PART II

CHAPTER I - THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS

It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men's voices
and the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was
first to spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying
flame.  The pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted
down, and it lingered for several minutes, making sure of the
sounds, and then it, too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-
wolf.

Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf - one of
its several leaders.  It was he who directed the pack's course on
the heels of the she-wolf.  It was he who snarled warningly at the
younger members of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when
they ambitiously tried to pass him.  And it was he who increased
the pace when he sighted the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across
the snow.

She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
position, and took the pace of the pack.  He did not snarl at her,
nor show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in
advance of him.  On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward
her - too kindly to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her,
and when he ran too near it was she who snarled and showed her
teeth.  Nor was she above slashing his shoulder sharply on
occasion.  At such times he betrayed no anger.  He merely sprang to
the side and ran stiffly ahead for several awkward leaps, in
carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country swain.

This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had
other troubles.  On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled
and marked with the scars of many battles.  He ran always on her
right side.  The fact that he had but one eye, and that the left
eye, might account for this.  He, also, was addicted to crowding
her, to veering toward her till his scarred muzzle touched her
body, or shoulder, or neck.  As with the running mate on the left,
she repelled these attentions with her teeth; but when both
bestowed their attentions at the same time she was roughly jostled,
being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to drive both
lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward leap with
the pack and see the way of her feet before her.  At such times her
running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly across
at each other.  They might have fought, but even wooing and its
rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.

After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from
the sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a
young three-year-old that ran on his blind right side.  This young
wolf had attained his full size; and, considering the weak and
famished condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average
vigour and spirit.  Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with
the shoulder of his one-eyed elder.  When he ventured to run
abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl and a snap
sent him back even with the shoulder again.  Sometimes, however, he
dropped cautiously and slowly behind and edged in between the old
leader and the she-wolf.  This was doubly resented, even triply
resented.  When she snarled her displeasure, the old leader would
whirl on the three-year-old.  Sometimes she whirled with him.  And
sometimes the young leader on the left whirled, too.

At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young
wolf stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches,
with fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.  This
confusion in the front of the moving pack always caused confusion
in the rear.  The wolves behind collided with the young wolf and
expressed their displeasure by administering sharp nips on his
hind-legs and flanks.  He was laying up trouble for himself, for
lack of food and short tempers went together; but with the
boundless faith of youth he persisted in repeating the manoeuvre
every little while, though it never succeeded in gaining anything
for him but discomfiture.

Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on
apace, and the pack-formation would have been broken up.  But the
situation of the pack was desperate.  It was lean with long-
standing hunger.  It ran below its ordinary speed.  At the rear
limped the weak members, the very young and the very old.  At the
front were the strongest.  Yet all were more like skeletons than
full-bodied wolves.  Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones
that limped, the movements of the animals were eftortless and
tireless.  Their stringy muscles seemed founts of inexhaustible
energy.  Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle, lay
another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
apparently without end.

They ran many miles that day.  They ran through the night.  And the
next day found them still running.  They were running over the
surface of a world frozen and dead.  No life stirred.  They alone
moved through the vast inertness.  They alone were alive, and they
sought for other things that were alive in order that they might
devour them and continue to live.

They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded.  Then they
came upon moose.  It was a big bull they first found.  Here was
meat and life, and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying
missiles of flame.  Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and
they flung their customary patience and caution to the wind.  It
was a brief fight and fierce.  The big bull was beset on every
side.  He ripped them open or split their skulls with shrewdly
driven blows of his great hoofs.  He crushed them and broke them on
his large horns.  He stamped them into the snow under him in the
wallowing struggle.  But he was foredoomed, and he went down with
the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his
last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.

There was food in plenty.  The bull weighed over eight hundred
pounds - fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd
wolves of the pack.  But if they could fast prodigiously, they
could feed prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all
that remained of the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a
few hours before.

There was now much resting and sleeping.  With full stomachs,
bickering and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this
continued through the few days that followed before the breaking-up
of the pack.  The famine was over.  The wolves were now in the
country of game, and though they still hunted in pack, they hunted
more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from
the small moose-herds they ran across.

There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split
in half and went in different directions.  The she-wolf, the young
leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their
half of the pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the
lake country to the east.  Each day this remnant of the pack
dwindled.  Two by two, male and female, the wolves were deserting.
Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of
his rivals.  In the end there remained only four:  the she-wolf,
the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-
old.

The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.  Her three
suitors all bore the marks of her teeth.  Yet they never replied in
kind, never defended themselves against her.  They turned their
shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and
mincing steps strove to placate her wrath.  But if they were all
mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.
The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness.  He caught
the one-eyed elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into
ribbons.  Though the grizzled old fellow could see only on one
side, against the youth and vigour of the other he brought into
play the wisdom of long years of experience.  His lost eye and his
scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.  He
had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about
what to do.

The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.  There was no
telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined
the elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked
the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.  He was
beset on either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile
comrades.  Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the
game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered.  That
business was a thing of the past.  The business of love was at hand
- ever a sterner and crueller business than that of food-getting.

And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
contentedly on her haunches and watched.  She was even pleased.
This was her day - and it came not often - when manes bristled, and
fang smote fang or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the
possession of her.

And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this
his first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.  On either side
of his body stood his two rivals.  They were gazing at the she-
wolf, who sat smiling in the snow.  But the elder leader was wise,
very wise, in love even as in battle.  The younger leader turned
his head to lick a wound on his shoulder.  The curve of his neck
was turned toward his rival.  With his one eye the elder saw the
opportunity.  He darted in low and closed with his fangs.  It was a
long, ripping slash, and deep as well.  His teeth, in passing,
burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.  Then he leaped
clear.

