The Voice of the Pack Part 1

The Voice of the Pack.

by Edison Marshall.

PROLOGUE

If one can just lie close enough to the breast of the wilderness, he can't help but be imbued with some of the life that pulses therein.--_From a Frontiersman's Diary_.

Long ago, when the great city of Gitcheapolis was a rather small, untidy hamlet in the middle of a plain, it used to be that a pool of water, possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis in winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the inefficient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Now snow water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields, scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side, leaping faster than a deer leaps--and when you speak of the speed of a descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can scarcely follow--from cataract to cataract; and the sight is always a pleasing one to behold. Incidentally, these same snow streams are quite often simply swarming with trout,--brook and cutthroat, steelhead and even those speckled fellows that fishermen call Dolly Vardens for some reason that no one has ever quite been able to make out. They are to be found in every ripple, and they bite at a fly as if they were going to crush the steel hook into dust between their teeth, and the cold water gives them spirit to fight until the last breath of strength is gone from their beautiful bodies. How they came there, and what their purpose is in ever climbing up the river that leads nowhere but to a snow bank, no one exactly knows.

The snow water back of the courthouse was not like this at all. Besides being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every inhabitant in the town who had any such instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally distasteful; and lastly, there were no trout in it. Neither were there any mud cat such as were occasionally to be caught in the Gitcheapolis River.

A little boy played at the edge of the water, this spring day of long ago. Except for his interest in the pond, it would have been scarcely worth while to go to the trouble of explaining that it contained no fish. He, however, bitterly regretted the fact. In truth, he sometimes liked to believe that it did contain fish, very sleepy fish that never made a ripple, and as he had an uncommon imagination he was sometimes able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and line and played at fis.h.i.+ng. He was too much afraid of the laughter of his boy friends. His mother probably wouldn't object if he fished here, he thought, particularly if he were careful not to get his shoes covered with mud. But she wouldn't let him go down to Gitcheapolis Creek to fish with the other boys for mud cat. He was not very strong, she thought, and it was a rough sport anyway, and besides,--she didn't think he wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usually particularly understanding, this was a curious thing.

The truth was that little Dan Failing wanted to fish almost as much as he wanted to live. He would dream about it of nights. His blood would glow with the thought of it in the spring-time. Women the world over will have a hard time believing what an intense, heart-devouring pa.s.sion the love of the chase can be, whether it is for fis.h.i.+ng or hunting or merely knocking golf b.a.l.l.s into a little hole upon a green. Sometimes they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most men, and thus most boys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired by just as laborious a process,--the lives of uncounted thousands of ancestors who fished and hunted for a living.

It was true that little Dan didn't look the part. Even then he showed signs of physical frailty. His eyes looked rather large, and his cheeks were not the color of fresh sirloin as they should have been. In fact, one would have had to look very hard to see any color in them at all.

These facts are interesting from the light they throw upon the next glimpse of Dan, fully twenty years later.

This story isn't about the pool of snow water; it is only partly about Gitcheapolis. "Gitche" means great in the Indian language, and every one knows what "apolis" means. There are a dozen cities in the middle-western part of the United States just like it--with Indian names, with muddy, snow-water pools, with slow rivers in which only mud cat live--utterly surrounded by endless fields that slope levelly and evenly to a drab horizon. And because that land is what it is, because there are such cities as Gitcheapolis, there has sprung up in this decade a far-seeing breed of men. They couldn't help but learn to see far, on such prairies. And, like little Dan by the pool, they did all their hunting and their fis.h.i.+ng and exercised many of the instincts that a thousand generations of wild men had instilled in them, in their dreams alone. It was great exercise for the imagination. And perhaps that has had something to do with the size of the crop of writers and poets and artists that is now being harvested in the Middle West.

Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture of little Dan, the pool back of the courthouse has very little importance in his story. It did, however, afford an ill.u.s.tration to him of one of the really astonis.h.i.+ng truths of life. He saw a shadow in the water that he pretended he thought might be a fish. He threw a stone at it.

