From the night of the terrible fight with the big gray lynx on the top
of the Sun Rock, Kazan remembered less and less vividly the old days
when he had been a sledge-dog, and the leader of a pack. He would never
quite forget them, and always there would stand out certain memories
from among the rest, like fires cutting the blackness of night. But as
man dates events from his birth, his marriage, his freedom from a
bondage, or some foundation-step in his career, so all things seemed to
Kazan to begin with two tragedies which had followed one fast upon the
other after the birth of Gray Wolf's pups.
The first was the fight on the Sun Rock, when the big gray lynx had
blinded his beautiful wolf mate for all time, and had torn her pups into
pieces. He in turn had killed the lynx. But Gray Wolf was still blind.
Vengeance had not been able to give her sight. She could no longer hunt
with him, as they had hunted with the wild wolf-packs out on the plain,
and in the dark forests. So at thought of that night he always snarled,
and his lips curled back to reveal his inch-long fangs.
The other tragedy was the going of Joan, her baby and her husband.
Something more infallible than reason told Kazan that they would not
come back. Brightest of all the pictures that remained with him was that
of the sunny morning when the woman and the baby he loved, and the man
he endured because of them, had gone away in the canoe, and often he
would go to the point, and gaze longingly down-stream, where he had
leaped from the canoe to return to his blind mate.
So Kazan's life seemed now to be made up chiefly of three things: his
hatred of everything that bore the scent or mark of the lynx, his
grieving for Joan and the baby, and Gray Wolf. It was natural that the
strongest passion in him should be his hatred of the lynx, for not only
Gray Wolf's blindness and the death of the pups, but even the loss of
the woman and the baby he laid to that fatal struggle on the Sun Rock.
From that hour he became the deadliest enemy of the lynx tribe. Wherever
he struck the scent of the big gray cat he was turned into a snarling
demon, and his hatred grew day by day, as he became more completely a
part of the wild.
He found that Gray Wolf was more necessary to him now than she had ever
been since the day she had left the wolf-pack for him. He was
three-quarters dog, and the dog-part of him demanded companionship.
There was only Gray Wolf to give him that now. They were alone.
Civilization was four hundred miles south of them. The nearest Hudson's
Bay post was sixty miles to the west. Often, in the days of the woman
and the baby, Gray Wolf had spent her nights alone out in the forest,
waiting and calling for Kazan. Now it was Kazan who was lonely and
uneasy when he was away from her side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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