The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into
a tickling cough.  Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he
sprang at the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs
going weak beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his
blows and springs falling shorter and shorter.

And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.  She
was made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-
making of the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was
tragedy only to those that died.  To those that survived it was not
tragedy, but realisation and achievement.

When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
stalked over to the she-wolf.  His carriage was one of mingled
triumph and caution.  He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he
was just as plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at
him in anger.  For the first time she met him with a kindly manner.
She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about and
frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion.  And he, for all
his grey years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and
even a little more foolishly.

Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-
written on the snow.  Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye
stopped for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.  Then it was
that his lips half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck
and shoulders involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a
spring, his claws spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for
firmer footing.  But it was all forgotten the next moment, as he
sprang after the she-wolf, who was coyly leading him a chase
through the woods.

After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come
to an understanding.  The days passed by, and they kept together,
hunting their meat and killing and eating it in common.  After a
time the she-wolf began to grow restless.  She seemed to be
searching for something that she could not find.  The hollows under
fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing
about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the
caves of overhanging banks.  Old One Eye was not interested at all,
but he followed her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her
investigations in particular places were unusually protracted, he
would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.

They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country
until they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly
went, leaving it often to hunt game along the small streams that
entered it, but always returning to it again.  Sometimes they
chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there was no
friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness
at meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation.  Several
times they encountered solitary wolves.  These were always males,
and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One Eye and his
mate.  This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder
with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary
ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.

One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye
suddenly halted.  His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his
nostrils dilated as he scented the air.  One foot also he held up,
after the manner of a dog.  He was not satisfied, and he continued
to smell the air, striving to understand the message borne upon it
to him.  One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted
on to reassure him.  Though he followed her, he was still dubious,
and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully
to study the warning.

She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the
midst of the trees.  For some time she stood alone.  Then One Eye,
creeping and crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair
radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.  They stood side by side,
watching and listening and smelling.

To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and
once the shrill and plaintive cry of a child.  With the exception
of the huge bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the
flames of the fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies,
and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.  But to their
nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story
that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of
which the she-wolf knew.

She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an
increasing delight.  But old One Eye was doubtful.  He betrayed his
apprehension, and started tentatively to go.  She turned. and
touched his neck with her muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded
the camp again.  A new wistfulness was in her face, but it was not
the wistfulness of hunger.  She was thrilling to a desire that
urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be
squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the
stumbling feet of men.

One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon
her, and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for
which she searched.  She turned and trotted back into the forest,
to the great relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore
until they were well within the shelter of the trees.

As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they
came upon a run-way.  Both noses went down to the footprints in the
snow.  These footprints were very fresh.  One Eye ran ahead
cautiously, his mate at his heels.  The broad pads of their feet
were spread wide and in contact with the snow were like velvet.
One Eye caught sight of a dim movement of white in the midst of the
white.  His sliding gait had been deceptively swift, but it was as
nothing to the speed at which he now ran.  Before him was bounding
the faint patch of white he had discovered.

They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a
growth of young spruce.  Through the trees the mouth of the alley
could be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade.  Old One Eye was
rapidly overhauling the fleeing shape of white.  Bound by bound he
gained.  Now he was upon it.  One leap more and his teeth would be
sinking into it.  But that leap was never made.  High in the air,
and straight up, soared the shape of white, now a struggling
snowshoe rabbit that leaped and bounded, executing a fantastic
dance there above him in the air and never once returning to earth.

One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down
to the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he
did not understand.  But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him.  She
poised for a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit.  She, too,
soared high, but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped
emptily together with 'a metallic snap.  She made another leap, and
another.

Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her.
He now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself
made a mighty spring upward.  His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and
he bore it back to earth with him.  But at the same time there was
a suspicious crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye
saw a young spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him.
His jaws let go their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this
strange danger, his lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat
snarling, every hair bristling with rage and fright.  And in that
moment the sapling reared its slender length upright and the rabbit
soared dancing in the air again.

The she-wolf was angry.  She sank her fangs into her mate's
shoulder in reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what
constituted this new onslaught, struck back ferociously and in
still greater fright, ripping down the side of the she-wolf's
muzzle.  For him to resent such reproof was equally unexpected to
her, and she sprang upon him in snarling indignation.  Then he
discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.  But she proceeded
to punish him roundly, until he gave over all attempts at
placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her, his
shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.

In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air.  The she-
wolf sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his
mate than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit.
As he sank back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the
sapling.  As before, it followed him back to earth.  He crouched
down under the impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth
still keeping tight hold of the rabbit.  But the blow did not fall.
The sapling remained bent above him.  When he moved it moved, and
he growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still,
it remained still, and he concluded it was safer to continue
remaining still.  Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good in
his mouth.

It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he
found himself.  She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling
swayed and teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off
the rabbit's head.  At once the sapling shot up, and after that
gave no more trouble, remaining in the decorous and perpendicular
position in which nature had intended it to grow.  Then, between
them, the she-wolf and One Eye devoured the game which the
mysterious sapling had caught for them.

There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in
the air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf
leading the way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the
method of robbing snares - a knowledge destined to stand him in
good stead in the days to come.
<--split-->
CHAPTER II - THE LAIR

For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.
He was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and
she was loath to depart.  But when, one morning, the air was rent
with the report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed
against a tree trunk several inches from One Eye's head, they
hesitated no more, but went off on a long, swinging lope that put
quick miles between them and the danger.

