He sat on his heels near the opening of the lean-to, the green ash spear lying under his right hand, and listened for Ben's breathing. That sound reached him at last, seeming untroubled; then he could watch with greater a.s.surance. If anything pushed through the brambles and dry brush at the top of the bank, he would hear it and be ready.

The eyes shifted, winked, vanished to reappear in silence. He found no more than four pairs at any time. If they became three or two, that might mean fresh danger. They remained, for a long time, four.

Reuben wondered when the snowfall had ceased. He remembered noticing that it was thinning when the eyes first appeared. Now it was over, the air clean and mild, a weak wind still sending the smoke away from the place where Ben lay sleeping. Reuben glanced upward in search of stars and found a few. Maybe--though not for hours yet, he thought--the moon would return, and shine on a smooth silver blank where yesterday his feet and Ben's had scrawled a trail.

He began to feel acquainted with those eyes. "You over on the left," he called--"you're Snotnose. You under the spruce, you're Trundletail, and your mother is Doxy Tumble." For a while he amused and warmed himself by hurling s...o...b..a.l.l.s at them.

They slunk away, not far. The unconcern of their withdrawal conveyed the arrogance of contempt. They could wait.

Reuben's amus.e.m.e.nt died like the breaking of a weapon in his hand. He thought: _What do they know?_ He stood as tall as he could, waving the green spear, and shouted at them: "I know you! Dirty dogs! Offal! I spit on you!" He fought back a desire to rush out in pursuit of them, with Ben's knife and the green spear.

That would be mad. They would understand his smallness, his singleness, and close in, tear him apart, move on to the shelter where Ben lay helpless and sleeping.... Reuben carried more wood to the other fire, then forced himself to squat once more patiently on his heels, and keep count of the pairs of eyes. Four. He could wait, too. How long?

Eternal hours. Like those that must have already pa.s.sed since the wolves came. Or had they been there forever?

Why, of course they had. The breed was immortal. They had never been far from Deerfield. They owned the wilderness before ever Christians came to it. They howled in Rome, when Reuben Cory was not. Meeting the green ancient stare from the dark, Reuben felt his face stiffly smiling. He thought: It's true, true--there was a time when I was not. Something new began--something--the name of it I, Reuben Cory. Well, this I may have known, but until now I did never believe it.... He shivered, and although there was cool pleasure in it he drove away the consolation of philosophy because anything that dimmed alertness was dangerous. He could wait.

In a reasonable world, one slept for a part of each revolution of the beautiful sun. Reuben thought back in search of the last time he had slept--Springfield, before Jesse was found in the snow. Danger hid in this reflection also, the danger of self-pity. He put an end to it: _I will not sleep._

It came to him that if one is hungry enough, any creature not downright poisonous is meat. Suppose, somehow----?

He could not go out against them, away from the fires. Either they would rush him all four together, or they would run away--good meat lost. But suppose, somehow, one of them might be tempted to come alone--say the old gray b.i.t.c.h who had already tried a sneak approach. How?

Wisdom lurked in her, a cold flame behind a long gray face. Reuben thought of her as their leader. He discovered that he hated her, in a swelling ecstasy not extended to her slinking companions. The thought of killing her, at first a random flicker like a further warning of madness, became a purpose, a source of power, a wildness deserving a better name than lunacy because of its very absurdity. For ten minutes or perhaps an hour Reuben hovered apart from his mind and watched the thought grow. A boy does not kill a grown wolf with a little stick.

And yet the point was sharp. The ash would bend like a bow but never break. His hand and eye were true, true as Ben's.

The fire beyond the lean-to was dying down. This had happened before--how many times? Marching over to refresh it, Reuben found he could not remember. No moon yet, therefore dawn must be remote in the future. He stood with his spear on the unimpeded ground between the two fires, considering, brooding.

The pa.s.sion of hatred held something of love or at least a sultry need, a hunger not of the belly. He studied the pairs of eyes--four--wondering which pair might be hers. He fell to muttering, aiming at the gray b.i.t.c.h wolf every foulness of indecent words he could recall. Words only, unrelieving, lacking the thrust and achievement of a spear. New words startled him: "Such meat should help him...."

He had not the strength to do any harm with a thrown spear; he would only lose the weapon. Sometimes the very power of a stronger adversary can be made to work for you. If you know how. If you dare.

Reuben knew he was not mad. Within the pa.s.sion was a coldness to match her own; shrewdness; wicked planning with all the treachery of a wolf and the bravery. No time now to think of courage or fear. Endless time to know the unbearable need for an act of love.

