The life game is a hard game, for we may win ten thousand times, and if
we fail but once our gain is gone. How many hundred times had the
Yellow Wolf scorned the traps; how many Cubs she had trained to do the
same! Of all the dangers to her life she best knew traps.
October had come; the Cub was now much taller than the mother. The
wolver had seen them once--a Yellow Wolf followed by another, whose
long, awkward legs, big, soft feet, thin neck, and skimpy tail
proclaimed him this year's Cub. The record of the dust and sand said
that the old one had lost a right front toe, and that the young one was
of giant size.
It was the wolver that thought to turn the carcass of the Calf to
profit, but he was disappointed in getting Coyotes instead of Wolves.
It was the beginning of the trapping season, for this month fur is
prime. A young trapper often fastens the bait on the trap; an
experienced one does not. A good trapper will even put the bait at one
place and the trap ten or twenty feet away, but at a spot that the Wolf
is likely to cross in circling. A favorite plan is to hide three or
four traps around an open place, and scatter some scraps of meat in the
middle. The traps are buried out of sight after being smoked to hide
the taint of hands and iron. Sometimes no bait is used except a little
piece of cotton or a tuft of feathers that may catch the Wolf's eye or
pique its curiosity and tempt it to circle on the fateful, treacherous
ground. A good trapper varies his methods continually so that the
Wolves cannot learn his ways. Their only safeguards are perpetual
vigilance and distrust of all smells that are known to be of man.
The wolver, with a load of the strongest steel traps, had begun his
autumn work on the 'Cottonwood.'
An old Buffalo trail crossing the river followed a little draw that
climbed the hills to the level upland. All animals use these trails,
Wolves and Foxes as well as Cattle and Deer: they are the main
thoroughfares. A cottonwood stump not far from where it plunged to the
gravelly stream was marked with Wolf signs that told the wolver of its
use. Here was an excellent place for traps, not on the trail, for
Cattle were here in numbers, but twenty yards away on a level, sandy
spot he set four traps in a twelve-foot square. Near each he scattered
two or three scraps of meat; three or four white feathers on a spear of
grass in the middle completed the setting. No human eye, few animal
noses, could have detected the hidden danger of that sandy ground, when
the sun and wind and the sand itself had dissipated the man-track taint.
The Yellow Wolf had seen and passed, and taught her giant son to pass,
such traps a thousand times before.
The Cattle came to water in the heat of the day. They strung down the
Buffalo path as once the Buffalo did. The little Vesper-birds flitted
before them, the Cowbirds rode on them, and the Prairie-dogs chattered
at them, just as they once did at the Buffalo.
Down from the gray-green mesa with its green-gray rocks, they marched
with imposing solemnity, importance, and directness of purpose. Some
frolicsome Calves, playing along-side the trail, grew sober and walked
behind their mothers as the river flat was reached. The old Cow that
headed the procession sniffed suspiciously as she passed the "trap
set," but it was far away, otherwise she would have pawed and bellowed
over the scraps of bloody beef till every trap was sprung and harmless.
But she led to the river. After all had drunk their fill they lay down
on the nearest bank till late afternoon. Then their unheard dinner-gong
aroused them, and started them on the backward march to where the
richest pastures grew.
One or two small birds had picked at the scraps of meat, some
blue-bottle flies buzzed about, but the sinking sun saw the sandy mask
untouched.
A brown Marsh Hawk came skimming over the river flat as the sun began
his color play. Blackbirds dashed into thickets, and easily avoided his
clumsy pounce. It was too early for the Mice, but, as he skimmed the
ground, his keen eye caught the flutter of feathers by the trap and
turned his flight. The feathers in their uninteresting emptiness were
exposed before he was near, but now he saw the scraps of meat.
Guileless of cunning, he alighted and was devouring a second lump
when--clank--the dust was flirted high and the Marsh Hawk was held by
his toes, struggling vainly in the jaws of a powerful wolf-trap. He was
not much hurt. His ample wings winnowed from time to time, in efforts
to be free, but he was helpless, even as a Sparrow might be in a
rat-trap, and when the sun had played his fierce chromatic scale, his
swan-song sung, and died as he dies only in the blazing west, and the
shades had fallen on the melodramatic scene of the Mouse in the
elephant-trap, there was a deep, rich sound on the high flat butte,
answered by another, neither very long, neither repeated, and both
instinctive rather than necessary. One was the muster-call of an
ordinary Wolf, the other the answer of a very big male, not a pair in
this case, but mother and son--Yellow Wolf and Duskymane. They came
trotting together down the Buffalo trail. They paused at the telephone
box on the hill and again at the old cottonwood root, and were making
for the river when the Hawk in the trap fluttered his wings. The old
Wolf turned toward him,-a wounded bird on the ground surely, and she
rushed forward. Sun and sand soon burn all trail-scents; there was
nothing to warn her. She sprang on the flopping bird and a chop of her
jaws ended his troubles, but a horrid sound--the gritting of her teeth
on steel--told her of peril. She dropped the Hawk and sprang backward
from the dangerous ground, but landed in the second trap. High on her
foot its death-grip closed, and leaping with all her strength, to
escape, she set her fore foot in another of the lurking grips of steel.
Never had a trap been so baited before. Never was she so unsuspicious.
Never was catch more sure. Fear and fury filled the old Wolf's heart;
she tugged and strained, she chewed the chains, she snarled and foamed.
One trap with its buried log, she might have dragged; with two, she was
helpless. Struggle as she might, it only worked those relentless jaws
more deeply into her feet. She snapped wildly at the air; she tore the
dead Hawk into shreds; she roared the short, barking roar of a crazy
Wolf. She bit at the traps, at her cub, at herself. She tore her legs
that were held; she gnawed in frenzy at her flank, she chopped off her
tail in her madness; she splintered all her teeth on the steel, and
filled her bleeding, foaming jaws with clay and sand.
She struggled till she fell, and writhed about or lay like dead, till
strong enough to rise and grind the chains again with her teeth.
And so the night passed by.
And Duskymane? Where was he? The feeling of the time when his
foster-mother had come home poisoned, now returned; but he was even
more afraid of her. She seemed filled with fighting hate. He held away
and whined a little; he slunk off and came back when she lay still,
only to retreat again, as she sprang forward, raging at him, and then
renewed her efforts at the traps. He did not understand it, but he knew
this much, she was in terrible trouble, and the cause seemed to be the
same as that which had scared them the night they had ventured near the
Calf.
Duskymane hung about all night, fearing to go near, not knowing what to
do, and helpless as his mother.
At dawn the next day a sheepherder seeking lost Sheep discovered her
from a neighboring hill. A signal mirror called the wolver from his
camp. Duskymane saw the new danger. He was a mere Cub, though so tall;
he could not face the man, and fled at his approach.
The wolver rode up to the sorry, tattered, bleeding She-wolf in the
trap. He raised his rifle and soon the struggling stopped.
The wolver read the trail and the signs about, and remembering those he
had read before, he divined that this was the Wolf with the great
Cub--the She-wolf of Sentinel Butte.
Duskymane heard the "crack" as he scurried off into cover. He could
scarcely know what it meant, but he never saw his kind old
foster-mother again. Thenceforth he must face the world alone.