The Sky Line of Spruce Part 22

He got up, with good manners; and he smiled, quietly and gently, into her sober, wistful face. "Sleep good," he prayed. "You've got solid walls around you to-night--and some one on guard, too. Good night."

A like good wish was on her lips, but she pressed it back. She had almost forgotten, for the moment, that this man was her abductor and her father's enemy. She ventured into the darkness of the cave.

Scratching a match Ben followed her, so that she could see her way. For the instant the fireside was deserted. And then both of them grew breathless and alert as the brush cracked and rustled just beyond the glowing coals.

Some huge wilderness creature was venturing toward them, at the edge of the little glade.

XXVII

The match flared out in Ben's fingers, and the only light that was left was the pale moonlight, like a cobweb on the floor of the glade, and the faint glow from the dying fire. About the glade ranged the tall spruce, Watching breathlessly; and for a termless second or two a profound and portentous silence descended on the camp. No leaf rustled, not a tree limb cracked. The creature that had pushed through the thickets to the edge of the glade was evidently standing motionless, deciding on his course.

Only the wild things seem to know what complete absence of motion means.

To stand like a form in rock, not a muscle quivering or a hair stirring, is never a feat for ragged, over stretched human nerves; and it requires a perfect muscle control that is generally only known to the beasts of the forest. Only a few times in a lifetime in human beings are the little, outward motions actually suspended; perhaps under the paralysis of great terror or, with painstaking effort, before a photographer's camera. But with the beasts it is an everyday accomplishment necessary to their survival. The fawn that can not stand absolutely motionless, his dappled skin blending perfectly with the background of shrubbery shot with sunlight, comes to an end quickly in the fangs of some great beast of prey. The panther that can not lurk, not a muscle quivering, in his ambush beside the deer trail, never knows full feeding. The creature on the opposite side of the glade seemed as bereft of motion as the spruce trees in the moonlight, or the cliff above the cave.

"What is it?" Beatrice whispered. The man's eyes strained into the gloom.

"I don't know. It may be just a moose, or maybe a caribou. But it may be--"

He tiptoed to the door of the cave, and his eye fell to the crouching form of Fenris. The creature outside was neither moose nor caribou. The great wolf of the North does not stand at bay to the antlered people. He was poised to spring, his fangs bared and his fierce eyes hot with fire, but he was not hunting. Whatever moved in the darkness without, the wolf had no desire to go forth and attack. Perhaps he would fight to the death to protect the occupants of the cave; but surely an ancient and devastating fear had hold of him. Evidently he recognized the intruder as an ancestral enemy that held sovereignty over the forest.

At that instant Ben leaped through the cavern maw to reach his gun.

There was nothing to be gained by waiting further. This was a savage and an uninhabited land; and the great beasts of prey that ranged the forest had not yet learned the restraint born of the fear of man. And he knew one breathless instant of panic when his eye failed to locate the weapon in the faint light of the fire.

Holding hard, he tried to remember where he had left it. The form across the glade was no longer motionless. Straining, Ben saw the soft roll of a great shadow, almost imperceptible in the gloom--advancing slowly toward him. Then the faint glow of the fire caught and reflected in the creature's eyes.

They suddenly glowed out in the half-darkness, two rather small circles of dark red, close together and just alike. This night visitor was not moose or caribou, or was it one of the lesser hunters, lynx or wolverine, or a panther wandered far from his accustomed haunts. The twin circles were too far above the ground. And whatever it was, no doubt remained but that the creature was steadily stalking him across the soft gra.s.s.

At that instant Ben's muscles snapped into action. Only a second remained in which to make his defense--the creature had paused, setting his muscles for a death-dealing charge. "Go back into the cave--as far as you can," he said swiftly to Beatrice. His own eyes, squinted and straining for the last iota of vision in that darkened scene, made a last, frantic search for his rifle. Suddenly he saw the gleam of its barrel as it rested against the wall of the cliff, fifteen feet distant.

