Читать книгу Swift Lightning - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 4

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The shot—that deadly humming in the air—and again the fierce red blood of the wolf sped like a running fire through Swift Lightning’s veins. Once more he was the raw, magnificent pirate of the barrens, a buccaneer of the great snows, “kakea iskootao”—“a hell-driver among beasts.” Quickly O’Connor had wrought the change—O’Connor and his rifle.

A new pulse stirred him. The loneliness that had drawn him to the cabin and the call of a breed long dead were replaced by another and more thrilling desire—the desire to rejoin his pack. The spell was broken. Again he was wolf—all wolf.

Straight as a compass might have pointed he streaked across the barren—five miles, six, seven, almost ten. Then he stopped, and with his sharp ears thrown to the wind ahead he listened.

Three times in the next three miles he stopped to listen. The third time he heard faintly and far away the voice of Baloo giving the hunt-cry to the pack—Baloo the Slaughterer, Baloo the Long-Winded, to whom size and fleetness and giant strength had given the leadership of packs. Swift Lightning sat back on his haunches and answered. From south, east, west, and north came echoes of the pack-cry of which Baloo was the center. His note was longer, more frequent, more significant; and those of the wolves who were hungry for new blood and fresh meat turned in its direction. In ones and twos and threes they trotted over the frozen ground. For seven days and nights, as hours were counted, there had been no big kill, and long fang and bloodshot eye were eager for the sight and the taste of game.

That same desire surged through Swift Lightning as it surged in the wildest of the wolves. Many of the pack had gathered and were on the move when he joined them. They ran silently, a close-shouldered, ghostly incarnation of savagery, a mighty force of jaw and fang and muscle bent on death. Perhaps there were fifty, and the number steadily increased—up to sixty, eighty, a hundred. At their head ran Baloo. In all the pack only one other wolf could compare with him in size and strength, and that was Swift Lightning. For that reason Baloo hated him. Tsar and overlord of all the others, he sensed in his rival a menace to his sovereignty. Yet they never had fought. This, again, was because of the Great Dane. For Swift Lightning, unlike any wolf that ever was born, coveted no power of leadership. In his youth and his strength, his individual prowess and his power to kill, lived the joy and the thrill and the fulfilment of his life. For days and weeks at a time he hunted alone, and held himself aloof from the pack. In those days and weeks his voice gave no response to its call. He adventured alone. He ran alone. Always alone—except that at these times the ghost of Skagen ran at his side. When he returned Baloo looked at him with red and bloodshot eyes, and the fangs of his great jaws were bared in jealous hate.

Swift Lightning, in the mastering youth of his three years, had no desire to fight his kind. He fought, but it was not the fighting of oppression, nor was it his choice; and he did not kill the conquered, as Baloo would have killed them. Many a swift gash of resentment he had taken from smaller and weaker wolves without demanding the vengeance which lay within the power of his jaws. Yet, at times, red murder ran in his heart.

It was there now. Never had the desire to kill been stronger in him, and he gave little thought to Baloo as he ran close to the head of the pack.

As the arctic fight for existence weighs heavily in the lives of men, so it is with the wolves. Baloo and his pack did not run as the forest wolves run. Their excitement was repressed, and once it had set foot to the trail the pack gave forth no cry. It was a weird and ghostly monster of a thing sweeping through the gloom like a Brobdingnagian loup-garou moved by the pulse of a single heart. Its silence was the silence that comes with the Long Night. One standing a distance away would have heard its passing—the purring beat of a multitude of feet, its panting breath, the clicking of jaws, a low and terrible whining.

To Swift Lightning this was his game, this his reward for living. He paid no attention to Muhekun, the young she-wolf who ran at his side. She was a slim, beautiful little beast, and all the effort of her agile young body was exerted to keep shoulder to shoulder with him. Three times he heard her panting breath close to his neck, and once he turned slightly so that his muzzle touched her back. With the birthright of young motherhood before her there had risen in her an instinct even greater than the instinct to kill. But in Swift Lightning there was no responsive thrill. The day and the hour had not come. Only one passion possessed him now—the passion to overtake what was ahead of him, to tear and to rend, to bury his fangs in living flesh and hot blood.

He was the first of all the pack to catch what a hundred muzzles were seeking in the air—the scent of the caribou herd. Another quarter-mile and it was coming up strong in the wind, and Baloo turned southwest with his horde. The speed of the pack increased, and slowly, very slowly, the monster shadow made up of a hundred racing bodies began to disintegrate, and the wolves to scatter. There had been no signal. The leader had made no sound. Yet it was as if a command had leaped from brain to brain, and each had responded to it. Daylight would have revealed a mighty spectacle and the impending tragedy. The hunters were spreading themselves over a front of an eighth of a mile. The strongest and fleetest made up the two ends of the advancing fighting-line. Less than a mile away were the caribou.

The thick gray gloom covered the onsweep of the deadly line, and the wind was against the herd of cloven hoof and horn. There was no warning and no sound.