Reuben sank to his heels on this open ground, the lean-to at his back, fires not great to the left and the right of him, between him and the wolves only an expanse of flame-lit snow. He dropped the green ash spear in that white so that the sharp end was covered. His hand curling midway on the shaft owned a separate life, refusing to suffer from the harsh coldness. Gradually he allowed his head to droop, lift feebly and droop again, while his upturned eyes, perhaps not plain to the enemy, maintained alertness. Seeing all. Clever as Ben's.

The beasts were cruelly wise, Jesse Plum used to say. Out of thickets and moon-shadows they watched men's ways, as dogs did. Unlike dogs they watched only for signs of weakness, and this from no motives but hunger and savagery--except, said Jesse, those wolves which were not wolves.

He must be not reckless but wise and cold as they. He must be ready also to recognize the need for retreat. Supposing they all four came together, then he must jump to life quickly, scare them with noise and bustling and renewal of the fires. But supposing, when this interminable ordeal of crouching, waiting and feigning weakness came to an end, supposing it ever did--supposing his feet had not grown numb and frozen to betray him--supposing the old gray b.i.t.c.h should advance alone, while Ben lay sleeping and the Great Bear slanted toward the North Star----

She was coming.

He would not believe it for a while. Slowly he explained to himself that one of them must have crept out into the open a long time ago, as some trick of the firelight deceived him into calling it another shadow.

Then he knew this was not so. She was coming to him. With all his heart he accepted it.

He lowered his head once more, and in that moment witnessed the brief belly-to-earth advance, the freezing down to watch him again across a much smaller distance. This could only be the one he hated, no other.

She was coming to him. The others remained a shifting of eyes beyond the clear ground--afraid of him, mere offal, mere dogs as she was not--or else they were holding back because they knew her reasons and his own.

He knew that if he were to jump to his feet and dodge back behind the fire, she would not rush, not yet. No gambler, she would slide away and wait for the certainty, wait till dawn or beyond dawn or beyond the next dawn. He could not do it. It might be wiser, safer; might almost be a duty to Ben that he should retreat to comparative safety, now, while he had time. His body would not do it. His body would only wait like a bowstring, clutching the spear, controlling that deceitful droop of his head until the approaching moment when one of them--a half-starved alien beast or a boy who must remember the doorway of a reddened room where he clung sickly to a bedpost and did nothing--one of them would die quickly.

Was she only a wolf? Some wolves, Jesse said----

Was it possible--he was up on his feet in the surging act of madness--was it possible she could hate and love him in the same way?

He could not understand.

His mind must have flown away, missing the interval, the second of decision. But she was here. She was down. It was over.

She had screamed once, he thought, like a human thing; his ears held something of the strangled cry. More of the moment returned, her flaring mouth receiving the point in mid-air, her own driven weight spitting her upon it. It could not have happened.

It had happened, and she was down, and it was over, and he could remember his own backward staggering at the impact while all of him tightened down on that center of existence where his hands grasped the green ash spear. There followed some wave of elastic power in his legs, and all the force was then flowing the other way until it was over.

Simple butchery remained. He must follow with the spear her agonized writhing, hating no longer. No danger. Her failing paws threshed and tore at the shaft of the death she had swallowed. Her blood fumed out around it from a pierced lung.

It was all over.

"Thursday night we came away--remember? That was the night you fell sick, and was burning and tossing all day Friday. Sat.u.r.day you was better, but once or twice you didn't know me. It was the Friday night when the wolves came."

"Are they still about? Nay, they can't be on so fair a morning. I feel washed clean, Ru. Weak, but--oh, I could do anything."

"Weaker than you know. It'll pa.s.s. I saw the wolves last on Sat.u.r.day.

They scented something, I think, and drifted away."

"It's all so still under the sun, and warm--what? I thought this was Sat.u.r.day."

"This is Monday, Ben. Yesterday was the Sabbath. I hadn't thought of that till now, when you began asking me about the time. It was yesterday your fever broke for good. These three days have been a hundred years.

I've had much time to think, when there was nothing else I could do--mind the fire, gather more wood, then either think or go mad, but I've not gone mad. I have not prayed, Ben, since before dawn on the Friday morning."

"I don't know what I should say about that. Father said, just before he died--did you hear?--said that G.o.d is far away."

"And Mother's last prayer was not answered. She prayed, 'Deliver us from evil.' And mine have never been answered."

"But we can't know that."

"I can't say that I know anything, anything at all, except that I'm here with you, and the air has turned warm, and the Bay Path road must be somewhere a mile or so over yonder, and tomorrow we shall try for Roxbury."

"And that thou hast killed a wolf.... Ru, if I didn't see that carca.s.s under my nose----"

"I never lied to you. Oh--tales for your fancy now and then."

"I know that. What did you do with the hide?"

"Flung it out to the cannibals. The entrails too, and the head. They were delighted."

"Puh! What's this part I'm eating now and enjoying so?"