The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him.He must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan.He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose. Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in the air again. As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he remembered, and, turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in his mouth.
A mile above the forks,running velvet-footed as was his custom,a gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
He slid his head around a corner of rock,where began an unusually large bend in the stream,and his quick eyes made out something that sent him crouching swiftly down.It was the maker of the track, a large female lynx.She was crouching as he had crouched once that day,in front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills.If he had been a gliding shadow before,he now became the ghost of such a shadow,as he crept and circled around,and came up well to leeward of the silent, motionless pair.
He lay down in the snow,depositing the ptarmigan beside him,and with eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the play of life before him—the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine, each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way of life.
Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened.The ball of quills might have been a stone for all it moved;the lynx might have been frozen to marble;and old One Eye might have been dead.Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.Something was happening.The porcupine had at last decided that its enemy had gone away.Slowly, cautiously,it was unrolling its ball of impregnable armour.It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation. Slowly,slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened.One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading itself like a repast before him.
Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its enemy.In that instant the lynx struck.The blow was like a flash of light. The paw,with rigid claws curving like talons,shot under the tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement.Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled,or had it not discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into it as it was withdrawn.
Everything had happened at once—the blow,the counter-blow, the squeal of agony from the porcupine,the big cat’s squall of sudden hurt and astonishment.One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up,his tail straight out and quivering behind him.The lynx’s bad temper got the best of her.She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.But the porcupine, squealing and grunting,with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection,flicked out its tail again,and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment.Then she fell to backing away and sneezing,her nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion.She brushed her nose with her paws,trying to dislodge the fiery darts,thrust it into the snow,and rubbed it against twigs and branches,and all the time leaping about, ahead, sidewise,up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
She sneezed continually,and her stub of a tail was doing its best toward lashing about by giving quick,violent jerks. She quit her antics,and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched.And even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall. Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that. It had been ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.
One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow,and chewed and tasted and swallowed.This served as a relish,and his hunger increased mightily;but he was too old in the world to forget his caution.He waited. He lay down and waited,while the porcupine grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals. In a little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a great quivering had set up. The quivering came to an end suddenly. There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all the quills drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
With a nervous, shrinking paw,One Eye stretched out the porcupine to its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened. It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what was to be done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he returned and took up his burden.
When he dragged the result of his day’s hunt into the cave,the she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him,and lightly licked him on the neck.But the next instant she was warning him away from the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had brought into the world.
CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB