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Title: The Watchers of the Trails
A Book of Animal Life
Author: Charles G. D. Roberts
Release Date: June 7, 2008 [EBook #25718]
Language: English
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[Illustration]
The Watchers of the Trails
A Book of Animal Life
[Illustration]
[Illustration: "A HUGE BLACK BEAR STANDING IN THE TRAIL."
(_See page 177_)]
THE WATCHERS
OF THE TRAIL
A BOOK OF ANIMAL LIFE _by_
CHARLES G D ROBERTS
_Author of_
"_The Kindred of the Wild_," "_The Heart of the
Ancient Wood_," "_Barbara Ladd_," "_The Forge in
the Forest_," "_Poems_," _etc._
[Illustration]
_With many Illustrations by_
_CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL_
A. WESSELS COMPANY
MDCCCCVI NEW YORK
[Illustration]
_Copyright, 1904, by_
The S. S. McClure Co.
_Copyright, 1904, by_
Perry Mason Company
_Copyright, 1903, 1904, by_
Robert Howard Russell
_Copyright, 1903, by_
The Metropolitan Magazine Company
_Copyright, 1903, by_
The Success Company
_Copyright, 1902, 1903, by_
The Outing Publishing Company
_Copyright, 1902, by_
Frank Leslie Publishing House
_Copyright, 1904, by_
L. C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)
_All rights reserved_
Published, June, 1904
_Colonial Press_
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
To
My Fellow of the Wild
Ernest Thompson Seton
[Illustration]
Prefatory Note
In the preface to a former volume[1] I have endeavoured to trace the
development of the modern animal story and have indicated what
appeared to me to be its tendency and scope. It seems unnecessary to
add anything here but a few words of more personal application.
[Footnote 1: "The Kindred of the Wild."]
The stories of which this volume is made up are avowedly fiction. They
are, at the same time, true, in that the material of which they are
moulded consists of facts,--facts as precise as painstaking
observation and anxious regard for truth can make them. Certain of the
stories, of course, are true literally. Literal truth may be attained
by stories which treat of a single incident, or of action so
restricted as to lie within the scope of a single observation. When,
on the other hand, a story follows the career of a wild creature of
the wood or air or water through wide intervals of time and space, it
is obvious that the truth of that story must be of a different kind.
The complete picture which such a story presents is built up from
observation necessarily detached and scattered; so that the utmost it
can achieve as a whole is consistency with truth. If a writer has, by
temperament, any sympathetic understanding of the wild kindreds; if
he has any intimate knowledge of their habits, with any sensitiveness
to the infinite variation of their personalities; and if he has
chanced to live much among them during the impressionable periods
of his life, and so become saturated in their atmosphere and their
environment;--then he may hope to make his most elaborate piece of
animal biography not less true to nature than his transcript of an
isolated fact. The present writer, having spent most of his boyhood on
the fringes of the forest, with few interests save those which the
forest afforded, may claim to have had the intimacies of the
wilderness as it were thrust upon him. The earliest enthusiasms which
he can recollect are connected with some of the furred or feathered
kindred; and the first thrills strong enough to leave a lasting mark
on his memory are those with which he used to follow--furtive,
apprehensive, expectant, breathlessly watchful--the lure of an unknown
trail.
There is one more point which may seem to claim a word. A very
distinguished author--to whom all contemporary writers on nature are
indebted, and from whom it is only with the utmost diffidence that I
venture to dissent at all--has gently called me to account on the
charge of ascribing to my animals human motives and the mental
processes of man. The fact is, however, that this fault is one which I
have been at particular pains to guard against. The psychological
processes of the animals are so simple, so obvious, in comparison with
those of man, their actions flow so directly from their springs of
impulse, that it is, as a rule, an easy matter to infer the motives
which are at any one moment impelling them. In my desire to avoid
alike the melodramatic, the visionary, and the sentimental, I have
studied to keep well within the limits of safe inference. Where I may
have seemed to state too confidently the motives underlying the
special action of this or that animal, it will usually be found that
the action itself is very fully presented; and it will, I think, be
further found that the motive which I have here assumed affords the
most reasonable, if not the only reasonable, explanation of that
action.
C. G. D. R.
New York, _April, 1904_.
Contents of the Book
[Illustration]
PAGE
Prefatory Note vii
The Freedom of the Black-faced Ram 3
The Master of Golden Pool 25
The Return to the Trails 45
The Little Wolf of the Pool 65
The Little Wolf of the Air 73
The Alien of the Wild 83
The Silver Frost 111
By the Winter Tide 121
The Rivals of Ringwaak 131
The Decoy 155
The Laugh in the Dark 173
The Kings of the Intervale 185
The Kill 197
The Little People of the Sycamore 211
Horns and Antlers 237
In the Deep of the Grass 247
When the Moon Is over the Corn 257
The Truce 267
The Keeper of the Water-Gate 291
When the Moose Cow Calls 311
The Passing of the Black Whelps 323
The Homeward Trail 351
[Illustration]
The Watchers of the Trails
The Freedom of the Black-faced Ram
On the top of Ringwaak Hill the black-faced ram stood motionless,
looking off with mild, yellow eyes across the wooded level, across the
scattered farmsteads of the settlement, and across the bright,
retreating spirals of the distant river, to that streak of scarlet
light on the horizon which indicated the beginning of sunrise. A few
paces below him, half-hidden by a gray stump, a green juniper bush,
and a mossy brown hillock, lay a white ewe with a lamb at her side.
The ewe's jaws moved leisurely, as she chewed her cud and gazed up
with comfortable confidence at the sturdy figure of the ram
silhouetted against the brightening sky.
This sunrise was the breaking of the black-faced ram's first day in
the wilderness. Never before had he stood on an open hilltop and
watched the light spread magically over a wide, wild landscape. Up to
the morning of the previous day, his three years of life had been
passed in protected, green-hedged valley pastures, amid tilled fields
and well-stocked barns, beside a lilied water. This rugged, lonely,
wide-visioned world into which fortune had so unexpectedly projected
him filled him with wonder. Yet he felt strangely at ease therein. The
hedged pastures had never quite suited him; but here, at length, in
the great spaces, he felt at home. The fact was that, alike in
character and in outward appearance, he was a reversion to far-off
ancestors. He was the product of a freak of heredity.
In the fat-soiled valley-lands, some fifteen miles back of Ringwaak
Hill, the farmers had a heavy, long-wooled, hornless strain of sheep,
mainly of the Leicester breed, which had been crossed, years back, by
an imported Scotch ram of one of the horned, courageous, upland,
black-faced varieties. The effect of this hardy cross had apparently
all been bred out, save for an added stamina in the resulting stock,
which was uniformly white and hornless. When, therefore, a lamb was
born with a black face and blackish-gray legs, it was cherished as a
curiosity; and when, in time, it developed a splendid pair of horns,
it became the handsomest ram in all the valley, and a source of great
pride to its owner. But when black-faced lambs began to grow common in
the hornless and immaculate flocks, the feelings of the valley folks
changed, and word went around that the strain of the white-faced must
be kept pure. Then it was decreed that the great horned ram should no
longer sire the flocks, but be hurried to the doom of his kind and go
to the shambles.
Just at this time, however, a young farmer from the backwoods
settlement over behind Ringwaak chanced to visit the valley. The sheep
of his settlement were not only hornless, but small and light-wooled
as well, and the splendid, horned ram took his fancy. Here was a
chance to improve his breed. He bought the ram for what he was worth
to the butcher, and proudly led him away, over the hills and through
the great woods, toward the settlement on the other side of Ringwaak.
The backwoodsman knew right well that a flock of sheep may be driven,
but that a single sheep must be led; so he held his new possession
securely by a piece of stout rope about ten feet long. For an hour or
two the ram followed with an exemplary docility quite foreign to his
independent spirit. He was subdued by the novelty of his
surroundings,--the hillocky, sloping pastures, and the shadowy
solemnity of the forest. Moreover, he perceived, in his dim way, a
kind of mastery in this heavy-booted, homespun-clad, tobacco-chewing,
grave-eyed man from the backwoods, and for a long time he felt none of
his usual pugnacity. But by and by the craving for freedom began to
stir in his breast, and the blood of his hill-roving ancestors
thrilled toward the wild pastures. The glances which, from time to
time, he cast upon the backwoodsman at the other end of the rope
became wary, calculating, and hostile. This stalwart form, striding
before him, was the one barrier between himself and freedom. Freedom
was a thing of which he knew, indeed, nothing,--a thing which, to most
of his kind, would have seemed terrifying rather than alluring. But to
him, with that inherited wildness stirring in his blood, it seemed the
thing to be craved before all else.
Presently they came to a little cold spring, bubbling up beside the
road and tinkling over the steep bank. The road at this point ran
along a hillside, and the slope below the road was clothed with
blueberry and other dense shrubs. The backwoodsman was hot and
thirsty. Flinging aside his battered hat, he dropped down on his hands
and knees beside the spring and touched his lips to the water.
In this position, still holding the rope in a firm grasp, he had his
back to the ram. Moreover, he no longer looked either formidable or
commanding. The ram saw his chance. A curious change came over his
mild, yellow eyes. They remained yellow, indeed, but became cold,
sinister, and almost cruel in their expression.
The backwoodsman, as he drank, held a tight grip on the rope. The ram
settled back slightly, till the rope was almost taut. Then he launched
himself forward. His movement was straight and swift, as if he had
been propelled by a gigantic spring. His massive, broad-horned
forehead struck the stooping man with terrific force.
With a grunt of pain and amazement, the man shot sprawling over the
bank, and landed, half-stunned, in a clump of blueberry bushes. Dazed
and furious, he picked himself up, passed a heavy hand across his
scratched, smarting face, and turned to see the ram disappearing among
the thickets above the road. His disappointment so overcame his wrath
that he forgot to exercise his vigorous backwoods vocabulary, and
resumed his homeward way with his head full of plans for the
recapture of his prize.
The ram, meanwhile, trailing the length of rope behind him, was
galloping madly through the woods. He was intoxicated with his
freedom. These rough, wild, lonely places seemed to him his home. With
all his love for the wilderness, the instinct which had led him to it
was altogether faulty and incomplete. It supplied him with none of the
needful forest lore. He had no idea of caution. He had no inkling of
fear. He had no conception of the enemies that might lurk in thicket
or hollow. He went crashing ahead as if the green world belonged to
him, and cared not who might hear the brave sound of his going. Now
and then he stepped on the rope, and stumbled; but that was a small
matter.
Through dark strips of forest, over rocky, tangled spaces, across
slopes of burnt barren, his progress was always upward, until, having
traversed several swampy vales and shadowy ravines, toward evening he
came out upon the empty summit of Ringwaak. On the topmost hillock he
took his stand proudly, his massive head and broad, curled horns in
splendid relief against the amber sky.
As he stood, surveying his new realm, a low bleat came to him from a
sheltered hollow close by, and, looking down, he saw a small white ewe
with a new-born lamb nursing under her flank. Here was his new realm
peopled at once. Here were followers of his own kind. He stepped
briskly down from his hillock and graciously accepted the homage of
the ewe, who snuggled up against him as if afraid at the loneliness
and the coming on of night. All night he slept beside the mother and
her young, in the sheltered hollow, and kept no watch because he
feared no foe. But the ewe kept watch, knowing well what perils might
steal upon them in the dark.
As it chanced, however, no midnight prowler visited the summit of
Ringwaak Hill, and the first of dawn found the great ram again at his
post of observation. It is possible that he had another motive besides
his interest in his new, wonderful world. He may have expected the
woodsman to follow and attempt his recapture, and resolved not to be
taken unawares. Whatever his motive, he kept his post till the sun was
high above the horizon, and the dew-wet woods gleamed as if sown with
jewels. Then he came down and began to feed with the ewe, cropping the
short, thin grass with quick bites and finding it far more sweet than
the heavy growths of his old pasture.
Late in the morning, when pasturing was over for the time, the ram and
the little ewe lay down in the shade of a steep rock, comfortably
chewing their cud, while the lamb slept at its mother's side. The ram,
deeply contented, did not observe two gray-brown, stealthy forms
creeping along the slope, from bush to rock, and from stump to
hillock. But the ewe, ever on the watch, presently caught sight of
them, and sprang to her feet with a snort of terror. She knew well
enough what a lynx was. Yet for all her terror she had no thought of
flight. Her lamb was too young to flee, and she would stay by it in
face of any fate.
The ram got up more slowly, turned his head, and eyed the stealthy
strangers with grave curiosity. Curiosity, however, changed into
hostility as he saw by the ewe's perturbation that the strangers were
foes; and a sinister glitter came into the great gold eyes which shone
so brilliantly from his black face.
[Illustration: "THROUGH DARK STRIPS OF FOREST."]
Seeing themselves discovered, the two lynxes threw aside their cunning
and rushed ravenously upon what they counted easy prey. They knew
something of the timorous hearts of sheep, and had little
expectation of resistance. But being, first of all, hungry rather than
angry, they preferred what seemed easiest to get. It was upon the lamb
and the ewe that they sprang, ignoring the ram contemptuously.
One thing which they had not reckoned with, however, was the temper of
the ewe. Before one fierce claw could reach her lamb, she had butted
the assailant so fiercely in the flank that he forgot his purpose and
turned with a snarl of rage to rend her. Meanwhile the other lynx,
springing for her neck, had experienced the unexpected. He had been
met by the lightning charge of the ram, fair in the ribs, and hurled
sprawling into a brittle, pointed tangle of dead limbs sticking up
from the trunk of a fallen tree.
Having delivered this most effective blow, the ram stepped back a pace
or two, mincing on his slender feet, and prepared to repeat it. The
lynx was struggling frantically among the branches, which stuck into
him and tore his fine fur. Just in time to escape the second assault
he got free,--but free not for fight but for flight. One tremendous,
wildly contorted leap landed him on the other side of the dead tree;
and, thoroughly cowed, he scurried away down the hillside.
The ram at once turned his attention to the ewe and her antagonist.
But the second lynx, who had not found his task so simple as he had
expected it to be, had no stomach left for one more difficult. The ewe
was bleeding about the head, and would, of course, if she had been
left to fight it out, have been worsted in a very short time. But the
enemy had felt the weight of her blows upon his ribs, and had learned
his lesson. For just a fraction of a second he turned, and defied the
ram with a screeching snarl. But when that horned, black, battering
head pitched forward at him he bounded aside like a furry gray ball
and clambered to the top of the rock. Here he crouched for some
moments, snarling viciously, his tufted ears set back against his
neck, and his stump of a tail twitching with rage, while the ram
minced to and fro beneath him, stamping defiance with his dainty
hoofs. All at once the big cat doubled upon itself, slipped down the
other side of the rock, and went gliding away through the stumps and
hillocks like a gray shadow; and the ram, perhaps to conceal his
elation, fell to grazing as if nothing out of the ordinary had
happened. The ewe, on the other hand, seeing the danger so well past,
took no thought of her torn face, but set herself to comfort and
reassure the trembling lamb.
After this, through the slow, bright hours while the sun swung hotly
over Ringwaak, the ram and his little family were undisturbed. An
eagle, wheeling, wheeling, wheeling in the depths of the blue, looked
down and noted the lamb. But he had no thought of attacking so well
guarded a prey. The eagle had a wider outlook than others of the wild
kindred, and he knew from of old many matters which the lynxes of
Ringwaak had never learned till that day.
There were other visitors that came and glanced at the little family
during the quiet content of their cud-chewing. A weasel ran restlessly
over a hillock and peered down upon them with hard, bright eyes. The
big ram, with his black face and huge, curling horns, was a novel
phenomenon, and the weasel disappeared behind the hillock, only to
appear again much nearer, around a clump of weeds. His curiosity was
mingled with malicious contempt, till the ram chanced to rise and
shake his head. Then the weasel saw the rope that wriggled from the
ram's neck. Was it some new and terrible kind of snake? The weasel
respected snakes when they were large and active; so he forgot his
curiosity and slipped away from the dangerous neighbourhood.
The alarm of the weasel, however, was nothing to that of the
wood-mice. While the ram was lying down they came out of their secret
holes and played about securely, seeming to realize that the big
animal's presence was a safeguard to them. But when he moved, and they
saw the rope trail sinuously behind him through the scanty grass, they
were almost paralyzed with panic. Such a snake as that would require
all the wood-mice on Ringwaak to assuage his appetite. They fairly
fell backward into their burrows, where they crouched quivering in the
darkest recesses, not daring to show their noses again for hours.
Neither weasel nor wood-mice, nor the chickadees which came to eye him
saucily, seemed to the big ram worth a moment's attention. But when a
porcupine, his quills rattling and bristling till he looked as big
around as a half-bushel basket, strolled aimlessly by, the ram was
interested and rose to his feet. The little, deep-set eyes of the
porcupine passed over him with supremest indifference, and their owner
began to gnaw at the bark of a hemlock sapling which grew at one side
of the rock. To this gnawing he devoted his whole attention, with an
eagerness that would have led one to think he was hungry,--as, indeed,
he was, not having had a full meal for nearly half an hour. The
porcupine, of all nature's children, is the best provided for, having
the food he loves lying about him at all seasons. Yet he is for ever
eating, as if famine were in ambush for him just over the next
hillock.
Seeing the high indifference of this small, bristling stranger, the
ram stepped up and was just about to sniff at him inquiringly. Had he
done so, the result would have been disastrous. He would have got a
slap in the face from the porcupine's active and armed tail; and his
face would have straightway been transformed into a sort of anguished
pincushion, stuck full of piercing, finely barbed quills. He would
have paid dear for his ignorance of woodcraft,--perhaps with the loss
of an eye, or even with starvation from a quill working through into
his gullet. But fortunately for him the ewe understood the
peculiarities of porcupines. Just in time she noted his danger, and
rudely butted him aside. He turned upon her in a fume of amazed
indignation; but in some way she made him understand that the
porcupine was above all law, and not to be trifled with even by the
lords of the wilderness. Very sulkily he lay down again, and the
porcupine went on chiselling hemlock bark, serenely unconscious of the
anger in the inscrutable yellow eyes that watched him from the ram's
black face.
When the shadows grew long and luminous, toward evening, the ram,
following some unexplained instinct, again mounted the topmost point
of Ringwaak, and stood like a statue gazing over the vast,
warm-coloured solitude of his new domain. His yellow eyes were placid
with a great content. A little below him, the white lamb wobbling on
weak legs at her side, the ewe pastured confidently, secure in the
proved prowess of her protector. As the sun dropped below the far-off
western rim of the forest, it seemed as if one wide wave of lucent
rose-violet on a sudden flooded the world. Everything on Ringwaak--the
ram's white fleece, the gray, bleached stumps, the brown hillocks, the
green hollows and juniper clumps and poplar saplings--took on a
palpitating aerial stain. Here and there in the distance the coils of
the river gleamed clear gold; and overhead, in the hollow
amber-and-lilac arch of sky, the high-wandering night-hawks swooped
with the sweet twang of smitten strings.
Down at the foot of the northern slope of Ringwaak lay a dense cedar
swamp. Presently, out from the green fringe of the cedars, a bear
thrust his head and cast a crafty glance about the open. Seeing the
ram on the hilltop and the ewe with her lamb feeding near by, he sank
back noiselessly into the cover of the cedars, and stole around toward
the darkening eastern slope, where a succession of shrubby copses ran
nearly to the top of the hill.
The bear was rank, rusty-coated, old, and hungry; and he loved sheep.
He was an adept in stalking this sweet-fleshed, timorous quarry, and
breaking its neck with a well-directed blow as it dashed past him in a
panic. Emerging from the swamp, he crept up the hill, taking cunning
advantage of every bush, stump, and boulder. For all his awkward
looking bulk, he moved as lightly as a cat, making himself small, and
twisting and flattening and effacing himself; and never a twig was
allowed to snap, or a stone to clatter, under his broad, unerring
feet.
About this time it chanced that the backwoodsman, who had been out
nearly all day hunting for his lost prize, approached the edge of the
forest at the other side of Ringwaak,--and saw the figure of the ram
against the sky. Then, seeing also the ewe with the lamb beside her,
he knew that the game was his.
Below the top of the hill there was not a scrap of cover for a
distance of perhaps twenty paces. The bear crept to the very last
bush, the ram being occupied with the world at a distance, and the ewe
busy at her pasturing. Behind the bush--a thick, spreading
juniper--the bear crouched motionless for some seconds, his little red
eyes aglow, and his jaws beginning to slaver with eagerness. Then
selecting the unconscious ewe, because he knew she was not likely to
desert the lamb, he rushed upon his intended victim.
The ewe, as it chanced, was about thirty-five or forty feet distant
from the enemy, as he lunged out, black and appalling, from behind the
juniper. At the same time the ram was not more than twenty or
twenty-five feet distant, straight above the lamb, in a direction at
right angles to the path of the bear. The ewe looked up with a
startled bleat, wheeled, sprang nimbly before the lamb, and faced her
doom dauntlessly, with lowered head.
[Illustration: "HE CREPT UP THE HILL."]
The ram's mild gaze changed in a flash to one of cold, yellow savagery
at the sight of the great black beast invading his kingdom. Down went
his conquering head. For just a fraction of a second his sturdy body
sagged back, as if he were about to sit down. This, so to speak, was
the bending of the bow. Then he launched himself straight down the
slope, all his strength, his weight, and the force of gravity
combining to drive home that mighty stroke.
The bear had never, in all his experience with sheep, encountered one
whose resistance was worth taking into account. The defiance of the
ewe was less than nothing to him. But as he saw, from the corner of
his eye, the huge bulk plunging down upon him, he hesitated, and half
turned, with great paw upraised for a finishing blow.
He turned not quite in time, however, and his defence was not quite
strenuous enough for the emergency. He struck like lightning, as a
bear always can, but just before the stroke could find its mark the
ram's armed forehead crashed into his ribs. The blow, catching him as
it did, was irresistible. His claws tore off a patch of wool and skin,
and ploughed red furrows across the ram's shoulder,--but the next
instant he was sprawling, his breath jarred from his lungs, against a
stump some ten feet down the slope.
As the bear struggled to his feet, furious but half-daunted with
amazement, the ram danced backward a pace or two on his nimble feet,
as if showing off, and then delivered his second charge. The
bewildered bear was again caught unready, irresolute as to whether he
should fight or flee; and again he was knocked headlong, a yard or two
further down the slope. His was not the dauntless spirit that most of
his kindred would have shown in such a case, and he would willingly
have made his escape at once if he had seen his way quite clear to do
so. But at this moment, while he hesitated, he heard a man's voice
shouting loudly, and saw the tall backwoodsman running toward him up
the hill. This sight turned his alarm into a blind panic. His feet
seemed to acquire wings as he tore madly away among the thickets. When
he was hidden by the leafage, his path could still be followed by the
crashing of dry branches and the clattering of loosened stones.
The woodsman had seen the whole incident, and was wild with enthusiasm
over the prowess of his prize. Bears had been the most dreaded scourge
of the settlement sheep-farmers, but now, as he proudly said to
himself, he had a ram that could "lick a b'ar silly!" He bore no
grudge on account of his discomfiture that morning beside the spring,
but rather thought of it with appreciation as a further evidence of
his favourite's cunning and prowess; and he foresaw, with a chuckle,
that there were painful surprises in store for the bears of the
Ringwaak range. He had made a wise purchase indeed when he saved that
splendid beast from the butcher.
Hearing the man's voice, the ram had halted in dismay just when he was
about to charge the bear a third time. He had no mind to go again into
captivity. But, on the other hand, for all his lordliness of spirit,
he felt that the man was his master. At first he lowered his head
threateningly, as if about to attack; but when the backwoodsman
shouted at him there was an authority in those tones which he could
not withstand, and he sullenly drew aside. With a good-natured laugh,
the man picked the lamb up in his arms, whereupon the mother stepped
timidly to his side, evidently having no fear. The man rubbed her nose
kindly, and stroked her ears, and gave her something from his pocket
which she ate greedily; and, as the ram looked on, the anger gradually
faded out from his yellow eyes. At length the man turned and walked
slowly down the hill, carrying the lamb. The ewe followed, crowding as
close to him as she could, and stumbling as she went because her eyes
were fixed upon her little one.
The ram hesitated. He looked at the hillside, the woods, and the sky
beginning to grow chill with the onrush of twilight. Then he looked
at the retreating figures. Suddenly he saw his world growing empty and
desolate. With an anxious bleat he trotted after the ewe, and took his
docile place a few feet behind the man's heels. The man glanced over
his shoulders, and a smile of pleasure softened his rugged face. In a
few moments the little procession disappeared in the woods, moving
toward the settlement, and Ringwaak Hill was left solitary in the
dusk, with the lonely notes of the night-hawks twanging over it.
The Master of Golden Pool
One shore of the pool was a spacious sweeping curve of the sward,
dotted with clumps of blue flag-flowers. From the green fringes of
this shore the bottom sloped away softly over a sand so deep and
glowing in its hue of orange-yellow as to give the pool the rich name
by which it was known for miles up and down the hurrying Clearwater.
The other shore was a high, overhanging bank, from whose top drooped a
varied leafage of birch, ash, poplar, and hemlock. Under this bank the
water was deep and dark, a translucent black with trembling streaks
and glints of amber. Fifty yards up-stream a low fall roared
musically; but before reaching the fresh tranquillity of the pool, the
current bore no signs of its disturbance save a few softly whirling
foam clusters. Light airs, perfumed with birch and balsam and warm
scents of the sun-steeped sward, drew over the pool from time to time,
wrinkling and clouding its glassy surface. Birds flew over it,
catching the small flies to whom its sheen was a ceaseless lure. And
huge dragon-flies, with long, iridescent bodies and great jewelled,
sinister eyes, danced and darted above it.
The cool black depths under the bank retained their coolness through
the fiercest heats of summer, because just here the brook was joined
by the waters of an icy spring stealing down through a crevice of the
rocks; and here in the deepest recess, exacting toll of all the varied
life that passed his domain, the master of Golden Pool made his home.
For several years the great trout had held his post in the pool,
defying every lure of the crafty fisherman. The Clearwater was a
protected stream, being leased to a rich fishing club; and the master
of the pool was therefore secure against the treacherous assaults of
net or dynamite. Many times each season fishermen would come and pit
their skill against his cunning; but never a fly could tempt him,
never a silvery, trolled minnow or whirling spoon deceive him to the
fatal rush. At some new lure he would rise lazily once in awhile,
revealing his bulk to the ambitious angler,--but never to take hold.
Contemptuously he would flout the cheat with his broad flukes, and go
down again with a grand swirl to his lair under the rock.
It was only to the outside world--to the dragon-fly, and the bird, and
the chattering red squirrel in the overhanging hemlock--that the deep
water under the bank looked black. To the trout in his lair, looking
upward toward the sunlight, the whole pool had a golden glow. His
favourite position was a narrow place between two stones, where he lay
with head up-stream and belly about two inches from the sandy bottom,
gently fanning the water with his party-coloured fins, and opening and
closing his rosy gill-fringes as he breathed. In length he was
something over twenty inches, with a thick, deep body tapering finely
to the powerful tail. Like all the trout of the Clearwater, he was
silver-bellied with a light pink flush, the yellow and brown markings
on his sides light in tone, and his spots of the most high, intense
vermilion. His great lower jaw was thrust forward in a way that gave a
kind of bulldog ferocity to his expression.
The sky of the big trout's world was the flat surface of Golden Pool.
From the unknown place beyond that sky there came to his eyes but
moving shadows, arrangements of light and dark. He could not see out
and through into the air unobstructedly, as one looks forth from a
window into the world. Most of these moving shadows he understood very
well. When broad and vague, they did not, as a rule, greatly interest
him; but when they got small, and sharply black, he knew they might at
any instant break through with a splash and become real, coloured
things, probably good to eat. A certain slim little shadow was always
of interest to him unless he was feeling gorged. Experience had taught
him that when it actually touched the shining surface above, and lay
there sprawling helplessly with wet wings, it would prove to be a May
fly, which he liked. Having no rivals to get ahead of him, there was
no need of haste. He would sail up with dignity, open his great jaws,
and take in the tiny morsel.
Sometimes the moving shadows were large and of a slower motion, and
these, if they chanced to break through, would prove to be
bright-coloured moths or butterflies, or glittering beetles, or fat
black and yellow bumblebees, or lean black and yellow wasps. If he was
hungry, all these things were good for food, and his bony,
many-toothed mouth cared nothing for stings. Sometimes when he was not
at all hungry, but merely playful, he would rise with a rush at
anything breaking the sheen of his roof, slap it with his tail, then
seize it between his hard lips and carry it down with him, only to
drop it a moment later as a child might drop a toy. Once in awhile,
either in hunger or in sport, he would rise swiftly at the claws or
wing-tips of a dipping swallow; but he never managed to catch the
nimble bird. Had he, by any chance, succeeded, he would probably have
found the feathers no obstacle to his enjoyment of the novel fare.
At times it was not a shadow, but a splash, that would attract his
attention to the shining roof of his world. A grasshopper would fall
in, and kick grotesquely till he rose to end its troubles. Or a
misguided frog, pursued perhaps by some enemy on land, would dive in
and swim by with long, webbed toes. At this sight the master of the
pool would dart from his lair like a bolt from a catapult. Frogs were
much to his taste. And once in a long time even a wood-mouse, hard
pressed and panic-stricken, would leap in to swim across to the meadow
shore. The first time this occurred the trout had risen slowly, and
followed below the swimmer till assured that there was no peril
concealed in the tempting phenomenon. After that, however, he always
went at such prey with a ferocious rush, hurling himself half out of
water in his eagerness.
But it was not only to his translucent sky that the master of the
pool looked for his meat. A large part of it came down upon the
current of the brook. Bugs, grubs, and worms, of land and water, some
dead, others disabled or bewildered by their passage through the
falls, contributed to his feasting. Above all, there were the smaller
fish who were so reckless or uninformed as to try to pass through
Golden Pool. They might be chub, or suckers, or red-fin; they might
be--and more often were--kith and kin of his own. It was all the same
to the big trout, who knew as well as any gourmet that trout were
royal fare. His wide jaws and capacious gullet were big enough to
accommodate a cousin a full third of his own size, if swallowed
properly, head first. His speed was so great that any smaller fish
which he pursued was doomed, unless fortunate enough to be within
instant reach of shoal water. Of course, it must not be imagined that
the great trout was able to keep his domain quite inviolate. When he
was full fed, or sulking, then the finny wanderers passed up and down
freely,--always, however, giving wide berth to the lair under the
bank. In the bright shallows over against the other shore, the
scurrying shoals of pin-fish played safely in the sun. Once in a long
while a fish would pass, up or down, so big that the master of the
pool was willing to let him go unchallenged. And sometimes a muskrat,
swimming with powerful strokes of his hind legs, his tiny forepaws
gathered childishly under his chin, would take his way over the pool
to the meadow of the blue flag-flowers. The master of the pool would
turn up a fierce eye, and watch the swimmer's progress breaking the
golden surface into long, parabolic ripples; but he was too wise to
court a trial of the muskrat's long, chisel-like teeth.
[Illustration: "THEY MIGHT BE--AND MORE OFTEN WERE--KITH AND KIN OF
HIS OWN."]
There were two occasions, never to be effaced from his sluggish
memory, on which the master of the pool had been temporarily routed
from his mastership and driven in a panic from his domain. Of these
the less important had seemed to him by far the more appalling.
Once, on a summer noonday, when the pool was all of a quiver with
golden light, and he lay with slow-waving fins close to the coldest
up-gushing of the spring which cooled his lair, the shining roof of
his realm had been shattered and upheaved with a tremendous splash. A
long, whitish body, many times his own length, had plunged in and
dived almost to the bottom. This creature swam with wide-sprawling
limbs, like a frog, beating the water, and leaping, and uttering
strange sounds; and the disturbance of its antics was a very
cataclysm to the utmost corners of the pool. The trout had not stayed
to investigate the horrifying phenomenon, but had darted madly
down-stream for half a mile, through fall and eddy, rapid and shallow,
to pause at last, with throbbing sides and panting gills, in a little
black pool behind a tree root. Not till hours after the man had
finished his bath, and put on his clothes, and strode away whistling
up the shore, did the big trout venture back to his stronghold. He
found it already occupied by a smaller trout, whom he fell upon and
devoured, to the assuaging of his appetite and the salving of his
wounded dignity. But for days he was tremulously watchful, and ready
to dart away if any unusually large shadow passed over his amber
ceiling. He was expecting a return of the great, white, sprawling
visitor.
His second experience was one which he remembered with cunning
wariness rather than with actual terror. Yet this had been a real
peril, one of the gravest with which he could be confronted in the
guarded precincts of Golden Pool. One day he saw a little lithe black
body swimming rapidly at the surface, its head above the water. It was
about ten feet away from his lair, and headed up-stream. The strange
creature swam with legs, like a muskrat, instead of with fins like a
fish, but it was longer and slenderer than a muskrat; and something in
its sinister shape and motion, or else some stirring of an inherited
instinct, filled the big trout with apprehension as he looked.
Suddenly the stranger's head dipped under the surface, and the
stranger's eyes sought him out, far down in his yellow gloom. That
narrow-nosed, triangular head with its pointed fangs, those bright,
cruel, undeceivable eyes, smote the trout with instant alarm. Here was
an enemy to be avoided. The mink had dived at once, going through the
water with the swiftness and precision of a fish. Few trout could have
escaped. But the master of the pool, as we have seen, was no ordinary
trout. The promptness of his cunning had got him under way in time.
The power of his broad and muscular tail shot him forth from his lair
just before the mink got there. And before the baffled enemy could
change his direction, the trout was many feet away, heading up for the
broken water of the rapids. The mink followed vindictively, but in the
foamy stretch below the falls he lost all track of the fugitive. Angry
and disappointed he scrambled ashore, and, finding a dead sucker
beside his runway, seized it savagely. As he did so, there was a
smart click, and the jaws of a steel trap, snapping upon his throat,
rid the wilderness of one of its most bloodthirsty and implacable
marauders. A half-hour later the master of the pool was back in his
lair, waving his delicate, gay-coloured fins over the yellow sand, and
lazily swallowing a large crayfish. One claw of the crayfish projected
beyond his black jaw; and, being thus comfortably occupied, he turned
an indifferent eye upon the frightened swimming of a small green frog,
which had just then fallen in and disturbed the sheen of his amber
roof.
Very early one morning, when all his world was of a silvery gray, and
over the glassy pallor of his roof thin gleams of pink were mingled
with ghostly, swirling mist-shadows, a strange fly touched the
surface, directly above him. It had a slender, scarlet, curving body,
with long hairs of yellow and black about its neck, and brown and
white wings. It fell upon the water with the daintiest possible
splash, just enough to catch his attention. Being utterly unlike
anything he had ever seen before, it aroused his interest, and he
slanted slowly upward. A moment later a second fly touched the water,
a light gray, mottled thing, with a yellow body, and pink and green
hairs fringing its neck. This, too, was strange to him. He rolled a
foot higher, not with any immediate idea of trying them, but under his
usual vague impulse to investigate everything pertaining to his pool.
Just then the mist-swirls lifted slightly, and the light grew
stronger, and against the smooth surface he detected a fine, almost
invisible, thread leading from the head of each fly. With a derisive
flirt of his tail he sank back to the bottom of his lair. Right well
he knew the significance of that fine thread.
The strange flies skipped lightly over the surface of the pool, in a
manner that to most trout would have seemed very alluring. They moved
away toward a phenomenon which he just now noticed for the first time,
a pair of dark, pillar-like objects standing where the water was about
two feet deep, over toward the further shore. These dark objects moved
a little, gently. Then the strange flies disappeared. A moment later
they dropped again, and went through the same performance. This was
repeated several times, the big trout watching with interest mingled
with contempt. There was no peril for him in such gauds.
Presently the flies disappeared for good. A few minutes later two
others came in their place,--one a tiny, white, moth-like thing, the
other a big, bristling bunch of crimson hairs. The latter stirred,
far back in his dull memory, an association of pain and fear, and he
backed deeper into his watery den. It was a red hackle; and in his
early days, when he was about eight inches long and frequented the
tail of a shallow, foamy rapid, he had had experience of its sharp
allurements. The little moth he ignored, but he kept an eye on the red
hackle as it trailed and danced hither and thither across the pool.
Once, near the other side, he saw a misguided fingerling dart from
under a stone in the shallow water and seize the gay morsel. The
fingerling rose, with a jerk, from the water, and was no more seen. It
vanished into the unknown air; and the master of the pool quailed as
he marked its fate. After this, the pair of dark, pillar-like objects
moved away to the shore, no longer careful, but making a huge,
splashing noise. No more strange flies appeared; and the gold light of
full day stole down to the depths of the pool. Soon, flies which the
master well knew, with no fine threads attached to them, began to
speck the surface over him, and he fed, in his lazy way, without
misgiving.
The big trout had good reason for his dread of the angler's lure. His
experience with the red hackle had given him the wisdom which had
enabled him to live through all the perils of a well-known
trout-stream and grow to his present fame and stature. Behind that red
hackle which hooked him in his youth had been a good rod, a crafty
head, and a skilful wrist. His hour had sounded then and there, but
for a fortunate flaw in the tackle. The leader had parted just at the
drop, and the terrified trout (he had taken the tail fly) had darted
away frantically through the rapids with three feet of fine gut
trailing from his jaw. For several weeks he trailed that hampering
thread, and carried that red hackle in the cartilage of his upper jaw;
and he had time to get very familiar with them. He grew thin and
slab-sided under the fret of it before he succeeded, by much nosing in
gravel and sand, in wearing away the cartilage and rubbing his jaw
clear of the encumbrance. From that day forward he had scrutinized all
unfamiliar baits or lures to see if they carried any threadlike
attachment.
When any individual of the wild kindreds, furred, feathered, or
finned, achieves the distinction of baffling man's efforts to undo
him, his doom may be considered sealed. There is no beast, bird, or
fish so crafty or so powerful but some one man can worst him, and will
take the trouble to do it if the game seems to be worth while. Some
lure would doubtless have been found, some scheme devised for the
hiding of the line, whereby the big trout's cunning would have been
made foolishness. Some swimming frog, some terrified, hurrying mouse,
or some great night-moth flopping down upon the dim water of a
moonless night, would have lulled his suspicions and concealed the
inescapable barb; and the master of the pool would have gone to swell
the record of an ingenious conqueror. He would have been stuffed, and
mounted, and hung upon the walls of the club-house, down at the mouth
of the Clearwater. But it pleased the secret and inscrutable deities
of the woods that the end of the lordly trout should come in another
fashion.
