Chapter 6

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_ Baree's fight with Oohoomisew was good medicine for him. It not only gave him great confidence in himself, but it also cleared the fever of ugliness from his blood. He no longer snapped and snarled at things as he went on through the night.

It was a wonderful night. The moon was straight overhead, and the sky was filled with stars, so that in the open spaces the light was almost like that of day, except that it was softer and more beautiful. It was very still. There was no wind in the treetops, and it seemed to Baree that the howl he had given must have echoed to the end of the world.

Now and then Baree heard a sound--and always he stopped, attentive and listening. Far away he heard the long, soft mooing of a cow moose. He heard a great splashing in the water of a small lake that he came to, and once there came to him the sharp cracking of horn against horn--two bucks settling a little difference of opinion a quarter of a mile away. But it was always the wolf howl that made him sit and listen longest, his heart beating with a strange impulse which he did not as yet understand. It was the call of his breed, growing in him slowly but insistently.

He was still a wanderer--pupamootao, the Indians call it. It is this "wander spirit" that inspires for a time nearly every creature of the wild as soon as it is able to care for itself--nature's scheme, perhaps, for doing away with too close family relations and possibly dangerous interbreeding. Baree, like the young wolf seeking new hunting grounds, or the young fox discovering a new world, had no reason or method in his wandering. He was simply "traveling"--going on. He wanted something which he could not find. The wolf call brought it to him.

The stars and the moon filled Baree with a yearning for this something. The distant sounds impinged upon him his great aloneness. And instinct told him that only by questing could he find. It was not so much Kazan and Gray Wolf that he missed now--not so much motherhood and home as it was companionship. Now that he had fought the wolfish rage out of him in his battle with Oohoomisew, the dog part of him had come into its own again--the lovable half of him, the part that wanted to snuggle up near something that was alive and friendly, small odds whether it wore feathers or fur, was clawed or hoofed.

He was sore from the Willow's bullet, and he was sore from battle, and toward dawn he lay down under a shelter of some alders at the edge of a second small lake and rested until midday. Then he began questing in the reeds and close to the pond lilies for food. He found a dead jackfish, partly eaten by a mink, and finished it.

His wound was much less painful this afternoon, and by nightfall he scarcely noticed it at all. Since his almost tragic end at the hands of Nepeese, he had been traveling in a general northeasterly direction, following instinctively the run of the waterways. But his progress had been slow, and when darkness came again he was not more than eight or ten miles from the hole into which he had fallen after the Willow had shot him.

Baree did not travel far this night. The fact that his wound had come with dusk, and his fight with Oohoomisew still later, filled him with caution. Experience had taught him that the dark shadows and the black pits in the forest were possible ambuscades of danger. He was no longer afraid, as he had once been, but he had had fighting enough for a time, and so he accepted circumspection as the better part of valor and held himself aloof from the perils of darkness. It was a strange instinct that made him seek his bed on the top of a huge rock up which he had some difficulty in climbing. Perhaps it was a harkening back to the days of long ago when Gray Wolf, in her first motherhood, sought refuge at the summit of the Sun Rock which towered high above the forest world of which she and Kazan were a part, and where later she was blinded in her battle with the lynx.

Baree's rock, instead of rising for a hundred feet or more straight up, was possibly as high as a man's head. It was in the edge of the creek bottom, with the spruce forest close at his back. For many hours he did not sleep, but lay keenly alert, his ears tuned to catch every sound that came out of the dark world about him. There was more than curiosity in his alertness tonight. His education had broadened immensely in one way: he had learned that he was a very small part of all this wonderful earth that lay under the stars and the moon, and he was keenly alive with the desire to become better acquainted with it without any more fighting or hurt. Tonight he knew what it meant when he saw now and then gray shadows float silently out of the forest into the moonlight--the owls, monsters of the breed with which he had fought. He heard the crackling of hoofed feet and the smashing of heavy bodies in the underbrush. He heard again the mooing of the moose. Voices came to him that he had not heard before--the sharp yap-yap-yap of a fox, the unearthly, laughing cry of a great Northern loon on a lake half a mile away, the scream of a lynx that came floating through miles of forest, the low, soft croaks of the nighthawks between himself and the stars. He heard strange whisperings in the treetops--whisperings of the wind. And once, in the heart of a dead stillness, a buck whistled shrilly close behind his rock--and at the wolf scent in the air shot away in a terror-stricken gray streak.

