There was a long pause, broken by neither wolves nor huskies. The silence was so deep that you could almost hear the shadows as they shortened under the moon.
All at once Shasta threw back his head and howled. It was the true wolf howl, long, vibrating, desolate. The desire to do so came on him suddenly, unexpectedly; a thing wholly strange and not to be explained. The note sang out sharply into the air. It seemed to rip, like a wolf's fangs, the silver throat of the moon.
The wolves cocked their ears and listened intently. Here was a new voice which they had never heard before; a wolf voice truly, yet with some fine difference which set it apart from all others and made it impossible to forget.
When Shasta had ended, and the last dim echo of his howl had faded from the rocks, he sat silent, shivering with fear. For now he had done what only a leader of a pack had the right to do—he had broken in upon the silence of the wolves.
What would they do? Would they punish him for his impertinence? Suppose some leader gave the signal for the entire pack to sweep down upon him and tear him limb from limb? Nitka and the foster-brothers would not be strong enough to save him. Even Shoomoo's giant bulk would be of no avail against the fury of the united pack. Always before when he had known fear, he had taken to his legs, and either he had escaped to the cave in time or else Nitka or Shoomoo had been at hand to save him; but he knew that his legs would be useless now. The great fear seemed to take from them the power of running, and to freeze him to the rock.
He did not move a muscle. He did not even dare to turn his eyes. Yet he saw everything with astonishing clearness down to the smallest detail. There was Shoomoo, motionless on his pinnacle, his ears erect, his hair bristling, the moonlight falling silverly on his dark coat and casting his shadow blackly down below. And there were the countless members of that vast pack equally motionless, equally alert, all their heads turned in one direction, all their gleaming eyes turned one way. And Shasta, seeing all those terrible eyes fixed upon him, not only saw them, but felt them—felt the fierce wolfish thought behind that united all the pack into one wolf-mind.
The silence was terrible. No arrow-headed flight of wild geese came honking from the north to break it. Not even the solitary song of the white-throated sparrow on his fir branch slipped softly out to show that he was awake and that there was a sweetness in the night; and if nothing sounded, so also nothing stirred, nothing except the wolfish shadows that shortened invisibly under the moon.
CHAPTER VII
SHASTA JOINS THE WOLF PACK
In that terrible silence when Shasta trembled with the fear that was in him, and did not dare to move, the great thing happened.