Miles farther than Linda's cabin, clear beyond the end of the trail that
Duncan took, past even the highest ridge of Trail's End and in the
region where the little rivers that run into the Umpqua have their
starting place, is a certain land of Used to Be. Such a name as that
doesn't make very good sense to a tenderfoot on the first hearing.
Perhaps he can never see the real intelligence of it as long as he
remains a tenderfoot. Such creatures cannot exist for long in the
silences and the endless ridges and the unbeaten trails of this land;
they either become woodsmen or have communication with the buzzards.
It isn't a land of the Present Time at all. It is a place that has never
grown old. When a man passes the last outpost of civilization, and the
shadows of the unbroken woods drop over him, he is likely to forget that
the year is nineteen hundred and twenty, and that the day before
yesterday he had seen an aeroplane passing over his house. It is true
that in this place he sees winged creatures in the air, seeming masters
of the aerial tracts, but they are not aeroplanes. Instead they are the
buzzards, and they are keeping even a closer watch on him than he is on
them. They know that many things may happen whereby they can get
acquainted before the morning breaks. The world seems to have kicked off
its thousand-thousand years as a warm man at night kicks off covers; and
all things are just as they used to be. It is the Young World,--a world
of beasts rather than men, a world where the hand of man has not yet
been felt.
Of course it won't be that way forever. Sometime the forests will fall.
What will become of the beasts that live in them there is no telling;
there are not many places left for them to go. But at present it is just
as savage, just as primitive and untamed as those ancient forests of the
Young World that a man recalls sometimes in dreams.
On this particular early-September day, the age-old drama of the
wilderness was in progress. It was the same play that had been enacted
day after day, year upon year, until the centuries had become too many
to count, and as usual, there were no human observers. There were no
hunters armed with rifles waiting on the deer trails to kill some of the
players. There were no naturalists taking notes that no one will believe
in the coverts. It was the usual matinee performance; the long, hot day
was almost at a close. The play would get better later in the evening,
and really would not be at its best until the moon rose; but it was not
a comedy-drama even now. Rather it was a drama of untamed passions and
bloodshed, strife and carnage and lust and rapine; and it didn't,
unfortunately, have a particularly happy ending. Mother Nature herself,
sometimes kind but usually cruel, was the producer; she furnished the
theater, even the spotted costume by which the fawn remained invisible
in the patches of light and shadow; and she had certain great purposes
of her own that no man understands. As the play was usually complicated
with many fatalities, the buzzards were about the only ones to benefit.
They were the real heroes of the play after all. Everything always
turned out all right for them. They always triumphed in the end.
The greatest difference between this wilderness drama and the dramas
that human beings see upon a stage is that one was reality and the other
is pretense. The players were beasts, not men. The only human being
anywhere in the near vicinity was the old trapper, Hudson, following
down his trap line on the creek margin on the way to his camp. It is
true that two other men, with a rather astounding similarity of purpose,
were at present coming down two of the long trails that led to the
region; but as yet the drama was hidden from their eyes. One of these
two was Bruce, coming from Linda's cabin. One was Dave Turner,
approaching from the direction of the Ross estates. Turner was much the
nearer. Curiously, both had business with the trapper Hudson.
The action of the play was calm at first. Mostly the forest creatures
were still in their afternoon sleep. Brother Bill, the great stag elk,
had a bed in the very center of a thick wall of buckbush, and human
observers at first could not have explained how his great body, with his
vast spread of antlers, had been able to push through. But in reality
his antlers aided rather than hindered. Streaming almost straight back
they act something like a snow-plow, parting the heavy coverts.
The bull elk is in some ways the master of the forest, and one would
wonder why he had gone to such an out-of-the-way place to sleep. Unless
he is attacked from ambush, he has little to fear even from the Tawny
One, the great cougar, and ordinarily the cougar waits until night to do
his hunting. The lynx is just a source of scorn to the great bull, and
even the timber wolf--except when he is combined with his relatives in
winter--is scarcely to be feared. Yet he had been careful to surround
himself with burglar alarms,--in other words, to go into the deep
thicket that no beast of prey could penetrate without warning him--by
the sound of breaking brush--of its approach. It would indicate that
there was at least one living creature in this region--a place where men
ordinarily did not come--that the bull elk feared.
The does and their little spotted fawns were sleeping too; the blacktail
deer had not yet sought the feeding grounds on the ridges. The cougar
yawned in his lair, the wolf dozed in his covert, even the poison-people
lay like long shadows on the hot rocks. But these latter couldn't be
relied upon to sleep soundly. One of the many things they can do is to
jump straight out of a dream like a flicking whiplash, coil and hit a
mark that many a good pistol shot would miss.
Yet there was no chance of the buzzards, at present spectators in the
clouds and waiting for the final act, to become bored. Particularly the
lesser animals of the forest--the Little People--were busy at their
occupations. A little brown-coated pine marten--who is really nothing
but an overgrown weasel famous for his particularly handsome coat--went
stealing through the branches of a pine as if he had rather questionable
business. Some one had told him, and he couldn't remember who, that a
magpie had her nest in that same tree, and Red Eye was going to look and
see. Of course he merely wanted to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps he
would try to arrange to get a little sip of the mother's blood, just as
it passed through the big vein of the throat,--but of course that was
only incidental. He felt some curiosity about the magpie's eggs too, the
last brood of the year. It might be that there were some little magpies
all coiled up inside of them, that would be worth investigation by one
of his scientific turn of mind. Perhaps even the male bird, coming
frantically to look for his wife, might fly straight into the nest
without noticing his brown body curled about the limb. It offered all
kinds of pleasing prospects, this hunt through the branches.