All these sounds held their new meaning for Baree. Swiftly he was coming into his knowledge of the wilderness. His eyes gleamed; his blood thrilled. Often for many minutes at a time he scarcely moved. But of all the sounds that came to him, the wolf cry thrilled him most. Again and again he listened to it. At times it was far away, so far that it was like a whisper, dying away almost before it reached him. Then again it would come to him full-throated, hot with the breath of the chase, calling him to the red thrill of the hunt, to the wild orgy of torn flesh and running blood--calling, calling, calling. That was it, calling him to his own kin, to the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh--to the wild, fierce hunting packs of his mother's tribe! It was Gray Wolf's voice seeking for him in the night--Gray Wolf's blood inviting him to the Brotherhood of the Pack.

Baree trembled as he listened. In his throat he whined softly. He edged to the sheer face of the rock. He wanted to go; nature was urging him to go. But the call of the wild was struggling against odds. For in him was the dog, with its generations of subdued and sleeping instincts--and all that night the dog in him kept Baree to the top of his rock.

Next morning Baree found many crayfish along the creek, and he feasted on their succulent flesh until he felt that he would never be hungry again. Nothing had tasted quite so good since he had eaten the partridge of which he had robbed Sekoosew the ermine.

In the middle of the afternoon Baree came into a part of the forest that was very quiet and very peaceful. The creek had deepened. In places its banks swept out until they formed small ponds. Twice he made considerable detours to get around these ponds. He traveled very quietly, listening and watching. Not since the ill-fated day he had left the old windfall had he felt quite so much at home as now. It seemed to him that at last he was treading country which he knew, and where he would find friends. Perhaps this was another miracle mystery of instinct--of nature. For he was in old Beaver Tooth's domain. It was here that his father and mother had hunted in the days before he was born. It was not far from here that Kazan and Beaver Tooth had fought that mighty duel under water, from which Kazan had escaped with his life without another breath to lose.

Baree would never know these things. He would never know that he was traveling over old trails. But something deep in him gripped him strangely. He sniffed the air, as if in it he found the scent of familiar things. It was only a faint breath--an indefinable promise that brought him to the point of a mysterious anticipation.

The forest grew deeper. It was wonderful virgin forest. There was no undergrowth, and traveling under the trees was like being in a vast, mystery-filled cavern through the roof of which the light of day broke softly, brightened here and there by golden splashes of the sun. For a mile Baree made his way quietly through this forest. He saw nothing but a few winged flirtings of birds; there was almost no sound. Then he came to a still larger pond. Around this pond there was a thick growth of alders and willows where the larger trees had thinned out. He saw the glimmer of afternoon sunlight on the water--and then, all at once, he heard life.

There had been few changes in Beaver Tooth's colony since the days of his feud with Kazan and the otters. Old Beaver Tooth was somewhat older. He was fatter. He slept a great deal, and perhaps he was less cautious. He was dozing on the great mud-and-brushwood dam of which he had been engineer-in-chief, when Baree came out softly on a high bank thirty or forty feet away. So noiseless had Baree been that none of the beavers had seen or heard him. He squatted himself flat on his belly, hidden behind a tuft of grass, and with eager interest watched every movement. Beaver Tooth was rousing himself. He stood on his short legs for a moment; then he tilted himself up on his broad, flat tail like a soldier at attention, and with a sudden whistle dived into the pond with a great splash.

In another moment it seemed to Baree that the pond was alive with beavers. Heads and bodies appeared and disappeared, rushing this way and that through the water in a manner that amazed and puzzled him. It was the colony's evening frolic. Tails hit the water like flat boards. Odd whistlings rose above the splashing--and then as suddenly as it had begun, the play came to an end. There were probably twenty beavers, not counting the young, and as if guided by a common signal--something which Baree had not heard--they became so quiet that hardly a sound could be heard in the pond. A few of them sank under the water and disappeared entirely, but most of them Baree could watch as they drew themselves out on shore.

