stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood
carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the
toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably
keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he
heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril.
He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between
his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice
over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with
stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the
wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the
air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew
inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.
And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became
alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways
he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs
ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as
they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and
slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten
ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks
which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks.
They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been
his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at
a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and
dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and
through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which
voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and
the cold, and dark.
Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged
through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had
found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener s
helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers
small copies of himself.
Chapter III. The Dominant Primordial Beast
18