Читать книгу Swift Lightning - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 6

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Swift Lightning and his great pack of wolves were heading north. Thin-ribbed and gaunt and with backs and haunches drooping from days and nights of futile questing for meat, they were scattered like a beaten army in retreat. Since the night they had slaughtered the greater part of the caribou herd, they had made only one big kill. Then had come a week of storm, and after the storm the caribou were gone. There was no longer scent of hoof on the barrens. In a world trackless and illimitable they had disappeared as utterly as though they had never been. But forty miles to the west, hugging the hollows of the coast plateaus for shelter, Swift Lightning could have found them, and the pack would now have been fattening at the tails of the thinned and scattered herds.

Had the eyes of Topek’s people seen the return of the pack into its old hunting-grounds, every god of the Eskimos would have been called upon for protection. For it was no longer a superstition that devils traveled in the bodies of the wolves. They were devils, and the hunger-madness was in their hearts. In other beasts starvation works its natural way—the animals crawl off and die; in the wolf it is a poisonous toxin. Under a billion stars and the silvery illumination in the sky, Swift Lightning’s pack, a hundred and fifty strong, traveled in deadly suspicion of itself. In truth they were pirates now—pirates watching for the opportunities to slit one another’s throats. Red-eyed and sleepless, their jaws white with the frozen drool of hunger, they watched and listened for the snarl and clash of fang that meant one more victim among their comrades. There was no howl or outcry as they crossed the barren. A moving, spectral horde of gaunt and thin-ribbed shadows, they made their way silently through the night.

Swift Lightning alone had escaped the madness. He, too, was starving. His giant body had grown thin. His eyes were red. A flaming desire possessed him, but his heritage from Skagen—that one drop of dog—had saved him. The dog abhorrence of cannibalism was strong within him. A score of times he had seen the pack rush in to fight and rend in its monstrous feast over a carcass of its kind. But he had held himself aloof, in his throat now and then—instead of the snarl of murder and hate—was a faint and yearning whine, and as the pack neared its old hunting-ground he felt once more the lure of the white men’s cabin on the edge of the glacier-slash. He had not forgotten the purring, deadly thing that had passed over his head—the bullet from O’Connor’s gun. But desire rose above fear. Again it was Skagen, the dog of twenty years ago, who answered to the glow of yellow sun within the cabin, the smell of smoke, and to that something which Swift Lightning, the wolf, could not understand.

He drifted back into the heart of the pack until the shadowy forms were traveling all about him. Among them he was a giant. He heard the snap of jaws in the gloom when he shouldered too near another of his clan. But he did not slink or cringe as he ran. He sensed the deadliness of those snarls, yet he felt no animus in return; and as he drifted he made his way to the east. In that direction the cabin lay. It was not logic that drew him. The cabin had given him nothing but the smell of smoke and the yellow glow, and out of it death had sung close over his head. Yet he went, his body moving mechanically to the impulse that lived in his brain. At the edge of the pack he stopped and watched the last of the starving shadows as they passed him. Then he headed north and east.

His speed increased. It was not the speed of the Swift Lightning who, a few weeks ago, had run like the wind down the frozen surface of Bathurst Inlet. In his movement was no longer the pure joy of running. His muscles had ceased to respond like living wires to the thrill of action. His feet were sore. A steady and aching distress lay between his ribs. The snap was gone from his jaws, the keenness of swift vision from his eyes, and his breath came short and quick in less than half a mile. When he slowed down he was panting. For a space he stood and listened. Starving, he still held his great head erect, and in the starlight his eyes gleamed brightly as he faced the direction of the famished pack. He did not want to go back to it now, and he did not want it to follow him. In his aloneness there fell upon him a new freedom. The pack was gone; the gnashing of teeth and the snarling of throats were gone—and he was glad. The air was clean, no longer heavy with the hot scent of mad beasts. Ahead of him lay the night, open and far-reaching, and filled with new promise.

What that promise might be was a thing of no definite fact in his mind. In all his world the one thing he wanted most was something to eat. He turned in the direction of the cabin and for a quarter of an hour he kept on. He was traveling with the wind, and twice he stopped for an instant to test it out. The second time he stood longer than the first, for he caught faintly a scent in the air—the wolf scent—and he growled. Half a mile farther on he stopped again, and the growl was deeper and more menacing. The scent was stronger than before, and yet he had been moving steadily away from the pack. He increased his speed, and in him began to grow a sullen resentment. The wind was his book. It was the one thing that held all knowledge for him, and it told him that back in the night something was following him.

