edge of a bush some thirty or forty paces distant he sat down on his
tail, and looked around with elaborate carelessness to see what his
rival was going to do. At the slightest provocation he was ready to
return and fight the matter out. But the otter was no longer
provocative. He swung about, glided back to the pool, slid into it, and
snatched up one of the fish which he had already slain. Dragging it out
upon the further bank, he fell to his meal with relish, in full view of
his late antagonist. Thereupon the lynx came prowling back. He put his
paw on the prize, and glared across the water with a defiant growl.
There was no response, his rival being apparently too busy to heed him.
He snatched up the fish in his teeth, and growled again. Still no reply
from the otter. Then, with his stub tail stiff in the air, and stepping
haughtily, he marched off into the silent green shades to make his meal.
The Shadows and John Hatch
When John Hatch found the lynx kittens in their shallow den on the
bright and windy shoulder of Old Sugar Loaf, he stood for some minutes
looking down upon them with a whimsical mixture of compassion and
hostility. In his eyes all lynxes were vermin of the worst kind. They
had killed three of his sheep. An old male had clawed his dog so
severely that the dog had lost its nerve and all value as a hunting
partner. They were great destroyers of the young deer, the grouse, and
the hares, and so interfered with the supply of John Hatch's larder. In
a word, they were his enemies, and therefore, according to his code, to
be destroyed without compunction. But these were the first kittens of
the hated breed that Hatch had ever seen. Unlike the full-grown lynx,
whose fur is of a tawny, shadowy gray, these youngsters had sleek,
brilliant coats adorned with stripes like a tiger's. They were so young
that their eyes were not yet open, and they lay huddled cosily and
trustingly together, in their bed of brown leaves, like so many
exaggerated kittens of the hearthside tabby. But this was no extenuation
of their crime, in John Hatch's eyes. It pleaded for them not at all,
for he had his established custom in dealing with superfluous kittens.
Presently he stooped down and stroked the huddle of shining fur. Blind
babies though they were, the youngsters knew the touch for an alien one,
the unknown smell for the smell of an enemy. Their tails and the ruffs
of their necks bristled instantly, and, with a feeble spitting, they
turned and clawed savagely at the intruding hand. The little claws drew
blood, and John Hatch withdrew his hand with a laugh that had a touch of
admiration in it.
"Gosh, but ye're spunky little devils!" he muttered. "But ye ain't
a-goin' to grow up to use them claws on my sheep nur my dawg, an' don't
ye fergit it!" For a moment he thought of wringing their necks, as the
simplest way of getting the matter off his hands. But his kindly
disposition shrank from the barbarity of the process; and, after all, to
his mind they were kittens of a kind, and therefore entitled to a more
gracious form of taking off. For all their spitting and clawing, he
picked them up by the scruffs of their necks, stuffed two of them into
his capacious pockets, carried the other two in his fist, and made his
way hastily down the mountain, keeping a watchful eye over his shoulder,
lest the mother-lynx should happen back from her hunting and attempt a
rescue. He made his way to a little well-like pool, a sort of pocket of
black water in a cleft of the granite, which he had passed and noted
curiously on his upward climb. Into this icy oblivion he dropped the
baby lynxes in a bunch, with a stone tied to them, as he was wont to do
with the superfluous kittens at home. "Good riddance to that rubbish!"
he muttered, as he strode on down the mountain.
But, underestimating the strength of these wild kittens, he had tied the
string carelessly. In their drowning struggles, the string had come
undone, and the victims, freed from the stone, had risen to the surface.
But by this time they were too weak for any effectual effort at escape,
and in their blindness they could not find the shore. Two, by chance,
drifted upon a lip of rock, where they sprawled half-awash and were
presently dead of the chill. The other two sank again into the black
depths.
Their puny struggles had not long been stilled--five minutes, perhaps,
or ten--when the mother-lynx arrived at the edge of the pool. Returning
to her den and finding her little ones gone, the footprints and the
trail of the woodsman had told her the story. Crouching flat, with ears
back and teeth bared to the sockets, she had glared about her with
terrible eyes, as if thinking that the ravisher might yet be within
reach. Then, after one long, agonized sniff at the spot where her young
had lain, she had sped away noiselessly down the steep, running with
nose to the blatant trail and wild eyes peering ahead through the tangle
of the brush.
