Medicine Road (12 page)

Awklet heard the king wolf's deep and summoning snarls and the next instant saw the whole pack
break off the attack to crowd, panting and growling,
around its huge leader. Shortly the whole horde of
the white raiders, save for six big dog-wolves, broke
into a chorus of excited howling and at once swept
away across the valley toward the main herd at the
exit of Blind Canon. Loki, too, had a last desperate
plan, it appeared. And like Awklet he clearly meant
to live or die by it.

It was significant that one of the six big wolves
that remained behind to deal with the young moose
and his caribou stags was a tremendous, deepfurred brute with one eye. Plainly Loki put a very
high value on the life of that hulking monster of a
bull moose. Furiously he led his five followers back
at the young moose and his ten old stags. In five
minutes of deadly in-and-out wolf fighting, too
swift for the poor caribou to react to, four more stags
were hauled down and left kicking in the snow. But
victory in Nature's harsh struggle is never lightly
taken. Two wolves also lay crippled and bleeding in
the same snow.

Loki and his three remaining fighters, and Awklet
and his six, faced each other panting heavily. All of
the contestants were blooded now. Yet even here
there was a singular difference in the blooding. The
wolves carried only minor wounds while three of
Awklet's stags were gravely injured, perhaps only
steps away from going down for the last time. Excited by the prospect, Loki now launched his second
attack. When it was over, his followers were less by
one, and one whose loss burned like a tearing fang,
even in Loki's cruel breast. Big Foot, fond companion of his cubhood days, faithful fighter at his side
through the growing years, lay motionlessly beneath
the still pounding hoofs of the enraged Awklet.

Still Big Foot had died very hard. He had taken
two of the injured caribou with him. Two other
badly wounded stags had somehow survived, but,
even as the fighting paused with Big Foot's passing,
one of them pitched forward in the snow and lay
without moving. The other stood with eyes glazed,
head down, tongue protruding slackly, dying on his
feet as he refused to fall in surrender.

Three wolves now. Three caribou. And a giant
young moose. The wolves all still in fighting condition. The caribou and the moose bleeding from
dozens of ripping wounds in foreleg, hock, haunch,
belly, and shoulder. Awklet gathered his weary
hindquarters under him, awaiting the next charge.
There remained but one last hope in his numbing
mind. It kept him on his feet, still trying to fight,
when every demand of his great tired body pleaded
with him to lie down in the snow and let the wolves
have their way. Perhaps his three brave fellows
would stay upright long enough and fight skillfully
enough to take Loki's two remaining wolves with
them when they at last went down, thus leaving the
king wolf and Awklet finally alone and face to face.

Suddenly from across the valley came the startling outcry of fifty hunting wolves closing for the
kill. The battle with the main herd at the canon exit
was being savagely carried forward by the pack.
Loki could now afford to take his time with the orphaned moose calf whose tiny life he had so carelessly spared in the beginning, and whose great
frame he was now determined to bring down. With
a ripple of his crouching shoulder muscles, the king
of the white Arctic wolves turned with cold wrath to
the final business of destroying Awklet, the adopted
moose leader of the Hemlock Wood caribou.

Loki himself went for the moose, his two companions driving into the three caribou and splitting
them away from Awklet. But Loki's lunge was only
a feint, designed to pull the big bull off balance. And
it worked viciously well. Before Awklet could recover and wheel back to join his fellows, all three
caribou were down. Loki himself swerved away
from Awklet at the last moment to take one of them, his followers each hamstringing one of the remaining two stags.

Thus Awklet found himself at last alone against
the king wolf. But scarcely as he had hoped, with
only Loki facing him. It is said that all brave things
know final fear. That when death is really lurking in
the next breath, there are no brave beings, animal or
human. There could be no doubt of the young bull
moose's courage, or of the quality of his fighting
spirit. Equally there could be no doubt that, as the
third old stag gasped and ceased to move in the reddened snow, Awklet knew the creeping cold of pure
terror.

It was nearing mid-morning of the short Arctic
day. A sharp wind had risen, driving a lowscudding pall of snow clouds before it. The light was
bad, growing rapidly worse. The youthful bull was
wounded, weary, out of breath. And he was terribly,
tremblingly, frighteningly alone. Alone with three
white Arctic wolves.

Across from him a guttural, nameless sound rumbled deeply in Loki's chest. Awklet, remembering
that sound from the dim past, shuddered uncontrollably. He had heard that ominous mutter once before, as he lay, a day-old baby, in the cedar tangle
where old Bera had hidden him in her useless effort
to outwit these same wolves. He could even recall
the picture of Loki, standing over the lifeless form of
One Ear as the king wolf made that same sound that
now shook his cavernous chest. Awklet knew that
sound. He had always known it. It was the death
snarl of the white Arctic wolf.

In the darkening shadows of the coming blizzard,
the three wolves crouched for what seemed an eternity, their glowing yellow eyes staring unblinkingly at the fear-bound moose. Then, in a bewildering,
snow-showering rush, they came for him, Loki
straining in the lead.

The king wolf's gaunt form rose up under the
fruitless lashing-out of Awklet's forehoofs. Upward
and inward the great wolf leaped, driving for the
soft and unprotected pulse of his victim's throat. In
a wild surge to avoid the murderous slash, the
young moose tripped across the body of one of the
dead caribou, stumbled wearily, and crashed heavily down into the waiting eternity of the Arctic
snows.

Where it should have meant death, Awklet's stumbling fall meant life. At least for another brief moment. Loki, unable to check his momentum, leaped
clear over him and landed in a deep bank of soft
snow. Before the king wolf could extricate himself,
Awklet was back on his feet.

