Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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Gray Cloud had lived only two years, but since his ninth month he had made nearly every week a memorable one. It was in his ninth month that he discovered how neatly his fangs would cut the hamstring of a cow, or even of a full-grown bull. That ended all necessity of hard labor for him.

Other wolves had to work hard across the diameter of a hundred-mile range. But Gray Cloud took things easily. Winter or summer, he could always find beef when he wanted it. Since he grew to prefer it perfectly fresh, he had to kill more often, and since he killed more often, he had to lurk closer to the dwellings of man. The terrible scent of steel and gunpowder was seldom out of the far-drawn horizon of his scenting powers, and nearly always there was the trace of man himself in the air.

That taught him lessons all the faster. He was learning, as it were, with a gun at his head, in more senses than one. He was nipped half a dozen times by bullets, but he was never seriously wounded by any of the hundreds of shots that were fired at him. He had discovered that at any distance over four hundred yards he ran little or no danger from firearms. He knew that in the open a horse could run him down, but for that reason he usually chose to hunt where there were rocky hills. In such going he could easily leave horses behind him, and dogs were also dropped to the rear.

Yes, they had begun to hunt him with dogs when he was a scant year and a half old and was just putting on the last of his normal hundred and thirty pounds. He learned a great deal from the dogs. He found out that they were helpless, singly, that they were timorous even when they ran in pairs, but that in groups they would fight as savagely as cornered wild cats. However, the life was close to the surface in them. Mr. Henry Morrissey found that out.

When the price on Gray Cloud’s scalp rose to a thousand dollars, Morrissey brought down his pack of hounds, and they nailed Gray Cloud in a narrow little gulley at the third running of him. He was not really concerned, but he was tired of running away from the brindled leader. So he turned in the narrows of the little ravine, and when the hunters came up, they found five dead or dying dogs on the ground, while the others stood back and growled at a wolf that had disappeared again among the rocks.

Morrissey went back to the Purvis ranch that night, and Gray Cloud followed him down. He killed a prize thoroughbred bull during the small hours of the morning, dined heartily, slept off the feast inside the Purvis barn while the dogs howled and raged on vain trails, and came out and nosed the poisoned carcass the next night. But he was not fooled. They had tried poison on him a hundred times; he knew all about it.

He was not really hungry, so he contented himself by drifting in on the dogs and cutting the throats of two more of them before he loped away into the brush. Morrissey came out and saw him in the moonlight, and thought he was as big as a grizzly bear. He fired five shots, and swore that three of them, at least, must have hit the mark.

People were always swearing that they had put a slug or two in Gray Cloud. But as a matter of fact, Morrissey had not even grazed him.

It was after this affair at the Purvis ranch that the cattlemen got together in a special meeting, the first time in history that so many prominent men had gathered to talk about any animal—that is, since the days of dragons. They agreed that a wolf that killed from two to four cows in a month was worth a price. They laid twenty-five hundred dollars on the head of Gray Cloud, and thereby they turned him at a stroke into something that was both history and legend.

You can still read the accounts of that meeting in a fine and flowing hand, written upon slightly yellowed paper, and signed by the clerk pro tem.

Morrissey, not so much for the money as for the sake of his honor, rebuilt his pack, bought four Russian wolfhounds, and tried again. His Russian wolfhounds were faster than the rest. They were so fast that they outdistanced the pack and came up neatly, in pairs, perfectly matched, one on each side of the monster.

In Russia they had been trained to close at the same instant on the quarry. They tried the same trick on Gray Cloud, and though he only killed one of the four, the other three were ruined for their business thereafter.

Morrissey gave up the job and returned home, without glory. And the Gray Cloud problem became a burning question. He had been lifted to the dignity of newspaper “follow-ups”—that is to say, the journals of the surrounding towns carried items about him every day, mentioning the last slaughters attributed to him, and always winding up, of course, with the amount on his scalp. It was the hard cash that made him the good news.

As a matter of fact, hardly a week went by without revealing, to some hungry cow-puncher or trapper, a sight of the great wolf.

Sometimes Gray Cloud was gliding off among the rocks. Sometimes he came up to the verge of camp fires to study his enemies at close hand, as it were. He was always known after his going by the size of the prints of his enormous paws. Their dimensions were etched upon the memories of every boy and on the entire range.