A fourth time he stopped. The scent was stronger. His pursuer had not only kept pace with him but was overtaking him. This time Swift Lightning waited, and his hair stiffened and his muscles grew tense for battle. It was not long before he saw a shadow advancing in stealthy, slinking silence. It stopped not more than fifty feet away. And then, a step at a time, it approached him, and Swift Lightning gathered himself to meet an enemy. Almost within leaping distance it stopped again, and this time Swift Lightning saw that it was a huge gray timber-wolf who had joined the pack far down in the scrub forest at the southern edge of the barren. As large and as dark as Swift Lightning was this wandering wolf of the big timber. Bred in the southern forests, wise in the ways of white men, trap-bitten and battle-scarred, Mistik the Wanderer had come north with the pack.

In the light of the stars the two great beasts faced each other. In that light Swift Lightning’s naked fangs gleamed, his lips drew back, and he began slowly the deadly circle. Mistik did not move. With steady, questioning eyes he watched Swift Lightning. His jaws were closed. There was no answering battle light in his eyes. Unafraid, he stood without movement in the center of Swift Lightning’s narrowing circle, offering no challenge and betraying no enmity. Slowly the snarl died out of Swift Lightning’s throat, and his flattened ears grew erect. And then he heard from Mistik a low, throaty whine. It was an offer of friendship. It was as if the great wolf, missing the shelter of his timber, were trying to tell him that he was tired of the madness and starvation of the pack, that he had come to hunt with him alone, and that he did not want to fight but wanted to be friends.

Swift Lightning sniffed. Stiff-shouldered and still suspicious, he thrust in his head. Again he heard the low whine in Mistik’s throat, and this time he answered it. A foot at a time, circling slowly in the maneuver, they drew nearer and at last their muzzles touched. A deep breath rose out of Swift Lightning’s chest. He was relieved. He was glad. And Mistik whined again and rubbed close to his shoulder, and together they looked ahead into the night in this first hour of their comradeship.

It was Swift Lightning who led the way north and east. His head was higher and he sensed the presence of a new thing in his life—a new kind of comradeship. Mistik felt Swift Lightning’s approval of him as they sped through the starlight shoulder to shoulder. The timber-wolf did not run as the pack wolves ran. Bred of the forests, he was more watchful and alert. Swift Lightning’s vision was ahead while Mistik’s was ahead and on both sides. At intervals it was Swift Lightning’s custom to stop dead in his tracks and sniff the back trail; Mistik, with quick, sidewise swings of his head, caught the back-trail scent as he ran. To his instincts the pitfalls and the trickeries of the forests were still about him; to Swift Lightning the open barrens held no concealment for treachery or peril. In his knowledge of things it was the pack that was deadly. Alone under the stars were freedom and safety.

Had Pelletier and O’Connor seen them as they ran, something of the majesty and sovereignty of the wild must have impressed itself upon them. And Aoo, the conjuror at Topek’s village, would have sworn by his gods that he had seen the two greatest devils in all the North racing on a mission of their own. For the two great beasts ran inch to inch in height. In length Mistik was the greater of the two, but in jaw and chest Swift Lightning made up the handicap; so that in a fight one would have hesitated to choose between them. But in Mistik’s head was much that Swift Lightning had yet to learn, for Mistik had fought his way in a white man’s world. His right forefoot was deformed from the bite of a trap, and he had almost died from the torment and fire of a poison bait. He had discovered the peril of deadfall and snare, and it was the white man he feared above everything else in the world.

So it happened that when they came within scent of the cabin it was Mistik who drew back with a sudden warning snap of his jaws. His spine shot erect; his ears grew flatter; and he circled widely in the wind, his great body no longer free but sinuous and slinking with the caution of the hunter and the hunted. Swift Lightning faced the window. There was no light in it tonight, and neither was there smoke in the air. He approached nearer, and behind him he heard Mistik’s ominous whine. Circling the cabin cautiously, he came into all quarters of the wind. The scent was cold.

After a little he knew that life and light and smoke were gone. The cabin was dead. The thrill died out of him, and he trotted boldly toward the window, nearer than he had ever gone before. Then he sat down on his haunches and looked steadily where he had seen the glow of yellow light. A hundred yards behind him sat Mistik, and in those few seconds of their silence a gulf as wide as the barren itself lay between them. For in Swift Lightning there grew a slow and compelling desire to throw back his head and howl before the dark window of the empty cabin, just as he had howled at it when there was light. When the cry came, Mistik slunk farther back, for in it was a note that troubled him, a note that he had heard far south in the howling of the dogs. He circled until he came to the edge of the glacier-slash, an eighth of a mile below the cabin, and it was there Swift Lightning joined him.

