where the descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst
of a miniature avalanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not
demonstrative. A pat and a rub around the ears from the man, and a
more prolonged caressing from the woman, and he was away down the
trail in front of them, gliding effortlessly over the ground in
true wolf fashion.
In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie
was given to his wolfhood by his color and marking. There the dog
unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him.
He was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and
shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath
to a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in
it. The white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes
was dirty because of the persistent and ineradicable brown, while
the eyes themselves were twin topazes, golden and brown.
The man and woman loved the dog very much; perhaps this was because
it had been such a task to win his love. It had been no easy
matter when he first drifted in mysteriously out of nowhere to
their little mountain cottage. Footsore and famished, he had
killed a rabbit under their very noses and under their very
windows, and then crawled away and slept by the spring at the foot
of the blackberry bushes. When Walt Irvine went down to inspect
the intruder, he was snarled at for his pains, and Madge likewise
was snarled at when she went down to present, as a peace-offering,
a large pan of bread and milk.
A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their
advances, refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with
bared fangs and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping
and resting by the spring, and eating the food they gave him after
they set it down at a safe distance and retreated. His wretched
physical condition explained why he lingered; and when he had
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64
recuperated, after several days’ sojourn, he disappeared.
And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his
wife were concerned, had not Irvine at that particular time been
called away into the northern part of the state. Riding along on
the train, near to the line between California and Oregon, he
chanced to look out of the window and saw his unsociable guest
sliding along the wagon road, brown and wolfish, tired yet
tireless, dust-covered and soiled with two hundred miles of travel.
Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at
the next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and
captured the vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The return trip
was made in the baggage car, and so Wolf came a second time to the
mountain cottage. Here he was tied up for a week and made love to
by the man and woman. But it was very circumspect love-making.
Remote and alien as a traveller from another planet, he snarled
down their soft-spoken love-words. He never barked. In all the
time they had him he was never known to bark.
To win him became a problem. Irvine liked problems. He had a
metal plate made, on which was stamped: RETURN TO WALT IRVINE,
GLEN ELLEN, SONOMA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA. This was riveted to a
collar and strapped about the dog’s neck. Then he was turned
loose, and promptly he disappeared. A day later came a telegram
from Mendocino County. In twenty hours he had made over a hundred
miles to the north, and was still going when captured.
He came back by Wells Fargo Express, was tied up three days, and
was loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern
Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he
received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He
was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing
instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price
of a sonnet in getting the animal back from northern Oregon.
Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the
length of California, all of Oregon, and most of Washington, before
he was picked up and returned “Collect.” A remarkable thing was
the speed with which he travelled. Fed up and rested, as soon as
he was loosed he devoted all his energy to getting over the ground.
On the first day’s run he was known to cover as high as a hundred
and fifty miles, and after that he would average a hundred miles a
day until caught. He always arrived back lean and hungry and
savage, and always departed fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way
northward in response to some prompting of his being that no one
could understand.
But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the
inevitable and elected to remain at the cottage where first he had
killed the rabbit and slept by the spring. Even after that, a long
time elapsed before the man and woman succeeded in patting him. It
was a great victory, for they alone were allowed to put hands on
him. He was fastidiously exclusive, and no guest at the cottage
ever succeeded in making up to him. A low growl greeted such
approach; if any one had the hardihood to come nearer, the lips
lifted, the naked fangs appeared, and the growl became a snarl – a
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
65
snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed the stoutest of them,
as it likewise awed the farmers’ dogs that knew ordinary dog-
snarling, but had never seen wolf-snarling before.
He was without antecedents. His history began with Walt and Madge.
He had come up from the south, but never a clew did they get of the
owner from whom he had evidently fled. Mrs. Johnson, their nearest
neighbor and the one who supplied them with milk, proclaimed him a
Klondike dog. Her brother was burrowing for frozen pay-streaks in
that far country, and so she constituted herself an authority on
the subject.
But they did not dispute her. There were the tips of Wolf’s ears,
obviously so severely frozen at some time that they would never
quite heal again. Besides, he looked like the photographs of the
Alaskan dogs they saw published in magazines and newspapers. They
often speculated over his past, and tried to conjure up (from what
they had read and heard) what his northland life had been. That
the northland still drew him, they knew; for at night they
sometimes heard him crying softly; and when the north wind blew and
the bite of frost was in the air, a great restlessness would come
upon him and he would lift a mournful lament which they knew to be
the long wolf-howl. Yet he never barked. No provocation was great
enough to draw from him that canine cry.
Long discussion they had, during the time of winning him, as to
whose dog he was. Each claimed him, and each proclaimed loudly any
expression of affection made by him. But the man had the better of
it at first, chiefly because he was a man. It was patent that Wolf
had had no experience with women. He did not understand women.
Madge’s skirts were something he never quite accepted. The swish
of them was enough to set him a-bristle with suspicion, and on a
windy day she could not approach him at all.
On the other hand, it was Madge who fed him; also it was she who
ruled the kitchen, and it was by her favor, and her favor alone,
that he was permitted to come within that sacred precinct. It was
because of these things that she bade fair to overcome the handicap
of her garments. Then it was that Walt put forth special effort,
making it a practice to have Wolf lie at his feet while he wrote,
and, between petting and talking, losing much time from his work.
Walt won in the end, and his victory was most probably due to the
fact that he was a man, though Madge averred that they would have
had another quarter of a mile of gurgling brook, and at least two
west winds sighing through their redwoods, had Wait properly
devoted his energies to song-transmutation and left Wolf alone to
exercise a natural taste and an unbiassed judgment.
“It’s about time I heard from those triolets”, Walt said, after a
silence of five minutes, during which they had swung steadily down
the trail. “There’ll be a check at the post-office, I know, and
we’ll transmute it into beautiful buckwheat flour, a gallon of
maple syrup, and a new pair of overshoes for you.”