Of course it is doubtful if the buzzards could detect his serpent-like
form; yet it is a brave man who will say what a buzzard can and cannot
see. Anything that can remain in the air as they do, seemingly without
the flutter of a wing, has powers not to speak of lightly. But if they
could have seen him they would have been particularly interested. A
marten isn't a glutton in his feeding, and often is content with just a
sip of blood from the throat. That leaves something warm and still for
the buzzard's beak.
A long, spotted gopher snake slipped through the dead grass on the
ground beneath. He didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. He
was just moseying--if there is such a word--along. Not a blade of grass
rustled. Of course there was a chipmunk, sitting at the door of his
house in the uplifted roots of a tree; but the snake--although he was
approaching in his general direction--didn't seem at all interested in
him. Were it not for two things, the serpent would have seemed to be
utterly bored and indifferent to life in general. One of these things
was its cold, glittering, reptile eyes. The other was its darting,
forked tongue.
It may be, after all, that this little tongue was of really great
importance in the serpent's hunting. Many naturalists think that quite
often the little, rattle-brained birds and rodents that it hunts are so
interested in this darting tongue that they quite fail to see the slow
approach of the mottled body of the snake behind it. At least it was
perfectly evident that the chipmunk did not see Limber-spine at present.
Otherwise he wouldn't have been enjoying the scenery with quite the same
complacency. If all went well, there might be a considerable lump in the
snake's throat yet this afternoon. But it would be a quite different
kind of lump from the one the chipmunk's little mate, waiting in vain
for her lord to come to supper, would have in _her_ throat.
An old raccoon wakened from his place on a high limb, stretched himself,
scratched at his fur, then began to steal down the limb. He had a long
way to go before dark. Hunting was getting poor in this part of the
woods. He believed he would wander down toward Hudson's camp and look
for crayfish in the water. A coyote is usually listed among the larger
forest creatures, but early though the hour was--early, that is, for
hunters to be out--he was stalking a fawn in a covert. The coyote has
not an especially high place among the forest creatures, and he has to
do his hunting early and late and any time that offers. Most of the
larger creatures pick on him, all the time detesting him for his
cunning. The timber wolf, a rather close relation whom he cordially
hates, is apt to take bites out of him if he meets him on the trail. The
old bull elk would like nothing better than to cut his hide into rag
patches with the sharp-edged front hoofs. Even the magpies in the tree
tops made up ribald verses about him. But nevertheless the spotted fawn
had cause to fear him. The coyote is an infamous coward; but even the
little cotton tail rabbit does not have to fear a fawn.
All these hunts were progressing famously when there came a curious
interruption. It was just a sound at first. And strangely, not one of
the forest creatures that heard it had ears sharp enough to tell exactly
from what direction it had come. And that made it all the more
unpleasant to listen to.
It was a peculiar growl, quite low at first. It lasted a long time, then
died away. There was no opposition to it. The forest creatures had
paused in their tracks at its first note, and now they stood as if the
winter had come down upon them suddenly and frozen them solid. All the
other sounds of the forest--the little whispering noises of gliding
bodies and fluttering feet, and perhaps a bird's call in a shrub--were
suddenly stilled. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then the
sound commenced again.
It was louder this time. It rose and gathered volume until it was almost
a roar. It carried through the silences in great waves of sound. And in
it was a sense of resistless power; no creature in the forest but what
knew this fact.
"The Gray King," one could imagine them saying among themselves. The
effect was instantaneous. The little raccoon halted in his descent, then
crept out to the end of a limb. Perhaps he knew that the gray monarch
could not climb trees, but nevertheless he felt that he would be more
secure clear at the swaying limb-tip. The marten forgot his curiosity in
regard to the nest of the magpie. The gopher snake coiled, then slipped
away silently through the grass.
The coyote, an instant before crawling with body close to the earth,
whipped about as if he had some strange kind of circular spring inside
of him. His nerves were always rather ragged, and the sound had
frightened out of him the rigid control of his muscles that was so
necessary if he were to make a successful stalk upon the fawn. The
spotted creature bleated in terror, then darted away; and the coyote
snarled once in the general direction of the Gray King. Then he lowered
his head and skulked off deeper into the coverts.
The blacktail deer, the gray wolf, even the stately Tawny One, stretched
in grace in his lair, wakened from sleep. The languor died quickly in
the latter's eyes, leaving only fear. These were braver than the Little
People. They waited until the thick brush, not far distant from where
the bull elk slept, began to break down and part before an enormous,
gray body.
No longer would an observer think of the elk as the forest monarch. He
was but a pretender, after all. The real king had just wakened from his
afternoon nap and was starting forth to hunt.
Even his little cousins, the black bears (who, after all is said and
done, furnish most of the comedy of the deadly forest drama) did not
wait to make conversation. They tumbled awkwardly down the hill to get
out of his way. For the massive gray form--weighing over half a ton--was
none other than that of the last of the grizzly bears, that terrible
forest hunter and monarch, the Killer himself.