Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 760
I found that Massey and Calmont had finished their butchering. Massey sat resting, puffing away at a pipe, while Calmont had his chin propped on his clenched fist, in dark thought. When I told them what I had discovered, Calmont cursed loudly.
“The whole thing is a bust!” he shouted. “I’m sick of it.”
“Go home, then,” said Massey, after taking a few more puffs on his pipe. “For my part, I’m going to stay here until I get him or until he dies!”
XXVIII. MORE OF ALEC’S WORK
MOST MEN, WHEN they talk about doing or dying, are bluffing, of course. Well, Massey was not. There was no bluff in his whole system. He was simply steel, inside and out.
He had had a number of checks in this business. He had lost the best dog team that I ever saw in the Northland. He had spent a vast amount of invaluable time. He had risked his life over and over again. But now he was settled to the work. Partly, I suppose, the very opposition of hard luck served to make him all the more determined to push through the business. Partly it must have been that he loved Alec the Great in a way that we could not quite understand.
I wondered what Calmont would do, and expected to see him trudge back across country to his shack and resume mining operations. But that was not Calmont’s kind. He could stick to disagreeable or hopeless work as long as the next one; and besides, I think he was biding his time and licking his lips for the moment when the dog might be taken by some lucky trick, and the long-postponed fight could take place.
At any rate, though he made no declaration of policy, he stayed on. The first thing we did was to build ourselves a fairly comfortable shelter with the sewed-up remnants of the tent and a lot of logs which we felled in a choice bit of woods. In the clearing that we made before the shack, we put up a meat platform, which was so high that not even a lynx or a fisher could jump to the edge of it. On this we stacked up the frozen moose meat, which made prime eating, I can tell you.
My special job was the light but mean one of stopping the chinks and holes among the log walls of our house with moss, and I was at work for days, doing my clumsy caulking. However, we got the place in fairly good shape, and prepared for a long stay.
Even Massey seemed to have no good plans. When Calmont asked him, he simply replied: “I’m trusting to luck and patience, and that’s all. Goodness knows how to go about this. Starvation is the only rope I know of that may be long enough to catch Alec!”
This needed explaining, but Massey pointed out, with a good deal of sense, that wolves and dogs will nearly always establish a regular beat through the woods or over the hills and stick to the particular field which they have outlined. Probably in hard times the range extended a good deal, but it is nearly always run inside of quite distinct limits.
Well, these were hard times for the wolves. We ourselves found little game, but enough to keep our larder well stocked, chiefly because Massey marched for many hours and many miles every day, studying the range of Alec’s band, and also shooting everything that he could find. Everything, he said, that he added to our cache on the meat platform was a possibility removed from the teeth and the starved stomachs of Alec and his forces. In fact, he hoped that by sharpening Alec’s hunger, he could eventually draw him close to the shack. As a last resort, he was willing to try traps to catch him, at the risk of taking him with a broken leg. But he wanted to wait until the last moment before he did this.
The position we had selected was, according to Massey’s explorations, about the center of the wolf range, and, therefore, we were in fairly close striking distance of all their operations.
In the meantime, poor Alec, by his Napoleonic stroke of running off his old companions, the dog team of Massey, had simply loaded himself down with doubled responsibilities. There were now twelve hungry mouths following him and, though we constantly heard the voices of the pack on the blood trail, we guessed that they got little for their trouble, and I’ve no doubt that rabbits and such lean fare made up most of their meals, such as they were.
Several times we saw them in the distance, and in the glasses of Massey they began to look very tucked-up and gaunted. If there was anything to be hoped for from a partnership with starvation, it looked as though we had it working already.
In the meantime, we sat back at ease and ate our moose meat and simply guarded against wolverines, those expert thieves being the only robbers we had to fear in that part of the woods. The attitude of Massey and Calmont toward one another had not altered. They were simply coldly polite and reserved; and each had an icy look of hatred with which he contemplated the other in unobserved moments. However, I was willing to stack my money on Alec’s remaining a free dog. And so long as he ran at large, I saw no chance of the battle taking place. Instinctively, silently, I was praying all day and every day that the fight would not become a fact.
For the more I knew of this pair, the more closely they seemed matched. Massey had the speed of hand, the dauntless spirit, the high courage, and the coldly settled heart of a fighting man. But Calmont balanced these qualities with his enormous strength and a certain brutal savagery which was liable to show him a way to win simply because it would never have occurred to a fair mind like Massey’s.
If they fought, I was reasonably sure that Calmont would bring it about that the battle should be hand to hand, and there all his natural advantages of weight and superior height would be sure to tell. That nightmare of expectancy never left me for a moment, night or day.
We had been out there in the woods for about two weeks, eating well and keeping ourselves snug by burning a vast quantity of fuel; and then Alec the Great struck a counter blow, most unexpectedly.
One night I was wakened from sound sleep by muffled noises from the front of the house, though there was enough of a wind whistling to cover any ordinary disturbance. Whatever made those noises, it was not the wind, so I got up and went to the door. This I pushed open and looked onto one of the queerest pictures that any man ever can have seen.
