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Then the daylight waned. The sky returned to its greyness as the night shades rose, and a bitter breeze shuddered through the woods and along the valleys. The sounds of the forest rose in mournful cadence, and, as the profundity of the mountain night settled heavily upon the world, the timber-wolf, the outlaw of the region, moved abroad, lifting his voice in a cry half-mournful, half-exultant.
And at that day the timber-wolf of the Green Mountains a long, lean, gray creature as big as a mastiff was much to be feared. The traps stretched so far along the creek that if one went out alone to examine and bait them, almost the entire day was consumed.
In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was given to his wolf-hood by his color and marking. There the dog unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns.
During their stay at the hut, nothing had come near to disturb them nothing in human guise. But from the first they had been aware of the timber-wolf, which Spurling had seen on his first visit and had described to Granger.
Small wood-mice swarmed, fleeing from the terror they could not see; and a great timber-wolf followed by a couple of cubs fled by without more than a sidelong look. The squirrel in the trees screeched alarm and once she caught sight of a big, dark lumbering body crashing through the undergrowth to the left of her, and divined that it was a bear.
"I did not see either the half-breed or the old man again until that early morning when I gazed in through the window at Murder Point . . . and, do you know, that scar on the old man's face is in the same place as the wound which I gave the timber-wolf?" Granger laughed nervously. "And what d'you make of that?"
His pricked ears were chipped and jagged from a hundred fights, and in a diagonal line across his muzzle was a broad white scar, gotten, men said, in combat with a timber-wolf in the Athabasca country. It was a part of Sourdough's pose or policy in life to profess short-sightedness. He would walk past a group of dogs as though unaware of their existence.
During the first storm of the early fall Breed pulled down a yearling mountain sheep on a high plateau. A motley crew answered the meat call. Breed, the yellow hybrid, Shady, the half-blood renegade, and four pairs of coyotes born in Sand Coulee Basin; the dog coyote with his timber-wolf mate and several of Breed's and Shady's conglomerate pups; all were there to feed.
Was he not the slayer of their enemy's sheep and the killer of the timber-wolf? Eventually he was presented with a broad collar studded with brass spikes, and engraved upon it was the sanguinary and somewhat ambiguous legend: "Chance The Killer of the Concho." John Corliss, visiting the round-up, rode over to Sundown's tepee, as it was called. The assistant cook was greasing Chance's wounds.
It was still set although the bait had been removed. It had been set at the mouth of a narrow track where it opened out in a small, snow-covered clearing. The blood stains of the raw meat with which it had been baited were still moist, but the flesh itself had been taken. He turned from his inspection. There were footprints in the snow, evidently the tracks of a timber-wolf.
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