It is an unusual thing, an unfortunate and pitiful thing, when death
comes to the wild kindred by the long-drawn, tragic way of
overripeness. When the powers begin to fail, the powers which enabled
them to conquer, or to flee from, or to outwit their innumerable
foes,--then life becomes a miserable thing for them. But that is not
for long. Fate meets them in the forest trails or the flowing
water-paths; and they have grown too dull to see, too heavy to flee,
too indifferent to contend. So they are spared the anguish of slow,
uncomprehending decrepitude.
But to the master of Golden Pool Fate came while he was yet master
unchallenged, and balked the hopes of many crafty fishermen. It came
in a manner not unworthy of the great trout's dignity and fame, giving
him over to swell no adversary's triumph, betraying him to no
contemptible foe.
One crisp autumn morning, when leaves were falling all over the
surface of the pool, and insects were few, and a fresh tang in the
water was making him active and hungry, the big trout was swimming
hither and thither about his domain instead of lying lazily in his
deep lair. He chanced to be over in the shallows near the grassy
shore, when he saw, at the upper end of the pool, a long, dark body
slip noiselessly into the water. It was not unlike the mink in form,
but several times larger. It swam with a swift movement of its
forefeet, while its hind legs, stretched out behind with the tail,
twisted powerfully, like a big sculling oar. Its method, indeed,
combined the advantages of that of the quadruped and that of the fish.
The trout saw at once that here was a foe to be dreaded, and he lay
quite still against a stone, trusting to escape the bright eyes of the
stranger.
But the stranger, as it happened, was hunting, and the stranger was an
otter. The big trout was just such quarry as he sought, and his bright
eyes, peering restlessly on every side, left no corner of the pool
uninvestigated. They caught sight of the master's silver and vermilion
sides, his softly waving, gay-coloured fins.
With a dart like that of the swiftest of fish, the stranger shot
across the pool. The trout darted madly toward his lair. The otter was
close upon him, missing him by a fin's breadth. Frantic now with
terror, the trout shot up-stream toward the broken water. But the
otter, driven not only by his forefeet but by that great combined
propeller of his hind legs and tail, working like a screw, swam
faster. Just at the edge of the broken water he overtook his prey. A
set of long, white teeth went through the trout's backbone. There was
one convulsive twist, and the gay-coloured fins lay still, the silver
and vermilion body hung limp from the captor's jaws.
For many days thereafter, Golden Pool lay empty under its dropping
crimson and purple leaves, its slow sailing foam flakes. Then, by twos
and threes, small trout strayed in, and found the new region a good
place to inhabit. When, in the following spring, the fishermen came
back to the Clearwater, they reported the pool swarming with pan-fish,
hardly big enough to make it worth while throwing a fly. Then word
went up and down the Clearwater that the master of the pool was gone,
and the glory of the pool, for that generation of fishermen, went with
him.
[Illustration: "HE WOULD SIT BACK AND WHINE FOR HIS MOTHER."]
The Return to the Trails
Down from the rocky den under the bald peak of Sugar Loaf, the old
black bear led her cub. Turning her head every moment to see that he
was close at her heels, she encouraged him with soft, half-whining,
half-grunting sounds, that would have been ridiculous in so huge a
beast had they been addressed to anything less obviously a baby than
this small, velvet-dark, wondering-eyed cub.
Very carefully the old bear chose her path, and very slowly she moved.
But for all her care, she had to stop every minute or two, and
sometimes even turn back a few paces, for the cub was continually
dropping behind. His big, inquiring ears took in all the vague, small
noises of the mountainside, puzzling over them. His sharp little nose
went poking in every direction, sniffing the strange new smells, till
he would get bewildered, and forget which foot to put forward first.
Then he would sit back and whine for his mother.
It was the cub's first adventure, this journey down the world outside
his den. Hitherto he had but played about his doorway.
When the little fellow had somewhat recovered from his first
bewilderment, the old bear moved more rapidly, leading him toward a
swampy, grassy pocket, where she thought there might be roots to dig.
The way was steep, winding down between rocks and stunted trees and
tangles of thick shrubbery, with here and there a black-green spur of
the fir forests thrust up tentatively from the lower slopes. Now and
again it led across a naked shoulder of the mountain, revealing, far
down, a landscape of dark, wide stretching, bluish woods, with
desolate, glimmering lakes strung on a thread of winding river. When
these vast spaces of emptiness opened suddenly upon his baby eyes, the
cub whimpered and drew closer to his mother. The swimming deeps of air
daunted him.
Presently, as the two continued their slow journey, the mother bear's
nostrils caught a new savour. She stopped, lifted her snout, and
tested the wind discriminatingly. It was a smell she had encountered
once before, coming from the door of a lumber camp. Well she
remembered the deliciousness of the lump of fat bacon which she had
succeeded in purloining while the cook was out getting water. Her
thin, red tongue licked her lips at that memory, and, without
hesitation, she turned up the side trail whence came the luring scent.
The cub had to stir his little legs to keep pace with her, but he felt
that something interesting was in the wind, and did his best.
A turn around a thick clump of juniper, and there was the source of
the savour. It looked pleasantly familiar to the old bear, that lump
of fat bacon. It was stuck on the end of a pointed stick, just under a
sort of slanting roof of logs, which, in a way, reminded her of the
lumbermen's cabin. The cabin had done her no harm, and she inferred
that the structure before her was equally harmless. Nevertheless, the
man smell, not quite overpowered by the fragrance of the bacon, lurked
about it; and all the works of man she viewed with suspicion. She
snatched hastily at the prize, turning to jump away even as she did
so.
But the bacon seemed to be fastened to the stick. She gave it an
impatient pull,--and it yielded suddenly. At that same instant, while
her eyes twinkled with elation, that roof of massive logs came
crashing down.
It fell across her back. Weighted as it was with heavy stones, it
crushed the life out of her in a second. There was a coughing gasp,
cut off abruptly; and the flattened form lay still, the wide-open
mouth and protruding tongue jammed down among the mosses. At the crash
the cub had jumped back in terror. Then he sat up on his haunches and
looked on with anxious bewilderment.
* * * * *
When, early the following morning, the Indian who had set the deadfall
came, he found the cub near perishing with cold and fear and hunger.
He knew that the little animal would be worth several bearskins, so he
warmed it, wrapped it in his jacket, and took it home to his cabin.
Fed and sheltered, it turned to its captor as a rescuer, and acquired
a perilous faith in the friendliness of man. In fact, it speedily
learned to follow the Indian about the cabin, and to fret for him in
his absence.
That same autumn the Indian took the cub into Edmundston and sold him
for a price that well repaid his pains; and thence, within three or
four months, and by as many transfers, the little animal found his way
into the possession of a travelling circus. Being good-natured and
teachable, and inclined, through his first misunderstanding of the
situation which had robbed him of his mother, to regard mankind as
universally beneficent, he was selected to become a trick bear. In the
course of his training for this honour, he learned that his trainer,
at least, was not wholly beneficent, and toward him he developed a
cordial bitterness, which grew with his years. But he learned his
lessons, nevertheless, and became a star of the ring; and for the
manager of the show, who always kept peanuts or gingerbread in pocket
for him, he conceived such a warmth of regard as he had hitherto
strictly reserved for the Indian.
Valued and well cared for, he grew to a magnificent stature, and up to
the middle of his fifth year he never knew what his life was missing.
To be sure, it was exasperatingly monotonous, this being rolled about
the world in stuffy, swaying cage-cars, and dancing in the ring, and
playing foolish tricks with a red-and-white clown, and being stared at
by hot, applauding, fluttering tiers of people, who looked exactly the
same at every place he came to. His memory of that first walk down the
mountain, at his great mother's heels, had been laid to sleep at the
back of his curiously occupied brain. He had no understanding of the
fierce restlessness, the vague longing, which from time to time, and
especially when the autumn frosts began to nip and tingle, would take
possession of him, moving him almost to hatred of even his special
friends, the manager and the clown.
One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into
the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River.
When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls
grew audible,--a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their
ears, they knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages
were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there
drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the
bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made
his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance,
imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of
his native wilderness, a message from the sombre solitudes of the
Squatook. He did not know that the lonely peak of Sugar Loaf was but
thirty or forty miles away. He knew only that something, in the air
and in his blood, was calling him to his own.
The bear--well-taught, well-mannered, well-content--was not regarded
as even remembering freedom, let alone desiring it. His fetters,
therefore, were at times little more than nominal, and he was never
very closely watched. Just on the edge of evening, when the dusk was
creeping up the valley and honey-scents from the fields mixed with the
tang of the dark spruce forests, his opportunity came. His trainer had
unhitched the chain from his collar and stooped over it to examine
some defect in the clasp.
At this instant that surge of impulse which, when it does come,
shatters routine and habit to bits, seized the bear. Without
premeditation, he dealt the trainer a cuff that knocked him clean over
a wagon-pole and broke his arm. Before any of the other attendants
could realize what had happened, the bear was beyond the circle of
wagons, and half-way across the buckwheat-fields. In ten minutes more
he was in the spicy glooms of the spruce-woods.
His years of association with men had given the bear a great
confidence in their resources. He was too crafty, therefore, to
slacken his efforts just because he had gained the longed-for woods.
He pressed on doggedly, at a shambling, loose-jointed, but very
effective run, till it was full night and the stars came out sharply
in the patches of clear, dark sky above the tree-tops. In the friendly
dark he halted to strip the sweet but insipid fruit of an Indian
pear, which for a little assuaged his appetite. Then he rushed
on,--perhaps aimlessly, as far as conscious purpose was concerned,
but, in reality, by a sure instinct, making toward his ancestral
steeps of Sugar Loaf.
All night he travelled; and in the steely chill of dawn he came out
upon a spacious lake. The night had been windless, and now, in the
first of the coming light, the water was smooth like blue-black oil
under innumerable writhing wisps and streamers of mist. A keen smell,
raw but sweet, rose from the wet shores, the wet spruce and fir woods,
and the fringe of a deep cedar swamp near by. The tired animal sniffed
it with an uncomprehending delight. He did not recognize it, yet it
made him feel at home. It seemed a part of what he wanted.
Being thirsty as well as hungry, he pushed through the bushes,--not
noiselessly, as a wild bear moves, but with crashing and tramplings,
as if there were no need of secrecy in the wilds,--and lurched down to
the gravelly brink. Here, as luck would have it, he found a big, dead
sucker lying half-awash, which made him a meal. Then, when sharp
streaks of orange along the eastern horizon were beginning to shed a
mystic colour over the lake, he drew back into the woods and curled
himself up for sleep behind the trunk of a big hemlock.
When the sun was about an hour high he awoke, and made haste to
continue his journey. Along the lake shore he went, to the outlet;
then down the clear, rushing Squatook; and in the afternoon he came
out upon a smaller lake, over which stood sentinel a lofty, beetling
mountain. At the foot of the mountain, almost seeming to duplicate it
in miniature, a steep island of rock rose sharply from the water.
The bear halted on the shore, sniffed wistfully, and looked up at the
lonely mountain. Dim memories, or emotions too dim to be classed as
memories, began to stir in the recesses of his brain. He hurried
around the lake and began to climb the steeps. The lonely mountain was
old Sugar Loaf. The exile had come home.
It was his feet, rather than his head, perhaps, that knew the way so
well. Upward he toiled, through swamps and fir woods, over blueberry
barrens and ranges of granite boulders, till, looking down, he saw the
eagle flying far below him. He saw a vast, empty forest land, beaded
with shining lakes,--and a picture, long covered up in his brain, came
back to him. These were the great spaces that so long ago had
terrified the little cub creeping at his mother's heels. He knew now
where his den was,--just behind that whitish gray rock with the
juniper shrub over it. He ran eagerly to resume possession.
It was now, for the first time, that he found the wilderness less
empty than he had imagined it. Another bear was in possession of the
den,--and in no mood to be disturbed.
He flung himself upon the intruder with a savage roar. The next moment
the two, clutched in a madly clawing embrace, went crashing through a
fringe of bushes and rolled together down a twenty-foot slope of bald
rock. They landed in a crevice full of roots, with a violence that
half-stunned them and threw them apart. As they picked themselves up,
it was plain that the exile had had the best of the tussle. His rich
black fur, to be sure, was somewhat torn and bloody, but he showed no
other signs of battle; while his antagonist breathed heavily and held
one paw clear of the ground.
[Illustration: "THE EAGLE FLYING FAR BELOW HIM."]
The exile was quite fearless, and quite ready to fight for what he
wanted, if necessary. But he was not conscious of any particular
ill-will toward his assailant. What he wanted was possession of that
den. Now, instead of taking advantage of his adversary's partly
disabled condition, he clambered with undignified haste up the steep
rock and plunged into the cave. It was certainly much smaller than he
had imagined it, but it was, nevertheless, much to his taste. He
turned around in it two or three times, as if to adjust it to himself,
then squatted on his haunches in the entrance and looked out
complacently over the airy deeps. The dispossessed bear stood for a
few minutes irresolute, his small eyes red with wrath. For a moment or
two he hesitated, trying to work himself up to the attack. Then
discretion came to his rescue. Grumbling deep in his throat, he turned
and limped away, to seek new quarters on the other side of the
mountain.
Now began for the returned exile two or three months of just such a
life as he had longed for. The keen and tonic winds that blew around
the peak of Sugar Loaf filled his veins with vigour. Through his lack
of education in the lore of the wilderness, his diet was less varied
than it might have been; but this was the fat of the year, and he
fared well enough. When the late berries and fruits were all gone
there were sweet tubers and starchy roots to be grubbed up along the
meadow levels by the water. Instinct, and a spirit of investigation,
soon taught him to find the beetles and grubs that lurked under
stones or in rotting logs,--and in the course of such a search he one
day discovered that ants were good to eat. But the small animals with
which a wild bear is prone to vary his diet were all absent from his
bill of fare. Rabbits, woodchucks, chipmunks, wood-mice, they all kept
out of his sight. His ignorance of the law of silence, the universal
law of the wild, deprived him of many toothsome morsels. As for the
many kinds of fungus which grew upon the mountain, he knew not which
were edible and which poisonous. After an experiment with one
pleasant-smelling red-skinned specimen, which gave him excruciating
cramps, he left the whole race of fungi severely alone.
For perhaps a month he had the solitudes to himself, except for the
big, scornful-looking eagle which always spent a portion of every day
sitting on the top of a blasted pine about a hundred feet above the
den. But, at length, one crisp morning, when he was down by the
lakeside fishing, he found a mate. A young she-bear came out of the
bushes, looked at him, then turned as if to run away,--but didn't. The
exile stopped fishing, and waited civilly to see if the newcomer
wanted to fight. Evidently she had no such desire.
The exile took a few steps up the beach,--which action seemed to
terrify the newcomer almost into flight. Seeing this, he sat down on
his haunches amiably, and waited to see what she would do. What she
did, after much hesitation and delay and half-retreat, was to come up
to his side and sniff trustfully but wonderingly at the great
iron-studded leather collar on his neck. After that the two soon
reached an understanding; and for the next six weeks or so they spent
most of their time together.
Under his mate's instruction, or else by force of her example, the big
bear made some progress in woodcraft, and gained some inklings of the
lesson of silence. He learned, also, to distinguish between the
wholesome and the poisonous fungi. He learned the sweets of a
bee-tree, and how a bear must go to work to attain them. Moving
through the shadows more quietly, he now had glimpses of rabbits and
chipmunks, and even caught sight of a wood-mouse whisking into his
hole under a root. But before he had acquired the cunning to capture
any of these shy kindreds, his mate wandered away, on her own affairs
intent; and he found himself once more alone. Frosts by this time were
binding swale and pool. Ice was forming far out from the edges of the
lake. The first snows had fallen and the great snows were threatening.
And the little she-bear was getting ready to creep into a hole and
curl up for her winter's sleep. She no longer wanted company,--not
even the company of this splendid, black comrade, whose collar had so
filled her with admiration.
When, at length, the winter of the north had fairly settled down upon
the Squatooks, the exile's ribs were well encased in fat. But that
fortunate condition was not to last long. When the giant winds, laden
with snow and Arctic cold, thundered and shrieked about the peak of
Sugar Loaf, and in the loud darkness strange shapes of drift rode down
the blast, he slept snugly enough in the narrow depths of his den. But
the essential winter lore of his kind he had not learned. He had not
learned to sleep away the time of storm and famine. As for instinct,
it failed him altogether in this emergency. During his five years of
life with the circus, he had had no chance to gratify his winter
drowsiness, and gradually the power to hibernate had passed away from
him. The loss was irremediable. By this one deprivation his contact
with man had ruined him for the life of nature.
When man has snatched away from Nature one of her wild children,
Nature, merciless in her resentments, is apt to say, "Keep him! He is
none of mine!" And if the alien, his heart aching for his own,
insists upon returning, Nature turns a face of stone against him.
Unskilled in hunting as he was, and unable to sleep, the bear was soon
driven to extremes. At rare intervals he succeeded in capturing a
rabbit. Once or twice, after a fierce frost had followed a wet sleet
storm, he had climbed trees and found dead birds frozen to their
perches. But most of the time he had nothing but starvation rations of
wood-ants and buds. In the course of a few weeks he was lean as a
heron, and his collar hung loose in his fur. He was growing to hate
the icy and glittering desolation,--and, as he had once longed for an
untried freedom, now he longed for the companionship of men.
He was now wandering far afield in his daily quest for food, sometimes
not returning for three or four days at a time. Once, on an excursion
over into the Madawaska Valley, he came upon a deadfall temptingly
baited with pork. He rushed forward ravenously to snatch the
bait,--but just in time that scent called up an ancient memory. The
horror and the shock of that far-off day when such a trap had crushed
his mother's life out, came back upon him. It was not the scene,
exactly, that came back, but rather the memory of an anguish. Obscure
as it was, it had power to master his appetite and drive him to
another foraging-ground. Thenceforth he foraged no more in the
Madawaska Valley.
In such a desolate fashion the exile dragged through the frozen weeks,
till February came in with deeper snows and fiercer frosts. At this
time hunger and loneliness drove him far over to the valley of the
Toledi; and here, one still and biting day, he came upon a human
trail.
Delightedly he sniffed at the familiar scent, which to him, as
pleasant memories of food and companionship welled up in his heart,
represented nothing but kindliness. His little disagreements with his
trainer were forgotten. He remembered only his unfailing friends, the
manager and the clown. The trail was a broad and mixed one,--the trail
of oxen, and of men with larriganed feet. It led toward a camp of
lumbermen, near the river. Joyously and confidently the exile followed
it. Soon he heard men's voices, and the familiar clank of chains. Then
a biting breeze drew through the forest,--biting, but sweet to the
bear's nostrils. It carried a savour of richness from the cook's
steaming boilers. It was dinner-hour at the camp.
For the second time in his life, the bear felt that he had come home.
Captive, indeed, he had been among men,--but a captive always highly
valued and heedfully cared for. He never for a moment doubted that
these men-creatures, who had always wanted him, would want him now.
They would chain him up, of course,--for fear he would change his mind
and leave them again. But they would feed him,--all he could eat; and
stare at him; and admire him. Then he would dance for them, and do
foolish things with a gun, and perhaps stand on his head. Whereupon
they would applaud, and laugh, and feed him with peanuts and
gingerbread. His famished jaws dripped at the thought.
Within the camp one of the hands, glancing from the window, saw him
just as he came in view. In an instant every man was looking out. The
boldness of the animal stirred up a great excitement. His terrible
leanness was noticed. He was coming straight for the door,--evidently
savage, insane with hunger! And such a big fellow, too!
Men seized their axes. The boss snatched down his big-bore Snider
rifle, slipped in a cartridge, and coolly threw open the cabin door.
He was a tall, ruddy-faced, wide-mouthed man, much like the kindly
manager of the show. At sight of him, standing there in the door, the
bear was overjoyed, and broke into a shuffling run.
Seeing what seemed to them such reckless ferocity, the lumbermen cried
out in amazement, and shouted hoarse warnings to the boss. But the
boss was a man of nerve. Raising his rifle to the shoulder, he stepped
right out clear of the door. He was a dead shot, and very proud of the
fact. When the bear was within thirty paces of him, he fired.
The massive bullet sped true; and the exile fell forward on his snout
without a gasp, shot through the brain.
The men gathered about the body, praising the shot, praising the
prize, praising the reckless audacity which had led the beast to rush
upon his doom. Then in the long, loose fur that clothed his bones they
found the heavy collar. At that they all wondered. The boss examined
it minutely, and stood pondering; and the frank pride upon his face
gradually died into regret.
"I swan, boys," said he, presently, "if that ain't the b'ar that run
away from the circus las' fall! I heard tell he was reckoned always
kind!"
The Little Wolf of the Pool
The bottom of the pool (it was too small to be called a pond) was
muddy, with here and there a thicket of rushes or arrow-weed stems.
Down upon the windless surface streamed the noon sun warmly. Under its
light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,--circular,
heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other
shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint,
diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear
downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated
by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of
the life of the pool.
For all its surface tranquillity and its shining summer peace, the
pool was thronged with life. Beneath the surface, among the weeds and
stalks, the gleams and shadows, there was little of tranquillity or
peace. Almost all the many-formed and strange-shaped inhabitants of
the pool were hunting or being hunted, preying or being preyed
upon,--from the goggle-eyed, green-throated bullfrog under the willow
root, down to the swarming animalculæ which it required a microscope
to see. Small crawling things everywhere dotted the mud or tried to
hide under the sticks and stones. Curled fresh-water snails moved up
and down the stems of the lilies. Shining little black water-bugs
scurried swiftly in all directions. In sheltered places near the
surface, under the leaves, wriggled the slim gray larvæ of the
mosquitoes. And hither and thither, in flickering shoals, darted
myriads of baby minnows, from half an inch to an inch and a half in
length.
In a patch of vivid sunshine, about six inches from a tangle of
arrow-weed stems, a black tadpole lay basking. Light to him meant not
only growth, but life. Whenever, with the slow wheeling of the sun,
the shadow of a lily leaf moved over him, he wriggled impatiently
aside, and settled down again on the brightest part of the mud. Most
of the time he seemed to be asleep; but in reality he was keeping that
incessant sharp lookout which, for the pool-dwellers, was the price of
survival.
Swimming slowly up toward the other side of the arrow-weed stems, came
a fantastic-looking creature, something more than an inch and a half
in length. It had a long, tapering, ringed and armoured body, ending
in a spine; a thick, armoured thorax, with six legs attached; and a
large head, the back of which was almost covered by two big, dully
staring globes of eyes. The whole front of its head--part of the eyes,
and all the face--was covered by a smooth, cleft, shieldlike mask,
reaching well down under the breast, and giving the creature an
expression both mysterious and terrible. On its back, folded close and
obviously useless, were rigidly encased attempts at wings.
The little monster swam slowly by the motion of its long and strong
legs, thrusting out two short, hornlike antennæ over the top of its
mask. It seemed to be eyeing a snail-shell on a stem above, and
waiting for the snail's soft body to emerge from the citadel; when on
a sudden, through the stems, it caught sight of the basking tadpole.
Instantly it became motionless, and sank, like a waterlogged twig, to
the level of the mud. It crept around, effacing itself against the
brown and greenish roots, till it was just opposite the quarry.
Then it sprang, propelling itself not only by its legs, but by the
violent ejection of a little stream of water from the powerful
breathing-valves near its tail.
The tadpole, as we have seen, was not asleep. With a convulsive
wriggle of its tail it darted away in a panic. It was itself no mean
swimmer, but it could not escape the darting terror that pursued. When
the masked form was almost within reach of its victim, the mask
dropped down and shot straight out, working on a sort of elbow-shaped
lever, and at the same time revealed at its extremity a pair of
powerful mandibles. These mandibles snapped firm hold of the victim at
the base of its wriggling tail. The elbow-shaped lever drew back, till
the squirming prize was held close against its captor's face. Then
with swift jets from the turbine arrangement of its abdominal gills,
the strange monster darted back to a retreat among the weed stems,
where it could devour its prey in seclusion.
Under those inexorable jaws the tadpole soon disappeared and for a few
minutes the monster rested, working its mandibles to and fro and
rubbing them with its front legs before folding back that inscrutable
mask over its savage face. Presently a plump minnow, more than an inch
long, with a black stripe along its bronze and silver sides, swam down
close by the arrow-weed stems. The big eyes of the monster never
moved. But, suddenly, out shot the mask once more, revealing the face
of doom behind it; and those hooked mandibles fixed themselves in the
belly of the minnow. Inexorable as was the grip, it nevertheless for
the moment left unimpeded the swimming powers of the victim; and he
was a strong swimmer. With lashing tail and beating fins, he dragged
his captor out from among the weed stems. For a few seconds there was
a vehement struggle. Then the minnow was borne down upon the mud, out
in the broad sheen where, a little before, the tadpole had been
basking. Clutching ferociously with its six long legs, the conqueror
crawled over the prey and bit its backbone in two.
Swift, strong, insatiably ravenous, immeasurably fierce, the larva of
the dragon-fly (for such the little monster was) had fair title to be
called the wolf of the pool. Its appearance alone was enough to daunt
all rivals. Even the great black carnivorous water-beetle, with all
its strength and fighting equipment, was careful to give wide berth to
that dreadful, quick-darting mask. Had these little wolves been as
numerous as they were rapacious, there would soon have been left no
life at all in the pool but theirs and that of the frogs. Between
these there would have been a long and doubtful struggle, the frogs
hunting the larvæ among the weed stems, and the larvæ devouring the
tadpoles on their basking-grounds.
It chanced that the particular larva whose proceedings we have noted
was just on the eve of that change which should transport it to the
world of air. After eating the minnow it somehow failed to recover its
appetite, and remained, all the rest of the day and through the night,
clinging to one of the weed stems. Next morning, when the sun was warm
on the pool, it crawled slowly up, up, up, till it came out into a new
element, and the untried air fanned it dry. Its great round eyes,
formerly dull and opaque, had now grown transparent, and were gleaming
like live jewels, an indescribable blend of emerald, sapphire, and
amethyst. Presently its armour, now for the first time drying in the
sun, split apart down the back, and a slender form, adorned with two
pairs of crumpled, wet wings, struggled three-quarters of its length
from the shell. For a short time it clung motionless, gathering
strength. Then, bracing its legs firmly on the edges of the shell, it
lifted its tail quite clear, and crawled up the weed a perfect
dragon-fly, forgetful of that grim husk it was leaving behind. A few
minutes later, the good sun having dried its wings, it went darting
and hurtling over the pool, a gemlike, opalescent shining thing,
reflected gloriously in the polished mirror beneath.
The Little Wolf of the Air
The pool lay shimmering and basking in the flood of the June sun. On
three sides, east, west, and north, the willows and birches gathered
close about it, their light leafage hanging motionless in the clear,
still heat. On the south side it lay open toward the thick-grassed
meadows, where bees and flies of innumerable species flickered lazily
over the pale crimson clover-blooms. From the clover-blooms and the
vetch-blooms, the wheel-rayed daisies, and the tall umbels of the wild
parsnip, strange perfumes kept distilling in the heat and pulsing in
across the pool on breaths of air too soft to ruffle its surface.
Above this unruffled surface the air was full of dancing life. Gnats
hung in little, whirling nebulæ; mosquitoes, wasplike flies, and
whirring, shard-winged beetles, passed and repassed each other in
intricate lines of flight; and, here and there, lucently flashing on
long, transparent, veined wings, darted the dragon-flies in their
gemlike mail. Their movements were so swift, powerful, and light that
it was difficult, in spite of their size and radiant colour, to detect
the business that kept the dragon-flies so incessantly and tirelessly
in action. Sometimes two or three would hurtle out for a brief
expedition over the blossoming meadow. Often one would alight for a
moment on a leaf or twig in the sun, and lie there gleaming, its two
pairs of wings flatly outspread in a way that showed every delicate
interlacing of the nerves. Then it would rise again into the air with
a bold, vehement spring; and when ever it began its flight, or
whenever it abruptly changed the direction of its flight, its wings
would make a dry, sharp, rustling sound.
The business that so occupied these winged and flashing gems, these
darting iridescences, was in truth the universal business of hunting.
But there were few indeed among all the kindred of earth, air, and
water whose hunting was so savage and so ravenous as that of these
slender and spiritlike beings. With appetites insatiable, ferocity
implacable, strength and courage prodigious for their stature, to call
them the little wolves of the air is perhaps to wrong the ravening
gray pack whose howlings strike terror down the corridors of the
winter forest. Mosquitoes and gnats they hunted every moment,
devouring them in such countless numbers as to merit the gratitude of
every creature that calls the mosquito its foe. But every summer fly,
also, was acceptable prey to these indomitable hunters, every
velvet-bodied moth, every painted butterfly. And even the envenomed
wasp, whose weapon no insect can withstand, was not safe. If the
dragon-fly could catch her engrossed in some small slaughter of her
own, and, pouncing upon her from above, grip the back of her armed
abdomen in his great grinding jaws, her sting could do nothing but
dart out vainly like a dark, licking flame; and she would prove as
good a meal as the most unresisting bluebottle or horse-fly.
Down to the pool, through the luxurious shadows of the birches, came a
man, and stretched himself against a leaning trunk by the waterside.
At his approach, all the business of life and death and mating in his
immediate neighbourhood came to a halt, and most of the winged
kindred, except the mosquitoes, drew away from him. The mosquitoes, to
whom he had become, so to speak, in a measure acclimatized, attacked
him with less enthusiasm than they would have displayed in the case of
a stranger, and failed to cause him serious annoyance. He fixed
himself in a position that was thoroughly comfortable, and then lay
quite still.
The man's face was under the shadow of the birch-tree, but his body
lay out in the full sun, and the front of his soft white summer shirt
made a patch of sharp light against the surrounding tones of brown and
green. When it had for a time remained quite still, the patch of
whiteness attracted attention, and various insects alighted upon it to
investigate. Presently the man noticed a very large steel-blue
dragon-fly on rustling wings balancing in the air a few feet in front
of him. At this moment, from a branch overhead, a hungry shrike dashed
down. The dragon-fly saw the peril just in time; and, instead of
fleeing desperately across the pool, to be almost inevitably overtaken
by the strong-winged bird, it dashed forward and perched for refuge on
a fold of the dazzling white shirt. The foiled shrike, with an angry
and astonished twitter, flew off to a tree across the pool.
For perhaps a minute the great fly stood with moveless, wide-spread
wings, scintillating aerial hues as if its body was compacted of a
million microscopic prisms. The transparent tissue of its wings was
filled with a finer and more elusive iridescence. The great rounded,
globose, overlapping jaws, half as big as the creature's whole head,
kept opening and shutting, as if to polish their edges. The other half
of its head was quite occupied by two bulging, brilliant spheres of
eyes, which seemed to hold in their transparent yet curiously
impenetrable depths a shifting light of emerald and violet. These
inscrutable and enormous eyes--each one nearly as great in
circumference as the creature's body--rolled themselves in a steady
stare at the man's face, till he felt the skin of his cheeks creep at
their sinister beauty. It seemed to him as if a spirit hostile and
evil had threatened him from beneath those shining eyes; and he was
amused to experience, for all his interest, a sense of half-relief
when the four beautiful wings hurtled crisply and the creature darted
away.
It would seem, however, that the fold of white shirt had found favour
in those mysteriously gleaming eyes; for a minute or two later the
same fly returned to the same spot. The man recognized not only its
unusual size and its splendour of colour, but a broken notch on one of
its wing films, the mark of the tip of a bird's beak. This time the
dragon-fly came not as a fugitive from fate, but as a triumphant
dispenser of fate to others. It carried between its jaws the body of
a small green grasshopper, which it had already partly eaten.
Fixing the enigmatic radiance of its eyes upon the man's face, the
dragon-fly calmly continued its meal, using the second joints of its
front pair of legs to help manipulate the rather awkward morsel. Its
great round jaws crushed their prey resistlessly, while the inner
mouth sucked up the juices so cleanly and instantaneously that the
repast left no smallest stain upon the man's spotless shirt. When the
feast was over there remained nothing of the victim but a compact,
perfectly rounded, glistening green ball, the size of a pea, made up
of the well-chewed shell-like parts of the grasshopper's body. It
reminded the man of the round "castings" of fur or feathers which an
owl ejects after its undiscriminating banquet. Having rolled the
little green ball several times between its jaws, to make sure there
was no particle of nourishment left therein, the dragon-fly coolly
dropped it into a crease in the shirt-bosom, and rustled away.
[Illustration: "A LARGE FROG RISE TO THE SURFACE JUST BELOW HER."]
It chanced that this particular and conspicuous individual of the
little wolves of the air was a female. A half-hour later, when the man
had almost grown tired of his watching, he again caught sight of the
great fly. This time she alighted on a half-submerged log, one end
of which lay on shore by the man's feet, while the other end was
afloat in deep water, where it could rise and fall with every change
in the level of the pool. Quivering and gleaming with all her subtle
fires, the dragon-fly stood motionless on the log for a few seconds.
Then she backed down close to the water's edge, thrust her long,
slender abdomen a good inch into the water, and curled it under her as
if she were trying to sting the hidden surface of the log. In reality,
as the man at once understood, she was busy laying eggs,--eggs that
should presently develop into those masked and terrible larvæ of hers,
the little wolves of the pool. She laid the eggs in a row under the
log, where there was no danger of the water receding from them. She
moved along the log daintily, step by step, and her wings fluttered
over the task.
The man had taken out his watch as soon as he saw what she was about,
in order that he might time the egg-laying process. But he was not
destined to discover what he wanted to know. The dragon-fly had been
at her business for perhaps two minutes, when the man saw a large frog
rise to the surface just below her. He liked all dragon-flies,--and
for this one in particular he had developed a personal interest.
Suddenly and violently he jumped to his feet, hoping to chase her away
from the approaching doom. But he was just too late. As he jumped, the
big frog sprang, and a long, darting, cleft tongue clutched the busy
fly, dragging her down. The frog disappeared with his prize,--to come
to the surface again at the edge of a lily-pad, a few feet off, and
blink his goggle-eyes in satisfaction. He had avenged (though about
that he cared as little as he knew) the lives of a thousand tadpoles.
The Alien of the Wild
A full day's tramp back from the settlement, on the edge of a
water-meadow beside the lonely Quah-Davic, stood the old woodsman's
cabin. Beside it he had built a snug log-barn, stored with hay from
the wild meadow. The hay he had made that August, being smitten with a
desire for some touch of the civilization to which as a whole he could
not reconcile himself. Then, with a still enthusiasm, he had built his
barn, chinking its crevices scrupulously with moss and mud. He had
resolved to have a cow. The dream that gave new zest to all his waking
hours was the fashioning of a little farm in this sunny, sheltered
space about his cabin. He had grown somewhat weary of living by trap
and snare and gun, hunting down the wild creatures whom he had come to
regard, through lapse of the long, solitary years by the Quah-Davic,
as in some sense comrade and kin to him.
It was late autumn, and the asters fading out like smoke along the
river edges, when the barn was finished and the hay safe stored
therein. Then the old woodsman journeyed out to the settlement to buy
his cow. He found one exactly to his whimsical liking,--a small, dark
red, long-horned scrub, with a look in her big, liquid eyes that made
him feel she would know how to take care of herself in the perilous
wilds. He equipped her with the most sonorous and far-sounding bell he
could find in all the settlement. Then proudly he led her away to her
new domain in the wilderness.
When the long-horned little cow had been salted and foddered in the
new barn, and when her liquid eyes had taken in the surroundings of
the sunny little meadow and cabin by the lonely Quah-Davic, she was
well enough content, and the mellow _tunk-a-tonk, tank tonk_ of her
bell was sounded never out of ear-shot from the cabin. The meadow and
the nearest fringes of the woods were range enough for her. Of the
perils that might lurk in the further depths she had a wary
apprehension. And the old woodsman, busy grubbing out a narrow cellar
under his cabin, was happy in his purchase. The _tunk-a-tonk_ of the
mellow bell was sweetest music in his ears as he worked.
Now it chanced that that autumn was one of unusual drought. In the
channel of the Quah-Davic rocks appeared which the old woodsman had
never seen before. The leaves fell early, before half their wonted
gamut of colour was run through. They wore a livery of pallid
tones--rusty-reds, cloudy light violets, grayish thin golds, ethereal
russets--under a dry, pale sky. The only solid, substantial colouring
was that of the enduring hemlocks and the sombre, serried firs. Then
there came a mistiness in the air, making the noonday sun red and
unradiant And the woodsman knew that there were forest fires somewhere
up the wind.
A little anxious, he studied the signs minutely, and concluded that,
the wind being light, the fires were too far distant to endanger the
Quah-Davic region. Thereupon he decided to make a hurried trip to the
settlement for a sack of middlings and other supplies, planning to
return by night, making the round trip within the twenty-four hours in
order that the little red cow should not miss more than one milking.
On the afternoon of the woodsman's going, however, the wind freshened
into a gale, and the fires which had been eating leisurely way through
the forest were blown into sudden fury. That same evening a hurricane
of flame swept down upon the lonely cabin and the little wild meadow,
cutting a mile-wide swath through the woods, jumping the Quah-Davic,
and roaring on to the north. It was days before the woodsman could get
back along the smoking, smouldering trail, through black, fallen
trunks and dead roots which still held the persistent fire in their
hearts. Of cabin and barn, of course, there was nothing left at all,
save the half-dug cellar and the half-crumbled chimney. Sick at heart
and very lonely, he returned to the settlement, and took up his new
abode on a half-reclaimed farm on the outskirts, just where the tilth
and the wilderness held each other at bay.
The red cow, meanwhile, being shrewd and alert, had escaped the
conflagration. She had taken alarm early, having seen a fire in the
woods once before and conceived an appreciation of its powers. Instead
of flying straight before it, and being inevitably overtaken, she ran
at once to the river and galloped madly down the shallow margin.
Before the flames were actually upon her, she was beyond the zone of
their fury. But she felt the withering blast of them, and their
appalling roar was in her ears. With starting eyes and wide,
palpitating nostrils, she ran on and on, and stopped only when she
sank exhausted in a rude cove. There she lay with panting sides and
watched far behind her the wide red arc of terror drawn across the
sky.
The next day she wandered some miles farther down the Quah-Davic, till
she came to a neighbourhood where the water-meadows were strung
thickly along the stream and where the pasturage, though now dry and
untasty, was abundant. Back from the water-meadows was a region of low
hills covered with a second growth of young birches and poplars. Among
the hills were ravines thick with hemlock and spruce. Here she
established herself, and at night, either because she missed the
narrow quarters of her stable, or because some wild instinct within
her led her to adapt herself quickly to the ways of the wild kindred,
she would make her lair in the deepest and most sheltered of the
ravines, where a peculiarly dense hemlock veiled the front of an
overhanging rock. This retreat was almost as snug as her old stable;
and, lying down with her long horns toward the opening, she felt
comparatively secure. As a matter of fact, though all these woods of
the Quah-Davic were populous with the furtive folk, the little red cow
saw few signs of life. She was surrounded, wherever she moved, by a
wide ring of resentful solitude. The inexplicable _tunk-a-tonk,
tunk, tonk_ of her deep-throated bell was disquieting to all the
forest kindred; and the least move of her head at night was enough to
keep the most interested prowler at a distance from the lair behind
the hemlock. There was not a bear, a wolf, or a panther on the
Quah-Davic (there was but a single pair of panthers, indeed, within a
radius of fifty miles!) that cared to investigate the fighting
qualities of this keen-horned red creature with the inexplicable
voice.
