The Sky Line of Spruce

by Edison Marshall

"At him, Fenris!" he shouted. The wolf leaped forward like a thrown spear,—almost too fast for the eye to follow. He was deathly afraid, with full knowledge of the power of the enemy he went to combat, but his fears were impotent to restrain him at the first sound of that masterful voice. These were the words he had waited for. He could never disobey such words as these—from the lips of his god. And Ben's mind had worked true; he knew that the wolf could likely hold the creature at bay until he could seize his rifle.

In an instant it was in his hands, and he had sprung back to his post in front of the cavern maw. And presently he remembered, heartsick, that the weapon was not loaded.

For his own safety he had kept it empty on the outward journey, partly to prevent accident, partly to be sure that his prisoner could not turn it against him. But he had shells in the pocket of his jacket. His hand groped, but his reaching fingers found but one shell, dropping it swiftly into the gun. And now he knew that no time remained to seek another. The beast in the darkness had launched into the charge.

Thereafter there was only a great confusion, event piled upon event with incredible rapidity, and a whole lifetime of stress and fear lived in a single instant. The creature's first lunge carried him into the brighter moonlight; and at once Ben recognized its breed. No woodsman could mistake the high, rocking shoulders, the burly form, the wicked ears laid back against the flat, massive head, the fangs gleaming white, the long, hooked claws slashing through the turf as he ran. It was a terrible thing to see and stand against, in the half-darkness. The shadows accentuated the towering outline; and forgotten terrors, lurking, since the world was young, in the labyrinth of the germ plasm wakened and spread like icy streams through the mortal body and seemed to threaten to extinguish the warm flame of the very soul.

The grizzly bawled as he came, an explosive, incredible storm of sound. Few indeed are the wilderness creatures that can charge in silence: muscular exertion can not alone relieve their gathered flood of madness and fury. And at once Ben sensed the impulse behind the attack. He and the girl had made their home in the grizzly's cave—perhaps the lair wherein he had hibernated through the winter and which he still slept in from time to time—and he had come to drive them out. Only death could pay for such insolence as this,—to make a night's lair in the den of his sovereignty, the grizzly.

It is not the accustomed thing for a grizzly to make an unprovoked attack. He has done it many times, in the history of the west, but usually he is glad enough to turn aside, only launching into his terrible death-charge when a mortal wound obliterates his fear of man, leaving only his fear of death. But this grizzly, native to these uninhabited wilds, had no fear of man to forget. He did not know what man was, and he had not learned the death that dwells in the shining weapon he carries in his arms. No trappers mushed through his snows of spring; no woodsman rode his winding trails. True, from the first instant that the human smell had reached him on the wind he had been disturbed and discomfited; yet it was not grizzly nature to yield his den without a fight. The sight of the wolf—known to him of old—only wakened an added rage in his fierce heart.

The wolf met him at his first leap, springing with noble courage at his grizzled throat; and the bear paused in his charge to strike him away. He lashed out with his great forepaw; and if that blow had gone straight home the ribs of the wolf would have been smashed flat on his heart and lungs. The tough trunk of a young spruce would have been broken as quickly under that terrible, blasting full-stroke of a grizzly. The largest grizzly weighs but a thousand pounds, but that weight is simple fiber and iron muscle, of a might incredible to any one but the woodsmen who know this mountain king in his native haunts. But Fenris whipped aside, and the paw missed him.

Immediately the wolf sprang in again, with a courage scarcely compatible with lupine characteristics, ready to wage this unequal battle to the death. But his brave fight was tragically hopeless. For all that his hundred and fifty pounds were, every ounce, lightning muscle and vibrant sinew, it was as if a gopher had waged war with a lynx. Yet by the law of his wild heart he could not turn and flee. His master—his stalwart god whose words thrilled him to the uttermost depths—had given his orders, and he must obey them to the end.

The second blow missed him also, but the third caught a small shrub that grew twenty feet beyond the dying fire. The shrub snapped off under the blow, and its branchy end smote the wolf across the head and neck. As if struck by a tornado he was hurled into the air, and curtailed and indirect though the blow was, he sprawled down stunned and insensible in the grass. The bear paused one instant; then lunged forth again.

But the breath in which the wolf had stayed the charge had given Ben his chance. With a swift motion of his arm he had projected the single rifle shell into the chamber of the weapon. The stock snapped to his shoulder; and his keen, glittering eyes sought the sights.