The only thing that happened was a splash, and then a slowly widening ripple. The circ.u.mference of the ripple grew ever larger, extended and widened, and finally died at the edge of the sh.o.r.e. It set little Dan to thinking. He wondered if, had the pool been larger, the ripple still would have spread; and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple would have gone on forever. At the time he did not know the laws of cause and effect. Later, when Gitcheapolis was great and prosperous and no longer untidy, he was going to find out that a cause is nothing but a rock thrown into a pond of infinity, and the ripple that is its effect keeps growing and growing forever.

It is a very old theme, but the astonishment it creates is always new. A man once figured out that if Clovis had spared one life that he took--say that of the under-chief whose skull he shattered to pay him for breaking the vase of Soissons--there would be to-day the same races but an entirely different set of individuals. The effect would grow and grow as the years pa.s.sed. The man's progeny each in turn would leave his mark upon the world, and the result would be--too vast to contemplate.

The little incident that is the real beginning of this story was of no more importance than a pebble thrown into the snow-water pond; but its effect was to remove the life of Dan Failing, since grown up, far out of the realms of the ordinary.

And that brings all matters down to 1919, in the last days of a particularly sleepy summer. You would hardly know Gitcheapolis now. It is true that the snows still fall deep in winter, but the city engineer has finally solved the problem of the pool back of the courthouse. In fact, the courthouse itself is gone, and rebuilt in a more pretentious section of the city. The business district has increased tenfold. And the place where used to be the pool and the playground of Dan Failing is now laid off in as green and pretty a city park as one could wish to see.

The evidence points to the conclusion that the story some of the oldest settlers told about this district was really so. They say that forty and fifty and maybe seventy-five years ago, the quarter-section where the park was laid out was a green little glade, with a real, natural lake in the center. Later the lake was drained to raise corn, and the fish therein--many of them such n.o.ble fish as perch and ba.s.s--all died in the sun-baked mud. The pool that had gathered yearly was just the lake trying, like a spent prize fighter, to come back. And it is rather singular that buildings have been torn down and money has been spent to restore the little glade to its original charm; and now construction has been started to build an artificial lake in the center. One would be inclined to wonder why things weren't kept the way they were in the first place. But that is the way of cities.

Some day, when the city becomes more prosperous, a pair of swans and a herd of deer are going to be introduced, to restore some of the natural wild life of the park. But in the summer of 1919, a few small birds and possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels were the extent and limit of the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these squirrels was perched on a wide-spreading limb over-arching a gravel path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He wished that some one would come along with a nut.

There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of Dan Failing would have been entirely different. In fact, as the events will show, there wouldn't have been any life worth talking about at all.

If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he hadn't been hungry, if any one of a dozen other things hadn't been as they were, Dan Failing would have never gone back to the land of his people. The little bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny!

BOOK ONE

REPATRIATION

I

Dan Failing stepped out of the elevator and was at once absorbed in the crowd that ever surged up and down Broad Street. Where the crowd came from, or what it was doing, or where it was going was one of the mysteries of Gitcheapolis. It appealed to a person rather as does a river: eternal, infinite, having no control over its direction or movement, but only subject to vast, underlying natural laws. In this case, the laws were neither gravity nor cohesion, but rather unnamed laws that go clear back to the struggle for existence and self-preservation. Once in the crowd, Failing surrendered up all individuality. He was just one of the ordinary drops of water, not an interesting, elaborate, physical and chemical combination to be studied on the slide of a microscope. No one glanced at him in particular. He was enough like the other drops of water not to attract attention. He wore fairly pa.s.sable clothes, neither rich nor shabby. He was a tall man, but gave no impression of strength because of the exceeding spareness of his frame. As long as he remained in the crowd, he wasn't important enough to be studied. But soon he turned off, through the park, and straightway found himself alone.

The noise and bustle of the crowd--never loud or startling, but so continuous that the senses are scarcely more aware of them than of the beating of one's own heart--suddenly and utterly died almost at the very border of the park. It was as if an ax had chopped them off, and left the silence of the wild place. The gravel path that slanted through the green lawns did not lead anywhere in particular. It made a big loop and came out almost where it went in. Perhaps that is the reason that the busy crowds did not launch forth upon it. Crowds, like electricity, take the shortest course. Moreover, the hour was still some distance from noon, and the afternoon pleasure seekers had not yet come. But the morning had advanced far enough so that all the old castaways that had slept in the park had departed. Dan had the path all to himself.

