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 _debris_ 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 _debris_ 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.