The Passing of the Black Whelps
I.
lopsided, waning moon, not long risen, looked over the ragged crest of the ridge, and sent long shadows down the sparsely wooded slope. Though there was no wind, and every tree was as motionless as if carved of ice, these spare, intricate shadows seemed to stir and writhe, as if instinct with a kind of sinister activity. This confusion of light and dark was increased by the patches of snow that still clung in the dips and on the gentler slopes. The air was cold, yet with a bitter softness in it, the breath of the thaw. The sound of running water was everywhere—the light clamour of rivulets, and the rush of the swollen brooks; while from the bottom of the valley came the deep, pervading voice of the river at freshet, labouring between high banks with its burden of sudden flood.
Over the crest of the ridge, inky black for an instant against the moon, came a leaping deer. He vanished in a patch of young firs. He shot out again into the moonlight. Down the slope he came in mighty bounds, so light of foot and so elastic that he seemed to float through the air. From his heaving sides and wild eyes it was evident that he was fleeing in desperation from some appalling terror. Straight down the slope he came, to the very brink of the high bluff overlooking the river. There he wheeled, and continued his flight up the valley, his violent shadow every now and then, as he crossed the spaces of moonlight, projecting grotesquely out upon the swirling flood.
Up along the river bluff he fled for perhaps a mile. Then he stopped suddenly and listened, his sensitive ears and dilating nostrils held high to catch the faintest waft of air. Not a sound came to him, except the calling of the waters; not a scent, save the raw freshness of melting snow and the balsamic tang of buds just beginning to thrill to the first of the rising sap. He bounded on again for perhaps a hundred yards, then with a tremendous leap sprang to one side, a full thirty feet, landing belly-deep in a thicket of scrub juniper. Another leap, as if he were propelled by steel springs, carried him yet another thirty feet aside. Then he turned, ran back a couple of hundred yards parallel to his old trail, and lay down in a dense covert of spruces to catch breath and ease his pounding heart. He was a very young buck, not yet seasoned in the craft of the wilderness, and his terror shook him. But he knew enough to take his snatched rest at the very edge of his covert, where his eyes could watch the back trail. For a quarter of an hour, however, nothing appeared along that staring trail. Then he got up nervously and resumed his flight, still ascending the valley, but now slanting away from the river, and gradually climbing back toward the crest of the ridge. He had in mind a wide reach of swales and flooded meadows, still miles away, wherein he might hope to elude the doom that followed him.
Not long after the buck had vanished there arose a strange sound upon the still, wet air. It came in a rising and falling cadence from far behind the ridge, under the lopsided moon. It was a high, confused sound, not unmusical, but terrifying—a cry of many voices. It drifted up into the silvery night, wavered and diminished, swelled again, and then died away, leaving a sense of fear upon the quiet that followed. The soft clamour of the waters, when one noticed them again, seemed to have taken a new note from the menace of that cadenced cry.
Presently over the top of the ridge, at the gap wherein had first appeared the form of the leaping buck, a low, dark shape came, moving sinuously and with deadly swiftness. It did not bound into the air and float, as the buck had seemed to do, but slid smoothly, like a small, dense patch of cloud-shadow—a direct, inevitable movement, wasting no force and fairly eating up the trail of the fleeing deer.
As it came down the slope, disappearing in the hemlock groves and emerging upon the bright, snowy hollows, the dread shape resolved itself into a pack of seven wolves. They ran so close, so evenly, with fanged muzzles a little low, and ample, cloudy tails a little high, that one might have almost covered the whole deadly pack with a table-cloth. Their tongues were hanging out, and their eyes shot green fire. They were fiercely hungry, for game was scarce and cunning that winter on their much ravaged range, and this chase was already a long one. When the trail of the buck wheeled at the river-brink, the leader of the pack gave one short howl as he turned, barely escaping the abyss. It seemed to him that the buck must have been nearly winded, or he would not, even for an instant, have contemplated taking to such mad water. With the renewed vigour of encouragement, he swept his pack along up the edge of the bluff.
On the pack-leader's right flank ran a sturdy wolf of a darker colour than his fellows—nearly black, indeed, on the top of his head, over his shoulders, and along his stiff-haired backbone. Not quite so tall or so long-flanked as the leader, he had that greater breadth of skull between the eyes which betokens the stronger intelligence, the more individualized resourcefulness. He had a look in his deep-set, fierce eye which seemed to prophesy that unless the unforeseen should happen he would ere long seize the leadership to himself.