Although he had plenty of other things to think about, the phenomena of the sudden silence came home to him very straight indeed. The noise from the street seemed wholly unable to penetrate the thick branches of the trees. He could even hear the leaves whisking and flicking together, and when a man can discern this, he can hear the cus.h.i.+ons of a mountain lion on a trail at night. Of course Dan Failing had never heard a mountain lion. Except on the railroad tracks between, he had never really been away from cities in his life.

At once his thought went back to the doctor's words. Dan had a very retentive memory, as well as an extra fine imagination. The two always seem to go together. The words were still repeating themselves over and over in his ears, and the doctor's face was still before his eyes. It had been a kind face; the lips had even curled in a little smile of encouragement. But the doctor had been perfectly frank, entirely straightforward. Dan was glad that he had. At least, he was rid of the dreadful uncertainty. There had been no evasion in his verdict.

"I've made every test," he said. "They're pretty well shot. Of course, you can go to some sanitarium, if you've got the money. If you haven't--enjoy yourself all you can for about six months."

Dan's voice had been perfectly cool and sure when he replied. He had smiled a little, too. He was still rather proud of that smile. "Six months? Isn't that rather short?"

"Maybe a whole lot shorter. I think that's the limit."

There was the situation: Dan Failing had but six months to live. Of course, the doctor said, if he had the money he could go to a sanitarium. But he had spoken entirely hopelessly. Besides, Dan didn't have the money. He pushed all thought of sanitariums out of his mind.

Instead, he began to wonder whether his mother had been entirely wise in her effort to keep him from the "rough games" of the boys of his own age. He realized now that he had been an under-weight all his life,--that the frailty that had thrust him to the edge of the grave had begun in his earliest boyhood. But it wasn't that he was born with physical handicaps. He had weighed a full ten pounds; and the doctor had told his father that a st.u.r.dier little chap was not to be found in any maternity bed in the whole city. But his mother was convinced that the child was delicate and must be sheltered. Never in all the history of his family, so far as Dan knew, had there been a death from the malady that afflicted him. Yet his sentence was signed and sealed.

But he harbored no resentment against his mother. It was all in the game. She had done what she thought was best. And he began to wonder in what way he could get the greatest pleasure from his last six months of life.

"Good Lord!" he suddenly breathed. "I may not even be here to see the snows come!" Perhaps there was a grim note in his voice. There was certainly no tragedy, no offensive sentimentality. He was looking the matter in the face. But it was true that Dan had always been partial to the winter season. When the snow lay all over the farmlands and bowed down the limbs of the trees, it had always wakened a curious flood of feelings in the wasted man. It seemed to him that he could remember other winters, wherein the snow lay for endless miles over an endless wilderness, and here and there were strange, many-toed tracks that could be followed in the icy dawns. He didn't ever know just what made the tracks, except that they were creatures of fang and talon that no law had ever tamed. But of course it was just a fancy. He wasn't in the least misled about it. He knew that he had never, in his lifetime, seen the wilderness. Of course his grandfather had been a frontiersman of the first order, and all his ancestors before him--a rangy, hardy breed whose wings would crumple in civilization--but he himself had always lived in cities. Yet the falling snows, soft and gentle but with a kind of remorselessness he could sense but could not understand, had always stirred him. He'd often imagined that he would like to see the forests in winter. He knew something about forests. He had gone one year to college and had studied all the forestry that the university heads would let him take. Later he had read endless books on the same subject. But the knowledge had never done him any good. Except for a few boyish dreams, he never imagined that it would.

In him you could see a reflection of the boy that played beside the pond of snow water, twenty years before. His dark gray eyes were still rather large and perhaps the wasted flesh around them made them seem larger than they were. But it was a little hard to see them, as he wore large gla.s.ses. His mother had been sure, years before, that he needed gla.s.ses; and she had easily found an oculist that agreed with her.

