Medicine Road (6 page)

Loki reached his Arctic homeland and rejoined
the pack ten days later. But he no longer wanted to
start back to the Hemlock Wood. An early spring
wind, blowing suddenly warm and constant, had
commenced to set the ice going out in the great
rivers. There was no foreseeing at the moment how
far such an unseasonable thaw might go. Loki could
not gamble on having the pack trapped south of its
frozen habitat. His infallible instincts warned him
not to try the trip, and as usual his uncanny intuition was rewarded. The thaw continued and within
two weeks the ice was going out of the rivers in full
flood. What had looked like a false touch of spring
had turned into the genuine thing. An expedition
south would have been disastrous.

Six weeks later the growing spring was fat with a
bumper crop of the small Arctic game upon which
the pack fed during the whelping season, and all its
members were busy hunting and foraging for the
cubs now being born. All was still well with the king
wolf's rule. An early spring meant an early winter.
With the first freezing of solid ice across the wide
rivers, Loki would go south ahead of the main pack
with a chosen few of his best hunters. They would
find the caribou herd and cut the queen doe and her
hump-nosed moose calf out of it, and that would be
the end of that. The herd would drift apart again and the hunting in Hemlock Wood would fall back
to being as fat and easy as ever. With that thought,
the big wolf was content.

He lay down and slept soundly, his only concern
being that he would awaken in good time to join his
old friends, Split Lip and Sukon, in digging out a
warren of buttery young snowshoe hares Sukon had
discovered only that morning. His dreams were
very pleasant.

It was a beautiful soft summer in the Northland,
and the same bountiful nature that fattened the wolf
pack in the shadow of the pole caused the caribou to
prosper and put on tallow in their forest land to the
south. For the first time in many years small bands
of them ventured up into the stunted timber north
of the Hemlock Wood and even beyond that out
onto the sweeping reaches of the old barren-ground
tundra pastures. Happiness was in the herd, and a
fresh sense of confidence and security.

It was a time, in that far northern land, of long
daylight and little darkness. The young of the herd
could see to play at their head-butting and hooffencing games until after ten o'clock at night. And
even then the brief dimming of the sun's warm light
lasted no later than four o'clock in the following
morning. Very nearly around the clock, the young of
the caribou gamboled in the golden light. Very
nearly around the clock their elders browsed or
rested or watched them with utter content.

As for Awklet, the orphaned moose calf, it was an
unbroken time of pure enjoyment and adventure.
Perhaps it was because the herd's luck had changed
for the better with his coming among the caribou.
Perhaps it was simply his association with the new
queen that had led them so well. Or perhaps it was
only because there was so much succulent tundra
moss and leafy forest browse to eat that especially
fine summer. But for whatever reason, the entire
caribou herd took the comical-looking moose calf to
its gentle-natured heart.

Wherever he went, and whichever members of the
herd he might seek out, he found constant welcoming snorts and friendly sniffings to greet him. His
particular favorites, however, were the crusty old
stags. It almost seemed as though he felt sorry for
them, or at least was sensitive enough to sense their
loneliness. It is a law of Nature, and a cruel one, that
the aged and the infirm are shown no attention and
given no help whatever. But Awklet acted as though
the law did not exist for him, and the grateful graybeards of the herd clearly regarded the young
moose as something very special.

As to the fawns of his age, there was a little trouble. They were much smaller than he and nowhere
nearly as powerful. Even in play it was difficult for
him to keep from hurting them. As a result Awklet
came gradually to draw apart from them, tending to
graze and herd with the older animals-always, of
course, within sight and smell and easy reach of his
beloved foster mother, Neetcha.

This companionship between the caribou doe and
the moose calf had been from the first a thing of the
most touching devotion. But in the course of that
first sweet summer they grew inseparable. To see them together in those sunlit, long, and cloudless
afternoons was to see a rare picture of Nature's
deepest and most vital instinct-mother love. And
nowhere does that mother love burn so intensely as
in the breast of a female wild thing deprived of her
own natural young and adopting, in consequence,
some other child of the wilderness.

The absurdity of the strange mating made its tenderness only the more compelling. The woodland
caribou doe is one of the least lovely of all creatures.
Its head is long and coarse, somewhat resembling
that of a common barnyard cow. It carries this great
awkward blob of a head so low it nearly touches the
ground. At the same time its shaggy shoulders are
as high and sharp and bony as an old hallway hat
rack. Its tremendous clumsy hoofs, cloven nearly to
the hock, splay out and clack across the frozen
ground of winter or the sucking mud of summer
like great misshapen snowshoes. It is a big and muscular animal standing four feet at the withers. A
coarse, horse-like mane of hair covers those withers,
and its tail looks as though a frayed-out stub of a
used paintbrush had been pinned on the opposite
end of the animal's paunchy body. It has a shuffling,
slouchy gait and, whether moving or standing motionlessly, is surely one of the homeliest animals in
the world.

Yet an early-born bull moose calf such as Awklet,
observed in mid-term of his first year's summer,
will by way of sheer contrast make a caribou doe
look handsome. Nothing in nature's entire comic
opera cast, from the dress-suited penguin of the
South Pole to the Humpty-Dumpty puffin of the
northern Atlantic Coast, can compare in purely ludicrous appearance to a first-summer bull moose calf. With his head as big and shapeless as a nail
keg, and with his slender trim-legged hindquarters
looking as though they had been cut off some other
animal half his size and grafted upon his own
bulging barrel of a body just at the hip line, Awklet
was easily the superior in lack of animal beauty to
his ungainly foster mother. His nose was as bulbous
and broken in profile as that of an ancient desert
camel's; his great lips, whiskered and bristled, hung
slackly as a tired old plow horse's, and his shoulders
were topped by a huge chunk of meaty gristle like
the neck crest of a Spanish fighting bull.

