This time also there was no trail, so the pack had full leisure to concentrate all its energies upon the job in hand, or paw, I should say--namely, galloping. No, racing would be the only word; for the white wolf, knowing his kind, perhaps, gave the pack no leisure to grow dangerous over its losses or its hunger. Only idleness gives time for questions to be asked about leadership, and he kept them busy; and if they wanted to keep up with him at all, they must needs extend themselves to the full.

Soon he led them to a clearing running, straight as a railway cutting, through the forest. Out in the clearing, he dropped his head, howled, flung half round, and began to follow tracks; but the scent was enough for him without the tracks. They were the footprints, the sleigh-trail, and the hoofprints of the beaters, the hunters, and the pack-horses, loaded with game from the hunt of the day that had just gone.

For a moment the pack, even _that_ pack, his pack, the pack of the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, checked a little, shied, and were dumb. They were used to his leading them upon some hectic murder-raids, but never one quite so blatant as this.

Quickly, however, the real pain in their empty stomachs got the better of them, and they swept round and began to follow--half-a-dozen here and there--with whimpers. And then, the excitement spreading, they all rushed in, and breaking out, with a blood-curdling rush, into the full-throated chorus, "Yi-yi-i-ki-yi!" of the wolf-pack in full cry--an M.F.H. who had never heard wolves might have mistaken it for the music of a pack of hounds if he had listened to it from a distance--they swept on after the vanishing white brush of their leader, like some great, hurrying, dark cloud-shadow, up the trail.

Anon, going always at their tireless wolf-lope that no beast in the world can outdistance in the end, they came to a village. Some of the beaters lived at this village, and had remained there. The wolves swept on and round the miserable place--some actually raced through the snowed-up street--and took up the continued trail on the other side.

Anon they came to an open plain, where the trail split, many of the beaters that were left striking away to another village where they lived; but the white wolf tore straight on along the main trail, the trail of the hunters, the attendants, and the pack-horses. And the shadows of the wolves in the moonlight kept pace with them all that terrible way.

The plain looked flat, but was gently undulating, like some gigantic ocean petrified; so that, in due time, the pack, still giving tongue wildly and terribly, saw before them, far, far ahead, a procession of dots straggling along over the endless, unbroken white. And instantly their music shut off as if at the wave of an invisible hand.

Then, as the quarry ran from scent to view, they raced. All their long, loose, nickel-steel-limbed, tireless gallop before had been nothing to their flying speed now. The taint of the blood of the slaughtered game from the chase was in their sensitive nostrils. It was like the sight of rare wines to a drunkard. Shift! Say, but the way those long-legged demons ate up the distance between them and their prey was awe-inspiring. It was uncanny. It was almost magic. It was awful.

Then things happened, as you might say, with some rapidity.

Three shots rang out in the silence--three shots in quick succession.

They were fired at the wolves by the only man in the group who had an efficient rifle, but were really meant to recall the sleighs with the sportsmen _and_ the rifles, which had gone on.

The wolves spread out into a long line; the ends of the line crept forward swiftly on either hand, and the whole pack raced to the attack in the formation of a Zulu impi--in the shape of a pair of horns, that is. When the points of the horns got on the far side of their "prey,"

they rushed together, and turned inwards, still at full gallop.

At this juncture the sleighs came back--at the gallop, too.

Four .450-caliber Express rifle bullets, one .375-caliber magazine and one .315-caliber magazine bullet, arriving among the wolves in quick succession produced no confusion. Not a wolf stopped. Each beast continued its tireless gallop, swerving and dispersing as it raced, and without uttering a sound, till, almost before you could realize what had happened at all, there was a dwindling crescent of gray specks in the background, and four or five other gray shapes--two kicking--lying about in the foreground.

But--and this is where we come in--neither there in the distant snow-haze nor close in by the crowding hunting-party was the white wolf.

He had been last on view far in advance of, and heading, the point of the right-hand horn of the swiftly encircling pack--his usual place, by the way--but from the moment the returning sleighs hove in sight, and the bar-like gleam of the moonlight could be seen upon the ready rifle-barrels--he had seen that, too, and knew its meaning--he had been--nowhere.

Now, before the encircling horns of the pack closed round, one of the pack-horses, maddened with fear, had stampeded and got clear away.

