side of the trail, and often compelled to stop and mend a bit of the
corduroy roadway before she could get across some particularly bad
stretch of bog. Her stout shoes and heavy woolen stockings were drenched
with the icy water, but she was strong and full of abounding health, and
she felt neither cold nor fatigue. In spite of her anxiety about her
mother, her attention was absorbed by the old familiar atmosphere of the
wilderness, the haunting colors, the chill, elusive, poignant smells. It
was not till fairly well along in the afternoon, therefore, that she
awoke to the fact that she had not covered more than half the distance
which she had to travel. The heavy going, the abominable state of the
road, had utterly upset her calculations. The knowledge came to her with
such a shock that she stopped short in consternation, almost dropping
her bundle. At this rate she would be in the forest all night, for it
would be impossible to traverse the bog-holes in the dark. Child of the
backwoods though she was, she had never slept out alone with the great
trees and the mysterious night stillness. For the first time she cast a
look of dread into the vistaed shadows of the fir trees. Forgetting the
violets, the greening birches, the delicate spring smells, she hurried
on at a reckless pace which soon forced her to stop and recover her
breath. The best she could hope was to reach the river-shore before
dark, and perhaps find the camp of the stream-drivers. She felt cold,
and tired, and small, and terribly alone.
Yet, as a matter of fact, she was by no means so alone as she imagined.
For the past half hour or more she had been strangely companioned.
Keeping parallel with the road, but at a distance, and hidden in the
shadows, went an immense and gaunt black bear. For all his bulk, he went
as noiselessly as a wild-cat, skirting the open spaces, and stopping
from time to time to sit up, motionless as a stump, and listen intently,
and sniff the air with sensitive nostrils. But his little, red-rimmed,
savage eyes never lost sight of the figure of the girl for more than a
few seconds at a time.
For bears this was the hungry season, the season of few roots and no
fruits, few grubs and little honey. The black bear loves sweets and
berries far better than any flesh food, however dainty. And human flesh
he either fears or dislikes so heartily that only under special stress
can he bring himself to contemplate it as a possible article of diet.
But this bear considered himself under special stress. His lean flanks
were fairly clinging together from emptiness. To his eyes, thus
prejudiced, the fresh young form of Sissy Bembridge, picking its way
down the trail, looked appetizing. Girl was something he had never
tried, and it _might_ be edible. At the same time, this inoffensive and
defenseless-looking creature undoubtedly belonged to the species Man, as
his nostrils well assured him. Therefore, small as she was, she was apt
to be very dangerous, even to go off at times with flame and a
terrifying noise. He was afraid to show himself to her, but his hunger,
coupled with curiosity, led him to track her, perhaps in the hope that
she might fall dead in the trail and so make it safe for him to approach
and taste.
The girl, meanwhile, under the influence of her uncertainty and fatigue,
was growing more and more apprehensive. She assured herself that there
was nothing to fear, that none of the wild inhabitants of these New
Brunswick woods would dare to interfere with a human being. At the same
time she found herself glancing nervously over her shoulder, as the
shadows lengthened and deepened, and all the wilderness turned to dusky
violet. From the wet pools began the cold and melancholy fluting of the
frogs, the voice of solitude, and under the plangency of it she found
the tears running down her cheeks. At this she shook herself
indignantly, squared her shoulders, stamped her foot, and plunged ahead
with a firm resolution that the approach of dark should _not_ make her a
fool. And away in the shadows of the firs the bear drew a little nearer,
encouraged by the fading of daylight.
Just as it was growing so dark that she found it hard to choose her path
between the pools and the bog-holes, to her infinite relief she caught
sight of a cabin roof crowning a little rise of ground by the roadside.
She broke into a run in her eagerness, reached the door, and pounced
upon it breathlessly. But there was no light in the window. With a
sinking heart she realized that it was empty--that it was nothing more
than a deserted lumber-camp. Then, as if in answer to her vehement
knocking, the door swung slowly open, showing the black darkness
within. It had been merely closed, not latched. With a startled cry she
sprang back, her skin creeping at the emptiness. Her first impulse was
to turn and run. But she recovered herself, remembering that, after all,
here was shelter and security for the night, infinitely preferable to a
wet bivouac beneath some dripping fir tree.
