Читать книгу Dusty Star - Olaf Baker - Страница 7

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They called him "Dusty Star" because he happened in the night. All over the prairies of the immense West you might find here and there, in the old buffalo times before the White men ploughed, those little circles of puff-balls that weren't there yesterday and which began under the stars. "Dusty Stars" the red men called them, in their strange prairie tongue. The name, like other Indian names, was very ancient. It was a word that went walking in the beginning of the world.

Dusty Star, unlike his name, was very young. But he was big—very big for his nine years. Even in the star-time he must have done a lot of growing, for when the morning light crept into the tepee, he was seen to be a considerable-sized baby—extra large for a papoose. And the thoughts in his head were like the bones in his body—big, very big! He soon grew tired of lying in his little beaver-skin hammock, slung so cunningly from one lodge pole to another, and listening to the prairie larks as they sang in the blue morning. He did such tremendous things with his fat arms that the lodge-poles creaked. And he screamed with the sheer force of being alive. When he fell out of the hammock and all but broke his neck, his mother thought he would be safer if she let him crawl. Even in his crawling days, he learnt a lot about the world. He learnt how grasshoppers jump and prairie mice run. He wanted to crawl right out along the prairie into the middle west. His mother caught him just in time. After that, she fastened a deer-thong round his middle. It wasn't fair, and stopped him being one of the greatest explorers—for his age—which the world has ever seen. But it probably saved his life.

After that he grew up as all prairie children grow, with a great deal of play by day, and a huge deal of sleep by night. And the sun and the wind were great companions, and meant very much to him; and the sun baked him to a fine redness, and the wind searched him, and seemed somehow to send gusts along his blood. And often and often he would fall asleep, listening to the eerie whisper and whack of it, when the poles creaked and the lodge-ears tapped; or to the long sobbing chorus of the coyotes, far out where the prairie humped itself to blackness against an orange-coloured sky, and the east began to be hollow for the rising of the moon. And where the wind ran, and the moon walked, and the coyotes chorused, was to him a magical country, with edges as sharp as the prairie ridges, that girdled all his dreams.

On the day that he was nine years old, Dusty Star sat outside the tepee, blinking in the sun. From where he sat he could look far across the prairies, and so observe anything that might be moving over its immense expanse. For a long time he saw nothing at all. That was not strange, since in that vast apparent flatness there were thousands of hollows where all manner of four-footed Cunningnesses could go about their business and never show so much as the tip of an ear to any human eye.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and many of the prairie people were not yet risen from their noon-day sleep. Presently, over the high butte to the north, he saw a buzzard on wide motionless wings, "sitting" in the blue. The circles he made were so immensely wide and slow that he scarcely seemed to move in that high watch-tower of the air where he scanned the world for carrion. Next, a pair of hawks came into sight, skimming above the clumps of sage and bunch-grass. And now Dusty Star knew by their busy flight that the smaller prairie folk had begun to follow the runways in their eager search for food. Then, as he watched, came a flash between the sage bushes, as a jack-rabbit dashed to feed on the juicy leaves that grew under the alder thicket by the stream.

After that, nothing happened for some time, until suddenly he saw something very far off that was like the figure of a horseman riding over a swell. It was only visible, for a moment or two before it disappeared, but Dusty Star's piercing eyes had seen it long enough to make him sure that it was Running Wolf, his father, returning from the chase. The boy looked eagerly for his father's reappearance. He had been gone for some time. Whenever Running Wolf returned from good hunting he always brought much game with him, and there was feasting many days. When Running Wolf came into sight again, he was so close home that Dusty Star could make out quite clearly the form of a buck lying across the pony's shoulders. Also, his father carried something small and dark that cuddled against his left side. When Running Wolf had reached the tepee and Dusty Star had seen what it was that he had brought home, and when he had finally realized that the little wolf-cub was to be his very own, there were no bounds to his delight. To be the owner of a cub that would one day be a grown-up wolf—this was a thing beyond his wildest dreams!

Henceforward the cub was the centre of his little world. He called it Kiopo, because that was a name that meant for him all sorts of wolfish things, which he could not otherwise express and which he could never have explained to anyone grown-up; which, indeed, he could not explain even to Kiopo himself. He talked to Kiopo a good deal, and when he was not telling him of matters of the highest importance, he was plying him with questions. It did not discourage him in the least that Kiopo received the information with the utmost unconcern, and never answered one of the questions. Dusty Star concluded that baby wolves were like that. They might indeed be full of wisdom, but they expressed it solely by means of their teeth.

