III
In the golden glow of the autumn sun there one day came up the stream overlooked by the Sun Rock a man, a woman, and a child. Almost two years had passed since Joan, the girl-wife, had left these regions with her trapper husband for a taste of that distant world which is known as Civilization. All her life, except the years she had passed at a Mission school over at Fort Churchill, she had lived in the forests—a wild flower of nature as truly as the velvety bakneesh flowers among the rocks. And civilization had done for her what it had done for many another wild flower transplanted from the depths of the wilderness. She did not look as she did in the days when she was Kazan’s mistress, and when the wolf-dog’s loyalty was divided between Gray Wolf, on the Sun Rock, and Joan, in the cabin half a mile away. Her cheeks were thin. Her blue eyes had lost their luster. She coughed, and when she coughed the man looked at her with love and fear in his eyes.
But now, slowly, the man had begun to see the transformation, and on the day their canoe pointed up the stream and into the wonderful valley that had been their home before the call of the distant city came to them, he noted the flush gathering once more in her cheeks, the fuller redness of her lips, and the gathering glow of happiness and content in her eyes. He laughed softly as he saw these things, and he blessed the forests.
“You are happy again, Joan,” he said joyously. “The doctors were right. You are a part of the forests.”
“Yes, I am happy,” she whispered, and suddenly there came a little thrill into her voice, and she pointed to a white finger of sand running out into the stream. “Do you remember—years and years ago, it seems—that Kazan left us here? She was on the sand over there, calling to him. Do you remember?” There came a little tremble to her mouth. “I wonder—where they—have gone.”
The cabin was as they had left it. Only the crimson bakneesh had grown up about it, and shrubs and tall grass had sprung up near its walls. Once more it took on life, and day by day the color came deeper into Joan’s cheeks, and her voice was filled with its old wild sweetness of song. Joan’s husband cleared the trails over his old trap-lines, and Joan and the little Joan, who romped and talked now, transformed the cabin into home. One night the man returned to the cabin late, and when he came in there was a glow of excitement in Joan’s blue eyes.
“Did you hear it?” she asked. “Did you hear—the call?”
He nodded, stroking her soft hair.
“I was a mile back in the creek swamp,” he said. “I heard it!”
Joan’s hands clutched his arms.
“It wasn’t Kazan,” she said. “I would recognize his voice. But it seemed to me it was like the other—the call that came that morning from the sandbar, his mate’s.”
The man was thinking. Joan’s fingers tightened. She was breathing a little quickly.
“Will you promise me this?” she asked. “Will you promise me that you will never hunt or trap for wolves?”
“I had thought of that,” he replied. “I thought of it—after I heard the call. Yes, I will promise.”
Joan’s arms stole up about his neck.
“We loved Kazan,” she whispered. “And you might kill him—or her.”
Suddenly she stopped. Both listened. The door was a little ajar, and to them there came again the wailing mate-call of the wolf. Joan ran to the door. Her husband followed. Together they stood silent, and with tense breath Joan pointed over the starlit plain.
“Listen! Listen!” she commanded. “It’s her cry, and it came from the Sun Rock!”
She ran out into the night, forgetting that the man was close behind her now, forgetting that little Joan was alone in her bed. And to them, from miles and miles across the plain, there came a wailing cry in answer—a cry that seemed a part of the wind, and that thrilled Joan until her breath broke in a strange sob.
Farther out on the plain she went, and then stopped, with the golden glow of the autumn moon and the stars shimmering in her hair and eyes. It was many minutes before the cry came again, and then it was so near that Joan put her hands to her mouth, and her cry rang out over the plain as of old:
“Kazan! Kazan! Kazan!”
At the top of the Sun Rock, Gray Wolf—gaunt and thinned by starvation—heard the woman’s cry, and the call that was in her throat died away in a whine. And to the north a swiftly moving shadow stopped for a moment, and stood like a thing of rock under the starlight. It was Kazan. A strange fire leaped through his body. Every fiber of his brute understanding was afire with the knowledge that here was home. It was here, long ago, that he had lived, and loved, and fought—and all at once the dreams that had grown faded and indistinct in his memory came back to him as real, living things. For, coming to him faintly over the plain, he heard Joan’s voice!
In the starlight Joan stood, tense and white, when from out of the pale mists of the moon-glow he came to her, cringing on his belly, panting and wind-run, and with a strange whining note in his throat. To Joan, Kazan was more than mere dog. Next to her husband and baby she loved him. There passed through her mind a day when he had saved her and the baby from the wolves—and again the scene of that other day when he had leaped upon the giant husky that was at the throat of little Joan.... As her arms hugged Kazan’s great shaggy head up to her, the man heard the whining, gasping joy of the beast.
And then there came once more across the plain Gray Wolf’s mate-seeking cry of grief and of loneliness. Swiftly, as though struck by a lash, Kazan was on his feet. In another instant he was gone.
“Now do you believe?” cried Joan pantingly. “Now do you believe in the God of my world—the God I have lived with, the God that gives souls to the wild things, the God that—that has brought—us all—together—once more—home!”
His arms closed gently about her.
“I believe, my Joan,” he whispered. Afterward they sat in the starlight in front of the cabin. But they did not hear again that lonely cry from the Sun Rock. Joan and her husband understood. “He’ll visit us again tomorrow,” the man said at last. “Come, Joan, let us go to bed.” Together they entered the cabin. And that night, side by side, Kazan and Gray Wolf hunted again on the moonlit plain.
Notes
4From James Other Curwood’s Kazan. Copyright 1914, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. By permission of the publishers.