knew that the land was somehow different; that through it strange
things were afoot and ranging; and he resolved to investigate after he
had finished the business in hand.
At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down.
For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and sleeping,
turn and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his
face toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope,
and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way,
heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of
direction that put man and his magnetic needle to shame.
As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in the
land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had
been there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in upon
him in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the
squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several
times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs,
reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was
oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity
already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down
into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.
Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair
rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and
tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story all but
the end. His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the
life on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant
silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in
hiding. One only he saw, a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray
dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the
wood itself.
As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose
was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped
and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.
He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow
protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.
73