At the edge of the pool she stopped. Though Hatch's trail went on, she
saw at once, from his halt at the edge, that something had happened
here. In a moment or two her piercing eyes detected those two little
limp bodies lying awash on the lip of granite at the other side of the
pool.
Eagerly she called to them, with a harsh but poignant mew, and in two
prodigious leaps she was leaning over them. With tender, mothering lips
she lifted them from the water by their necks, curled herself about them
for warmth, and fell to licking them passionately with soft murmurs of
caress. She did not notice, apparently, the absence of the other two, or
perhaps her sense of numbers was defective, and she could not count.
However that may be, she devoted herself with concentrated fervor for
some minutes to the two limp and bedraggled little forms striving
passionately to stir them back to life. Then, as if realizing on the
sudden that they were dead, she almost spurned them from her, sprang to
her feet with a long yowl, and ran around the pool till she again picked
up John Hatch's trail.
It was about four in the afternoon when John Hatch crossed the last of
the half-bare slopes, with their scant growth of poplar and sapling
birch, which fringed the foot of Old Sugar Loaf, and plunged into the
dark spruce woods which separated him from his lonely farm on the banks
of Burnt Brook. His trail was now an easy one, an old and moss-grown
"tote-road" of the lumbermen. It was some ten or a dozen years since
this region had been lumbered over, and by this time the young timber
which had then been left, as below the legal diameter for cutting, had
grown to the full and stately stature of the spruce. The great trees,
however, had not yet had time to kill out the bushy undergrowth which
had sprung up luxuriantly in the wake of the choppers, and consequently
the forest on either side of the trail was a dense riot of jungle to the
height of six or eight feet.
John Hatch knew that the mother-lynx, had he caught her at home, would
have put up a valiant fight in defense of her babies. He thought that
she might even have attacked him in the open if she had come up with him
while he had the kittens on him. He despised all lynxes as cordially as
he hated them; but he knew that a mother, of almost any breed, may do
desperate things for her young. Having his axe with him, however, and
the nicest of woodsman's skill in using it, he had had no misgivings at
any moment, and, now that the kittens were at the bottom of the pool, he
dismissed the whole matter from his mind. There remained of it nothing
at all but a dim satisfaction that four dangerous enemies to his sheep
had been thus easily disposed of.
Suddenly, without knowing why, John Hatch stopped in his stride, gripped
his axe instinctively, and glanced over his shoulder. The skin of his
cheeks, beneath the grizzled stubble, crept curiously. He felt that he
was being followed. But there was nothing on the trail behind him, which
was clear and straight to his view for a good two hundred yards back. He
peered deep into the undergrowth, first on one side, then on the other.
No living thing was to be seen, except a little black-and-white
woodpecker, which slipped behind a hemlock trunk and peered around at
him with bright, inquiring eyes.
"Guess I've got the creeps," growled Hatch, with certain unprintable
expletives, which seemed to indicate annoyance and surprise. Whirling
angrily on his heel, he resumed his long, loose-kneed woodsman's stride.
But he could not get rid of that sensation of being followed. For a
long time he resolutely ignored it. There was nothing in the woods that
he had need to fear. He knew there was no wild beast, not even the
biggest bear between Old Sugar Loaf and the Miramichi, that would be so
rash as to seek a quarrel with him. As for the mother-lynx, she had
passed out of his mind, so ingrained and deep was his scorn of all such
"varmin." But presently the insistence of that unseen presence on his
trail became too strong for him, and, with a curse, he turned his head.
There was nothing there. He bounded into the wood on the left of the
track, parting the undergrowth furiously with both arms outstretched
before his face. To his eyes, still full of the sunlight, the
brown-green gloom was almost blackness, for the moment. But he seemed to
see, or imagined he saw, a flitting shadow--whether darker or lighter
than its surroundings he could not have told--fade into the obscurity
around it.
Hatch swore softly and turned back into the homeward trail. "It's
nawthin' but that lynx!" he muttered. "An' I'm a fool, an' no mistake!"
The mystery thus satisfactorily solved, he swung on contentedly for the
next mile or so. Then once more that uncanny impression of being trailed
began to tingle in his cheeks and stir the roots of the hair on his
neck. He laughed impatiently, and gave no further heed to it. But, in
spite of himself, a peculiar picture began to burn itself into his
consciousness. He realized a pair of round, pale, baleful eyes, piercing
with pain and vengeful fury, fixed upon him as they floated along, close
to the ground, in the midst of a gliding shape of shadow. Knowing well
that the beast would never dare to spring upon him, he spat upon the
ground in irritated contempt. At the same time he was nettled at its
presumption in thus dogging his trail. He could see no object in it. The
futile menace of it angered him keenly.
"I'll bring my gun along next time I'm over to Sugar Loaf," he murmured,
"an' I'll put a ball through her guts if she don't keep off my trail!"
His vexation was not mollified by the fact that, when he came out from
the spruce woods into the open pastures of his clearing, and saw his
farmyard below him basking in the sun, he felt a distinct sense of
relief. This was an indignity that he could never have dreamed of. That
a lynx should be able to cause him a moment's apprehension! It was
inconceivable. Yet--he was glad of the open. He resolved to get out all
his traps and snares at once, and settle scores with the beast without
delay.
That night, however, he dismissed the idea of traps from his mind as
making too much of the matter. As he sat by his kitchen fire, smoking
comfortably, his chores all done up, the battle-scarred dog asleep
beside his chair, and forgiving tabby curled up on his knee, and the
twang of night-hawks in a clear sky coming in through the open window
with the fresh smell of the dew, he chuckled at his own folly.
"I sure _did_ have the creeps," he explained to the cat, which opened
one eye at him and shut it again noncommittally. "But I ain't a-goin' to
have 'em ag'in. No, sir-ee!"
But the scarred dog, a lean black-and-tan mongrel, with some collie
strain revealed in his feathering and in his long, narrow jaw, stirred
uneasily in his sleep and whimpered.
John Hatch had two cows and a yoke of red steers. At this kindly time of
year they all stayed out at pasture, day and night, with the sheep, in
the upper burnt lot--a ragged field of hillocks and short, sweet grass,
and fire-blackened stumps slowly rotting. Along the left of the field
the dark spruce woods came down close to the zigzag snake fence of split
rails which bounded Hatch's clearing. At this point were the pasture
bars, which served the purpose of a gate; and here, about sundown, the
two cows stood lowing softly, waiting for Hatch to come with his tin
milk pails and ease their heavy udders of the day's burden.
On the evening following Hatch's trip up Old Sugar Loaf, he was a little
later than usual at his milking, and the pasture was all afloat in
violet dusk as he dropped the two upper bars at one end and swung his
long legs over with a clatter of his two tin pails. He picked up his
three-legged stool, hitched himself under the flank of the nearest cow,
gripped a pail between his knees, and in a moment began the soft, frothy
thunder of the two white streams pulsating down alternately into the tin
under the rhythmic persuasion of his skilled fingers. The dog, who was
not _persona grata_ to the cows, because he had at times to rebuke them
for trespassing on the oat field or the turnip patch, sat up on his
haunches at the other side of the fence and watched the milking
indifferently.
The first cow was milked and had wandered off to feed, and Hatch was
almost through with the second, when through the bars he saw the dog get
up quickly and go trotting off homeward with an air of having been
kicked. Mildly wondering, he muttered to himself: "Got more whims 'n a
mare colt, that Jeff!"
A moment later the cow snorted and gave a jump which would have upset a
less wary milker than John Hatch. She ran away down the field, tossing
her horns, to join her companion and the steers. And Hatch was left
sitting there with the pail between his legs, staring fixedly into the
dark woods. For the fraction of a second he half fancied that a shadow
flitted across them. Then he knew it was an illusion of his eyes,
straining suddenly in that illusive light.
Very angry--too angry to find expression in even the most
unparliamentary of speech--he rose to his feet, set the pail of milk
beside its fellow, grabbed the sturdy milking-stool by one leg, vaulted
the fence, and plunged into the woods. It was not a particularly handy
weapon, the stool, but John Hatch was not a particularly prudent man. If
there _was_ anything there in the woods, prying on his steps and
frightening his "critters," he wanted to come to grips with it at once.