Till the snow fell deep, covering the dry grass on the meadows, the
little cow throve well enough. But when the northern winter had fairly
settled in, and the great white stillness lay like sleep upon the
ancient wood, and the fir-trees, with their cloaking of snow, were so
many spires and domes and pinnacles of glittering marble under the icy
sunlight, then the wanderer would have starved if she had not chanced
to be both resourceful and indomitable. From her lair under the
hemlock, which was sheltered from all winds, her deeply trodden trail
led both to the meadows and the birchen hill-slopes. She could paw her
way down to the deep-buried grasses; but it took so much digging to
uncover a few poor and unsatisfying mouthfuls that she could never
have kept herself alive in this fashion. Being adaptable, however, she
soon accustomed herself to browsing on the slimmest of the birch and
poplar twigs, and so, having proved herself one of the fittest, she
survived. When the late, reluctant spring brought the first green of
sprouting grasses to the meadows of the Quah-Davic, it found the red
cow a mere bag of bones, indeed, but still alive, and still presenting
an undaunted pair of horns to a still distrusted world.
Into this unfriendly world, when the painted trilliums and the purple
wake-robins were dotting every half-exposed glade, was born a sturdy
bull-calf. His sire was a handsome black half-breed Durham which had
been brought into the settlement the previous summer for the
improvement of the scrubby backwoods stock. The calf was jet-black in
colour. As he grew, he soon began to show hints of his sire's broad
forehead and massive fore-quarters. He had his mother's large,
half-wild, discriminating eyes; and his legs, soon throwing off the
straddling awkwardness of calfhood, developed his mother's almost
deer-like activity.
The summer passed uneventfully for the pair of aliens in the
wilderness. With abundant pasturage on the Quah-Davic water-meadows,
they had no occasion to wander into the perils of the deep wood; and
the little red cow had none of that prevision of wild mothers, which
leads them to instruct their young in the two great vital points of
woodcraft,--the procuring of food and the avoiding of enemies. She
herself knew little woodcraft save what she and the calf were
absorbing together, unconsciously, day by day. For the time they
needed none, their food being all about them, their enemies kept at
bay by the ceaseless _tunk-a-tonk_ of the mellow bell. Thus it came
about that to the black bull-calf the wilderness seemed almost empty
of life, save for the birds, the insects, the squirrels, and the fish
leaping in the pool. To all these the bell was a matter of
indifference.
Once only, late in the autumn, did he get a glimpse of the old
Quah-Davic panther. He and his mother were lying in the sun by the
meadow's edge, comfortably chewing the cud, when the long, tawny
beast, following their trail with more curiosity than hunger, came
upon them suddenly, and stopped short about twenty paces distant. The
little red cow, recognizing the most dangerous of all her possible
enemies, had sprung to her feet with a bellow and lowered her defiant
horns. Thereupon, the panther had slunk off with a whipped look and a
drooping tail; and the little black bull conceived a poor opinion of
panthers. But it was the sudden _tonk-tonking_ of the bell, not the
challenge of his redoubtable mother, that had put the fierce-eyed
prowler to flight.
It was much the same with the bears, who were numerous about the
Quah-Davic. They regarded the noisy bell with hatred and invincible
suspicion. But for that, they would probably have put the red cow's
horns to the test, and in all likelihood the career of the lonely
alien would have come to an end ere the snow fell. As it was, however,
the black bull-calf never saw a bear in any attitude save that of
sulkily slinking away from his mother's neighbourhood; and therefore,
in that first summer of his life, he conceived a very dangerous
contempt for bears. As for the lynxes,--those soundless-footed, gray
shadows of the wild,--neither he nor his mother ever saw them, so
fearful were they of the voice of the bell. But their screeches and
harsh caterwaulings often filled his heart with wonder. Fear he had as
yet had no occasion to learn; and therefore he had little real part in
the ever-watchful life of the wilderness.
The next winter was a hard one for all the beasts of the Quah-Davic;
and, ere it went by, the lair under the hemlocks was surrounded by
many lynx tracks. But to neither red cow nor black calf did tracks
carry much significance, and they had no thought for the perils that
begirt them. Once, indeed, even the two panthers came, and turned upon
them pale, bright, evil eyes. But they did not come very near. The cow
shook her horns at them defiantly; and the calf shook his broadening,
curly forehead at them; and wild were the clamours of the vigilant
bell. The hearts of the hunting beasts turned to water at these
incomprehensible voices. In their chagrin they shifted their range
farther east; and for several years they came no more to the
water-meadows of the Quah-Davic.
Late in the following summer, when the fireweed was beginning to
crimson the open spaces on the hillside, fate came to the
water-meadows in a form which the bell was powerless to avert. An
Indian, paddling down the Quah-Davic to the sea, caught sight of the
red cow drinking by the waterside. He knew there was no settlement
within leagues. He knew the cow was a stray, and therefore no man's
property. He knew he wanted fresh meat, to say nothing of cowhide for
moccasins and thongs. Up went his big smooth-bore muzzle-loader. There
was a deafening, clattering report, unlike the smart detonation of a
rifle. The little red cow fell on her knees, with a cough and a wild
clamour of the bell, then rolled over in the shallow, shimmering
water. With a whoop of exultation, the Indian thrust ashore; and, as
he did so, the black yearling, taught terror at last by the report and
by the human voice, broke from his covert in a willow thicket and
dashed wildly into the woods.
When he came back, hours later, the Indian had vanished, and, with
that strident bellow of his, from which the calf-bleat was not yet
quite gone, he trotted down the bank to look for his mother. But the
smell of fresh blood, and the red spectacle which he saw on the
pebbles of the river-beach, struck a new and madder terror into his
heart. With stiffly uplifted tail and staring eyes, he dashed away
again into the woods.
From that day he never again went near that particular meadow;
neither, though for days he called to her in his loneliness, did he
search any more for the mother who had so suddenly disappeared out of
his life. Standing on the edge of a bluff, in the fading sunset, he
would thrust his head and neck out straight and bellow his sonorous
appeal. Then he would stop and listen long for an answer. And as he
called, evening after evening in vain, a deeper, surer tone came into
his voice, a more self-reliant, masterful look into the lonely but
fearless eyes with which he surveyed the solitude.
Again came autumn to the Quah-Davic, with the pale blue smoke of
asters along the meadow-ledges, the pale gold glimmer of birches on
the slopes, and the wax-vermilion bunches of the rowan-berries
reflected in each brown pool. By this time the black bull was of the
stature of a well-grown two-year-old, massive in the shoulder, lean
and fine in limb and flank, with a cushion of dense, close, inky curls
between his horns. The horns themselves--very short, thick,
keen-pointed spikes of horns--were not set forward, but stood out
absolutely straight on either side of his broad black head. Young
though he was, he was an ominous figure to all the furtive eyes that
watched him, as he stood and bellowed from his bluff in the fading
sunset.
[Illustration: "BUT THEY DID NOT COME VERY NEAR."]
About this time it was that the young bull began to find the solitude
more populous. Since the voice of the bronze bell was hushed, the wild
creatures were no longer held aloof. Hitherto the red squirrels and
the indifferent, arrogant porcupines were the only animals he had
noticed. But now he saw an occasional slim and snaky mink at its
fishing; or a red fox stealing down upon the duck asleep in the lily
patch; or a weasel craftily trailing one of the brown hares which
had of a sudden grown so numerous. All these strange little beasts
excited his curiosity. At first he would sniff, and snort, and
approach to investigate, which would lead, of course, to an immediate
and discouraging disappearance. Only the fox was too haughty to
disappear. He would maintain a judicious distance, but otherwise
seemed to regard the inquisitive bull with utter unconcern. This
unconcern, together with the musky smell of the bush-tailed red
stranger, at last so aggravated the bull that he charged furiously
again and again. But the fox eluded him with mocking ease, till the
bull at last sulkily ignored him.
The bull's next important acquaintance was the lynx. He was lying
under a scarlet maple, chewing his cud, and lazily watching a rabbit
scratching its ears some dozen paces distant. Suddenly a soundless
gray shadow shot from a thicket and dropped upon the rabbit. There was
a squeak, a feeble scuffle; and then a big lynx, setting the claws of
one paw into the prey, turned with a snarl and eyed venomously the
still, dark form under the maple. This seemed like a challenge. With a
mixture of curiosity and indignation, the young bull got up, grunted,
pawed the earth once or twice by way of ceremony, and emerged to the
encounter. But the lynx had no stomach to meet the charge of that
sturdy front. He snatched up the rabbit in his jaws and bounded away
into the underbrush.
A few days later, as the bull again lay under the scarlet maple and
looked out contemplatively over his yellow autumn world, a large bear
lumbered past, taking his own well-beaten trail to the waterside. The
bull lurched to his feet, and stood on guard, for this was a
formidable-looking stranger. But the bear, fed fat with autumn
berries, was at peace with all the world. He gave the black bull a
shrewd glance out of his little cunning eyes, and paid no further
attention; and the bull, seeing no incentive to a quarrel, snorted
doubtfully and lay down again. After this he saw several more bears,
but, being well fed and lazy, they made no effort to molest him. Then,
one unfortunate day, as he came up dripping from his favourite pool,
he met one face to face.
The bear was surprised, and halted. He half-settled back upon his
haunches, as if to turn aside and yield the path. Then he thought
better of it and held his ground, being at the moment good-natured
enough, but careful of his dignity, as a bear is apt to be. The young
bull, however, was enraged at this obstinate intrusion upon his trail.
He was unlucky enough to remember how often he had seen bears slink
off to avoid his mother's charge. With an angry bellow, he lifted his
tail, lowered his head, and launched himself upon the intruder.
The bear, poising himself upon three legs, gracefully and lightly
avoided the attack, and at the same instant delivered a terrific
buffet upon the young bull's neck. The blow struck low, where the
muscles were corded and massive, or the neck would have been broken.
As it was, the bull went staggering to his knees at one side of the
trail, the blood spurting from his wounds. In that moment he realized
that he was not yet a match for a full-grown bear. Smarting with pain
and wrath, he rushed on up the trail, and hid himself in the old lair
under the hemlock. When again, some days later, he met another bear,
he made haste to yield the right of way.
In the wild, as in the world, to be once beaten is to invite the fist
of fate. While the young bull's wounds were still red and raw, there
came a big-antlered, high-shouldered bull-moose to the bluff
overlooking the Quah-Davic. The moose was surprised at sight of the
short-legged, black animal on the bluff. But it was rutting season,
and his surprise soon gave way to indignation. The black bull, whose
careless eyes had not yet noticed the visitor, began to bellow as was
his evening wont. The moose responded with a hoarse, bleating roar,
thrashed the bushes defiantly with his antlers, and shambled up to the
attack. The bull, astonished and outraged, stood his ground boldly,
and at the first charge got in a daunting blow between the enemy's
antlers. But he was not yet strong enough or heavy enough to hold so
tough an antagonist, and, after a very few minutes of fierce grunting
and pushing, he was thrust clear over the bank and sent rolling down
into the river. All next day he sulked, but when night came he
returned to the bluff, his eyes red with rage. He found the moose
before him, but not alone. A tall, dingy-coloured, antlerless cow was
there, fondling her mate's neck and ears with her long, flexible
muzzle. This sight gave the young bull a new and uncomprehended fury,
under the impulse of which he would have attacked an elephant. But the
moose, thus interrupted in his wooing, was far more dangerous than he
had been the night before. Like a whirlwind of devastation he rushed
to meet the intruder; and the young bull was hopelessly overmatched.
Within five minutes he was gored, beaten down, pounded from the field,
and driven bellowing through the bushes. For several weeks he hardly
showed himself in the open meadows, but lurked all day in the
thickets, nursing his wounds and his humiliation.
The next winter set in early and severe, driving the drowsy bears into
their winter quarters and their long, snow-comforted sleep before they
had time to get hungry and dangerous. The lynxes, no longer mystified
by the voice of the bell, came prowling about the lair beneath the
hemlock, but the sullen front and angry, lonely eyes of the black bull
held them in awe. Not even in the worst of the cold, when they had
taken to hunting together in a loosely organized pack, did they dare
to trouble the bull. When spring came, it found him a big, burly
three-year-old, his temper beginning to sour with an unhappiness which
he did not understand; and by the time the bears came hungry from
their winter sleep he was quite too formidable to be meddled with.
Stung by humiliating memories, he attacked with fury every bear he
saw; and they soon learned to give him a wide berth.
As the summer wore along, his loneliness grew more bitter and
distracting. He would spend sometimes a full hour upon the bluff, when
the yellow day was fading into dusk, bellowing his calls across the
stillness, and waiting for he knew not what reply. He was now a huge
and daunting figure. When, at last, came round again the full October
moon, and the spirit of mating went abroad on the crisp air, he grew
more restless than ever. Then, one night, on a clear white stretch of
sand some distance down the shore, he saw a cow-moose standing close
by the water. He was much interested, and half unconsciously began to
move in her direction. When she stretched out her long, ungainly head
and uttered her harsh call, he answered with a soft, caressing bellow.
But at almost the same instant her call was answered by another and a
very different voice; and a tall bull-moose strode out arrogantly upon
the sand.
The black bull's heart swelled with wrath and longing. With a roar he
charged down from the bluff; and the moose, diverted from his wooing,
turned to meet the assault. But he was no match for this dreadful
black bulk that descended upon him with the resistlessness of doom. He
went down at the first crash, a pathetic sprawl of long limbs and
long, ineffective, beautiful antlers; and barely escaping with his
life, he fled away into the thickets. Then, satisfied with his
victory, the black bull lifted his head and turned to the watching
cow.
The cow, after the manner of her kind appreciating a conqueror,
awaited somewhat doubtfully his approach. But when he was within a
few feet of her, wonder and interest gave way to terror. His bulk, his
blackness, his square, mighty head, his big, blazing eyes, and short,
thick muzzle filled her with repulsion and amazement. His voice, too,
though unmistakably caressing and persuasive, was too daunting in its
strangeness. With a wild snort, she turned and fled into the woods
with a speed that he could not hope to match.
After this experience the black bull's loneliness grew almost
intolerable, and his temper so bad that he would go raging up and down
the woods in search of bears to chase. The winter cooled him down
somewhat, and in the spring his temper was not so raw. But he was now
troubled with a spirit of wandering, and kept ranging the woods in
every direction, only returning to the young green of the water-meadow
once or twice a day.
One afternoon, however, there came a change. He was browsing irritably
near the bank when he heard voices that made him look up sharply. A
canoe was passing up-stream, poled by two men. It passed slowly,
surging against the current. As he looked at the men, a dreadful
memory stirred within him. He recalled the loud report which had
driven him mad with fear on that day when the red cow disappeared. He
remembered an appalling sight on the beach of that lower meadow which
he had never visited since. His eyes went red. With a grunt of fury,
he thundered down the bank and out knee-deep into the current.
The men in the canoe were astonished, and hastily pushed over toward
the other shore. The one in the bow laid down his pole and reached
back for his rifle. But the man in the stern intervened.
"What's the good o' shootin' him?" said he. "He can't git at us here,
an' we ain't a-wantin' for grub. Let him be!"
"That's so!" said the other, picking up his pole again. "But ain't he
handsome? An' mad, eh? How do you suppose he come here, anyways?"
"Strayed!" grunted the man in the stern, bending to his pole as the
canoe met a heavier rush of the current.
As the two voyagers pursued their strenuous way up-stream, rock and
eddy and "rip" consuming all their attention, the furious bull kept
abreast of them along the shore, splashing in the shallows and
bellowing his challenge, till at length a deep insetting of the
current compelled him to mount the bank, along which he continued his
vain pursuit for several miles. At last a stretch of dense swamp
headed him off, and the canoe vanished from his sight.
He was now in unknown territory, miles away from his meadows. His rage
against the men had all died out, but some faint stirring of inherited
instincts impelled him to follow for companionship. Had they suddenly
reappeared, close at hand, doubtless his rage would have burst forth
anew. But when they were gone, he had to follow. A dim intuition told
him that where they were going dwelt some kind of relief for his
loneliness. He skirted the swamp, rejoined the river, and kept slowly
on his way up-stream, pasturing as he went. He had turned his back for
ever on the water-meadows and the life of which he could not be a
part, and was off on the quest for that unknown which he felt to be
his own.
After two days of leisurely journeying he passed through a belt of
burnt lands, and had his curiosity mildly excited by a blackened
chimney rising from a heap of ruins near the water. Through this burnt
land he travelled swiftly; and about dawn of the fourth day of his
quest he came out upon the pasture-lands skirting the rear of the
settlement.
Here he found a rude but strong snake fence, at which he sniffed with
wonder. Then, beyond the fence, a creature shaped something like
himself, but red and white in colour, got up from among the misty
hillocks and stared at him. But for the colour, he might have thought
it was the little red mother who had vanished two years before. _This_
was what he had come for. This was the object of his quest. Two or
three other cows, and some young steers, presently arose and fell to
feeding. He lowed to them softly through the rails, and they eyed him
with amiable interest. With a burst of joy, he reared his bulk against
the fence, bore it down, trotted in confidently, and took command of
the little herd. There was no protesting. Cows and steers alike
recognized at once the right of this dominant black stranger to rule;
and soon he fell to pasturing among them quietly, his heart healed at
last of its loneliness.
The two canoemen, meanwhile, on their arrival at the settlement, had
told of their encounter with the wild black bull. As they described
the adventure to a little circle gathered in the back room of the
grocery, the old woodsman whose cabin had been burned in the great
fires was one of their most interested listeners.
[Illustration: "A LORDLY BLACK BEAST IN COMMAND OF THE HERD."]
"I'll bet he's mine! I'll bet he's out of the little red cow I bought
just afore the fire!" he exclaimed at last. And his theory, duly
expounded, met with general credence.
When, therefore, a couple of mornings later, the old woodsman, on
going to the pasture to fetch in his cows for the milking, found a
lordly black beast in command of the herd, he understood at once.
Fortunately for him, he understood so well that he took certain
precautions, instead of walking straight into the middle of the
pasture as usual to get the cows. With judgment born of intuitive
understanding, he let down the pasture bars unnoticed, then went over
near the stable door and called. At the familiar summons the cows
lifted their heads, and came filing lazily toward the open bars, which
lay a little to one side of the direct way to the house. But the black
bull was of another mind. He saw the man; and straight his eyes saw
red. He pawed the earth, roared angrily, gave one uncertain glance at
the cows sauntering away from him, and then charged straight for the
unknown foe. The works of man might, indeed, have some strange
inherited attraction for him; but man, the individual, he hated with
destructive hate.
The woodsman noticed that the bull was not heading for the bars.
"The fence'll stop him!" he said to himself, confidently.
But not so. The wild bull had no conception of the sanctity and
authority of fences. The stout rails went down before him like
corn-stalks. The old woodsman shook his head deprecatingly, stepped
into the stable, and latched the door.
The bull, much puzzled at the unaccountable disappearance of his foe,
stopped for a moment, snorting, then dashed around the barn to see if
the enemy were hiding on the other side. Twice he circled it, his rage
increasing instead of diminishing; and then he caught sight of the
man's face eyeing him calmly through the little square stable window.
He stopped again to paw the earth, bellowing his heavy challenge; and
the old woodsman wondered what to do. He wanted the splendid black
bull for his little herd, but he was beginning to have serious
misgivings. Moreover, he wanted to get into the house. He threw open
the stable door; and as the bull dashed in he scrambled through a
manger, swung himself into the loft, dropped from the hay window, and
darted for the house at top speed. He had had an idea of shutting the
stable door, and imprisoning his unmanageable visitor; but the bull
was too quick for him. He got the heavy kitchen door slammed to just
in time. Thoughtfully he rubbed his grizzled chin as he glanced out
and saw the black beast raging up and down before the window.
"Can't do nothin' with that, I'm afeared!" he muttered.
Just then the bull stopped his ravings, turned his head, and stared
away up the road. There came a clamour of gay young voices; and the
old woodsman, following the beast's eyes, saw a little group of
children approaching on their way to school. Among them he noticed a
girl in a bright scarlet waist. This the bull noted also. He forgot
his enemy in the house. He grunted savagely, gave his tail a vicious
twist, and trotted down the lane toward the road.
The old woodsman saw that the time had come for prompt action. He
snatched up his loaded rifle from the corner where it stood always
ready, ran out upon the steps, and shouted at the bull. The great
black animal stopped and looked around, mumbling deep in his throat.
He wheeled half-about to return to the old enemy. Then he paused
irresolutely and eyed the gay bevy of children. Which foe should he
obliterate first?
While he hesitated, the rifle rang out, and the heavy bullet found
its mark just back of his fore-shoulder. He sank forward upon his
outstretched muzzle and his knees, his tail stiffening straight up,
and quivering. Then he rolled over on his side.
The old woodsman strode down the lane, and stood over the great black
form. His shrewd gray eyes were filled with regret and sympathetic
comprehension.
"Spiled!" said he. "Clean spiled all 'round! The woods, they wa'n't no
place fer you, so ye had to quit 'em. But they spiled you fer the
habitations o' man. It's a born stranger and an alien you was, an'
there wa'n't no place fer ye neither here nor there!"
The Silver Frost
In the heart of an almost impenetrable thicket of young firs the
rabbit had crouched all night, sometimes sleeping the light sleep of
the woodsfolk, sometimes listening to the swish of the winter rain on
his roof of branches. In spite of the storm, he had been warm and dry
all night, only a big drop coming through from time to time to make
him shift his couch. Hearing the rain, he was vaguely puzzled because
he felt so little of it; for he knew that even the densest of fir
thickets were not proof against a prolonged and steady rainfall. He
was glad to profit, however, by a phenomenon which he could not
comprehend, so he lay close, and restrained his impatient appetite,
and kept his white fur dry and warmly fluffy. Had the night been fine,
he would have been leaping gaily hither and thither over the deep,
midwinter snow, and browsing on the tender, aromatic shoots of the
young birches which dotted the little woodland valley.
Early in the night, soon after the rain began, the lower air had
turned cold, and every wet branch and twig had found itself on a
sudden encased with ice. Meanwhile, in the upper dark a warm and
moisture-laden current had kept drifting up from the southwest, and
ceaselessly spilling its burden on the hushed world. Had this fine
rain been less warm, or had the wrapping of cold air next to the earth
been deeper, the drops would have frozen in their descent, and fallen
as sleet; but as it was, they waited till they fell, and then froze
instantly. Thus every limb, and branch, and twig, and every delicate,
perennial frondage of fir and hemlock, gathered an ever-increasing
adornment of clearest crystal. And thus it was that the rabbit in the
fir thicket slept dry through the storm, the branches above him having
been transformed into a roof of ice.
The rain had stopped a little before dawn, and just as the sunrise
colours began to spread down the valley, the rabbit came hopping out
from his snug retreat. He stopped in surprise, sat up, and waved his
long ears to and fro, while his large, bulging eyes surveyed the world
in wonder. He was a young rabbit, born the spring before, and his
world had changed in the night to something he had never dreamed of.
He hopped back beneath the firs for a moment, and sniffed about to
reassure himself, then came out and stared again.
The valley was an open space in the woods, with wooded hills all about
it except on the east, where it stretched away toward the fields and
scattered farmsteads of the settlement. It had once been cleared, but
young seedlings of birch and poplar and maple, with willows along the
course of a hidden stream, had been suffered to partly reclaim it.
Here and there a group of dark fir or hemlock stood out among the
slenderer saplings. Now, all this valley was transmuted to crystal.
The soft white surface of the snow was overlaid with a sheet of
transparent silver, flashing white light and cold but coloured fire.
Every bush and tree was a miracle of frostwork, lavish, inexhaustible,
infinitely varied, and of an unspeakable purity wherever it failed to
catch the young light. But that light, spreading pink and yellow and
rose from the growing radiance upon the eastern horizon, seemed to
penetrate everywhere, reflected and re-reflected from innumerable
facets; and every ray seemed to come from the live heart of a jewel.
Each icy tree and bush emitted thin threadlike flames, high and aerial
in tone, but of a piercing intensity. It was as if the quiet valley
had been flooded all at once with dust of emerald and opal, of
sapphire and amethyst and diamond. And as the light grew the miracle
changed slowly, one keen gleam dying out as another flashed into life.
Having convinced himself that this dazzling and mysterious world was
really the world he knew, the rabbit thought no more about it, but
went leaping gaily over the radiant crust (which was just strong
enough to support him) toward some young birches, where he proposed to
nibble a breakfast. As he went, suddenly a curious sound just under
his feet made him jump wildly aside. Trembling, but consumed with
curiosity, he stared down at the glassy surface. In a moment the sound
was repeated. It was a sharp, impatient tapping against the under side
of the crust. To the rabbit's ears the sound conveyed no threat, so he
hopped nearer to investigate. What he saw beneath the clear shell of
ice was a cock-partridge, his wings half-spread, his head thrown back
in the struggle to break from his snowy grave. His curiosity
satisfied, the rabbit bounded away again, and fell to nibbling the
young birch-twigs. Of small concern to him was the doom of the
imprisoned bird.
At dusk of the preceding evening, when the cock-partridge went to
roost, there had been no suggestion of rain, but a bitter air from
the northwest searching through the woods. The wise old bird, finding
cold comfort on his perch, had bethought him of a trick which many a
time before had served his turn. In the open, where the snow was deep,
he had rocketed down, head foremost, with such force that he was
fairly buried in the light, feathery mass. A little kicking, a little
awkward burrowing, and he had worked his way to a depth of perhaps two
feet. Turning about and lifting his wings gently, he had made himself
a snug nest, where neither wind nor cold could reach him, and where
there was small likelihood that any night marauder would smell him
out. Here in the fluffy stillness he got no word of the change of the
wind, no hint of the soft rain sifting over him. When he woke and
started to revisit the outer world, he found a wall of glass above
him, which his sturdy beak could not break through. A fate that
overtakes many of his kindred had caught him unawares.
While the partridge was resting after his struggles with the
inexorable ice, through which he could look out dimly on the jewelled
world of freedom, a red fox appeared on the edge of the wood. His
crafty eyes fell on the rabbit, and crouching flat, he crept
noiselessly forward. But the crust, strong enough to support the
rabbit, was not strong enough to quite support the heavier animal.
With light, crackling sound one foot broke through, and the rabbit,
with a frightened glance at the most dreaded of all his foes, went
sailing away in long bounds. Soundless though his padded footfalls
were, his flight was accompanied and heralded by a crisp rattling of
icicles as the frozen twigs snapped at his passing.
Laboriously the fox followed, breaking through at every other stride,
but hungry and obstinate, and unwilling to acknowledge himself
baffled. Halfway across the valley, however, he gave up. After pausing
a moment to consider, he retraced his steps, having apparently had
some scheme in mind when diverted by the sight of the rabbit. The
latter, being young and properly harebrained, and aware of his present
advantage, now came back by a great circle, and fell to browsing again
on the birch-twigs. As he fed, however, he kept a sharp eye on the
enemy.
The fox, meanwhile, was growing more and more exasperated. He was
happening upon every weak spot in the crust, and floundering at almost
every step. All at once, as the surface broke there came to his
nostrils the familiar smell of a partridge. It was a fresh scent. The
fox forgot his indignation. He poked his narrow snout into the snow,
sniffed sharply, and began to dig with all his might.
Now it chanced that the imprisoned bird, in his search for an exit,
had worked away from the spot where he had slept. The fox was puzzled.
That alluring scent was all about him, and most tantalizingly fresh.
He understood this partridge trick, and had several times made his
knowledge supply him with a meal. But hitherto he had always found the
partridge asleep; and he had no idea what the bird would do in such a
case as the present. He dug furiously in one direction, then fiercely
in another, but all in vain. Then he lifted his head, panting, his
pointed ears and ruddy face grotesquely patched with snow. At this
moment a great puff of the white powder was flapped into his eyes, a
feathery dark body jumped up from under his very nose, and the crafty
old bird went whirring off triumphantly to the nearest tree. With his
tongue hanging out, the fox stared foolishly after him, then slunk
away into the woods. And the white rabbit, nibbling at his
birch-twigs, was left in undisputed possession of the scintillating
rainbow world.
By the Winter Tide
Behind the long, slow-winding barrier of the dyke the marshes of
Tantramar lay secure, mile on mile of blue-white radiance under the
unclouded moon. Outside the dyke it was different. Mile on mile of
tumbled, mud-stained ice-cakes, strewn thickly over the Tantramar
flats, waited motionless under the moon for the incoming tide. Twice
in each day the far-wandering tide of Fundy would come in, to lift,
and toss, and grind, and roll the ice-cakes, then return again to its
deep channels; and with every tide certain of the floes would go forth
to be lost in the open sea, while the rest would sink back to their
tumbled stillness on the mud. Just now the flood was coming in. From
all along the outer fringes of the flats came a hoarse, desolate roar;
and in the steady light the edges of the ice-field began to turn and
flash, the strange motion creeping gradually inland toward that
impassive bulwark of the dyke. Had it been daylight, the chaotic
ice-field would have shown small beauty, every wave-beaten floe being
soiled and streaked with rust-coloured Tantramar mud. But under the
transfiguring touch of the moon the unsightly levels changed to plains
of infinite mystery--expanses of shattered, white granite, as it were,
fretted and scrawled with blackness--reaches of loneliness older than
time. So well is the mask of eternity assumed by the mutable moonlight
and the ephemeral ice.
Nearer and nearer across the waste drew the movement that marked the
incoming flood. Then from over the dyke-top floated a noiseless,
winnowing, sinister shape which seemed the very embodiment of the
desolation. The great white owl of the north, driven down from his
Arctic hunting-grounds by hunger, came questing over the ragged
levels. His long, soft-feathered wings moved lightly as a ghost, and
almost touched the ice-cakes now and then as his round, yellow eyes,
savagely hard and brilliant, searched the dark crevices for prey. With
his black beak, his black talons protruding from the mass of snowy
feathers which swathed his legs, and the dark bars on his plumage, one
might have fancied him a being just breathed into menacing and
furtive life by the sorcery of the scene.
Suddenly, with a motion almost as swift as light, the great owl
swooped and struck. Swift as he was, however, this time he struck just
too late. A spot of dark on the edge of an ice-cake vanished. It was a
foraging muskrat who had seen the approaching doom in time and slipped
into a deep and narrow crevice. Here, on the wet mud, he crouched
trembling, while the baffled bird reached down for him with vainly
clutching claws.
On either side of the two ice-cakes which had given the muskrat
refuge, was a space of open mud which he knew it would be death to
cross. Each time those deadly black talons clutched at him, he
flattened himself to the ground in panic; but there were several
inches to spare between his throat and death. The owl glared down with
fixed and flaming eyes, then gave up his useless efforts. But he
showed no inclination to go away. He knew that the muskrat could not
stay for ever down in that muddy crevice. So he perched himself bolt
upright on the very edge, where he could keep secure watch upon his
intended victim, while at the same time his wide, round eyes might
detect any movement of life among the surrounding ice-cakes.
The great flood-tides of Fundy, when once they have brimmed the steep
channels and begun to invade the vast reaches of the flats, lose
little time. When the baffled owl, hungry and obstinate, perched
himself on the edge of the ice-cake to wait for the muskrat to come
out, the roar of the incoming water and the line of tossing, gleaming
floes were half a mile away. In about four minutes the fringe of
tumult was not three hundred yards distant,--and at the same time the
vanguards of the flood, thin, frothy rivulets of chill water, were
trickling in through the crevice where the little prisoner crouched.
As the water touched his feet, the muskrat took heart anew,
anticipating a way of escape. As it deepened he stood upright,--and
instantly the white destruction cruelly watching struck again. This
time the muskrat felt those deadly talons graze the long, loose fur of
his back; and again he cowered down, inviting the flood to cover him.
As much at home under water as on dry land, he counted on easy escape
when the tide came in.
It happens, however, that the little kindreds of the wild are usually
more wise in the general than in the particular. The furry prisoner at
the bottom of the crevice knew about such regular phenomena as the
tides. He knew, too, that presently there would be water enough for
him to dive and swim beneath it, where his dreadful adversary could
neither reach him nor detect him. What he did not take into account
was the way the ice-cakes would grind and batter each other as soon as
the tide was deep enough to float them. Now, submerged till his furry
back and spiky tail were just even with the surface, his little, dark
eyes glanced up with mingled defiance and appeal at the savage, yellow
glare of the wide orbs staring down upon him. If only the water would
come, he would be safe. For a moment his eyes turned longingly toward
the dyke, and he thought of the narrow, safe hole, the long, ascending
burrow, and the warm, soft-lined chamber which was his nest, far up in
the heart of the dyke, high above the reach of the highest tides and
hidden from all enemies. But here in the hostile water, with a cruel
death hanging just above him, his valorous little heart ached with
homesickness for that nest in the heart of the dyke; and though the
water had no chill for his hardy blood, he shivered.
Meanwhile, the long line of clamour was rushing steadily inland. The
roar suddenly crashed into thunder on the prisoner's ears and a rush
of water swept him up. The white owl spread his wings and balanced
himself on tiptoe, as the ice-cake on which he was perching lurched
and rolled. Through all the clamour his ears, miraculously keen beyond
those of other birds, caught an agonized squeak from below. The
jostling ice had nipped the muskrat's hind quarters.
Though desperately hurt, so desperately that his strong hind legs were
almost useless, the brave little animal was not swerved from his
purpose. Straight from his prison, no longer now a refuge, he dived
and swam for home through the loud uproar. But the muskrat's small
forelegs are of little use in swimming, so much so that as a rule he
carries them folded under his chin while in the water. Now, therefore,
he was at a piteous disadvantage. His progress was slow, as in a
nightmare,--such a nightmare as must often come to muskrats if their
small, careless brains know how to dream. And in spite of his frantic
efforts, he found that he could not hold himself down in the water. He
kept rising toward the surface every other second.
Balancing had by this time grown too difficult for the great, white
owl, and he had softly lifted himself on hovering wings. But not for
an instant had he forgotten the object of his hunt. What were floods
and cataclysms to him in the face of his hunger? Swiftly his shining
eyes searched the foamy, swirling water. Then, some ten feet away,
beside a pitching floe, a furry back appeared for an instant. In that
instant he swooped. The back had vanished,--but unerringly his talons
struck beneath the surface--struck and gripped their prey. The next
moment the wide, white wings beat upward heavily, and the muskrat was
lifted from the water.
As he rose into the air, though near blind with the anguish of that
iron grip, the little victim writhed upward and bit furiously at his
enemy's leg. His jaws got nothing but a bunch of fluffy feathers,
which came away and floated down the moonlight air. Then the life sank
out of his brain, and he hung limply; and the broad wings bore him
inland over the dyke-top--straight over the warm and hidden nest where
he had longed to be.
The Rivals of Ringwaak
I.
A white flood, still and wonderful, the moonlight lay on the naked
rampikes and dense thickets of Ringwaak Hill. Beneath its magic the
very rocks, harsh bulks of granite, seemed almost afloat; and every
branch, spray and leaf, swam liquidly. The rampikes, towering trunks
of pine, fire-blasted and time-bleached, lifted lonely spires of
silver over the enchanted solitude.
Apparently, there was neither sound nor motion over all Ringwaak, or
over the wide wilderness spread out below its ken. But along the
secret trails, threading the thicket, and skirting the granite
boulders, life went on with an intensity all the deeper and more
stringent for the seal of silence laid upon it. The small, fugitive
kindreds moved noiselessly about their affairs, foraging, mating,
sometimes even playing, but ever watchful, a sleepless vigilance the
price of each hour's breath; while even more furtive, but more
intermittent in their watchfulness, the hunting and blood-loving
kindreds followed the trails.
Gliding swiftly from bush to rock, from rock to thicket, now for an
instant clear and terrible in a patch of moonlight, now ghost-gray and
still more terrible in the sharp-cut shadows, came a round-eyed,
crouching shape. It was somewhere about the size of a large spaniel,
but shorter in the body, and longer in the legs; and its hind legs, in
particular, though kept partly gathered beneath the body, in readiness
for a lightning spring, were so disproportionately long as to give a
high, humped-up, rabbity look to the powerful hind quarters. This
combined suggestion of the rabbit and the tiger was peculiarly
daunting in its effect. The strange beast's head was round and
cat-like, but with high, tufted ears, and a curious, back-brushed
muffle of whiskers under the throat. Its eyes, wide and pale, shone
with a cold ferocity and unconquerable wildness. Its legs, singularly
large for the bulk of its body, and ending in broad, razor-clawed,
furry pads of feet, would have seemed clumsy, but for the impression
of tense steel springs and limitless power which they gave in every
movement. In weight, this stealthy and terrifying figure would have
gone perhaps forty pounds--but forty pounds of destroying energy and
tireless swiftness.
As he crept through a spruce thicket, his savage eyes turning from
side to side, the lynx came upon a strange trail, and stopped short,
crouching. His stub of a tail twitched, his ears flattened back
angrily, his long, white fangs bared themselves in a soundless snarl.
A green flame seemed to flicker in his eyes, as he subjected every
bush, every stone, every stump within his view to the most piercing
scrutiny. Detecting no hostile presence, he bent his attention to the
strange trail, sniffing at it with minute consideration.
The scent of the trail was that of a wildcat; but its size was too
great for that of any wildcat this big lynx had ever known. Wildcats
he viewed with utter scorn. For three years he had ruled all Ringwaak
Hill; and no wildcat, in those three years, had dared to hunt upon his
range. But this newcomer, with the wildcat smell, seemed about as big
as three wildcats. The impression of its foot on a patch of moist
mould was almost as large as that of the lynx himself--and the lynx
well knew that the wildcats were a small-footed tribe. Like most of
the hunting beasts, he was well-schooled in the lore of the trails,
and all the signs were to him a clear speech. From the depth and
definiteness of that footprint, he felt that both weight and strength
had stamped it. His long claws protruded from their hidden sheaths, as
he pondered the significance of this message from the unknown. Was the
stranger a deliberate invader of his range, or a mere ignorant
trespasser? And would he fight, or would he run? The angry lynx was
determined to put these questions to the test with the least possible
delay.
