but all at once his rifle came to his shoulder and he sent a stream of fire out where the eyes were thickest. Baree knew what the shots meant, and filled with the mad desire to get at the throat of one of his enemies he dashed in their direction. Carvel gave a startled yell as he went. He saw the flash of Baree's body, saw it swallowed up in the gloom, and in that same instant heard the deadly clash of fangs and the impact of bodies. A wild thrill shot through him. The dog had charged alone—and the wolves had waited. There could be but one end. His four-footed comrade had gone straight into the jaws of death!
He could hear the ravening snap of those jaws out in the darkness. It was sickening. His hand went to the Colt .45 at his belt, and he thrust his empty rifle butt downward into the snow. With the big automatic before his eyes he plunged out into the darkness, and from his lips there issued a wild yelling that could have been heard a mile away. With the yelling a steady stream of fire spat from the Colt into the mass of fighting beasts. There were eight shots in the automatic, and not until the plunger clicked with metallic emptiness did Carvel cease his yelling and retreat into the firelight. He listened, breathing deeply. He no longer saw eyes in the darkness, nor did he hear the movement of bodies. The suddenness and ferocity of his attack had driven back the wolf horde. But the dog! He caught his breath, and strained his eyes. A shadow was dragging itself into the circle of light. It was Baree. Carvel ran to him, put his arms under his shoulders, and brought him to the fire.
For a long time after that there was a questioning light in Carvel's eyes. He reloaded his guns, put fresh fuel on the fire, and from his pack dug out strips of cloth with which he bandaged three or four of the deepest cuts in Baree's legs. And a dozen times he asked, in a wondering sort of way,
"Now what the deuce made you do that, old chap? What have YOU got against the wolves?"
All that night he did not sleep, but watched.
Their experience with the wolves broke down the last bit of uncertainty that might have existed between the man and the dog. For days after that, as they traveled slowly north and west, Carvel nursed Baree as he might have cared for a sick child. Because of the dog's hurts, he made only a few miles a day. Baree understood, and in him there grew stronger and stronger a great love for the man whose hands were as gentle as the Willow's and whose voice warmed him with the thrill of an immeasurable comradeship. He no longer feared him or had a suspicion of him. And Carvel, on his part, was observing things. The vast emptiness of the world about them, and their aloneness, gave him the opportunity of pondering over unimportant details, and he found himself each day watching Baree a little more closely. He made at last a discovery which interested him deeply. Always, when they halted on the trail, Baree would turn his face to the south. When they were in camp it was from the south that he nosed the wind most frequently. This was quite natural, Carvel thought, for his old hunting grounds were back there. But as the days passed he began to notice other things. Now and then, looking off into the far country from which they had come, Baree would whine softly, and on that day he would be filled with a great restlessness. He gave no evidence of wanting to leave Carvel, but more and more Carvel came to understand that some mysterious call was coming to him from out of the south.
It was the wanderer's intention to swing over into the country of the Great Slave, a good eight hundred miles to the north and west, before the mush snows came. From there, when the waters opened in springtime, he planned to travel by canoe westward to the Mackenzie and ultimately to the mountains of British Columbia. These plans were changed in February. They were caught in a great storm in the Wholdaia Lake country, and when their fortunes looked darkest Carvel stumbled on a cabin in the heart of a deep spruce forest, and in this cabin there was a dead man. He had been dead for many days, and was frozen stiff. Carvel chopped a hole in the earth and buried him.
The cabin was a treasure trove to Carvel and Baree, and especially to the man. It evidently possessed no other owner than the one who had died. It was comfortable and stocked with provisions; and more than that, its owner had made a splendid catch of fur before the frost bit his lungs, and he died. Carvel went over them carefully and joyously. They were worth a thousand dollars at any post, and he could see no reason why they did not belong to him now. Within a week he had blazed out the dead man's snow-covered trap line and was trapping on his own account.
This was two hundred miles north and west of the Gray Loon, and soon Carvel observed that Baree did not face directly south in those moments when the strange call came to him, but south and east. And now, with each day that passed, the sun rose higher in the sky; it grew warmer; the snow softened underfoot, and in the air was the tremulous and growing throb of spring. With these things came the old yearning to Baree; the heart-thrilling call of the lonely graves back on the Gray Loon, of the burned cabin, the abandoned tepee beyond the pool—and of Nepeese. In his sleep he saw visions of things. He heard again the low, sweet voice of the Willow, felt the touch of her hand, was at play with her once more in the dark shades of the forest—and Carvel would sit and watch him as he dreamed, trying to read the meaning of what he saw and heard.
In April Carvel shouldered his furs up to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Lac la Biche, which was still farther north. Baree accompanied him halfway, and then—at sundown Carvel returned to the cabin and found him there. He was so overjoyed that he caught the dog's head in his arms and hugged it. They lived in the cabin until May. The buds were swelling then, and the smell of growing things had begun to rise up out of the earth.
Then Carvel found the first of the early blue flowers.
That night he packed up.
"It's time to travel," he announced to Baree. "And I've sort of changed my mind. We're going back—there." And he pointed south.
CHAPTER XXX
A strange humor possessed Carvel as he began the southward journey. He did not believe in omens, good or bad.
Superstition had played a small part in his life, but he possessed both curiosity and a love for adventure, and his years of lonely wandering had developed in him a wonderfully clear mental vision of things, which in other words might be called a singularly active imagination. He knew that some irresistible force was drawing Baree back into the south—that it was pulling him not only along a given line of the compass, but to an exact point in that line.
For no reason in particular the situation began to interest him more and more, and as his time was valueless, and he had no fixed destination in view, he began to experiment. For the first two days he marked the dog's course by compass. It was due southeast. On the third morning Carvel purposely struck a course straight west. He noted quickly the change in Baree—his restlessness at first, and after that the dejected manner in which he followed at his heels. Toward noon Carvel swung sharply to the south and east again, and almost immediately Baree regained his old eagerness, and ran ahead of his master.
After this, for many days, Carvel followed the trail of the dog.
"Mebby I'm an idiot, old chap," he apologized one evening. "But it's a bit of fun, after all—an' I've got to hit the line of rail before I can get over to the mountains, so what's the difference? I'm game—so long as you don't take me back to that chap at Lac Bain. Now—what the devil! Are you hitting for his trap line, to get even? If that's the case—"
He blew out a cloud of smoke from his pipe as he eyed Baree, and Baree, with his head between his forepaws, eyed him back.
A week later Baree answered Carvel's question by swinging westward to give a wide berth to Post Lac Bain. It was midafternoon when they crossed the trail along which Bush McTaggart's traps and deadfalls had been set. Baree did not even pause. He headed due south, traveling so fast that at times he was lost to Carvel's sight. A suppressed
