Description
The Wolf Hunters
CHAPTER I
THE FIGHT IN THE FOREST
Cold winter lay deep in the Canadian wilderness. Over it the moon was
rising, like a red pulsating ball, lighting up the vast white silence of
the night in a shimmering glow. Not a sound broke the stillness of the
desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the
nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the
basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light
of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black
and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack,
bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in by impenetrable
gloom.
A huge white owl flitted out of this rim of blackness, then back again,
and its first quavering hoot came softly, as though the mystic hour of
silence had not yet passed for the night-folk. The snow of the day had
ceased, hardly a breath of air stirred the ice-coated twigs of the
trees. Yet it was bitter cold–so cold that a man, remaining motionless,
would have frozen to death within an hour.
Suddenly there was a break in the silence, a weird, thrilling sound,
like a great sigh, but not human–a sound to make one’s blood run faster
and fingers twitch on rifle-stock. It came from the gloom of the
tamaracks. After it there fell a deeper silence than before, and the
owl, like a noiseless snowflake, drifted out over the frozen lake. After
a few moments it came again, more faintly than before. One versed in
woodcraft would have slunk deeper into the rim of blackness, and
listened, and wondered, and watched; for in the sound he would have
recognized the wild, half-conquered note of a wounded beast’s suffering
and agony.