Mee-Koo!" he said in a whisper to Nepeese.
That was it, the call of the blood that was running swift in Baree's veins—not alone the call of his species, but the call of Kazan and Gray Wolf and of his forbears for generations unnumbered. It was the voice of his people. So Pierrot had whispered, and he was right. In the golden night the Willow was waiting, for it was she who had gambled most, and it was she who must lose or win. She uttered no sound, replied not to the low voice of Pierrot, but held her breath and watched Baree as he slowly faded away, step by step, into the shadows. In a few moments more he was gone. It was then that she stood straight, and flung back her head, with eyes that glowed in rivalry with the stars.
"Baree!" she called. "Baree! Baree! Baree!"
He must have been near the edge of the forest, for she had drawn a slow, waiting breath or two before he was and he whined up into her face. Nepeese put her hands to his head.
"You are right, mon pere," she said. "He will go to the wolves, but he will come back. He will never leave me for long." With one hand still on Baree's head, she pointed with the other into the pitlike blackness of the forest. "Go to them, Baree!" she whispered. "But you must come back. You must. Cheamao!"
With Pierrot she went into the cabin; the door closed silence. In it he could hear the soft night sounds: the clinking of the chains to which the dogs were fastened, the restless movement of their bodies, the throbbing whir of a pair of wings, the breath of the night itself. For to him this night, even in its stillness, seemed alive. Again he went into it, and close to the forest once more he stopped to listen. The wind had turned, and on it rode the wailing, blood-thrilling cry of the pack. Far off to the west a lone wolf turned his muzzle to the sky and answered that gathering call of his clan. And then out of the east came a voice, so far beyond the cabin that it was like an echo dying away in the vastness of the night.
A choking note gathered in Baree's throat. He threw up his head. Straight above him was the Red Moon, inviting him to the thrill and mystery of the open world.
The sound grew in his throat, and slowly it rose in volume until his answer was rising to the stars. In their cabin Pierrot and the Willow heard it. Pierrot shrugged his shoulders.
"He is gone," he said.
"Oui, he is gone, mon pere" replied Nepeese, peering through the window.
CHAPTER XVIII
No longer, as in the days of old, did the darkness of the forests hold a fear for Baree. This night his hunt cry had risen to the stars and the moon, and in that cry he had, for the first time, sent forth his defiance of night and space, his warning to all the wild, and his acceptance of the Brotherhood. In that cry, and the answers that came back to him, he sensed a new power—the final triumph of nature in telling him that the forests and the creatures they held were no longer to be feared, but that all things feared him. Off there, beyond the pale of the cabin and the influence of Nepeese, were all the things that the wolf blood in him found now most desirable: companionship of his kind, the lure of adventure, the red, sweet blood of the chase—and matehood. This last, after all, was the dominant mystery that was urging him, and yet least of all did he understand it.
He ran straight into the darkness to the north and west, slinking low under the bushes, his tail drooping, his ears aslant—the wolf as the wolf runs on the night trail. The pack had swung due north, and was traveling faster than he, so that at the end of half an hour he could no longer hear it. But the lone wolf howl to the west was nearer, and three times Baree gave answer to it.
At the end of an hour he heard the pack again, swinging southward. Pierrot would easily have understood. Their quarry had found safety beyond water, or in a lake, and the muhekuns were on a fresh trail. By this time not more than a quarter of a mile of the forest separated Baree from the lone wolf, but the lone wolf was also an old wolf, and with the directness and precision of long experience, he swerved in the direction of the hunters, compassing his trail so that he was heading for a point half or three-quarters of a mile in advance of the pack.
This was a trick of the Brotherhood which Baree had yet to learn; and the result of his ignorance, and lack of skill, was that twice within the next half-hour he found himself near to the pack without being able to join it. Then came a long and final silence. The pack had pulled down its kill, and in their feasting they made no sound.
The rest of the night Baree wandered alone, or at least until the moon was well on the wane. He was a long way from the cabin, and his trail had been an uncertain and twisting one, but he was no longer possessed with the discomforting sensation of being lost. The last two or three months had been developing strongly in him the sense of orientation, that "sixth sense" which guides the pigeon unerringly on its way and takes a bear straight as a bird might fly to its last year's denning place.
Baree had not forgotten Nepeese. A dozen times he turned his head back and whined, and always he picked out accurately the direction in which the cabin lay. But he did not turn back. As the night lengthened, his search for that mysterious something which he had not found continued. His hunger, even with the fading-out of the moon and the coming of the gray dawn, was not sufficiently keen to make him hunt for food.
It was cold, and it seemed colder when the glow of the moon and stars died out. Under his padded feet, especially in the open spaces, was a thick white frost in which he left clearly at times the imprint of his toes and claws. He had traveled steadily for hours, a great many miles in all, and he was tired when the first light of the day came. And then there came the time when, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, he stopped like a shot in his tracks.
At last it had come—the meeting with that for which he had been seeking. It was in a clearing, lighted by the cold dawn—a tiny amphitheater that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east. With her head toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, his scent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf. Baree had not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim of young balsams that fringed the clearing. It was then that he stopped, and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed to breathe.
There was not a fortnight's difference in their age and yet Maheegun was much the smaller of the two. Her body was as long, but she was slimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of a fox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a sign of swiftness almost equal to the wind. She stood poised for flight even as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost their alertness and dropped aslant.
Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and bushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. He was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her and faced the east, where a faint penciling of red and gold was heralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his fair acquaintance—as many a two-legged animal has done before him—his tremendous importance in the world at large.
And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree's bluff worked as beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the air with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun's ears sprang alert, and she sniffed it with him. He turned his head from point to point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction. And when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her throat, but smothered and low as a woman's exclamation when she is not