Loki's reign would have ended in the next half
breath had it not been for his two fellow wolves. He
was still struggling to free himself from the snowbank when Awklet charged. But the other wolves,
momentarily disconcerted by their leader's miss of
what had looked like an easy kill, now recovered
and closed in behind the big moose as he rushed the
helpless Loki.

Both struck viciously for the great tendons of his
hind legs, striving to cripple him and bring him
down. Both missed, slicing their fangs instead into
his upper haunches. The searing pain of the double
wound swung Awklet around, and saved Loki's life.
But it cost the king wolf heavily, nonetheless.

The quicker of his two followers leaped for Awklet's throat as the young moose came around. Instinctively Awklet lowered his head. The wolf,
missing his mark, landed full upon the crest of
Awklet's massive neck. Before he could scramble off
his precarious perch, the big bull dropped to his
knees, throwing his enemy forward and into the
trap of his palmated antlers. Rearing upright again,
Awklet lunged at the nearest boulder, pinning the
wolf between it and his bony forehead. With a
crushing thrust, he brought his 1,300 pounds of
bone and muscle to bear against the ungiving surface of the rock. The shapeless mass that an instant
later was shaken free of his antlers to fall into the
snow could not be called a wolf. It was a nameless
bundle of blood and fur.

But the second wolf had been given time to leap
once more for Awklet's rear leg. The repeated attempt
at hamstringing the raging bull ended as had the
first-with the death of a wolf. As the brute's jaws
closed on the leg, they missed the tendon by inches,
burying themselves in the tough bone and sinew of
the hock above it. For a fraction of a second the wolf
could not free his fangs from their grim hold. Rearing on his hind legs, Awklet came backward and
downward, literally sitting down on his attacker.

It was not a dramatic or a brilliant feat, but Awklet
was not trying to be dramatic or brilliant. He was
fighting for his life, and an awkward death counted
just as decisively as a skillful one. The second wolf
died in the crunching moment it took for the bull's
immense hindquarters to come fully down upon
him. But Loki, at the same moment, freed himself
from the snowbank where Awklet's life-saving
stumble had caused him to land. Even so, the king wolf did not come at once to the attack, as he would
certainly have done with any other moose of his
long experience.

The old wolf's hesitation was inspired by cunning, not fear. Here was really dangerous work, and
work that even a king wolf had better undertake
with every bit of craft gained in a long lifetime of
killing the hoofed and horned tundra grazers and
forest browsers of the Northland deer family. Loki
knew this. His every instinct told him to be
supremely careful now. It was a tribute to his utter
confidence, however, that the giant wolf did not
once consider the possibility of defeat coming to
him. That any single animal in the Arctic world
could vanquish him in individual combat was beyond the brute comprehension of the king wolf.

He began to circle Awklet intently and with catfooted caution. Yet, even in the act of doing so, he
was already concerned, not with the killing of Awklet, but with taking command of the rest of the wolf
pack the moment the brave but doomed young
moose was down. The angry caribou herd at the
canon exit would have to be split apart so that the
wolf pack could escape through it to the outer safety
of Half Moon Valley.

But where a confident old wolf thought ahead, a
desperate young bull moose was thinking back. A
towering young bull with blood on his body and
vengeance burning in his small black eyes. A longmemoried young moose with the indelible picture
of his gentle foster mother's cruel murder imprinted
on his angry heart. He and his mortal enemy were
face to face at last. Wolf against moose. Fang and
paw against hoof and horn. Victory and life against
defeat and death. Awklet against Loki!

The king wolf struck first. And missed! That is, if
he meant to try for the throat, as it appeared he did,
he missed. His ripping fangs merely opened an
ugly gash in Awklet's right foreleg. The wound bled
freely but did not seem serious. The young moose
ignored it.

Loki's second rush had the same result. It looked
as though he drove in, seeking to come at Awklet's
throat, and failed. In missing the throat, as before,
he succeeded only in inflicting another freebleeding leg wound, this one below the right knee.

Twice more, in seemingly similar frustrated fashion, he repeated the tactic. The third and fourth
wounds thus inflicted on his desperately dodging
prey appeared in turn to be minor ones, although
they bled well enough even so.

Now, belatedly, it was Awklet who took the offensive. He struck at the king wolf once, twice, three
times, each hoof blow so fast it was actually a part of
one continuous action. Yet each of the blows missed
widely. Loki seemed to evaporate, to disappear
completely. When the heavy cloven hoofs whistled
into a spot where he had been, he was no longer
there. He moved like magic and Awklet presently
had the feeling he was fighting a ghost.

No animal of a moose's vast bulk could hope to
match a wolf in the speed with which a blow was
struck or evaded. Four more times, in as many lightning rushes, Loki now darted in to counter Awklet's
attack. Each time his fangs found their mark with
unerring accuracy, while he leaped back and away,
unscathed. And each time the young moose's hoof
blows and antler slashes missed by wider margins.

Actually the pattern of the king wolf's attack was
chillingly simple. A veteran of a hundred such wilderness murders, he was not trying for the throat
at all. That was sheer and pure wolf cunning. Instead, he was deliberately and methodically inflicting a series of minor wounds, the sum of which
would be a great and rapid loss of blood. With blood
went strength. That, again, was elementary killer's
arithmetic. And shortly the understanding of that
fact began to beat its way into Awklet's tired brain.

If his wolf enemy could put enough of those ripping tears in his weakening body, without getting
himself seriously hurt in the process, the end was
only minutes, perhaps seconds away. He could feel
his great strength ebbing as he stood swaying helplessly in front of his will-o'-the-wisp adversary. He
was very frightened, and very near final defeat, for
there was apparently no way in which he could stop
Loki's deadly blood-letting attack. Yet he would not
give up.