XIV
WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD
And the Northern Lights come down
To dance on the houseless snow;
And God, who clears the grounding berg,
And steers the grinding flow,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow.—RUDYARD KIPLING.
A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest; and a white hare slid, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent forest aisle.
Then came the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, the terror of the blizzard, ghost-like, enormous, and swift. In dead, grim silence came he, loping his loose, tireless wolf's lope, and stopped at a windfall, where two forest giants, their decaying strength discovered by the extra weight of snow, lay prone, one across the other.
For a moment he paused, nose up, testing the still, cold air; then he leapt upon the upper fallen tree. He had, seen up there and clearly, an enormously thick and woolly coat, that magnified his already record size. You see him trotting along the tree-trunk. Then he stopped and stared down into the dark hollow under the upper tree. Then he sniffed—audibly. Then he licked his nose—and very red was his tongue. Then—but this he couldn't help, I verily believe, as he balanced there with his pricked ears and bright eyes—he whined.
And instantly his little, impatient, dog-like whine was answered by a deep, deep growl, that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth.
He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him. And that thing was a bear.
Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of a wolf. They are impregnable where they are, and know it. The extraordinary reason, however, was present. The white wolf was sniffing at it now—the bear's blood-trail to the windfall. Bruin had been roused once before that day—by beaters. He had then been driven forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den. But—but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in that vicinity.
The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the sparsely scattered people—perhaps because at a short distance he was nearly invisible. His white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse to him when there was no snow—which was one reason, maybe, why he retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer—was an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.