She could not bring herself, however, to grope her way into the thick
darkness of the interior. Stepping some paces back from the threshold,
she nervously untied her bundle and got out a box of matches. Lighting
one, she shaded it with her hand, crept forward, and cautiously peered
inside. In the spurt of light the place looked warm and snug. She
returned for her bundle, went in and shut the door. Then she drew a long
breath and felt better. The camp was small, but dry and in good repair.
It was quite empty, except for the tier of bunks along one wall, a
rough-hewn log bench, a broken stove before the rude chimney, and
several lengths of rust-eaten stove-pipe scattered on the floor.
Lighting match after match, she hunted about for something to serve as
fuel, for she craved the comfort, as well as the warmth of a fire.
There was nothing, however, but a few handfuls of dry, fine spruce tips,
left in one of the bunks. This stuff, she knew, would flare up at once
and die in a couple of minutes. She made up her mind to go out and grope
about in the wet gloom for a supply of dead branches, though she was now
conscious of a childish reluctance to face again the outer solitude.
Almost furtively she lifted the heavy latch and opened the door
half-way. Instantly, with a gasp, she slammed it to again and leaned
against it with quaking knees. Straight in front of her, not twenty feet
away, black and huge against the gray glimmer of the open, she had seen
the prowling bear.
Recovering herself after a few seconds, she felt her way stealthily to
the bench and sat down upon it so as to face the two windows. The
windows were small--so small that she was sure no monster such as the
one which had just confronted her could by any possibility force its way
through them. But she waited in a sort of horror, expecting momently
that a dreadful shadowy face would darken one or the other of them and
glare in upon her. She felt that the eyes of it would be visible by
their own light, and she summoned up all her resolution that she might
not scream when it appeared. For the time, however, nothing of the sort
took place, and the two little squares continued to glimmer palely.
After what seemed to her an hour of breathless waiting, she heard a
sound as of something rubbing softly along the logs of the back wall.
She swung around on her seat to stare with straining eyes at the spot
where the sound came from. But, of course, all was blackness there. And
she could not keep her eyes for more than a few seconds from the baleful
fascination of the window-squares.
The door of the camp was a heavy one and sturdily put together, but
along its bottom was a crack some half an inch in width. Presently there
came a loud sniffing at this crack, and then the door creaked, as if a
heavy body were leaning against it. She shuddered and gathered herself
together for a desperate spring, expecting the latch or the hinges to
give way. But the honest New Brunswick workmanship held, and she took
breath again with a sob.
After this respite, a thousand fantastic schemes of defense began to
chase themselves through her brain. Out of them all she clung to just
one, as possibly offering some hope in the last emergency. Noiselessly
she gathered those few handfuls of withered spruce twigs and heaped them
upon the top of the stove. If the bear should succeed in squeezing
through the window or breaking down the door, she would light the dry
stuff, and perhaps the sudden blaze and smoke might frighten him away.
That it would daunt him for a moment, she felt sure, but she was equally
sure that its efficacy would not last very long.
As she was working up the details of this scheme--more for the sake of
keeping her terror in check than for any great faith she had in it--the
thing she had been expecting happened. One of the glimmering gray-blue
squares grew suddenly dark. She gave a burst of shrill, hysterical
laughter and ran at it, as a trapped rat will jump at a hand approaching
the wires. As she did so, she scratched a bunch of four or five matches
and threw them, spluttering and hissing, in the face of the apparition.
She had a glimpse of small, savage eyes and an open, white-fanged mouth.
Then the great face withdrew itself.
Somewhat reassured to find that the monster could be disconcerted by the
spurt of a match, she groped back to her seat, and fell to counting, by
touch, the number of these feeble weapons still left in the box. She had
only six more, and she began to repent of having used the others so
recklessly. After all, as she told herself, _that_ bear could not
possibly squeeze himself through the window, so why should he not amuse
himself by looking in at her if he wanted to? It might keep him
occupied. It occurred to her that she ought to be glad that the bear was
such a big one. His face alone had fairly filled the window. She would
save the remaining matches.
For a good ten minutes nothing more happened, though from time to time
her intent ears caught the sound of cautious sniffing on the other side
of the log walls, as if the enemy were reconnoitering to find a weak
point in her fortress. She smiled scornfully there in the dark, knowing
well the strength of those log walls. Then, all at once her face
stiffened and she sat rigid, clutching the edge of the bench with both
hands. The door had once more begun to creak and groan under the weight
of a heavy body surging against it.