They did not go far - a couple of days' journey.  The she-wolf's
need to find the thing for which she searched had now become
imperative.  She was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly.
Once, in the pursuit of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have
caught with ease, she gave over and lay down and rested.  One Eye
came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with his muzzle
she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over
backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her
teeth.  Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become
more patient than ever and more solicitous.

And then she found the thing for which she sought.  It was a few
miles up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the
Mackenzie, but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its
rocky bottom - a dead stream of solid white from source to mouth.
The she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance,
when she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank.  She turned
aside and trotted over to it.  The wear and tear of spring storms
and melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had
made a small cave out of a narrow fissure.

She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over
carefully.  Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base
of the wall to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined
landscape.  Returning to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.
For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch, then the walls
widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet
in diameter.  The roof barely cleared her head.  It was dry and
cosey.  She inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who
had returned, stood in the entrance and patiently watched her.  She
dropped her head, with her nose to the ground and directed toward a
point near to her closely bunched feet, and around this point she
circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that was almost a
grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down,
her head toward the entrance.  One Eye, with pointed, interested
ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against the white light,
she could see the brush of his tail waving good-naturedly.  Her own
ears, with a snuggling movement, laid their sharp points backward
and down against the head for a moment, while her mouth opened and
her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed that
she was pleased and satisfied.

One Eye was hungry.  Though he lay down in the entrance and slept,
his sleep was fitful.  He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the
bright world without, where the April sun was blazing across the
snow.  When he dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers
of hidden trickles of running water, and he would rouse and listen
intently.  The sun had come back, and all the awakening Northland
world was calling to him.  Life was stirring.  The feel of spring
was in the air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap
ascending in the trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.

He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to
get up.  He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered
across his field of vision.  He started to get up, then looked back
to his mate again, and settled down and dozed.  A shrill and minute
singing stole upon his heating.  Once, and twice, he sleepily
brushed his nose with his paw.  Then he woke up.  There, buzzing in
the air at the tip of his nose, was a lone mosquito.  It was a
full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in a dry log all
winter and that had now been thawed out by the sun.  He could
resist the call of the world no longer.  Besides, he was hungry.

He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up.
But she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the
bright sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the
travelling difficult.  He went up the frozen bed of the stream,
where the snow, shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline.
He was gone eight hours, and he came back through the darkness
hungrier than when he had started.  He had found game, but he had
not caught it.  He had broken through the melting snow crust, and
wallowed, while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on top
lightly as ever.

He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of
suspicion.  Faint, strange sounds came from within.  They were
sounds not made by his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar.
He bellied cautiously inside and was met by a warning snarl from
the she-wolf.  This he received without perturbation, though he
obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he remained interested in
the other sounds - faint, muffled sobbings and slubberings.

His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in
the entrance.  When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair,
he again sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.
There was a new note in his mate's warning snarl.  It was a jealous
note, and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance.
Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between her legs against the
length of her body, five strange little bundles of life, very
feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes
that did not open to the light.  He was surprised.  It was not the
first time in his long and successful life that this thing had
happened.  It had happened many times, yet each time it was as
fresh a surprise as ever to him.

His mate looked at him anxiously.  Every little while she emitted a
low growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too
near, the growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.  Of her own
experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her
instinct, which was the experience of all the mothers of wolves,
there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and
helpless progeny.  It manifested itself as a fear strong within
her, that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the
cubs he had fathered.

But there was no danger.  Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him
from all the fathers of wolves.  He did not question it, nor puzzle
over it.  It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the
most natural thing in the world that he should obey it by turning
his back on his new-born family and by trotting out and away on the
meat-trail whereby he lived.

Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks
going off among the mountains at a right angle.  Here, leading up
the left fork, he came upon a fresh track.  He smelled it and found
it so recent that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction
in which it disappeared.  Then he turned deliberately and took the
right fork.  The footprint was much larger than the one his own
feet made, and he knew that in the wake of such a trail there was
little meat for him.

Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
gnawing teeth.  He stalked the quarry and found it to be a
porcupine, standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on
the bark.  One Eye approached carefully but hopelessly.  He knew
the breed, though he had never met it so far north before; and
never in his long life had porcupine served him for a meal.  But he
had long since learned that there was such a thing as Chance, or
Opportunity, and he continued to draw near.  There was never any
telling what might happen, for with live things events were somehow
always happening differently.

The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp
needles in all directions that defied attack.  In his youth One Eye
had once sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of
quills, and had the tail flick out suddenly in his face.  One quill
he had carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks,
a rankling flame, until it finally worked out.  So he lay down, in
a comfortable crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and
out of the line of the tail.  Thus he waited, keeping perfectly
quiet.  There was no telling.  Something might happen.  The
porcupine might unroll.  There might be opportunity for a deft and
ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.

But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
motionless ball, and trotted on.  He had waited too often and
futilely in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more
time.  He continued up the right fork.  The day wore along, and
nothing rewarded his hunt.

The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon
him.  He must find meat.  In the afternoon he blundered upon a
ptarmigan.  He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face
with the slow-witted bird.  It was sitting on a log, not a foot
beyond the end of his nose.  Each saw the other.  The bird made a
startled rise, but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it down
to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it
scuttled across the snow trying to rise in the air again.  As his
teeth crunched through the tender flesh and fragile bones, he began
naturally to eat.  Then he remembered, and, turning on the back-
track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in his mouth.

A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the
trail, he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had
discovered in the early morning.  As the track led his way, he
followed, prepared to meet the maker of it at every turn of the
stream.

He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something
that sent him crouching swiftly down.  It was the maker of the
track, a large female lynx.  She was crouching as he had crouched
once that day, in front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills.  If
he had been a gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost of
such a shadow, as he crept and circled around, and came up well to
leeward of the silent, motionless pair.