Kiopo left the marks of his teeth upon everything that he could bite. When Dusty Star's mother, Nikana, found them upon one of her best bead moccasins, so that many of the beads were missing, she gave him a tap with the moccasin that made him yelp with pain. But when Blue Wings, Dusty Star's baby sister, was, one fine day, found lying carelessly about on the floor of the tepee, to Kiopo's intense delight, and began to be treated like the beads, Nikana, roused by her screaming, gave Kiopo such a shaking, and such a cuffing between the shakes, that he really thought his last hour had come, and yelled as piercingly as Blue Wings herself. Not that he wanted to hurt things for the sake of hurting. He merely wanted to worry them, and to bite and bite, and bite.

It was all very strange after the old life in the Carboona, where the blue jays made such loud remarks to each other from thicket to thicket, and whoever hadn't got wings, went upon four feet. But here the tall, human creatures went always upon two only, and it was only the little Dusty Star that understood stomach-walking on all fours, and making companionable noises in the throat. As for Blue Wings—the cub that yelled when you bit her—she was a poor imitation of a human, though possibly with a high food value, if only they would let you try.

One of the hardest things to get used to was the tepee itself, with its peculiar Indian smells, so utterly different to the badger-hole where the only scent was the good home smell of the family, or perhaps of some fine old bone that had had many teeth at work upon it, and was trying hard to be dead. It was some time before Kiopo grew accustomed to the new smells, so as to be able to sort them out as belonging to the various objects which gave them. And when night had fallen, it was a dismal experience to wake up and see the inside of the tepee full of unfamiliar shapes in the glimmer of the moon. And then a great fear would take him, and he would lift the thin pipe of his cub voice and yelp aloud, because he wanted his mother, and because there lay at the back of his head a dim idea that there were ears upon Carboona that would catch the sound, and send a gaunt hairy body loping to the rescue. But the listeners upon Carboona were too remote to catch that wailing cry, and those that were close at hand were not disposed to be sympathetic. When Running Wolf shouted at him, he was all the more terrified, and yelped the louder, and when the angry Indian seized him and shook him into silence, his little heart was fit to break.

Under cover of the darkness, Dusty Star stole across to where the wolf-cub lay cowering, and gathered the little shivering body into his arms. And then he made him a lair in the buffalo robe that covered his own bed. And when Kiopo felt the warmth and good neighbourhood of the human brother's body, he cuddled himself against it with a sigh and whimpered himself to sleep.

In the day-time it was not so lonely because there were many things to sniff at and to watch. Besides there was always the big brother ready to play with him, and to come down on all fours from the great heights of the hind-leg-walking world, or to tickle him in the ribs when he rolled over on his back and exposed the round bulge that was his stomach to the public. It was wonderful how much Kiopo managed to cram into that bulge, and how his body grew in proportion to the bulge. His appetite never seemed to be satisfied. Bits of buffalo meat, old bones, odds and ends of waste, shreds of pemmican, or gollops of stew—the bulge took them all and still had room for more.

By the end of the second moon after his arrival, he was already far advanced in cub-hood, and showed signs of extraordinary development when he should be fully grown. And always he was learning new things. With Dusty Star for his constant companion and teacher he was learning very fast. And what he learnt, he never forgot, so that his knowledge was of the utmost service to him afterwards when the time came to fight his own battles far out along the world. His love and reverence for the little man-brother were unbounded. What the man-brother said and did were for him the great, important, splendid things. In a surprisingly short time, he had forgotten to think about his wolf-kindred, far away upon Carboona. Yet though he did not know it, the wisdom of his wolf-ancestors lay deep down within him in the secret lair of memory where the wild things never forget.

He was immensely curious about the outer world. There was the willow-copse by the stream where the brown water talked with a wet tongue. It was crossed by tiny trails of wood and water folk that had furtive scurrying movements and were very hard to catch. Kiopo's small wolf-eyes had the keenest possible sight, and what his eyes did not tell him about the little furtive folk, he found out by experiments with his paws, mouth and nose. Sometimes his curiosity got him into trouble, as upon the day when, pouncing upon an immense green grasshopper close to the water's edge, he lost his balance, and rolled head-over-heels into the stream. Fortunately the water was shallow, but the scrambling and spluttering and yelping were so tremendous that the commotion brought the big brother racing to the rescue. After that experience Kiopo learnt the lesson that however tempting game may be, it is best to look beyond it before you make your spring.

It was not long before he became a mighty hunter of mice. Between the grass bents and the stalks of the prairie plants, their runways ran like little roads down which they scurried in the early morning or late afternoon, doing a hundred miles of mouse geography to their watering-places at the stream. No cunning wolf-mother taught Kiopo to nose these narrow water-trails, and lie down beside them very craftily, with his head between his paws. Yet the ancient hunting-craft of wolf ancestors who had made their kills years beyond memory in the grey backwards of the moons, woke in his blood when the time arrived and showed him what to do. And Dusty Star, observing how, after countless failures, his cub gained mastery over the mice, admired his tireless perseverance, and loved the little hunter with all his Indian heart.