Swift Lightning leaped suddenly ahead. For the first time he exerted his great speed. Pack-instinct, the law of leadership, the presence of the young she-wolf, who had fought hard to keep her pace beside him, were no longer a part of his existence. He sprang shoulder to shoulder with Baloo. He passed him. His speed was the speed of the wind itself. In half a mile he gained an eighth—and he was alone. The smell of living flesh was hot in his nostrils. Gray shapes loomed up in the night ahead of him, and straight as an arrow he launched himself to the kill. In that same instant came the savage outcry of the pack. Silent until the moment of attack, its throat burst now, and like an army of pitiless Huns the wolves swept down upon the caribou.

The herd was scattered. They had been digging the crisply frozen green moss from under the snow, and Swift Lightning’s attack was their first warning. From him alone they would have fled instantly and without confusion, but terror seized upon them with the coming of the pack, and on the frozen plains there was suddenly the beat of hoofs that sounded like the rumble of distant thunder. The instinct of the sheep is to herd close in time of danger, and so it is with the caribou.

Swift Lightning’s rush carried him twenty yards inside the lines of the herd, and his fangs were at the throat of a young bull when the terrified animals began crowding upon him. In a close and crushing mass they hemmed him in. With his hundred and forty pounds of muscle and bone he hung to the young bull’s jugular. He heard the crash of bodies, the snarling tumult of the pack, but no sound came from between his own locked jaws. His brethren were at work, two and three and four to a caribou, but it was Swift Lightning’s humor to make his kill alone. The great herd began to move, and in the heart of the inundation he and his victim went down. Not for an instant did he loosen his grip at the bull’s throat. A mass of bodies swept over them; they felt the beat of hoofs, and about them was a rattle and crash of horns. Still deeper sank Swift Lightning’s fangs. Then for a moment he ceased to breathe; every vital force within him rose to the supreme effort; and with his forefeet braced he gathered his body like a powerful spring and flung himself backward, and the young bull’s blood gushed in a crimson stream on the hoof-beaten snow.

Twenty caribou were down when Swift Lightning staggered up from his kill. The tail of the herd had passed. The main herd, a thousand strong, was stampeding wildly to the south and west. Again it was like slow-moving thunder. No hunger could rise above the lust of the pack for slaughter, and from their victims the blood-crazed outlaws of the barrens raced after others. Exhaustion alone stopped the killings. Until their jaws were tired, and they could run no farther, the wolves hung to the tail of the herd. When the last of them turned back, sixty caribou lay dead over a blood-stained trail three miles in length.

Then the feast began on the carcasses of the animals last killed. Swift Lightning had not made his second kill alone. It had been a long fight and a hard one. His body was kicked and horned and trampled, and it would have gone still harder with him had not another pair of jaws joined his own. In the throes of that battle he had caught the inleap of a slim body; he had heard a fierce and vengeful snarling and the slash of other teeth—and when the work of death was done he found that it was the young she-wolf who had come to help him. Her jaws were red, she was bleeding from wounds and panting like a beaten and wind-run thing—yet she came to stand in triumph and joy at his side.

They had killed! That was her attitude. They had killed—Swift Lightning and she! And on that red field of death a thing came to Swift Lightning which he had not known when she had run at his side an hour before. It was then the instinct of her sex told Muhekun that at last she had won.

With new inspiration Swift Lightning tore a great hole in the caribou’s side, and when it was large enough Muhekun joined him. Then, side by side, they began the feast. The young wolf’s body lay close and warm against Swift Lightning, and he was filled with the satisfaction of the possessor and the master. He did not eat ravenously, but tore chunks of flesh loose that Muhekun might get at them more easily. And as other wolves passed them, or their snarling sounded near, her eyes roved jealously. It was she who saw the big form come up on the other side of their caribou, and pause there, looking down on her with gleaming eyes. Swift Lightning, with his mouth full of meat, heard the warning snarl in her throat but paid no attention to it. He was not quarrelsome and a dozen wolves might have fed on his caribou without disturbing his temper. But the thrill of matehood and of allegiance to her mate ran through Muhekun’s blood like fire. It was Baloo who was intruding. He began tearing at the caribou, and the next instant Muhekun was at him—a vengeful flash. Her ivory fangs slashed his shoulder, and the big leader whirled upon her.

Then Swift Lightning saw what was happening and a leap carried him to Baloo. The leader’s jaws were at Muhekun’s throat when he struck, and there was a rending of flesh as the two great beasts rolled in the snow. Swift Lightning was up an instant quicker than his enemy. On her belly Muhekun was dragging herself toward him. Blood streamed from her torn throat and a strange sobbing was in her breath. Swift Lightning heard her choking whimper, and there rose up in him—stronger and mightier than it had ever come to him before—the spirit of the Great Dane. Out of the mists of the past the heart of a dog cried out, not alone for vengeance but for justice, for the defense of the weak, for the brute chivalry of the dog—alien to the wolf—which demands the protection and championship of the female. To Baloo, the gashing of a she-wolf’s throat meant no more than the slashing of a male’s. To Swift Lightning, for the first time in his life, came a blind and terrific desire to avenge.