The beavers lost no time in getting at their labor, and Baree watched and listened without so much as rustling a blade of the grass in which he was concealed. He was trying to understand. He was striving to place these curious and comfortable-looking creatures in his knowledge of things. They did not alarm him; he felt no uneasiness at their number or size. His stillness was not the quiet of discretion, but rather of a strange and growing desire to get better acquainted with this curious four-legged brotherhood of the pond. Already they had begun to make the big forest less lonely for him. And then, close under him--not more than ten feet from where he lay--he saw something that almost gave voice to the puppyish longing for companionship that was in him.

Down there, on a clean strip of the shore that rose out of the soft mud of the pond, waddled fat little Umisk and three of his playmates. Umisk was just about Baree's age, perhaps a week or two younger. But he was fully as heavy, and almost as wide as he was long. Nature can produce no four-footed creature that is more lovable than a baby beaver, unless it is a baby bear; and Umisk would have taken first prize at any beaver baby show in the world. His three companions were a bit smaller. They came waddling from behind a low willow, making queer little chuckling noises, their little flat tails dragging like tiny sledges behind them. They were fat and furry, and mighty friendly looking to Baree, and his heart beat a sudden swift-pit-a-pat of joy.

But Baree did not move. He scarcely breathed. And then, suddenly, Umisk turned on one of his playmates and bowled him over. Instantly the other two were on Umisk, and the four little beavers rolled over and over, kicking with their short feet and spatting with their tails, and all the time emitting soft little squeaking cries. Baree knew that it was not fight but frolic. He rose up on his feet. He forgot where he was--forgot everything in the world but those playing, furry balls. For the moment all the hard training nature had been giving him was lost. He was no longer a fighter, no longer a hunter, no longer a seeker after food. He was a puppy, and in him there rose a desire that was greater than hunger. He wanted to go down there with Umisk and his little chums and roll and play. He wanted to tell them, if such a thing were possible, that he had lost his mother and his home, and that he had been having a mighty hard time of it, and that he would like to stay with them and their mothers and fathers if they didn't mind.

In his throat there came the least bit of a whine. It was so low that Umisk and his playmates did not hear it. They were tremendously busy.

Softly Baree took his first step toward them, and then another--and at last he stood on the narrow strip of shore within half a dozen feet of them. His sharp little ears were pitched forward, and he was wiggling his tail as fast as he could, and every muscle in his body was trembling in anticipation.

It was then that Umisk saw him, and his fat little body became suddenly as motionless as a stone.

"Hello!" said Baree, wiggling his whole body and talking as plainly as a human tongue could talk. "Do you care if I play with you?"

Umisk made no response. His three playmates now had their eyes on Baree. They didn't make a move. They looked stunned. Four pairs of staring, wondering eyes were fixed on the stranger.

Baree made another effort. He groveled on his forelegs, while his tail and hind legs continued to wiggle, and with a sniff he grabbed a bit of stick between his teeth.

"Come on--let me in," he urged. "I know how to play!"

He tossed the stick in the air as if to prove what he was saying, and gave a little yap.

Umisk and his brothers were like dummies.

And then, of a sudden, someone saw Baree. It was a big beaver swimming down the pond with a sapling timber for the new dam that was under way. Instantly he loosed his hold and faced the shore. And then, like the report of a rifle, there came the crack of his big flat tail on the water--the beaver's signal of danger that on a quiet night can be heard half a mile away.

"DANGER," it warned. "DANGER--DANGER-- DANGER!"

Scarcely had the signal gone forth when tails were cracking in all directions--in the pond, in the hidden canals, in the thick willows and alders. To Umisk and his companions they said:

"RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"

Baree stood rigid and motionless now. In amazement he watched the four little beavers plunge into the pond and disappear. He heard the sounds of other and heavier bodies striking the water. And then there followed a strange and disquieting silence. Softly Baree whined, and his whine was almost a sobbing cry. Why had Umisk and his little mates run away from him? What had he done that they didn't want to make friends with him? A great loneliness swept over him--a loneliness greater even than that of his first night away from his mother. The last of the sun faded out of the sky as he stood there. Darker shadows crept over the pond. He looked into the forest, where night was gathering--and with another whining cry he slunk back into it. He had not found friendship. He had not found comradeship. And his heart was very sad. _

Read next: Chapter 7

Read previous: Chapter 5

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