Up there on top of our meat platform was the fine white figure of Alec the Great, and he was dragging great chunks of meat to the edge of the platform and letting them fall into the throats of his followers. This was almost literally true, for the instant that a bit of meat fell, it seemed to be devoured before it had a chance to touch the ground.
It was not so amazing that he had got to the top of the platform. Calmont carelessly had left the ladder standing against it the evening before, forgetful of Alec’s ability to climb such things. What startled me was that he should be pulling that meat off the platform and letting it fall to his mates. I dare say that any other animal would have filled his own belly and disregarded its companions. At least, not many outside of the mothers of litters would have had the wit or the impulse to give away fine provisions.
Well, there was Alec up there doing the very thing I have described. It took my breath so that I stared for a moment, incapable of movement. Then I slipped back to Massey and shook him by the shoulder. He waked with a start and grabbed me so hard that he almost broke me in two.
“It’s only Joe,” I told him. “Alec’s outside with his gang. Up on the meat platform. Maybe you can do something about—”
He was at the door before I had finished saying this. On the way, he caught down from the wall a leather rope which he had been making during the past few days, and using as a lariat in practice. And if he could get there close enough to the platform, I was reasonably sure that he would be able to pop the rope onto Alec, and then perhaps have that white treasure for good!
Calmont was up now. The three of us looked out on the destruction of our provisions with no care about them, but only the hope that we could evolve out of this loss a way of recapturing the great dog.
Massey decided that he would go out through the back wall, and that is what he did, pulling up some of the flooring boughs which we used to keep us off the frozen ground, and then burrowing out through the drifted snow beyond.
The other pair of us, still waiting breathlessly inside the doorway, presently made out Massey’s stalking through the gloom of the woods at the side of the meat cache.
It looked to me like the end of the chase, and perhaps it might have been, except for a strange thing.
Alec was still pulling the supplies to the edge and letting them topple to the ground, and the rest of the pack were gathered below, snarling softly, now and then, but enjoying that rain of food with burning eyes. One, however, had withdrawn with a prize to the edge of the shrubbery, and this one now started up with a loud, frightened yell.
Once more I could have sworn that it was the old female of whom I’ve spoken before.
She had spotted Massey in spite of his Indian-like care. And, at that alarm, that wolf-dog pack hit the grit for the shadows as fast as they could scamper.
Alexander the Great, however, delayed a fraction of a second. He picked up a chunk of frozen meat, jumped into the snow with it, and ran after the rest’ of his boys, carrying his lunch basket with him.
That was an exhibition of good, cool nerve. It was like seeing a man come out of a burning building reading a newspaper on the way, and stopping on the front porch to admire a headline.
Calmont laughed aloud, and I could not help grinning, but poor Massey came in with a desperate face. He actually sat by the fire with his head in his hands, after this, and he said to me that the job was hopeless. They never would capture Alec.
I dared not say that I hoped they wouldn’t!
This adventure made me feel that he would have to resort to traps, after all. We had some along with us, carted in from Calmont’s shack, and these we oiled up and Calmont himself set them, because he knew the ways of wild animals very well, and had done a good deal of trapping here and there in his day.
Several days after the affair of the meat platform, when we judged that the pack would have empty bellies and eager teeth once more, the traps were placed in well-selected spots, and baited.
The next morning we followed along from trap to trap and found that every one of them had been exposed by scratching in the snow around them.
After this, the wolves had apparently gone on, leaving the traps exposed to ridicule and the open light of the day. Calmont scratched his head and swore that he would try again, and again and again we made the experiment. But it was nearly always with the same result.
Then we saw that the footprints around the traps were always the well-known sign of Alec. The scoundrel was doing all of this detective work which made us feel so helpless and foolish! Presently we began to feel as though Alec were quietly laughing at us, and heartily scorning our foolish efforts to capture him in his own domain. For my part, I had given up the idea entirely.
Then came the great blizzard.
For ten days the wind hardly stopped blowing for a moment. At times f we had a sixty mile wind, and zero weather, which is the coldest thing in the world, so far as I know. There was a great deal of snow that fell during this storm, and at the end of the time, when the gale stopped, we went out into a white world in which Alec was to write a new chapter.
XXIX. WITH TEETH BARED
WE WERE A little low in wood for burning, and I went out that morning to get a bit of exercise and also chop down some trees and work them into the right lengths. I picked out some of about the suitable diameter, and soon the axe strokes were going home, while the air filled with the white smoke of the dislodged snow that puffed up from the branches. There was enough wind, now and then, to pick up light whirls of the snow from the ground also, or from the tips of branches, and the air was constantly filled with a dazzling, bright mist. Such an atmospheric condition often brings on snow blindness, I believe. And after working for a time, I was fairly dizzy with the shifting lights and with the surge of blood into my head from the swinging of the axe.
I stepped back, finally, when I had got together a good pile of fuel; and it was then that I saw the rabbit which was eventually to lead on to that adventure.