But there was nothing there, as far as he could see. Once more the fine
hairs crept and tingled up and down the back of his neck. He stalked
indignantly back to the fence, vaulted it, flung down the milking-stool,
grabbed up the milk pails so roughly that the contents slopped over on
to his homespun breeches, and set off for home. Not once did he allow
himself to look back, though, to his impatient wrath, he felt sure all
the way down the lane that malevolent eyes were watching him through the
fence.
On the following day John Hatch spent most of the time in the woods
with his gun, hunting the coverts for miles about the clearing. He
hunted stealthily now, as noiseless and furtive as any of the wild
kindred themselves. He saw nothing more formidable than a couple of
indifferent skunks and a surly old porcupine which rattled its quills at
him. He wanted to shoot the skunks as "varmin," inimical to his
chickens; but he refrained, lest he should give the alarm to the unknown
enemy whom he was hunting. He searched assiduously for anything like a
hostile trail; but there had been no rain lately, and the ground was
hard, and the dead-brown spruce needles formed a carpet which took
little impression from wary paws, and he gained no clue whatever. He
turned homeward, somewhat relieved, toward milking time. But, before he
reached the edge of the woods, once more came that warning and uncanny
creep at the roots of his hair.
In a flash of fury he wheeled and fired into the thickets just behind
him. He could have sworn that a gray shadow flitted away behind the gray
trunks. But his most minute search could discover no trail save here
and there a light disturbance of the spruce needles. It was easy for him
to infer, however, with his instinct and his woodcraft, that these
disturbances were due to the great, softly padded paws of a lynx.
He bared his teeth in scorn, and on the following day he fairly sowed
that section of the forest with snares and traps. Within a week he had
taken a weasel, three woodchucks, half a dozen skunks, and thirteen
rabbits. Then, feeling that the game was carried on under a surveillance
which he could neither locate nor evade, he suddenly quitted it, and
fell back upon an attitude of contemptuous indifference. But he cleared
away all the undergrowth in the woods within fifty yards of the pasture
bars, because he would not have the cows scared at milking.
As long as Hatch kept out of the woods, or the very immediate
neighborhood of them, he was quite untroubled by the sense of the
haunting shadow and the unseen, watching eyes. For a time now he did
keep out of them, being fully occupied with his tasks in the little
farm. Then came a day when he found that he wanted poles. The best
poles, as he knew, grew on the shores of a little lake some miles away,
near the foot of Sugar Loaf. But he thought he would make shift to do
with the very inferior poles which grew along the edge of the wild
meadow at the other side of the farm. At first he persuaded himself that
his object in this was merely to save time. Then he realized that he was
shrinking from the journey through the woods. Flushing with shame, he
consigned his folly and all lynxes to the place of eternal torment,
hitched his old sorrel mare to the drag, and set out after those
superior poles which grew below Sugar Loaf. But he took his gun along
with him, which had not been hitherto by any means his invariable
custom.
On the way out there occurred nothing unusual. The green summer woods
seemed once more to John Hatch the old, friendly woods, with neither
menace nor mystery to his rather unimaginative spirit. He whistled gaily
over his chopping, while the old sorrel pastured comfortably in a patch
of wild meadow by the lake, troubled by nothing but the flies, whose
attention kept her long tail ceaselessly busy. Well along in the
afternoon he started homeward with a light heart, as many trimmed poles
on his drag as the sorrel could comfortably haul.
The journey was uneventful. After a time, indeed, Hatch felt himself
once more so completely at home in his familiar wilderness that the
tension of his nerves relaxed, and the exasperating experiences of the
past weeks were forgotten. He reached a turn of the wood road, where it
crested a rise about half a mile from his clearing, and saw his homely
cabin, with its farmyard and its fields basking in the low afternoon
sunshine, straight before him.
It was a comfortable picture, framed as in a narrow panel by the dark
uprights of the spruce on either side of the mossy road. Hatch framed
his lips to whistle in his satisfaction at the picture.