Baloo was up and facing him, even as the dying whimper in Muhekun’s throat ended in a choking gasp. Slowly, hardly more than an inch at a time, they began to circle, and, as they circled, wolves that were near left their feasting and gathered about them in a red-eyed and watchful ring—the death ring out of which only one of the fighters would come alive. Baloo, the true wolf, circled with a cautious, slinking movement. His ears were alert, but his body sagged like a gathered spring, and his bushy tail dragged on the snow. Swift Lightning, with all the appearance of the wolf, stood differently. From head to tail he was erect and tense, every muscle in him ready for the life-and-death struggle. He was only half as old as Baloo, which was to his advantage in the matter of strength and endurance. But Baloo all his life had been a fighter. He was cunning, a trickster, sharp as a fox in his strategy. Suddenly he swung inward, and so unexpected and lightning-like was his movement that, before Swift Lightning could either evade or meet him, the other’s fangs had laid open a six-inch gash in his rump.

Clever as the old warrior’s attack had been, his getaway was still cleverer. Scarcely had he struck his blow when Swift Lightning lunged at him with all his gigantic strength, and Baloo—instead of leaping to right or left—did the unexpected thing, and flattened himself so adroitly that Swift Lightning passed half over him. Baloo flung his head sideways and upward, and his teeth slit like knives in the other’s belly. It was a deep cut, and Swift Lightning’s blood flowed freely.

Both strikes had covered a space of not more than twenty seconds, and in an ordinary wolf-battle an immense advantage would have rested with Baloo; for a twice-stricken wolf whose own attack has met with defeat, is no longer a game fighter, but accepts the great handicap and greater hazard of defensive instead of offensive action. Here was where Swift Lightning’s heritage from old Skagen put a checkmate to Baloo’s triumph and strategy. A second time he leaped at his enemy, and a third time he was slashed—this time in the shoulder. For an instant he was down, but only for an instant. A third time he rushed Baloo, and for the first time jaw clashed against jaw. A roar filled his throat. His fangs closed with a terrific crunch, and Baloo went down and under, twisting and snarling. For a quarter of a minute their jaws were locked. Then Baloo twisted himself free, and again with that deadly sideways fling of his head he knifed Swift Lightning deep in the chest.

Swift Lightning’s blood already reddened the wolf-ringed arena, and the scent of it filled the air. Baloo was bleeding from his jaws. Thirty or forty of the pack had gathered in an ominous circle about the fighters, and the others were joining it. Muhekun had not moved since her last effort to drag herself to Swift Lightning. A pool of blood had gathered under her throat, and her eyes were growing dim. But she faced the fighters, keeping them within her vision as long as she could see.

Swift Lightning saw his elusive enemy now through the flame of a blind and terrific rage. He did not feel his wounds. It was the soul of Skagen that fought in his great body now. He no longer pranced and circled in the wolfish way. His huge shoulders hunched aggressively; he lowered his head; his pointed ears lay flat and there was no sound in his throat as he drove at the leader of the pack. Again and again Baloo cut and slashed, and through those slashings Swift Lightning rushed for the death-hold. Twice he almost had it. The third time he got his hold—at the back of his enemy’s neck. It was an all-dog hold. He did not rip. His jaws simply closed—as Skagen’s jaws would have closed—and, even as the circle of red-eyed wolves edged nearer, Baloo’s neck snapped and the fight was over.

It was a full minute before Swift Lightning loosened his grip and staggered away, and in that instant the waiting hordes piled upon Baloo, tearing his dead body into ribbons. It was the law of the pack, the wolf’s age-old instinct to outrage the fallen.

Swift Lightning stood alone at the little she-wolf’s side. Muhekun tried to raise her head, but failed. Her dying eyes closed. Twice she opened them, and with a whine Swift Lightning touched her muzzle with his own. She tried to answer, but all that came was a strange sob in her breath. And then, suddenly, a tremor ran through her beautiful young body, a last sigh, and she no longer struggled to breathe or open her eyes.

Over her Swift Lightning stood, and he knew that death had come. He waited a moment, and then sat back on his bleeding haunches and pointed his head to the sky. And the wolves that were tearing at Baloo heard and understood, for out of Swift Lightning’s throat came the cry of mastery, of triumph, of leadership of the pack—and in that cry was also a note of grief and of sorrow. The soul of Skagen, after twenty years, had come to overlord the wolves.

A few days later, in the cabin on the edge of the glacier-slash, Corporal Pelletier added another and final postscript to his official communication to the superintendent of “M” Division, at Fort Churchill:

Since writing the above, the wolves have made another big kill, and the caribou are drifting still farther south and west. With Constable O’Connor I shall organize at once a great hunt of the Eskimos along this part of the coast in an effort to exterminate at least a part of the monster pack that is driving all game from the eastern barrens.

Respectfully,

François Pelletier.