The Cross Pull/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
For two weeks Flash had seen no human being but Moran.
It was late in June, and even in the high passes the snow drifts had melted down until Moran could put his horses across from one valley to the next all over the Land of Many Rivers. Up in this high country the drifts never entirely disappear.
All through the summer, tiny streams trickled from the foot of each miniature glacier that lingered in some sheltered spot, and defied the sun to blot out its last few ragged patches before the early fall snows once more began to build it up.
These were great days for Flash.
He had known the stunted cedars of the badlands, the cottonwoods along the stream beds in the foothills, and the willow thickets that marked each sidehill spring, but this was his first trip into the heavily timbered hills themselves.
Now they wandered through solid forests for miles on unending miles; the slopes dense with spruce growth and valleys of stately lodge-pole pines, broken only by the open parks and meadows along the streams or by the bald, windswept ridges that reared their rocky crests above the trees.
The world of men was far behind them, and Flash had Moran to himself.
Moran spoke to him as he would have spoken to another man, and found a sufficient sense of companionship from the presence of the dog. Often he told him that he was the best stock dog in the world, and while Flash could not understand the words he knew from the inflection that his master spoke in praise.
It was merited praise, for Flash solved the one problem that is always uppermost in the mind of every lonely rambler in the hills—the possible loss of his horses.
The love and understanding between Moran and his horses far surpassed that between most men and their saddle stock, but Moran was also a realist and he endowed no animal with legendary qualities it did not possess.
He knew that when in a strange country a range-bred horse will inevitably make use of every opportunity to break for home—a gelding for the spot where he was born, and a mare straight for the range where her first colt was foaled. The fact that he always knew where to find them later had proven small solace upon the several occasions in the past when they had eluded his every precaution and left him on foot in the hills.
But now no worry or listening for a distant horse bell broke his rest at night. Flash knew that Moran wanted the horses kept close at hand, and he kept them there.
His nose and ears told him things which his master could not know, and often at night he raised his head and nosed the air or inclined his ear to catch some sound, then slipped silently away from the sleeping Moran. In the morning the horses were always grazing near.
They saw many animals that Flash had never seen before. Droves of cow elk in the valleys and bunches of blacktail does and fawns along the streams, while higher up in the rim-rocked pockets near timberline they met the lords of the same species with their antlers in the velvet. Bighorn rams peered down at them from ledges of the cliffs and their ewes and lambs grazed on the broad grassy meadows above the timberline.
Moran told Flash why it was that these animals are seldom seen in pairs and how, among all the animals of the wild, the wolf and his cousins are the only true lovers of the lot; that the males of wolf, fox and coyote are the only ones that help raise their own young and rustle food for the female and the pups.
Moran knew that fatherhood rests lightly on the antlered tribes and that the bull elk or blacktail buck that remains with the herd, and protects his wives and offspring, is the hero of legend, not the real animal of the hills whose wives know him only during the mating moon; that the males of the wandering cat tribes in common with most of the furry kinds are even prone to kill their own offspring if they meet before the kits are grown.
Moran told all this to Flash, and he listened in dignified silence, drinking in each word without understanding even one. But in his own right Flash already knew these things—and many more which Moran, for all his constant research, would never know.
As if to make up for the marital shortcomings of other beasts the wolf lavishes the utmost care upon his mate and pups.
Flash combined the love of wolf for mate and the love of dog for man into one of single hearted devotion to Moran. But even this binding tie did not still the warring cross currents of mixed ancestral blood.
Here, away from the cabin and the works of man, the night sounds seemed to take on a new meaning, and as Moran slept Flash lay night after night and listened to their call.
The note of the big gray owls, and the quavering howl of the coyotes; the yelping, turkey-like bark of the cow elk, and the weird squall of the foxes that traveled the high bald ridges; all these in some way seemed of a world which he had known and to which he should belong.
Whispering voices called him and urged him to come. But with it all there was something lacking in the nights—some note for which he seemed to listen but never heard. At times he felt that if he could but raise his own voice, this unknown note for which he longed must surely answer it.
One night when the ache grew strong he slipped away and ran for miles. His was not the scrambling gait of the dog but the swift, gliding movement of the wolf. As he ran he learned a new game that seemed in some way associated with the missing sound. After that he played it often when Moran lay asleep in his blankets.
