On the ledge above the four wolves a tall man shook a clenched fist at the sky. Almighty God, what a fight it had been! He sang a few triumphant bars in his loudest baritone and then addressed himself to the four dogs who, mouths open and sides heaving, looked up at him. "Hyar, fellers! Shore as shootin that war no fight for greenhorns! I salute you, wild wolves of the mountains! This here critter knows a good huggin match when he sees one and that was just about the best he has ever seen." To the panting wolves still staring up he said, "Hyar!" and waved a hand at them. "Good~bye, brave warriors! Keep your teeth sharp, and good luck!"

Sam had a lively admiration for the big gray wolf. He thought it the most intelligent of all the wild beasts—in tracking, in dodging enemies, including traps, and in loyalty to his own kind. He knew there were stories of wolves that devoured one another when half dead with hunger, but no mountain man had any proof of it. The human animal would eat his own kind, but not the wolf. On the contrary, a wolf family would fight to the death to protect one another, and that was more than most human families would do. No other beast, and only a few of the birds, would do that. He liked the clean deadly way in which they fought. Around campfires mountain men raised the question, Which of the beasts in the Rocky Mountains was king? Now and then one argued that the grizzly was, and he was, beast for beast; but twice now Sam had seen wolves put a grizzly on the run.

He knew all the wolf calls. Some men said there were five, some, six. Sam could identify only five. There was the high-keyed rasping whine the parents made when warning or commanding their pups; the hunting call, a loud deep-throated howl in two or more keys, followed by sharp barking; the shrill eager yelping when in pursuit of prey; the announcement that the prey had been brought down, a deep growl exploding up the victorious throat; and the mating cry in midwinter, which was the chilling howlin the frozen white nights.

As far as Sam could figure it out, the Almighty had made the world only for the brave and the strong, both male and female; and though Bill Williams said a woman’s breast was a hard rock on which he could find no trail, and though some of the mountain men agreed with him, Sam thought the female of both man and beast had her special virtues. He liked best of all the way some of them would fight to the death for their children—and what female, he wondered, had ever fought more magnificently than the mother on the Musselshell? Not all mothers would fight, or even most of them. The buffalo cow, the big strong lubber, would beller her head off and bug her eyes out, or make short charges at the wolves determined to bring her baby down. She would fall behind with her calf and then have to make the choice of leaving it or going with the herd. She always went with the herd. So did the elk mother, and so, Sam had heard, did the caribou mother. It was only a few of the flesh-eating mothers that really fought for their young.

The bitch wolf would fight till she died. Or the Wolverine, the bobcat, the badger, the weasel, the bear, the cougar, and many more. These were all natural fighters. But the most remarkable courage, for Sam, was shown by some of the feathered mothers, who actually had nothing to fight with. He had seen a grouse mother fly into the face of a wolf and try to strike it down with her wings; and in the next moment he had seen that mother torn into pieces, while her downy little ones scattered to the undergrowth. He had seen the avocet spread her wings, open her absurdly long bill, and rush on her long spindly legs at the enemy, only to die as suddenly as the grouse mother. He had seen a horned lark with a leg and a wing broken rush from her nest at an enemy, half walking and rolling and fluttering on the good leg and the good wing. What the poor crippled creature, little more than a handful of feathers and song, had thought she could do against a coyote Sam could not imagine; or why the Creator had put such courage in creatures that had nothing to fight with. God had built into the osprey hawk knowledge of how to carry a fish in flight, so there would be the least possible wind resistance; into the shrike mother the knowledge of how to spread her wings in hot weather, to protect the babies in her nest; and into the red-tailed hawk the sense of how to execute, in mid-air, a deft maneuver when the falcon came down to strike—the redtail suddenly turned over on its back and presented its talons. But he had not built into the meadow lark, one of his superlative musicians, the sense not to build its nest on the ground, where every coyote, bobcat, weasel, and wolverine could easily find it.

Reading nature, for Sam, was like reading the Bible; in both, the will of the Creator was plain. Or so anyway it had seemed to him since coming west; his experiences had run the gamut from the tenderest to the most savage emotions. One day he had looked down from a ledge on three baby redtails in a nest with a dead squirrel: one baby hawk, no larger than his brothers but more aggressive, was so determined to have all the squirrel that when the other two strove for a part of it he struck them fiercely with talons and beak, and then, seizing one by the tail, upended him and pushed him over the rim of the nest and down. One morning he had lain in daylight dusk in a kind of tent he had made and watched the marvelous flight of two swallows flashing back and forth just above him, as they looked over his interior to see if it was suitable for a nest; and another time he had observed the amazing mating dance of the sage cock. The birds had returned to their strutting grounds, to which they came year after year; and while the plainly dressed hens looked for insects and seemed not to care at all for wooing, the handsome males showed themselves off in dance steps. A cock would take six or eight quick steps and half turn, his wings drooping, his spiked tail spread to its fullest width, his proud head high and back, his chest pulled full of arrogance. He looked as if he were showing off the pure snowy whiteness of the feathers around his neck. As he danced, repeating his steps and half turn, feathers parted and small bare areas of his body became visible, looking like gray leather; and his air sacs, for all the world like two eggs nesting in white down, alternately filled and collapsed. As the air sacs collapsed he uttered a kind of gobbling or plopping sound and raised his wings, holding them high an instant and letting them fall. This part of his act he usually repeated three times, and then danced again. His gutturals were in a series of three and at the end of the third the cock voiced a high flutelike sound that carried to the farthest hen in the area. When thirty or forty cocks were dancing and strutting the mountain men thought it one of the doggonedest spectacles they had ever seen. But whether it was the loon treading with both feet and wing tips at high speed across the waters and uttering his insane yell, or the hummingbird poised on wings that moved too fast for the human eye, while with her long bill she thrust deep into the throat of her baby and pumped food into its stomach, or meadow lark or purple finch or bluebird or wood thrush pouring upon the golden air their liquid notes, or the water ouzel diving twenty feet to stroll along the bottom of a pool, or the snipe’s tail feathers making fantastic music at dusk, or the harsh symphony from the music boxes of a hundred frogs and toads, it was all for Sam a part of a divine plan and he loved it all. What made him most unhappy were the hours he had to give to sleep, in a life that was short at best. He thought that possibly the Creator had given sleep to His creatures so that they would awaken with the eyes of morning and a fresh discovery of the world.