The trail was comparatively fresh, and the lynx began to follow it,
forgetful of his hunger and of the hunt on which he had set out. He
moved now more warily than ever, crouching flat, gliding smoothly as a
snake, and hoping to score the first point against his rival by
catching him unawares. So noiselessly did he go, indeed, that a
weasel, running hard upon the trail of a rabbit, actually brushed
against him, to bound away in a paroxysm of fear and rush off in
another direction, wondering how he had escaped those lightning claws.
In fact the lynx, intent only upon the hunting of his unknown foe, was
almost as astonished as the weasel, and quite unprepared to seize the
sudden opportunity for a meal. He eyed the vanishing weasel malignly
for a moment, then resumed his stealthy advance. A white-footed mouse,
sitting up daintily at the door of her burrow, fell over backwards,
and nearly died of fright, as the ghost-gray shape of doom sped up and
passed. But the lynx had just then no mind for mice, and never saw
her.
The strange trail, for some hundreds of yards, kept carefully to the
thickets and the shadows. In one place the marks of a scuffle, with a
heap of speckled feathers and a pair of slim claws, showed that the
intruder had captured and devoured an unwary partridge mothering her
brood. At this evidence of poaching on his preserves, the big lynx's
anger swelled hotly. He paused to sniff at the remnants, and then
stole on with added caution. The blood of the victim was not yet dry,
or even clotted, on the leaves.
A little further on, the trail touched the foot of a clean-stemmed
young maple. Here the trespasser had paused to stretch himself,
setting his claws deep into the bark. These claw-marks the lynx
appeared to take as a challenge or a defiance. Rearing himself against
the tree, he stretched himself to his utmost. But his highest scratch
was two inches below the mark of the stranger. This still further
enraged him. Possibly, it might also have daunted him a little but for
the fact that his own claw-marks were both deeper and wider apart
than those of his rival.
From the clawed tree, the trail now led to the very edge of the open
and thence to the top of an overhanging rock, white and sharply
chiseled in the moonlight. The lynx was just about to climb the rock,
when there beneath it, in the revealing radiance, he saw a sight which
flattened him in his tracks. The torn carcass of a young doe lay a few
feet from the base of the rock; and on top of the prey, glaring savage
challenge, crouched such a wildcat as the lynx had never even dreamed
of.
II.
A few days before this night of the white full moon, a gigantic
wildcat living some fifteen miles from Ringwaak had decided to change
his hunting-grounds. His range, over which he had ruled for years, was
a dark, thick-wooded slope overlooking the brown pools and loud chutes
of the Guimic stream. Here he had prospered hunting with continual
success, and enjoying life as only the few overlords among the wild
kindreds can hope to enjoy it. He had nothing to fear, as long as he
avoided quarrel with a bear or a bull moose. And a narrow escape when
young had taught him to shun trap and snare, and everything that
savoured of the hated works of man.
Now, the lumbermen had found their way to his shadowy domain. Loud
axe-strokes, the crash of falling trees, the hard clank of ox-chains,
jarred the solemn stillness. But far more intolerable to the great
cat's ears was the noise of laughter and shouting, the masterful
insolence of the human voice unabashed in the face of the solitude.
The men had built a camp near each end of his range. No retreat was
safe from their incursions. And they had cut down the great pine-tree
whose base shielded the entrance of his favourite lair. All through
the winter the angry cat had spent the greater portion of his time
slinking aside from these boisterous invaders or glaring fierce hate
upon them from his densest coverts. Thus occupied, he had too little
time for his hunting, and, moreover, the troubled game had become shy.
His temper grew worse and worse as his ribs grew more and more obvious
under his brownish, speckled fur. Nevertheless, for all his swelling
indignation, he had as yet no thought of forsaking his range. He kept
expecting that the men would go away.
When spring came, and the Guimic roared white between its tortuous
shores, some of the loud-mouthed men did go away. Nevertheless, the
big cat's rage waxed hotter than ever. Far worse than the men who went
were three portable steam sawmills which came in their place. At three
separate points these mills were set up--and straightway the long,
intolerable shriek of the circulars was ripping the air. In spite of
himself, the amazed cat screeched in unison when that sound first
smote his ears. He slunk away and hid for hours in his remotest lair,
wondering if it would follow him. When, in the course of weeks, he
grew so far accustomed to the fiendish sound that he could go about
his hunting within half a mile of it, he found that the saws had
worked him an unspeakable injury. They had fouled his beloved
fishing-pools with sawdust.
[Illustration: "HIS ROUND FACE BENT CLOSE DOWN TO THE GLASSY
SURFACE."]
It was the big cat's favoured custom to spend hours at a time crouched
over one or another of these pools, waiting for a chance to catch a
trout. Where an overhanging rock or a jutting root came out into deep
water, he would lie as motionless as the rock or log itself, his round
face bent close down to the glassy surface, his bright eyes intently
following the movements of the big, lazy trout in their safe deeps.
Once in a long while, often enough to keep his interest keen, a
May-fly or a fat worm would drop close past his nose and lie kicking
on top of the water. Up would sail a big trout, open-jawed to engulf
the morsel. At that instant the clutching paw of the watcher would
strike down and around more swiftly than eye could follow--and the
next instant the fish would be flopping violently among the underbrush
up the bank, with leaves and twigs clinging to its fat, silvery,
dappled sides. The sport was one which gave the big wildcat
never-failing delight; and, moreover, there was no other food in all
the wilderness quite so exquisite to his palate as a plump trout from
the ice-cool waters of the Guimic. When, therefore, he found his pools
covered, all day long, with the whitey-yellow grains of sawdust, which
prevented the trout feeding at the surface or drove them in disgust
from their wonted haunts, he realized that his range was ruined. The
men and the mills were the conquerors, and he must let himself be
driven from his well-beloved Guimic slopes. But first he would have
revenge. His caution somewhat undermined by his rage, he crept much
nearer to the main camp than he had hitherto dared to go, and hid
himself in a low tree to see what opportunity fate might fling to
him.
Belonging to the camp was a brindle dog, a sturdy and noisy mongrel
whose barking was particularly obnoxious to the wildcat. Of a surly
yet restless temper, the mongrel was in reality by no means popular in
the camp, and would not have been tolerated there but for the fact
that he belonged to the Boss. In the wildcat's eyes, however, as in
the eyes of all the wild kindreds, he seemed a treasured possession of
the menkind, and an especially objectionable expression of all their
most objectionable characteristics. Moreover, being four-footed and
furred, he was plainly more kin to the wild creatures than to man--and
therefore, to the wild creature, obviously a traitor and a renegade.
There was not one of them but would have taken more satisfaction in
avenging its wrongs upon the loud-mouthed mongrel than upon one of the
mongrel's masters; not one but would have counted that the sweetest
and completest form of vengeance.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the big cat quivered with eager
hate when he saw the dog come lazily out of the cook-house and wander
toward the spring--which lay just beyond the thick tree! His eyes
blazed green, his fur rose slightly, and he set his claws into the
bark to gain firm foothold.
Confident and secure, the dog approached the tree. On the way he
jumped savagely at a chipmunk, which dodged in time and whisked into
its hole. For a minute or two the dog pawed and scratched at the hole,
trying to dig the little fugitive out. Then he gave up the vain task,
and moved on toward the spring.
The wildcat gave one quick glance on every side. There was not a man
in sight. The cook was in the cook-house, rattling tins. Then the dog
came beneath the tree--and stopped to sniff at the wildcat's track.
There was a sharp scratch in the tree above--and in the next instant a
brown furry shape dropped upon him noiselessly, bearing him to the
ground. This thing was a mass of teeth and claws and terrific muscles.
It gave one sharp screech as the dog's yelping howl arose, then made
no sound but a spitting growl as it bit and ripped. From the first the
brindled mongrel had no ghost of a chance; and the struggle was over
in three minutes. As the cook, astonished by the sudden uproar, came
rushing axe in hand from his shanty, the wildcat sprang away with a
snarl and bounded into the cover of the nearest spruce bushes. He was
none the worse save for a deep and bleeding gash down his
fore-shoulder, where his victim had gained a moment's grip. But the
dog was so cruelly mauled that the woodsman could do nothing but
compassionately knock him on the head with the axe which he had
brought to the rescue.
Savage from the struggle, and elated from his vengeance, the wildcat
with no further hesitation turned his back upon his old haunts,
crossed the Guimic by great leaps from rock to rock, and set southward
toward the wooded slopes and valleys overlooked by the ragged crest of
Ringwaak.
The indignant exile, journeying so boldly to confront the peril of
which he had no suspicion or forewarning, belonged to a species
confined to the forests of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia or the
neighbourhood of their boundaries. He was a giant cousin of the common
wildcat, and known to the few naturalists who had succeeded in
differentiating and classifying his species as _Lynx Gigas_. In weight
and stature he was, if anything, more than the peer of his other and
more distant cousin, the savage Canada lynx. The cook of the camp, in
telling his comrades about the fate of the dog, spoke of the great
wildcat as a "catamount," to distinguish him from the common cat of
the woods. These same woodsmen, had they seen the lynx who ruled on
Ringwaak Hill, would have called him a "lucerfee," while any
Madawaska Frenchman in their company would have dubbed him _loup
cervier_. Either catamount or lucerfee was respectfully regarded by
the woodsmen.
For an hour the great cat journeyed on, wary and stealthy from habit
rather than intention, as he was neither hunting for prey nor avoiding
enemies. But when he found himself in strange woods--a gloomy cedar
swamp, dotted with dry hardwood knolls like islands--with true cat
instinct he delayed his journey to look about him and investigate.
Prowling from side to side, and sniffing and peering, he presently
found something that he was not looking for. In a hollow beneath a
granite boulder, behind the roots of two gnarled old cedars, he came
upon two glossy black bear cubs, fast asleep. The mother was nowhere
in sight, but the intruder shrank back with an abashed and guilty air
and ran up the nearest tree. Thence he made his way from branch to
branch, and did not return to the ground till he had put three or four
hundred yards between him and the den. He had no mind to bring
relentless doom upon his trail.
Not till he was well clear of the cedar swamp did the catamount
remember that he was hungry. The idea of being suspected of an
interest in young bear's meat had taken away his appetite. Now,
however, coming to a series of wild meadows, he lingered to hunt
meadow-mice. Among the roots of the long grass the mice had
innumerable hidden runways, through which they could travel without
danger from the hawks and owls. Crouching close to one of these
runways, the big cat would listen till a squeak or a faint scurrying
noise would reveal the passing of a mouse. Then a lightning pounce,
with paws much wider apart than in his ordinary hunting, would tear
away the frail covering of the runway, and usually show the victim
clutched beneath one paw or the other. This was much quicker as well
as craftier hunting than the more common wildcat method of lying in
wait for an hour at the door of a runway. Three of these plump
meadow-mice made the traveller a comfortable meal. Forgetting his
wrongs, he stretched himself in the full sun under the shelter of a
fallen tree, and slept soundly for an hour. Once only he awoke, when
his ears caught the beat of a hawk's wings winnowing low over his
retreat. He opened wide, fiercely bright eyes, completely alert on the
instant; but seeing the source of the sound he was asleep again
before the hawk had crossed the little meadow.
His siesta over, the exile mounted the fallen tree, dug his claws deep
into the bark, stretched himself again and again, yawned prodigiously,
and ended the exercise with a big, rasping miaow. At the sound there
was a sudden rustling in the bushes behind the windfall. Instantly the
catamount sprang, taking the risk of catching a porcupine or a skunk.
But whatever it was that made the noise, it had vanished in time; and
the rash hunter returned to his perch with a shamefaced air.
From this post of vantage on the edge of the meadows he could see the
crest of old Ringwaak dominating the forests to the south; and the
sight, for some unknown reason, drew him. Among those bleak rampikes
and rocks and dark coverts he might find a range to his liking. He
resumed his journey with a definiteness of purpose which kept him from
squandering time on the chase. Only once he halted, and that was when
the cries and flutterings of a pair of excited thrushes caught his
attention. He saw their nest in a low tree--and he saw a black snake,
coiled in the branches, greedily swallowing the half-fledged
nestlings. This was an opportunity which he could not afford to lose.
He ran expertly up the tree, pounced upon the snake, and bit through
its back bone just behind the head. The strong, black coils
straightened out limply. Carrying his prize between his jaws, the
catamount descended to the ground, growling and jerking savagely when
the wriggling length got tangled among the branches. Quick to
understand the services of their most unexpected ally, the desperate
birds returned to one surviving nestling, and their clamours ceased.
Beneath the tree the exile hurriedly devoured a few mouthfuls of the
thick meat of the back just behind the snake's head, then resumed his
journey toward Ringwaak.
It was close upon sunset when he reached the first fringes of the
northward slope of the mountain. Here his reception was benign. On the
banks of a tiny brook, rosy-gold in the flooding afternoon light, he
found a bed of wild catnip. Here for a few minutes he rolled in
ecstasy, chewing and clawing at the aromatic leaves, all four paws in
air, and hoarsely purring his delight. When, at last, he went on up
the slope, he carried with him through the gathering shadows the
pungent, sweet aroma of the herb. In a fierce gaiety of spirit he
would now and then leap into the air to strike idly at some bird
flitting high above his reach. Or he would jump and clutch
kittenishly with both paws at a fluttering, overhanging leaf, or
pounce upon an imaginary quiet mouse crouched among the leaves.
About twilight, as he was nearing the summit of the hill, he came
across a footprint which somewhat startled him out of his
intoxication. It was a footprint not unlike his own, but distinctly
larger. Being an old sign, there was no scent left to it--but its size
was puzzling and disquieting. From this on he went warily, not knowing
when he might be called upon to measure forces with some redoubtable
possessor of the range. When the moon rose, round and white and
all-revealing, and threw sinister shadows from rampike and rock, he
kept to the densest thickets and felt oppressed with strangeness. But
when he succeeded in surprising a hen partridge hovering over her
brood, with the blood warm in his mouth he began to feel at home. This
fine range should be his, whoever might contest the sovereignty.
Coming across a deer trail leading beneath an overhanging rock, he
climbed the rock and crouched in ambush, waiting to see what might
come by.
For an hour he crouched there, motionless as the eternal granite
itself, while the moon climbed and whitened, and the shadows of the
rampikes changed, and the breathless enchantment deepened over
Ringwaak. At long intervals there would be a faint rustling in some
near-by clump of juniper, or a squeak and a brief scuffle in the
thickets; or, on wings as soundless as sleep, a great owl would pass
by, to drop sharply behind a rock, or sail away like a ghost among the
rampikes. But to none of these furtive happenings did the watcher on
the rock pay any heed. He was waiting for what might come upon the
trail.
At last, it came. Stepping daintily on her small, fine hoofs, her
large eyes glancing timorously in every direction, a little yearling
doe emerged from the bushes and started to cross the patch of
brilliant light. The strange, upright pupils of the catamount's eyes
narrowed and dilated at the sight, and his muscles quivered to sudden
tension. The young doe came beneath the rock. The cat sprang,
unerring, irresistible; and the next moment she lay kicking helplessly
beneath him, his fangs buried in her velvet throat.
[Illustration: "SOMETHING MADE HIM TURN HIS HEAD QUICKLY."]
This was noble prey; and the giant cat, his misgivings all forgotten,
drank till his long thirst was satiated. His jaws dripping, he lifted
his round, fierce face, and gazed out and away across the moonlit
slopes below him toward his ancient range beyond the Guimic. While he
gazed, triumphing, something made him turn his head quickly and eye
the spruce thicket behind him.
III.
It was at this moment that the old lynx, master of Ringwaak, coming
suddenly out into the moonlight, saw the grim apparition beneath the
rock, and flattened to the ground.
Through long, momentous, pregnant seconds the two formidable and
matched antagonists scrutinized each other, the lynx close crouched,
ready to launch himself like a thunderbolt, the catamount half risen,
his back bowed, one paw of obstinate possession clutching the head of
his prey. In the eyes of each, as they measured each other's powers
and sought for an advantage, flamed hate, defiance, courage, and
savage question.
Seen thus near together, catamount by lucerfee, they were obviously
akin, yet markedly different. The cat was heavier in the body,
outweighing his rival by perhaps not far from ten pounds, but with
shorter and more gracefully shaped legs, and smaller feet. His head
was more arched, seeming to indicate a greater intelligence, and his
flaming eyes were set wider apart; but his mouth was smaller, his
fangs less long and punishing. His fur was of a browner, warmer hue
than that of the lynx, whose gray had a half-invisible ghostliness in
the moonlight. The tails of both were ridiculously short, not six
inches in length, but that of the catamount was straight and stiff,
while that of the lucerfee had a curious upward twist that somehow
mocked the contortions of his huge and overlong hind legs. The eyes of
the lynx, under his flatter forehead, were the more piercing, the less
blazing. Altogether the great wildcat was the more beautiful of the
two beasts, the more intelligent, the more adaptable and resourceful.
But the lynx, with his big, uncouth, hind quarters, and great legs
gathered under him, and exaggerated paws, looked to be the more
formidable fighting machine.
Thus, unstirring, they eyed each other. Then with a strident screech
that seemed to tear the spell of the night to tatters, the gray body
of the lynx shot through the air. It landed, not upon the catamount,
but squarely upon the carcass of the doe, where, a fraction of a
second before, the catamount had stood. The wary intruder had not
waited to endure the full shock of that charge, but lightly as a puff
of down had leaped aside. The next instant he had pounced, with a yowl
of defiance, straight for the lynx's neck.
Lightning quick though he was, the lynx recovered in time to meet the
attack with deadly counter-stroke of bared claws, parrying like a
skilled boxer. In this forearm work the catamount, lighter of paw and
talon, suffered the more; and being quick to perceive his adversary's
advantage, he sought to force a close grapple. This the lynx at first
avoided, rending and punishing frightfully as he gave ground; while
the solemn height of old Ringwaak was shocked by a clamour of spitting
and raucous yowling that sent every sleepy bird fluttering in terror
from its nest.
Suddenly, perceiving that the lynx was backing dangerously close to
the face of the rock, the great cat sprang, took a frightful, ripping
buffet across the face, broke down his foe's guard and bore him to the
ground by sheer weight. Here, in this close embrace, the hinder claws
of both came into play with hideous effect. The clamour died down to a
tense, desperate, gasping snarl; for now the verdict of life or death
was a matter of moments. But in this fearful and final test, when
there was no more room for fencing, no more time for strategy, the
more powerful hind legs and longer, more eviscerating claws of the
lynx had the decisive advantage. Though borne down, and apparently
getting the worst of the fight, the master of Ringwaak was in reality
ripping his enemy to pieces from beneath. All at once the latter
sprang away with a scream, stood for a second erect and rigid, then
sank limp beside the torn carcass of the doe.
The lynx, badly torn and bitten, but with no fatal injury, pounced
upon the unresisting body of the catamount and mauled it till well
assured of the completeness of his victory. Then, heedless of his
wounds, he mounted the carcass of the doe, lifted his head high, and
screeched his challenge across the night. No answer coming, he tore a
mouthful of the meat to emphasize possession, stepped down, and crept
off to nurse his hurts in some dark retreat; for not easy had been the
task of defending his lordship. When all was still once more on
Ringwaak, presently descended again the enchantment of the mystic
light. And under its transforming touch even the torn bodies lying
before the bright face of the rock lost their hideousness, becoming
remote, and unsubstantial and visionary.
The Decoy
High above the flat-spread earth, their strong wings driving them at
tremendous speed through the thin, cold air of dawn, the wild-goose
flock journeyed north. In the shape of an irregular V they journeyed,
an old gander, wise and powerful, at the apex of the aerial array. As
they flew, their long necks stretched straight out, the living air
thrilled like a string beneath their wing-beats. From their throats
came a throbbing chorus, resonant, far-carrying, mysterious,--_honka,
honka, honka, honk, honka, honk_. It seemed to be the proper utterance
of altitude and space.
The flight was as true as if set by a compass; but the longer limb of
the V would curve and swerve sinuously from time to time as the weaker
or less experienced members of the flock wavered in their alignment.
Flat, low-lying forests, and lonely meres, and rough, isolated farms
sped past below the rushing voyagers,--then a black head-land, and
then a wide, shallow arm of the sea. For a few minutes the glimmer of
pale, crawling tides was everywhere beneath them,--then league on
league of gray-green, sedgy marsh, interlaced with little pools and
lanes of bright water, and crisscrossed with ranks of bulrush. The
leader of the flock now stretched his dark head downward, slowing the
beat of his wings, and the disciplined array started on a long decline
toward earth. From its great height the flock covered nearly a mile of
advance before coming within a hundred yards of the pale green levels;
and all through the gradual descent the confusion of marsh, and pool,
and winding creek, seemed to float up gently to meet the long-absent
wanderers. At length, just over a shallow, spacious, grassy mere, and
some thirty feet above its surface, the leader decided to alight. It
was an old and favoured feeding-ground, where the mud was full of
tender shoots and tiny creatures of the ooze. The wings of the flock,
as if on signal, turned out and upward, showing a flash of paler
colour as they checked the still considerable speed of the flight.
In that pause, just before the splash of alighting, from a thick cover
of sedge across the pool came two sharp spurts of flame, one after the
other, followed by two thunderous reports, so close together as to
seem almost like one. Turning straight over, the leader fell upon the
water with a heavy splash; and immediately after him dropped his
second in leadership, the strong young gander who flew next him on the
longer limb of the V. The flock, altogether demoralized, huddled
together for a few seconds with loud cries; then rose and flapped off
seaward. Before the hunter in the sedge could get fresh cartridges
into his gun, the diminished flock was out of range, making desperate
haste to safer feeding-grounds.
Of the two birds thus suddenly smitten by fate, the younger, shot
through the heart, lay motionless where he had dropped, a sprawl of
black and white, and ashen feathers tumbled by the little ripples of
the pool. But the older bird was merely winged. Recovering himself
almost instantly from the shock of the wound and the fall, he made one
pathetically futile effort to rise again, then started swimming down
the pond, trailing his shattered wing behind him and straining his
gaze toward the departing flock.
Immediately after the two shots, out from the shelter of the rushes
had sprung a large, curly-coated, brown retriever. With a yelp of
excitement he had dashed into the water and dragged ashore the body
of the dead bird. Now the hunter, standing up and stretching his legs
as if cramped from a long lying-in-wait, started on a sharp run down
the wet shore of the pond, whistling the retriever after him. He had
noted the splendid stature of the wounded bird, and wanted to capture
him alive.
Not without cause had the great gander achieved the leadership of the
flock, for he possessed not only strength but intelligence. When he
saw that his trailing wing so hampered his swimming that he would
presently be overtaken, he turned and darted into the sedges of the
opposite shore, trusting to the difficulties of the swamp to protect
him. He did not know that the big brown retriever was almost
amphibious, and more cunning than himself.
The hunter stopped, and pointed to the spot of waving reeds where the
bird had disappeared.
"Fetch him, Pete!" he commanded,--"But gently, boy, ge-e-ently!" And
the wise old dog understood, either from the words or from the tone in
which they were uttered, that this was to be a bloodless capture.
Barking joyously, he tore around the pond to the place where the
gander had vanished, and dashed splashing into the reeds. A few
seconds later a tumult arose, the reeds were beaten down, and the dog
reappeared, dragging his prize by the uninjured wing.
The great bird, powerful and dauntless, made a gallant fight; but he
was hopelessly handicapped. His most formidable weapons were the bony
elbows of his strong, untiring wings; and of both these he was now
deprived, one wing being shattered, and the other in the grip of the
enemy's jaws. He struck and bit and worried with his hard bill; but
the dog, half-shutting his eyes, took the mauling grimly and dragged
his troublesome captive into the water.
Here, however, he made a mistake. The great bird was a mighty swimmer,
and indomitable; and in half a minute his captor was glad to drag him
to land again. Then the hunter arrived on the scene; and the dog,
gladly relinquishing so unmanageable a prisoner, sat back on his
haunches, with tongue hanging out, to see what his master would do.
The dauntless gander bit furiously, and pounded with his one undamaged
wing, and earned his adversary's unstinted commendation: but in a
minute or two he found himself helpless, swathed like a cocoon in a
stout, woollen hunting-coat, and his head ignominiously bagged in one
of the sleeves. In this fashion, his heart bursting with fear and
wrath, his broken wing one hot throb of anguish, he was carried under
the hunter's arm for what seemed to him a whole night long. Then he
was set free in a little open pen in a garden, beside a
green-shuttered, wide-eaved, white cottage on the uplands.
The hunter was so kind to his captive, so assiduous in his care, that
the wild bird presently grew almost indifferent to his approach, and
ceased to strike at him savagely with his free wing whenever he
entered the pen. The other wing, well cleaned and salved, and bound in
cunning splints, healed rapidly, and caused no pain save when its
owner strove to flap it,--which he did, with long, desolate, appealing
cries, whenever a wild-goose flock went honking musically across the
evening or morning sky.
At length, while the injured wing was still in bandage, the hunter
took the bird in spite of all protest, tucked the long neck and
troublesome head under his arm, and attached to one leg a little
leather wrapping and a long, strong cord. Then he opened the pen. The
big gander strode forth with more haste than quite comported with his
dignity. Straight down the slope he started, seeking the wide marshes
where he expected to find his flock. Then suddenly he came to the end
of his cord with a jerk, and fell forward on his breast and bill with
a _honk_ of surprise. He was not free, after all, and two or three
violent struggles convinced him of the fact. As soon as he realized
himself still a prisoner, his keen, dark eyes turned a look of
reproach upon his jailer, who was holding the other end of the cord
and watching him intently. Then he slackened on the tether, and fell
to cropping the short grass of the lawn as if being tied by the leg
was an ancient experience. It was a great thing, after all, to be out
of the pen.
"He'll do!" said the man to himself with satisfaction, as he fixed the
tether to a young apple-tree. When he had gone into the house the bird
stopped feeding, turned first one eye and then the other toward the
empty sky, stretched his long, black neck and clean white throat, and
sent out across the green spaces his appealing and lonely
cry,--_honka, honka, honka, ho-onka_!
Very early the following morning, before the stars had begun to pale
at the approach of dawn, the captive was once more wrapped up
securely and taken on a blind journey. When he was uncovered, and
anxiously stretched out his head, he found himself again on the edge
of that shallow pool in the marshes where fate had overtaken him. The
brown retriever was sitting on his haunches close by, regarding him
amicably. The man was fastening one end of the tether to a stake at
the water's edge, and from the east a grayness touched with chill pink
was spreading over the sky.
A moment later the surprised bird found himself standing among the wet
sedge, close to the water. With a nervous glance at the dog, whom he
shrank from with more dread than from the man, he launched himself
into the water and swam straight out from shore.
This time, surely, he was free. Next to the spacious solitudes of the
air, this was his proper element. How exquisite to the thin webs of
his feet felt the coolness of it, as he pushed against it with strong
strokes! How it curled away luxuriously from his gray, firm-feathered
breast! This was to live again, after the pain and humiliation of his
captivity! And yonder, far down the mere, and past those tall reeds
standing shadowy in the pallor, surely he would find the flock which
had moved on without him! Then, all at once, it was as if something
had clutched him by the leg. With a startled cry and a splash he
tipped forward, and his glad journey came to an end. He had reached
the limit of his tether.
Remembering his experience of the day before, he made no vain
struggle, but floated quietly for a minute or two, stricken with his
disappointment. The man and the big brown dog had disappeared; but
presently his keen and sagacious eyes detected them both, lying
motionless in a thicket of reeds. Having stared at them indignantly
for a few moments, swimming slowly to and fro and transfixing them
with first one eye and then the other, he ducked his head and began
biting savagely at the leathern wrapping on his leg. But the
uselessness of this soon appearing to him, he gave it up, and sought
to ease his despair by diving and guttering with his bill among the
roots of the oozy bottom. In this absorbing occupation he so far
forgot his miseries that all at once he tried to lift himself on the
water, flap his wings, and sound his trumpet-call. One wing did give a
frantic flap. The other surged fiercely against its bandages, sending
a throb of anguish through his frame, and the trumpet-call broke in a
single hoarse _honk_. After this he floated for a long time in
dejection, while the level rays of sunrise stole mysteriously across
the pale marshes.
The hunter, tired of his long stillness in the sedge, was just about
to stand up and stretch himself, when from far down the sky to
southward came a hollow and confused clamour. The hunter heard it, and
the brown retriever heard it; and both crouched low behind their
shelter, as motionless as stones. The wild captive, floating at the
end of his tether out on the pink-and-gold mirror of the pond, also
heard it, and stretched his fine black head aloft, rigid with
expectancy. Nearer and nearer came the thrilling voices. Blacker and
larger against the sky grew the journeying V as it approached the
marshes. The heart of the captive swelled with hope and longing. Not
his own flock, indeed, but his own kin, these free and tireless
voyagers coming confidently to safe feeding-grounds! Forgetting
everything but his great loneliness, he raised himself as high as he
could upon the water, one wing partly outspread, and called, and
called again, summoning the travellers to alight.
Hearing this kindly summons, the flock dipped at once and came
slanting steeply toward earth. In their haste they broke rank,
descending more abruptly than usual, their customary caution quite
laid aside when they saw one of their own kind waiting to receive
them. The joyous captive ducked and bowed his head in greeting. In
another moment the whole flock would have settled clamorously about
him, and he would have been happy,--but before that moment came there
came instead two bursts of flame and thunder from the covert of sedge.
And instead of the descending flock, there fell beside the captive two
heavy, fluttering gray-and-black shapes, which beat the water feebly
and then lay still.
As the betrayed and panic-stricken flock flapped away in confusion the
captive tugged frantically at his tether, crying shrilly and
struggling to follow them. In his desperation he paid no heed whatever
as the big, brown dog dashed out and triumphantly dragged the bodies
of the two victims to land. He was horrified by the terrible noise,
and the killing; but his attention was chiefly engrossed by the fact
that the flock had been frightened away, leaving him to his
loneliness. For several minutes he continued his cries, till the flock
was far out of sight. Then silence fell again on the marshes.
A quarter of an hour later much the same thing happened again. Another
flock, passing overhead, came clamouring fearlessly down in response
to the captive's calls, met the doom that blazed from the reed-covert,
and left two of its members gasping on the surface of the pond. This
time, however, the despair of the captive was less loud and less
prolonged. As leader, for two seasons, of his own flock, he had
necessarily learned certain simple processes of deduction. These
pitiful tragedies through which he had just passed were quite
sufficient to convince him that this particular shallow pond, though
so good a feeding-ground, was a fatal place for the voyaging geese to
visit. Further, in a dim way, his shocked and shuddering brain began
to realize that his own calling was the cause of the horrors. If he
called, the flocks came fearlessly, content with his pledge that all
was well. Upon their coming, the fire, and dreadful thunders, and
inexplicable death burst forth from the sedge; and then the great
brown dog appeared to drag his prey to shore. The whole mischief, as
it seemed to him, was the work of the dog; and it did not occur to him
that the man, who seemed fairly well-disposed and all-powerful, had
anything whatever to do with it. This idea gradually grew clear in
the captive's brain, as he swam, very slowly, to and fro upon the
brightening water. In a vague way his heart determined that he would
lure no more of his kindred to their doom. And when, a little later, a
third flock came trumpeting up the sky, the captive eyed their
approach in despairing silence.
As the beating wings drew near, stooping toward the silvery pools and
pale green levels, the captive swam back and forward in wild
excitement, aching to give the call and ease his loneliness. The
flock, perceiving him, drew nearer; but in his excited movements and
his silence its leader discerned a peril. There was something sinister
and incomprehensible in this splendidly marked bird who refused to
summon them to his feeding-ground, and kept swimming wildly back and
forth. Keeping well beyond gunshot, they circled around this smiling
but too mysterious water, to alight with great clamour and splashing
in a little, sheltered mere some two or three hundred yards farther
inland. The hunter, crouching moveless and expectant in his ambush,
muttered an exclamation of surprise, and wondered if it could be
possible that his incomparable decoy had reached an understanding of
the treacherous game and refused to play it.
"There's no smarter bird that flies than a wild gander!" he mused,
watching the great bird curiously and with a certain sympathy. "We'll
see what happens when another flock comes by!"
Meanwhile the new arrivals, over in the unseen pond behind the rushes,
were feeding and bathing with a happy clamour. They little dreamed
that a pot-hunting rustic from the village on the hills, flat on his
belly in the oozy grass, was noiselessly worming his way toward them.
Armed with an old, single-barrel duck gun, the height of his ambition
was to get a safe and easy shot at the feeding birds. No delicate
wing-shooting for him. What he wanted was the most he could get for
his powder and lead. Big and clumsy though he was, his progress
through the grass was as stealthy as that of a mink.
[Illustration: "HE LIFTED UP HIS VOICE IN A SUDDEN ABRUPT 'HONK,
HONK!'"]
It chanced that the path of the pot-hunter took him close past the
further shore of the pond where the captive was straining at his
tether and eating his heart out in determined silence. The homesick,
desolate bird would swim around and around for a few minutes, as a
caged panther circles his bounds, then stop and listen longingly to
the happy noise from over beyond the reed-fringes. At last, goaded
into a moment of forgetfulness by the urge of his desire, he lifted up
his voice in a sudden abrupt _honk, honk_!
The pot-hunter stopped his crawling and peered delightedly through the
sedgy stems. Here was a prize ready to his hand. The flock was still
far off, and might easily take alarm before he could get within range.
But this stray bird, a beauty too, was so near that he could not miss.
Stealthily he brought his heavy weapon to the shoulder; and slowly,
carefully, he took aim.
The report of the big duck gun was like thunder, and roused the
marshes. In a fury the hunter sprang from his ambush across the mere,
and ran down to the water's edge, threatening vengeance on the lout
who would fire on a decoy. The brown retriever, wild with excitement,
dashed barking up and down the shore, not knowing just what he ought
to do. Sandpipers went whistling in every direction. And the foraging
flock, startled from their security, screamed wildly and flapped off
unhurt to remoter regions of the marsh. But the lonely captive, the
wise old gander who had piloted his clan through so many hundred
leagues of trackless air, lay limp and mangled on the stained water,
torn by the heavy charge of the duck gun. The whimsical fate that
seems to play with the destinies of the wild kindreds had chosen to
let him save one flock from the slaughterer, and expiate his blameless
treason.
The Laugh in the Dark
Though the darkness under the great trees was impenetrable, it gave an
impression of transparency which invited the eyes to strain and peer,
as if vision might be expected to reward an adequate effort. It was
that liquid darkness which means not mist, but the utter absence of
light on a clear air; and it was filled with elusive yet almost
illuminating forest scents. To the keen nostrils of the man who was
silently mounting the trail, it seemed as if these wild aromas almost
enabled him to veritably see the trees which towered all about him, so
clearly did they differentiate to him their several species as he
passed,--the hemlock, in particular, and the birch, the black poplar,
and the aromatic balsam-fir. But his eyes, though trained to the open,
could in truth detect nothing whatever, except now and then a darting
gleam which might come from a wet leaf, or from the gaze of a watching
wood-mouse, or merely from the stirrings of the blood within his own
brain.
The man was on his way up from the lake, by an old trail long ago
familiar to his feet, to make camp for the night in a deserted lumber
shanty about a quarter of a mile back from the water. Over the dimly
glimmering, windless water, under a cloudless sky, he had groped his
way in his canoe to the old landing. Turning the canoe over his
supplies for protection in case of rain, he had set out for the lumber
shanty with only a blanket and a couple of hardtack. His rifle he had
indifferently left in the canoe, but in his right hand he carried a
paddle, to steady his steps and help him feel his way through the
dark.
Once the grayness of the open shore had faded behind him, the man
found himself walking stealthily, like the stealthiest of the wild
kindred themselves. The trail being well-worn, though long deserted by
man, his feet kept it without difficulty; but he held the paddle out
before him lest he should stumble over a windfall. Presently he took
note of the fact that the trail was marvellously smooth for one that
had been so long deserted, and with a little creeping of the skin,
which was not in any sense fear but rather an acknowledgment of
mystery, he realized that it was other than human feet which were
keeping the lonely path in use. What kind were they, he wondered,--the
great, noiseless pads of bear, or lynx, or panther, the hard hoofs of
moose or deer, or the airy, swift feet of hare and mink and marten? As
he wondered, moving more and more furtively as the spirit of the
unseen wild pervaded and possessed him, his nostrils discerned across
the savours of the trees and the mould a sudden musky scent; and he
knew that one of the frequenters of the trail was a red fox, who had
just gone by.
Impressed by a sense that he was not so utterly alone as he had
imagined himself to be, the man now obeyed one of the wary impulses of
the wood-folk. He stepped aside from the trail, feeling his way, and
leaned his back against a huge birch-tree. The ragged, ancient,
sweet-smelling bark felt familiar and friendly to his touch. Here he
stood, sniffing the still air with discrimination, testing with
initiated ears every faint forest breathing. The infinitesimal and
incessant stir of growth and change and readjustment was vaguely
audible to his fine sense, making a rhythmic background against which
the slightest unusual sound, even to the squeak of a wood-mouse, or
the falling of a worm-bitten leaf, would have fairly startled the
dark. Once he heard a twig snap, far in the depths on the other side
of the trail, and he knew that some one of the wild kindred had moved
carelessly. But on the trail nothing went by.
Had there been ever so small a glimmer of light, to enable his eyes to
play their part in this forest game, the man could have watched for an
hour as moveless as the tree on which he leaned. But in that strange,
absolute dark the strain soon grew almost intolerable. The game
certainly ceased to be amusing after an uneventful fifteen minutes had
passed. He was just about to give up, to step forth into the trail and
resume his journey to the cabin, when he caught a strange sound, which
made him stiffen back at once into watchful rigidity.
The sound was a great breath. In its suddenness and its vagueness the
listener was unable to distinguish whether it came from a dozen yards
down the trail, or a couple of dozen inches from his elbow. His nose,
however, assured him that he had not the latter alternative to face;
so he waited, his right hand upon the knife in his belt. He could hear
his heart beating.
For several minutes nothing more was heard. Then through the high
leafage overhead splashed a few big drops of rain, with the hushing
sound of a shower not heavy enough to break through. The next moment a
flash of white lightning lit up the forest aisles,--and in that moment
the man saw a huge black bear standing in the trail, not ten feet
distant. In that moment the eyes of the man and the eyes of the beast
met each other fairly. Then the blackness fell once more; and a thin
peal of midsummer thunder rolled over the unseen tree-tops.
When all was silence again the man felt uncomfortable, and regretted
the rifle which he had left under the canoe. That the bear would
attack him, unprovoked, he knew to be improbable; but he also knew
enough about bears to know that it is never well to argue too
confidently as to what they will do. The more he waited and listened,
the more he felt sure that the bear was also waiting and listening, in
an uncertainty not much unlike his own. He decided that it was for him
to take the initiative. Clapping his hands smartly, he threw back his
head, and burst into a peal of laughter.
