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.