The Cross Pull

Front matter

THE CROSS PULL

NEW BORZOI NOVELS SPRING, 1920

PETER JAMESON By Gilbert Frankau

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

Those who believed in the famous legend of the Lost Herd are gone and few men know the truth.

History records the fact that when the last big herd of bison moved into the north on the spring migration it never returned. The hide hunters watched in vain for the southward movement in the fall for it never came. The big gray buffalo wolves, too, had suddenly vanished from the plains. Strange rumors were heard about this mysterious evaporation of the shaggy horde—rumors which gave birth to the fable of the lost herd that would some day come grazing down out of the north.

Not only in legend were they lost, but lost in truth. Rather than once more run the gauntlet of the guns along the Arkansas and the Platte, the last herd departed from the customs of untold centuries and sought refuge in the hills. They chose the Land of Many Rivers in which to make their final stand.

The snow that falls in one small tangled mass of peaks and valleys feeds the headwaters of a score of rivers. The Wind River and the Greybull; the Gibbon and the Firehole; the Shoshone, Yellowstone, Green River and the Buffalo Fork of the Snake, each finds its course in one wild whirl of interlacing, tributary streams.

Here, in the Bighorns, the Tetons and the Sunlight peaks, the herd scattered in small bands through the high mountain valleys in one last effort to exist. The bleached white skulls that dot the green meadows on the head reaches of Thoroughfare River and the basins of the upper Yellowstone, mark the spots where they died in the deep snow of the high country while the buffalo hunters of Dodge still waited for the fabled return of the lost herd.

Stockmen grazed their cows on the old range of the bison, pushing farther to the west each year until their cows fed on the first roll of the hills; farther north until they came to a spot where Nature, as if exhausted from piling wonder upon wonder with lavish hand, had left the badlands of the Little Bighorn and the desolate foothills of the Greybull nestled under the very shadow of the Rainbow Peaks.

Then great wolves appeared, coming down out of the hills and taking heavy toll from the cows on the ranges; wolves of a kind the stockmen had never known, larger even than those of Siberia. Ranchers spoke of a new and savage breed. They distorted the word “logo”—the Shoshone Indian name for the baldface grizzly—to “lobo,” meaning grizzly wolf.

The ranchmen organized a war of extermination against this savage lobo tribe, placing an ever-increasing bounty on each one, until an even hundred was posted as the price on every scalp.

This created a new occupation for men, and soon the professional wolfer was scouring the breaks of the badlands with poison, trap and gun for the last few survivors of a vanishing breed.

Old Dad Kinney was a wolfer and he had reason to believe that a single family of loboes were denned somewhere within forty miles of his spring camp. He knew, too, that Clark Moran was in the badlands on the same quest.

Between them was an agreement whereby Kinney felt there was no possible way for him to lose. If either of them found the den, Moran was to have one pup alive and Kinney was to draw the bounty on the rest.

Moran seemed more interested in some lost herd that had died fifty years before than in bounty rewards—in some theory that this was not a new species but an almost forgotten kind which had followed the lost herd into the hills and had now come back to the edge of their old range; that the rare lobo of the present was the buffalo gray of the past.

As Moran and Kinney lay rolled in their blankets ten miles apart, they formed two points of a human triangle of which Ash Brent, far up the slope of the hills, formed the third.

In common with most men who live their lives in the open, Kinney and Moran had come to draw a certain sense of companionship from the night sounds of the hills. But there is one note to which a man may listen for a thousand nights and on the next he will inevitably nestle a trifle closer into his bed roll when it sounds and feel the same chilly prickling of the skin along his spine. The far-off note of a lobo always carries an added ache of loneliness to the man in the open.

A lone lobo raised his voice and, as if connected by a mysterious current, the three widely scattered men each felt the same sudden tensing of the muscles and tingling of the skin. In the reaction only did they differ.

While Kinney calculated a probable profit, Brent cursed fretfully at the wolf shiver which shook him at the sound, and Moran smiled over a pet theory of his own.

He knew that any beast, when angry or alarmed, bristles his back hair into a roach along the spine. He felt that this was a heritage handed down to him through a thousand generations from the time when his primitive ancestors, garbed in hair instead of cloth, had bristled with a mixture of rage and fear at each call of their enemy the wolf; that this sprouting of goose flesh between his own shoulder blades at the lobo call was but the age-old instinct to bristle the hair where hair had ceased to grow.

As always, the dread cry was followed by a vast, tense quiet, as if each dweller of the open hesitated to shatter the silence with his own voice and thus draw particular attention to himself. This was no paltry wolf—no straggler from the north, but an old dog lobo on his home range.

