The Cross Pull/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
Those who believed in the famous legend of the Lost Herd are gone and few men know the truth.
History records the fact that when the last big herd of bison moved into the north on the spring migration it never returned. The hide hunters watched in vain for the southward movement in the fall for it never came. The big gray buffalo wolves, too, had suddenly vanished from the plains. Strange rumors were heard about this mysterious evaporation of the shaggy horde—rumors which gave birth to the fable of the lost herd that would some day come grazing down out of the north.
Not only in legend were they lost, but lost in truth. Rather than once more run the gauntlet of the guns along the Arkansas and the Platte, the last herd departed from the customs of untold centuries and sought refuge in the hills. They chose the Land of Many Rivers in which to make their final stand.
The snow that falls in one small tangled mass of peaks and valleys feeds the headwaters of a score of rivers. The Wind River and the Greybull; the Gibbon and the Firehole; the Shoshone, Yellowstone, Green River and the Buffalo Fork of the Snake, each finds its course in one wild whirl of interlacing, tributary streams.
Here, in the Bighorns, the Tetons and the Sunlight peaks, the herd scattered in small bands through the high mountain valleys in one last effort to exist. The bleached white skulls that dot the green meadows on the head reaches of Thoroughfare River and the basins of the upper Yellowstone, mark the spots where they died in the deep snow of the high country while the buffalo hunters of Dodge still waited for the fabled return of the lost herd.
Stockmen grazed their cows on the old range of the bison, pushing farther to the west each year until their cows fed on the first roll of the hills; farther north until they came to a spot where Nature, as if exhausted from piling wonder upon wonder with lavish hand, had left the badlands of the Little Bighorn and the desolate foothills of the Greybull nestled under the very shadow of the Rainbow Peaks.
Then great wolves appeared, coming down out of the hills and taking heavy toll from the cows on the ranges; wolves of a kind the stockmen had never known, larger even than those of Siberia. Ranchers spoke of a new and savage breed. They distorted the word “logo”—the Shoshone Indian name for the baldface grizzly—to “lobo,” meaning grizzly wolf.
The ranchmen organized a war of extermination against this savage lobo tribe, placing an ever-increasing bounty on each one, until an even hundred was posted as the price on every scalp.
This created a new occupation for men, and soon the professional wolfer was scouring the breaks of the badlands with poison, trap and gun for the last few survivors of a vanishing breed.
Old Dad Kinney was a wolfer and he had reason to believe that a single family of loboes were denned somewhere within forty miles of his spring camp. He knew, too, that Clark Moran was in the badlands on the same quest.
Between them was an agreement whereby Kinney felt there was no possible way for him to lose. If either of them found the den, Moran was to have one pup alive and Kinney was to draw the bounty on the rest.
Moran seemed more interested in some lost herd that had died fifty years before than in bounty rewards—in some theory that this was not a new species but an almost forgotten kind which had followed the lost herd into the hills and had now come back to the edge of their old range; that the rare lobo of the present was the buffalo gray of the past.
As Moran and Kinney lay rolled in their blankets ten miles apart, they formed two points of a human triangle of which Ash Brent, far up the slope of the hills, formed the third.
In common with most men who live their lives in the open, Kinney and Moran had come to draw a certain sense of companionship from the night sounds of the hills. But there is one note to which a man may listen for a thousand nights and on the next he will inevitably nestle a trifle closer into his bed roll when it sounds and feel the same chilly prickling of the skin along his spine. The far-off note of a lobo always carries an added ache of loneliness to the man in the open.
A lone lobo raised his voice and, as if connected by a mysterious current, the three widely scattered men each felt the same sudden tensing of the muscles and tingling of the skin. In the reaction only did they differ.
While Kinney calculated a probable profit, Brent cursed fretfully at the wolf shiver which shook him at the sound, and Moran smiled over a pet theory of his own.
He knew that any beast, when angry or alarmed, bristles his back hair into a roach along the spine. He felt that this was a heritage handed down to him through a thousand generations from the time when his primitive ancestors, garbed in hair instead of cloth, had bristled with a mixture of rage and fear at each call of their enemy the wolf; that this sprouting of goose flesh between his own shoulder blades at the lobo call was but the age-old instinct to bristle the hair where hair had ceased to grow.
