Gray Wolf, his wild mate, lay near him, flat on her belly, her forepaws
reaching out, her eyes and nostrils as keen and alert as the smell of
man could make them. For there was that smell of man, as well as of
balsam and spruce, in the warm spring air. She gazed anxiously and
sometimes steadily, at Kazan as he slept. Her own gray spine stiffened
when she saw the tawny hair along Kazan's back bristle at some dream
vision. She whined softly as his upper lip snarled back, showing his
long white fangs. But for the most part Kazan lay quiet, save for the
muscular twitchings of legs, shoulders and muzzle, which always tell
when a dog is dreaming; and as he dreamed there came to the door of the
cabin out on the plain a blue-eyed girl-woman, with a big brown braid
over her shoulder, who called through the cup of her hands, "Kazan,
Kazan, Kazan!"
The voice reached faintly to the top of the Sun Rock, and Gray Wolf
flattened her ears. Kazan stirred, and in another instant he was awake
and on his feet. He leaped to an outcropping ledge, sniffing the air and
looking far out over the plain that lay below them.
Over the plain the woman's voice came to them again, and Kazan ran to
the edge of the rock and whined. Gray Wolf stepped softly to his side
and laid her muzzle on his shoulder. She had grown to know what the
Voice meant. Day and night she feared it, more than she feared the scent
or sound of man.
Since she had given up the pack and her old life for Kazan, the Voice
had become Gray Wolf's greatest enemy, and she hated it. It took Kazan
from her. And wherever it went, Kazan followed.
Night after night it robbed her of her mate, and left her to wander
alone under the stars and the moon, keeping faithfully to her
loneliness, and never once responding with her own tongue to the
hunt-calls of her wild brothers and sisters in the forests and out on
the plains. Usually she would snarl at the Voice, and sometimes nip
Kazan lightly to show her displeasure. But to-day, as the Voice came a
third time, she slunk back into the darkness of a fissure between two
rocks, and Kazan saw only the fiery glow of her eyes.
Kazan ran nervously to the trail their feet had worn up to the top of
the Sun Rock, and stood undecided. All day, and yesterday, he had been
uneasy and disturbed. Whatever it was that stirred him seemed to be in
the air, for he could not see it or hear it or scent it. But he could
_feel_ it. He went to the fissure and sniffed at Gray Wolf. Usually she
whined coaxingly. But her response to-day was to draw back her lips
until he could see her white fangs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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