There was an answering call, and both Kinney and Moran raised on their elbows to better catch the sound. The starting note was a hoarse imitation of her mate’s but seemed to break into the tremolo of the coyote. Both men arrived at al- most the same conclusion but in different ways.

Kinney linked the strange note with a renegade Scotch sheep dog he had seen traveling with the coyotes two years before.

“That she wolf is half coyote and half dog,” he said.

Moran, too, had noted the coyote shrill and also that he experienced no wolf shiver from the sound.

“A cross,” he reflected. “Part coyote and part dog.”

The lobo does not call often, and not until half an hour before dawn did the sound come again. It awakened the three men, and each prepared his breakfast and was off upon his business of the day.

While Kinney and Moran resumed their tireless, systematic search for the wolf den, Brent headed his horses for a far divide. Beyond it lay the Land of Many Rivers, where, for a hundred miles, there was no human habitation known to men; yet Brent had twelve horses packed out with flour and supplies.

Ten days later Moran sat cross-legged on the ground with a third-grown wolf pup between his knees. The lobo pup was wrapped securely in a sack, tied round and round with heavy cord and with only his head protruding from the roll.

“There goes the balance of your family, pup,” said Moran. “You’re an orphan now.”

Kinney, leading two pack horses from which dangled the remains of the rest of the wolf family, was just disappearing in the direction of his camp and the last den of loboes in the badlands had fallen victims to the ranchmen’s bounty war.

The father was a mighty lobo, almost a packload for one horse; the mother was a half-breed, crossed between a coyote and a dog. The rifled den had yielded a freakish lot of pups, as if each clashing strain of ancestry had struggled to perpetuate its own. One was a fluffy, yellow, coyote pup; two a strange mixture of wolf and dog; while the fourth was a blue-gray Scotch sheep dog, with shaggy face and a white splash on the breast. The one which Moran held between his knees was pure lobo from tip to tip. Only in his yellow coyote eyes did a trace of off color strain crop out.

“You’re the prize pup of the lot,” said Moran. “How about it, old fellow? Are you going to make friends with me?”

For answer the lobo pup writhed around in his wrappings and made one swift slash at his captor’s face.

“You’re a game little youngster and as quick as a flash,” said Moran. “That’s what I’ll call you—Flash. Come on, Flash, let’s be pals.”

For more than an hour he tried to win the confidence of the lobo pup, rubbing and scratching his neck and head behind the ears where the white fangs could not reach his hand, and talking to him in an even, friendly tone.

Even a very young pup reads the intonations of the human voice sufficiently to distinguish between those men who care for animals and dogs and those who don’t.

The wolf pup felt the first stirrings of the inner conflict—the battling for supremacy between the wild blood and the tame—that would influence his every move through life. It was as if the different elements of his ancestry had established cross-currents in his veins, exerting a strange cross-pull upon each thought and deed.

The wolf and coyote in him revolted at the man scent, but the dog strain responded to the friendly voice and thrilled to the touch of exploring fingers which scratched his neck and ears. He lay passive and made no protest at the touch.

At last he felt Moran’s hand slip slowly around beneath his chin, rubbing his throat and lower jaw. His throat muscles contracted at this new move, and he withdrew his head, turtle-wise, as far as possible within the sheltering roll. The yellow coyote eyes were bright with suspicion; the sensitive lips writhed up, exposing the ivory fangs of the wolf, but the yearning of a dog to be loved by man held him from sinking them deep in the hand that was now within easy reach—the first compromise between the wild and tame.

The glare gradually died from his eyes, the lips settled slowly back and covered the fangs, and Moran knew then that he had won.

“Come on, Flash; let’s go home,” he said.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

Harmon was away, and for two days Moran had the forest ranger’s cabin on Spring Creek to himself.

He spent the time trying to wean Flash from his early training and induce him to eat by tempting him with morsels of fresh meat.

The first day the pup shrank away from it; on the next he sniffed it hungrily but still refused to eat. He craved it with every fiber of his being but there was one thing he knew. He must never touch one bite of meat other than that which he himself had freshly killed—and after once leaving that he must return to it no more.

In his few hunts with his parents they had pulled down a fresh beef each trip. At first he had seen no reason why he was not allowed to go near other food, but gradually he had seen many things which explained it all.

One night the wind had borne the scent of stale meat, and with the odor had come a clanking, grinding sound. A coyote leaped at the end of a chain and ground his teeth against the steel thing that clamped his foot.

