Shepherds of the Wild

by Edison Marshall

To linger at the outskirts of the band, to kill when he chose, perhaps even to know that most terrible of all wilderness lusts,—the feast of death. All forest creatures know this feast: they have an inborn passion for it that simply must almost tear them in twain. In all the world of carnage and wickedness there is no debauch that is half so terrible, and the first laws of the forest have decreed against it. For the death-feast is not the rational, honest killing of the hunt. Rather it is the thing that sheepmen dread above all things else: a perfect orgy of slaying, not for food but from desire, the tearing-out of a hundred throats in so many seconds. Yet was not Broken Fang the monarch of the forest? What laws were there to restrain him?

His long tail began to lash back and forth; his fangs caught the dim light of the encroaching dawn as he crept like a serpent through the thickets. The smell became even more plain, the fierce blood leaped even more wildly in his veins. There was nothing here to fear: no leaping camp fire to fill him with the age-old awe, no tall form of the herder on constant guard. He could kill, kill, kill—as much as he wanted—until the savagery in his heart was satiated. It was true that human beings had recently been on guard, but their smell was dim, and even now they were starting away, into the forest.

He paused, taking full stock of the situation. Usually at camps such as this there were, besides the herder with his death-stick, two dogs that would die before they would permit him to touch the sheep. He knew something about the fighting spirit of the shepherd dogs. He knew their blind courage, their terrible ferocity, and he knew only one fighting spirit to compare with theirs,—that with which the she-wolf guards her whelps. Such dogs always seemed to partake of man’s own unconquerable spirit and they were terrible to face. But to-night only one of the dogs was on guard, and he could find killing in plenty before they should come to grips.

Then he drew up short, scarcely able to restrain a yowl of disappointment. He was on the wrong side of the river. A veritable torrent, deep and swift, flowed between. He came of a breed that has no love for water. Of course he could cross in time, he could wander up and down the bank until he found a dead tree stretching the full way over, but he was in no mood for delays. There was a log here, true, slanting down from his own shore, but it thrust down into water but a few feet from the bank and offered no crossing. And his passion almost consumed him at the sight of a ewe and lamb, just out of leaping range,—feeding at the very margin of the river on the opposite bank.

He shivered all over with excitement. He knew already the taste of the red ecstasy in their veins. He knew—in his dark beast-fancy—the feel of their soft flesh beneath his own terrible talons. He lay still, watching greedily.

But the forest gods were good to him, after all. He couldn’t see just what happened. The whole tragedy had occupied but a miniature fraction of a second. Perhaps the bank gave way, possibly the sure little feet missed their hold, or a rock rolled and struck from behind. No matter the cause, the result was the same: the ewe stood alone on the margin. The lamb—a white, dainty creature whose flesh was soft and warm as a bird’s—had fallen into that raging torrent, had been swept down the stream, and as if by a miracle had been hurled into a thatch of dead sticks and driftwood that had been wedged between some of the great bowlders of the river bed.

The glaring eyes beheld its struggles and his own triumph. It was as if the forest gods had planned the whole disaster for his especial benefit. The barrier of the river was an advantage now: such guardians as kept watch over the flock could not cross those frightful waters to fight him off. He had only to steal down the log that slanted into the water, stretch out a paw to the white struggling figure half-submerged in the raft of driftwood, and snatch it up to his own remorseless fangs.

CHAPTER VIII

For the first dozen paces up the trail Hugh tried to shut his ears to the frenzied barking of the dog. He found it hard to believe that the animal was merely rounding up the sheep, keeping them in a compact herd as he had been trained to do. It wasn’t the same cry that he had listened to before. It had an angry, warning quality, a threatening note as if it were trying to intimidate some enemy of the sheep. Then Hugh began to believe that his own fancy was carrying him away. For it seemed to him that the animal’s voice had an actual undertone addressed to himself,—an appeal for aid before it was too late.

But, after all, he was not responsible for the flock. They were not his sheep. He had not been employed by the flock owner to care for them; and the idea of Hugh Gaylord, member of the Greenwood Club, acting as sheep herder was simply laughable. It was not his war,—that in which the herder had been struck down. He was anxious to go back to his own kind, to take up anew his old carefree life in his home city.