It looked like a mere puff of snow at first. Then I saw the dull gleam of its eyes and threw the axe at it.
It hopped a few short bounds away and crouched again. It acted as though it were altogether too weak to move very far.
So I ran suddenly after it, picking up the axe, and the rabbit bobbed up and down, keeping just a little ahead of me, and going with a stagger. It was certainly either sick or exhausted from hunger. Hunger I guessed, because one of the prolonged arctic storms is apt to starve even rabbits.
I went over the top of the next hill and down into the hollow, when, out of the whirling snow mist, leaped a white fox and caught up that rabbit at my very feet.
He carried it off to a very short distance and there actually stopped and began to eat, in full view of me. This amazed me more than ever. They say that animals can tell, sometimes, when men have guns with them and when their hands are empty. I had the light axe, but the fox seemed to know perfectly well that it was a rather silly weapon for distance work.
He went on eating, while I walked slowly toward him.
Two or three times he retreated with the remains of his dinner. But he was reluctant, and he gave me a snaky look and a couple of silent snarls when I walked up on him.
He was about gone with exhaustion and hunger, I could guess. His belly cleaved to his backbone. He was bent like a bow with emptiness and with cold and looked brittle and stiff.
The way he put himself outside that rabbit was worth seeing and, when he had finished it, he did not skulk off, but licked his red chops and began to eye me!
I tried to laugh at the impudence of him, but I found that I was getting the creeps. A fox is not a very big creature and, minus its beautiful coat, it is usually a poor little starveling. But that fox seemed to grow bigger and bigger.
Finally, I again threw my axe at it.
The beast let the axe fly over its head without so much as budging and, staring at me, it licked its red lips again. I was to it what a moose would be to a man — a mountain of meat, and somehow I knew that that beast was coveting the lord of creation as represented by me.
I stepped back. I turned on it. The little brute snarled at me with the utmost hate, and would not budge.
This angered me so much that I shouted, and ran forward, after which my fox shrank a little to the side, and remained there, snarling, its snaky bright eyes on my throat. I was almost afraid to pick up my axe, for fear I would be rushed as I bent forward; but when I had the axe in my hand, I decided that I would waste no more time out here getting myself frozen, and instead go back toward the house, in the hope of luring this vengeful fox after me.
But the matter of the fox was taken off my hands exactly as the matter of the rabbit had been. Out of the snow mist, shining and thick, a stream of gaunt, gray forms came streaking, with a shining white body in the forefront. The fox whirled about and started to scamper, but he had waited too long in his interest in me.
Before he could get into his running stride, Alec the Great struck him down before my eyes, and the poor fox screamed for one half second as the gray flood closed over him.
I dare say that between the time the meat was stolen from the platform and the time this fox was pulled down that pack had not touched food of any kind. At least, they looked it, with their hollowed stomachs and arched backs, and their eyes were stains of red, glaring frightfully.
“Alec!” I loudly shouted. “Alec, Alec!”
At my voice, that wave of gray parted from above the bones of the fox and then closed together once more over it. They, also, seemed to know pretty well that even if I were a man, yet I had no gun with me. I whirled the axe and shouted again, without getting any more response than if I had shouted at the arctic trees in their winter silence.
This frightened me suddenly.
There are stories about hungry wolves and overly confident men. You will hear those stories occasionally, in camp, when the beasts are howling far away on a blood trail. They make bad yarns and haunt one at night.
Well, I backed away from that gang and then turned and started for the house. I had barely got started, when I heard a rushing sound behind me, something like that of a gust of wind through trees. I looked back over my shoulder. It was no wind. It was the noise of the loose, dry snow, whipped up by the running legs of thirteen dogs and wolves, for that whole pack was coming for me, and Alec the Great was in the lead, with the ugly wolf bitch at his side.
Fear did not numb me, luckily. There was a patch of trees standing in a huddle to one side of me, and I got to those trees as fast as a greyhound could have jumped the distance. They would guard my back, if only I could fight off the enemy from the front! I shouted with all my might, but — perhaps it was the sight of the snow fog in the air — I was sure that my voice would never reach to the ears of my friends in the house. If only the wolves would howl.
But they did not. They sat down in a semicircle before me, while Alec the Great, according to his usual tactics, marched up and down the line, marshaling his forces, planning his wicked devices.
I say wolves, though most of them were merely huskies, but they looked all wolf, now, and they certainly acted all wolf, as well. Their red eyes had evil in them, and there was more evil in Alec, our former pet, than in any of the rest of the lot.
Suddenly I said: “Alec, old boy, you ought to remember me. Yonder in Nome I got you out of as bad a mess as this, when the dog team was about to mob you!”
Now, when I said this, I give you my word that that beautiful white brute stopped in his slinking walk and turned his head toward me, with ears so pricked and with eyes so bright that I could have sworn that he understood every syllable that I was speaking.
He waited there, with a forepaw raised, and smiling a red, wolfish smile. I was understood by him, he seemed to be saying; but he was not at all convinced that he intended to return good for good.