Later they had passed near a steer his father had killed two nights before. Two coyotes lay there, dead and bloated, while a third ran in crazy circles and went into series of horrible convulsions with a rattling cough in his throat before he died. He knew then that it was unsafe even to return to previous kills of their own.

All over the range the wolf family had found tempting bits of meat and fat. Flash had not known that each rider was furnished with strychnine to poison the carcass of every dead steer on the range; that they cut off these bits of meat, filled them with the deadly crystals and scattered them about for the coyotes to pick up.

His parents had known—and a wicked snap warned each pup away from every such tempting morsel that they found. One of his sisters had broken over and swallowed just one tiny scrap, flattening her ears in anticipation of feeling her mother’s teeth at this infraction of the rules.

Instead, agony had clutched her from within. The rest of them had watched her die as the mad coyote had.

From these things Flash had come to know that the scent of cold meat meant not food but death, and that only warm, quivering flesh was safe to eat.

Once more the blood of his ancestors exerted their cross-currents in his puppy heart. Hunger and the doglike affection he was beginning to feel for Moran spurred the desire to take the food; wolf suspicion of man and the things he had seen of their works against his kind combined with his dread of the cold meat scent to hold him back. He compromised by licking the meat Moran held out to him, but refusing to take it in his mouth.

Evening of the second day found Moran still patiently tempting him to eat.

A horse clattered into the yard and Ash Brent dismounted before the house. His horse flinched nervously away from him as he stooped to loosen the cinch and Brent jerked savagely on the reins until blood trickled from the ends of the heavy spade bit.

He strode to the door and stood looking in—a big man with a too small head set low upon wide shoulders. His light eyebrows showed up white against the baked red of his skin and from beneath them a pair of cold blue eyes peered bleakly forth upon the world and saw no good therein.

“Hello, Moran. I want to see Harmon,” he said by way of greeting. “Is he anywhere around?”

“I’m looking for him any minute,” said Moran. “Come in, Brent. Come in and wait.” The cordiality of the invitation masked Moran’s vast dislike of this man—this maltreator of horses and cows. Moran was but a visitor at the ranger’s, and Brent’s business was with his host, so he could not reveal his real feeling for the man. But toleration passed for friendship with Brent. Even in this new country peopled by hard men, no one of them accorded him a warmer regard than that—and he paid them back in kind.

Rough men whose own hands were by no means light with horses shook their heads, disgusted by each new tale that was heard on the Greybull of Brent’s frenzied atrocity when aroused by some nervous or refractory horse.

“What have you drug in now?” Brent asked as he entered, jerking his thumb at the wolf pup.

“That’s my new dog,” said Moran. “What do you think of him?’

Brent’s mouth expanded in a mirthless grin.

“He’s a sulky little brute,” he said. “Can’t you make him eat?”

“That’s intelligence,’ Moran explained. “His early training taught him not to gulp down everything he sees. I’ve only had him a day or two. He’ll come out of it as soon as confidence in me overcomes that wolf caution of his.”

As the two men talked, the wolf pup noted their difference of tone. Then, too, they gave off a different scent. Moran’s was friendly and quieting, while Brent radiated an atmosphere of cold-blooded cruelty toward every living thing. His only ascendency over beasts would be the rule of fear.

Flash was already beginning to classify the world of men. Those who do not know speak of “animal instinct” when referring to the unerring ability of animals to recognize love, hatred, fear and other emotions in man. Moran’s naturalist mind was not satisfied with the vague generality of this term. He knew that this so called instinct was in reality a delicately balanced sense of hearing and of smell. No man who has lived much and understandingly with animals but knows that each kind has a vocabulary of its own—not that of the spoken word but of the varying inflection of tone.

It is this that enables a dog to catch the under- tone of hidden hate or fear in the voice which does not reveal it to the duller ear of man. He checks this with his nose so there is no chance for a mistake. Man’s system reacts to any emotional strain and his pores betray his state of mind to the keenly sensitive noses of the animal world.

Moran knew that it was certain knowledge that caused Flash to sidle farther from Brent and closer to himself. With his nose flattened between his paws, Flash favored Brent with an unblinking stare from his yellow eyes—eyes as fierce and untamed as those of a hawk. Except in color there was little difference between his eyes and Brent’s, and a wave of dislike was exchanged between them with the stare.

Not until Moran went outside to feed the horses in the corral did Flash shift from his position on the floor or remove his eyes from Brent. As Moran left him he moved away from Brent to the full limit of his chain.