The loud, incongruous sound shocked the silences. It almost horrified
the man himself, so unexpected, so unnatural, so inexplicable did it
seem even to his own ears. When it ceased, he knew that it had
accomplished its purpose. He heard rustling and snapping noises
swiftly diminishing in the distance, and knew that the bear was
retreating in a panic. At this he laughed again, not loudly, but to
himself, and stepped out into the trail.
But the man was not yet done with the effects of his loud challenge to
the solemnities of the dark. Hardly had he taken three steps along the
trail when a little in front of him--perhaps, as he guessed, some five
and twenty paces--there arose a slashing and crashing noise of
struggle. Branches cracked and rustled and snapped, heavy feet pounded
the earth, and a confusion of gasping grunts suggested a blind
menagerie in mortal combat. The man, fairly startled, groped his way
back to the tree, and waited behind it, knife in hand. In fact he had
a strong inclination to climb into the branches; but this impulse he
angrily restrained.
For a whole minute the daunting uproar continued, neither approaching
nor receding, and at length the man's curiosity, ever insatiable where
the mysteries of the wild were concerned, got the better of his
prudence. He lit a match and peered from behind his shelter. The
little, sudden blaze spread a sharp light, but whatever was making the
uproar went on as before, quite heedless of the singular phenomenon.
When the match died out it left the man no wiser. Then with hurried
hands he stripped some birch bark, and rolled himself a serviceable
torch. When this blazed up with its smoky flame, he held it well off
to one side and a little behind him, and made his way warily to the
scene of the disturbance.
A turn in the trail, and the mystery stood revealed. With a cry of
indignation the man darted forward, no longer cautious. What he saw
before him was a great, gaunt moose-cow reared upon her hind legs,
caught under the jaws by a villainous moose-snare. With her head high
among the branches, she lurched and kicked in a brave struggle for
life, while every effort but drew tighter the murdering noose. A few
feet away stood her lanky calf, trembling, and staring stupidly at the
light.
The man lost not a moment. Dropping his bundle and paddle, but
carefully guarding the torch, he climbed the tree above the victim,
lay out on a branch, reached down, and dexterously severed the noose
with his knife. What matter if, with his haste and her struggles, he
at the same time cut a slash in the beast's stout hide? The
blood-letting was a sorely needed medicine to her choked veins. She
fell in a heap, and for a minute or two lay gasping loudly. Then she
staggered to her feet, and stood swaying, while she nosed the calf
with her long muzzle to assure herself that it had not been hurt in
the cataclysm which had overtaken her.
The man watched her until his torch was almost gone, then climbed down
the tree (which was not a birch) to get himself another. Noticing him
now for the first time, the moose pulled herself together with a
mighty effort, and thrust the calf behind her. Could this be the enemy
who had so nearly vanquished her? For a moment the man thought she was
going to charge upon him, and he held himself in readiness to go up
the tree again. But the poor shaken beast thought better of it. Pain,
rage, fear, amazement, doubt,--all these the man fancied he could see
in her staring, bloodshot eyes. He stood quite still, pitying her, and
cursing the brutal poachers who had set the snare. Then, just before
the torch gave its last flicker, the great animal turned and led her
calf off through the woods, looking back nervously as she went.
When the light was out, and silence had come again upon the forest,
the man resumed his journey. He travelled noisily, whistling and
stamping as he went, as a warning to all wild creatures that a man
was in their woods, and that they must give room to a master. He
carried with him now, besides his blanket and his paddle, a generous
roll of birch bark, with which to illuminate the lumber shanty before
going in. It had occurred to him that possibly some lynx or wildcat
might have taken up its dwelling therein; and if so, he was no longer
in the mood to meet it at close quarters in the dark.
The Kings of the Intervale
Far out over the pale, smooth surface of the river a crow flew,
flapping heavily. From time to time he uttered an angry and frightened
squawk. Over, under, and all around him, now darting at his eyes, now
dropping upon him like a little, arrow-pointed thunderbolt, now
slapping a derisive wing across his formidable beak, flashed a small,
dark bird whose silvery white belly now and then caught the sun.
The crow's accustomed alert self-possession was quite shattered. He
had forgotten his own powers of attack. He seemed to fear for his
eyes,--and among all the wild kindred there is no fear more horrifying
than that. When he ducked, and swerved, and tried to dodge, he did it
awkwardly, as if his presence of mind was all gone.
His assailant, less than a third of his weight, was a king-bird, whose
nest, in the crotch of an elm on the intervale meadow, the crow had
been so ill-advised as to investigate. The crow was comparatively
inexperienced, or he would have known enough to keep away from the
nests of the king-birds. But there it was, in plain sight; and he
loved eggs or tender nestlings. Before he had had time to find out
which it was that the nest contained, both the parent birds had fallen
upon him with a swift ferocity which speedily took away his appetite
for food or fight. Their beaks were sturdy and burning sharp. Their
short, powerful wings gave them a flight so swift and darting that,
for all his superior strength, he felt himself at their mercy. His one
thought was to save his eyes and escape.
Both birds chased him till he was well out over the river. Then the
female returned to her nest, leaving her mate to complete the
intruder's chastisement. Had the crow been an old and cunning bird, he
would have sought the extreme heights of air, where the king-bird is
disinclined to follow; but lacking this crow-wisdom, he kept on at the
level of the tallest tree-tops, and was forced to take his punishment.
He was, in reality, more sore and terrified than actually injured.
That darting, threatening beak of his pursuer never actually struck
his eyes. But for this, it is probable, he had only the indulgence of
the king-bird to thank. When at last the chastiser, tired of his task,
turned and flew back up the river toward the nest in the elm-crotch,
the ruffled crow took refuge out of sight, in the top of the densest
hemlock, where he rolled his eyes and preened his plumage silently for
an hour before daring again the vicissitudes of the wilderness world.
The nest to which the triumphant king-bird hurried back was
audaciously perched in plain view of every prowler. The crotch of the
elm-tree which it occupied was about twelve feet from the ground. The
intervale, or water-meadow, by the side of the river, held but a few
widely scattered trees,--trees of open growth, such as elm,
balsam-poplar, and water-ash. It was free from all underbrush. There
was nothing, therefore, to shield the nest from even the most careless
eyes; and with an insolence of fearlessness matched only by that of
the osprey, it was made the more conspicuous by having great tufts of
white wool from a neighbouring sheep-pasture woven into its bulky,
irregular frame. So irregular and haphazard, indeed, did it appear,
that it might almost have been mistaken for a bunch of rubbish left in
the tree from the time of freshet. But if the two king-birds relied on
this resemblance as a concealment, they presumed as so clever a bird
is not likely to do upon the blindness or stupidity of the wild
kindred. The wild kindred are seldom blind, and very seldom stupid,
because those members of the fellowship who are possessed of such
defects sooner or later go to feed their fellows. Hence it was that
most of the folk of the riverside, furred or feathered, knew well
enough what the big whitish-gray bunch of rubbish in the elm-crotch
was.
There were five eggs at the bottom of the smooth, warm cup, which
formed the heart of the nest. They were a little smaller than a
robin's egg, and of a soft creamy white, blotched irregularly with
dull purplish maroon of varying tone. So jealous of these mottled
marvels were the king-birds that not even the most harmless of
visitors were allowed to look upon them. If so much as a thrush, or a
pewee, or a mild-mannered white throat, presumed to alight on the very
remotest branch of that elm, it was brusquely driven away.
One morning early, the male king-bird was sitting very erect, as was
his custom, on the naked tip of a long, slender, dead branch some ten
feet above the nest The morning chill was yet in the air, so it was a
little early for the flies which formed his food to be stirring. But
he was hungry, and on the alert for the first of them to appear. Only
the tense feathers of his crest, raised to show the flame-orange spot
which was his kingly crown, betrayed his eagerness; for he was a
self-contained bird. The sun was just beginning to show the red
topmost edge of his rim through the jagged line of firs across the
river, and the long, level streaks of aerial rose, creeping under the
branches, filled all the shadowed places of the wilderness with
mysterious light. The eastward sides of the tree-trunks and naked
branches glimmered pink; and dew-wet leaves, here and there, shone
like pale jewels of pink, amber, and violet. The mirror-like surface
of the river was blurred with twisting spirals of mist, silvery and
opalescent, through which the dim-seen figure of a duck in straight
flight shot like a missile.
As the king-bird sat erect on his branch, watching with bright eyes
the miracle of the morning, an over-adventurous dragon-fly arose from
a weed-top below him and flew into the rosy light. The bird darted
straight and true, zigzagged sharply as the victim tried to dodge,
caught the lean prize in his beak, and carried it very gallantly to
his mate upon the nest. Then he fluttered back to his post on the
branch.
As the sun got up over the hill, and the warmth dried their wings, the
intervale began to hum softly with dancing flies and hurrying
beetles, and the king-bird was continually on the move, twittering
with soft monotony (his sole attempt at song), between each successful
sally. At length the female rose from her eggs, stood on the edge of
the nest, and gave an impatient call. Her mate flew down to take her
place, and the two perched side by side, making a low chirping sound
in their throats.
Just at this moment a small black snake, warmed into activity and
hunger by the first rays of the sun, glided to the tree and began to
climb. Bird's-nesting was the black snake's favourite employment; but
it had not stopped to consider that the nest in this particular tree
was a king-bird's. It climbed swiftly and noiselessly, and the
preoccupied birds did not get glimpse of it till it was within two
feet of the nest.
There was no time for consultation in the face of this peril. Like
lightning the two darted down upon the enemy, buffeting its head with
swift wing-strokes. The first assault all but swept it from the tree,
and it shrank back upon itself with flattened head and angry hiss.
Then it struck fiercely, again and again, at its bewildering
assailants. But swift as were its movements, those of the king-birds
were swifter, and its fangs never hit upon so much as one harassing
feather. Suddenly, in its fury, it struck out too far, weakening for a
moment its hold upon the crevices of the bark; and in that moment,
both birds striking it together, its squirming folds were hurled to
the ground. Thoroughly cowed, it slipped under cover and made off,
only a wavering line among the grasses betraying its path. The
king-birds, with excited and defiant twittering, followed for a little
its hidden retreat, and then returned elated to the nest.
Among the kindred of the wild as well as among those of roof and
hearth, events are apt to go in company. For day after day things will
revolve in set fashion. Then chance takes sudden interest in a
particular spot or a certain individual, and there, for a time, is
established a centre for events. This day of the black snake was an
eventful day for the little kings of the intervale. They had hardly
more than recovered from their excitement over the snake when a red
squirrel, his banner of a tail flaunting superbly behind him, came
bounding over the grass to their tree. His intentions may have been
strictly honourable. But a red squirrel's intentions are liable to
change in the face of opportunity. As he ran up the tree, and paused
curiously at the nested crotch, a feathered thunderbolt struck him on
the side of the head. It knocked him clean out of the tree; and he
turned a complete somersault in the air before he could get his
balance and spread his legs so as to alight properly. When he reached
the ground he fled in dismay, and was soon heard chattering
vindictively among the branches of a far-off poplar.
It was a little before noon when came the great event of this eventful
day. The male king-bird was on the edge of the nest, feeding a fat
moth to his mate. As he straightened up and glanced around he saw a
large marsh-hawk winnowing low across the river. As it reached the
shore it swooped into the reed-fringe, but rose again without a
capture. For a few minutes it quartered the open grass near the bank,
hunting for mice. The two king-birds watched it with anxious, angry
eyes. Suddenly it sailed straight toward the tree; and the king-birds
shot into the air, ready for battle.
It was not the precious nest, however, nor the owners of the nest, on
which the fierce eyes of the marsh-hawk had fallen. When he was within
twenty paces of the nest he dropped into the grass. There was a moment
of thrashing wings, then he rose again, and beat back toward the river
with a young muskrat in his talons.
Considering the size and savagery of the hawk, any small bird but the
little king would have been well content with his riddance. Not so the
king-birds. With shrill chirpings they sped to the rescue. Their wings
cuffed the marauder's head in a fashion that confused him. Their
wedge-like beaks menaced his eyes and brought blood through the short
feathers on the top of his head. He could make no defence or
counter-attack against opponents so small and so agile of wing. At
length a sharp jab split the lower lid of one eye,--and this added
fear to his embarrassment. He dropped the muskrat, which fell into the
river and swam off little the worse for the experience.
Relieved of his burden, the hawk made all speed to escape. At the
farther shore the female king-bird desisted from the pursuit, and
hurried back to her nest. But the avenging wrath of the male was not
so easily pacified. Finding the tormentor still at his head, the hawk
remembered the security of the upper air, and began to mount in sharp
spirals. The king-bird pursued till, seen from the earth, he seemed no
bigger than a bee dancing over the hawk's back. Then he disappeared
altogether; and the hawk, but for his nervous, harassed flight, might
have seemed to be alone in that clear altitude. At last his wings
were seen to steady themselves into the tranquil, majestic soaring of
his kind. Presently, far below the soaring wings, appeared a tiny dark
shape, zigzagging swiftly downward; and soon the king-bird, hastening
across the river, alighted once more on his branch and began to preen
himself composedly.
The Kill
It was early winter and early morning, and the first of the light lay
sharp on the new snow. The sun was just lifting over a far and low
horizon. Long, level rays, streaking the snow with straight,
attenuated stains of pinkish gold and sharp lines of smoky-blue
shadow, pierced the edges of the tall fir forests of Touladi. Though
every tint--of the blackish-green firs, of the black-brown trunks, of
the violet and yellow and gray birch saplings, of the many-hued snow
spaces--was unspeakably tender and delicate, the atmosphere was of a
transparency and brilliancy almost vitreous. One felt as if the whole
scene might shatter and vanish at the shock of any sudden sound. Then
a sound came--but it was not sudden; and the mystic landscape did not
dissolve. It was a sound of heavy, measured, muffled footfalls
crushing the crisp snow. There was a bending and swishing of bare
branches, a rattling as of twigs upon horn or ivory--and a huge bull
moose strode into view. With his splendid antlers laid far back he
lifted his great, dilating nostrils, stared down the long, white
lanelike open toward the rising sun, and sniffed the air inquiringly.
Then he turned to browse on the aromatic twigs of the birch saplings.
The great moose was a lord of his kind. His long, thick, glistening
hair was almost black over the upper portions of his body, changing
abruptly to a tawny ochre on the belly, and the inner and lower parts
of the legs. The maned and hump-like ridge of his mighty
fore-shoulders stood a good six feet three from the ground; and the
spread of his polished, palmated antlers, so massive as to look a
burden for even so colossal a head and neck as his, was well beyond
five feet. The ridge of his back sloped down to hind-quarters
disproportionately small, finished off with a little, meagrely tufted
tail that on any beast less regal in mien and stature would have
looked ridiculous. The majesty of a bull moose, however, is too secure
to be marred by the incongruous pettiness of his tail. From the lower
part of his neck, where the great muscles ran into the spacious,
corded chest, hung a curious tuft of long and very coarse black hair,
called among woodsmen the "bell." As he turned to his browsing, his
black form stood out sharply against the background of the firs. Far
down the silent, glittering slope, a good mile distant, a tall, gray
figure on snow-shoes appeared for a second in the open, caught sight
of the pasturing moose, and vanished hurriedly into the birch
thickets.
[Illustration: "STARED DOWN THE LONG, WHITE LANELIKE OPEN."]
Having cropped a few mouthfuls here and there from branches within
easy reach, the great bull set himself to make a more systematic
breakfast. Selecting a tall young birch with a bushy top, he leaned
his chest against it until he bore it to the ground. Then, straddling
it and working his way along toward the top, he held it firmly while
he browsed at ease upon the juiciest and most savoury of the tips.
For some minutes he had been thus pleasantly occupied, when suddenly
an obscure apprehension stirred in his brain. He stopped feeding,
lifted his head, and stood motionless. Only his big ears moved,
turning their wary interrogations toward every point of the compass,
and his big nostrils suspiciously testing every current of air.
Neither nose nor ears, the most alert of his sentinels, gave any
report of danger. He looked about, saw nothing unusual, and fell again
to feeding.
Among the wild kindreds, as far as man can judge, there are
occasional intuitions that seem to work beyond the scope of the
senses. It is not ordinarily so, else would all hunting, on the part
of man or of the hunting beasts, be idle. But once in a while, as if
by some unwilling telepathic communication from hunter to hunted, or
else by an obscure and only half-delivered message from the powers
that preside over the wild kindreds, a warning of peril is conveyed to
a pasturing creature while yet the peril is far off and unrevealed.
The great moose found his appetite all gone. He backed off the sapling
and let its top spring up again toward the empty blue. He looked back
nervously over his trail, sniffed the air, waved his ears inquiringly.
The more he found nothing to warrant his uneasiness, the more his
uneasiness grew. It was as if Death, following far off but
relentlessly, had sent a grim menace along the windings of the trail.
Something like a panic came into the dilating eyes of the big bull. He
turned toward the fir forest, at a walk which presently broke into a
shambling, rapid trot; and presently he disappeared among the sombre
and shadowy colonnades.
In the strange gloom of the forest, a transparent gloom confused by
thin glints and threads of penetrating, pinkish light, the formless
alarm of the moose began to subside. In a few minutes his wild run
diminished into a rapid walk. He would not go back to his feeding,
however. He had been seized with a shuddering distrust of the young
birch thickets on the slope. Over beyond the next ridge there were
some bushy swales which he remembered as good pasturage--where,
indeed, he had a mind to "yard up" for the winter, when the snow
should get too deep for wide ranging. Once more quickening his pace,
he circled back almost to the fringe of the forest, making toward a
little stretch of frozen marsh, which was one of his frequented
runways between ridge and ridge. That nameless fear in the birch
thickets still haunted him, however, and he moved with marvellous
quietness. Not once did his vast antlers and his rushing bulk disturb
the dry undergrowth, or bring the brittle, dead branches crashing down
behind him. The only sound that followed him was that of the shallow
snow yielding crisply under his feet, and a light clicking, as the
tips of his deep-cleft, loose-spreading hoofs came together at the
recovery of each stride. This clicking, one of the most telltale of
wilderness sounds to the woodsman's ear, grew more sharp and insistent
as the moose increased his speed, till presently it became a sort of
castanet accompaniment to his long, hurried stride. A porcupine, busy
girdling a hemlock, ruffled and rattled his dry quills at the sound,
and peered down with little, disapproving eyes as the big, black form
fled by below him.
The snowy surface of the marsh was stained with ghosts of
colour--aerial, elusive tinges of saffron and violet--as the moose
came out upon it. As he swung down its lonely length, his gigantic
shadow, lopsided and blue, danced along threateningly, its head lost
in the bushes fringing the open. When he came to the end of the marsh,
where the wooded slope of the next ridge began, he half paused,
reaching his long muzzle irresolutely toward the tempting twigs of a
young willow thicket; but before he could gather one mouthful, that
nameless fear came over him again, that obscure forewarning of doom,
and he sprang forward toward the cover of the firs. As he sprang,
there was a movement and a flash far down a wooded alley--a sharp,
ringing crack--and something invisible struck him in the body. He had
been struck before, by falling branches, or by stones bounding down a
bluff, but this missile seemed very different and very small. Small as
it was, however, the blow staggered him for an instant; then he
shuddered, and a surge of heat passed through his nerves. But a second
later he recovered himself fully, and bounded into the woods, just in
time to escape a second bullet, as a second shot rang out in vain
behind him.
Straight up the wooded steep he ran, startled, but less actually
terrified now, in fleeing from a definite peril, then when trembling
before a formless menace. This peril was one that he felt he could
cope with. He knew his own strength and speed. Now that he had the
start of them, these slow-moving, relentless man-creatures, with the
sticks that spoke fire, could never overtake him. With confident
vigour he breasted the incline, his mighty muscles working as never
before under the black hair of shoulder and flank. But he did not know
that every splendid stride was measured by a scarlet sign on the snow.
For a few minutes the moose rushed on through the morning woods, up
and up between the tall trunks of the firs, half-forgetting his alarm
in the triumph of his speed. Then it began to seem to him that the
slope of the hill had grown steeper than of old; gradually, and
half-unconsciously, he changed his course, and ran parallel with the
ridge; and with this change the scarlet signs upon his trail grew
scanter. But in a few minutes more he began to feel that the snow was
deeper than it had been--deeper, and more clinging. It weighted his
hoofs and fetlocks as it had never done before, and his pace
slackened. He began to be troubled by the thick foam welling into his
nostrils and obstructing his breath. As he blew it forth impatiently
it made red flecks and spatters on the snow. He had no pain, no
realization that anything had gone wrong with him. But his eyes took
on suddenly a harassed, anxious look, and he felt himself growing
tired. He must rest a little before continuing his flight.
The idea of resting while his enemies were still so near and hot upon
the trail, would, at any other time, have been rejected as absurd; but
now the brain of the black moose was growing a little confused. Often
before this he had run till he felt tired, and then lain down to rest.
He had never felt tired till he knew that he had run a great distance.
Now, from his dimming intelligence the sense of time had slipped away.
He had been running, and he felt tired. Therefore, he must have run a
long distance, and his slow enemies must have been left far behind. He
could safely rest. His old craft, however, did not quite fail him at
this point. Before yielding to the impulse which urged him to lie
down, he doubled and ran back, parallel to his trail and some fifty
paces from it, for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Staggering
at every other stride, and fretfully blowing the stained froth from
his nostrils, he crouched behind a thicket of hemlock seedlings, and
watched the track by which his foes must come.
For a little while he kept his watch alertly, antlers laid back, ears
attentive, eyes wide and bright. Then, so slowly that he did not seem
aware of it himself, his massive head drooped forward till his muzzle
lay outstretched upon the snow. So far back from the gate of the
senses drew the life within him, that when three gray-coated figures
on snow-shoes went silently past on his old trail, he never saw them.
His eyes were filled with a blur of snow, and shadows, and unsteady
trunks, and confusing little gleams of light.
Of the three hunters following on the trail of the great black moose,
one was more impetuous than the others. It was his first moose that he
was trailing; and it was his bullet that was speaking through those
scarlet signs on the snow. He kept far ahead of his comrades, elated
and fiercely glad, every nerve strung with expectation. Behind each
bush, each thicket, he looked for the opportunity to make the final,
effective shot that should end the great chase. Not unlearned in
woodcraft, he knew what it meant when he reached the loop in the
trail. He understood that the moose had gone back to watch for his
pursuers. What he did not know or suspect was, that the watcher's eyes
had grown too dim to see. He took it for granted that the wise beast
had marked their passing, and fled off in another direction as soon as
they got by. Instead, however, of redoubling his caution, he plunged
ahead with a burst of fresh enthusiasm. He was very properly sure his
bullet had done good work, since it had so soon compelled the enduring
animal to rest.
A puff of wandering air, by chance, drifted down from the running man
to the thicket, behind which the black bull lay, sunk in his torpor.
The dreaded man-scent--the scent of death to the wilderness folk--was
blown to the bull's nostrils. Filled though they were with that red
froth, their fine sense caught the warning. The eyes might fail in
their duty, the ears flag and betray their trust; but the nostrils,
skilled and schooled, were faithful to the last. Their imperative
message pierced to the fainting brain, and life resumed its duties.
Once more the dull eyes awoke to brightness. The great, black form
lunged up and crashed forward into the open, towering, formidable, and
shaking ominous antlers.
Taken by surprise, and too close to shoot in time, the rash hunter
sprang aside to make for a tree. He had heard much of the charge of a
wounded moose. As he turned, the toe of one snow-shoe caught on a
branchy stub, just below the surface of the snow. The snow-shoe turned
side on, and tripped him, and he fell headlong right in the path of
the charging beast.
As he fell, he heard a shout from his comrades, hurrying up far behind
him; but the thought that flashed through him was that they could not
be in time. Falling on his face, he expected the next instant to feel
the bull's great rending hoofs descend upon his back and stamp his
life out.
But the blow never fell. The moose had seen his foe coming, and
charged to meet him, his strength and valour flashing up for an
instant as the final emergency confronted him. But ere he could reach
that prostrate shape in the snow, he forgot what he was doing, and
stopped short. With legs a little apart he braced himself, and stood
rigid. His noble head was held high, as if he scorned the enemies who
had dogged him to his last refuge. But in reality he no longer saw
them. The breath came hard through his rattling nostrils, and his
eyes, very wide open, were dark with a fear which he could not
understand. The life within him strove desperately to maintain its
hold upon that free and lordly habitation. The second hunter, now, was
just lifting his rifle,--but before he could sight and fire, the chase
was ended. That erect, magnificent figure, towering over the fallen
man, collapsed all at once. It fell together into a mere heap of hide
and antlers. The light in the eyes went out, as a spark that is
trodden, and the laboured breathing stopped in mid-breath. The fallen
hunter sprang up, rushed forward with a shout, and drew his knife
across the outstretched throat.
The Little People of the Sycamore
I.
The fantastic old sycamore, standing alone on the hill, thrust out its
one gaunt limb across the face of the moon. It was late April, and the
buds not yet swollen to bursting. On the middle of the limb, blackly
silhouetted against the golden disk, crouched a raccoon, who sniffed
the spring air and scanned the moon-washed spaces. From the marshy
spots at the foot of the hill, over toward the full-fed, softly
rushing brook, came the high piping of the frogs, a voice of poignant,
indeterminate desire.
Having reconnoitred the night to her satisfaction, the raccoon
returned to a deep hole in the sycamore, and hastily touched with her
pointed nose each in turn of her five, blind, furry little ones. Very
little they were, half-cub, half-kitten in appearance, with their long
noses, long tails, and bear-like feet. They huddled luxuriously
together in the warm, dry darkness of the den, and gave little
squeals in response to their mother's touch. In her absence they had
been voiceless, almost moveless, lest voice or motion should betray
them to an enemy.
Having satisfied herself as to the comfort of the furry children, the
old raccoon nimbly descended the tree, ran lightly down the hill, and
made for the nearest pool, where the frogs were piping. She was a
sturdy figure, yet lithe and graceful, about the bulk of the largest
cat, and with a tail almost the length of her body. Her legs, however,
were much shorter and more powerful than those of a cat; and when, for
a moment of wary observation, she stood still, her feet came down
flatly, like those of a bear, though in running she went on her toes,
light as the seed of the milkweed. Her head was much like a bear's in
shape, with the nose very long and pointed; and a bar of black across
the middle of her face, gave a startling intensity to her dark, keen,
half-malicious eyes. Her fur, very long and thick, was of a cloudy
brown; and the black rings on her gray tail stood out sharply in the
moonlight. Both in expression and in movement, she showed that strange
mixture of gaiety, ferocity, mischievousness, and confident sagacity,
which makes the raccoon unlike in character to all the other wild
kindreds.
[Illustration: "CROUCHED FLAT, MOVELESS AS THE LOG ITSELF."]
Though she was on important affairs intent, and carrying the cares of
the family, she was not too absorbed to feel the glad impulse of the
spring; and for sheer exuberance of life, she would go bounding over a
stick or a stone as if it were a tree or a boulder. Though life was a
serious matter, she was prepared to get out of it all the fun there
was to be had.
But when she neared the noisy pools she went stealthily enough.
Nevertheless, for all her caution, the pipings ceased in that section
of the pool when she was within two or three feet of the waterside;
and, in the little space of sudden silence, she knew that every small
piper was staring at her with fixed, protruding eyes. On she went,
straight out to the end of a half-submerged log, and there crouched
flat, moveless as the log itself. She knew that if she only kept still
long enough, she would come to be regarded by the pool-dwellers as
nothing more than a portion of the log. Meanwhile the high chorus from
the adjoining pools swelled ever louder and shriller, as the small
musicians voiced the joy of spring.
For perhaps ten minutes the space about the waiting raccoon on the log
appeared lifeless. Then one little black spot, which had seemed like a
lump of mud against a dead grass-stalk, moved; then another, and
another, and another--all over the pool. Pale throats began to throb
rhythmically; and the pipings once more pulsed forth buoyant and
strong. The frogs had utterly forgotten the intruder, and their
bulging eyes were no longer fixed on the log. Nevertheless, as it
chanced, there was not a single piper within reach of the watcher's
paw.
The raccoon's eyes gleamed with intenser fire, but she never stirred.
She knew that the price of a meal, to most of the wood-folk, was
patience as untiring as a stone. Only her full, dark eyes, set in
their bar of black, moved watchfully, searching the pallid spaces all
about the log.
A moment more and her patience was rewarded. A big frog from the
neighbour pool, unaware that there had been any intrusion here, came
swimming up, on some errand of private urgency, and made directly for
the log. The next instant, before he had any inkling of the imminence
of doom, the raccoon's forepaw shot out like a flash. It was a
wide-spread, flexible paw, like a little, black, lean hand, strong and
delicate, the fingers tipped with formidable claws. It caught the
swimming frog under the belly, swept him from the water, and threw him
far up on to the shore. With a pounce, the raccoon was upon him; and
a snap of her strong teeth ended his struggles.
The raccoon was very hungry, but, unlike others of the hunting tribes,
she did not fall instantly to her meal. The mauled victim was covered
with bits of dried stubble and leaf and earth, which clung to its
sticky skin and were most distasteful to her fastidious appetite.
Picking it up in her jaws, she carried it back to the pool. There,
holding it in her claws, she proceeded to wash it thoroughly, sousing
it up and down till there was not a vestige of soilure to be found
upon it. When quite satisfied that no washing could make it cleaner,
she fell to and made her meal with relish.
But what was one frog to a raccoon with a family, a mother whose
breast must supply five hungry little mouths? She ran over to the
brook, and followed down its bank to a spot where it widened out and a
strong eddy made up against the hither shore, washing a slope of
gravel. Here, in the shallows, she heard a feeble flopping, and knew
that a sick or disabled fish was making its last fight with fate. It
was a large chub, which had evidently been hooked by some heedless
trout-fisher farther up-stream, torn from the hook in anger because it
was not a trout, and thrown back into the water, to survive or die as
the water-fates should will. It turned on one side, revealing its
white belly and torn gills; then, feeling itself washed ashore by the
eddy, it gave one more feeble flop in the effort to regain the safe
deeps. At this moment the raccoon, pouncing with a light splash into
the shallows, seized it, and with a nip through the backbone ended its
misery.
Having eaten the fish, and daintily cleaned her fur, the raccoon
ascended the bank, with the purpose of returning to her lair in the
old sycamore. She stopped abruptly, however, as a new sound, very
different from that of the frog chorus, fell upon her heedful ear. It
was an excited, yelping whine; and presently she caught sight of a
long-legged, plumy-tailed dog, rushing wildly hither and thither, nose
to earth, quartering the ground for fresh trails.
The raccoon knew the dog, from a distance, for the young, unbroken,
brown Irish setter which had lately come to the neighbour farm. His
qualities and capabilities, however, were, as yet, unknown to her.
Though she knew herself more than a match for the average dog, and
particularly for the small black and white mongrel which, up to a
month ago, had been the only dog on the farm, she did not know just
how dangerous the Irish setter might be. Therefore, though the light
of battle flamed into her eyes, she considered her responsibilities,
and looked around for a tree.
There was no tree near, so she turned, crouched close to the ground,
and attempted to steal off unperceived. But as she turned the dog
caught sight of her. At the same instant he also caught her scent. It
was a new scent to him, a most interesting scent; and he rushed upon
her, with streaming tail and a peal of joyously savage yelpings. The
raccoon backed up against a granite rock, and stood at bay, her long,
white teeth bared, her eyes fierce, fearless, and watchful.
The Irish setter was a wild, undisciplined pup, harebrained and
headlong after the manner of his breed. Of raccoons and their
capabilities he had had no experience. This small, crouching animal,
under the rock in the moonlight, seemed to promise an easy victory. He
sprang upon her, open-mouthed, and snapped confidently at her neck.
All his big jaws got were a few hairs; for on the instant the raccoon
had dodged. Her keen claws raked the side of his face, and her fine,
punishing fangs tore a gash in his neck, dangerously near his throat.
With a yelp of pain and terror he tore himself free of those deadly
teeth and bounded out of reach. And the raccoon, silently triumphant,
backed up again into her posture of defence against the rock.
But the Irish setter, in that half-minute, had learned a great deal
about raccoons. He now refused to come within four or five feet of his
small antagonist. He leaped up and down, snapping and barking, but had
no more stomach for the actual encounter. His noisy threatenings,
however, which did violence to the silver magic of the night, soon
brought no answer; and the black and white mongrel, barking in great
excitement, rushed up to take a hand in the affray.
At the sight of the quietly desperate raccoon he stopped short. But
his hesitation was from discretion, not from cowardice. He knew that
the raccoon could master him. He took some sort of swift counsel,
therefore, with the blustering setter; and then, having apparently
received assurance of support, sprang boldly on the enemy.
There was a sharp tussle, a confusion of snapping, snarling, clawing,
growling, and squealing; while the Irish setter, having reconsidered
his promise to take a hand, contented himself with barking brave
encouragement from a safe distance. At last the black and white
mongrel, finding that he was getting badly worsted and receiving no
support, tried to draw away; and the raccoon, fearing to be dragged
from her post of vantage against the rock, at once let him go. Both
combatants were breathless and bleeding, and they eyed each other with
the watchfulness born of respect.
The little mongrel now seemed to hold a second and more elaborate
conference with the Irish setter. Possibly he conveyed his opinion of
the latter's character, for the proud-plumed tail drooped
disconsolately, and the loud-mouthed threatenings ceased. Just what
new courage the sagacious mongrel might have succeeded in infusing
into the volatile heart of his ally, just what plan of concerted
action might have been evolved, to the ruin of the heroic little
fighter under the rock, will never be known; for at this moment a
second and larger raccoon came running swiftly and silently up the
bank.
It was the mother 'coon's mate, who had heard the noise of combat
where he was foraging by himself, far down the brook. At sight of this
most timely reinforcement, the beleaguered raccoon made a sortie.
Recognizing the weak point in the assailing forces, she darted
straight upon the hesitating setter, and snapped at his leg.
This was quite too much for his jarred nerves, and with a howl, as if
he already felt those white teeth crunching to the bone, the setter
turned and fled. The black and white mongrel, highly disgusted, but
realizing the hopelessness of the situation, turned and fled after him
in silence. Then the triumphant raccoons touched noses in brief
congratulation, and presently moved off to their hunting as if nothing
had happened. The wild kindred, as a rule, maintain a poise which the
most extravagant adventures this side of death seldom deeply disturb.
II.
Up to this time, through the hungry weeks of late winter and the first
thaws, the raccoons in the old sycamore had resisted the temptation of
the farmer's hen-roosts. They knew that the wilderness hunting, though
the most difficult, was safe, while any serious depredations at the
farm would be sure to bring retaliation from that most crafty and
dangerous creature, man. Now, however, after the fight with the dogs,
a mixture of audacity with the desire for revenge got the better of
them; and that same night, very late, when the moon was casting long,
sharp shadows from the very rim of the horizon, they hurried through
the belt of forest, which separated their sycamore from the cleared
fields, and stole into the rear of the barn-yard.
The farm was an outpost, so to speak, of the settlements, on the
debatable ground between the forces of the forest and the forces of
civilization, and therefore much exposed to attack. As the raccoons
crept along behind the wood-shed they smelt traces of a sickly pungent
odour, and knew that other marauders had been on the ground not very
long before. This made them bolder in their enterprise, for they knew
that such depredations as they might commit would be laid to the
account of the skunks, and therefore not likely to draw down vengeance
upon the den in the sycamore. They killed a sitting hen upon her nest,
feasted luxuriously upon her eggs and as much of herself as they could
hold, and went away highly elated. For three successive nights they
repeated their raid upon the fowl-house, each night smelling the
pungent, choking scent more strongly, but never catching a glimpse of
the rival marauder. On the fourth night, as they crossed the hillocky
stump-lot behind the barns, the scent became overpowering, and they
found the body of the skunk, where fate had overtaken him, lying
beside the path. They stopped, considered, and turned back to their
wildwood foraging; and through all that spring they went no more to
the farmyard, lest they should call down a similar doom upon
themselves.
As spring ripened and turned to summer over the land, food grew
abundant in the neighbourhood of the sycamore, and there was no
temptation to trespass on man's preserves. There were grouse nests to
rifle, there were squirrels, hare, wood-mice, chipmunks, to exercise
all the craft and skill of the raccoons. Also there were the
occasional unwary trout, chub, or suckers, to be scooped up upon the
borders of the brook. And once, more in hate than in hunger, the old
mother raccoon had the fierce joy of eradicating a nest of weasels,
which she found in a pile of rocks. She had a savage antipathy to the
weasel tribe, whose blood-lust menaces all the lesser wood-folk, and
whose teeth delight to kill, after hunger is sated, for the mere
relish of a taste of quivering brain or a spurt of warm blood. The
raccoon carried more scars from the victory over the weasels than she
had to remind her of the scuffle with the dogs. But she had the nerve
that takes punishment without complaint, and the scars troubled her
little.
When the five young raccoons came down from the sycamore and began to
depend upon their own foraging, it soon became necessary to extend the
range, as game grew shyer and more scarce. Even chub and suckers
learn something in course of time; and as for wood-mice and chipmunks,
under such incentive as an active family of raccoons can give them
they attain to a truly heartless cunning in the art of making their
enemies go hungry. Hanging together with an intense clannishness, the
raccoon family would make expeditions of such length as to keep often
for two or three days at a time away from the home in the sycamore.
At last, one night in late summer, when the stars seemed to hang low
among the warm and thick-leaved trees, and warm scents steamed up
wherever the dew was disturbed by furry feet, the raccoons wandered
over to the edge of the corn-field. It chanced that the corn was just
plumping to tender and juicy fulness. The old raccoons showed the
youngsters what richness of sweetness lay hidden within the green
wrappings of the ears; and forth-with the whole clan fell to feasting
recklessly.
In regard to the ducks and chickens of the farm, the raccoons were
shrewd enough to know that any extensive depredations upon them would
call down the swift vengeance of the farmer-folk; but they could not
realize that they were in mischief when they helped themselves to
these juicy, growing things. The corn, though manifestly in some way
involved with the works of man, seemed nevertheless to them a portion
of nature's liberality. They ran riot, therefore, through the tall,
well-ordered ranks of green, without malice or misgiving; and in their
gaiety they were extravagant. They would snatch a mouthful out of one
sweet ear, then out of another, spoiling ten for one that they
consumed.
Night after night they came to the corn-field, and waxed fat on their
plunder, till at last, when they had done the damage of a herd of
oxen, one silvery night they were discovered. The young farmer, with
his hired boy and the harebrained, Irish setter, chanced to come by
through the woods, and to notice that the corn was moving although
there was no wind. The raccoons were promptly hunted out; and one of
the young ones, before they could gain the shadowy refuge of the
trees, was killed with sticks,--the setter contributing much noise,
but keeping at a very safe distance. When the affray was over, and the
young farmer, going through the field, found out what damage had been
done, he was eloquent with picturesque backwoods blasphemies, and
vowed the extermination of the whole 'coon clan. With the aid of the
setter, who now, for the first time, was able to prove the worth of
his breeding, he tracked the escaping marauders through the woods,
and at last, after a long hunt, located their lair in the old
sycamore-tree on the hill. At this his wrath gave way to the hunter's
elation. His eyes sparkled.