He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and
with eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he
watched the play of life before him - the waiting lynx and the
waiting porcupine, each intent on life; and, such was the
curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in the eating
of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not
eaten.  While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in the covert, played
his part, too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of
Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way of
life.

Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened.  The balls of
quills might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might
have been frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead.
Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was
almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more
alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.

One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
Something was happening.  The porcupine had at last decided that
its enemy had gone away.  Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its
ball of impregnable armour.  It was agitated by no tremor of
anticipation.  Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out
and lengthened.  One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his
mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living
meat that was spreading itself like a repast before him.

Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered
its enemy.  In that instant the lynx struck.  The blow was like a
flash of light.  The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons,
shot under the tender belly and came back with a swift ripping
movement.  Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not
discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was
struck, the paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of
the tail sank sharp quills into it as it was withdrawn.

Everything had happened at once - the blow, the counter-blow, the
squeal of agony from the porcupine, the big cat's squall of sudden
hurt and astonishment.  One Eye half arose in his excitement, his
ears up, his tail straight out and quivering behind him.  The
lynx's bad temper got the best of her.  She sprang savagely at the
thing that had hurt her.  But the porcupine, squealing and
grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its
ball-protection, flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat
squalled with hurt and astonishment.  Then she fell to backing away
and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-
cushion.  She brushed her nose with her paws, trying to dislodge
the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed it against
twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.

She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks.  She quit her
antics, and quieted down for a long minute.  One Eye watched.  And
even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of
hair along his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning,
straight up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and most
terrible squall.  Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling
with every leap she made.

It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died
out that One Eye ventured forth.  He walked as delicately as though
all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready
to pierce the soft pads of his feet.  The porcupine met his
approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth.
It had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite the
old compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that.  It had
been ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.

One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed
and tasted and swallowed.  This served as a relish, and his hunger
increased mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his
caution.  He waited.  He lay down and waited, while the porcupine
grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp
little squeals.  In a little while, One Eye noticed that the quills
were drooping and that a great quivering had set up.  The quivering
came to an end suddenly.  There was a final defiant clash of the
long teeth.  Then all the quills drooped quite down, and the body
relaxed and moved no more.

With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine
to its full length and turned it over on its back.  Nothing had
happened.  It was surely dead.  He studied it intently for a
moment, then took a careful grip with his teeth and started off
down the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the porcupine,
with head turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly
mass.  He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted
back to where he had left the ptarmigan.  He did not hesitate a
moment.  He knew clearly what was to be done, and this he did by
promptly eating the ptarmigan.  Then he returned and took up his
burden.

When he dragged the result of his day's hunt into the cave, the
she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked
him on the neck.  But the next instant she was warning him away
from the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that
was more apologetic than menacing.  Her instinctive fear of the
father of her progeny was toning down.  He was behaving as a wolf-
father should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young
lives she had brought into the world.
<--split-->
CHAPTER III - THE GREY CUB

He was different from his brothers and sisters.  Their hair already
betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
while he alone, in this particular, took after his father.  He was
the one little grey cub of the litter.  He had bred true to the
straight wolf-stock - in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye
himself, physically, with but a single exception, and that was he
had two eyes to his father's one.

The grey cub's eyes had not been open long, yet already he could
see with steady clearness.  And while his eyes were still closed,
he had felt, tasted, and smelled.  He knew his two brothers and his
two sisters very well.  He had begun to romp with them in a feeble,
awkward way, and even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with
a queer rasping noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked
himself into a passion.  And long before his eyes had opened he had
learned by touch, taste, and smell to know his mother - a fount of
warmth and liquid food and tenderness.  She possessed a gentle,
caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over his soft
little body, and that impelled him to snuggle close against her and
to doze off to sleep.

Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in
sleeping; but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for
longer periods of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite
well.  His world was gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew
no other world.  It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to
adjust themselves to any other light.  His world was very small.
Its limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge
of the wide world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow
confines of his existence.

But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was
different from the rest.  This was the mouth of the cave and the
source of light.  He had discovered that it was different from the
other walls long before he had any thoughts of his own, any
conscious volitions.  It had been an irresistible attraction before
ever his eyes opened and looked upon it.  The light from it had
beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes and the optic nerves had
pulsated to little, sparklike flashes, warm-coloured and strangely
pleasing.  The life of his body, and of every fibre of his body,
the life that was the very substance of his body and that was apart
from his own personal life, had yearned toward this light and urged
his body toward it in the same way that the cunning chemistry of a
plant urges it toward the sun.

Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
crawled toward the mouth of the cave.  And in this his brothers and
sisters were one with him.  Never, in that period, did any of them
crawl toward the dark corners of the back-wall.  The light drew
them as if they were plants; the chemistry of the life that
composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their
little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the
tendrils of a vine.  Later on, when each developed individuality
and became personally conscious of impulsions and desires, the
attraction of the light increased.  They were always crawling and
sprawling toward it, and being driven back from it by their mother.

It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of
his mother than the soft, soothing, tongue.  In his insistent
crawling toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a
sharp nudge administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him
down and rolled him over and over with swift, calculating stroke.
Thus he learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt,
first, by not incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had
incurred the risk, by dodging and by retreating.  These were
conscious actions, and were the results of his first
generalisations upon the world.  Before that he had recoiled
automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
light.  After that he recoiled from hurt because he KNEW that it
was hurt.