Irritated by this move, Brent caught the chain near where it was fastened to the leg of the table and drew Flash toward him. The pup braced his feet but was dragged forward, his toenails scratching for a hold. When within a few feet of Brent his tactics changed and he leaped for the hand, his white teeth clashing shut in two lightning snaps as Brent jerked back. He retreated again to the length of his chain and stood there, bristling with rage and fear.

Brent’s insane temper flared at the sting where the sharp little teeth had grazed his thumb. He stepped over to the pup, raising his heavy glove and bringing the gauntlet down across his head and ears, Flash tried to fight, but the glove bruised his lips and ears and when he cowered down on the floor, half dazed by the rain of blows, Brent kicked him under the table and went outside.

When the two came in once more, Milt Harmon, the ranger, was with them. As the three men talked, Flash lay in his corner, his head resting, wolf fashion, flat between his paws, and regarded their every move.

Harmon did not fit in either of his previous classifications, so he classed him by himself. Here in the room were men that represented each of the three divisions under which he would place all men as he met them—those he tolerated, those he hated with a savage intensity and those he loved. His present feeling for Harmon typified his later attitude toward the great majority of men. The mass of them would mean little to him and only a very few individuals would ever interest him sufficiently to be classed with either extreme.

Brent finished his business, and Moran stood looking after him as he rode away.

“There goes a beast,” he said. “He hasn’t one decent, softening thought. When you look at that blizzard of a face it forces you to believe all those tales you hear of him.”

“They’re true,” Harmon said. “I saw it once myself. I heard a horse scream and rode down.” The ranger swore softly. “Brent was standing there mouthing the same words over and over again as if his own mad-dog fit had left his mind a blank. ‘He struck at me,’ he mumbled. ‘He struck at me. A horse can’t strike at me.’ I rode right on past. I knew I’d kill him if I stopped.”

“Flash spotted that streak in him the minute he came in,” said Moran. “It’s harder to fool an animal than a man.”

The next morning Moran shot a rabbit, jerked the pelt from it while it was still warm and offered the meat to Flash.

This time he took it. From this small start Moran led him on until in a few days he would take anything he offered. It was the first con- cession of the wild blood to the tame—the turning of the dog in in him to Moran. In order to keep the proper balance he presented his wolf side to all other men and would touch not a single bite of food that came from any other than Moran.

His education along all lines progressed. When Moran took long walks he led Flash with a light chain. Later he unsnapped it from the collar and Flash found himself free to wander around inside the cabin. Moran next tried him in the yard with the chain trailing loose. Flash was glad of this new opportunity to trot around, but it did not occur to him to leave. By gradual degrees Moran removed first the chain and then the collar, but Flash followed him as closely as before. His world revolved around Moran. His greatest moments were those that Moran spent in scratching his neck and ears and rolling him around in rough play. But he would let no other man touch him, moving stiffly away at the first sign of this intent.

Brent stopped at the cabin at infrequent intervals and on these occasions the hate flared to a white heat in Flash. From association he had lost his early unreasoning fear of men but had learned also that he must not turn his teeth against them. He showed his dislike of Brent by watching him suspiciously and bristling his shoulder hair at every move. Never once did he make a sound, and this silent, deadly hatred inspired a like feeling in the man.

Twice when Moran was gone, Brent kicked Flash the length of his chain when the pup bristled at his approach.

Eventually Moran let Flash follow him on long trips without his chain, trusting that his hold was greater than the call of the free hills to the pup. Flash joyously chased the long-eared jack rabbits of the foothills but always returned to Moran.

Flash had grown, and his was the wolf growth which lacks the awkwardness seen in growing dogs. In mid-August he attained his sixth month and with it the requisite speed to catch his first jack. Thereafter he hunted them tirelessly, killing for pleasure long after his hunger was appeased. The swift chase, growing in excitement and terminating in the wild thrill of joy with the final snap of jaws upon his prey, matched his supreme moments with Moran and thus both extremes in him were satisfied.

Horses no longer feared him and fled from the dread wolf scent as at first. From living long in the cabin and around the fire at cooking time he had come to smell much as a dog who leads that life and the horses accepted him as such. Moran then started breaking him to handle stock. He knew that in trying to teach this art to Flash it meant a two to one chance of having to sacrifice a horse.

Flash would take one of three holds upon the first animal that Moran worked him on. He might have inherited the strike of a natural born heeler from his renegade grandmother and go to the heel of a horse or cow. Otherwise he would lunge for a wolf hold, and a wolf strikes either for the flank, ripping a gash through which the heavy paunch drops out, or slashes each hind leg above the hock turn, severing the hamstrings of his prey.

