Nomads of the North: A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars

by James Oliver Curwood

It seemed a vast distance away at first—the hot throated cry of wolves on the trail of meat. It was swinging northward into the plain, and this shortly brought the cry with the wind, which was out of the north and the west. The howling of the pack was very distinct after that, and in Miki's brain nebulous visions and almost unintelligible memories were swiftly wakening into life. It was not Challoner's voice that he heard, but it was A VOICE THAT HE KNEW. It was the voice of Hela, his giant father; the voice of Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for a hundred and a thousand generations before him, and it was the instinct of those generations and the hazy memory of his earliest puppyhood that were impinging the thing upon him. A little later it would take both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate the hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog. And this voice of his blood was COMING! It bore down upon them swiftly, fierce and filled with the blood-lust of hunger. He forgot Neewa. He did not observe the cub when he slunk back deeper under the windfall. He rose up on his feet and stood stiff and tense, unconscious of all things but that thrilling tongue of the hunt-pack.

Wind-broken, his strength failing him, and his eyes wildly searching the night ahead for the gleam of water that might save him, Ahtik, the young caribou bull, raced for his life a hundred yards ahead of the wolves. The pack had already flung itself out in the form of a horse-shoe, and the two ends were beginning to creep up abreast of Ahtik, ready to close in for the hamstring—and the kill. In these last minutes every throat was silent, and the young bull sensed the beginning of the end. Desperately he turned to the right and plunged into the forest.

Miki heard the crash of his body and he hugged close to the windfall. Ten seconds later Ahtik passed within fifty feet of him, a huge and grotesque form in the moonlight, his coughing breath filled with the agony and hopelessness of approaching death. As swiftly as he had come he was gone, and in his place followed half a score of noiseless shadows passing so quickly that to Miki they were like the coming and the going of the wind.

For many minutes after that he stood and listened but again silence had fallen upon the night. After a little he went back into the windfall and lay down beside Neewa.

Hours that followed he passed in restless snatches of slumber. He dreamed of things that he had forgotten. He dreamed of Challoner. He dreamed of chill nights and the big fires; he heard his master's voice and he felt again the touch of his hand; but over it all and through it all ran that wild hunting voice of his own kind.

In the early dawn he came out from under the windfall and smelled of the trail where the wolves and the caribou had passed. Heretofore it was Neewa who had led in their wandering; now it was Neewa that followed. His nostrils filled with the heavy scent of the pack, Miki travelled steadily in the direction of the plain. It took him half an hour to reach the edge of it. After that he came to a wide and stony out-cropping of the earth over which he nosed the spoor to a low and abrupt descent into the wider range of the valley.

Here he stopped.

Twenty feet under him and fifty feet away lay the partly devoured carcass of the young bull. It was not this fact that thrilled him until his heart stood still. From out of the bushy plain had come Maheegun, a renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which she had not helped to kill. She was a slinking, hollow-backed, quick-fanged creature, still rib-thin from the sickness that had come of eating a poison-bait; a beast shunned by her own kind—a coward, a murderess even of her own whelps. But she was none of these things to Miki. In her he saw in living flesh and bone what his memory and his instinct recalled to him of his mother. And his mother had come before Challoner, his master.

For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man's presence would have failed to rouse. He was very close to Maheegun before she was conscious that he was near. The Mother-smell was warm in his nose now; it filled him with a great joy; and yet—he was afraid. But it was not a physical fear. Flattened on the ground, with his head between his fore-paws, he whined.

Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of her jaws and her bloodshot eyes aglow with menace and suspicion. Miki had no time to make a move or another sound. With the suddenness of a cat the outcast creature was upon him. Her fangs slashed him just once—and she was gone. Her teeth had drawn blood from his shoulder, but it was not the smart of the wound that held him for many moments as still as if dead. The Mother-smell was still where Maheegun had been. But his dreams had crumbled. The thing that had been Memory died away at last in a deep breath that was broken by a whimper of pain. For him, even as for Neewa, there was no more a Challoner, and no longer a mother. But there remained—the world! In it the sun was rising. Out of it came the thrill and the perfume of life. And close to him—very close—was the rich, sweet smell of meat.