The Outcasts | Page 8

Store. The meat was feeling all right in its way when the stomach was lean, but at the Fort, at the time of giving up the robes--Waugh! God of the fallen Indians! how they would revel in the fierce fire-water, the glorious fire-water! Even the Squaws, useful at the skinning, would also drink, and reel, and become lower than the animals they had slain to bring about all this saturnalia. Why had his forefathers fought against the Palefaces? Was not all this civilized evil a good thing, after all?
A cloud drifted a frown over the face of the cold moon, and A'tim skulked closer and closer--almost to the very edge of the slaughter-pit. The Indian Pack-Dogs snarled at his presence, and yapped crabbedly. Other gray shadows, less venturesome than the Dog-Wolf, flitted restlessly back and forth in the dim mist of the silent plain.
A'tim sneered to himself maliciously. "To-day is the Kill of the Buffalo," he muttered; "to-morrow you, my Gray Brothers, will give up your lives because of the Death Powder. There will be meat enough for the poisoning; feast to-night, for to-morrow you die, and your pelts will go with those of the Dead Grass-Eaters. If you had not outcasted me, I, who know of this thing, would save you; but to-morrow I shall be far away and care not."
Would the Indians never gorge themselves to sleep? Eagle Shoe's voice was hushed; one by one the feasters stretched themselves upon the silent grass, and slumbered with a heaviness of full content. When the last Squaw, weary of the blood toil, curled beneath her blanket, A'tim crept to the meat piles. All the energy of his rested stomach urged him to the feasting; there was no stint.
Surely no Swift-runner, Dog or Wolf, ever had such a choosing. The Pack-Dogs kept the Wolves at bay, but with A'tim was the scent of their own kind, the Dog scent. He was not an utter stranger to them, only an Outcast; they tolerated him as a beggar at the meat store of which they had more than enough.
At last the hunger pain was all gone. Once in his Train-Dog days he had looted a cache of White Fish, and eaten until he could eat no more; it was like that now. Then, with a Dog thought for the morrow, he stole four huge pieces of choice meat, and cached them in the little coulee where waited Shag.
"Ah! you've come back, Brother," said the Bull, as A'tim crept complacently to his side. "I was afraid something might have happened to you, for hunger often carries us into unknown danger."
"E-u-h-h! but it was a mighty Kill, Shag. Such flesh I've never tasted--never--tasted--" He was asleep.
"I wonder what makes the moon red," muttered Shag, drowsily, as he, too, nodded off to sleep.
Then again the two Outcasts, the one for whom the blood horror had colored the moon red, and the other with a new joy of meat fullness, slumbered together in the little coulee by the Buffalo Pound.
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CHAPTER THREE
Shag was the first to awaken; the night's banquet caused the morning to come slowly to A'tim.
The pulling cut of Shag's heavy jaws on the crisp grass awoke the Dog-Wolf. He yawned heavily, and eyed the old Bull with sleepy indifference. Ghur-h-h-h! what a plaintive figure the aged Buffalo was, to be sure.
"Good-morning, Brother," whuffed Shag, his mouth full of grass; "where are you going?"
"I cached a piece of the new meat here last night," answered A'tim, as he nosed under an overhanging cut-bank. "Forest thieves!" he ejaculated angrily; "the Gray Stealers of Things have taken it." His cache was as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard--not even a bone; there was nothing but the reddened stones where the meat had lain, and a foul odor of Wolf. Impetuously he rushed to the second cache; it, too, was void of all meat; the third cache held nothing but the footprints of his gray half-brothers, the Wolf Thieves.
Despair crept into the heart of A'tim; what use to explore the fourth cache? The meat would be gone of a certainty. Why had he slept so soundly? Why had he hidden the meat at all? Oh! but he was stupid; as silly as a calf Musk Ox.
And the other meat up at the Pound, such as was left, would be full of Death Powder, put there for the Gray Runners. How he hoped they might eat it all--the thieves! It seemed such unnecessary looting, too, to steal his food when there was so much at the Pound; it was like the persecution that had kept him an Outcast from the Wolf Pack.
"There is nothing meaner in the world than a Wolf," he muttered; "nothing; and already I am hungry again."
At his fourth cache he scratched indifferently. But the long nails of