That horse was galloping now madly across the plain, hidden from view by a gentle swell of ground, and--the white wolf was racing alongside of it; and away behind--for few could keep up with the tremendous speed of the white wolf--another, and an ordinary gray wolf was gliding in their tracks. That was a female wolf, who more than once before had found it a profitable investment to keep her eye upon the doings of the great white leader.

She saw the white wolf leap, beheld his wrenching side-stroke at the terrified horse's throat, heard the horse scream, and watched it bound forward. Followed another leap of the relentless giant white shape; the horse seemed to stumble in full gallop, and next instant came down headlong. The rest was a whirl of snow, flying hoofs, and a horrible worrying sound. Then all settled down, and as she tore up she found the white wolf feeding ravenously against time, bolting his meal as only the wild members of the dog tribe, hyenas, and vultures can. She was starving, that she-wolf, but she halted upon her hams, such was the reputation of the white leader; but when he failed to snarl at her, she, too, fell to, and bolted her meal like a crazy thing.

Directly he had fed enough the white wolf flung round upon his heels, and, with a single quick whimper, was gone, streaking over the plain away from the hunters, away from the scattered, discomfited pack; away, away, as he had never galloped before. But, then, before he had always been the hunter. This time, if he knew anything of "Pack Law" and the temper of the pack over this bad defeat and heavy loss, coming on top of the bad bear "break"--this time, I say, it was he who was, or, at any rate, might be, the hunted. And he had reasons--very sound and private reasons--why he must not meet even one wolf of the pack in combat. Wherefore he streaked, stretched flat, and doubled into a bow, his shadow chasing him, and the she-wolf--afraid to be left alone--chasing his shadow.

Very often before the white wolf had caused the pack to run into dangerous and decimating trouble, but always with a feed at the end.

He had never before sold them a pup, as the saying is, like this one.

Moreover, he felt that his slaying of the horse secretly--and they were bound to scent out and read that--would not improve matters. Wherefore he guessed that, after years of restless rule, it was about time to quit, and he quitted. But unfortunately there is only one thing harder than becoming leader of a big wolf-pack, and that is, ceasing to be leader and--live.

Five miles over the desolate waste of white--and what is five miles, or ten, or fifteen, to a desperate wolf?--the two beasts ran into a river--literally into a river. Ice stretched far out from the bank, yet the river was so wide that they could scarce see the opposite bank.

They could see the grinding, growling ice-blocks floating all round them which they plunged in, however, and they could feel the icy bite of the water--water that would stop the action of a man's heart.

But the white wolf did not attempt to swim to the opposite bank, or mean to. He made a detour, and landed upon the same side he had started from. He did that three times, the she-wolf always following faithfully, because she had now become too frightened to stay alone and do anything else; and then he started upon another mad gallop of miles, but this time along the bank of the great river.

Finally he stopped and stared out over the ice, the thick water, and the gnashing pack-ice. Far away, it seemed, through the snow-haze, he could see a wooded height, an immense island, round which the river looped in two great arms.

He knew the spot--trust him.

No beast in its senses would try to swim the long distance across to that island, but from time to time a hunted deer had made the attempt, and a few of those that tried it had survived the ordeal and populated the island. More than once, in heavy snow, the white wolf himself, at the head of his pack, had hunted a deer down to that very spot, and had watched its head fade across the water into the distance. Once he had started to follow; but the pack had turned back, and he at length after them, snarling at their heels. Now he knew how long the swim looked from the deer's point of view.

It was an ugly proposition. But--he turned his head in the stillness, broken only by the mult.i.tudinous voices of the ice, and heard a far, far distant mult.i.tudinous murmur, and that was no ice, and it settled him. It was the united voice of the pack _on his trail_!

He paused, ran up and down, gave an odd, little, deeply expressive whine, like a puppy afraid to take its first bath, plunged in with a rush, and struck out. Soon he was out upon a piece of drift ice, shaking himself, and began leaping from one lump of floating ice to another. It was tricky, slippery, slidy work, and a fall might mean a broken leg or a crushed skull; but anything was better than dissolving like mincemeat in the jaws of the slavering pack.

Once, when a long way out, he looked back, and beheld the she-wolf, whining piteously as if she were being thrashed--and wolves are dumb beasts when "up against it"--following him.

She, too, had heard that wild, terrifying, implacable music of the wolf-pack following them; and although I, personally, doubt if they would have touched her--unless it was the other she-wolves that did it--she seemed to have been smitten by panic, and to prefer the deep sea, or the river, rather, to that pack of maddened devils.