He was a fierce little cub.  So were his brothers and sisters.  It
was to be expected.  He was a carnivorous animal.  He came of a
breed of meat-killers and meat-eaters.  His father and mother lived
wholly upon meat.  The milk he had sucked with his first flickering
life, was milk transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month
old, when his eyes had been open for but a week, he was beginning
himself to eat meat - meat half-digested by the she-wolf and
disgorged for the five growing cubs that already made too great
demand upon her breast.

But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter.  He could make a
louder rasping growl than any of them.  His tiny rages were much
more terrible than theirs.  It was he that first learned the trick
of rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke.  And it was
he that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged
and growled through jaws tight-clenched.  And certainly it was he
that caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from
the mouth of the cave.

The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
day.  He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward
the cave's entrance, and as perpetually being driven back.  Only he
did not know it for an entrance.  He did not know anything about
entrances - passages whereby one goes from one place to another
place.  He did not know any other place, much less of a way to get
there.  So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall - a wall of
light.  As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall was to him
the sun of his world.  It attracted him as a candle attracts a
moth.  He was always striving to attain it.  The life that was so
swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall
of light.  The life that was within him knew that it was the one
way out, the way he was predestined to tread.  But he himself did
not know anything about it.  He did not know there was any outside
at all.

There was one strange thing about this wall of light.  His father
(he had already come to recognise his father as the one other
dweller in the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near
the light and was a bringer of meat) - his father had a way of
walking right into the white far wall and disappearing.  The grey
cub could not understand this.  Though never permitted by his
mother to approach that wall, he had approached the other walls,
and encountered hard obstruction on the end of his tender nose.
This hurt.  And after several such adventures, he left the walls
alone.  Without thinking about it, he accepted this disappearing
into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and half-
digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.

In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking - at least, to the
kind of thinking customary of men.  His brain worked in dim ways.
Yet his conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by
men.  He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the
why and wherefore.  In reality, this was the act of classification.
He was never disturbed over why a thing happened.  How it happened
was sufficient for him.  Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the
back-wall a few times, he accepted that he would not disappear into
walls.  In the same way he accepted that his father could disappear
into walls.  But he was not in the least disturbed by desire to
find out the reason for the difference between his father and
himself.  Logic and physics were no part of his mental make-up.

Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine.
There came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the
milk no longer came from his mother's breast.  At first, the cubs
whimpered and cried, but for the most part they slept.  It was not
long before they were reduced to a coma of hunger.  There were no
more spats and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at
growling; while the adventures toward the far white wall ceased
altogether.  The cubs slept, while the life that was in them
flickered and died down.

One Eye was desperate.  He ranged far and wide, and slept but
little in the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable.
The she-wolf, too, left her litter and went out in search of meat.
In the first days after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had
journeyed several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the
rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of
the streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and that source of
supply was closed to him.

When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the
far white wall, he found that the population of his world had been
reduced.  Only one sister remained to him.  The rest were gone.  As
he grew stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the
sister no longer lifted her head nor moved about.  His little body
rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too
late for her.  She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round
with skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last
went out.

Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
entrance.  This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
famine.  The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there
was no way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey
cub.  Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream
where lived the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye.
And she had found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the
trail.  There were many signs of the battle that had been fought,
and of the lynx's withdrawal to her lair after having won the
victory.  Before she went away, the she-wolf had found this lair,
but the signs told her that the lynx was inside, and she had not
dared to venture in.

After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork.  For
she knew that in the lynx's lair was a litter of kittens, and she
knew the lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible
fighter.  It was all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a
lynx, spitting and bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a
different matter for a lone wolf to encounter a lynx - especially
when the lynx was known to have a litter of hungry kittens at her
back.

But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all
times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the
time was to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub's sake, would
venture the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx's
wrath.
<--split-->
CHAPTER IV - THE WALL OF THE WORLD

By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting
expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his
approaching the entrance.  Not only had this law been forcibly and
many times impressed on him by his mother's nose and paw, but in
him the instinct of fear was developing.  Never, in his brief cave-
life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid.  Yet fear
was in him.  It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through
a thousand thousand lives.  It was a heritage he had received
directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it
had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had
gone before.  Fear! - that legacy of the Wild which no animal may
escape nor exchange for pottage.

So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which
fear was made.  Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions
of life.  For he had already learned that there were such
restrictions.  Hunger he had known; and when he could not appease
his hunger he had felt restriction.  The hard obstruction of the
cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother's nose, the smashing
stroke of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several famines, had
borne in upon him that all was not freedom in the world, that to
life there was limitations and restraints.  These limitations and
restraints were laws.  To be obedient to them was to escape hurt
and make for happiness.

He did not reason the question out in this man fashion.  He merely
classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.
And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions
and the remunerations of life.

Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother,
and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing,
fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.  It remained to him
a white wall of light.  When his mother was absent, he slept most
of the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept
very quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled in his
throat and strove for noise.

Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall.  He
did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-
trembling with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the
contents of the cave.  The cub knew only that the sniff was
strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible -
for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the
making of fear.

The hair bristled upon the grey cub's back, but it bristled
silently.  How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a
thing at which to bristle?  It was not born of any knowledge of
his, yet it was the visible expression of the fear that was in him,
and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.  But fear
was accompanied by another instinct - that of concealment.  The cub
was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound,
frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.  His
mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the wolverine's track,
and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him with undue
vehemence of affection.  And the cub felt that somehow he had
escaped a great hurt.

But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of
which was growth.  Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.  But
growth demanded disobedience.  His mother and fear impelled him to
keep away from the white wall.  Growth is life, and life is for
ever destined to make for light.  So there was no damming up the
tide of life that was rising within him - rising with every
mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew.  In the
end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of
life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.

Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
seemed to recede from him as he approached.  No hard surface
collided with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively
before him.  The substance of the wall seemed as permeable and
yielding as light.  And as condition, in his eyes, had the seeming
of form, so he entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in
the substance that composed it.

It was bewildering.  He was sprawling through solidity.  And ever
the light grew brighter.  Fear urged him to go back, but growth
drove him on.  Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave.
The wall, inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped
back before him to an immeasurable distance.  The light had become
painfully bright.  He was dazzled by it.  Likewise he was made
dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space.
Automatically, his eyes were adjusting themselves to the
brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased distance of
objects.  At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.  He now
saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.
Also, its appearance had changed.  It was now a variegated wall,
composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered
the mountain.

A great fear came upon him.  This was more of the terrible unknown.
He crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world.
He was very much afraid.  Because it was unknown, it was hostile to
him.  Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his
lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating
snarl.  Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced
the whole wide world.

Nothing happened.  He continued to gaze, and in his interest he
forgot to snarl.  Also, he forgot to be afraid.  For the time, fear
had been routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of
curiosity.  He began to notice near objects - an open portion of
the stream that flashed in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that
stood at the base of the slope, and the slope itself, that ran
right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on
which he crouched.

Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.  He had
never experienced the hurt of a fall.  He did not know what a fall
was.  So he stepped boldly out upon the air.  His hind-legs still
rested on the cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward.  The
earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp.  Then
he began rolling down the slope, over and over.  He was in a panic
of terror.  The unknown had caught him at last.  It had gripped
savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some terrific
hurt.  Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi'd like any
frightened puppy.

The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
yelped and ki-yi'd unceasingly.  This was a different proposition
from crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just
alongside.  Now the unknown had caught tight hold of him.  Silence
would do no good.  Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that
convulsed him.

But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.
Here the cub lost momentum.  When at last he came to a stop, he
gave one last agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.
Also, and quite as a matter of course, as though in his life he had
already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry
clay that soiled him.

After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of
the earth who landed upon Mars.  The cub had broken through the
wall of the world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here
he was without hurt.  But the first man on Mars would have
experienced less unfamiliarity than did he.  Without any antecedent
knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found
himself an explorer in a totally new world.

Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
unknown had any terrors.  He was aware only of curiosity in all the
things about him.  He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-
berry plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine
that stood on the edge of an open space among the trees.  A
squirrel, running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him,
and gave him a great fright.  He cowered down and snarled.  But the
squirrel was as badly scared.  It ran up the tree, and from a point
of safety chattered back savagely.

This helped the cub's courage, and though the woodpecker he next
encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.
Such was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped
up to him, he reached out at it with a playful paw.  The result was
a sharp peck on the end of his nose that made him cower down and
ki-yi.  The noise he made was too much for the moose-bird, who
sought safety in flight.

But the cub was learning.  His misty little mind had already made
an unconscious classification.  There were live things and things
not alive.  Also, he must watch out for the live things.  The
things not alive remained always in one place, but the live things
moved about, and there was no telling what they might do.  The
thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must be
prepared.

He travelled very clumsily.  He ran into sticks and things.  A twig
that he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on
the nose or rake along his ribs.  There were inequalities of
surface.  Sometimes he overstepped and stubbed his nose.  Quite as
often he understepped and stubbed his feet.  Then there were the
pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon them;
and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not
all in the same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave - also,
that small things not alive were more liable than large things to
fall down or turn over.  But with every mishap he was learning.
The longer he walked, the better he walked.  He was adjusting
himself.  He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements,
to know his physical limitations, to measure distances between
objects, and between objects and himself.

His was the luck of the beginner.  Born to be a hunter of meat
(though he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside
his own cave-door on his first foray into the world.  It was by
sheer blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan
nest.  He fell into it.  He had essayed to walk along the trunk of
a fallen pine.  The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a
despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed
through the leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of
the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan
chicks.

They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.  Then he
perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.  They
moved.  He placed his paw on one, and its movements were
accelerated.  This was a source of enjoyment to him.  He smelled
it.  He picked it up in his mouth.  It struggled and tickled his
tongue.  At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of
hunger.  His jaws closed together.  There was a crunching of
fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth.  The taste of it
was good.  This was meat, the same as his mother gave him, only it
was alive between his teeth and therefore better.  So he ate the
ptarmigan.  Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.
Then he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and
began to crawl out of the bush.

He encountered a feathered whirlwind.  He was confused and blinded
by the rush of it and the beat of angry wings.  He hid his head
between his paws and yelped.  The blows increased.  The mother
ptarmigan was in a fury.  Then he became angry.  He rose up,
snarling, striking out with his paws.  He sank his tiny teeth into
one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily.  The ptarmigan
struggled against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing.
It was his first battle.  He was elated.  He forgot all about the
unknown.  He no longer was afraid of anything.  He was fighting,
tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.  Also, this live
thing was meat.  The lust to kill was on him.  He had just
destroyed little live things.  He would now destroy a big live
thing.  He was too busy and happy to know that he was happy.  He
was thrilling and exulting in ways new to him and greater to him
than any he had known before.

He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched
teeth.  The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush.  When she turned
and tried to drag him back into the bush's shelter, he pulled her
away from it and on into the open.  And all the time she was making
outcry and striking with her free wing, while feathers were flying
like a snow-fall.  The pitch to which he was aroused was
tremendous.  All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and
surging through him.  This was living, though he did not know it.
He was realising his own meaning in the world; he was doing that
for which he was made - killing meat and battling to kill it.  He
was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater;
for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that
which it was equipped to do.

