Gomposh's lair was in the black heart of the cedar swamp. Old though the cedars were, Gomposh had the feeling of being even older. He liked the ancientness of the place; its dankness and darkness, and, above all, its silence—the silence of green decaying things. It was so silent that he could almost hear himself thinking, and his thoughts seemed to make more noise even than his great padded feet. Under the grey twisted trunks, the ground oozed with moisture, which fed the pits of black water that never went dry even in the summer drought. Whatever life stirred in those black pits, occasionally disturbing their stagnant surfaces with oily ripples, it did not greatly affect Gomposh. He preferred not to bother about them, and to devote his mind instead to the clumps of fat fungus—white, red, pink and orange—which, glowed like dull lamps in the heart of the gloom. The taste of their flabby fatness pleased his palate. It was not exactly an exciting form of food; but it grew on your doorstep, so to speak, and saved a lot of trouble. And when you wanted to vary your diet, there were the skunk cabbages and other damp vegetables.
Another thing that recommended the place to the old bear was its comparative freedom from other animals. Goohooperay, it is true, inhabited the hollow hemlock on the farther side of the swamp, but he seldom came near Gomposh's lair, since his activities took him generally to the open slopes of the Bargloosh where the hunting was fair to medium, and sometimes even good. His voice, of course, was a thing to be regretted, and when, on first getting out of bed, he would perch at the top of his tree and send the loudest parts of himself shrilling lamentably far out into the twilight, Gomposh's little eyes would shine with disapproval, and he would make remarks to himself deep down in his throat. But a voice cannot be cuffed into silence, when it has wings that carry it out of the reach of your paw, and so Gomposh had to content himself with a little wholesome grumbling which, after all, kept him from becoming all fungus and fat, and made him change his feeding-ground from place to place. The only other bird that ever intruded upon his privacy was the nuthatch. But as this little bird, being one of the quietest of all the feathered folk, spent its time mainly in sliding up and down the cedar trunks like a shadow without feet, only now and then giving forth a tiny faint note in long silences, as if it were apologizing to itself for being there at all—Gomposh couldn't find it in his heart to lodge a complaint. He would lie in his lair for hours and hours, listening contentedly to the fat, oozy silence, and observing the solemn gloom in which the colours of the red and orange toadstools seemed loud enough to make a noise, and wish that the nuthatch needn't go on apologizing.
The lair was in a deep hollow, between the humpy roots of a large old cedar. It was dry enough, except when the rains were very heavy, as it was tunnelled out on the edge of one of the Hardwood knolls which rose up from the swamp here and there, like the last remaining hill-tops of a drowned world. To make this hole still more rainproof, and at the same time warmer, Gomposh had covered the cedar roots with boughs which he had contrived cunningly into a roof! Oh, he was a wise, wary old person, was Gomposh! and the experience of unnumbered winters had taught him that when the blizzards come swirling over the Bargloosh from the northeast, it is a grand and comforting thing to have a good roof over you, thatched thick and warm with snow. So to this deep cave in the roots of the cedar when the wind moaned in the draughty tops of the spruce woods and the frost bit with invisible teeth, Gomposh, bulging with berries and fat, would retire for the winter, and sleep, and sleep, and sleep!
Toadstools and various sorts of berries made up the principal part of his diet; but as berries did not grow in the swamp, and after a time he had eaten all the best toadstools in the neighbourhood of his den, he occasionally found it pleasant to leave the swamp and ascend to the blueberry barrens high up on the slopes of the Bargloosh.
One morning, not many days after Shasta's return to his wolf kin, Gomposh got up with the berry feeling in him very bad. It was a little early for blueberries, but there were other things he might find—perhaps an Indian pear with its sweet though tasteless fruit, ripened early in some sunny spot. And anyhow there were always confiding beetles under stones, and whole families of insects that live in rotten logs.
He left his lair, picking his way carefully between the humpy roots that made the ground lift itself into such strange shapes, and setting his great padded feet on the thick moss as delicately as a fox, so that, in case some mouse or water-rat should be out of its hole, he might catch it unawares with one of the lightning movements of his immense paw. At the edge of the swamp he pushed his way stealthily through a thicket of Indian willows and then paused to sniff the air with that old sensitive nose of his which brought him tidings of the trails as to what was abroad, with a fine certainty that could not err. But, sniff as he would, nothing came to his questing nostrils except the smell that was as old as the centuries—the raw, keen sweetness of the wet spruce and fir forests, mixed with the homely scent of the cedar swamp. Yet in spite of this, he did not move without the utmost caution, and, for all his apparent clumsiness, his vast furry bulk seemed to drift in among the spruces with the quietness of smoke.
Far away on the other side of the lake, a great bull moose was making his way angrily through the woods, looking for the cow he had heard calling to him at dawn, and thrashing the bushes with his mighty antlers as a challenge to any one who should be rash enough to dispute his title of Lord of the Wilderness. But as he was travelling up-wind, and was, moreover, too far away for the sound of his temper to carry, Gomposh's unerring nose did not receive the warning as he ascended the Bargloosh with the berry want in his inside.
