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His legs were weak with toil, but his neck, his jaws, and his heart were strong, and now all you who love the Dogs had better close the book on up and down fifteen to one, they came, the swiftest first, and how it was done, the eye could scarcely see, but even as a stream of water pours on a rock to be splashed in broken Jets aside, that stream of Dogs came pouring down the path, in single file perforce, and Duskymane received them as they came.
Duskymane hung about all night, fearing to go near, not knowing what to do, and helpless as his mother. At dawn the next day a sheepherder seeking lost Sheep discovered her from a neighboring hill. A signal mirror called the wolver from his camp. Duskymane saw the new danger. He was a mere Cub, though so tall; he could not face the man, and fled at his approach.
His nose even tells which way it ran, and in a word renders a statement of every animal that recently crossed his trail, whence it came, and whither it went. That power had Duskymane in the highest degree; his broad, moist nose was evidence of it to all who are judges of such things.
Yet he was different from them in several ways older by two weeks, stronger, and marked on the neck and shoulders with what afterward grew to be a dark mane. Little Duskymane could not have been happier in his choice of a foster-mother, for the Yellow Wolf was not only a good hunter with a fund of cunning, but she was a Wolf of modern ideas as well.
And Duskymane, following after the Yellow Wolf, was taught the places and uses of the many signal-stations without any conscious attempt at teaching on the part of his foster-mother. Example backed by his native instincts was indeed the chief teacher, but on one occasion at least there was something very like the effort of a human parent to guard her child in danger.
The Yellow Wolf and Duskymane were out for supper, though not yet knowing where, when the tidings of veal arrived, and they trotted up the wind. The Calf was in an open place, and plain to be seen in the moonlight.
She struggled till she fell, and writhed about or lay like dead, till strong enough to rise and grind the chains again with her teeth. And so the night passed by. And Duskymane? Where was he? The feeling of the time when his foster-mother had come home poisoned, now returned; but he was even more afraid of her. She seemed filled with fighting hate.
Thus by trivial chance it was that Duskymane was known to his foe, as 'Badlands Billy. Ryder was familiar with the muster-call of the Wolves, the long, smooth cry, but Billy's had a singular feature, a slurring that was always distinctive.
One was the muster-call of an ordinary Wolf, the other the answer of a very big male, not a pair in this case, but mother and son Yellow Wolf and Duskymane. They came trotting together down the Buffalo trail. They paused at the telephone box on the hill and again at the old cottonwood root, and were making for the river when the Hawk in the trap fluttered his wings.
Might is right in wolf-land, and Duskymane and his mother had been driven out of Sentinel Butte. But it was a very delectable land and he kept drifting back to his native mountain. One or two big Wolves there resented his coming.
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