For weeks the slash had been catching the windblown drift of the snow like a great furrow, and in places it was filled almost to the brim. Where this had happened the gnarled and twisted tops of trees lay sprawled out on the surface like the grotesque and agonized hands of monsters smothering underneath. In other places the humors of the wind had left deep dark pits where no snow had gathered at all, and into these pits Mistik’s eyes blazed like coals of fire. It was there, and not in the open barren, that he saw their first promise of meat, and with the noiseless stealth of the forest wolf he slunk down into the deepest and darkest of them all. Swift Lightning followed.

He felt the shroud of tree tops growing overhead. The brilliance of the stars was shut out. He was traveling in a darkness which he did not like, and in that darkness Mistik’s eyes were red and green points of flame when they turned his way. Twice he heard the snap of powerful snow-owl beaks not far away. Once Mistik made a terrific lunge at a ghostly shadow that swept so close over their heads they could hear the purr of its wings. Out of this pit they climbed over a mountainous drift into a second, and here also they found no smell of meat. Then it was that Swift Lightning took the lead. He clambered again up to the level of the barren and Mistik followed him as he set out for the Tom Thumb forest in which he had seen the big white hares weeks before.

Neither of them ran now. Their exertion in the crumbling avalanches and uncertain footing of the pits had betrayed more than ever their weakness. Hours ago they had passed through the physical rack of hunger, and the process of starvation had developed beyond the stage of acute and muscular torment in their bodies. Its gnawing pain was gone from between their ribs. In its place was an increasing and at times almost irresistible desire to lie down. A little while ago it was the cabin that had urged Swift Lightning to greater exertion. Now it was the century-old “forest” of junipers and cedars that grew no taller than the crook of a man’s arm, and his brain was filled with dancing visions of big white hares.

They came to it and passed into it. Most of it was choked and smothered under drifted snow. Here and there were places swept clean by the wind. In all his life in the thick and tangled swamps of the South Mistik had never seen anything like this grotesque and misshapen forest of the arctic world. Its trees, some of them hundreds of years old, were like sprawling octopuses. As Nature had made human dwarfs, so with her intense cold had she made deformed and club-footed hunchbacks of the junipers and cedars. But there was no meat here. Even the little white foxes that Swift Lightning hated were gone. Famine lay upon the Tom Thumb forest as heavily as it lay upon the barren.

In Swift Lightning there was still one last homing instinct—the instinct that was drawing the starving pack. On the trails of the old hunts were many bones. Now that his visions of the hares were gone, meat ceased to exist in his comprehension of things. He saw the bones. He saw them lying thick where once the snow had run red with warm blood. Toward the bones he set out, and Mistik—strong in his faith even as his strength ebbed away—kept with him neck to neck.

An hour later they came upon the broad and beaten path where for the sixth and last time Topek and Olee John and Olee John’s reindeer herd had traveled over the open barren. It was warm and rich with the smell of meat. The air still breathed the fragrance of steaming flesh. Swift Lightning’s heart leaped into his throat, and Mistik trembled beside him. Every desire of hunger flamed up in them anew, painful and terrible again, as desire is roused in the thirst-dying man who sees the rippling water of a mirage close ahead of him in the desert. In those moments they breathed deeply and stood still, while their bodies, like machines straining to a new task, gathered themselves for the final tremendous effort. Their blood ran swifter, their heads shot erect, the fagged muscles of their shoulders and legs hardened as they stood, and in their poise was a fresh alertness. They had not only struck the trail of a herd, but the herd was near, and instinctively they were listening to catch the beat of its hoofs.

And then Swift Lightning sat down in the middle of the reindeer trail and with his gray muzzle pointing up to the stars he sent back over the barren the hungering, wailing meat-cry of the pack. And Mistik, squatting on his haunches beside him, opened his great jaws to add voice to that cry, so that together they sent far and wide over the windless plains the summons to the hunt. From a mile away came an answer. From two miles another. Voice carried to voice, until the white world shivered to the thrilling news, and starving, thin-ribbed shadows raced in like ghosts from out of the night—a hungry, savage horde, pitiless and unpitied, scourging Huns of the upper lands, fiercest of all fighters for the meat of life. And the way of their craving stomachs led this time straight to a white man’s trap!