Dusty Star

In an old badger-hole among a maze of bramble-brakes and ancient thickets of thorn and juniper covering the foot of one of Carboona's eastern spurs, one morning very early, as Little-Sweet-Voice, the white-throated sparrow, was singing his earliest song, a great event took place. It was twilight in the badger-hole, and only persons accustomed to odds and ends of day-light could have seen what was going on. Not that it mattered. The only person to whom it could have mattered was a grey mother-wolf, and she did not need the light. The badger-hole had been enlarged, and specially arranged for the event, without the badgers having been consulted. This wasn't as rude as it sounds, for the simple reason that there hadn't been any badgers to consult. Long before the mother-wolf and her mate had gone apartment-hunting, the badgers had moved deeper into Carboona, leaving no address. Now that it was more roomy and better aired, it was a pleasant place enough so long as you didn't stub your nose against a jagged stump of pine root that pierced the northern wall. True it was a little damp in places, and got noticeably stuffier as you went further in; but it was a good wolf stuffiness, and helped to give the true home smell that warned strangers that all interfering noses had best keep out of the way. Before Little-Sweet-Voice, at the tip of his fir-branch high over the hole, had come to the end of his song, seven baby wolves had got themselves born. Seven little blind, hairless, helpless things that hadn't an inch of beauty between them; seven little flabby uglinesses that could do nothing but wriggle and suck. But such as they were, the old wolf loved her ugly babies with all her wolfish heart. For a long time no one—not even the father wolf—saw them but herself. A better place for being secret than the hole among the bramble-brakes she could not have chosen. The great old thorn-trees, with their twisty stems and thorny branches which had been growing twistier and thornier through countless moons, stretched their gnarled limbs high above the den and guarded endless secrecies as countless as the moons. And the brambles reached their twisted tangles this way and that in a bewildering labyrinth of thorns. While, dotting all the upper slopes, the junipers, large and little, stood up in dusk battalions above the lonely land. None but the wild furred feet of the wilderness ever went that way. In all its mazy length the print of human moccasins had never slurred the undergrowth trails. Even the wild creatures themselves did not greatly frequent it, by reason of its mighty growth of thorns, so that even among the long solitudes of Carboona, it was a loneliness apart. It was some time before the little wolves got any idea of the outside thorniness and brambleness which hid them from the public gaze. All they knew of the world was the good smell and the good gloom of the badger-hole, where, as soon as their eyes were opened after the nine days, they could make out the immense grey mass of their mother, who came and went mysteriously, a mountain of warmth and food. And here, in the perpetual twilight, they slept and sucked, and sprawled and tumbled, and occasionally went tremendous expeditions, and stubbed their noses against the pine root that struck like a savage promontory into the abyss. Not until they were several weeks old, and were really getting very troublesome in the den, did the patient old mother allow them their first glimpse of the world; and then only after she had taken every possible precaution to safeguard against anything, bird, beast and human, being on the watch.