And so, slipping, sliding, splashing, swimming, scrambling, the white wolf, after the most appalling struggle of his life, managed somehow, blindly in the end, with sobbing breath and pounding sides, to make that terrible pa.s.sage, and collapse as he landed in a stiff white heap, the water frozen in icicles upon his body as he landed.

For a long time he did not move, and it began to seem as if he had burst his heart. But at last he dragged himself to his feet and turned drunkenly--to find the she-wolf lying at his side.

Thoughts came back slowly; but at length he shook himself, and stood erect at his full, immense height. He had given the wolf-pack something tricky in the way of trails to unravel, but he knew what he had taught them too well to build too much on that. And he was right, for presently, from far, far across the water, came the unutterably terrible baying clamor of the pack, moving swiftly along--then it stopped.

For a long while he waited after that, straining ears and eyes out over the moving ice, and the water, and the night that was there; but nothing could he see, and nothing more he heard except at last, far away, one last, long, lonely, ghastlily lonesome howl--the howl of defeat.

Then it seemed--but truly it may only have been a trick of the moonlight as he snarled, revealing his white fangs under his wickedly-curled-back lip--it seemed, I say, that the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste grinned. And good reason had he to grin, for the life of the white wolf had been nothing more nor less than one long, bad, bold, bl.u.s.tering, bullying _bluff_! What's that? Yes, sirs--bluff! And in this wise.

Firstly, his extraordinarily long legs gave him a height out of all proportion to his real hulk; secondly, his abnormally long and woolly coat gave him an apparent bulk which was out of all proportion to fact; thirdly, his actual bulk was really scarcely larger than that of any very large wolf; and, fourthly--but this concerned him only now--he was really quite an old wolf; one long past his prime, one quite unable to face any really full-grown fine young wolf, one retaining only his matchless speed by reason of his abnormally long legs, and his leadership by terrific and cleverly acted ferocity on the strength of his apparent giant dimensions. That was all, but it was enough; wasn't it, boys? Would you care to have changed places with the old rascal, and played that bluff out against _those_ odds, in _that_ company, for years as he had done? I _don't_ think. No, nor I, either. It was some gamble, that. What?

At last the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste turned, with an insolent flourish of his brush, and trotted up the bank on the heels of the she-wolf, who had come to life again and preceded him into the dense tangle of the woods, which swallowed him up, him and his darned bluff, utterly.

XV

FATE AND THE FEARFUL

We are the little folks--we!

Too little to love or to hate.--RUDYABD KIPLING.

No one ever accused him of not being all there. The job was to see what was there.

A tiny alderman of the red bank-vole people, whose tunnels marched with the road through the wood, taking the afternoon sun--a slanting copper net, it was--at his own front-door under the root of the Scots fir, was aware of a flicker at a hole's mouth. He looked again, and saw the mouth of that hole was empty. He blinked his star-bright eyes in his fat, furry, little square head, after the manner of one who thought he had been dreaming. But catch a bank-vole dreaming! Besides, how about the squirrel overhead? He was hanging over a branch where the flicker had been, swearing fit to slit his lungs, and old squirrel wasn't much given to make mistakes, as a rule.

The bank vole turned back into his hole, knowing the law against taking chances in the wild, and the first stride fetched him up short in violent collision with another bank-vole--otherwise red-backed field-mouse, if you like--coming the other way.

The blow, full on the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to have done. It cast him clean over backwards out of his own front-door, where he fell down the bank, and was received, all his little short paws scrambling for a hold, by a thistle, and would have told all the world, with a thin, high squeak, what he had sat on, if the squeak had not frozen between his chisel teeth.

There had shot out of the hole, and back, a Thing. It might have been the thick end of a whip-lash or a spring, and, like a spring, as it recoiled it coiled, and was still.

The bank-vole saw. Most entirely did he see, and felt no joy in the seeing, either. Indeed, there was no room for mistake in the zigzag black chain down the back, in the unspeakably cruel, fixed stare of the gla.s.sy, lidless eyes, in the short head and flat cranium of the true viper--viper, adder, or whatever you like to call the calamity without legs, whose other name is death.

Now, bank-voles know all about vipers. They have to; they die, else.

They die anyway; but no matter, for they are small and very many.