As always, the dread cry was followed by a vast, tense quiet, as if each dweller of the open hesitated to shatter the silence with his own voice and thus draw particular attention to himself. This was no paltry wolf—no straggler from the north, but an old dog lobo on his home range.
There was an answering call, and both Kinney and Moran raised on their elbows to better catch the sound. The starting note was a hoarse imitation of her mate’s but seemed to break into the tremolo of the coyote. Both men arrived at almost the same conclusion but in different ways.
Kinney linked the strange note with a renegade Scotch sheep dog he had seen traveling with the coyotes two years before.
“That she wolf is half coyote and half dog,” he said.
Moran, too, had noted the coyote shrill and also that he experienced no wolf shiver from the sound.
“A cross,” he reflected. “Part coyote and part dog.”
The lobo does not call often, and not until half an hour before dawn did the sound come again. It awakened the three men, and each prepared his breakfast and was off upon his business of the day.
While Kinney and Moran resumed their tireless, systematic search for the wolf den, Brent headed his horses for a far divide. Beyond it lay the Land of Many Rivers, where, for a hundred miles, there was no human habitation known to men; yet Brent had twelve horses packed out with flour and supplies.
Ten days later Moran sat cross-legged on the ground with a third-grown wolf pup between his knees. The lobo pup was wrapped securely in a sack, tied round and round with heavy cord and with only his head protruding from the roll.
“There goes the balance of your family, pup,” said Moran. “You’re an orphan now.”
Kinney, leading two pack horses from which dangled the remains of the rest of the wolf family, was just disappearing in the direction of his camp and the last den of loboes in the badlands had fallen victims to the ranchmen’s bounty war.
The father was a mighty lobo, almost a packload for one horse; the mother was a half-breed, crossed between a coyote and a dog. The rifled den had yielded a freakish lot of pups, as if each clashing strain of ancestry had struggled to perpetuate its own. One was a fluffy, yellow, coyote pup; two a strange mixture of wolf and dog; while the fourth was a blue-gray Scotch sheep dog, with shaggy face and a white splash on the breast. The one which Moran held between his knees was pure lobo from tip to tip. Only in his yellow coyote eyes did a trace of off color strain crop out.
“You’re the prize pup of the lot,” said Moran. “How about it, old fellow? Are you going to make friends with me?”
For answer the lobo pup writhed around in his wrappings and made one swift slash at his captor’s face.
“You’re a game little youngster and as quick as a flash,” said Moran. “That’s what I’ll call you—Flash. Come on, Flash, let’s be pals.”
For more than an hour he tried to win the confidence of the lobo pup, rubbing and scratching his neck and head behind the ears where the white fangs could not reach his hand, and talking to him in an even, friendly tone.
Even a very young pup reads the intonations of the human voice sufficiently to distinguish between those men who care for animals and dogs and those who don’t.
The wolf pup felt the first stirrings of the inner conflict—the battling for supremacy between the wild blood and the tame—that would influence his every move through life. It was as if the different elements of his ancestry had established cross-currents in his veins, exerting a strange cross-pull upon each thought and deed.
The wolf and coyote in him revolted at the man scent, but the dog strain responded to the friendly voice and thrilled to the touch of exploring fingers which scratched his neck and ears. He lay passive and made no protest at the touch.
At last he felt Moran’s hand slip slowly around beneath his chin, rubbing his throat and lower jaw. His throat muscles contracted at this new move, and he withdrew his head, turtle-wise, as far as possible within the sheltering roll. The yellow coyote eyes were bright with suspicion; the sensitive lips writhed up, exposing the ivory fangs of the wolf, but the yearning of a dog to be loved by man held him from sinking them deep in the hand that was now within easy reach—the first compromise between the wild and tame.
The glare gradually died from his eyes, the lips settled slowly back and covered the fangs, and Moran knew then that he had won.
“Come on, Flash; let’s go home,” he said.