At once he knew that his only course was to spring for it in the instant that remained, and trust to its mighty shocking power to stop the charge that would in a moment ensue. Yet it seemed to tear the life fiber of the man to do it. His inmost instincts, urgent and loud in his ear, told him to remain on guard, not to leave that cavern maw for an instant but to protect with his own body the precious life that it sheltered. His mind worked with that incredible speed that is usually manifest in a crisis; and he knew that the creature might charge into the cavern entrance in the second that he left it. Yet only in the rifle lay the least chance or hope for either of them.

"At him, Fenris!" he shouted. The wolf leaped forward like a thrown spear,--almost too fast for the eye to follow. He was deathly afraid, with full knowledge of the power of the enemy he went to combat, but his fears were impotent to restrain him at the first sound of that masterful voice. These were the words he had waited for. He could never disobey such words as these--from the lips of his G.o.d. And Ben's mind had worked true; he knew that the wolf could likely hold the creature at bay until he could seize his rifle.

In an instant it was in his hands, and he had sprung back to his post in front of the cavern maw. And presently he remembered, heartsick, that the weapon was not loaded.

For his own safety he had kept it empty on the outward journey, partly to prevent accident, partly to be sure that his prisoner could not turn it against him. But he had sh.e.l.ls in the pocket of his jacket. His hand groped, but his reaching fingers found but one sh.e.l.l, dropping it swiftly into the gun. And now he knew that no time remained to seek another. The beast in the darkness had launched into the charge.

Thereafter there was only a great confusion, event piled upon event with incredible rapidity, and a whole lifetime of stress and fear lived in a single instant. The creature's first lunge carried him into the brighter moonlight; and at once Ben recognized its breed. No woodsman could mistake the high, rocking shoulders, the burly form, the wicked ears laid back against the flat, ma.s.sive head, the fangs gleaming white, the long, hooked claws slashing through the turf as he ran. It was a terrible thing to see and stand against, in the half-darkness. The shadows accentuated the towering outline; and forgotten terrors, lurking, since the world was young, in the labyrinth of the germ plasm wakened and spread like icy streams through the mortal body and seemed to threaten to extinguish the warm flame of the very soul.

The grizzly bawled as he came, an explosive, incredible storm of sound.

Few indeed are the wilderness creatures that can charge in silence: muscular exertion can not alone relieve their gathered flood of madness and fury. And at once Ben sensed the impulse behind the attack. He and the girl had made their home in the grizzly's cave--perhaps the lair wherein he had hibernated through the winter and which he still slept in from time to time--and he had come to drive them out. Only death could pay for such insolence as this,--to make a night's lair in the den of his sovereignty, the grizzly.

It is not the accustomed thing for a grizzly to make an unprovoked attack. He has done it many times, in the history of the west, but usually he is glad enough to turn aside, only launching into his terrible death-charge when a mortal wound obliterates his fear of man, leaving only his fear of death. But this grizzly, native to these uninhabited wilds, had no fear of man to forget. He did not know what man was, and he had not learned the death that dwells in the shining weapon he carries in his arms. No trappers mushed through his snows of spring; no woodsman rode his winding trails. True, from the first instant that the human smell had reached him on the wind he had been disturbed and discomfited; yet it was not grizzly nature to yield his den without a fight. The sight of the wolf--known to him of old--only wakened an added rage in his fierce heart.

The wolf met him at his first leap, springing with n.o.ble courage at his grizzled throat; and the bear paused in his charge to strike him away.

He lashed out with his great forepaw; and if that blow had gone straight home the ribs of the wolf would have been smashed flat on his heart and lungs. The tough trunk of a young spruce would have been broken as quickly under that terrible, blasting full-stroke of a grizzly. The largest grizzly weighs but a thousand pounds, but that weight is simple fiber and iron muscle, of a might incredible to any one but the woodsmen who know this mountain king in his native haunts. But Fenris whipped aside, and the paw missed him.

