The Collected Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood
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even as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost their alertness and dropped aslant.
Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and bushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. He was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her and faced the east, where a faint penciling of red and gold was heralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his fair acquaintance—as many a two-legged animal has done before him—his tremendous importance in the world at large.
And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree's bluff worked as beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the air with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun's ears sprang alert, and she sniffed it with him. He turned his head from point to point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction. And when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her throat, but smothered and low as a woman's exclamation when she is not quite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not. At this sound, which Baree's sharp ears caught, he swung up to her with a light and mincing step, and in another moment they were smelling noses.
When the sun rose, half an hour later, it found them still in the small clearing on the side of the ridge, with a deep fringe of forest under them, and beyond that a wide, timbered plain which looked like a ghostly shroud in its mantle of frost. Up over this came the first red glow of the day, filling the clearing with a warmth that grew more and more comfortable as the sun crept higher.
Neither Baree nor Maheegun were inclined to move for a while, and for an hour or two they lay basking in a cup of the slope, looking down with questing and wide-awake eyes upon the wooded plain that stretched away under them like a great sea.
Maheegun, too, had sought the hunt pack, and like Baree had failed to catch it. They were tired, a little discouraged for the time, and hungry—but still alive with the fine thrill of anticipation, and restlessly sensitive to the new and mysterious consciousness of companionship. Half a dozen times Baree got up and nosed about Maheegun as she lay in the sun, whining to her softly and touching her soft coat with his muzzle, but for a long time she paid little attention to him. At last she followed him. All that day they wandered and rested together. Once more the night came.
It was without moon or stars. Gray masses of clouds swept slowly down out of the north and east, and in the treetops there was scarcely a whisper of wind as night gathered in. The snow began to fall at dusk, thickly, heavily, without a breath of sound. It was not cold, but it was still—so still that Baree and Maheegun traveled only a few yards at a time, and then stopped to listen. In this way all the night prowlers of the forest were traveling, if they were moving at all. It was the first of the Big Snow.
To the flesh-eating wild things of the forests, clawed and winged, the Big Snow was the beginning of the winter carnival of slaughter and feasting, of wild adventure in the long nights, of merciless warfare on the frozen trails. The days of breeding, of motherhood—the peace of spring and summer—were over. Out of the sky came the wakening of the Northland, the call of all flesh-eating creatures to the long hunt, and in the first thrill of it living things were moving but little this night, and that watchfully and with suspicion. Youth made it all new to Baree and Maheegun. Their blood ran swiftly; their feet fell softly; their ears were attuned to catch the slightest sounds.
In this first of the Big Snow they felt the exciting pulse of a new life. It lured them on. It invited them to adventure into the white mystery of the silent storm; and inspired by that restlessness of youth and its desires, they went on.
The snow grew deeper under their feet. In the open spaces they waded through it to their knees, and it continued to fall in a vast white cloud that descended steadily out of the sky. It was near midnight when it stopped. The clouds drifted away from under the stars and the moon, and for a long time Baree and Maheegun stood without moving, looking down from the bald crest of a ridge upon a wonderful world.
Never had they been able to see so far, except in the light of day. Under them was a plain. They could make out forests, lone trees that stood up like shadows out of the snow, a stream—still unfrozen—shimmering like glass with the flicker of firelight on it. Toward this stream Baree led the way. He no longer thought of Nepeese, and he whined with pent-up happiness as he stopped halfway down and turned to muzzle Maheegun. He wanted to roll in the snow and frisk about with his companion; he wanted to bark, to put up his head and howl as he had howled at the Red Moon back at the cabin.
Something held him from doing any of these things. Perhaps it was Maheegun's demeanor. She accepted his attentions rigidly. Once or twice she had seemed almost frightened; twice Baree had heard the sharp clicking of her teeth. The previous night, and all through tonight's storm, their companionship had grown more intimate, but now there was taking its place a mysterious aloofness on the part of Maheegun. Pierrot could have explained. With moon and stars above him, Baree, like the night, had undergone a transformation which even the sunlight of day had not made in him before. His coat was like polished jet. Every hair in his body glistened black. BLACK! That was it. And Nature was trying to tell Maheegun that of all the creatures hated by her kind, the creature which they feared and hated most was black. With her it was not experience, but instinct—telling her of the age-old feud between the gray wolf and the black bear. And Baree's coat, in the moonlight and the snow, was blacker than Wakayoo's had ever been in the fish-fattening days of May. Until they struck the broad openings of the plain, the young she-wolf had followed Baree without hesitation; now there was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, and twice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.
An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the west the tonguing of the wolf pack. It was not far distant, probably not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose, and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegun laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.
The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put Baree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was running blindly, favored by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes the pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it disappeared. And then came the pack.
At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree's heart leaped for an instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run away from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. He no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf—all wolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the pack.
Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her. In the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have her at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one of the gray monsters of the pack. Half a minute later a new hunter swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a third. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new companions. He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap of their jaws as they ran—and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the sound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in its race for life.
It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always. He had joined it naturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush. There had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had given him in the open, and no hostility. He belonged with these slim, swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped and his blood ran hot as the smell of the