The Wolf Cub: A Novel of Spain

by Patrick Casey; Terence Casey

These mules were thoughtful and discreet to a degree. They did not leap, screaming, off the walls of the mountains. They expired in their tracks and therefore saved to the nine Quixotes the panniers strapped over their spines.

Morales and his men became, all at once, coldly furious. The third mule in dying, coughed up a round, compactly pressed ball of pointed black-green leaves. Some one in the company had forced handfuls of oleander leaves down the throats of the three mules!

Now, the leaves of the oleander are extremely poisonous to man and beast. Horses and kindred cattle have an instinct which warns them against eating the shrub. But man who has no strong instincts, often dies poisoned by the oleander's juices. It is related that several British soldiers during the Peninsular War cut and peeled some oleander branches to use as skewers for roasting meat over the campfires. Of the twelve men who ate that meat, seven died.

Even a creature as asinine as an ass knows enough to avoid the pointed black-green leaves. Most mules would rather starve than even smell of the plant. Yet, during the nights that preceded their untimely taking-off, some one in the company had forced handfuls of the poisonous leaves down the throats of the three mules.

For hours before the death, each mule had coughed. Also, each mule had simpered, simpered like a convent girl. Simpered is a strange word to use in such a case, but it describes exactly the way the mules had moved and worked their lips in a try to rid their stomachs of the deadly leaves.

Of the whole caravan of seven mules that had trotted so bravely out, there was left now but one sorely burdened ass. The nine cabalgadores weighted the surviving beast with some of the provisions from the backs of the three poisoned mules; they encumbered their own shoulders with the rest; then they continued doggedly on, thinking to kill the last mule for meat, once the provisions upon their backs and in the panniers were completely exhausted.

That night they bivouacked in a stony and savage ravine, and built two small fires, and hugged them close. It was very cold. An icy mountain fog or neblina had crept down like a clammy gray ghost from the windy passes and frozen snowfields far above. One could not see much farther before one through the thick mist than the nose upon one's face.

They wrapped their ponchos about them and shivered in the damp. A cavern of snarling wind-echoes and of eddying, dark shapes was the steep ravine. Down the length of it, the fog marched like an endless caravan of ghostly, silent, gray mules. The two fires, robust enough and certainly well attended, seemed as pale and anæmic and cold as two incandescents in the black heart of a mine.

Without the fling of the twin fires, a man in sheepskin zamarra, alpagartas and voluminous mountaineer's shawl sat cross-legged on a large boulder and watched the men bulk before the flames, and move back and forth, and lie down, keeping close together for warmth. He did not seem to feel the icy chill of the fog; he did not seem to fear discovery. And yet, should the fires leap up and burn voraciously because of some knot braided with pitch, he would be disclosed most surely to the men about the flames.

For days, however, he had been with them and never once had chance betrayed him to the men he watched. He had clung to a risco above them when they had climbed like slow obstinate flies out of the profundities of the Llanos de Jaen and plunged into the gargantas and barrancas of the desolate Sierra Nevada. He had hung upon their flank as a wolf hangs upon the flank of a gang of deer; as a podenco, or hunting dog, hangs upon the flank of a sounder of wild boar. While they ate, he had lingered near and, with a rare and pensive curiosity, had watched them slowly but surely exhaust the linings of their mules' panniers.