Yet to Awklet his foster mother was the most
beautiful thing in the Hemlock Wood, and to
Neetcha he was the grandest sight to be had south of
the Arctic Circle. For Awklet, that first summer was
to remain the happiest time of his life. And truly it
was a memorable summer. All of the northern deer
tribe prospered throughout it, and none so amazingly as Awklet. Nature had made him a large calf to
begin with. His mother, gaunt old Bera, had been
unusually big for a cow of that area. His father, a
chance migrant from far Alaska's Kenai Peninsula,
where grow the largest and most powerful moose in
the world, had been a tremendous bull standing
nearly seven feet at the shoulder and weighing almost 1,600 pounds. Awklet had inherited truly from
his giant sire, and as summer waned into early autumn the sheer bulk and power of the young moose
became startling.

At eight months he was very nearly as large as are
most moose at maturity. He weighed close to half a
ton and was already within a few inches of six feet
at the hump of his ungainly withers. His rear and
forequarters were as thick and rounded as those of a draft horse, yet his lower legs were as clean and trim
as a racer's. His face, despite the great barrel-like
head and lumpy nose of his kind, wore an expression of intelligent gentleness. His eyes, small and
deep-set and dark as midnight, held a look of calm
assurance and pride in growing strength, difficult to
define but unmistakable when observed.

With this raw material, Neetcha had worked the
summer through, teaching him all she knew of caution and cleverness in the ways of wilderness survival, while certain of the old stags instructed him
in the fighting use of his head and hoofs. As the fall
days grew short of sunlight and the nights sharp
with cold, Neetcha felt she had done everything in
her power to ready Awklet for his second winter in
the Hemlock Wood and his next meeting with the
Arctic wolves.

Even so, she was not able to rest. The instincts of
the born leader would not let her forget the wolves.
There must be something else she could do to put
the herd beyond the reach of Loki's killers. The caribou were fat and soft with the ease of the summer
living, not yet ready to fight the wolves. The moose
calf needed time to grow. He was not yet, by many
months, in his prime or prepared to face the whitefurred invaders. Suddenly an instinct of selfpreservation struck Neetcha, the caribou doe. Where
it could not yet fight, the herd could still run away!

When the wolves came, they would find only the
small creatures awaiting them-the wandering
hare, the slumbering squirrel, the snow-hidden
ptarmigan, the deep-burrowed deer mouse. Unable
to live on such scant prey, the murderous pack
would be forced to return and starve out the winter
in their own bleak polar homeland. Still, where could the caribou go? How could they live? What
would they find to eat in some strange new land?
These were questions beyond Neetcha's reach, but
she knew one thing and one thing alone. Anything
was better than to stay and wait for the wolves
again.

Awklet, listening to the coughing and grunting of
the elder caribou objecting to the young queen's decision to leave the Hemlock Wood, shook his big
head in puzzlement. He would not have known, any
better than those quarrelsome old stags, what
should be done. But Neetcha knew. She knew instinctively, and she followed her instincts.

With the first snow flurries of an unusually early
winter, a wondrous migration began. Before the
snow had a chance to pile deeply enough to hold the
telltale tracks, the caribou started drifting south. In
bands they went, in dozens and scores, and singly
or in twos and threes. By night and by day they
traveled, never stopping, never resting, and bearing
always and continually southward.

Within a week there were no caribou in all the
vast land from the barren-ground tundra to the far
southern border of the Hemlock Wood. The hare,
the squirrel, the deer mouse, and the ptarmigan
came out of their cover and listened and looked and
wondered. In all their lives they could not remember such an empty, silent forest.

True to his hunting habits Loki was in the Hemlock Wood with the first solid river ice. But wolf after wolf of his small advance pack returned with the
same news: nowhere within a long day's sight,
sound, or smell were there any caribou. The herd
had vanished. With it, of course, had vanished the
young queen doe and her weanling moose calf.

Loki's one eye blazed green with rage. He
growled and snarled in a towering fit of black anger,
the froth and foam slobbering from his great jaws.
Sukon, Split Lip, and the others had never seen him
like this. He was behaving like a yearling cub that
has just been soundly thrashed by a full-grown male
in front of his favorite young she-wolf. All of them,
tough and battle-scarred as they were, backed away
and lay down well out of his reach, waiting for his
madness to pass.

Before long the king wolf grew quiet. This was no
accident, this empty forest. Those caribou had been
led in their escape by that new queen he had tried to
kill last spring. The young doe's action would mean
great and immediate trouble for him. The main pack
was due to arrive in a day or two and would expect
and require heavy feeding upon its arrival. Instead,
it would find only a shred of winter-thin snowshoe
hare or bony Arctic ptarmigan to reward its members for their long, hard journey and their trust in
his leadership. And worse. There was nothing Loki
could tell them except to turn around and go back
home. They could not, as a full pack with fifty-odd
bellies to fill, continue on after the caribou. As it
was, even turning back at the Hemlock Wood, they
would be weak and starving before they reached
home. This was Loki's first failure, and he knew that
the wolf people were not of a nature to allow their
leaders to fail more than once.

Leaving Sukon to wait for the pack and lead it
back north, hunting as they went, Loki decided to
go on with the others in search of the caribou. Loki
and his pack would be gone as long as need be.
They would find the doe and the calf and the rest of
the herd if it took them all winter. When they did, there would be no more blunders on Loki's part.
This time they would kill the herd queen and her
ugly orphan calf.