Summary
A bullet meant for a collie’s skull instead ricochets off the conscience of a barefoot farm boy; the child, luminous with pity, snatches the pup from oblivion and looses it into the spruce-shadowed vastness where civilization frays like wet rope. Seasons wheel: the dog, now a dusk-eyed hybrid, learns the etiquette of fang and frost, his coat absorbing moonlight, his howl braided with wolf-song until ranchers brand him reaper incarnate. The same boy, taller, rifle slung, tracks the mythic killer only to find the once-floppy ears flattened by pain, a steel jaw gnawing bone. Mercy reprised: the trap’s teeth spring open, the animal’s gaze flickers recognition, and a pact older than domestication rekindles. Later, when earth gulps the boy into a limestone maw, the wolf-dog becomes courier, summoning two-leggers who would murder him for pedigree alone. Again the boy intercedes, stepping between gun and beast, sealing a companionship that neither kennel nor wilderness can sunder.
Synopsis
A young boy saves a collie pup's life when his master is ready to move on and is about to shoot him. The pup is then free to roam the wilderness and must fight for existence along with the wolves. Acquiring wolfish ways, he is hunted throughout the range as the killer wolf. When the boy goes hunting for this killer wolf and stumbles upon the dog (now grown to adulthood) caught in a trap, he sets him free. The wolf-dog and the boy become friends, and when the boy falls into a trap, the dog fetches help. The searchers free the boy and are about to kill the dog but again the boy comes to his rescue, an act resulting in a permanent bond between man and beast.
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