Immediately the wolf sprang in again, with a courage scarcely compatible with lupine characteristics, ready to wage this unequal battle to the death. But his brave fight was tragically hopeless. For all that his hundred and fifty pounds were, every ounce, lightning muscle and vibrant sinew, it was as if a gopher had waged war with a lynx. Yet by the law of his wild heart he could not turn and flee. His master--his stalwart G.o.d whose words thrilled him to the uttermost depths--had given his orders, and he must obey them to the end.

The second blow missed him also, but the third caught a small shrub that grew twenty feet beyond the dying fire. The shrub snapped off under the blow, and its branchy end smote the wolf across the head and neck. As if struck by a tornado he was hurled into the air, and curtailed and indirect though the blow was, he sprawled down stunned and insensible in the gra.s.s. The bear paused one instant; then lunged forth again.

But the breath in which the wolf had stayed the charge had given Ben his chance. With a swift motion of his arm he had projected the single rifle sh.e.l.l into the chamber of the weapon. The stock snapped to his shoulder; and his keen, glittering eyes sought the sights.

XXVIII

Few wilderness adventures offer a more stern test to human nerves than the frightful rush of a maddened grizzly. It typifies all that is primal and savage in the wild: the insane rage that can find relief only in the cruel rending of flesh; the thundering power that no mere mortal strength can withstand. But Ben was a woodsman. He had been tried in the fire. He knew that not only his life, but that of the girl in the cavern depended upon this one shot; and it was wholly characteristic of Wolf Darby that his eye held true and his arm was steady as a vice of iron.

He was aware that he must wait until the bear was almost upon him, in order to be sure to send the bullet home to a vital place. This alone was a test requiring no small measure of self-control. The instinct was to fire at once. In the moonlight it was difficult to see his sights: his only chance was to enlarge his target to the last, outer limit of safety. He aimed for the great throat, below the slavering jaw.

His finger pressed back steadily against the trigger. The slightest flinching, the smallest motion might yet throw off his aim. The rifle spoke with a roar.

But this wilderness battle was not yet done. The ball went straight home, down through the throat, mushrooming and plowing on into the neck, inflicting a wound that was bound to be mortal within a few seconds. The bear recoiled; but the mighty engine of its life was not yet destroyed.

Its incalculable fonts of vitality had not yet run down.

The grizzly bounded forward again. The ball had evidently missed the vertebrae and spinal column. His crashing, thunderous roar of pain smothered instantly the reechoing report of the rifle and stifled the instinctive cry that had come to Ben's lips. He was a forester; and he had known of old what havoc a mortally wounded bear can wreak in a few seconds of life. In that strange, vivid instant Ben knew that his own and the girl's life still hung in the balance, with the beam inclining toward death.

The grizzly was in his death-agony, nothing more; yet in that final convulsion he could rip into shreds the powerful form that opposed him.

Ben knew, with a cold, sure knowledge, that if he failed to slay the beast, it would naturally crawl into its lair for its last breath. As this dreadful thought flashed home he dropped the empty rifle and seized the axe that leaned against a log of spruce beside the fire.

There was no time at all to search out another sh.e.l.l and load his rifle.

If the shock of the heavy bullet had not slackened the bear's pace he would not even have had time to seize the axe. Finally, if the bear had not been all but dead, in his last, threshing agony, Ben's mortal strength could not have sent home one blow. As it was they found themselves facing each other over the embers of the fire, well-matched contestants whose stake was life and whose penalty was death. The grizzly turned his head, caught sight of Ben, identified him as the agent of his agony, and lurched forward.

Just in time Ben sprang aside, out of the reach of those terrible forearms; and his axe swung mightly in the air. Its blade gleamed and descended--a blow that might have easily broken the bear's back if it had gone true but which now seemed only to infuriate him the more. The bear reared up, reeled, and lashed down; and dying though he was, he struck with incredible power. One slashing stroke of that vast forepaw, one slow closing of those cruel fangs upon skull or breast, and life would have gone out like a light. But Ben leaped aside again, and again swung down his axe.