[Illustration: "THEY RAN RIOT ... THROUGH THE TALL, WELL-ORDERED RANKS
OF GREEN."]
"To-morrow night," said he, to the hired boy, "we'll have a reg'lar
old-fashioned 'coon hunt!"
Then, whistling off the setter, who was barking, jumping, and whining
ecstatically at the foot of the sycamore-tree, he turned and strode
away through the moon-shadows of the forest, with the dog and the
hired boy at his heels. The diminished raccoon family, with beating
hearts and trembling nerves, snuggled down together into the depths of
the sycamore, and dreamed not of the doom preparing for them.
III.
On the following night, soon after moonrise, they came. Stealthily,
though there was little need of stealth, they crept, Indian file,
around the branchy edges of the fields, through the wet,
sweet-smelling thickets. The hunter's fever was upon them, fierce and
furtive. They came to the corn-field--to find that the raccoons had
paid their visit, made their meal, and got away at the first faint
signal of the approach of danger. With an outburst of excited
yelpings, the dogs took up the hot trail, and the hunters made
straight through the woods for the sycamore-tree.
It was a party of five. With the young farmer, the hired boy, the
harebrained Irish setter, and the wise little black and white mongrel,
came also the young schoolmaster of the settlement, who boarded at the
farm. A year out of college, and more engrossed in the study of the
wild creatures than ever he had been in his books, he had joined the
hunt less from sympathy than from curiosity. He had outgrown his
boyhood's zeal for killing things, and he had a distinct partiality
for raccoons; but he had never taken part in a 'coon hunt, and it was
his way to go thoroughly into whatever he undertook. He carried a
little .22 Winchester repeater, which he had brought with him from
college, and had employed, hitherto, on nothing more sentient than
empty bottles or old tomato-cans.
Now it chanced that not all the raccoon family had made their escape
to the deep hole in the sycamore. The old male, who was rather
solitary and moody in his habits at this season, had followed the
flight of the clan for only a short distance; and suddenly, to their
doubtful joy and complete surprise, the two dogs, who were far ahead
of the hunters, overtook him. After a moment's wise hesitation, the
black and white mongrel joined battle, while the setter contributed a
great deal of noisy encouragement. By the time the hunters came up the
mongrel had drawn off, bleeding and badly worsted; and the angry
raccoon, backed up against a tree, glared at the newcomers with fierce
eyes and wide-open mouth, as if minded to rush upon them.
The odds, however, were much too great for even so dauntless a soul as
his; and when the enemy were within some ten or twelve paces, he
turned and ran up the tree. In the first fork he crouched, almost
hidden, and peered down with one watchful eye.
The young farmer was armed with an old, muzzle-loading,
single-barrelled duck-gun. He raised it to his shoulder and took aim
at the one bright eye gleaming from behind the branch. Then he lowered
it, and turned to his boarder with a mixture of politeness and rustic
mockery.
"Your first shot!" said he. "I'll shoot the critter, after you've
tried that there pea-shooter on him!"
"He's licked the dogs in fair fight," said the schoolmaster. "Let's
let him off!"
The farmer swore in unaffected amazement. "Why, that's the ---- ----
that does more damage than all the rest put together!" he exclaimed.
"You'll see me fix _him_. But you take first shot, Mister Chase. I
want to see the pea-shooter work!"
The young schoolmaster saw his prestige threatened,--and with no
profit whatever to the doomed raccoon. Prestige is nowhere held at
higher premium than in the backwoods. It is the magic wand of power.
The young man fired, a quick, but careful shot; and on the snappy,
insignificant report, the raccoon fell dead from the tree.
"You _kin_ shoot some!" remarked the farmer, picking up the victim,
and noting the bullet-hole in its forehead. And the hired boy spread
his mouth in a huge, broken-toothed grin of admiration.
The old sycamore stood out lonely in the flood of the moonlight. Not a
raccoon was in sight; but the round, black doorway to their den was
visible against the gray bark, beside the crotch of the one great
limb. The frantic yelpings of the dogs around the foot of the tree
were proof enough that the family were at home. The hunters, after the
ancient custom of men that hunt 'coons, had brought an axe with them;
but the hired boy, who carried it, looked with dismay at the huge
girth of the sycamore.
"Won't git that chopped down in a week!" said he, with pardonable
depreciation of his powers.
"Go fetch another axe!" commanded the farmer, seating himself on a
stump, and getting out his pipe.
"It would be a pity to cut down that tree, the biggest sycamore in the
country, just to get at a 'coon's nest!" said the young schoolmaster,
willing to spare both the tree and its inhabitants.
The farmer let his match go out while he eyed the great trunk.
"Never mind the axe," said he, calling back the hired boy. "Fetch me
the new bindin' rope out of the spare manger; an' a bunch of rags, an'
some salmon-twine. An' stir yerself!"
Relieved of his anxiety as to the chopping, the boy sped willingly on
his errand. And the young schoolmaster realized, with a little twinge
of regret, that the raccoon family was doomed.
When the boy came back, the farmer took the bunch of rags, smeared
them liberally with wet gunpowder, and tied them into a loose, fluffy
ball, on the end of a length of salmon-twine. Then, having thrown the
rope over the limb of the sycamore, he held both ends, and sent the
hired boy up into the tree, where he sat astride, grinning and
expectant, and peered into the well-worn hole.
"Now," said the farmer, tossing the ball of rags up to him, "light
this 'ere spittin' devil, an' lower it into the hole, an' we'll see
what's what!"
As he spoke, he turned, and gave the schoolmaster a slow wink, which
quickened the latter's expectations. The next moment the boy had set a
match to the rags, and they were ablaze with wild sputterings and jets
of red flame. Eagerly, but carefully, he lowered the fiery ball into
the hole, paying out the string till it was evident that the tree was
hollow almost down to the butt.
Suddenly there was a wild commotion of squeals, grunts, and
scratchings in the depths of the invaded hole. The sounds rose swiftly
up the inside of the trunk. Then there was an eruption at the mouth of
the hole. A confusion of furry forms shot forth, with such violence
that the startled boy almost lost his balance. As it was, he backed
away precipitately along the branch, amid derisive encouragement from
his friends below.
Having eluded, for the moment, the flaming invader of their home, the
raccoons paused on the limb to survey the situation.
"Fling 'em down to us," jeered the farmer, hugely amused at the boy's
dismay.
The latter grinned nervously, and started forward as if to obey. But
at this moment the raccoons made their decision. The dogs and men
below looked more formidable than the hesitating boy astride of their
branch. In a resolute line, their fierce old mother leading, they made
for him.
The boy backed away with awkward alacrity, but still keeping his hold
on the salmon-twine. Consequently, by the time he had nearly reached
the end of the limb, the still sputtering fire-ball emerged from the
hole in the crotch. At the sound of it behind them the young raccoons
turned in terror, and straightway dropped from the tree; but the old
mother, undaunted, darted savagely upon her foe. The boy gave a cry of
fear. The next instant there was a spiteful crack from the
schoolmaster's little rifle. The old raccoon stopped, shrank, and
rolled lifeless from the limb.
Meanwhile, the youngsters were in a _mêlée_ with the two dogs. Though
little more than three-fourths grown, they had courage; and so brave a
front did they oppose to their enemies that for a few moments the dogs
were cautious in attack. Then the black and white mongrel sprang in;
and the big setter, realizing that these were no such antagonists as
their parents had been, followed, and was astonished to learn that he
could stand a bite from those sharp teeth and resist the impulse to
howl and run away. In less time than it takes to describe, one of the
raccoons was shaken to death in the setter's great jaws, and then the
other three scattered in flight.
One was overtaken in two seconds by the black and white mongrel, and
bitten through the back. The second ran past the farmer, and was
killed by a quick blow with his gun-barrel. The third, full of courage
and resource, flew straight at the setter's throat, and so alarmed him
that he jumped away. Then, seeing no tree within reach, and probably
realizing that there was no escape by any ordinary course, he fled
straight to the farmer.
The farmer, however, mistook this action for the ferocity of despair.
He struck out with his gun-barrel, missed his aim, swore
apprehensively, and caught the little animal a kick, which landed it
within a couple of yards of the spot where stood the young
schoolmaster, watching the scene with mingled interest and pity. His
sympathies now went out warmly to this brave and sole survivor of the
little people of the sycamore. His quick intuitions had understood the
appeal which had been so cruelly repulsed.
For a second the young raccoon stood still where he had fallen, and
his keen, dark eyes flashed a glance on each of his enemies in turn.
Both dogs were now rushing upon him. The ever-imminent doom of the
wild kindred was about to lay hold of him. He half-turned, as if to
die fighting, then changed his mind, darted to the feet of the young
schoolmaster, ran up his trouser-leg, and confidently took refuge
under his coat.
"Shake him off! Shake him off! A 'coon's bite is pizen!" shouted the
farmer, in great excitement.
"Not much!" said the young schoolmaster, with decision, gathering his
coat snugly around his panting guest. "This 'coon hunt's over. This
little chap's coming home to live with me!"
The farmer stared, and then laughed good-naturedly.
"Jest as you say," said he. "Recken ye've 'arned the right to have a
say in the matter. But ye'll find 'coons is mighty mischeevous 'round
a house. Fetch the karkisses, Jake. Reckon we've done pretty well for
one night's huntin', an' there ain't goin' to be no more 'coons
messin' in the corn _this_ summer!"
In a few minutes the procession was again plodding, Indian file,
through the still, dew-fragrant, midnight woods. The little raccoon,
its heart now beating quietly, nestled in secure contentment under
the young schoolmaster's arm, untroubled even by the solemn and
deep-toned menace of a horned-owl's cry from the spiky top of a dead
hemlock near at hand. From the lake behind the hill came the long
laughter of a loon, the wildest and saddest of all the wilderness
voices. And a lonely silence settled down about the old sycamore on
the hill, solitary under the white, high-sailing moon.
Horns and Antlers
The young red and white bull was very angry. He stood by the pasture
bars grumbling, and blowing through his nostrils, and shaking his
short, straight horns, and glaring fiercely after the man, who was
driving three cows down the hill to the farmyard in the shadowy
valley. Every evening for weeks the man had come about sunset and
taken away the cows in that fashion, rudely suppressing the young
bull's efforts to accompany his herd, and leaving him to the sole
companionship of two silly and calf-like yearlings whom he scorned to
notice. For the past few evenings the bull had been trying to work
himself up to the point of fairly joining issue with the man, and
having it out with him. But there was something in the man's cool
assurance, in his steady, compelling eye, in the abrupt authority of
his voice, which made the angry animal hesitate to defy him. Certainly
the bull could see that the man was very much smaller than he,--a
pigmy, indeed, in comparison; but he felt that within that erect and
fragile-looking shape there dwelt an unknown force which no
four-footed beast could ever hope to withstand. Every evening, after
the man and cows had gone half-way down the hillside, the bull would
fall to bellowing and pawing the ground, and rolling his defiance
across the quiet valley. But when next the man came face to face with
him, and spoke to him, he would assume, in spite of himself, an
attitude of lofty and reluctant deference.
The high hill pasture, with its decaying stumps, its rounded hillocks,
its patches of withering fern and harsh dwarf juniper, was bathed in
all the colours of the autumn sunset, while the farmyard down in the
valley was already in the first purple of the twilight. The centre of
the pasture was the hilltop, roughly rounded, and naked save for one
maple-tree, now ablaze with scarlet and amber. Along the line of hills
across the dusk valley the last of the sunset laid a band of clear
orange, which faded softly through lemon and pink and violet and
tender green to the high, cold gray-blue of the dome above the hill,
where one crow was beating his way toward the tree-tops on the farther
ridge. The tranquillity of the scene was curiously at variance with
the loud vapourings of the bull, as he raged up and down behind the
bars, watched tremblingly by the pair of awestruck yearlings.
Over on the other side of the hill, behind the red maple, where the
hillocks and fern patches lay already in a cool, violet-brown shadow,
stood a high-antlered red buck, listening to the bull's ravings. He
had just come out of the woods and up to the snake fence of split
rails which bounded the pasture. With some curiosity, not unmixed with
scorn, he had sniffed at the fence, a phenomenon with which he was
unfamiliar. But the voice of the bull had promptly absorbed his
attention. There was something in the voice that irritated him,--which
seemed, though in a language he did not know, to convey a taunt and a
challenge. His fine, slim head went high. He snorted several times,
stamped his delicate hoofs, then bounded lightly over the fence and
trotted up the slope toward the shining maple.
For most of the greater members of the wild kindred,--and for the
tribes of the deer and moose, in particular,--the month of October is
the month of love and war. Under those tender and enchanting skies,
amid the dying crimsons and purples and yellows and russets, and in
the wistfulness of the falling leaf, duels are fought to the death in
the forest aisles and high hill glades. When a sting and a tang
strike across the dreamy air, and the frosts nip crisply, then the
blood runs hot in the veins and mating-time stirs up both love and
hate. The red buck, as it happened, had been something of a laggard in
awakening to the season's summons. His antlers, this year, had been
late to mature and overlong in the velvet. When he entered the field,
therefore, he found that other bucks had been ahead of him, and that
there were no more does wandering forlorn. He had "belled" in vain for
several days, searched in vain the limits of his wonted range, and at
last set out in quest of some little herd whose leader his superior
strength might beat down and supplant. Of his own prowess, his power
to supplant all rivals, he had no doubt. But hitherto he had found
none to answer his challenge, and his humour was testy. He had no idea
what sort of an animal it was that was making such objectionable
noises on the other side of the hill; but whatever it might be, he did
not like it. He knew it was not a bear. He knew it was not a
bull-moose. And of nothing else that walked the forest did he stand in
deference, when the courage of rutting-time was upon him.
Stepping daintily, the red buck reached the top of the hill and saw
the bull below him. A formidable antagonist, surely! The buck stopped
where he was. He had now less inclination to pick a quarrel; but he
was consumed with curiosity. What could the heavy red and white beast
be up to, with his grunting and bellowing, his pawings of the sod, and
his rampings to and fro? The buck could see no object for such
defiance, no purpose to such rage. It was plain to him, however, that
those two odd-looking, rather attractive little animals, who stood
aside and watched the bull's rantings, were in no way the cause or
object, as the bull completely ignored them. Growing more and more
inquisitive as he gazed, the buck took a few steps down the slope, and
again paused to investigate.
At this point the bull caught sight of the intruder, and wheeled
sharply. His half-artificial rage against the man was promptly
forgotten. Who was this daring trespasser, advancing undismayed into
the very heart of his domain? He stared for a moment or two in
silence, lashing his tail wrathfully. Then, with a rumbling bellow
deep in his throat, he lowered his head and charged.
This was a demonstration which the red buck could very well
understand, but his ill-humour had been swallowed up in curiosity,
and he was not now so ready to fight. In fact, it was with large
apprehension that he saw that dangerous bulk charging upon him, and
his great, liquid eyes opened wide. He stood his ground, however, till
the bull was almost upon him, and then bounded lightly aside.
The bull, infuriated at this easy evasion, almost threw himself in his
effort to stop and turn quickly; and in a few seconds he charged
again. This time the charge was down-hill, which doubled its speed and
resistlessness. But again the buck sprang aside, and the bull
thundered on for a score of yards, ploughing up the turf in the fierce
effort to stop himself.
And now the big, wondering eyes of the buck changed. A glitter came
into them. It had angered him to be so hustled. And moreover, the
ponderous clumsiness of the bull filled him with contempt. When the
bull charged him for the third time, he stamped his narrow, sharp
hoofs in defiance, and stood with antlers down. At the last moment he
jumped aside no farther than was absolutely necessary, and plowed a
red furrow in the bull's flank as he plunged by.
[Illustration: "THIS TIME THE CHARGE WAS DOWN-HILL."]
Beside himself with rage, the bull changed his tactics, trying
short, close rushes and side lunges with his horns. But the buck,
thoroughly aroused, and elated with the joy of battle, was always just
beyond his reach, and always punishing him. Before the fight had
lasted ten minutes, his flanks and neck were streaming with blood.
With his matchless agility, the buck more than once sprang right over
his enemy's back. It was impossible for the bull to catch him.
Sometimes, instead of ripping with the antlers, he would rear straight
up, and slash the bull mercilessly with his knifelike hoofs. For a
time, the bull doggedly maintained the unequal struggle; but at
length, feeling himself grow tired, and realizing that his foe was as
elusive as a shadow, he lost heart and tried to withdraw. But the
buck's blood was up, and he would have no withdrawing. He followed
relentlessly, bounding and goring and slashing, till the helpless bull
was seized with panic, and ran bellowing along the fence, looking
vainly for an exit.
For perhaps a hundred yards the conquering buck pursued, now half in
malice, half in sport, but always punishing, punishing. Then, suddenly
growing tired of it, he stopped, and went daintily mincing his steps
back to where the two yearlings stood huddled in awe. They shrank,
staring wildly, as he approached, but for some reason did not run
away. Sniffing at them curiously, and not finding their scent to his
taste, he lifted his slim muzzle, and "belled" sonorously several
times, pausing between the calls to listen for an answer from the
forest. Then, receiving no reply, he seemed to remember his
interrupted quest, and moved off over the hill through the fading
light.
In the Deep of the Grass
Misty gray green, washed with tints of the palest violet, spotted with
red clover-blooms, white oxeyes, and hot orange Canada lilies, the
deep-grassed levels basked under the July sun. A drowsy hum of bees
and flies seemed to distil, with warm aromatic scents, from the
sun-steeped blooms and grass-tops. The broad, blooming, tranquil
expanse, shimmering and softly radiant in the heat, seemed the very
epitome of summer. Now and again a small cloud-shadow sailed across
it. Now and again a little wind, swooping down upon it gently, bent
the grass-tops all one way, and spread a sudden silvery pallor. Save
for the droning bees and flies there seemed to be but one live
creature astir between the grass and the blue. A solitary marsh-hawk,
far over by the rail fence, was winnowing slowly, slowly hither and
thither, lazily hunting.
All this was in the world above the grass-tops. But below the
grass-tops was a very different world,--a dense, tangled world of dim
green shade, shot with piercing shafts of sun, and populous with
small, furtive life. Here, among the brown and white roots, the
crowded green stems and the mottled stalks, the little earth kindreds
went busily about their affairs and their desires, giving scant
thought to the aerial world above them. All that made life significant
to them was here in the warm, green gloom; and when anything chanced
to part the grass to its depths they would scurry away in unanimous
indignation.
On a small stone, over which the green closed so thickly that, when he
chanced to look upward, he caught but the scantiest shreds of sky, sat
a half-grown field-mouse, washing his whiskers with his dainty claws.
His tiny, bead-like eyes kept ceaseless watch, peering through the
shadowy tangle for whatever might come near in the shape of foe or
prey. Presently two or three stems above his head were beaten down,
and a big green grasshopper, alighting clumsily from one of his blind
leaps, fell sprawling on the stone. Before he could struggle to his
long legs and climb back to the safer region of the grass-tops, the
little mouse was upon him. Sharp, white teeth pierced his green mail,
his legs kicked convulsively twice or thrice, and the faint
iridescence faded out of his big, blank, foolish eyes. The mouse made
his meal with relish, daintily discarding the dry legs and wing-cases.
Then, amid the green débris scattered upon the stone, he sat up, and
once more went through his fastidious toilet.
But life for the little mouse in his grass-world was not quite all
watching and hunting. When his toilet was complete, and he had amiably
let a large black cricket crawl by unmolested, he suddenly began to
whirl round and round on the stone, chasing his own tail. As he was
amusing himself with this foolish play, another mouse, about the same
size as himself, and probably of the same litter, jumped upon the
stone, and knocked him off. He promptly retorted in kind; and for
several minutes, as if the game were a well-understood one, the two
kept it up, squeaking soft merriment, and apparently forgetful of all
peril. The grass-tops above this play rocked and rustled in a way that
would certainly have attracted attention had there been any eyes to
see. But the marsh-hawk was still hunting lazily at the other side of
the field, and no tragedy followed the childishness.
Both seemed to tire of the sport at the same instant; for suddenly
they stopped, and hurried away through the grass on opposite sides of
the stone, as if remembered business had just called to them. Whatever
the business was, the first mouse seemed to forget it very speedily,
for in half a minute he was back upon the stone again, combing his
fine whiskers and scratching his ears. This done to his satisfaction,
he dropped like a flash from his seat, and disappeared into a small
hollow beneath it. As he did so, a hairy black spider darted out, and
ran away among the roots.
A minute or two after the disappearance of the mouse, a creature came
along which appeared gigantic in the diminutive world of the grass
folk. It was nearly three feet long, and of the thickness of a man's
finger. Of a steely gray black, striped and reticulated in a
mysterious pattern with a clear whitish yellow, it was an ominous
shape indeed, as it glided smoothly and swiftly, in graceful curves,
through the close green tangle. The cool shadows and thin lights
touched it flickeringly as it went, and never a grass-top stirred to
mark its sinister approach. Without a sound of warning it came
straight up to the stone, and darted its narrow, cruel head into the
hole.
There was a sharp squeak, and instantly the narrow head came out
again, ejected by the force of the mouse's agonized spring. But the
snake's teeth were fastened in the little animal's neck. The doom of
the green world had come upon him while he slept.
But doomed though he was, the mouse was game. He knew there was no
poison in those fangs that gripped him, and he struggled desperately
to break free. His powerful hind legs kicked the ground with a force
which the snake, hampered at first by the fact of its length being
partly trailed out through the tangle, was unable to quite control.
With unerring instinct,--though this was the first snake he had ever
encountered,--the mouse strove to reach its enemy's back and sever the
bone with the fine chisels of his teeth. But it was just this that the
snake was watchful to prevent. Three times in his convulsive leaps the
mouse succeeded in touching the snake's body,--but with his feet only,
never once with those destructive little teeth. The snake held him
inexorably, with a steady, elastic pressure which yielded just so far,
and never quite far enough. And in a minute or two the mouse's brave
struggles grew more feeble.
All this, however,--the lashing and the wriggling and the
jumping,--had not gone on without much disturbance to the grass-tops.
Timothy head and clover-bloom, oxeye and feathery plume-grass, they
had bowed and swayed and shivered till the commotion, very conspicuous
to one looking down upon the tranquil, flowery sea of green, caught
the attention of the marsh-hawk, which at that moment chanced to be
perching on a high fence stake. The lean-headed, fierce-eyed,
trim-feathered bird shot from his perch, and sailed on long wings over
the grass to see what was happening. As the swift shadow hovered over
the grass-tops, the snake looked up. Well he understood the
significance of that sudden shade. Jerking back his fangs with
difficulty from the mouse's neck, he started to glide off under the
thickest matting of the roots. But lightning quick though he was, he
was not quite quick enough. Just as his narrow head darted under the
roots, the hawk, with wings held straight up, and talons reaching
down, dropped upon him, and clutched the middle of his back in a grip
of steel. The next moment he was jerked into the air, writhing and
coiling, and striking in vain frenzy at his captor's mail of hard
feathers. The hawk flew off with him over the sea of green to the top
of the fence stake, there to devour him at leisure. The mouse, sore
wounded but not past recovery, dragged himself back to the hollow
under the stone. And over the stone the grass-tops, once more still,
hummed with flies, and breathed warm perfumes in the distilling
heat.
When the Moon Is over the Corn
In the mystical transparency of the moonlight the leafy world seemed
all afloat. The solid ground, the trees, the rail fences, the serried
ranks of silver-washed corn seemed to have lost all substantial
foundation. Everything lay swimming, as it were, upon a dream. The
light that poured down from the round, gold-white, high-sailing moon
was not ordinary moonlight, but that liquid enchantment which the
sorceress of the heavens sheds at times, and notably at the ripe of
the summer, lest earth should forget the incomprehensibility of
beauty. A little to one side, beyond the corn-field and over a billowy
mass of silvered leafage, stood the gray, clustered roofs of a
backwoods farmstead.
In the top of a tall, slim poplar, leaning out from the edge of the
woods and over the fence that marked the bounds of the wilderness,
clung a queer-looking, roundish object, gently swaying in the magic
light. It might almost have been mistaken for a huge, bristly
bird's-nest, but for the squeaky grunts of satisfaction which it kept
emitting at intervals. Whether it was that the magic of the moonlight
had got into its blood, driving it to strange pastimes, or that it was
merely indulging an established taste for the game of "Rock-a-bye-baby,"
observation made it plain that the porcupine was amusing itself by
swinging in the tree-top. Any other of the woods folk would have chosen
for their recreation a less conspicuous spot than this poplar-top thrust
out over the open field. But the porcupine feared nobody, and was quite
untroubled by bashfulness. He cared not a jot who heard, saw, or derided
him. It was a pleasant world; and for all that had ever been shown him
to the contrary, it belonged to him.
After a time he got tired of swinging and squeaking. He straightened
himself out, slowly descended the tree, and set off along the top of
the fence toward the farmyard. Never before had it occurred to him to
visit the farmyard; but now that the moon had put the madness into his
head, he acted upon the whim without a moment's misgiving. Unlike the
rest of the wild kindreds, he stood little in awe of either the works
or the ways of man.
[Illustration: "SET OFF ALONG THE TOP OF THE FENCE."]
Presently the fence turned off at a sharp angle to the way he had
chosen to go. He descended, and crawled in leisurely fashion along an
unused, grassy lane, wandering from side to side as he went, as if
time were of no concern to him. About a hundred feet from the fence he
came to a brook crossing the lane. Spring freshets had carried away
the little bridge, doubtless years before, and now the stream was
spanned by nothing but an old tree-trunk, carelessly thrown across.
Upon the end of this,--for him an ample bridge,--the porcupine
crawled, never troubling himself to inquire if another passenger might
chance to be crossing from the other side.
At the very same moment, indeed, another passenger raised furtive,
padded paws, and took possession of the opposite end of the bridge. It
was a huge bob-cat, with stubby tail and wide, pale green, unwinking
eyes. It had come stealing down from the thick woods to visit the
farmyard,--driven, perhaps, by the same moon-madness that stirred the
porcupine. But at the edge of the silent farmyard, white and tranquil
under the flooding radiance, the man-smell on the bars had brought the
bob-cat to a sudden halt. No moon-madness could make the cautious cat
forget the menace of that smell. It had turned in its tracks, and
concluded to look for woodchucks in the corn-field.
When the bob-cat had taken a few paces along the log, it paused and
glared at the porcupine vindictively, its eyes seeming to emit faint,
whitish flames. The porcupine, on the other hand, came right on,
slowly and indifferently, as if unaware of the bob-cat's presence. The
latter crouched down, flattened back its ears, dug long, punishing
claws into the bark, opened its sharp-toothed jaws, and gave a savage
spitting snarl. Was it possible that this insignificant, blundering,
sluggish creature, this pig of the tree-tops, was going to demand the
right of way? The porcupine, unhurried, continued to advance, nothing
but an increased elevation of his quills betraying that he was aware
of an opponent. The cat's absurd stub of a tail twitched
spasmodically, and for a few seconds it seemed as if rage might get
the better of discretion. But all the wild creatures know the
qualities of that fine armory of quills carried by the porcupine. The
big cat pulled himself together with a screech, ran back, and sprang
off to a rock on the bank, whence he spat impotently while the
porcupine crawled by.
So leisurely was the progress of the bristling little adventurer that
it was a good half-hour ere he reached the farmyard bars. Here he
stopped, and sniffed curiously. But it was no dread of the dreaded
man-smell that delayed him. The bars had been handled by many hot,
toiling hands; and the salt of their sweat had left upon the wood a
taste which the porcupine found pleasant. Here and there, up and down,
he gnawed at the discoloured surfaces. Then, when the relish was
exhausted, he climbed down on the inside, and marched deliberately up
the middle of the yard toward the kitchen door. His quills made a dry,
rustling noise as he went; his claws rattled on the chips, and in the
unshadowed open he was most audaciously in evidence. His bearing was
not defiant, but self-reliant, as of one who minded his own business
and demanded to be let alone. From the stables across the yard came
the stamping of horses' hoofs; a turkey in the tree behind the
barn _quit-quitted_ warningly; and a long-drawn, high-pitched
_kwee-ee-ee-ee-ee_ of inquiry came from the wakeful Leghorn cock in
the poultry-house. To all these unfamiliar sounds the porcupine turned
the deaf ear of self-contained indifference.
At this moment around from the front door-step came the farmer's big
black and white dog, to see what was exciting his family. He was a
wise dog, and versed in the lore of the wilderness. Had the intruder
been a bear he would have sought to attract its attention, and raised
an outcry to summon his master to the fray. But a porcupine! He was
too wary to attack it, and too dignified to make any fuss over it.
With a scornful _woof_, he turned away, and strolled into the garden,
to dig up an old bone which he had buried in the cucumber-bed.
The porcupine, meanwhile, had found something that interested him.
Near the kitchen door stood an empty wooden box, shining in the
moonlight. First its bright colour, then its scent, attracted his
attention. It had recently contained choice flakes of salted codfish,
and the salt had soaked deep into its fibres. With the long, keen
chisels of his front teeth, he attacked the wood eagerly,--and the
loud sound of his gnawings echoed on the stillness. It awoke the
farmer, who rubbed his eyes, arose on his elbow, listened a moment,
muttered, "Another of them durn porkypines!" and dropped to sleep
again.
When the leisurely adventurer had eaten as much of the box as he could
hold, he took it into his head to go home,--which meant, to any
comfortable tree back in the woods. His home was at large. This time
he decided to go through a hole under the board fence between the barn
and the fowl-house. And it was here that, for the first time on this
expedition, he was induced by a power outside himself to change his
mind. As he approached the hole under the fence, from the radiance of
the open yard beyond came another animal, heading for the same point.
The stranger was much smaller than the porcupine, and wore no panoply
of points. But it had the same tranquil air of owning the earth. The
moonlight, shining full upon it, showed its pointed nose, and two
broad, white stripes running down the black fur of its back.
The stranger reached the opening in the fence about three seconds
ahead of the porcupine. And this time the porcupine was the one to
defer. He did not like it. He grunted angrily, and his deadly spines
stood up. But he drew aside, and avoided giving any offence to so
formidable an acquaintance. No foot of ground would his sturdy courage
yield to bob-cat, bear, or man; but of a skunk he was afraid. When the
skunk had passed through the fence, and wandered off to hunt for eggs
under the barn, the porcupine turned and went all the way around the
fowl-house. Then he struck down through the back of the garden, gained
the rail fence enclosing the corn-field, and at length, whether by
intention, or because the fence, a convenient promenade, led him to
it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing
him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low
now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird.
But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and
in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung
himself luxuriously to sleep.
The Truce
Too early, while yet the snow was thick and the food scarce, the big
black bear had roused himself from his long winter sleep and forsaken
his snug den under the roots of the pine-tree. The thawing spring
world he found an empty place, no rabbits to be captured, no roots to
be dug from wet meadows; and his appetite was sorely vexing him. He
would have crept back into his hole for another nap; but the air was
too stimulatingly warm, too full of promise of life, to suffer him to
resume the old, comfortable drowsiness. Moreover, having gone to bed
thin the previous December, he had waked up hungry; and hunger is a
restless bedfellow. In three days he had had but one meal--a big
trout, clawed out half-dead from a rocky eddy below the Falls; and
now, as he sniffed the soft, wet air with fiercely eager nostrils, he
forgot his customary tolerance of mood and was ready to do battle with
anything that walked the wilderness.
It was a little past noon, and the shadows of the tree-tops fell blue
on the rapidly shrinking snow. The air was full of faint trickling
noises, and thin tinklings where the snow veiled the slopes of little
rocky hollows. Under the snow and under the rotting patches of ice,
innumerable small streams were everywhere hurrying to swell the still
ice-fettered flood of the river, the Big Fork, whose roomy valley lay
about a half-mile eastward through the woods. Every now and then, when
a soft gust drew up from the south, it bore with it a heavy roar, a
noise as of muffled and tremendous trampling, the voice of the Big
Fork Falls thundering out from under their decaying lid of ice. The
Falls were the only thing which the black bear really feared. Often as
he had visited them, to catch wounded fish in the ominous eddies at
their foot, he could never look at their terrific plunge without a
certain awed dilation of his eyes, a certain shrinking at his heart.
Perhaps by reason of some association of his cubhood, some imminent
peril and narrow escape at the age when his senses were most
impressionable, in all his five years of life the Falls had never
become a commonplace to him. And even now, while questing noiselessly
and restlessly for food, he rarely failed to pay the tribute of an
instinctive, unconscious turn of head whenever that portentous voice
came up upon the wind.
Prowling hither and thither among the great ragged trunks, peering and
sniffing and listening, the bear suddenly caught the sound of small
claws on wood. The sound came apparently from within the trunk of a
huge maple, close at hand. Leaning his head to one side, he listened
intently, his ears cocked, eager as a child listening to a watch.
There was, indeed, something half childish in the attitude of the huge
figure, strangely belying the ferocity in his heart. Yes, the sound
came, unmistakably, from within the trunk. He nosed the bark warily.
There was no opening; and the bark was firm. He stole to the other
side of the tree, his head craftily outstretched and reaching around
far before him.
The situation was clear to him at once,--and his hungry muzzle jammed
itself into the entrance to a chipmunk's hole. The maple-tree was
dead, and partly decayed, up one side of the trunk. All his craft
forgotten on the instant, the bear sniffed and snorted and drew loud,
fierce breaths, as if he thought to suck the little furry tenant forth
by inhalation. The live, warm smell that came from the hole was
deliciously tantalizing to his appetite. The hole, however, was barely
big enough to admit the tip of his black snout, so he presently gave
over his foolish sniffings, and set himself to tear an entrance with
his resistless claws. The bark and dead wood flew in showers under his
efforts, and it was evident that the chipmunk's little home would
speedily lie open to the foe. But the chipmunk, meanwhile, from the
crotch of a limb overhead, was looking down in silent indignation.
Little Stripe-sides had been wise enough to provide his dwelling with
a sort of skylight exit.
Suddenly, in the midst of his task, the bear stopped and lifted his
muzzle to the wind. What was that new taint upon the air? It was one
almost unknown to him,--but one which he instinctively dreaded, though
without any reason based directly upon experience of his own. At
almost any other time, indeed, he would have taken the first whiff of
that ominous man-smell as a signal to efface himself and make off
noiselessly down the wind. But just now, his first feeling was wrath
at the thought of being hindered from his prospective meal. He would
let no one, not even a man, rob him of that chipmunk. Then, as his
wrath swelled rapidly, he decided to hunt the man himself. Perhaps,
as the bear relishes practically everything edible under the sun
except human flesh, he had no motive but a savage impulse to punish
the intruder for such an untimely intrusion. However that may be, a
red light came into his eyes, and he swung away to meet this unknown
trespasser upon his trails.
On that same day, after a breakfast before dawn in order that he might
make an early start, a gaunt trapper had set out from the Settlement
on the return journey to his camp beyond the Big Fork. He had been in
to the Settlement with a pack of furs, and was now hurrying back as
fast as he could, because of the sudden thaw. He was afraid the ice
might go out of the river and leave him cut off from his camp,--for
his canoe was on the other side. As the pelts were beginning to get
poor, he had left his rifle at home, and carried no weapon but his
knife. He had grown so accustomed to counting all the furry wild
folk as his prey that he never thought of them as possible
adversaries,--unless it might chance to be some such exception as a
bull-moose in rutting season. A rifle, therefore, when he was not
after skins, seemed to him a useless burden; and he was carrying,
moreover, a pack of camp supplies on his broad back. He was tall,
lean, leather-faced and long-jawed, with calm, light blue eyes under
heavy brows; and he wore a stout, yellow-brown, homespun shirt,
squirrel-skin cap, long leggings of deerhide, and oiled cowhide
moccasins. He walked rapidly with a long, slouching stride that was
almost a lope, his toes pointing straight ahead like an Indian's.
When, suddenly, the bear lurched out into his trail and confronted
him, the woodsman was in no way disturbed. The bear paused, swaying in
surly fashion, about ten paces in front of him, completely blocking
the trail. But the woodsman kept right on. The only attention he paid
to the big, black stranger was to shout at him authoritatively--"Git
out the way, thar!"
To his unbounded astonishment, however, the beast, instead of getting
out of the way, ran at him with a snarling growl. The woodsman's calm
blue eyes flamed with anger; but the life of the woods teaches one to
think quickly, or rather, to act in advance of one's thoughts. He knew
that with no weapon but his knife he was no match for such a foe, so,
leaping aside as lightly as a panther, he darted around a tree,
regained the trail beyond his assailant, and ran on at his best speed
toward the river. He made sure that the bear had acted under a mere
spasm of ill-temper, and would not take the trouble to follow far.
When, once in a long time, a hunter or trapper gets the worst of it in
his contest with the wild kindreds, in the majority of cases it is
because he had fancied he knew all about bears. The bear is strong in
individuality and delights to set at nought the traditions of his
kind. So it happens that every now and then a woodsman pays with his
life for failing to recognize that the bear won't always play by rule.
To the trapper's disgusted amazement, this particular bear followed
him so vindictively that before he realized the full extent of his
peril he was almost overtaken. He saw that he must deliver up his
precious pack, the burden of which was effectively handicapping him in
the race for life. When the bear was almost upon him, he flung the
bundle away, with angry violence, expecting that it would at once
divert the pursuer's attention.
In about ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, perhaps, it would have
done so, for among other things it contained bacon and sugar, dainties
altogether delectable to a bear's palate. But as luck would have it,
the bundle so bitterly hurled struck the beast full on the snout,
making him grunt with pain and fresh fury. From that moment he was a
veritable demon of vengeance. Well enough he knew it was not the
bundle, but the man who had thrown it, upon whom he must wipe out the
affront. His hunger was all forgotten in red rage.
Fortunate it was now for the tall woodsman that he had lived
abstemiously and laboured sanely all that winter, and could depend
upon both wind and limb. Fortunate, too, that on the open trail, cut
years before by the lumbermen of the Big Fork Drive, the snow was
already almost gone, so that it did not seriously impede his running.
He ran almost like a caribou, with enough in reserve to be able to
glance back over his shoulder from time to time. But seeing how
implacable was the black bulk that pursued, he could not help thinking
what would happen, there in the great, wet, shadow-mottled solitudes,
if he should chance to trip upon a root, or if his wind should fail
him before he could reach the camp. At this thought, not fear, but a
certain disgust and impotent resentment, swelled his heart; and with a
challenging look at the ancient trunks, the familiar forest aisles,
the high, branch-fretted blue, bright with spring sunshine, he defied
the wilderness, which he had so long loved and ruled, to turn upon him
with such an unspeakable betrayal.