There was a sound of scratching, a rattle of iron claws, which told her
that the beast was rearing itself upright against the door. The massive
paws seemed to fumble inquisitively. Then her blood froze. She heard the
heavy latch lift with a click.
The door swung open.
She felt as if she were struggling in a nightmare. With a choked scream
she leapt straight at the door. She had a mad impulse to slam it in the
monster's face and brace herself, however impotently, against it. As she
sprang, however, her foot caught in one of the pieces of stove-pipe. She
fell headlong, and the pipe flew half-way across the floor, clattering
over its fellows as it went, and raising a prodigious noise.
Through a long, long moment of horror she lay flat on her face,
expecting a gigantic paw to fall upon her neck as a cat's paw falls upon
a mouse. Nothing happened. She ventured to raise her head. The door was
wide open and the doorway quite clear. A dozen feet away from it, at
the edge of the road, stood the bear, staring irresolutely. He had been
rather taken aback by the suddenness with which the door had flown open,
and had hesitated to enter, fearing a trap. The wild clatter of the
stove-pipes had further disturbed him, and he had withdrawn to consider
the situation. In one bound the girl was at the door and had shut it
with a bang.
The problem was now to fix the latch so that it could not again be
lifted from the outside. She lit one more precious match, examined the
mechanism, and hunted frantically for a splinter of wood with which to
jam it down. There was nothing in sight that would serve. She tried to
tear off a strip of her petticoat to bind it down with, but all her
underwear was of a most serviceable sturdiness, and would not tear. She
heard the bear moving again outside. She heard his breathing close to
the door. Desperately she thrust a couple of fingers into the space
above the latch, so that it would not lift. Then with the other hand she
whipped off one shoe and stocking. The stocking was just the thing, and
in a minute she had the latch secure.
It was no more than secure, however, before the weight of the bear once
more came against the door. From the heavy, scratchy fumblings the girl
could perceive that her enemy was trying to repeat his former maneuver.
On this point, at least, she had no anxiety. She knew the door could not
now be unlatched from the outside. She could almost afford to laugh in
her satisfaction as she groped her way back to her seat.
But her satisfaction was of brief life. The door began to creak more and
more violently. It was evident that the bear, having once learned that
this was a possible way in, was determined to test it to the utmost. The
girl sprang up. She heard the screws of a hinge begin to draw with an
ominous grating sound. Now at last the crisis was truly and inevitably
upon her. And, to her amazement, she was less terrified than before. The
panic horror had all gone. She had small hope of escape, but her brain
worked calmly and clearly. She moved over beside the broken stove, and
stood, match in hand, ready to set fire to the pile of dry spruce tips.
The door groaned and creaked. Then the upper hinge gave way, and the
door leaned inward, admitting a wide streak of glimmer. For some
moments, thereafter, all sounds ceased, as if the bear had drawn back
cautiously to consider the result of his efforts. Then he came on again
with more confidence. Under his weight the door came crashing down, but
slowly, with the noise of yielding latch and snapping iron. As it fell,
the girl scratched the match and set it to the dry stuff.
In the doorway the bear paused, eyeing suspiciously the tiny blue spurt
of the struggling match. After a second or two, however, he came forward
with a savage rush, furious at having been so long balked. The girl
slipped around the stove. And just as the bear reached the place where
she had been standing, the spruce tips sparked sharply and flared up in
his face. With a loud _woo-oof_ of indignation and alarm, he recoiled,
turned tail, scurried out into the road, and disappeared.
In a couple of minutes the cabin was full of sparks and smoky light. The
girl ran to the door and peered out. Her heart sank once more. There
was the bear, a few paces up the road, calmly sitting on his haunches,
waiting. He had seen camp fires before, and he was waiting for this one
to die down.
Sissy Bembridge knew that it would die down at once, and then--well, her
last card would have been played. She wrung her hands, but in the new
self-possession which had come to her, she could not believe that the
end had really arrived. It was unbelievable that within some half a
dozen minutes she should become a lifeless, hideous, shapeless thing
beneath those mangling claws. No, there must be--there was--something to
do, if she could only think of it.
And then it came to her.
