The Lonesome Trail. John G. Neihardt
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snow between them. To Antoine, the ever-widening space of glinting coldness vaguely symbolised the barrier that seemed growing between him and his last companion.
“Susette, O, Susette!” he cried at last, breathless and exhausted. His cry was dirge-like, even as the wolves’; thin and sharp and ice-like—the voice of the old world-ache.
She had disappeared in the dusk of a ravine. Antoine, huddled in the snows with his face upon his knees, sobbed in the winter stillness. At last, with slow and faltering step, he returned to his lair; and for the first time in months he felt the throat-pang of the alien.
He threw himself down upon the floor of the cave and cursed the world. Then he cursed Susette.
“It’s some other wolf!” he hissed. “Some other grey dog that she’s gone to see. O, damn him! damn his grey hide! I’ll kill her when she comes back!”
He took out his knife and began whetting it viciously upon his boot.
“I’ll cut her into strips and eat ’em! Wasn’t I good to her? O, I’ll cut her into strips!”
He whetted his knife for an hour, cursing the while through his set teeth. At last his anger grew into a foolish madness. He hurled himself upon the bunch of furs beside him and imagined that they were Susette. He set his teeth into the furs, he crushed them with his hands, he tore at them with his nails. Then in the impotence of his anger, he fell upon his face and sobbed himself to sleep.
Strange visions passed before him. Again he killed Lecroix, and saw the dead face grinning at the stars. Again he sat in his mother’s lodge and wept because he was a stranger. Again he was fleeing, fleeing, fleeing from a leather noose that hung above him like a black cloud, and circled and lowered and raised and lowered until it swooped down upon him and closed about his neck.
With a yell of fright he awoke from his nightmare. His head throbbed, his mouth was parched. At last day came in sneakingly through the opening—a dull, melancholy light; and with it came Susette, sniffing, with the bristles of her neck erect.
“Susette! Susette!” cried the man joyfully.
He no longer thought of killing her. He seized her in his arms; he kissed her frost-whitened muzzle; he caressed her; he called her a woman. She received his caresses with disdain. Whereat the man redoubled his acts of fondness. He fed her and petted her as she ate; whereat the bristles on her neck fell. She nosed him half fondly.
And Antoine, man-like, was glad again. He contented himself with touching the frayed hem of the garment of Happiness.
He ate none that day. He said to himself, “I won’t hunt till it’s all gone; she can have it all.” He was afraid to leave Susette. He was afraid to take her with him again into the land of her own people. Antoine was jealous.
All day he was kind to her with the pitiful kindness of a doting lover for his unfaithful mistress.
That night she consented to lie within his arms, and Antoine cried softly as he whispered into her ear: “Susette, I hain’t a goin’ to be jealous no more. You’ve been a bad girl, Susette. Don’t do it again. I won’t be mean less’n you let him come skulkin’ round here, damn his grey hide! But O, Susette”—his voice was like a spoken pang—“I wisht—I wisht I was that other wolf!”
The next morning Antoine did not get up. He felt sore and exhausted. By evening his heart was beating like a hammer. His head ached and swam; his burning eyes saw strange, uncertain visions.
“Susette,” he called, “I hain’t quite right; come here and let me touch you again.”
Night was falling and Susette sat sullenly apart, listening for the call of her people. She did not go to him. All night the man tossed and raved. After a lingering age of delirious wanderings, dizzy flights from huge pitiless pursuers, he became conscious of the daylight. He raised his head feebly and looked about the den. Susette was gone. A fury of jealousy again seized Antoine. She had gone to that other wolf—he felt certain of that. He tried to arise, but the fever had weakened him so that he lay impotently, torn alternately with anger and longing.
Suddenly a frost-whitened snout was thrust in at the opening. It was Susette. The man was too weak to cry out his joy, but his eyes filled with a soft light.
Susette entered sniffing strangely, whining and switching her tail as she came. At her heels followed another grey wolf—a male, larger-boned, lanker, with a more powerful snout. He whined and moved his tail nervously at sight of the man.
Antoine lay staring impotently upon the intruder. “So that’s him,” thought the man; “I wisht I could get up.”
A delirious anger shook him; he struggled to arise, but could not. “O God,” he moaned; it was an unusual thing for this man to say the word so; “O God, please le’ me get up and fight!”
A harsh growl stopped him. The grey intruder approached him with a rapid, sinuous movement of the tail. His jaws grinned hideously with long sharp teeth displayed. The rage of hunger was in his eyes fixed steadily upon the sick man.
Antoine stared steadily into the glaring eyes of his wolfish rival, already crouching for the spring.
On a sudden, a strange exhilaration came over the man. He seemed drinking in the essence of life from the pitiless stare of his adversary. His great limbs, seeming devitalised but a moment before, now tingled to their extremities with a sudden surging of the wine of life. His eyes, which the fever had burned into the dulness of ashes, flamed suddenly again with the eager lust of fight.
He raised himself upon his haunches, beast-like, and with the lifting of a sneering lip that disclosed his grinding teeth, he gave a cry that was both a snarl and a sob. In that moment, these many centuries of artificial life were as a vanished dream. From the long-slumbering dust of the prehistoric cave-man came a giant spirit to steel the sinews of its far removed and weaker kin.
Antoine met the impetuous spring of the wolf with the downward blow of a fist, and sprang whining upon his momentarily worsted foe. Never before had he fought in all his bitter pariah life as now he fought for the possession of his last companion.
His antagonist was larger than Susette, the survivor of many moonlit battles to the death in the frozen, foodless wilderness of hills.
Antoine struggled not as a man; he was now merely the good, glorious, fighting beast—masterful, primitive, the keeper of his own. Lacerated with the snapping of powerful jaws, bleeding from his face and hands, the man felt that he was winning. With a whining cry, less than half human, he succeeded in fixing his left hand upon the hairy throat, crushed the wolf down upon its back, and with prodigious strength, began pressing the fingers of his right hand in between the protruding lower ribs. He would tear them out! He would thrust his hand in among the vitals of his foe!
All the while Susette, whining and switching her tail, watched with glowing eyes the struggle of the males, and waited for the proof of the master.
At this juncture she arose with a nervous, threatening swaying of the head, approached the two cautiously, then hurled herself into the encounter. She leaped with a savage yelp upon him who had long been her master.
The man’s grip relaxed. He fell back and threw out his arms in which once more the weakness of the fever came.
“Susette!” he gasped; “I was good to you; I——”
His voice was choked into a wheeze. Susette had gripped him by the throat, and the two were upon him.
She had gone back to the ways of her kind—and the man was an alien.
II. THE LOOK IN THE FACE
It was after one of the Saturday night feasts at No-Teeth Lodge that I drew my old friend, Half-a-Day, to one side where the shadows were not broken by the firelight.
“Tell