Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories | Page 2

"Oh, that all your song-transmutations were as successful!" she
laughed.
"Name one that wasn't."
"Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that was
accounted the worst milker in the township."
"She was beautiful----" he began.
"But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted.
"But she was beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted.
"And here's where beauty and utility fall out," was her reply. "And
there's the Wolf!"
From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush, and
then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of rock,
appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced forepaws dislodged a
pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he watched the
fall of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then he transferred his gaze
and with open mouth laughed down at them.
"You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman called
out to him. The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head
seemed to snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.
They watched him scramble backward into the thicket, then proceeded
on their way. Several minutes later, rounding a turn in the trail where
the descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst of a
miniature avalanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not
demonstrative. A pat and a rub around the ears from the man, and a
more prolonged caressing from the woman, and he was away down the
trail in front of them, gliding effortlessly over the ground in true wolf
fashion.
In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was
given to his wolf-hood by his color and marking. There the dog

unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He
was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and
shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to
a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The
white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty
because of the persistent and ineradicable brown, while the eyes
themselves were twin topazes, golden and brown.
The man and woman loved the dog very much; perhaps this was
because it had been such a task to win his love. It had been no easy
matter when he first drifted in mysteriously out of nowhere to their
little mountain cottage. Footsore and famished, he had killed a rabbit
under their very noses and under their very windows, and then crawled
away and slept by the spring at the foot of the blackberry bushes. When
Walt Irvine went down to inspect the intruder, he was snarled at for his
pains, and Madge likewise was snarled at when she went down to
present, as a peace-offering, a large pan of bread and milk.
A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their advances,
refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with bared fangs
and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping and resting by
the spring, and eating the food they gave him after they set it down at a
safe distance and retreated. His wretched physical condition explained
why he lingered; and when he had recuperated, after several days'
sojourn, he disappeared.
And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his wife
were concerned, had not Irvine at that particular time been called away
into the northern part of the state. Biding along on the train, near to the
line between California and Oregon, he chanced to look out of the
window and saw his unsociable guest sliding along the wagon road,
brown and wolfish, tired yet tireless, dust-covered and soiled with two
hundred miles of travel.
Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at the
next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and captured the
vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The return trip was made in the
baggage car, and so Wolf came a second time to the mountain cottage.
Here he was tied up for a week and made love to by the man and
woman. But it was very circumspect love-making. Remote and alien as
a traveller from another planet, he snarled down their soft-spoken

love-words. He never barked. In all the time they had him he was never
known to bark.
To win him became a problem. Irvine liked problems. He had a metal
plate made, on which was stamped: "Return to Walt Irvine, Glen Ellen,
Sonoma County, California." This was riveted to a collar and strapped
about the dog's neck. Then he was turned loose, and promptly He
disappeared. A day later came a