CHAPTER II--THE LAIR

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.