ld have been Gulo, or something very much like
him. But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for
his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master. Gulo,
however, was not a cross. He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, _alias_
glutton, _alias_ carcajou, _alias_ quick-hatch, _alias_ fjeldfras in
the vernacular, or, officially, _Gulo luscus_. But, by whatever name
you called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character, too, was of
a bad odor. A great man once said that he was like a bear cub with a
superadded tail; but that great man cannot have seen his face. If he
had, he would have looked for his double among the fiends on the top of
Notre Dame. There was, in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only
in a very hot place not on the earth.

He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man, and no beast,
ought to be trusted with; and he had no soul. God alone knows if love,
which softens most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior
seemed to show that it had not. Perhaps love was afraid of him. And,
upon my soul, I don't wonder.

It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place in the pine-forest
where Gulo stood, and the unpitying moon cast a dainty tracery through
the tasseled roof upon the new and glistening snow around him--the snow
that comes early to those parts--and the north-east wind cut like
several razors. But Gulo did not seem to care. Wrapped up in his
ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black cloak--just his
gray-sided, black fiend's face poking out--he seemed warm enough. When
he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the murderous, scraping,
long claws of him were nearly white; and as he set his lips in a
devilish grin, his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.

Verily, this was no beast--he would have taped four feet and a quarter
from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure
him--no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves. Things
were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other
living creature--awful things.

Suddenly he looked up. The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as
if an army were asleep there. And an army was--of wood-pigeons.
Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head,
come from Heaven knows where, going to--who could tell in the end?

All at once one fell. Without apparent reason or cause, it fell. And
the wolverine, with his qui