The Way of the Wild | Page 4

couple of feet deep, that man can overtake friend wolverine--if
he knows the way. Most men don't. On that he trusted. At any other
time--but this was not any other time.
Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo
heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a
cock-capercailzie--the feathered giant of the woods--rising. It was only
a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite
enough, for him. Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of
the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more than
enough. He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone in his
eyes--it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.
A lynx passed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs. It looked
all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he
cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of its
long, springing hindlegs. Something, too--the same something--must
have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.
Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the
miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his
character. Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all
alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding
along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.
At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up. A gray-blue haze, like
the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except in
the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that foretold
frost. It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite left off,
was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes. The silence was
almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his
rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very faintly--a
sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away again at a
gallop with a strange new light burning in his little, wide-set eyes. It
was the unmistakable sound of a horse sneezing--once. Gulo did not
wait to hear if it sneezed twice. He was gone in an instant. Man, it
seemed, had not been long in answering that challenge of the cache
escapade.
After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting
succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran
when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that
glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.) It
almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely dealt
in it, to know fear.
Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.
At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a dead
sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his hunched,
slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him. At the top
of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back along the trail.
Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of an
inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled,
serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out upon the
spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than
crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked like a
smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping hard,
with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no bells, and
it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace was wanted here, and the snow was

not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the required speed
under such conditions.
The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place
where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was
being followed. Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and
teeth showing, had never ceased to gallop. This, apparently, was not the
first wolverine that horse had trailed. It seemed to have a personal
grudge against the whole fell