But the whistle wavered out in a thin breath, as he felt once more that
hated creeping of the skin, that crawling at the back of his neck. He
dropped the reins and snatched up his gun from where it lay on top of
the load of poles. At the same moment the sedate old sorrel shied
violently, almost knocking him over, and then started on a wild gallop
down the road, spilling the poles in every direction as she went.
With a crisp oath, Hatch burst through the undergrowth which fringed the
road. He fancied that he saw a gray shadow fading off among the gray
trunks, and he fired at once.
Hatch was a good shot, and he felt sure that he had scored a hit. In
keen exultation he ran forward, expecting to find his enemy stretched on
the spruce needles. But there was nothing there. He turned on his heel
in deep disgust, and caught sight of another shadowy shape flickering
off in another direction. Up went his gun again to the shoulder. But he
did not fire, for there was no longer anything to fire at. He lowered
his gun and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, feeling even his old
lumber-camp vocabulary inadequate.
Outwardly cold, but boiling within, Hatch stalked slowly homeward,
ignoring the scattered poles along the way. He felt no more of the
presence of the dogging shadows, presumably because they had withdrawn
themselves at the sound of the gunshot. Arrived at home, he found the
old sorrel, with the empty drag, waiting at the gate to be let in, and
Jeff, who always stayed at home to guard the house, wagging his tail
interrogatively beside her, puzzled to know why she had come home
without her master or her load.
John Hatch looked at the dog musingly.
"Jeff," said he, "if ye warn't so blankety blank _blank_ afeerd o'
lynxes, ye'd help me a sight in runnin' them varmin down. But ye ain't
got no nerve left. Reckon I'll have to take ye into the woods now an'
ag'in, kind of fur discipline, an' help ye to git it back. Ye ain't much
account now, Jeff."
And the dog, feeling the reproach in Hatch's quaint speech, dropped his
tail and pretended he had business behind the barn.
After this, when Hatch's affairs took him into the woods, Jeff went with
him. But he went unhappily, crowding at his master's heels, with head
and ears and tail one unanimous protest. To Hatch these expeditions
sometimes proved uneventful, for sometimes the hostile shadows seemed to
be off somewhere else, and too occupied to follow Hatch's trail. On such
occasions Hatch knew that the unseen surveillance was withdrawn,
because he had none of those warning "creeps" at the nape of his neck.
But to Jeff every covert or thicket within a radius of fifty yards was
an ambush for lynxes, and only at his master's heels did he feel secure
from their swift and eviscerating claws. When he saw John Hatch stop
abruptly, glare about him, and plunge into the underbush, then Jeff
would try to get between his legs, an effort not helpful to Hatch's
marksmanship or to his temper. And the shadows--for there seemed to John
Hatch to be two of them haunting him now--would fade off elusively into
the environing and soundless shade.
All through the summer and the autumn this mysterious trailing went on,
till Hatch, disgusted by the futility of his attempts to shake it off,
assumed indifference and pretended to himself that he rather liked being
haunted. He remarked to Jeff--with whom he could allow himself to speak
more frankly than to most--that an occasional creepy feeling about the
roots of one's hair might be good for the scalp, a preventive of
baldness even. But in the depths of his heart he grew more and more
uneasy. Such vigilant and untiring vindictiveness on the part of
creatures which are wont to shun all human neighborhood with an
incorrigible savagery of shyness was unnatural. It seemed to him to
suggest a very madness of hate, an obsession which might culminate in
some deed of desperation unheard of among lynxes.
When, however, the winter had once settled in with full rigor, Hatch
found that he was being shadowed with less and less insistence. He
inferred at once that this was because his foes were now forced to spend
most of their time in foraging for their own livelihood, and he drew a
wry face of self-disgust as he realized the depth of his relief. As the
winter advanced, and the cold bit fiercer, and the snow gathered as if
to bury the wilderness world away from sight forever, it came at last to
seem as if the unknown purpose of the avengers was forgotten. No more,
upon his tramps on snowshoes through the muffled woods, did John Hatch
feel those admonitory creepings of his flesh, and presently he forgot
all about the haunting shadows and their menace.