But—the unforeseen did happen, at that moment. The trail, just there, led across a little dip wherein the snow still lingered. Thinly covered by the snow lay a young pine-tree, lightning shivered and long dead. Thrust up from the trunk was a slim, sharp-pointed stub, keen and hard and preserved by its resin. Upon this hidden dagger-point, as he ran, the dark wolf planted his right fore foot—planted it fair and with a mighty push. Between the spreading toes, between the fine bones and sinews and the cringing nerves of the foot, and out by the first joint of the leg it thrust its rending way.
At the suddenness of the anguish the dark wolf yelped, falling forward upon his muzzle as he did so, and dropping from his place as the pack sped on. But as he wrenched his foot free and took one stumbling stride forward, the pack stopped, and turned. Their long white fangs snapped, and the fire in their eyes took a different hue.
Very well the dark wolf knew the meaning of the halt, the turn, the change in his fellows' eyes. He knew the stern law of the pack—the instant and inevitable doom of its hurt member. The average gray wolf knows how to accept the inevitable. Fate itself—the law of the pack—he does not presume to defy. He will fight—to justify his blood, and, perhaps, to drug his despair and die in the heat of the struggle. But he does not dream of trying to escape.
And in this fashion, fighting in silence, this dark wolf would have died at the brink of the river bluff, and been eaten by his fellows ere they continued their chase of the leaping buck—in this fashion would he have died, but for that extra breadth of skull between the eyes, that heightened individualism and resourcefulness. Had there been any chance to escape by fighting, fighting would have been the choice of his fierce and hardy spirit. But what was he against six?
Defying the fiery anguish in his foot, he made a desperate leap which took him to the extreme overhanging edge of the bluff. Already the jaws of the executioners were gnashing at his heels. A second more and they would have been at his throat. But before that second passed he was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not far ahead?
But the black-shouldered wolf was not drowned. The flood was thick, indeed, with crunching ice-cakes and wallowing logs and slowly turning islets of uprooted trees and the débris of the winter forest. But fortune so favoured the wolf that he fell in a space of clear water, instead of being dashed to a pulp on ice-cake or tree trunk. He disappeared, came to the surface gasping, struck out hardily through the grim and daunting turmoil, and succeeded in gaining one of those islets of toughly interlaced débris which turned slowly in the flood. Upon this precarious refuge, crouched shivering on the largest tree root and licking persistently at his wounded paw, he was carried swiftly down-stream through the roar of waters.
II.
When the lopsided moon, now hung high over a low, desolate shore of blanched rampikes, was fading to a papery whiteness against a sky of dawn, the roar of the river grew louder, and the islet, no longer slowly revolving, plunged forward, through a succession of wallowing waves, over a wild half-mile of ledges, and joined itself to a wider and mightier stream. The wolf, drenched, shivering, and appalled by the tumult, clung to his refuge by tooth and claw; and the islet, being well compacted, held together through the wrenching plunges, and carried its burden safely forth upon the quiet current.
For a day and a night and a day the starving wolf voyaged down the flood, till his gaunt sides clung together, and a fierce ache gnawed at his vitals. But with the fasting and the ceaseless soothing of his tongue his wound rapidly healed; and when, after sunset of his second evening on the river, the islet grounded in an eddy under the bank, he sprang ashore with speed little impaired. Only a limp and an ache remained to remind him of the hurt which had so nearly cost him his life and had exiled him to untried hunting-grounds.
His feet once more on firm ground, the wolf halted warily. The air that came down the bank carried a strange and warning scent. Noiselessly he crept up the steep, went through a few yards of shrubbery like a ghost, and peered forth upon a rough back-settlement road. At one side he saw a cabin, with a barn near it, and two long-horned steers (he had seen steers at a lumber camp in his own wild land), thrusting their muzzles over the fence. Down the road toward the cabin came a man, in gray homespun and cowhide larrigans, with an axe over his shoulder. It was the man-smell which had made the wolf so cautious.