Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
At intervals during the day Jean drank the strengthening broth, too “bush wise” to sicken himself by gorging. By late afternoon he was able to drive the rejuvenated Fleur to the barren and bring back the meat on the sled.
The days following were busy ones. At first his weakness forced him to husband his strength while the stew and roasted red meat were thickening his blood, but as the food began to tell, he was able to hunt farther and farther into the barrens where the main migration of the caribou was passing. When he was strong enough, he took Fleur with a load of meat back to his old winter camp, returning with traps. These he set at the carcasses he had shot, for foxes, lynxes, and wolverenes were drawn from the four winds to his kill. So, while he hunted meat to carry him through April—and home, at the same time he added materially to his fur pack.
Toward the end of March, before the first thaws softened his back trail and made sled travel heartbreaking for Fleur, Jean began relaying west the meat he had shot. He had now, cached in the barrens, ample food to supply Fleur and himself until the opening of the waterways when fish would be a most welcome change. His sledding over, he returned to his camp in the barrens to get his traps and take one last hunt, for the lean weeks of the winter had made him overcautious and he wished to make the trip back with a loaded sled.
By the coming of April, Fleur, in whom an abundance of red caribou meat had swiftly worked a transformation, had increased in bone and weight. As Jean watched her throw her heavy shoulders into her collar and trot lightly off over the hard trail with a three-hundred-pound load, his heart leaped with love of the beautiful beast who worshiped him with every red drop in her shaggy body.
Lately he had noticed a new trait in his dog. Several times, deep in the night when he waked to renew the fire, he had found that Fleur was not sleeping near him but had wandered off into the bush. As she needed no food, he thought these night hunts of the husky peculiar. But at dawn, he always found Fleur back in camp sleeping beside him.
It was Marcel’s last night in the barren-ground camp. Leaving Fleur, he had, as usual, hunted all day, returning with a sled load of meat which he drew himself. As he approached the camp he crossed the trail of a huge timber wolf and hurried to learn if his dog had been attacked, for tied as she was, she would fight with a cruel handicap. But Fleur greeted him as usual with yelps of delight. In the vicinity of the camp there were no tracks to show that the wolf had approached the husky. However, Marcel decided that he would not leave her again bound in camp unable to chew through the rawhide thongs in time to protect herself from sudden attacks of the wolves which roamed the country.
After supper man and dog sat by the fire, but manifestly Fleur was restless. Time and again she left his side to take long, sniffs of the air. Not even the rubbing of her ears which usually brought grunts Of pleasure had the magic to hold her long.
The early moon hung on the bald brow of a distant ridge and Jean, finishing his pipe, was about to renew his fire and roll into his blankets when a long, wailing howl floated across the valley.
Fleur bounded to her feet, her quivering nostrils sucking in the keen air. Again the call of the timber wolf drifted out on the silent night. Fleur, alive with excitement, trotted into the bush. In a moment she returned to the fire, whimpering. Then sitting down, she pointed her nose at the stars and her deep throat swelled with the long-drawn howl of the husky. Shortly, when the timber wolf replied, the lips of Fleur did not lift from her white fangs in a snarl nor did her thick mane rise as her ears pricked eagerly forward.
As long as he lay awake Jean wondered at this behavior. But presently his wondering was drowned in sleep.
At dawn Jean waked with a sense of loneliness. Pushing together the embers of his fire, he put on fresh wood, and not seeing Fleur, called to her; but she did not appear. She had a habit of prowling around the neighboring bush at dawn, inspecting fresh tracks of mice, searching for ptarmigan or for the snowshoe rabbits that were not there.
But when Marcel’s breakfast was cooked Fleur was still absent. Thinking that a fresh game trail had led her some distance, he ate, then started to break camp. Finally he put his index and middle fingers between his teeth and blew the piercing whistle which had never failed to bring her leaping home. Intently he listened for her answer somewhere in the valley of the stream or on the edge of the barren. But the yelp of his dog did not come to his ears.
Curious as to the cause of her absence Jean smoked his pipe and waited. He was anxious to start back with his traps and meat; but where was Fleur? By the middle of the morning, becoming alarmed, he made a wide circle of the camp, hoping to pick up her trail. Two days previous there had been a flurry of snow sufficient to enable him to follow her tracks on the stiff crust. In the vicinity of the camp were traces of Fleur’s recent footprints; but finally, at a distance, Marcel ran into a fresh trail leading down into the brook bottom. There he lost it, and after hours of search returned to camp to wait for her return.
The day wore away and still the husky did not appear. Night came and visions of his dog lying somewhere stiff in the snow, slashed and torn by wolves, tortured his thoughts.
As he sat brooding by his fire, he came to realize, now that he had lost her, what a part of him the dog had become. His thoughts drifted back over their life together, months of grueling toil and delight. Tears traced their way down his wind-burned cheeks as he recalled her early puppy ways and antics and how she had loved to nibble with her sharp milk teeth at his moccasins and sit in the bow of the canoe, on their way down the coast, scolding at the seals and ducks.
