With wide-open, frightened eyes, he stared out into the world. On the bramble-sprays the dew lay thickly. Dew was grey on the grass round the trodden doorway of the den. It was a damp world that glimmered in the yellow gleam of the dawn. Beyond the brambles lay the trees, beyond the trees, the rocky peaks; beyond the utmost peak, the blue vastness where the eagles have their trails. It all made the cub feel dreadfully small, dreadfully alone.
Yet somewhere out there, in the wet grey world of the dawn, his mother and the family were to be found. He put his baby nose to the ground and sniffed. The family smell was plain all about the doorway. A faint trail of it seemed to lead off towards the junipers, but when he took a step or two in that direction the trail was drowned in dew. He went back to the den-door, paused to sniff again, and set off in the opposite direction.
Why he went that way, he could not tell. Once he had started, he did not think of turning back. To return meant the den again. He had a distrust of the den. It was in the den that he had first known fear.
He went on for what seemed to him an endless distance among enormous jungles of bramble and fern. No sign of his mother, or the other cubs, nor any faintest whiff of the heavy family smell! Once a rabbit, leaping past, scared him out of his wits; and once—how his heart thumped with terror as he pressed himself close to the ground!—a great dog-fox went slinking to windward, spilling the musk of his murderous self into the telltale air.
For some time after the fox had disappeared, the cub crouched where he was, too terrified to stir. Then, bit by bit, his courage came to him again, and he went cautiously on his way.
He had just reached the end of the thickets, where the forest proper began, and was plucking up heart to enter the shade of the giant trees, when a new terror presented itself, and he crouched low as before. But this time it was no fox, lynx, or other four-footed enemy that threatened him. It was a creature that stood on two hind feet, with its fore-paws by its side, and an eagle feather in its hair.
The cub narrowed his eyes till they were as good as shut, with only the tiniest slit between their lids through which it could see the strange adornments the creature wore on its feet. He hoped, if he lay as motionless as a stone, that the creature would not notice him. When hunting was afoot, absolute stillness would often serve to hide you as effectually as a cover of leaves. In his utter ignorance of the world, he could have no idea of an Indian's piercing sight.
There was a swift movement, noiseless as the swoop of an owl's wing, and before he could open his eyes, he felt himself seized by the back of the neck and swung into the air.
When the mother-wolf reached the den for the sixth and last time, her fine sense told her in an instant that something was wrong. She entered the den with misgiving. As she feared, it was empty. Her nose found the trail immediately; but it was growing a little stale, for the sun was high now, and it had been made in the dawn dew. Nevertheless, the mother-passion within her sharpened the keenness of her scent, and off she went at a swift trot. Every time the cub had stopped, she sniffed eagerly, as if to drink his very body through her nose. When she took up the fainter trail of his movement, an uneasy light glittered in her eyes. Woe to the creature, whatever it was, which had dared to harm him, if she should find a second trail!
Where the maze of the thickets ended and the forest began she stopped dead, her hair bristling, her eyes alight. Here was the spot of the cub's capture! Here was the second trail! As she sniffed, and learnt the record told in smell, her anger rose. But with the anger went misgiving, and the uneasiness of fear; for here she recognized again the trail of the new presence upon Carboona, the dread of which had caused her to seek another den. The trail went straight into the forest, in a south-easterly direction. With the utmost caution the mother-wolf took it up, in a swift, noiseless lope, passing deeper and deeper into the vast wilderness of spruce and pine that went descending, always descending, towards the basin of the world. But long before it reached the lowest levels, the trail turned due east through the mighty gorge that sucks the prairie wind into Carboona's bosom like an enormous throat. Through the gorge went the old wolf, sniffing, peering, listening—every sense strained to the utmost, for now the buckskin scent was strong upon the ground, and the trail was very new.