Before Little-Sweet-Voice, at the tip of his fir-branch high over the hole, had come to the end of his song, seven baby wolves had got themselves born.
Seven little blind, hairless, helpless things that hadn't an inch of beauty between them; seven little flabby uglinesses that could do nothing but wriggle and suck. But such as they were, the old wolf loved her ugly babies with all her wolfish heart. For a long time no one—not even the father wolf—saw them but herself. A better place for being secret than the hole among the bramble-brakes she could not have chosen. The great old thorn-trees, with their twisty stems and thorny branches which had been growing twistier and thornier through countless moons, stretched their gnarled limbs high above the den and guarded endless secrecies as countless as the moons. And the brambles reached their twisted tangles this way and that in a bewildering labyrinth of thorns. While, dotting all the upper slopes, the junipers, large and little, stood up in dusk battalions above the lonely land. None but the wild furred feet of the wilderness ever went that way. In all its mazy length the print of human moccasins had never slurred the undergrowth trails. Even the wild creatures themselves did not greatly frequent it, by reason of its mighty growth of thorns, so that even among the long solitudes of Carboona, it was a loneliness apart.
It was some time before the little wolves got any idea of the outside thorniness and brambleness which hid them from the public gaze. All they knew of the world was the good smell and the good gloom of the badger-hole, where, as soon as their eyes were opened after the nine days, they could make out the immense grey mass of their mother, who came and went mysteriously, a mountain of warmth and food. And here, in the perpetual twilight, they slept and sucked, and sprawled and tumbled, and occasionally went tremendous expeditions, and stubbed their noses against the pine root that struck like a savage promontory into the abyss.
Not until they were several weeks old, and were really getting very troublesome in the den, did the patient old mother allow them their first glimpse of the world; and then only after she had taken every possible precaution to safeguard against anything, bird, beast and human, being on the watch.
The first coming out of the cubs into the sunlight was a wonderful affair. The old mother, having first scoured the country on all sides to see that no danger was lurking near, put her nose into the mouth of the den, and made a low noise in her throat. Instantly there was a hollow thumping and scurrying and scrambling and yelping, and then the badger-hole became a miniature volcano that shot seven small wolf-bodies into the light.
Out they tumbled, seven little furry fatnesses, with pointed noses, and pricked ears, and tiny black eyes that blinked nervously in the sun. And there they sat for a while in unspeakable amazement, and stared and blinked, and blinked and stared, and wondered where they were.
The first to move was a cub the merest trifle larger than the rest. He ran a few steps in an uncertain wobbling manner, stubbed his nose against a stone, yelped, backed almost as fast as he had gone forward, lost his balance on an old mole-hill, and rolled over on his back. And this was his first experience of the unevenness of the world. After that he lay and kicked, struggling with all his baby might to get right side up again. And his six brothers and sisters observed him from their superior elevation of six inches, and never offered to help; till, all of a sudden, it occurred to them what a glorious opportunity his upside-downness presented to them, and rolled down upon him in a body. During the scuffle which followed, the old mother sat and watched with admiring love. When the babies rolled over on their backs, or came to mimic disaster with roots or stones, she let them recover themselves as best they could, and learn by experience what were the hard things in the world and what the soft. And when she considered they had been long enough out of doors, she packed them back to bed again, and went off to hunt.
The cubs had played out of doors many times, and had grown quite used to the look of the bramble-brakes and the great thorns, and that immense hot roundness that went dazzling down behind the western peaks, when, one evening, the wolf-mother came upon a strange trail. Of all the creatures upon Carboona there was not one with whose body-scent and foot-scent she was not familiar. When the merest ghosts of scent came wafting along the tides of the summer air, her nose disentangled them delicately and never gave the right smell to the wrong owner. But the smell of the strange trail puzzled her. It belonged to neither bear, badger, fox, wolf, lynx nor caribou. It was buckskin, and yet not wholly buckskin; it was buckskin with something inside it which certainly was not buck.
The strange trail did not cross the brakes. That was fortunate, but it came dangerously near their northern extremity, and then turned east. The wolf followed it for a long distance till it passed out of her home range, and then slowly retraced it through the darkening spruce woods, sniffing suspiciously as she went. A week later she hit upon the trail again. This time the smell was fainter, but the trail itself was more disturbing: it actually touched the upper slopes where the junipers went black against the moon.