The wilderness loves a master; and the challenge was not accepted. No
root tripped his feet, nor did his wind fail him; and so he came out,
with the bear raging some ten paces behind his heels, upon the banks
of the Big Fork. Once across that quarter-mile of sloppy, rotting ice,
he knew there was good, clear running to his cabin and his gun. His
heart rose, his resentment left him, and he grinned as he gave one
more glance over his shoulder.
As he raced down the bank, the trampling of the Falls, a mile away,
roared up to him on a gust of wind. In spite of himself he could not
but notice how treacherous the ice was looking. In spite of himself he
noticed it, having no choice but to trust it. The whole surface looked
sick, with patches of sodden white and sickly lead-colour; and down
along the shore it was covered by a lane of shallow, yellowish water.
It appeared placid and innocent enough; but the woodsman's practised
eye perceived that it might break up, or "go out," at any moment. The
bear was at his heels, however, and that particular moment was not the
one for indecision. The woodsman dashed knee-deep through the margin
water, and out upon the free ice; and he heard the bear, reckless of
all admonitory signs, splash after him about three seconds later.
On the wide, sun-flooded expanse of ice, with the dark woods beyond
and soft blue sky above, the threat of imminent death seemed to the
woodsman curiously out of place. Yet there death was, panting savagely
at his heels, ready for the first mis-step. And there, too, a mile
below, was death in another form, roaring heavily from the swollen
Falls. And hidden under a face of peace, he knew that death lurked all
about his feet, liable to rise in mad fury at any instant with the
breaking of the ice. As he thought of all this besetting menace, the
woodsman's nerves drew themselves to steel. He set his teeth grimly. A
light of elation came into his eyes. And he felt himself able to win
the contest against whatever odds.
As this sense of new vigour and defiance spurred him to a fresh burst
of speed, the woodsman took notice that he was just about half-way
across the ice. "Good!" he muttered, counting the game now more than
half won. Then, even as he spoke, a strange, terrifying sound ran all
about him. Was it in the air, or beneath the ice? It came from
everywhere at once,--a straining grumble, ominous as the first growl
of an earthquake. The woodsman understood that dreadful voice very
well. He wavered for a second, then sprang forward desperately. And
the bear, pursuing, understood also. His rage vanished in a breath. He
stumbled, whimpered, cast one frightened glance at the too distant
shore behind him, then followed the woodsman's flight,--followed now,
with no more heed to pursue.
For less than half a minute that straining grumble continued. Then it
grew louder, mingled with sharp, ripping reports, and long, black
lanes opened suddenly in every direction. Right before the woodsman's
flying feet one opened. He took it with a bound. But even as he sprang
the ice went all to pieces. What he sprang to was no longer a solid
surface, but a tossing fragment which promptly went down beneath the
impact of his descent. Not for nothing was it, however, that the
woodsman had learned to "run the logs" in many a tangled boom and
racing "drive." His foot barely touched the treacherous floe ere he
leaped again and yet again, till he had gained, by a path which none
but a riverman could ever have dreamed of traversing, an ice-cake
broad and firm enough to give him foothold. Beyond this refuge was a
space of surging water, foam, and ice-mush, too broad for the essay of
any human leap.
The Big Fork, from shore to shore, was now a tossing, swishing,
racing, whirling, and grinding chaos of ice-cakes, churning in an
angry flood and hurrying blindly to the Falls. In the centre of his
own floe the woodsman sat down, the better to preserve his balance. He
bit off a chew from his plug of "blackjack," and with calm eyes
surveyed the doom toward which he was rushing. A mile is a very short
distance when it lies above the inevitable. The woodsman saw clearly
that there was nothing to be done but chew his "blackjack," and wait
on fate. That point settled, he turned his head to see what the bear
was doing.
To his surprise, the animal was now a good fifty yards farther
up-stream, having evidently been delayed by some vagary of the
struggling ice. He was now sitting up on his haunches on a floe, and
staring silently at the volleying cloud which marked the Falls. The
woodsman was aware of a curious fellow feeling for the great beast
which, not five minutes ago, had been raging for his life. To the
woodsman, with his long knowledge and understanding of the wild
kindreds, that rage and that pursuit now appeared as lying more or
less in the course of events, a part of the normal savagery of Nature,
and no matter of personal vindictiveness.
Now that he and his enemy were involved in a common and appalling
doom, the enmity was forgotten. "Got cl'ar grit, too!" he murmured to
himself, as he took note of the quiet way the bear was eyeing the
Falls.
And now it seemed to him that the trampling roar grew louder every
second, drowning into dumbness the crashing and grinding of the ice;
and the volleying mist-clouds seemed to race up-stream to meet him.
Then, with a sickening jump and turn of his heart, a hope came and
shook him out of his stoicism. He saw that his ice-cake was sailing
straight for a little rocky islet just above the fall. Two minutes
more would decide his fate,--at least for the time. He did not trouble
to think what he would do on the island, if he got there. He rose
cautiously and crouched, every sinew tense to renew the battle for
life.
Another minute fled away, and the island was close ahead, wrapped in
the roar and the mist-volleys. A cross-current seized the racing
ice-cake, dragging it aside,--and the man clenched his fists in a
fury of disappointment as he saw that he would miss the refuge after
all. He made ready to plunge in and at least die battling. Then fate
took yet another whim, and a whirling mass of logs and ice, colliding
with the floe, forced it back to its original course. Another moment
and it grounded violently, breaking into four pieces, which rolled off
on either side toward the abyss. And the woodsman, splashing into the
turbulent shallows, made good his hold upon a rock and dragged himself
ashore.
Fairly landed, he shook himself, spat coolly into the flood, and
turned to see what was happening to his fellow in distress. To the
roaring vortex just below him--so close that it seemed as if it might
at any moment drag down the little island and engulf it--he paid no
heed whatever, but turned his back contemptuously upon the tumult and
the mists. His late enemy, alive, strong, splendid, and speeding to a
hideous destruction, was of the keener interest to his wilderness
spirit.
[Illustration: "HE LAUNCHED HIMSELF AGAIN, DESPERATELY."]
The bear was now about twenty paces above the island; but caught by an
inexorable current, he was nearly that distance beyond it. With a
distinct regret, a pang of sympathy, the man saw that there was no
chance of his adversary's escape. But the bear, like himself, seeing a
refuge so near, was not of the temper to give up without a struggle.
Suddenly, like a gigantic spring uncoiling, he launched himself forth
with a violence that completely up-ended his ice-cake, and carried him
over a space of churned torrent to the edge of another floe. Gripping
this with his mighty forearms till he pulled it half under, he
succeeded in clawing out upon it. Scrambling across, he launched
himself again, desperately, sank almost out of sight, rose and began
swimming, with all the energy of courage and despair combined.
But already he was opposite the head of the island. Could he make it?
The man's own muscles strained and heaved in unconscious sympathy with
that struggle. The bear was a gallant swimmer, and for a moment it
looked as if there might be the ghost of a chance for him. But no, the
torrent had too deadly a grip upon his long-furred bulk. He would
_just_ miss that last safe ledge!
In his eagerness, and without any conscious thought of what he was
doing, the man stepped down into the water knee-deep, bracing himself,
and clinging with his left hand to a tough projecting root. Closer
came the bear, beating down the splintered refuse that obstructed him,
his long, black body labouring dauntlessly. Closer he came,--but not
quite close enough to get his strong paws on the rock. A foot more
would have done it,--but that paltry foot he was unable to make good.
The man could not stand it. It was quite too fine a beast to be
dragged over the Falls before his eyes, if he could help it. Reaching
out swiftly with his right hand, he caught the swimmer by the long fur
of his neck, and heaved with all his strength.
For a moment he wondered if he could hold on. The great current drew
and sucked, almost irresistibly. But his grip was of steel, his
muscles sound and tense. For a moment or two the situation hung in
doubt. Then the swimmer, stroking desperately, began to gain. A moment
more, and that narrow, deadly foot of space was covered. The animal
got first one paw upon the rocks, then the other. With prompt
discretion, the woodsman dropped his hold and stepped back to the top
of the island, suddenly grown doubtful of his own wisdom.
Drawing himself just clear of the torrent, the bear crouched panting
for several minutes, exhausted from the tremendous struggle; and the
man, on the top of the rock, waited with his hand upon his knife-hilt
to see what would come of his reckless act. In reality, however, he
did not look for trouble, knowing the natures of the wild kindreds. He
was merely holding himself on guard against the unexpected. But he
soon saw that his caution was unnecessary. Recovering breath, the bear
clambered around the very edge of the rocks to the farther side of the
island, as far as possible from his rescuer. There he seated himself
upon his haunches, and devoted himself to gazing down, as if
fascinated, at the cauldron from which he had been snatched.
During the next half-hour the woodsman began to think. For the
present, he knew that the bear was quite inoffensive, being both
grateful and overawed. But there was no food on the island for either,
except the other. So the fight was bound to be renewed at last. And
after that, whoever might be the victor, what remained for him? From
that island, on the lip of the fall and walled about with wild rapids,
there could be no escape. The situation was not satisfactory from any
point of view. But that it was clear against his principles to
knuckle down, under any conditions, to beast, or man, or fate, the
woodsman might have permitted himself to wish that, after all, his
ice-cake had missed the island. As it was, however, he took another
bite from his plug of "blackjack," and set himself to whittling a
stick.
With a backwoodsman's skill in the art of whittling, he had made good
progress toward the shaping of a toy hand-sled, when, looking up from
his task, he saw something that mightily changed the face of affairs.
He threw away the half-shaped toy, thrust the knife back into his
belt, and rose to his feet. After a long, sagacious survey of the
flood, he drew his knife again, and proceeded to cut himself a stout
staff, a sort of alpenstock. He saw that an ice-jam was forming just
above the falls.
The falls of the Big Fork lie at a sharp elbow of the river, and cross
the channel on a slant. Immediately above them the river shoals
sharply; and though at ordinary seasons there is only one island
visible, at times of low water huge rocks appear all along the brink.
It chanced, at this particular time, that after the first run of the
ice had passed there came a second run that was mixed with logs. This
ice, moreover, was less rotten than that which had formed near the
falls, and it came down in larger cakes. When some of these big cakes,
cemented with logs, grounded on the head of the island, the nucleus of
a jam was promptly formed. At the same time some logs, deeply frozen
into an ice-floe, caught and hung on one of the unseen mid-stream
ledges. An accumulation gathered in the crook of the elbow, over on
the farther shore; and then, as if by magic, the rush stopped, the
flood ran almost clear from the lip of the falls, and the river was
closed from bank to bank.
The woodsman sat quietly watching, as if it were a mere idle
spectacle, instead of the very bridge of life, that was forming before
his eyes. Little by little the structure welded itself, the masses of
drift surging against the barrier, piling up and diving under, till it
was compacted and knit to the very bottom,--and the roar of the falls
dwindled with the diminishing of the stream. This was the moment for
which the man was waiting. Now, if ever, the jam was solid, and might
hold so until he gained the farther shore. But beyond this moment
every second of delay only served to gather the forces that were
straining to break the obstruction. He knew that in a very few minutes
the rising weight of the flood must either sweep all before it, or
flow roaring over the top of the jam in a new cataract that would
sweep the island bare. He sprang to his feet, grasped his stick, and
scanned the tumbled, precarious surface, choosing his path. Then he
turned and looked at the bear, wondering if that animal's woodcraft
were subtler than his own to distinguish when the jam was secure. He
found that the bear was eyeing him anxiously, and not looking at the
ice at all; so he chuckled, told himself that if he didn't know more
than a bear he'd no business in the woods, and stepped resolutely
forth upon the treacherous pack. Before he had gone ten paces the bear
jumped up with a whimper, and followed hastily, plainly conceding that
the man knew more than he.
In the strange, sudden quiet, the shrunken falls clamouring thinly and
the broken ice swishing against the upper side of the jam, the man
picked his way across the slippery, chaotic surface of the dam,
expecting every moment that it would crumble with a roar from under
his feet. About ten or a dozen yards behind him came the bear,
stepping hurriedly, and trembling as he looked down at the diminished
cataract. The miracle of the vanishing falls daunted his spirit most
effectively, and he seemed to think that the whole mysterious
phenomenon was of the man's creating. When the two reached shore, the
flood was already boiling far up the bank. Without so much as a thank
you, the bear scurried past his rescuer, and made off through the
timber like a scared cat. The man looked after him with a slow smile,
then turned and scanned the perilous path he had just traversed. As he
did so, the jam seemed to melt away in mid-channel. Then a terrific,
rending roar tortured the air. The mass of logs and ice, and all the
incalculable weight of imprisoned waters hurled themselves together
over the brink with a stupefying crash, and throbbing volumes of spray
leapt skyward. The woodsman's lean face never changed a muscle; but
presently, giving a hitch to his breeches under the belt, he muttered
thoughtfully:
"Blame good thing we come away when we did!"
Then, turning on his larriganed heels, he strode up the trail till the
great woods closed about him, and the raving thunders gradually died
into quiet.
[Illustration: "IT WOULD HAVE SEEMED LIKE NO MORE THAN A DARKER,
SWIFTLY-MOVING SHADOW IN THE DARK WATER."]
The Keeper of the Water-Gate
Some distance below the ice, through the clear, dark water of the
quiet-running stream, a dim form went swimming swiftly. It was a
sturdy, broad-headed, thick-furred form, a little more than a foot in
length, with a naked, flattened tail almost as long as the body. It
held its small, handlike forepaws tucked up under its chin, and swam
with quick strokes of its strong hind legs and eel-like wrigglings of
the muscular tail. It would have seemed like no more than a darker,
swiftly-moving shadow in the dark water, save for a curious burden of
air-bubbles which went with it. Its close under-fur, which the water
could not penetrate, was thickly sprinkled with longer hairs, which
the water seemed, as it were, to plaster down; and under these long
hairs the air was caught in little silvery bubbles, which made the
swimmer conspicuous even under two inches of clear ice and eighteen
inches of running water.
As he went, the swimmer slanted downward and aimed for a round hole at
the bottom of the bank. This hole was the water-gate of his winter
citadel; and he, the keeper of it, was the biggest and pluckiest
muskrat on the whole slow-winding length of Bitter Creek.
At this point Bitter Creek was about four feet deep and ten or twelve
feet wide, with low, bushy shores subject to overflow at the slightest
freshet. Winter, setting in suddenly with fierce frost, had caught it
while its sluggish waters were still so high from the late autumn
rains that the bushes and border grasses were all awash. Now the young
ice, transparent and elastic, held them in firm fetters. The flat
world of field and wood about Bitter Creek was frozen as hard as iron,
and a biting gale, which carried a thin drift of dry, gritty snow, was
lashing it pitilessly. The branches snapped and creaked under the
cruel assault, and not a bird or beast was so hardy as to show its
head abroad. But in the muskrat's world, there under the safe ice, all
was as tranquil as a May morning. The long green and brown water-weeds
swayed softly in the faint current, with here and there a silvery
young chub or an olive-brown sucker feeding lazily among them. Under
the projecting roots lurked water-snails, and small, black, scurrying
beetles, and big-eyed, horn-jawed larvæ which would change next spring
to aerial forms of radiance. And not one of them, muskrat, chub, or
larva, cared one whit for the scourge of winter on the bleak world
above the ice.
The big muskrat swam straight to the mouth of the hole, and plunged
half-way into it. Then he suddenly changed his mind. Backing out
abruptly, he darted up to the surface close under the edge of the
bank. Along the edge of the bank the ice-roof slanted upward, the
water having fallen several inches since the ice had set. This left a
covered air space, about two inches in height, all along the fringes
of the grass roots; and here the muskrat paused, head and shoulders
half out of water, to take breath. He was panting heavily, having come
a long way under water without stopping to empty and refill his
long-suffering little lungs. Two inches over his head, on the other
side of the ice, the thin, hard snow went driving and swirling, and he
could hear the alders straining under the bitter wind. His little,
bead-bright eyes, set deep in his furry face, gleamed with
satisfaction over his comfortable security.
Having fully eased his lungs, the muskrat dived again to the bottom,
and began to gnaw with fierce energy at a snaky mass of the roots of
the yellow material. Having cut off a section about as long as
himself, and more than an inch in thickness, he tugged at it fiercely
to loosen the fibres which held it to the bottom. But this particular
piece was more firmly anchored than he had expected to find it, and
presently, feeling as if his lungs would burst, he was obliged to
ascend to the air-space under the ice for a new breath. There he
puffed and panted for perhaps a minute. But he had no thought of
relinquishing that piece of succulent, crisp, white-hearted lily-root.
As soon as he had rested, he swam down again, and gripping it savagely
tore it loose at the first pull. Holding the prize lengthwise that it
might not obstruct his entrance, he plunged into the hole in the bank,
the round, black water-gate to his winter house.
The house was a most comfortable and strictly utilitarian structure.
The entrance, dug with great and persistent toil from the very bottom
of the bank, for the better discouragement of the muskrat's deadliest
enemy, the mink, ran inward for nearly two feet, and then upward on a
long slant some five or six feet through the natural soil. At this
point the shore was dry land at the average level of the water; and
over this exit, which was dry at the time of the building, the muskrat
had raised his house.
The house was a seemingly careless, roughly rounded heap of
grass-roots, long water-weeds, lily-roots and stems, and mud, with a
few sticks woven into the foundation. The site was cunningly chosen,
so that the roots and stems of a large alder gave it secure anchorage;
and the whole structure, for all its apparent looseness, was so well
compacted as to be secure against the sweep of the spring freshets.
About six feet in diameter at the base, it rose about the same
distance from the foundation, a rude, sedge-thatched dome, of which
something more than three feet now showed itself above the ice.
To the unobservant eye the muskrat house in the alders might have
looked like a mass of drift in which the rank water-grass had taken
root. But within the clumsy pile, about a foot below the centre of the
dome, was a shapely, small, warm chamber, lined with the softest
grasses. From one side of this chamber the burrow slanted down to
another and much larger chamber, the floor of which, at the present
high level of the water, was partly flooded. From this chamber led
downward two burrows,--one, the main passage, by which the muskrat had
entered, opening frankly, as we have seen, in the channel of the
creek, and the other, longer and more devious, terminating in a narrow
and cunningly concealed exit, behind a deeply submerged willow-root.
This passage was little used, and was intended chiefly as a way of
escape in case of an extreme emergency,--such as, for example, the
invasion of a particularly enterprising mink by way of the main
water-gate. The muskrat is no match for the snake-swift, bloodthirsty
mink, except in the one accomplishment of holding his breath under
water. And a mink must be very ravenous, or quite mad with the
blood-lust, to dare the deep water-gate and the long subaqueous
passage to the muskrat's citadel, at seasons of average high water. In
time of drought, however, when the entrance is nearly uncovered and
the water goes but a little way up the dark tunnels, the mink will
often glide in, slaughter the garrison, and occupy the well-built
citadel.
The big muskrat, dragging his lily-root, mounted the narrow, black,
water-filled passage till he reached the first chamber. Here he was
met by his mate, just descending from the upper room. She promptly
appropriated the piece of lily-root, which the big muskrat meekly gave
up. He had fed full before coming, and now had no care except to
clean his draggled fur and make his toilet before mounting to the
little dry top chamber and curling himself up for a nap.
This toilet was as elaborate and painstaking as that of the cleanliest
of cats or squirrels. He was so loose-jointed, so loose-skinned, so
flexibly built in every way, that he could reach every part of his fur
with his teeth and claws at once. He would seem to pull great folds of
skin from his back around under his breast, where he could comb it the
more thoroughly. It was no trouble at all for him to scratch his left
ear with his right hind foot. He went about his task with such zeal
that in a very few minutes his fur was as fluffy and exquisite as that
of a boudoir kitten. Then he rubbed his face, eyes, and ears
vigorously with both forepaws at once in a half-childish fashion,
sitting up on his hind-quarters as he did so. This done, he flicked
his tail sharply two or three times, touched his mate lightly with his
nose, and scurried up to the little sleeping-chamber. Something less
than a foot above his head the winter gale howled, ripped the
snow-flurries, lashed the bushes, sent the snapped twigs hurtling
through the bare branches, turned every naked sod to stone. But to the
sleeping muskrat all the outside sound and fury came but as a murmur
of Jun trees.
His mate, meanwhile, was gobbling the lily-root as if she had not
eaten for a week. Sitting up like a squirrel, and clutching the end of
the root with both little forepaws, she crushed the white esculent
into her mouth and gnawed at it ravenously with the keen chisels of
her teeth. The root was as long as herself, and its weight perhaps a
sixth of her own. Yet when it was all eaten she wanted more. There
were other pieces stored in the chamber; and indeed the whole house
itself was in great part edible, being built largely of such roots and
grasses as the muskrat loves to feed on. But such stores were for
emergency use. She could forage for herself at present. Diving down
the main passage she presently issued from the water-gate, and
immediately rose to the clear-roofed air-space. Here she nibbled
tentatively at some stems and withered leafage. These proving little
to her taste, she suddenly remembered a clam-bed not far off, and
instantly set out for it. She swam briskly down-stream along the
air-space, her eyes and nose just out of the water, the ice gleaming
silvery above her head.
She had travelled in this position perhaps fifty yards when she saw,
some twelve or fifteen feet ahead of her, a lithe, dark, slender
figure with a sharp-nosed, triangular head, squeeze itself over a
projecting root which almost touched the ice. The stranger was no
larger than herself,--but she knew it was not for her to try
conclusions with even the smallest of minks. Catching a good lungful
of air, she dived on the instant, down, down, to the very bed of the
creek, and out to mid-channel.
The mink, eagerly desirous of a meal of muskrat-meat, dived also,
heading outward to interrupt the fugitive. He swam as well as the
muskrat,--perhaps faster, indeed, with a darting, eel-like, deadly
swiftness. But the stream at this point had widened to a breadth of
twelve or fifteen yards,--and this was the little muskrat's salvation.
The mink was afraid to follow her to such a distance from the
air-space. He knew that by the time he overtook her, and fixed his
teeth in her throat, he would be fairly winded; and then, with no
breathing-hole at hand, he would die terribly, bumping up against the
clear ice and staring madly through at the free air for which his
lungs were agonizing. His fierce heart failed him, and he turned back
to the air-space under the bank. But the sight of the muskrat had
whetted his appetite, and when he came to the muskrat house in the
alders, he swam down and thrust his head inside the water-gate. He
even, indeed, went half-way in; but soon instinct, or experience, or
remembered instruction, told him that the distance to the air-chamber
was too great for him. He had no more fancy to be drowned in the
muskrat's winding black tunnel, than under the clear daylight of the
ice; so he turned away, and with red, angry eyes resumed his journey
up-stream.
The little muskrat, seeing that her enemy was disheartened, went on
cheerfully to the clam-bed. Here she clawed up from the oozy bottom
and devoured almost enough clams to make a meal for a full-grown man.
But she took longer over her meal than the man would, thereby saving
herself from an otherwise imminent indigestion. Each bivalve, as she
got it, she would carry up to the air-space among the stones,
selecting a tussock of grass on which she could rest half out of the
water. And every time, before devouring her prize, she would
carefully, though somewhat impatiently, cleanse her face of the mud
and dead leafage which seemed to be an inseparable concomitant of her
digging. When she had eaten as many clams as she could stuff into her
little body, she hastened back to join her mate in the safe nest over
the water-gate.
In the upper world the winter was a severe one, but of all its
bitterness the muskrats knew nothing, save by the growing thickness of
the ice that sheltered them. As Bitter Creek shrank to normal, winter
level, and the strong ice sank in mid-channel, the air-space along
shore increased till they had a spacious, covered corridor in which to
disport themselves. Food was all about them--an unlimited abundance of
lily-roots and clams; and once in awhile their diet was varied by the
capture of a half-torpid sucker or chub. There were no otters in
Bitter Creek; and the mink, which had investigated their water-gate so
hungrily, got caught in a trap at an open spring up-stream, where he
was accustomed to fish for eels. So the muskrats had no dangerous
enemies to mar their peace.
The spring thaws came suddenly, while the ice was yet strong, and the
flood went wide over the low banks of Bitter Creek. But the little
house among the alders withstood them sturdily. The water rose till it
filled the lower chamber. Inch by inch it crept up the last passage,
till it glistened dimly just an inch below the threshold. But it never
actually touched that threshold; and the little grass-lined retreat
stayed warm and dry. Then the ice went out, under the sun and showers
of late April, and the waters sank away as rapidly as they had risen;
and the muskrats, wild with the intoxication of spring, rolled,
played, and swam gaily hither and thither on the surface of the open
creek. They made long excursions up and down-stream for the sheer
delight of wandering, and found fresh interest in every clam-flat,
lily cove, or sprouting bed of sweet-flag. Their appetites they had
always with them; and though it was fun to chase each other, or to
roll and wallow luxuriously on the cool surface of the water when the
sun shone warm, there was nothing quite so worth while, day in and day
out, as eating. Other muskrats now appeared, the wander-spirit seizing
them all at once; and the males had many fierce fights, which left
their naked tails scarred and bleeding. But the big muskrat, from the
house in the alders, was denied the joy of battle, because none of his
rivals were so hardy as to confront him.
About this pleasant season, in the upper chamber over the water-gate,
was born a family of nine very small and very naked young muskrats.
Their big father was amiably indifferent to them, and spent most of
his time, when at home, in the lower chamber, which was now dry and
clean enough for his luxurious tastes. Their small mother, however,
was assiduous in her care; and in an exceedingly short time the
youngsters, very sleek and dark in their first fur, were investigating
the wonderful, great world beyond their water-gate. They had
prodigious appetites, and they grew prodigiously. One, on their very
first outing, got snapped up by a greedy black duck. The attention of
the little mother was just then occupied, and, never having learned to
count up to nine, she, apparently, never realized her loss; but she
was destined to avenge it, a week or two later, by eating two
new-hatched ducklings of that same black duck's brood. Another of the
little muskrats encountered fate on the threshold of his existence,
being snatched by the hungry jaws of a large pickerel, which darted
upon him like lightning from under the covert of a lily-pad. But in
this case, vengeance was instant and direct. The big muskrat chanced
to be near by. He caught the pickerel, while the latter was
preoccupied with his meal, bit clean through the back of his neck, and
then and there devoured nearly half of him. In the engrossing task of
cleaning his fur after this feast, and making his toilet, which he did
with minute nicety on a stranded log by the shore, he promptly forgot
the loss to his little family, the wrong which he had so
satisfactorily and appropriately avenged. As for the remaining seven,
they proceeded to grow up as rapidly as possible, and soon ceased to
stand in any danger of pickerel or mallard.
Though fairly omnivorous in his tastes, the big muskrat, like all his
tribe, was so content with his lilies, flag-root, and clams, that he
was not generally regarded as a foe by the birds and other small
people of the wilderness. He was too well fed to be a keen hunter.
Having learned (and taught his fellows) to avoid muskrat-traps, the
big muskrat enjoyed his lazy summer life on Bitter Creek with a
care-free spirit that is permitted to few, indeed, of the furtive
kindred of the wild. There was no mink, as we have seen, to beware of;
and as for hawks, he ignored them as none of the other small wild
creatures--squirrels, hares, or even the fierce and fearless
weasel--could afford to do. The hawks knew certain inconvenient
capacities of his kind. When, therefore, that sudden alarm would ring
clamorous over the still, brown woods, that shrill outcry of the
crows, jays, and king-birds, which sends every weak thing trembling to
cover, the big muskrat would sit up, untroubled, on his log, and go on
munching his flag-root with as fine an unconcern as if he had been
a bear or a bull moose.
[Illustration: "WITH A SCREAM OF PAIN AND FEAR, THE BIRD DROPPED
HIM."]
But one day, one late, rose-amber afternoon, when the gnats were
dancing over the glassy creek, he was startled out of this confidence.
He was standing in shallow water, digging out an obstinate, but
tempting root, when there arose a sudden great outcry from all the
birds. It meant "A hawk!--A hawk!--A hawk!--A hawk!" He understood it
perfectly; but he never lifted his head from his task. Next moment
there was a mighty rush of wind in his ears; a thunderbolt seemed to
strike him, frightful claws gripped him, piercing his back, and he was
swept into the air. But it was a young hawk, unversed in the way of
the muskrat, which had seized him. What those steely claws really
clutched was little more than a roll of loose skin. Hurt, but not
daunted, the muskrat twisted his head up and back, and sank his long,
punishing incisors into the enemy's thigh. He did not hang on, in
bulldog fashion, but cut, cut, cut, deep through the bird's hard
feather armour, and into the cringing red strata of veins and muscles.
With a scream of pain and fear, the bird dropped him, and he fell into
the water. At first, he dived deep, fearing a second attack, and came
up under a tangle of grasses, from which he could peer forth unseen.
Then, perceiving that the hawk had vanished, he, by and by, came out
of the grass, and paddled to his favourite log. He was bleeding
profusely, and his toilet that evening was long and painful. But in a
few days he was as well as ever, with an added confidence.
About this time, however, a small, inquisitive, and particularly
bloodthirsty mink came down from the upper waters of the creek, where
game had grown scarce under the ravages of her insatiable and
implacable family. One of her special weaknesses was for muskrat-meat,
and many a muskrat house she had invaded so successfully that the
long, smothering, black, drowned galleries had no more terrors for
her.
She came to the house in the alders. She noted its size, and realized
that here, indeed, was good hunting. She swam down to the water-gate
at the bottom of the channel, poked her nose in, and returned to the
surface for a full supply of air. Then, with great speed, she dived
again, and disappeared within the blackness of the water-gate.
It chanced that the big muskrat was just descending. From the inner
darkness he saw the enemy clearly, before her savage, little, peering
eyes could discover him. He knew all the deadliness of the peril. He
could easily have escaped, turning back and fleeing by the other
passage while the foe went on to her bloody work in the chambers.
There was no time to warn the rest.
But flight was far from the big muskrat's mind in that crucial moment.
Not panic, but a fierce hate blazed in his usually good-natured eyes.
With a swift, strenuous kick of his powerful hind legs, he shot
downward upon the enemy, and grappled with her in the narrow tunnel.
The mink had seen him just before he fell upon her, and quicker than
thought itself had darted up her snake-like jaws to gain the fatal
throat-hold. But long success had made her over-confident. No muskrat
had ever, within her experience, even tried to fight her. This present
impetuous attack she mistook for a frantic effort to crowd past her
and escape. Half careless, therefore, she missed the fatal hold, and
caught only a mouthful of yielding skin. Before she could try
again--borne down and hampered as she was by the muskrat's weight--a
set of long, tenacious teeth, crunching and cutting, met in the side
of her face, just at the root of the jaw.
This time the muskrat was wise enough to hold on. His deep grip held
like a vise. The mink's teeth, those vindictive teeth that had killed
and killed for the mere joy of killing, now gnashed impotently. In
utter silence, there in the choking deep, the water in their eyes and
ears and jaws, they writhed and strove, the mink's lithe body twisting
around her foe like a snake. Then, with a convulsive shudder, her
struggles ceased. Her lungs had refused to hold the strained breath
any longer. They had opened--and the water had filled them. Her body
trailed out limply; and the muskrat, still maintaining that inexorable
grip, dragged her out through the water-gate which he had so well
kept. Out in the brown, blurred light of the current he still held her
down, jamming her head into a patch of bright sand, until the ache of
his own lungs gave him warning. Then, carrying the body to the
surface, he flung it scornfully over a root to await the revival of
his appetite, and proceeded to calm his excitement by a long,
elaborate toilet. Steely dark and cold the waters of Bitter Creek
slipped by between their leafless, bushy banks. And inside the dome of
the house in the alders the thick-furred muskrat colony slept
luxuriously, little dreaming of the doom just averted from their
door.
When the Moose Cow Calls
The smell of the burning rubbish heaps--the penetrating November
smell--spread up from the clearings and filled the chilly, windless
evening air. It seemed a sort of expression of the cold sky, those
pale steel-gray and sea-green wastes, deepening into sharp straight
bands of orange and smoke colour along the far horizon. It seemed
equally an expression of the harsh, darkening upland pastures, dotted
with ragged stumps and backed by ragged forests. It was the
distinctive autumn smell of the backwoods settlements, that smell
which, taken into the blood in childhood, can never lose its potency
of magic, its power over the most secret springs of memory and
longing.
On the rude snake fence at the back of the pasture sat a boy, with a
roll of birch bark in his hands. The bark was fashioned into the shape
of a fish-horn, and the boy handled it proudly. He took deep breaths
of the pungent-smelling air, and felt an exciting thrill as he
glanced over his shoulder at the dark woods just behind him. It was
for the sake of this thrill, this delicious though unfounded
apprehension, that he had come here to the very back of the pasture,
in the twilight, after bringing up the cows from the milking. The cows
he couldn't see, for they were feeding in the lower pasture, just
under the rise of the hill. The lights beginning to glimmer in the
farmhouse were very far down in the valley; and very far down were the
little creeping flames whence came that pungent smell pervading the
world; and the boy felt his spirit both expand and tremble before the
great spaces of the solitude.
It was for the purpose of practising privately the call of the
cow-moose that the boy had betaken himself to the lonely back pasture.
On the previous evening an old hunter, just back from a successful
"calling" over on Nictau Lake, had given the boy some lessons in this
alluring and suggestive department of woodcraft, and had made his joy
complete by the gift of the bark "moose-call" itself, a battered old
tube with many "kills" to its credit. The boy, with his young voice
just roughening toward the bass of manhood, had proved an apt pupil.
And the hunter had not only told him that practice would make him a
first-class "caller," but had promised to take him hunting next
season. This promise had set the boy's imagination aflame, and all day
he had been dreaming of tall moose-bulls, wide-antlered, huge-belled,
black of mane and shoulder.
Of course, when he went up to the fence of the back pasture to
practise his new accomplishment, the boy had no idea of being heard by
anything in the shape of a bull-moose, still less of being able to
deceive that crafty animal. Had he imagined the possibility of gaining
any response to his call, he would have come well-armed, and would
have taken up his post in the branches of some safe tree. But it was
getting near the end of the season, and what was more to the purpose,
there ran a tradition in the settlement that the moose never came east
of Five Mile Creek, a water-course some four miles back from the fence
whereon the boy was sitting. Such traditions, once established in a
backwoods village, acquire an authority quite superior to fact and
proof against much ocular refutation. The boy had an unwavering faith
that, however seductively he might sound the call of the cow, never a
moose bull would hear him, because never a moose bull could be found
this side of Five Mile Creek. It was fascinating to pretend,--but he
had no will to evoke any monstrous apparition from those dark woods
behind him, on which he found it so thrillingly hard to keep his
back turned.
After sitting silent and moveless for a few minutes, listening to the
vague, mysterious stir of the solitude till his eyes grew wide as a
watching deer's, the boy lifted his birchen tube in both hands,
stretched his neck, and gave forth the harsh, half-bleating bellow, or
bray, with which the cow-moose signals for a mate. It was a good
imitation of what the old hunter had done, and the boy was proud of
it. In his exultation he repeated it thrice. Then he stopped to
listen,--pretending, as boys will, that he expected an answer.
The silence following upon that sonorous sound seemed startling in its
depth; and the boy held his breath lest he should mar it. Then came an
unexpected noise, at which the boy's heart jumped into his throat,--a
sharp crashing and rattling of branches, as if somebody was thrashing
the underbrush with sticks. It seemed to be some hundreds of yards
away, beyond the farthest fence of the pasture. For a moment the boy
wondered tremulously what it could be. Then he thought he understood.
"Some fool steer's got through the fence and gone stumbling through
the brush piles," he muttered to himself. The explanation had the
merit of explaining; and when the sound had ceased the boy once more
set the bark trumpet to his lips and sounded its harsh appeal.
This time he called twice. As he paused to draw breath, a little
creepy feeling on the skin of his cheeks and about the roots of his
hair made him turn his head and fix his eyes upon a dense spruce
thicket some twenty paces behind him. Surely there was a movement
among the young spruce tops. Almost as smoothly as a mink slips from a
rock the boy slipt down from his too conspicuous perch and crouched
behind the fence. Peering between the rails he saw a tall, dark shape,
with gigantic head, vast antlers, and portentous bulk of shoulder,
step noiselessly from the thicket and stand motionless. With a heart
that throbbed in mingled exultation and terror, the boy realized that
he had called a bull-moose.
Huge as seemed its stature to the boy's excited vision, the moose was
in reality a young and rather small bull, who had been forced by
stronger rivals to go unmated. Driven by his restless desire, he had
wandered beyond his wonted range. Now he stood like a statue, head
uplifted, peering on every side to catch sight of the mate whose voice
had so resistlessly summoned him. Only his wide ears moved, waving
inquisitively. His nostrils, ordinarily his chief source of
information, were dulled almost to obtuseness by that subtly acrid
perfume of the smoke.
The boy in his fence corner, with a gray stump beside him, shrank
within himself and stared through half-closed eyes, trembling lest the
mighty stranger should detect him. He had a very reasonable notion
that the mighty stranger might object to the deception which had been
practised upon his eager emotions, and might not find the old rail
fence much barrier to his righteous wrath. For all his elation, the
boy began to wish that he had not been in such haste to learn
moose-calling. "Don't call till you've some idea who'll answer!" was a
rule which he deduced from that night's experience.
It is possible that the bull, during those few minutes while he stood
waiting and watching, saw the dim figure of the boy behind the fence.
If so, the figure had no concern for him. He caught nothing of the
dreaded man-smell; and he had no reason to associate that small,
harmless creature with the mate to whose calling he had sped so
eagerly. But there was no doubt that the calling had come from this
very place. Was it possible that the cow, more coquettish than her
kind are apt to be, had hidden herself to provoke him? He came closer
to the fence, and uttered a soft grumble in his throat, a sound both
caressing and appealing. "My! how disappointed he'll be!" thought the
boy, and devoutly wished himself safe at home.
At this trying moment came relief from an unexpected quarter. That
distant threshing of the bushes which the boy had heard after his
first calling had not been a stray steer. Not by any means. It was the
response of another young wandering moose bull, beating on the
underbrush with his ill-developed, but to himself quite wonderful,
antlers. He, too, was seeking a mate in a region far remote from that
where ruled the tyrannous elder bulls. Silently and swiftly, assured
by the second summons, he had hurried to the tryst; and now, to his
ungovernable rage, what he saw awaiting him in the dusk was no mate at
all, but a rival. Pausing not to consider the odds, he burst from the
covert and rushed furiously to the attack.
