It was a peculiar growl, quite low at first. It lasted a long time, then died away. There was no opposition to it. The forest creatures had paused in their tracks at its first note, and now they stood as if the winter had come down upon them suddenly and frozen them solid. All the other sounds of the forest—the little whispering noises of gliding bodies and fluttering feet, and perhaps a bird's call in a shrub—were suddenly stilled. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then the sound commenced again.
It was louder this time. It rose and gathered volume until it was almost a roar. It carried through the silences in great waves of sound. And in it was a sense of resistless power; no creature in the forest but what knew this fact.
"The Gray King," one could imagine them saying among themselves. The effect was instantaneous. The little raccoon halted in his descent, then crept out to the end of a limb. Perhaps he knew that the gray monarch could not climb trees, but nevertheless he felt that he would be more secure clear at the swaying limb-tip. The marten forgot his curiosity in regard to the nest of the magpie. The gopher snake coiled, then slipped away silently through the grass.
The coyote, an instant before crawling with body close to the earth, whipped about as if he had some strange kind of circular spring inside of him. His nerves were always rather ragged, and the sound had frightened out of him the rigid control of his muscles that was so necessary if he were to make a successful stalk upon the fawn. The spotted creature bleated in terror, then darted away; and the coyote snarled once in the general direction of the Gray King. Then he lowered his head and skulked off deeper into the coverts.
The blacktail deer, the gray wolf, even the stately Tawny One, stretched in grace in his lair, wakened from sleep. The languor died quickly in the latter's eyes, leaving only fear. These were braver than the Little People. They waited until the thick brush, not far distant from where the bull elk slept, began to break down and part before an enormous, gray body.
No longer would an observer think of the elk as the forest monarch. He was but a pretender, after all. The real king had just wakened from his afternoon nap and was starting forth to hunt.
Even his little cousins, the black bears (who, after all is said and done, furnish most of the comedy of the deadly forest drama) did not wait to make conversation. They tumbled awkwardly down the hill to get out of his way. For the massive gray form—weighing over half a ton—was none other than that of the last of the grizzly bears, that terrible forest hunter and monarch, the Killer himself.
XIV
Long ago, when Oregon was a new land to white men, in the days of the clipper ships and the Old Oregon Trail, the breed to which the Killer belonged were really numerous through the little corner north of the Siskiyous and west of the Cascades. The land was far different then. The transcontinental lines had not yet been built; the only settlements were small trading posts and mining camps, and people did not travel over paved highways in automobiles. If they went at all it was in a prairie-schooner or on horseback. And the old grizzly bears must have found the region a veritable heaven.