And with what mad delight she had welcomed his visits to the stockade at Whale River, circling him at full speed, until breathless and panting she leaped upon him, her hot tongue seeking his hands and face! On the long trail home from the south coast marshes, how closely she would snuggle to his back as they lay on the beaches, as if fearing to lose him while she slept. And the winter on the Ghost, with its ghastly end—what a rock his dog had been when his partners failed him! In the moment of his peril, how savagely she had battled for Jean Marcel!
Through the lean weeks of starvation when hope had died, to the dawn when she had waked him at the coming of the caribou, his thoughts led him. And now, when spring and Whale River were near, it was all over. Their life together with its promise of the future had been snapped short off. He should never again look into the slant, brown eyes of Fleur. He had lost everything; first Julie, and now Fleur.
At daybreak, without hope, he took up the search along the stream. Where the wind had driven, the crust, now stiff with alternate freezing and thawing and swept clean of snow, would show little sign of the passing of the dog. But in the sheltered areas where the crust was softer and the young snow lay he hoped to cross Fleur’s tracks.
At length, miles up the valley, he picked up the trail of the dog in some light drift. Following the tracks across the brook bottom and up into the scrub of the opposite slope, he suddenly stopped, wide-eyed with amazement at the evidence written plainly in the light covering of the crust. Fleur’s tracks had been joined by, and ran side by side with the trail of a wolf.
“By gar!” gasped the surprised Frenchman. “She do not fight wid de wolf!”
As he traveled, he still found no marks of battle in the snow, simply the parallel trail of the two, dog and wolf, now trotting, now lengthening out into the long wolf lope.
“Fleur leave Jean Marcel for de wolf!”
The trapper rubbed his eyes as though suspicious of a trick of vision. His Fleur, whom he loved as his life and who adored Jean Marcel, to desert him this way in the night—and for a timber wolf!
It was strange indeed. Yet he had heard of such things. It was this way that the Eskimos kept up the marvelous strain to which Fleur belonged. He recalled the peculiar actions of the dog during the previous days—the wolf tracks near the camp—her excitement of the night before when the call had sounded over the valley. This wolf had been dogging their trail for a week and Fleur had known it.
“Ah!” he murmured, nodding his head. “It ees de spreeng!”
Yes, the spring was slowly creeping north and the creatures of the forest were already answering its call. It was April, the season of mating, and Fleur, too, had succumbed to an urge stronger for the moment than the love of the master. April, the Crees’ “Moon of the Breaking of the Snowshoes,” when at last the wind would begin to shift to the south and the nights lose their edge. Then the snow would melt at noon, softening the trails, and later on, rain and sleet would drive in from the great bay, turning the white floor of the forest to slush, flooding the ice of the rivers which later would break up and move out, overrunning the ice shell of pond and lake which late in May would honeycomb and disappear.
Marcel followed the trails of wolf and dog until he lost them on the wind-packed snow of the barren. There was nothing to do but wait. He knew his dog had not forgotten him—would come home. But when? It was high time for his return to the camp in the Salmon country, to his precious cache of meat, which would attract lynxes and wolverenes for miles around. The bears would soon leave their “washes” and the uprights of his cache were not proof against bear. But he would not go without Fleur, and she was away, somewhere in the hills.
Three days he waited, continuing to hunt that he might take a full sled load back to his cache. But the weather was softening, and any day now might mean the start of the big break-up. It was deep in the third night that a great gray shape burst out of the forest and pounced upon the muffled figure under the shed tent by the fire. As the dog pawed at the blanketed shape, Marcel, drugged with sleep and bewildered by the attack, was groping for his knife when a familiar whine and the licks of a warm tongue proclaimed the return of Fleur. The man threw his arms around his dog.
“Fleur come back to Jean?” Breaking from him, as he rose to his feet, the dog in sheer delight repeatedly circled the fire, then rearing on her hind legs put her forepaws on his chest.
“Fleur bad dog to run away wid de wolf!”
Marcel seized her by the jowls and shook the massive head, peering into the slant eyes in the dim starlight. And Fleur, as though ashamed of her desertion of the master, pushed her nose under his arm, the rumbling in her throat voicing her joy to be with him again. Then Marcel gave her meat from the cache which she bolted, greedily.
It had not entered his mind, once he had found her tracks, that Fleur would not return to him; but during her long absence the condition of the snow had been a source of worry. Each day’s delay meant the chance of the bottom suddenly falling out of the trail before he could freight his load of meat and traps back to his old camp far to the west. Once the big thaw was on, all sledding would be over. So, hurriedly eating his breakfast, he started under the stars, for at noon he would be held up by the softening trail. Toward mid-afternoon, when it turned colder, he would travel again.
Back at his Old camp, Marcel found that the fishhook necklace with which he had circled each of the peeled spruce uprights of his cache had properly baffled the wolverenes and lynxes. Resetting short trap lines, he waited for the break-up with tranquil mind. For his cache groaned with meat.