The Way of the Wild | Page 3

found again.
He returned. He thrust his head in a second time, got hold of something,
and backed out. It was another trap, and with it he vanished also; and it,
too, was never found. He returned, and went, and a third trap went with
him.
The fourth investigation revealed an ax. It he partly buried. The fifth
yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over the place.
The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he dined.
The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere
unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.
What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he
defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
cache, but a third-rate débâcle, he sauntered, always slouching, always
grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and droop-tailed,
shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the darkness of the night,
under the trees.
By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more. Heaven knows where he was!
Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting up,
almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws. A
man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.
A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal

against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.
But Gulo was taking no notice of them. He was used to attentions of
that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him. He was
looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the
buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist,
southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something
was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of
whisper in that direction for some time. Now it was unmistakable.
A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by,
her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like
some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up, hackles
alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look back, a wild
reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he seemed to
be--all these passed, now on one side, now on the other, often only
glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up and shaded
his eyes with his paws. Something was moving those beasts, those
haunters of the forest, and no little thing either. Something? What?
Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade, And the
whisper spreads and widens far and near; And the sweat is on thy brow,
for he passes even now-- He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.
Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his
domestic arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool
hard by. The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf
and stone, with fine green moss of incomparable softness. He drank
swiftly and long, then flung about with a half-insolent, half-aggressive
wave of his tail, and set off at a rolling, clumsy, shuffling shamble.
At ordinary times that deceiving gait would have left nearly everything
behind, but this afternoon it was different. Gulo had barely shed the
shelter of the dotted thickets before he realized, and one saw, the fact.
He broke his trot. He began to plunge. Nevertheless, he got along.
There was pace, of a sort. Certainly there was much effort. He would
have outdistanced you or me easily in no time, but it was not you or I

that came, and who could tell how fast that something might travel?
The trouble was the snow--that was the rub, and a very big and serious
rub, too, for him. Now, if the snow had been a little less it would not
have mattered--a little more, and he could have run easily along the
hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just enough to
retard him, and no more. And it is then, when the snow is like that, just
above a