Still, he continued to grow wiser and safer, and safer and wiser. He knew as well as you do the difference between a gun in the holster and a gun out of it. He knew, if they were to windward, whether men had guns or not. Once he nearly paid for his life with that knowledge, for “Buck” Wainwright, of the Harry Smith ranch, got a rope on him, one day when he ventured too rashly close, and might well have dragged the famous beast to death, except that the teeth of Gray Cloud were too sharp for the strands of the rope.

That was another lesson, and he could be trusted to remember it.

Yet, for all his past, he went far down into the grass lands hardly a month later for no other reason than because he was a little bored with the ease of his life. He wanted adventure, and he got it in the most unsuspected way.

It was a rabbit that started the trouble. Gray Cloud, drifting cautiously over the ridge of a hill—for he knew the danger of showing himself against any skyline—first made sure that there was not a sign of a human being in the wide hollow. Next, he saw a rabbit a hundred yards away, and the rabbit saw him.

With the folly of its kind, it ducked down behind a tuft of high grass that grew up around a small stone, and there it waited, with the quivering tips of its ears plain to see.

Upon the folly of jack rabbits most Western beasts of prey make their dinners. And Gray Cloud started to stalk. It was not that he wanted the dinner, but that he wanted the game.

A wolf that can catch a rabbit can also catch an antelope now and then, and Gray Cloud loved venison even more than he loved beef. So he went down the slope into the hollow as softly as a silver cloud draws down the soundless blue arch of heaven. He came near to the tuft of grass. He gathered his legs under him. Through his limbs ran an iron tremor of strength; he was just ready for the spring that is the chief delight of hunting when the rabbit happened to poke its silly head above the tuft of grass and saw Fate smiling at it with a capacious set of white teeth.

The rabbit and the wolf leaped at the same time. The side slash of Gray Cloud missed its mark; he turned and rushed after the dissolving streak of tan. It was not that he had the least hope of overtaking that little flash of dim lightning; it was merely because his muscles needed the tuning of a bit of hard running. Also, he was irritated.

So he sprinted a furlong, losing about as much distance as he covered, and then found himself flung heavily to the ground. His own weight and the force of running half stunned him.

Then he dragged himself to his feet and found the rigid teeth of a trap had closed over a hind leg. He lay down and thought the matter over, occasionally studying the scent of his own blood. It was oddly like the smell of other blood.

He was afraid, dreadfully afraid, not because of the pain, not because of the inexorable hold of the steel teeth, but because this gift had come to him from man.

He recognized the present; he recognized the state of war. He had preyed on man and the things of man most of his life. Now man would take a hand in the final session!

He had seen others of his kind, and many a coyote, standing helpless till a bullet knocked them over.

Instinct told him that he could bite off his foot below the trap’s teeth and then pull out the mangled leg. It was better, first, to see if he could not draw out the leg without resorting to this desperate means. He stood up tentatively, then heavily strained at the trap, his lips furling back with a grin of agony. And as he put down a forefoot for a second effort, another trap closed over it with a clank.

He was stretched out to the full beneath the pair. He could not move.

Therefore, after blinking his yellow eyes a few times, he lay down and waited for remorseless Fate to overtake him.

He lay there for two days, burned by the terrible strength of the sun. On the first day three coyotes stopped by to visit him. They could see, clearly enough, that he was helpless, and they would gladly have tasted his blood. But when he lifted his great head, they leaped away and fled, their tails down. Instinctive terror was greater in them than knowledge.

On the second day a pair of buzzards began to circle in the blue above him. By midday they were wheeling low down, and he could see the naked, ugly heads.

He understood that, also. What beast in the wild does not recognize those living graves that float forever in the thinnest of the air?

It was early afternoon, when he had done studying the buzzards, that he noted something else—a taint of smoke and an increased heat coming down the wind. It was a grass fire. That grass was not the crisp yellow that it would be a month later, but it was dry enough and long enough to feed a hot blaze.

The loose skin along his back puckered. He turned over on his belly and snarled. It was better to die in any way, better to die under the tooth, even, than to endure fire.

The heat, the smoke, increased momentarily. The sun turned a dull red. Tired of this, he closed his eyes and thought back to happier days—to the day when the wolfhounds had closed on him in the throat of the gulley, and had met the deadly flashing of his teeth.

When he looked out again, the sun was quite blocked away by the head and shoulders of a man!