These were but the first blows of a terrific battle that carried like a storm through the still reaches of the forest. Far in the distant tree aisles the woods people paused in their night's occupation to listen, stirred and terrified by the throb and thrill in the air; the grazing caribou lifted his growing horns and snorted in terror; the beasts of prey paused in the chase, growling uneasily, gazing with fierce, luminous eyes in the direction of the battle.

It is beyond the ken of man whether or not, in their wild hearts, these forest folk sensed what was taking place,--that their gray monarch, the sovereign grizzly, was at the death-fight with some dreadful invader from the South. They heard the bear's fierce bawls, unimitatable by any other voice as he lashed down blow after blow; and they heard the thud and crunch of the axe against his body. Had this monarch of the trails found his master at last?

Gazing out through the aperture of the cave Beatrice beheld the whole picture: the ring of spruce trees, the glade so strange and ensilvered in the moonlight, and these two fighting beasts, magnificent in fury over the embers of the dying fire. And Ben's powers increased, rather than lessened. Ever he swung his terrible axe with greater power.

He fought like the wolf that was his blood brother,--lunging, striking down, recoiling out of harm's way, and springing forward to strike again. This man was Wolf Darby, a forester known in many provinces for his woods prowess, but even those who had seen his most spectacular feats, in past days, had not appreciated the real extent of his powers.

There was a fury and a might in his blows that was hard to a.s.sociate with the world of human beings,--such ferociousness and wolf-like savagery, welling strength and prowess of battle that mostly men have forgotten in their centuries of civilization, but which still mark the death-fight between beasts.

Ben had always recalled the earlier types of man--his great-thewed ancestors, wild hunters in the forests of ancient Germany--but never so much as to-night. He was in his natural surroundings--at the mouth of his cave in which the Woman watched and exulted in his blows, enclosed by the primeval forest and beside the ashes of his fire. There could be nothing strange or unreal about this scene to Beatrice. It was more true than any soft vista of a far-away city could possibly be. It was life itself,--man battling for his home and his woman against the raw forces of the wild.

All superficialities and superfluities were gone, and only the basic stuff of life remained,--the cave, the fire, the man who fought the beast in the light of the ancient moon. At that moment Ben was no more of the twentieth century than he was of the first, or of the first more than of some dark, unnumbered century of the world's young days. He was simply the male of his species, the man-child of all time, forgetting for the moment all the little lessons civilization had taught, and fighting his fight in the basic way for the basic things.

This was no new war which Ben and the grizzly fought in the pale light of the moon. It had begun when the race began, and it would continue, in varied fields, until men perished from the earth. Ben fought for _life_--not only his own but the girl's--that old, beloved privilege to breathe the air and see and know and be. He represented, by a strange symbolism, the whole race that has always fought in merciless and never-ending battle with the cruel and oppressive powers of nature. In the grizzly were typified all those ancient enemies that have always opposed, with claw and fang, this stalwart, self-knowing breed that has risen among the primates: he symbolized not only the Beast of the forest, but the merciless elements, storm and flood and cold and all the legions of death. And had they but known their ultimate fate if this intruder survived the battle and brought his fellows into this, their last stronghold, the watching forest creatures would have prayed to see the grizzly strike him to the earth.

Ben knew, too, that he was fighting for his home; and this also lent him strength. _Home_! His shelter from the storm and the cold, the thing that marked him a man instead of a beast. The grizzly had come to drive him forth; and they had met beside the ashes of his fire.

The old exhilaration and rapture of battle flashed through him as he swung his axe, sending home blow after blow. Sometimes he cried out, involuntarily, in his fury and hatred; and as the bear weakened he waged the fight at closer quarters. His muscles made marvelous response, flinging him out of danger in the instant of necessity and giving terrific power to his blows.