At first thought the idea was so audacious, so startling, so fantastic,
that she shrank from it as absurd. But on second thoughts she convinced
herself not only that it was the one thing to be done, but also that it
was practical and would almost certainly prove effective. But there was
not a moment to be lost.
Snatching up one of the fragments of stove-pipe, she used the edge as a
shovel, and carried a portion of the blazing stuff to the open doorway.
Here she deliberately set fire to the dry woodwork, nursing with hand
and breath the tiny uplicking flames. She fed them with a few more
scraps of spruce scraped up from another bunk, till she saw that they
would surely catch. Then, with her stove-pipe shovel, she started
another fire in the further corner of the camp, and yet another in the
uppermost bunk. When satisfied that all were fairly going, she retrieved
her stocking from the broken latch, reclothed her naked foot and set her
bundle safely outside. Then she looked at the bear, still sitting on his
haunches a little way up the road, and she laughed at him. At last she
had him worsted. She darted in through the doorway--now blazing
cheerfully all up one side--and dragged forth the heavy bench, that she
might have something dry to sit on while she watched the approaching
conflagration.
Her calculation--and she knew it was a sound one--was that the cabin, a
solid structure of logs, would burn vigorously the whole night through,
and terrify the bear to final flight. If it should by any chance die
down before full daylight, she would be able to build a circle of small
fires with the burning remnants. And she felt sure that in daylight her
enemy would not dare to renew the attack.
In another ten minutes the roof was ablaze, and soon the flames were
shooting up riotously. The woods were lighted redly for hundreds of
yards around, the pools in the road were like polished copper, and the
bear was nowhere to be seen. Sissy dragged her bench and bundle still
further away, and sat philosophically warming her wet feet. The reaction
from her terror, and her sense of triumph, made her so excited that
fatigue and anxiety were all forgotten. She grew warm and comfortable,
and finally, opening her bundle, she got out a package of neglected
sandwiches and made a contented meal.
As she was shaking the crumbs from her lap, she heard voices and
pounding, splashing hoofs from up the trail. She sprang to her feet.
Three lumbermen came riding into the circle of light, and drew rein
before her in astonishment. "Sissy--Bembridge--_you_!" cried the
foremost, springing from his saddleless mount.
The girl ran to him. "Oh, Mike," she exclaimed, crying and laughing all
at the same time, and clutching him by the arm, "I _had_ to do it! The
bear nigh got me! Take me to mother, quick. I'm _that_ tired."
A Basket of Fish
Fresh and tender, the light of the mild spring afternoon caressed the
little abandoned clearing in the wilderness. At the back of the
clearing, beneath a solitary white birch tree just bursting into green,
stood a squatter's log cabin, long deserted, its door and window gone,
its roof of poles and bark half fallen in. Past the foot of the
clearing, with dancing sparkle and a crisp, musical clamor, ran a
shallow stream some dozen yards in width, its clear waters amber-tawny
from the far-off cedar-swamps in which it took its rise. Along one side
came the deeply rutted backwoods road, skirting the clearing and making
its precarious way across the stream by a rude bridge not lightly to be
ventured after dark. Over all the face of the lonely backwoods world was
washed the high, thin green of the New Brunswick May-time, under a sky
of crystal cobalt dotted with dense white fleeces.
Before the ruined cabin stood a light wagon, its wheels and polished
body bespattered with mud. In the open back of the wagon, thrust well
under the seat to be in the shade, lay a large wicker fishing-basket,
with a tuft of grass sticking out through the square hole in the cover.
Some ten or a dozen paces distant, tethered beneath the birch tree, a
sorrel horse munched the last remnants of a bundle of hay, and whisked
his long tail industriously to keep off the flies.
From behind a corner of the ruined cabin peered craftily a red fox. He
eyed the wagon, he eyed the horse beneath the birch tree, he scrutinized
the whole clearing, the road, and the open stretch of the stream. Then
his narrowed, searching gaze returned to the wagon and to the fat basket
in the back of the wagon. At length he stepped forth mincingly into full
view, trotted up, and sniffed inquisitively. As if in doubt, he raised
himself on his hind legs, with his fore-paws on the tire of the nearest
wheel, and took a long, satisfying sniff. Yes, undoubtedly there were
fish in the basket, fresh fish--trout, in fact.
