"Jack London. The Call of the Wild (Сборник из 7 рассказов на англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

accents. He, too, sat down and howled. This over, he came out of
his angle and the pack crowded around him, sniffing in half-
friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted the yelp of the
pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves swung in behind,
yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by side with the
wild brother, yelping as he ran.


* * *


And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many
when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for
some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with
a rift of white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than
this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the
pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning
greater than they, stealing from their camps in fierce winters,
robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest
hunters.


Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return
to the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen
found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about
them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall,
when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there is a
certain valley which they never enter. And women there are who
become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil Spirit
came to select that valley for an abiding-place.


In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of
which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated
wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone
from the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space
among the trees. Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moose-
hide sacks and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing
through it and vegetable mould overrunning it and hiding its
yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once,
long and mournfully, ere he departs.


But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on
and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be
seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or
glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great
throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is
the song of the pack.