After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling.  He still held
her by the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each
other.  He tried to growl threateningly, ferociously.  She pecked
on his nose, which by now, what of previous adventures was sore.
He winced but held on.  She pecked him again and again.  From
wincing he went to whimpering.  He tried to back away from her,
oblivious to the fact that by his hold on her he dragged her after
him.  A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used nose.  The flood of
fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he turned tail
and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.

He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of
the bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting,
his nose still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper.
But as he lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of
something terrible impending.  The unknown with all its terrors
rushed upon him, and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter
of the bush.  As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a
large, winged body swept ominously and silently past.  A hawk,
driving down out of the blue, had barely missed him.

While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open
space fluttered out of the ravaged nest.  It was because of her
loss that she paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky.  But
the cub saw, and it was a warning and a lesson to him - the swift
downward swoop of the hawk, the short skim of its body just above
the ground, the strike of its talons in the body of the ptarmigan,
the ptarmigan's squawk of agony and fright, and the hawk's rush
upward into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan away with it,

It was a long time before the cub left its shelter.  He had learned
much.  Live things were meat.  They were good to eat.  Also, live
things when they were large enough, could give hurt.  It was better
to eat small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone
large live things like ptarmigan hens.  Nevertheless he felt a
little prick of ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle
with that ptarmigan hen - only the hawk had carried her away.  May
be there were other ptarmigan hens.  He would go and see.

He came down a shelving bank to the stream.  He had never seen
water before.  The footing looked good.  There were no inequalities
of surface.  He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying
with fear, into the embrace of the unknown.  It was cold, and he
gasped, breathing quickly.  The water rushed into his lungs instead
of the air that had always accompanied his act of breathing.  The
suffocation he experienced was like the pang of death.  To him it
signified death.  He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like
every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death.  To
him it stood as the greatest of hurts.  It was the very essence of
the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one
culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him,
about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open
mouth.  He did not go down again.  Quite as though it had been a
long-established custom of his he struck out with all his legs and
began to swim.  The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up
with his back to it, and the first thing his eyes rested upon was
the opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim.  The
stream was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score
of feet.

Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
downstream.  He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of
the pool.  Here was little chance for swimming.  The quiet water
had become suddenly angry.  Sometimes he was under, sometimes on
top.  At all times he was in violent motion, now being turned over
or around, and again, being smashed against a rock.  And with every
rock he struck, he yelped.  His progress was a series of yelps,
from which might have been adduced the number of rocks he
encountered.

Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy,
he was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed
of gravel.  He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down.
He had learned some more about the world.  Water was not alive.
Yet it moved.  Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was
without any solidity at all.  His conclusion was that things were
not always what they appeared to be.  The cub's fear of the unknown
was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by
experience.  Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess
an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn the
reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.

One other adventure was destined for him that day.  He had
recollected that there was such a thing in the world as his mother.
And then there came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than
all the rest of the things in the world.  Not only was his body
tired with the adventures it had undergone, but his little brain
was equally tired.  In all the days he had lived it had not worked
so hard as on this one day.  Furthermore, he was sleepy.  So he
started out to look for the cave and his mother, feeling at the
same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and helplessness.

He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
intimidating cry.  There was a flash of yellow before his eyes.  He
saw a weasel leaping swiftly away from him.  It was a small live
thing, and he had no fear.  Then, before him, at his feet, he saw
an extremely small live thing, only several inches long, a young
weasel, that, like himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring.
It tried to retreat before him.  He turned it over with his paw.
It made a queer, grating noise.  The next moment the flash of
yellow reappeared before his eyes.  He heard again the intimidating
cry, and at the same instant received a sharp blow on the side of
the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the mother-weasel cut into his
flesh.

While he yelped and ki-yi'd and scrambled backward, he saw the
mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into
the neighbouring thicket.  The cut of her teeth in his neck still
hurt, but his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down
and weakly whimpered.  This mother-weasel was so small and so
savage.  He was yet to learn that for size and weight the weasel
was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the killers
of the Wild.  But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be
his.

He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared.  She did
not rush him, now that her young one was safe.  She approached more
cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself.
Her sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and
he snarled warningly at her.  She came closer and closer.  There
was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean,
yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his
vision.  The next moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in
his hair and flesh.

At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and
this was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a
whimper, his fight a struggle to escape.  The weasel never relaxed
her hold.  She hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to
the great vein were his life-blood bubbled.  The weasel was a
drinker of blood, and it was ever her preference to drink from the
throat of life itself.

The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the
bushes.  The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf's
throat, missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead.  The she-
wolf flirted her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the
weasel's hold and flinging it high in the air.  And, still in the
air, the she-wolf's jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the
weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.

The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
mother.  Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
being found.  She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts
made in him by the weasel's teeth.  Then, between them, mother and
cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the
cave and slept.
<--split-->
CHAPTER V - THE LAW OF MEAT

The cub's development was rapid.  He rested for two days, and then
ventured forth from the cave again.  It was on this adventure that
he found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he
saw to it that the young weasel went the way of its mother.  But on
this trip he did not get lost.  When he grew tired, he found his
way back to the cave and slept.  And every day thereafter found him
out and ranging a wider area.

He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his
weakness, and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious.  He
found it expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare
moments, when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself
to petty rages and lusts.

He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
ptarmigan.  Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of
the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.  While the sight
of a moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of
rages; for he never forgot the peck on the nose he had received
from the first of that ilk he encountered.

But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him,
and those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some
other prowling meat hunter.  He never forgot the hawk, and its
moving shadow always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.
He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing
the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without
exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as deceptive
as it was imperceptible.