Now that he was alone on the path, the utter absence of color in his cheeks was startling. That meant the absence of red,--that warm glow of the blood, eager and alive in his veins. There was, indeed, another color, visible only because of the stark whiteness of his skin. He was newly shaven, and his lips and chin looked somewhat blue from the heavy growth of hair under the skin. Perhaps an observer would have noticed lean hands, with big-knuckled fingers, a rather firm mouth, and closely cropped dark hair. He was twenty-nine years of age, but he looked somewhat older. He knew now that he was never going to be any older. A doctor as sure of himself as the one he had just consulted couldn't possibly be mistaken.

It was rather refres.h.i.+ng to get into the park. Dan could think ever so much more clearly. He never could think in a crowd. Someway, the hurrying people always seemed to bewilder him. Here the leaves were flicking and rustling over his head, and the shadows made a curious patchwork on the green lawns. He became quite calm and reflective. And then he sat down on a park bench, just beneath the spreading limb of a great tree. He would sit here, he thought, until he finally decided what he would do with his remaining six months.

He hadn't been able to go to war. The recruiting officer had been very kind but most determined. The boys had brought him great tales of France. It might be nice to go to France and live in some country inn until he died. But he didn't have very long to think upon this vein. For at that instant the squirrel came down to see if he had a nut.

It was the squirrel of Destiny. But Dan didn't know it then.

Now it is true that it takes more than one generation for any wild creature to get completely away from its natural timidity. Quite often a person is met who has taken quail eggs from a nest and hatched them beneath the warm body of a domestic hen. Just what is the value of such a proceeding is rather hard to explain, as quail have neither the instincts nor the training to enjoy life in a barnyard. Yet occasionally it is done, and the little quail spend most of their days running frantically up and down the coop, yearning for the wild, free s.p.a.ces for which they were created. But they haven't, as a rule, many days to spend in this manner. Mostly they run until they die.

The rule is said to work both ways. A tame canary, freed, will usually try to return to his cage. And this is known to be true of human beings just as of the wild creatures. There are certain breeds of men, used to the far-lying hills, who, if inclosed in cities, run up and down them until they die. The Indians, for instance, haven't ever been able to adjust themselves to civilization. There are several thousand of them now where once were millions.

Bushy-tail was not particularly afraid of the human beings that pa.s.sed up and down the park, because he had learned by experience that they usually attempted no harm to him. But, nevertheless, he had his instincts. He didn't entirely trust them. Occasionally a child would come with a bag of nuts, and he would sit on the gra.s.s not a dozen feet away to gather such as were thrown to him. But all the time he kept one sharp eye open for any sudden or dangerous motions. And every instinct warned him against coming nearer than a dozen feet. After several generations, probably the squirrels of this park would climb all over its visitors and sniff in their ears and investigate the back of their necks. But this wasn't the way of Bushy-tail. He had come too recently from the wild places. And he wondered, most intensely, whether this tall, forked creature had a pocket full of nuts. He swung down on the gra.s.s to see.

"Why, you little devil!" Dan said in a whisper. His eyes suddenly sparkled with delight. And he forgot all about the doctor's words and his own prospects in his bitter regrets that he had not brought a pocketful of nuts. Unfortunately, he had never acquired the peanut habit. His mother had always thought it vulgar.

And then Dan did a curious thing. Even later, he didn't know why he did it, or what gave him the idea that he could decoy the squirrel up to him by doing it. That was his only purpose,--just to see how close the squirrel would come to him. He thought he would like to look into the bright eyes at close range. All he did was suddenly to freeze into one position,--in an instant rendered as motionless as the rather questionable-looking stone stork that was perched on the fountain.

He didn't know it, at the time, but it was a most meritorious piece of work. The truth was that he was acting solely by instinct. Men who have lived long in the wilderness learn a very important secret in dealing with wild animals. They know, in the first place, that intimacy with them is solely a matter of sitting still and making no sudden motions.

It is motion, not shape, that frightens them. If a hunter is among a herd of deer and wishes to pick the bucks off, one by one, he simply sits still, moving his rifle with infinite caution, and the animal intelligence does not extend far enough to interpret him as an enemy.

Instead of being afraid, the deer are usually only curious.

Dan simply sat still. The squirrel was very close to him, and Dan seemed to know by instinct that the movement of a single muscle would give him away. So he sat as if he were posing before a photographer's camera.