He was half-way up the mountain, when, all at once, he stopped, and swung his nose into the wind. Something was abroad now—something with a warmer, thicker scent than the sharp tang of the spruces. What was it? There was a smell of wolf in it, and yet again something which was not wolf. It was a mixture of scents so finely jumbled together that only a nose like Gomposh's could have disentangled them. In spite of his immense knowledge of the thousand ways in which the wilderness kindreds spill themselves upon the air, the old bear was puzzled. So, in order to give his mind perfect leisure to attend to his nose, Gomposh sank back on his haunches, and then sat bolt upright with his paws hanging idly in the air.
The scent came more and more plainly. And as it grew, Gomposh's brain worked faster and faster. The smell was half strange and half familiar. Where had he smelt it before? And then, suddenly, he knew.
Shasta, stealing through the spruces as noiselessly as any of the wild brotherhood, thought he had done an extremely clever thing. He fully believed he had caught an old black bear unawares, sitting up on the trail and sniffing at nothing, with his paws dangling foolishly before him. It was not until the boy was close upon him that Gomposh quickly turned his head, and pretended to be surprised. Shasta, recognizing his old friend, came slowly forward with shining eyes.
At first Gomposh did not speak, but that was not surprising. Gomposh was not one to rush into speech when you could express so much by saying nothing. To be able to express a good deal, and yet not to put it into the shape of words—to say things with your whole body and mind without making noises with your mouth and throat—is a wonderful faculty. Few people know anything about it; because half the business of people's lives is carried on in the mouth, and they are not happy or wise enough to be quiet; but the beasts use it continually; because they are very happy and very wise.
So Gomposh looked at Shasta, and Shasta looked at Gomposh, and for a long time neither of them made a sound. But the mind that was in Gomposh's big body, and the body that was outside Gomposh's big mind, went on quietly making all sorts of observations which Shasta easily understood. So he knew, just as well as if Gomposh had said it, that the bear was telling him he had been on his travels; also that things were different in him; that he was another sort of person, because many things had happened to him in the meantime. Exactly what those things were, Gomposh did not know; but he knew what the effect was which they had produced in Shasta. He knew that the part of Shasta that was not wolf had mingled with that part of the world which also is not wolf, and that therefore he was a little less wolfish than before.
At first Shasta felt a little uncomfortable at the way Gomposh looked him calmly through and through. It was as if Gomposh said: "We are a long way off, little Brother. We have travelled far apart. But I catch you with the mind."
And Shasta couldn't help feeling as if he had done something of which he was ashamed. He had left the wild kindred—the wolf-father, the wolf-mother, all that swift, stealthy, fierce wolf-world that had its going among the trees. He had gone out to search for another kindred, almost as swift, stealthy and fierce as the wolves themselves, yet of a strange, unnamable cunning, and of a smell stranger still. And yet with all this strangeness, the new kindred had fastened itself upon him with a hold which Shasta could not shake off, as of something which his half-wolf nature could neither resist nor deny. And the more Gomposh looked at him out of his little piercing eyes, the more keenly he felt that the old bear was realizing this hold upon him of the new kindred, far off beyond the trees.
When at last Gomposh spoke—that is, when he allowed the wisdom that was in him to ooze out in bear language—what he remarked amounted to this:
"You have found the new kindred. You have learnt the new knowledge. You are less wolf than you were."
Shasta did not like being told that he had grown less a wolf. It was just as if Gomposh had accused him of having lost something which was not to be recovered.
"I am just the same as I was," he replied stoutly; but he knew it was not true.
"The moons have gone by, and the moons have gone by," Gomposh said. "The runways have been filled with folk. But you have not come along them. You have not watched them. You have missed everything that has gone by."
Shasta made it clear that one could not be everywhere at the same time, and that, anyhow, he had not missed the moons.
"No one misses the moons," Gomposh remarked gravely, "except those of us who go to sleep. It is a pleasant sleep in the winter when we go sleeping through the moons."
"Nitka and Shoomoo do not sleep," Shasta said boastfully. "We do not sleep the winter sleep—we of the wolves!"
"And so you do not find the world beautifully new when you wake up in the spring," Gomposh said.
That was a fresh idea to Shasta. He knew what a wonderful thing it was to find the world new every day, but it must seem terribly new indeed to you after the winter sleep. The thought of hunger came to his rescue.
"You must be very hungry," he said triumphantly.
"It is better to be very hungry once and get it over," Gomposh said composedly, "than to go on being hungry all the winter when they tell me food is scarce."
Another fresh thought for Shasta! If Gomposh kept on putting new ideas into him at this rate, he felt as if something unpleasant must happen in his head. If he had been rather more of a boy, and rather less of a wolf, he might have been inclined to argue with Gomposh, just for the sake of arguing. As it was, he was wise enough to realize that Gomposh knew more than he did; and that however new or uncomfortable the things were that Gomposh said, they were most likely true. So he said nothing more for some time, but kept turning over in his head the fresh ideas about newness and hunger, and the being less a wolf.
"You will not stay among us," Gomposh said after a long pause. "You will go back to the new kindred, and the new smell."
Shasta felt frightened at that—so frightened as to be indignant. He was afraid lest the old bear might be saying what was true. And the memory of the hide thong that had cut into his flesh and of the horrible captivity when he had been forced to stay in one small space, whether he liked it or not, made him feel more and more strongly that he would not go back whatever happened.
As Gomposh did not seem inclined to talk any more, Shasta thought he would continue his walk. It was good to be out on the trails again, passing where the wild feet passed that had never known what it was to be held prisoners in one place. And as he went, all his senses were on the watch to see and hear and smell everything tha............