In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning.  The
seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of
his killings.  His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and
he cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so
volubly and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub
was approaching.  But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could
climb trees, and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon
the squirrel when it was on the ground.

The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.  She could get
meat, and she never failed to bring him his share.  Further, she
was unafraid of things.  It did not occur to him that this
fearlessness was founded upon experience and knowledge.  Its effect
on him was that of an impression of power.  His mother represented
power; and as he grew older he felt this power in the sharper
admonishment of her paw; while the reproving nudge of her nose gave
place to the slash of her fangs.  For this, likewise, he respected
his mother.  She compelled obedience from him, and the older he
grew the shorter grew her temper.

Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
more the bite of hunger.  The she-wolf ran herself thin in the
quest for meat.  She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending
most of her time on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly.  This
famine was not a long one, but it was severe while it lasted.  The
cub found no more milk in his mother's breast, nor did he get one
mouthful of meat for himself.

Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now
he hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing.  Yet the
failure of it accelerated his development.  He studied the habits
of the squirrel with greater carefulness, and strove with greater
craft to steal upon it and surprise it.  He studied the wood-mice
and tried to dig them out of their burrows; and he learned much
about the ways of moose-birds and woodpeckers.  And there came a
day when the hawk's shadow did not drive him crouching into the
bushes.  He had grown stronger and wiser, and more confident.
Also, he was desperate.  So he sat on his haunches, conspicuously
in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the sky.  For
he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat, the
meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.  But the hawk
refused to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into
a thicket and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.

The famine broke.  The she-wolf brought home meat.  It was strange
meat, different from any she had ever brought before.  It was a
lynx kitten, partly grown, like the cub, but not so large.  And it
was all for him.  His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere;
though he did not know that it was the rest of the lynx litter that
had gone to satisfy her.  Nor did he know the desperateness of her
deed.  He knew only that the velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he
ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.

A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother's side.  He was aroused by her
snarling.  Never had he heard her snarl so terribly.  Possibly in
her whole life it was the most terrible snarl she ever gave.  There
was reason for it, and none knew it better than she.  A lynx's lair
is not despoiled with impunity.  In the full glare of the afternoon
light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-
mother.  The hair rippled up along his back at the sight.  Here was
fear, and it did not require his instinct to tell him of it.  And
if sight alone were not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder
gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing abruptly upward into a
hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.

The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
snarled valiantly by his mother's side.  But she thrust him
ignominiously away and behind her.  Because of the low-roofed
entrance the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling
rush of it the she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down.  The
cub saw little of the battle.  There was a tremendous snarling and
spitting and screeching.  The two animals threshed about, the lynx
ripping and tearing with her claws and using her teeth as well,
while the she-wolf used her teeth alone.

Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
lynx.  He clung on, growling savagely.  Though he did not know it,
by the weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and
thereby saved his mother much damage.  A change in the battle
crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose his hold.
The next moment the two mothers separated, and, before they rushed
together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw
that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling
sidewise against the wall.  Then was added to the uproar the cub's
shrill yelp of pain and fright.  But the fight lasted so long that
he had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of
courage; and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a
hind-leg and furiously growling between his teeth.

The lynx was dead.  But the she-wolf was very weak and sick.  At
first she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the
blood she had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a
day and a night she lay by her dead foe's side, without movement,
scarcely breathing.  For a week she never left the cave, except for
water, and then her movements were slow and painful.  At the end of
that time the lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf's wounds had
healed sufficiently to permit her to take the meat-trail again.

The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped
from the terrible slash he had received.  But the world now seemed
changed.  He went about in it with greater confidence, with a
feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the
battle with the lynx.  He had looked upon life in a more ferocious
aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a
foe; and he had survived.  And because of all this, he carried
himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him.
He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity
had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.

He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much
of the killing of meat and began to play his part in it.  And in
his own dim way he learned the law of meat.  There were two kinds
of life - his own kind and the other kind.  His own kind included
his mother and himself.  The other kind included all live things
that moved.  But the other kind was divided.  One portion was what
his own kind killed and ate.  This portion was composed of the non-
killers and the small killers.  The other portion killed and ate
his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind.  And out of
this classification arose the law.  The aim of life was meat.  Life
itself was meat.  Life lived on life.  There were the eaters and
the eaten.  The law was:  EAT OR BE EATEN.  He did not formulate
the law in clear, set terms and moralise about it.  He did not even
think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at
all.

He saw the law operating around him on every side.  He had eaten
the ptarmigan chicks.  The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother.
The hawk would also have eaten him.  Later, when he had grown more
formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk.  He had eaten the lynx
kitten.  The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not herself
been killed and eaten.  And so it went.  The law was being lived
about him by all live things, and he himself was part and parcel of
the law.  He was a killer.  His only food was meat, live meat, that
ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the air, or climbed
trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with him, or
turned the tables and ran after him.

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life
as a voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a
multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and
being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and
confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and
slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.

But the cub did not think in man-fashion.  He did not look at
things with wide vision.  He was single-purposed, and entertained
but one thought or desire at a time.  Besides the law of meat,
there were a myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and
obey.  The world was filled with surprise.  The stir of the life
that was in him, the play of his muscles, was an unending
happiness.  To run down meat was to experience thrills and
elations.  His rages and battles were pleasures.  Terror itself,
and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.

And there were easements and satisfactions.  To have a full
stomach, to doze lazily in the sunshine - such things were
remuneration in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours
and tolls were in themselves self-remunerative.  They were
expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing
itself.  So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment.
He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.