And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,—life in the raw, life as it is when all the superficialities that blunt the vision had been struck away. Dan had known that it would be thus. It brought strange pictures to his mind. He saw the winter snows, the spirits of Cold and Famine walking over them. He saw Fear in many guises—in the forest fire, in the landslide, in the lightning cleaving the sky. In the song were centered and made clear all the many lesser voices with which the forest had spoken to him these two months and which he had but dimly understood,—the passion, the exultation, the blood-lust, the strength, the cruelty, the remorseless, unceasing struggle for existence that makes the wilderness an eternal battle ground. But over it all was sadness. He couldn't doubt that. He heard it all too plainly. The wild was revealed to him as it never had been before.
"It's the wolf pack," Lennox told him softly. "As long as I have been in the mountains, it always hits me the same. The wolves have just joined together for the fall rutting. There's not another song like it in the whole world."
Dan could readily believe it. The two men sat still a long time, hoping that they might hear the song again. And then they got up and moved across the cleared field to the ridge beyond. The silence closed deeper around them.
"Then it means the end of the summer?" Dan asked.
"In a way, but yet we don't count the summer ended until the rains break. Heavens, I wish they would start! I've never seen the hills so dry, and I'm afraid that either Bert Cranston or some of his friends will decide it's time to make a little money fighting forest fires. Dan, I'm suspicious of that gang. I believe they've got a regular arson ring, maybe with unscrupulous stockmen behind them, and perhaps just a penny-winning deal of their own. I suppose you know about Landy Hildreth,—how he's promised to turn State's evidence that will send about a dozen of these vipers to the penitentiary?"
"Snowbird told me something about it."
"He's got a cabin over toward the marshes, and it has come to me that he's going to start to-morrow, or maybe has already started to-day, down into the valley to give his evidence. Of course, that is deeply confidential between you and me. If the gang knew about it, he'd never get through the thickets alive."
But Dan was hardly listening. His attention was caught by the hushed, intermittent sounds that are always to be heard, if one listens keenly enough, in the wilderness at night. "I wish the pack would sound again," he said. "I suppose it was hunting."
"Of course. And there is no living thing in these woods that can stand against a wolf pack in its full strength."
"Except man, of course."