The whole forest seemed to quake as he went.
While all this was happening, Shasta, crouched behind his tree, had watched with intense excitement the progress of the fight. Now that Gomposh had proved himself conqueror, and that the moose had disappeared, he came out from his refuge.
He wanted to thank Gomposh, to make him feel how glad he was that he had beaten the moose. But for some reason peculiar to himself, Gomposh evidently did not want to be thanked. And when Shasta went up to lay his hand on his thick black coat, he rumbled something rude in his chest and moved sulkily away. As he went he turned once to look back at the boy, and then, like the moose, disappeared among the trees.
Left alone on the spot where the great battle had been fought, and where he had come so near losing his life, Shasta looked about him carefully. The ground was torn up and trampled, the grass and leaves blotched with dark stains. A faint smell of newly-spilt blood filled the air. And all round crowded the trees, dark, solemn, full of unnamable things.
As Shasta watched, a feeling of dread came over him. He could not have explained the feeling. All he knew was that it was a bad place where bad things could happen, and where even Gomposh had not cared to remain. Without lingering another moment, he fled away on noiseless naked feet.
And down in the cedar swamp, among the skunk cabbage and the bad black pools, old Gomposh sat in his lair and licked his wound. It did not heal for several days; but the big slavery tongue kept busily at work, and Nature, the old unfailing nurse, attended to her job. A good deal of grumbling accompanied the licking, and acted like a tongue on Gomposh's mind. So it was not long before he went about as usual, and the nuthatches perceived that Gomposh was so very much Gomposh again that the toadstools were being punished for having grown so fat!
CHAPTER XIV
SHASTA LEAVES HIS WOLF KIN
The days and weeks went by. By the time the dark blue flower of the camass had faded, and the yellow wild parsley had begun to look tired, Shasta began to feel again the same strange restlessness creeping over him which he had felt before. And whenever he turned his face towards the southeast, the remembrance of the Indian village would sit down thickly upon him, and he would stop to think. When he remembered the raw-hide lariat and the husky dogs, he hated the camp; but when he remembered with his nose-memory, the pleasant odour of the burning cottonwood and of the dried sweet-grass came to him and made a stirring in his heart. Moreover, the Indian smell was there—the smell that does not come from cottonwood nor sweet-grass, or parfleches filled with buffalo meat, but clings about even the Indian names and is an odour of the old, forgotten times.
And as he went along the trails, somehow or other everything was different. The birds were there just the same. The blue jays were full of jabbering talk. The crows followed each other from tree to tree, always crying to those ahead to go farther on, and fasten their food-bags to another bough. And the woodpecker hammered hollowly at the hidden heart of the woods. As with the birds, so with the beasts. Nitka and Shoomoo went and came on the hunting trails, and the wolf-brothers howled in the night. Gomposh slapped the dead logs for grubs, and was a silly old bear when nobody was watching. But when he met any one he would sit down heavily at once and look dreadfully wise. And the weasels went on their wicked ways, killing and killing, not because of hunger, but the blood-lust to kill. And the red squirrels and the grey squirrels ran along the tree-tops for miles, without ever coming to ground; and the fussy little chipmunks fussed.