Even a lobo, powerful as he is, never strikes for a throat hold until after his meat is down, knowing that even as he tore the life from a plunging steer the battering hoofs would strike him down or the crazed beast would kneel and crush his life out with its own.

Moran gathered a bunch of a dozen horses and headed them toward Harmon’s cabin. He motioned Flash after them.

“Run ’em in, Flash,” he said, repeating the motion and the words until Flash understood that Moran really meant that he was to chase those horses. Always he had wanted to leap after every animal he saw but he had known that these were the property of man and that he must not molest them.

He trotted half way to the horses, turned and looked back questioningly at Moran. Again came the motion and the words, assuring him that this was right and he swept joyously down upon the bunch.

Moran’s anxiety as to which of the three holds Flash would take had been reflected in his voice, and the doubt of what he was to do with the horses other than to chase them around was communicated to Flash.

He ran in on the hindmost horse and made a savage lunge for the flank but even as he struck, he withheld the slash, feeling that this hold might not be right.

He dropped back and ran behind the bunch. Moran’s horse was running swiftly behind him, and once more Moran urged him on.

Flash singled out another horse and lunged for the hamstring—but the doubt aroused by the anxiety in Moran’s voice still persisted and he withheld the snap of fangs that would have hopelessly crippled one hind leg. While he ran on close behind the bunch, a horse lashed out at him with wicked heels and even as he ducked the kick Flash knew that he must punish those offending feet. He darted in and nipped the heel.

He heard Moran’s wild yell of encouragement. It dispelled all doubt—this was the thing to do.

He darted from horse to horse and his was the strike of the born heeler. Not once did he bite as the hind foot struck the ground, when a kick might have brained him, but timed each nip when the hind legs were outstretched to the fullest extent at the end of the stride. Before Moran could recall him he had scattered the flying horses all over the flat.

Moran patiently rounded them up each time Flash scattered them, and at last he understood that Moran wanted them to remain bunched and headed for home. From then on no straggler left the horse herd. If one started Flash was after him at a motion from Moran, and before he moved far he was headed back for the bunch.

After a few more lessons he knew what was expected of him and he began rapidly to learn all the details of the game.

In this as in all else the strange mixed blood cropped out. He loved this work of handling horses and performed it well. The dog in him thrilled at the trust Moran gave to him. But each time he darted to a heel, something called to him to lunge at the flank. Instead he struck like a stock dog but put behind it the forceful drive of the wolf.

Under his management the most confirmed bunch-quitter on the range would soon be the best of the lot. No horse or steer would chance those punishing teeth a second time.

Men soon began to speak of him as the best stock dog on the range.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

Naturalists have made only incidental mention of the rare swift-fox that inhabits a limited area of the badlands and cedar breaks along the east slope of the Rockies.

Moran had searched long for a den of these little fellows, scarcely larger than a squirrel but an exact duplicate in miniature of the coyote.

The fur markets listed them as kit-fox but locally all men called them swifts. Aside from the fact that each year a few were caught in coyote traps or with strychnine bait, little was known of them.

To better study them, Moran shifted his base camp the following spring, moving his outfit into a log cabin used by the Bar T ranch for a winter line camp.

On his first day at the cabin Flash had jumped a pair of these tiny swifts in a near-by gulch. Several times since Moran had seen one running like a vivid yellow streak, and he knew the den was somewhere close at hand.

The year-old wolf could not resist the call to match his tremendous speed against that of these pigmy cousins each time he sighted them. This was no part of Moran’s plan, and Flash, to his everlasting disgust, spent much of his time chained to a staple in the cabin wall.

Morning and evening Moran lay concealed on some commanding ridge, sweeping the country with his powerful glasses as he tried to determine the locality where the swift family had their home.

Riders from the Bar T ranch often dropped by, sometimes stopping to see Moran or lolling sidewise in their saddles to exchange a few words before riding on. Those who came to the cabin when Moran was gone always spoke in a friendly tone to Flash but made no move to touch him. It was known to them that this great wolf dog with the bright yellow eyes would allow no hand to touch him but Moran’s.

Long before they came in sight the thudding hoofs and creak of the saddle leather informed Flash of their approach. Then the wind announced their identity to his quivering nose.

Thus it happened that on the morning Brent rode to the cabin Flash was standing tense and rigid, his shoulder hair bristling, even before Brent turned the corner of the corral.