The Golden Snare | Page 5

appearing at a post for
food. A loup-garou. An animal-man. A companion of wolves. By the
end of the third year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack. It
was wolf, all wolf. From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had
twenty in his pack. They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he
killed. Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death,
but these wolf- beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they
recognized instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And
Bram, monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they
were brother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate with
them, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were

comradeship and protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was
meat in the country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a
caribou or a moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram
himself there would always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he
arrived. Four years of that! The Police would not believe it. They
laughed at the occasional rumors that drifted in from the far places;
rumors that Bram had been seen, and that his great voice had been
heard rising above the howl of his pack on still winter nights, and that
half-breeds and Indians had come upon his trails, here and there--at
widely divergent places. It was the French half-breed superstition of the
chasse-galere that chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere
is a thing not to be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of
creatures who have sold their souls to the devil for the power of
navigating the air, and there were those who swore with their hands on
the crucifix of the Virgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram
and his wolves pursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through the
skies.
So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram, meanwhile,
keeping himself from all human eyes, was becoming more and more
each day like the wolves who were his brothers. But the white blood in
a man dies hard, and always there flickered in the heart of Bram's huge
chest a great yearning. It must at times have been worse than
death--that yearning to hear a human voice, to have a human creature to
speak to, though never had he loved man or woman. Which brings us at
last to the final tremendous climax in Bram's life--to the girl, and the
other man.

CHAPTER II

The other man was Raine--Philip Raine.
To-night he sat in Pierre Breault's cabin, with Pierre at the opposite side
of the table between them, and the cabin's sheet iron stove blazing red
just beyond. It was a terrible night outside. Pierre, the fox hunter, had
built his shack at the end of a long slim forefinger of scrub spruce that
reached out into the Barren, and to-night the wind was wailing and

moaning over the open spaces in a way that made Raine shiver. Close
to the east was Hudson's Bay--so close that a few moments before
when Raine had opened the cabin door there came to him the low,
never-ceasing thunder of the under-currents fighting their way down
through the Roes Welcome from the Arctic Ocean, broken now and
then by a growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like a great
knife, through one of the frozen mountains. Westward from Pierre's
cabin there stretched the lifeless Barren, illimitable and void, without
rock or bush, and overhung at day by a sky that always made Raine
think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Dore's "Inferno"--a low,
thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always threatening to pitch itself
down in terrific avalanches. And at night, when the white foxes yapped,
and the wind moaned--
"As I have hope of paradise I swear that I saw him--alive, M'sieu,"
Pierre was saying again over the table.
Raine, of the Fort Churchill patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, no longer smiled in disbelief. He knew that Pierre Breault was a
brave man, or he would not have perched himself alone out in the heart
of the Barren to catch the white foxes; and he was not superstitious,
like most of his kind, or the sobbing cries and strife of the everlasting
night-winds would have driven him away.
"I swear it!" repeated Pierre.
Something that was almost eagerness was burning now in Philip's face.
He leaned over the table, his hands gripping tightly. He was thirty-five;
almost slim as Pierre himself, with eyes as steely blue as Pierre's were
black. There was a time, away back, when he wore a dress