University of Virginia Library

7. VII

NIGHT was falling, and Susette sat sullenly apart, listening for the call of her people. She did not go to him. All night the man tossed and raved.

After a lingering age of delirious wanderings, dizzy flights from huge, pitiless pursuers, he became conscious of the daylight. He raised his head feebly and looked about the den. Susette was gone.

A fury of jealousy came upon Antoine. She had gone again to find that other wolf; he felt certain of this. He tried to arise, but the fever had weakened him so that he lay impotent, torn alternately with anger and longing.

Suddenly a frost-whitened snout was thrust in at the opening.

It was Susette. The man gave a feeble cry of joy, and his eyes were filled with a soft light. Susette entered, sniffing strangely and switching her tail as she came. At her heels came another gray wolf — a male — larger-boned, lanker, with more powerful jaws. He whined and moved his tail nervously at sight of the man.

Antoine lay staring at the intruder.

"So that's him!" thought the man. "I wisht I could git up!"

The gray intruder approached him with a sinuous movement of the tail. His jaws grinned hideously with long, sharp teeth displayed. The rage of hunger was in his eyes, fixed steadily upon the sick man.

Antoine stared into the eyes of his enemy, already crouching for the spring. On a sudden, a strange exhilaration seized him. He seemed to be drinking in the essence of life from the pitiless stare of his adversary. His great limbs, devitalized but a moment before, now tingled to the extremities with a surging of the wine of life. His eyes, which the fever had burned into the dulness of ashes, flamed again with the eager lust of fight.

He raised himself upon his haunches, and with the lifting of a sneering lip that disclosed his grinding teeth, he gave a cry that was both a snarl and a sob.

In that moment these many centuries of artificial life were as a vanished dream. From the long-slumbering dust of the prehistoric cave-man came a giant spirit to steel the sinews of its far-removed and weaker kin.

Antoine met the impetuous spring of the intruding wolf with a downward blow of his fist, and sprang upon his momentarily worsted foe. Never before in all his bitter, pariah life had he fought as now he fought for the possession of his last companion. His antagonist, bigger than Susette, was the survivor of many moonlight battles to the death in the frozen, foodless wilderness of hills.

Antoine struggled not as a man; he was now merely the good, glorious fighting beast — masterful, primitive, the taker of his own. Lacerated by the snapping of powerful jaws, bleeding from his face and hands, the man felt that he was winning. With a whining cry he succeeded in fixing his left hand upon the hairy throat, crushed the wolf down upon his back, and, using prodigious strength, began to press the fingers of his right hand under the protruding lower ribs. He would tear them out! He would thrust his hand in among the vitals of his foe!

All the while Susette, whining and wagging her tail nervously, watched the struggle with glowing eyes, and waited for the sign of the victor. But at this juncture she arose with a threatening sway of the head, approached the two cautiously, then hurled herself into the encounter. She leaped with a savage yelp upon him who had long been her master.

The man's grip suddenly relaxed. He fell back and threw out his arms, into which once more there came the weakness of the fever.

"Susette!" gasped Antoine; "I was always good to you! I —"

His cry was choked into a wheeze. Susette had gripped him by the throat, and the two were upon him.

She had gone back to the ways of her kind, and the man was an alien.