets. He’ll do you no harm . . . while you’re with me.”
The great cat looked down at the stranger with eyes as glowing as yellow lights. And the trapper took a breath. “That big devil has a bad eye,” said Ranger.
“Nothing compared with his brother,” answered Oliver Crosson.
They stepped on, Ranger keeping an anxious glance turned up toward the lion, which was lashing its sides with its long tail.
“You have his brother, eh?” asked Ranger.
“Yes. We got the pair of them together.”
“Trapped?”
“No, out of their cave.”
“You found ’em while the mother was away, eh?”
“No, she was there.”
A blue jay flashed above their heads. At that a harsh sound came from the lips of Crosson and the bright bird staggered in its flight, swerved downward almost within reach of Crosson’s hand, and then veered upward again, its own rasping note trailing behind it. Crosson had held up a hand to it, but more by way of greeting than to capture it.
“That mother puma was in the cave, eh?” persisted Ranger, for he sensed something worth hearing on this incident of the capture of the two cubs.
“She was there,” said Crosson.
He looked upward idly. By the special sense of their own, his feet seemed to find the most level way over the floor of the wood. Then, making a quick, musical murmur, it brought down a chattering response from a pair of squirrels above him.
“You asked her for the two cubs, I suppose,” said Ranger ironically, “and she just pushed them to you. Was that it?”
Crosson chuckled. “She was a mad cat I can tell you,” he said. “I never saw a cat carry on worse than she did. She gave a yowl when she saw me moving into the cave and then started for me.”
“And you started out?”
“How could I do that? The passage was pretty narrow. Only at the last second I’d stepped into a place where the space was a good deal bigger. It was the main part of the cave, where the water had washed away the limestone and made a good big room out of the interior. But that cat acted as though she were sure of me for supper.” He paused, to laugh at the memory.
“You shot her when she was crouching?” suggested Ranger, wild with eagerness to get at the details.
“No, she had her spring, all right.”
“You had to pot her in the air, then?” suggested Ranger. “That takes shooting when they jump at you like that.”
“Why, you might know that guns are not allowed on the place by my father.”
“Doesn’t he?”
“No.”
“That seems to me a strange idea.”
“I suppose it is. It’s his way, though.”
“But do you mind telling me, Crosson, how the devil you managed to handle that puma after it had jumped you, and you hadn’t so much as a revolver to defend yourself?”
“Why, you can guess,” said Crosson, half turning toward his companion, so great was his apparent surprise.
“How I got rid of the mother, of course.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
“All right. You just put yourself in my place. You’ve had a cat of some sort jump at you, I suppose?”
“No. Not even a house cat.”
“Haven’t?” said Crosson, apparently more surprised than before. “Well, it’s a stupid way that they have. When they stalk a thing and run up on it without jumping, that’s a different matter. They’re harder than the lightning to dodge. But when they jump out into the air, poor fools can’t help spreading themselves out. They get into a beautiful position in the air and come arching at you with their teeth like flickers of white fire.”
“That sounds pleasant,” said the trapper dryly.
“Does it sound pleasant?” Crosson turned his head again and looked curiously at Ranger. “It’s a good trick,” said the boy. “It’s a great deal of fun, and it isn’t hard. But it’s like climbing after them mountain goats. Suppose that you do make a mistake . . . suppose that your foot slips or a pebble rolls . . . that’s the end of you, absolutely. You see, a cat like that would tear you up in no time.”
Ranger nodded. “I’ll bet it would,” he agreed. Then he added: “You wound up with the big cat in the air. What happened then?”
“Oh, that’s easy enough, then. Only, one has to be careful not to slip. You just side-step and let the cat have the knife as it goes by through the air. That’s easy. You put the knife into it and make a jump yourself. The cat lands and whirls for the second spring, unless that first thrust has been enough.”
“How about the mother of that little house pet back there on the limb of the tree, looking at me like he wanted to digest me? What about her?”
“That was a bad time,” said the boy, nodding. “That time I made a bad stroke. You see, it was very dark in the cave. Like twilight, at the most.”