The first bull, though somewhat the larger of the two, and by far the
better antlered, was taken at a disadvantage. Before he could whirl
and present his formidable front to the charge, the newcomer caught
him on the flank, knocked him clear off his feet, and sent him
crashing into the fence. The fence went down like stubble; and the
boy, his eyes starting with astonished terror, scurried like a rabbit
for the nearest tree. Climbing into the branches with an agility which
surprised even himself, he promptly recovered from his panic and
turned to watch the fight.
The first bull, saved from serious injury by the defects of his
adversary's antlers, picked himself up from the wreckage of the fence,
and, grunting with anger, plunged back to meet his assailant. The
latter, somewhat puzzled by the fence and its zig-zag twistings, had
drawn a little to one side, and so it happened that when the first
bull rushed at him, the angle of a fence corner intervened. When the
opposing antlers came together, they met harmlessly between the heavy
rails, and got tangled in a way that seemed to daunt their owners'
rage. In the pushing and struggling the top rail was thrown off and
fell smartly across the newcomer's neck. At the same time one of the
stakes flew up and caught the first bull fairly on the sensitive
muzzle. Sneezing violently, he jumped back; and the two stood eyeing
each other with fierce suspicion over the top of the fence.
The boy was trembling with excitement there in his tree, eager for the
fight to go on and eager to see which would win. But in this he was
doomed to disappointment. The end came in a most unlooked-for fashion.
It chanced that the boy's "calling" had deceived others besides the
two young bulls. The old hunter, in his cabin under the hill, had
heard it. He had snatched his rifle from behind the door, and stolen
swiftly up to the back pasture.
From a clump of hemlock not fifty yards away came a red flash and a
sharp report. The bull on the near side of the fence sprang into the
air with a gasping cough, and fell. The smaller bull, who knew what
guns meant, simply vanished. It was as if the dusk had blotted him
out, so noiselessly and instantaneously did he sink back into the
thickets; and a moment later he was heard crashing away through the
underbrush in mad flight. As the hunter stepped up to examine his
prize, the boy dropped from the tree, grabbed his birch-bark tube, and
came forward proudly.
"There wasn't any cow at all,--'cept me!" he proclaimed, his voice
ringing with triumph.
The Passing of the Black Whelps
[Illustration: "OVER THE CREST OF THE RIDGE, INKY BLACK FOR AN INSTANT
AGAINST THE MOON, CAME A LEAPING DEER"]
I.
A lopsided, waning moon, not long risen, looked over the ragged crest
of the ridge, and sent long shadows down the sparsely wooded slope.
Though there was no wind, and every tree was as motionless as if
carved of ice, these spare, intricate shadows seemed to stir and
writhe, as if instinct with a kind of sinister activity. This
confusion of light and dark was increased by the patches of snow that
still clung in the dips and on the gentler slopes. The air was cold,
yet with a bitter softness in it, the breath of the thaw. The sound of
running water was everywhere--the light clamour of rivulets, and the
rush of the swollen brooks; while from the bottom of the valley came
the deep, pervading voice of the river at freshet, labouring between
high banks with its burden of sudden flood.
Over the crest of the ridge, inky black for an instant against the
moon, came a leaping deer. He vanished in a patch of young firs. He
shot out again into the moonlight. Down the slope he came in mighty
bounds, so light of foot and so elastic that he seemed to float
through the air. From his heaving sides and wild eyes it was evident
that he was fleeing in desperation from some appalling terror.
Straight down the slope he came, to the very brink of the high bluff
overlooking the river. There he wheeled, and continued his flight up
the valley, his violent shadow every now and then, as he crossed the
spaces of moonlight, projecting grotesquely out upon the swirling
flood.
Up along the river bluff he fled for perhaps a mile. Then he stopped
suddenly and listened, his sensitive ears and dilating nostrils held
high to catch the faintest waft of air. Not a sound came to him,
except the calling of the waters; not a scent, save the raw freshness
of melting snow and the balsamic tang of buds just beginning to thrill
to the first of the rising sap. He bounded on again for perhaps a
hundred yards, then with a tremendous leap sprang to one side, a full
thirty feet, landing belly-deep in a thicket of scrub juniper. Another
leap, as if he were propelled by steel springs, carried him yet
another thirty feet aside. Then he turned, ran back a couple of
hundred yards parallel to his old trail, and lay down in a dense
covert of spruces to catch breath and ease his pounding heart. He was
a very young buck, not yet seasoned in the craft of the wilderness,
and his terror shook him. But he knew enough to take his snatched rest
at the very edge of his covert, where his eyes could watch the back
trail. For a quarter of an hour, however, nothing appeared along that
staring trail. Then he got up nervously and resumed his flight, still
ascending the valley, but now slanting away from the river, and
gradually climbing back toward the crest of the ridge. He had in mind
a wide reach of swales and flooded meadows, still miles away, wherein
he might hope to elude the doom that followed him.
Not long after the buck had vanished there arose a strange sound upon
the still, wet air. It came in a rising and falling cadence from far
behind the ridge, under the lopsided moon. It was a high, confused
sound, not unmusical, but terrifying--a cry of many voices. It drifted
up into the silvery night, wavered and diminished, swelled again, and
then died away, leaving a sense of fear upon the quiet that followed.
The soft clamour of the waters, when one noticed them again, seemed to
have taken a new note from the menace of that cadenced cry.
Presently over the top of the ridge, at the gap wherein had first
appeared the form of the leaping buck, a low, dark shape came, moving
sinuously and with deadly swiftness. It did not bound into the air and
float, as the buck had seemed to do, but slid smoothly, like a small,
dense patch of cloud-shadow--a direct, inevitable movement, wasting no
force and fairly eating up the trail of the fleeing deer.
As it came down the slope, disappearing in the hemlock groves and
emerging upon the bright, snowy hollows, the dread shape resolved
itself into a pack of seven wolves. They ran so close, so evenly, with
fanged muzzles a little low, and ample, cloudy tails a little high,
that one might have almost covered the whole deadly pack with a
table-cloth. Their tongues were hanging out, and their eyes shot green
fire. They were fiercely hungry, for game was scarce and cunning that
winter on their much ravaged range, and this chase was already a long
one. When the trail of the buck wheeled at the river-brink, the leader
of the pack gave one short howl as he turned, barely escaping the
abyss. It seemed to him that the buck must have been nearly winded, or
he would not, even for an instant, have contemplated taking to such
mad water. With the renewed vigour of encouragement, he swept his
pack along up the edge of the bluff.
On the pack-leader's right flank ran a sturdy wolf of a darker colour
than his fellows--nearly black, indeed, on the top of his head, over
his shoulders, and along his stiff-haired backbone. Not quite so tall
or so long-flanked as the leader, he had that greater breadth of skull
between the eyes which betokens the stronger intelligence, the more
individualized resourcefulness. He had a look in his deep-set, fierce
eye which seemed to prophesy that unless the unforeseen should happen
he would ere long seize the leadership to himself.
But--the unforeseen did happen, at that moment. The trail, just there,
led across a little dip wherein the snow still lingered. Thinly
covered by the snow lay a young pine-tree, lightning shivered and long
dead. Thrust up from the trunk was a slim, sharp-pointed stub, keen
and hard and preserved by its resin. Upon this hidden dagger-point, as
he ran, the dark wolf planted his right fore foot--planted it fair and
with a mighty push. Between the spreading toes, between the fine bones
and sinews and the cringing nerves of the foot, and out by the first
joint of the leg it thrust its rending way.
At the suddenness of the anguish the dark wolf yelped, falling
forward upon his muzzle as he did so, and dropping from his place as
the pack sped on. But as he wrenched his foot free and took one
stumbling stride forward, the pack stopped, and turned. Their long
white fangs snapped, and the fire in their eyes took a different hue.
Very well the dark wolf knew the meaning of the halt, the turn, the
change in his fellows' eyes. He knew the stern law of the pack--the
instant and inevitable doom of its hurt member. The average gray wolf
knows how to accept the inevitable. Fate itself--the law of the
pack--he does not presume to defy. He will fight--to justify his
blood, and, perhaps, to drug his despair and die in the heat of the
struggle. But he does not dream of trying to escape.
And in this fashion, fighting in silence, this dark wolf would have
died at the brink of the river bluff, and been eaten by his fellows
ere they continued their chase of the leaping buck--in this fashion
would he have died, but for that extra breadth of skull between the
eyes, that heightened individualism and resourcefulness. Had there
been any chance to escape by fighting, fighting would have been the
choice of his fierce and hardy spirit. But what was he against six?
Defying the fiery anguish in his foot, he made a desperate leap which
took him to the extreme overhanging edge of the bluff. Already the
jaws of the executioners were gnashing at his heels. A second more and
they would have been at his throat. But before that second passed he
was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling
to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim
eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then
withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not
far ahead?
But the black-shouldered wolf was not drowned. The flood was thick,
indeed, with crunching ice-cakes and wallowing logs and slowly turning
islets of uprooted trees and the _débris_ of the winter forest. But
fortune so favoured the wolf that he fell in a space of clear water,
instead of being dashed to a pulp on ice-cake or tree trunk. He
disappeared, came to the surface gasping, struck out hardily through
the grim and daunting turmoil, and succeeded in gaining one of those
islets of toughly interlaced _débris_ which turned slowly in the
flood. Upon this precarious refuge, crouched shivering on the largest
tree root and licking persistently at his wounded paw, he was carried
swiftly down-stream through the roar of waters.
II.
When the lopsided moon, now hung high over a low, desolate shore of
blanched rampikes, was fading to a papery whiteness against a sky of
dawn, the roar of the river grew louder, and the islet, no longer
slowly revolving, plunged forward, through a succession of wallowing
waves, over a wild half-mile of ledges, and joined itself to a wider
and mightier stream. The wolf, drenched, shivering, and appalled by
the tumult, clung to his refuge by tooth and claw; and the islet,
being well compacted, held together through the wrenching plunges, and
carried its burden safely forth upon the quiet current.
For a day and a night and a day the starving wolf voyaged down the
flood, till his gaunt sides clung together, and a fierce ache gnawed
at his vitals. But with the fasting and the ceaseless soothing of his
tongue his wound rapidly healed; and when, after sunset of his second
evening on the river, the islet grounded in an eddy under the bank, he
sprang ashore with speed little impaired. Only a limp and an ache
remained to remind him of the hurt which had so nearly cost him his
life and had exiled him to untried hunting-grounds.
His feet once more on firm ground, the wolf halted warily. The air
that came down the bank carried a strange and warning scent.
Noiselessly he crept up the steep, went through a few yards of
shrubbery like a ghost, and peered forth upon a rough back-settlement
road. At one side he saw a cabin, with a barn near it, and two
long-horned steers (he had seen steers at a lumber camp in his own
wild land), thrusting their muzzles over the fence. Down the road
toward the cabin came a man, in gray homespun and cowhide larrigans,
with an axe over his shoulder. It was the man-smell which had made the
wolf so cautious.
With savage but curious eyes he watched the man, with no thought of
attacking alone so redoubtable a foe. Presently the latter began to
whistle, and at the incomprehensible sound the wolf shrank back, fear
mingled with his curiosity. But when the man was well past, there came
a new scent upon the air, a scent quite unknown to him; and then a
small black and white cur trotted into view, nosing along the roadside
in quest of chipmunks. The jaws of the starving wolf dripped water at
the sight. He gathered himself for a rush. He saw that the man had
disappeared. The dog ran across the road, sniffing a new chipmunk
trail, and halted, in sudden apprehension, not five feet from the
hidden wolf. There was a rustle, a leap, a sharp yelp; and the wolf
was back into cover with his prey.
Emboldened by the success of this, his first hunting in the unknown
land, the wolf slept for a few hours in his bushy retreat, and then,
when the misshapen moon was up, went prowling cautiously around the
outskirts of the scattered little settlement. Everywhere the man-smell
kept him on his guard. Once he was careless enough to get between the
wind and a farmyard, whereupon a watchful cur started a barking, which
was taken up and kept up for an hour by all the dogs of the village.
At this the wolf, with snarling, contemptuous jaws apart, withdrew to
a knoll, sat quietly erect upon his haunches, and waited for the din
to subside. He noted carefully the fact that one or two men were
aroused by the alarm, and came out to see what was the matter. When
all was quiet again he sought the house of the nearest yelper, took
him by surprise, and killed him in sheer rage, leaving his torn body
beside the very door-step, instead of dragging it away for a later
meal. This was a mistake in hunting craft. Had he been more familiar
with the man-folk, his wide-skulled intelligence would have taught him
better than to leave a clue behind him in this careless fashion.
[Illustration: "HE BARED HIS FANGS DISDAINFULLY."]
From the farmyard he wandered back toward the hills, and came upon a
lonely sheep pasture. Here he found killing so easy that he slew in
wantonness; and then, about daybreak, gorged and triumphant, withdrew
to a rocky hillside, where he found a lair to his taste.
Later in the day, however, he realized his mistake. He had called down
upon himself the wrath of the man-folk. A din of dogs aroused him,
and, mounting a rock, he saw a motley crowd of curs upon his trail,
with half a dozen men following far behind them. He bared his fangs
disdainfully, then turned and sought the forest at a long gallop,
which, for all his limp and his twinge, soon carried him beyond
ear-shot of his pursuers.
For hours he pressed on ever eastward, with a little trend to the
south, crossing many a trail of deer, caribou, and moose, passing here
and there a beaver village, and realizing that he had come to
wonderful hunting-grounds. But when he came to the outskirts of
another settlement, he halted. His jaws ran water at the thought of
finding another sheep pasture, and he decided to range for awhile in
this neighbourhood. He was quick to realize the disadvantage of man's
proximity, but he would dare it for a little before retiring into the
untainted wilderness. He had learned his lesson quickly, however. That
night he refrained from stirring up the dogs of the settlement; and he
killed but one sheep, in a secluded corner of the pasture.
Now, by singular chance, it happened that at this particular
settlement there was already a sheep-killer harrying the thick-wooled
flocks. A wandering peddler, smitten with a fever while visiting the
settlement, had died, and left to pay for his board and burial only
his pack and his dog. The dog, so fiercely devoted to him as to have
made the funeral difficult, was a long-legged, long-haired, long-jawed
bitch, apparently a cross between a collie and a Scotch deerhound. So
unusual a beast, making all the other dogs of the settlement look
contemptible, was in demand; but she was deaf, for a time, to all
overtures. For a week she pined for the dead peddler; and then, with
an air of scornful tolerance, consented to take up her abode with the
village shopkeeper. Her choice was made not for any distinction in the
man, but for a certain association, apparently, with the smell of the
contents of her late master's pack. For months she sulked and was
admired, making friends with neither man, woman, nor child, and
keeping all the village curs at a respectful distance.
A few days, however, before the arrival of the journeying wolf, a new
interest had entered into the life of the long-jawed bitch. Her eyes
resumed their old bright alertness, and she grew perceptibly less
ungracious to the loafers gathered around the stove in the back store.
She had entered upon a career which would have ended right speedily
with a bullet in her reckless brain, but for an utterly unlooked-for
freak of fate. She had discovered that, if every night she could hunt,
run down, and kill one sheep, life might again become worth living,
and the coarse-clodded grave in the little lonely cemetery might be
forgotten. It was not the killing, but the chase, that she craved. The
killing was, of course, merely the ecstatic culmination. So she went
about the sport with artistic cunning. To disguise her trail she came
upon the flocks from the side of the forest, as any wild beast would.
Then she would segregate her victim with a skill born of her collie
ancestry, set it running, madden it to the topmost delirium of fear
and flight, and almost let it escape before darting at its throat and
ending the game with the gush of warm blood between her jaws.
Such had been her adventures for three nights: and already the
settlement was concerned, and already glances of half-formed suspicion
had been cast upon the long-legged bitch so innocently asleep by the
stove, when the wandering wolf arrived upon the outskirts of the
settlement. The newcomer was quick to note and examine the tracks of a
peculiarly large dog--a foeman, perhaps, to prove not unworthy of his
fangs. And he conducted his reconnoitring with more care. Then he came
upon the carcass of a sheep, torn and partly eaten. It was almost like
a wolf's work--though less cleanly done--and the smell of the cold
trail was unmistakably dog. The black-backed wolf was puzzled. He had
a vague notion that dogs were the protectors, not the hunters, of all
the four-legged kindred belonging to men. The problem seemed to him an
important one. He crouched in ambush near the carcass to consider it
for a time, before setting out upon his own sheep-hunting.
As he crouched, watching, he saw the killer approach. He saw a tall,
lean bitch come up, tear carelessly at the dead sheep for a moment or
two, in a manner of ownership, and turn to leave. She was as long in
leg and flank as himself, and possessed of the like punishing jaws;
but she was not so massive in the shoulder. The wolf felt that he
could master her in combat; but he felt no disposition for the fight.
The dog-smell that came to his nostrils did not excite the usual hot
aversion. On the contrary, it made him desire to know more of the
sheep-killing stranger.
But acquaintance is not made lightly among the wild kindred, who are
quick to resent a presumption. The wolf slipped noiselessly back into
his covert, emerged upon the farther side of the thicket, and at a
distance of some twenty paces stood forth in the glimmering light. To
attract the tall bitch's attention he made a soft, whining sound.
At the unexpected noise behind her the bitch wheeled like lightning.
At sight of the big wolf the hair rose along her back, her fangs bared
themselves dangerously, and she growled a deep note of challenge. For
some seconds the wolf thought she would fly at him,; but he stood
motionless, tail drooping humbly, tongue hanging a little way from his
lips, a soft light in his eyes. Then he sat back upon his haunches,
let his tongue hang out still farther, and drooped his head a little
to one side--the picture of conciliation and deference.
The long-jawed bitch had never before seen a wolf, but she recognized
him at once as a natural enemy. There was something in his attitude of
unoffending confidence, however, which made her hesitate to attack,
although he was plainly a trespasser. As she eyed him, she felt her
anger melting away. How like he was to certain big, strong dogs which
she had seen once or twice in her wanderings with the peddler! and how
unlike to the diminutive, yelping curs of the settlement! Her
bristling hairs smoothed themselves, the skin of her jaws relaxed and
set itself about her teeth in a totally different expression; her
growling ceased, and she gave an amicable whine. Diffidently the two
approached each other, and in a few minutes a perfect understanding
was established.
That night they hunted sheep together. In the joy of comradeship and
emulation, prudence was scattered to the winds, and they held a riot
of slaughter. When day broke a dozen or more sheep lay dead about the
pastures. And the wolf, knowing that men and dogs would soon be noisy
on their trail, led his new-found mate far back into the wilderness.
III.
The tall bitch, hating the settlement and all the folk therein, was
glad to be quit of it. And she found the hunting of deer far more
thrilling than the tame pursuit of sheep. Slipping with curious ease
the inherited sympathies of her kind, she fell into the ways of the
wild kindred, save for a certain brusque openness which she never
succeeded in laying off.
For weeks the strangely mated pair drifted southward through the
bright New Brunswick spring, to come to a halt at last in a region to
their liking between the St. John and the Chiputneticook chain of
lakes. It was a land of deer and rabbits and ducks, with settlements
small and widely scattered; a land where never a wolf-snout had been
seen for half a hundred years. And here, on a thick-wooded hill-slope,
the wanderers found a dry cave and made it their den.
In due course the long-jawed bitch bore a litter of six sturdy whelps,
which throve amazingly. As they grew up they showed almost all wolf,
harking back to the type--save that in colour they were nearly black,
with a touch of tan in the gray of their under parts. When they came
to maturity, and were accredited hunters all, they were in general
larger and more savage than either of their parents, differing more
widely, one from another, than would the like number of full-blooded
wolves. The eight, when they hunted together, made a pack which, for
strength, ferocity, and craft, no like number of full-blooded wolves
in all Canada could have matched.
The long-jawed bitch, whose highly developed brain guided, for the
most part, the destinies of the pack, for a time kept them from the
settlement and away from the contact with men; and the existence of
wolves in the Chiputneticook country was not dreamed of among the
backwoods settlements. In this policy she was backed by the sagacity
and strength of her mate, under whose wide-arched skull was a clear
perception of the truth that man is the one master animal. But the
hybrid whelps, by some perversion of inherited instinct, hated man
savagely, and had less dread of him than either of their parents. More
than once was the authority of the leaders sharply strained to prevent
a disastrous attack upon some unsuspecting pair of lumbermen, with
their ox-team and their axes.
[Illustration: "THEY PROWLED AND HOWLED ABOUT THE DOOR."]
The second winter of the wolves in the Chiputneticook country proved a
very hard one--game scarce and hunting difficult; and toward the
end of February the pack drew in toward the settlements, in the hope
of more abundant foraging. Fate promptly favoured the move. Some
sheep, and a heifer or two, were easily killed, with no calamitous
result; and the authority of the leaders was somewhat discredited.
Three of the young wolves even went so far as to besiege a solitary
cabin, where a woman and some trembling children awaited the return of
the man. For two hideous moonlit hours they prowled and howled about
the door, sniffing at the sill, and grinning in through the low
window; and when the sound of bells came near they withdrew sullenly,
half-minded to attack the man and horse.
A few nights after this, when the pack was following together the
discouraging trail of a long-winded and wily buck, they crossed the
trail of a man on snow-shoes. This trail was fresher, and to the young
wolves it seemed to promise easier hunting. The leaders were
overruled, and the new trail was taken up with heat.
The trail was that of a gaunt, tan-faced backwoodsman, on his way to a
lumber camp a few miles down the other side of the lake. He was
packing a supply of light needfuls, of which the lumbermen had
unexpectedly run short, and he was pressing forward in haste to avoid
a second night on the trail. The pack was carried high on his powerful
shoulders, in a manner to interfere as little as possible with his
long, snow-shoeing stride. In one hand he carried his axe. From under
the brim of his coonskin cap his piercing gray eyes kept watch with a
quiet alertness--expecting no danger, indeed, and fearing none, but
trained to cool readiness for every vicissitude of the wild.
He was travelling through a stretch of heavy timber, where the
moonlight came down in such scant streaks that he had trouble in
picking a clear path, when his ear was caught by an unwonted sound far
behind him. He paused to listen, no unwonted sound being matter of
indifference to them who range the wood. It came again, long-drawn and
high and cadenced. The big woodsman looked surprised. "I'd 'a' took my
oath," said he to himself, "ther' wa'n't a wolf in New Brunswick! But
I knowed the deer'd bring 'em back afore long!" Then, unconcernedly,
he resumed his tramp, such experience as he had had with wolves in the
West having convinced him that they would not want to meddle with a
man.
In a few minutes, however, the instinct of the woods awoke in him
suddenly, and told him that it was not some buck, but himself, whom
the hunting pack were trailing. Then the sound came again, perceptibly
nearer, though still far off. The woodsman gave a grunt of impatience,
angry to think that any four-foot creature of the forest should
presume to hunt _him_. But the barest prudence told him that he should
make haste for the open. Under protest, as it were, he broke into a
long trot, and swerved to the right, that he might sooner reach the
lake.
As he ran, the novel experience of feeling himself pursued got on his
nerves, and filled him with rage. Were there not plenty of deer in the
woods? he thought, indignantly. He would teach the vermin a lesson.
Several times he was on the point of stopping and waiting, to have it
out with them as soon as possible. But wisdom prevailed, and he pushed
on to the open. On the lake, the moonlit snow was packed hard, and the
running good. About a mile from shore a little, steep, rocky island,
upthrusting itself boldly, suggested to the woodsman that if his
pursuers were really going to have the audacity to attack him, it
might be well to have his back to a rock, that he might not be
surrounded. He headed for the island, therefore, though with protest
in his heart. And just as he got to it the wolves emerged from cover,
and darted out upon the shining level.
"Looks like they really meant it!" growled the big woodsman, loosing
his pack-strap, and setting his jaws for a fight.
When the pack came near he was astonished first at the stature and
dark colour of its members, and he realized, with a sudden fury, that
the outcome was not so assured as he had taken for granted it would
be. Perhaps he would never see camp, after all! Then he was further
astonished to note that one of the pack-leaders looked like a dog. He
shouted, in a voice of angry command; and the onrushing pack
hesitated, checked themselves, spread apart. From that dominating
voice it was evident that this was a creature of power--not to be
attacked carelessly, but to be surrounded.
That voice of command had thrilled the heart of the long-jawed bitch.
Something in it reminded her of the dead peddler, who had been a
masterful man. She would have none of this hunting. But she looked at
each of her savage whelps, and knew that any attempt to lead them off
would be worse than vain. A strange hatred began to stir within her,
and her fangs bared toward them as if they, not the man against the
rock, were the enemy. She looked again at the man, and saw the bundle,
so like a peddler's pack, at his feet! Instantly her heart went out to
him. She was no longer a wolf, but a dog; and there was her
master--not her old master, but such a one as he had been. At his
side, and fighting his foes, was her place. Like a flash, she darted
away from her companions, stopped a few feet in front of the ready
woodsman, turned about, and faced the pack with a savage growl. Her
hair was stiffly erect from neck to tail; her long, white teeth were
bared to the roots; her eyes were narrowed to slits of green flame;
she half-crouched, ready to spring in mad fury and tear the throat of
any beast which should try to hurt the man.
As for the woodsman, he knew dogs, and was not greatly surprised at
his strange ally. At her sudden approach he had swung his axe in
readiness, but his cool eye had read her signals aright. "Good dog!"
he said, with cheerful confidence. "We'll lick the varmints!"
But the young wolves went wild with rage at this defection and
defiance, and rushed in at once. They sprang first upon the bitch;
though one, rushing past, leaped venomously at the woodsman's throat.
This one got the axe in his skull, and dropped without a sound.
Meanwhile, the old wolf, who had been holding back in uncertainty, had
made his decision. When he saw his mate attacked, his doubts vanished,
and a red haze for an instant went over his eyes. These unnatural
whelps that attacked her--he suddenly saw them, not as wolves at all,
but as dogs, and hated them with a deadly hate. Silently he fell upon
the nearest, and tore him savagely. He was too late, however, to save
his mistress. The long-jawed bitch, for all her strength and her
valiant spirit, was overwhelmed by her powerful offspring. One she had
killed, and for one she had crunched a leg-joint to splinters; but now
she lay mangled and still under the struggle. The brute whose
leg-joint she had smashed dragged out from the _mêlée_; and her
faithful mate, the wide-skulled old wanderer wolf, found himself in
the death-grapple with three raging adversaries, each fairly his match
for weight and strength. True wolf, he fought in silence; but in his
antagonists the mixed breed came out, and they fought with yelps and
snarls.
At this juncture, fortunately for the old wolf, the woodsman's
understanding eye had penetrated the whole situation. He saw that the
black-haired beasts were the common enemy; and he fell upon the three
with his axe. His snow-shoes he had kicked off when making ready for
the struggle. In his mighty grasp the light axe whirled and smote with
the cunning of a rapier; and in a few seconds the old wolf, bleeding
but still vigorous, found himself confronting the man across a heap of
mangled black bodies. The man, lowering his axe, looked at the
bleeding wolf with mingled doubt and approbation. The wolf glared back
for an instant,--fear, hate, and grief in the green gleam of his
eyes,--then turned and fled, his pace accelerated by the cheerful yell
which the man sent after him.
"He's got the sand, sure!" muttered the woodsman, to himself, wiping
his axe. "Glad I didn't hev to knock him on the head, too!"
Then turning about, he saw the disabled whelp trying to sneak off,
and, with unerring aim, threw his axe. The black mongrel sank with a
kick, and lay still. The woodsman got out his pipe, slowly stuffed it
with blackjack, and smoked contemplatively, while he stood and
pondered the slain. He turned over the bodies, and patted the fur of
the long-jawed bitch, which had so splendidly turned back to her
traditions in the time of need. As he thought, the main elements of
the story unfolded themselves to him. Considerately he carried the
limp body, and securely buried it under a heap of stones on the
island. The rest he cached carelessly, intending to return and skin
them on the morrow.
"Them black pelts'll be worth somethin', I reckon!" he said to himself
with satisfaction as he took up his pack.
The Homeward Trail
In the lumber camp, far back upon the lonely headquarters of the
Quah-Davic, there was the stir of something unusual afoot. It was
Christmas Eve, and every kerosene lamp, lantern, and candle that the
camp could boast, was blazing. The little square windows gleamed
softly through the dust and cobwebs of unwashen years. For all the
cold that snapped and bit through the stillness of the forest night,
the door of the camp was thrown wide open, and from it a long sheet of
light spread out across the trodden and chip-littered snow. Around the
doorway crowded the rough-shirted woodsmen, loafing and smoking after
their prodigious dinner of boiled pork, boiled beans, and steaming-hot
molasses cake. The big box-stove behind them, which heated the camp,
was wearing itself to a dull red glow; and the air that rushed out
with the light from the open door was heavy with the smell of wet
woollens, wet larrigans, and wet leather. Many of the men were wearing
nothing on their feet but their heavy, home-knit socks of country
yarn; but in these they did not hesitate to come out upon the dry
snow, rather than trouble themselves to resume their massive
foot-gear.
Before the door, in the spread of the light, stood a pair of sturdy,
rough-coated gray horses, hitched to a strong box sled, or "pung." The
bottom of the pung was covered thick with straw, and over the broad,
low seat were blankets, with one heavy bearskin robe. Into the space
behind the seat a gaunt, big-shouldered man was stowing a haunch of
frozen moose-meat. A lanky, tow-haired boy of fifteen was tucking
himself up carefully among the blankets on the left-hand side of the
seat. The horses stood patient, but with drooping heads, aggrieved at
being taken from the stable at this unwonted hour. In the pale-blue,
kindly, woods-wise eyes of both the man and the boy shone the light of
happy anticipation. They seemed too occupied and excited to make much
response to the good-natured banter of their comrades, but grinned
contentedly as they hastened their preparations for departure. The man
was Steve Williams, best axe-man and stream-driver in the camp; the
boy, young Steve, his eldest son, who was serving as "cookee," or
assistant to the camp cook. The two were setting out on a long night
drive through the forest to spend Christmas with their family, on the
edge of the lonely little settlement of Brine's Brook.
When all was ready, the big-shouldered woodsman slipped into the seat
beside his son, pulled the blankets and the bearskin all about him,
and picked up the reins from the square dashboard. A sharp _tchk_
started the horses, and, amid a chorus of shouts,--good nights and
Merry Christmases, and well-worn rustic pleasantries,--the loaded pung
slid forward from the light into the great, ghost-white gloom beyond.
The sled-bells jangled; the steel runners crunched and sang frostily;
and the cheerful camp, the only centre of human life within a radius
of more than twenty miles, sank back behind the voyagers. There was
the sound of a door slamming, and the bright streak across the snow
was blotted out. The travellers were alone on the trail, with the
solemn ranks of trees and the icy-pointed stars.
They were well prepared, these two happy Christmas adventurers, to
face the rigours of the December night. Under their heavy
blanket-coats were many thicknesses of homespun flannel. Inside their
high-laced, capacious "shoe-packs" were several pairs of yarn socks.
Their hands were covered by double-knit home-made mittens. Their
heads were protected by wadded caps of muskrat fur, with flaps that
pulled down well over the ears. The cold, which iced their eyelashes,
turned the tips of their up-turned coat-collars and the edges of their
mufflers to board, and made the old trees snap startlingly, had no
terrors at all for their hardy frames. Once well under way, and the
camp quite out of sight, they fell to chatting happily of the surprise
they would give the home folks, who did not expect them home for
Christmas. They calculated, if they had "anyways good luck," to get
home to the little isolated backwoods farmhouse between four and five
in the morning, about when grandfather would be getting up by
candle-light to start the kitchen fire for mother, and then go out and
fodder the cattle. They'd be home in time to wake the three younger
children (young Steve was the eldest of a family of four), and to add
certain little carven products of the woodsman's whittling--ingenious
wooden toys, and tiny elaborate boxes, filled with choicest globules
of spruce gum--to the few poor Christmas gifts which the resourceful
and busy little mother had managed to get together against the
festival. As they talked these things over, slowly and with frugal
speech, after the fashion of their class, suddenly was borne in upon
them a sense of the loneliness of the home folks' Christmas if they
should fail to come. Under the spell of this feeling, a kind of
inverted homesickness, their talk died into silence. They sat
thinking, and listening to the hoarse jangle of their bells.
In such a night as this, few of the wild kindreds were astir in the
forest. The bears, raccoons, woodchucks, and chipmunks were snugly
"holed up," and sleeping away the great white cold. The deer and moose
were in their well-trodden "yards," for the snow was deep. The
travellers knew that there were plenty of wood-mice astir,--that if
there had been light enough they would have seen their delicate trails
wandering everywhere among the trees. But the jangling of the
sled-bells was enough to keep all shy beasts at a distance. Only the
porcupine was quite undaunted by the strange sounds. One came out into
the middle of the road, and stood there seemingly to dispute passage.
The boy, in whom primal instincts were still dominant, was for getting
out and killing the insolent little bristler. But the father turned
the team aside, and gracefully yielded the road, saying:
"Let him be, son! The woods is hisn as much as ourn. An' I respect
him, fer he ain't skeered of nothin' that goes on legs!"
An hour later, when the boy was getting very drowsy from watching the
ceaseless procession of dark fir-trees, his father nudged him, and
whispered, "Look!" The boy, wide awake on the instant, peered into the
gloom, and presently his trained young eyes made out a shadowy,
slouching form, that flitted without a sound from tree to tree.
"Lucivee?" he asked, breathless with interest, laying his mittened
hand on his little rifle under the blankets.
"Yes, lucivee! lynx!" answered the father.
"Let me take a shot at him," said the boy, removing the mitten from
his right hand, and bringing out his weapon.
"Oh, what's the good o' killin' the beast Christmas times!" protested
the father, gently. And the boy laid down the gun.
"What does he think he's follerin' us fer?" he inquired, a moment
later.
"The moose-meat, maybe!" replied the man. "He smells it likely, an'
thinks we're goin' to give it to him for a Christmas present!"
At this suggestion the boy laughed out loud. His clear young voice
rang through the frosty shadows; and the lynx, surprised and
offended, shrank back, and slunk away in another direction.
"Bloodthirsty varmints, them lucivees!" said the boy, who wanted a
lynx-skin as a trophy. "Ain't it better to shoot 'em whenever one gits
the chance?"
"Well," said the father, dubiously, "maybe so! But there's better
times fer killin' than Christmas times!"
A little farther ahead, the road to Brine's Brook turned off. Here the
going was very heavy. The road was little travelled, and in places
almost choked up by drifts. Most of the time the horses had to walk;
and sometimes the man and boy had to get out and tramp a path ahead of
the discouraged team.
"At this rate, dad, we ain't a-goin' to git home in time fer
breakfast!" exclaimed the boy, despondently. To which the man replied,
"Don't you fret, son! It'll be better goin' when we git over the rise.
You git into the pung now an' take the reins, an' let me do the
trampin'."
The boy, who was tired out, obeyed gladly. He gathered up the
reins,--and in two minutes was sound asleep. The man smiled, tucked
the blankets snugly around the sleeping form, and trudged on
tirelessly for a couple of hours, the horses floundering at his
heels. Then the drifts ceased. The man kicked the snow from his
trousers and shoe-packs, and climbed into the pung again. "We'll make
it in time fer breakfast yet!" he murmured to himself, confidently, as
the horses once more broke into a trot.
They were traversing now a high table-land, rather sparsely wooded,
and dotted here and there with towering rampikes. Suddenly from far
behind came a long, wavering cry, high-pitched and peculiarly
daunting. The horses, though they had probably never heard such a
sound before, started apprehensively, and quickened their pace. The
man reined them in firmly; but as he did so he frowned.
"I've hearn say the wolves was comin' back to these here parts," he
muttered, "now that the deer's gittin' so plenty agin! But I didn't
more'n half-believe it afore!"
Presently the grim sound came again. Then the man once more awoke the
boy.
"Here's somethin' to interest you, lad," said he, as the latter put a
mittened fist to sleepy eyes. "Hark to that there noise! Did you ever
hear the like?"
The boy listened, paled slightly, and was instantly wide awake.
"Why, that's like what I've read about!" he exclaimed. "It must be
wolves!"
"Nary a doubt of it!" assented his father, again reining the uneasy
horses down to a steady gait. "They've followed the deer back, and
now, seems like their a-follerin' us!"
The boy looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, carelessly:
"Oh, well, I reckon there's deer a-plenty for 'em, an' they're not
likely to come too nigh us, lookin' fer trouble. I reckon they ain't
much like them Roosian wolves we read about, eh, dad?"
"I reckon," agreed the father. At the same time, it was with a certain
satisfaction that he set his foot on his trusty axe, amid the straw in
the bottom of the pung.
As the high, quavering voices drew nearer, the horses grew more and
more alarmed; but the man soothed them with his voice, and sternly
held them in, husbanding their strength lest there should be more
heavy going farther ahead. At length, some three hundred yards behind
them, they caught a glimpse of their pursuers, four swiftly running
shapes.
"Only four!" cried the boy, scornfully, as he patted his little
rifle. "I thought there was always more'n that in a pack!"
"You needn't grumble," said the man, with a grin. "It's gittin' home
fer breakfast we're after, not fightin' wolves, son!"
The road was so much better now that the man gave the horses their
head a little, and the pung flew over the singing snow. But in a few
minutes the four wolves, though keeping a distance of a couple of
hundred yards, were running abreast of them. The animals were
evidently unacquainted with horses or men, and shy about a close
investigation. The sled-bells, too, were to them a very suspicious
phenomenon. Deer, assuredly, were safer hunting; but they would, at
least, keep this strange, new kind of quarry in sight for awhile, to
see what might turn up.
For the next half-hour there was no change in the situation. From time
to time, where the woods thickened, the wolves would draw nearer to
the pung; and the boy, with shining eyes, would lift his rifle. But
presently they would sheer off again; and the boy grew more and more
scornful. Then came the winter dawn, a creeping, bitter gray, and for
a few minutes the forest was an unreal place, full of ghosts, and cold
with a cold to pierce the soul. Then, a growing, spreading, pervading
glory of pink and lilac and transparent gold. As the light streamed
through the trees, the wolves got a clearer view of their quarry; and
perceiving in it a something distinctly dangerous, they dropped the
chase and faded back into the thickets. The man looked at the boy's
disappointed face, and said, smilingly:
"I reckon they was extry-ordinary civil, seein' us home that way
through the woods!"
A few moments later the woods were left behind, and the travellers
came out among the snowy stump-fields. There below them, half-way down
the hill, was home, bathed in the sparkling sun. Smoke was pouring
cheerfully from the chimney; and there in the yard was grandfather,
bringing in a pail of milk from the barn.
"Mother'll have breakfast jest about ready!" cried the man, his rough
face tender and aglow.
"But I wisht I could've brought her a nice wolf-skin for Christmas!"
exclaimed the boy, sighing softly as he laid down the little rifle.
THE END.
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