He wanted those fish exceedingly. It seemed easy enough to get them. He
shifted his fore-paws to the back of the wagon, and studied the
situation. Why should he not climb up and help himself? The sorrel
horse, catching a whiff of his pungent scent, looked around at him
suddenly and snorted. But what did he care for the disapproval of the
sorrel horse? All horses, submissive and enslaved, he held in
profoundest scorn. He would have those trout, whether the horse liked it
or not. And, anyhow, he saw that the horse was tethered to the tree. He
settled himself back upon his haunches to spring into the wagon.
Then a new idea flashed into his cunning red head. No one who valued
fresh-caught trout at their full worth would leave them thus unguarded
unless for a sinister purpose. They were surely left there as a trap.
The fox wrinkled his nose with mingled regret and disdain. He knew
something of traps. He had once been nipped. He was not to be caught
again, not he. What fools these men were, after all! His satisfaction at
having seen through their schemes almost compensated him for the loss of
the expected meal. He drew back, sat down on his tail, and eyed the
wagon minutely for a while. Then he trotted away into the forest again
to hunt wood-mice.
But it was just here that the red prowler's cunning overreached itself.
The basket in the wagon was full of trout, and there was no trap to be
feared. He might have feasted to his heart's content, and incurred no
penalty more serious than the disapproval of the tethered horse, had he
not been quite so amazingly clever. For even among the wild kindreds the
prize is not always to him of nimble wit.
The trout were there in the basket simply because the fishing had been
so good. The two fishermen who had driven out from town, in the gray of
dawn, over those fifteen miles of bad backwoods road, had fished the
stream upward from the bridge throughout the morning. At this season the
trout--fine, vivid fish, of good pan size--were lying in the open,
dancing runs and about the tails of the rapids; and they were rising
freely to almost any bright fly, though with a preference for a red
hackle. Toward noon the fishermen had returned to the clearing to lunch
beneath the birch tree and to feed and water the horse. They had
emptied all their catch into one basket, stowed the basket under the
wagon seat, then started off again to fish the finer reaches of the
stream, with its wide pools and long, sunlit rapids, below the bridge.
Good fishermen, but not expert woodsmen, they had no idea that, here in
the solitude, they ran any risk of being robbed of their morning's
spoils.
* * * * *
Soon after the departure of the over-crafty fox, a backwoods tramp came
by, with a ragged little bundle slung from the stick on his shoulder.
His eyes lighted up at sight of the unguarded wagon from town, and he
understood the situation at a glance. In the front of the wagon, by the
dash-board, he found a lunch-basket, still half full, as the fishermen
had provided themselves for another substantial meal. He hurriedly
devoured about half the contents of the lunch-basket, transferred the
rest to his dirty bundle, and with huge satisfaction lighted a
half-burned cigar which one of the fishermen had left lying on a log.
Next he investigated the fishing-basket. Half a dozen of the finest
fish he took out and strung upon a forked twig. This he did not regard
as stealing, but merely as the exaction of a small and reasonable
tribute from a Society which had of late neglected to feed him any too
well. Puffing his cigar butt in high good humor, he went over and made
friends with the horse, feeding it with a few handfuls of fresh grass.
Then, with the string of fish dangling beside his bundle and flapping
against it as he walked, he resumed his solitary journey, picked his way
over the dilapidated bridge, and vanished into the fir forest beyond.
The horse, feeling rather lonely, neighed after him as he disappeared.
An abandoned clearing or a deserted log cabin, something to which man
has set his hand and then withdrawn it, seems always a place of peculiar
fascination to the creatures of the wilderness. They have some sense,
perhaps, of having regained a lost dominion. Or possibly they think,
from these his leavings, to learn something significant of man's
mysterious over-lordship. In any case, the attraction seldom fails.
The tramp had not been long gone, when a new visitor arrived. Up from
the fringing bushes along the stream's edge came furtively a little,
low, long-bodied beast, in shape much like an exaggerated weasel, but
almost black in color. Its head was almost triangular; its eyes, set
near together, were bright and cruel. It came half-way across the
meadow, then stopped, and eyed for some time the tethered horse and the
deserted wagon. Seeing nothing to take alarm at, it made a wide circuit,
ran behind the cabin, and reappeared, as the fox had done, at the corner
nearest the wagon. From this point of vantage it surveyed the situation
anew, a little spark of blood-red fire alternately glowing and fading in
its eyes as its keen nostrils caught the scent of the fish.