As Flash trotted under the trees it seemed that phantom shapes were trotting with him and that he heard the soft patter of running feet. Some larger shape fled before them and he increased the pace, pressing after it with all his flying speed. He thrilled to the rush of air past his ears as his powerful muscles drove him on. His sole purpose in life was to be first of all the dim forms that traveled with him to reach the fleeing shape ahead.
It always eluded him until one night when he burst from among the trees and sped down a long, grassy park.
The pattering feet of the shades beside him were as soft and unreal as before but the shadow out ahead seemed suddenly to take on more concrete form.
He gained on it. The sound of flying hoofbeats on the grass, and the warm elk scent in the air made the game more real. With a last tremendous spurt he closed with it, and while still in the throes of his exalted dream he lunged and struck.
His teeth cut through real flesh and blood, and he was thrown end over end on the grass. The dream was gone but he struck again and the shape fell, both ham-strings cleanly cut. Then he drove at the throat. In less than a minute from the first lunge he was tearing at the warm, quivering meat of a dead cow elk. A dream come true in part—he had led a phantom wolf pack to his first real kill.
Often at night Moran noticed his keen interest in every far off note, and he appeared to nose the air and tilt his ear as if to catch some scent or sound, the meaning of which was not clear to him.
Each morning they packed up and wandered on, making a new camp each night.
They moved up the Buffalo Fork of the Snake until one evening they stood in Two Ocean Pass. Moran could almost have tossed a chip from either hand, consigning each one to a different sea. They were in the very center of the Land of Many Rivers—the wonder spot of the world—and for fifty miles around there was no evidence of man.
Fifty miles to the south the nearest wagon road skirted the base of the Teton range: a like distance east of them the Sunlight Gap broke through the Rainbow Peaks to the scattered ranches of the Greybull; north they could see the Rampart Pass in a saddle of the Wapiti Mountains, leading down Seclusion Creek to the government trail on the Shoshone, the one dim tentacle of civilization stretching forth into the hills; fifty miles to the west, across Lake Yellowstone, was the Thumb Station on the Park road. Between, there was not even a path except the network of game trails worn by countless generations of elk and deer.
Moran prodded a white skull from the grass with his toe.
“Here’s one of the lost herd, Flash,” he said. “This is where they died. Their skulls are scattered through here for a hundred miles. And you come straight down from the buffalo grays that followed them into the hills.”
“You’re nearly the last of your line. I doubt if you ever hear that note you listen for every night. I’m afraid the rest of your breed have followed the lost herd, Flash, and have gone this route, and he tapped the skull with his toe.
The whole country here was high, yet the hills were not nearly so lofty as the distant ranges that ringed them in. The bald ridges that branched off from the divide on which they stood were barely above timberline.
That night as Moran slept, the breezes bore faint vibrations of sound and whiffs of scent that spoke of man to Flash.
He grew restless and uneasy and explored various long ridges, trying to find the source of these. Near morning a sound floated up to him as he trotted along a crest and he moved to the edge and looked down. The rimrocks fell sheer away from his feet. From below the scent came strong. He could catch no individual odor, only the combined scent of a number of men and someway, while there was not a single trace of the one scent he hated worst of all, the whole air of the place was suggestive of Brent and he flattened his ears at the thought. These men must be camped in the gulch below.
He trotted back to Moran and looked him over carefully to see that all was right, then found a break and dropped down to the floor of the canyon that ran along the base of that particular ridge. It was a jungle of heavy spruce but he found no trace of the camp he sought.
He stopped often and nosed the wind but it brought no scent. Dawn was beginning to gray off toward the Sunlight Gap when he finally caught a sound, but the sound came from above. They were on the ridge after all it seemed. He sat down and peered up through the trees at the sheer face of the towering cliff. The drone of voices came plainer now and there was an undertone to it all that he liked as little as he had the scent. But he had no time to figure it out—Moran would be up and around by now—so he hurried back.
Moran noticed that Flash was uneasy. All through the meal and while Moran saddled and packed up, Flash made repeated trips to the break and looked first down the gulch, then far out along the ridge.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Moran asked. “Is there a grizzly around somewhere? You’ve seen enough of them by now to know they don’t mean any harm to us.”
Not until they were half a dozen miles away did the wolf’s uneasiness subside. Even then he continued to turn on every commanding point and look back toward their former camp.
Moran finally decided that Flash had pulled down an elk or deer during the night, and that a grizzly had happened along and driven him from the kill.
But Moran was wrong.