Doomsdorf’s trap lines lay in great circles, coinciding at various
points in order to reduce the number of cabins needed to work them, and
ultimately swinging back to the home cabin in the thicket beside the
sea. They were very simple to follow, he explained—Bess’s line running
up the river to the mouth of a great tributary that flowed from the
south, the camp being known as the Eagle Creek cabin; thence up the
tributary to its forks, known as the Forks cabin, up the left-hand forks
to its mother springs, the Spring cabin, and then straight down the
ridge to the home cabin, four days’ journey in all. She couldn’t miss
any of the three huts, Doomsdorf explained, as all of them were located
in the open barrens, on the banks of the creeks she was told to follow.
Doomsdorf drew for her guidance a simple map that would remove all
danger of going astray.
Ned’s route was slightly more complicated, yet nothing that the veriest
greenhorn could not follow. It took him first to what Doomsdorf called
his Twelve-Mile cabin at the very head of the little stream on which the
home cabin was built, thence following a well-blazed trail along an
extensive though narrow strip of timber, a favorable country for marten,
to the top of the ridge, around the glacier, and down to the hut that
Bess occupied the third night out, known as the Forks cabin; thence up
the right-hand fork to its mother spring, the Thirty-Mile cabin; over
the ridge and down to the sea, the Sea cabin; and thence, trapping
salt-water mink and otter, to the home cabin, five days’ journey in all.
“If you use your head, you can’t get off,” Doomsdorf explained. “If you
don’t, no one will ever take the trouble to look you up.”
As if smiling upon their venture, nature gave them a clear dawn in which
to start forth. The squaw and Bess started up from the river mouth
together, the former in the rôle of teacher; Ned and Doomsdorf followed
up the little, silvery creek that rippled past the home cabin. And for
the first time since his landing on Hell Island Ned had a chance really
to look about him.
It was the first time he had been out of sight of the cabin and thus
away from the intangible change that the mere presence of man works on
the wild. All at once, as the last vestige of the white roof was
concealed behind the snow-laden branches of the spruce, he found himself
in the very heart of the wilderness. It was as if he had passed from one
world to another.
Even the air was different. It stirred and moved and throbbed in a way
he couldn’t name, as if mighty, unnamable passions seemed about to be
wakened. He caught a sense of a resistless power that could crush him to
earth at a whim, of vast forces moving by fixed, invisible law; he felt
that secret, wondering awe which to the woodsman means the nearing
presence of the Red Gods. Only the mighty powers of nature were in
dominion here: the lashing snows of winter, the bitter cold, the wind
that wept by unheard by human ears. Ned was closer to the heart of
nature, and thus to the heart of life, than he had ever been before.
He had no words to express the mood that came upon him. The wind that
crept through the stunted spruce trees expressed it better than he; it
was in the song that the wolf pack rings to sing on winter nights; in
the weird complaint that the wild geese called down from the clouds.
What little sound there was, murmuring branches and fallen aspen leaves,
fresh on the snow, rustling faintly together and serving only to
accentuate the depth of the silence, had this same, eerie
motif,—nothing that could be put in words, nothing that ever came
vividly into his consciousness, but which laid bare the very soul and
spirit of life. Cold and hunger, an ancient persecution whose reason no
man knew, a never-to-be-forgotten fear of a just but ruthless God!
This was the land untamed. There was not, at first, a blaze on a tree,
the least sign that human beings had ever passed that way before. It was
the land-that-used-to-be, unchanged seemingly since the dim beginnings
of the world. Blessed by the climbing sun of spring, warm and gentle in
the summer, moaning its old complaint when the fall winds swept through
the branches, lashed by the storms of winter,—thus it had lain a
thousand-thousand years. And now, a little way up the stream, there was
more tangible sign that this was the kingdom of the wild. Instead of an
unpeopled desert, it was shown to be teeming with life. They began to
see the trails of the forest creatures in the snow.
Sometimes they paused before the delicate imprint of a fox, like a snow
etching made by a master hand; sometimes the double track of marten and
his lesser cousin, the ermine; once the great cowlike mark of a caribou,
seeking the pale-green reindeer moss that hung like tresses from the
trees. Seemingly every kind of northern animal of which Ned had ever
heard had immediately preceded them through the glade.
“Where there’s timber, there’s marten,” Doomsdorf explained. “Marten, I
suppose you know, are the most valuable furs we take, outside of silver
and blue fox—and one of the easiest taken. The marten’s such a ruthless
hunter that he doesn’t look what he’s running into. You won’t find them
far on the open barrens, but they are in hundreds in the long, narrow
timber belt between Twelve-Mile cabin, to-night’s stop, and Forks cabin
that you’ll hit to-morrow night. And we’ll make our first set right
here.”
He took one of the traps from Ned’s shoulder and showed him how to make
the set. The bait was placed a few feet above the trap, in this case, on
the trunk of the tree, so that to reach it the marten would almost
certainly spring the trap.
“Put ’em fairly thick through here,” Doomsdorf advised. “Lay more
emphasis on fox and lynx in the open barrens.” He stepped back from the
set. “Do you think you can find this place again?”
Ned looked it over with minute care, marking it in relation to certain
dead trees that lay across the creek. “I think I can.”
“That’s the very essential of trapping, naturally. It will come to be
second nature after a while—without marking it by trees or anything.
You’ll have better than a hundred traps; and it isn’t as easy as it
looks. Remember, I won’t be with you the next time you pass this way.”
They tramped on, and Doomsdorf pointed out where a wolverine had come
down the glade and crossed the creek. “You’ll curse at the very name of
wolverine before the season’s done,” Doomsdorf told him, as Ned paused
to study the imprint. “He’s the demon of the snow so far as the trapper
is concerned. Nevertheless, you’ll want to take a skin for your own use.
It’s the one fur for the hood of a parka—you can wear it over your
mouth in fifty below and it doesn’t get covered with ice from your
breath. But you’ll have to be a smarter man than I think you are to
catch him.”
A few minutes later the timber became to be more noticeably stunted, the
trees farther and farther apart, and soon they were in the open. These
were the barren lands, deep moss or rich marsh grass already heavy with
snow; and the only trees remaining were a few willow, quivering aspen,
and birch along the bank of the creek. From time to time the two men
stopped to place their traps, Doomsdorf explaining the various “sets”,
how to conceal the cold steel of which most all creatures have such an
instinctive fear, and how to eliminate the human smell that might
otherwise keep the more cunning of the fur-bearers from the bait. Once
they paused before a great, cruel instrument of iron, seemingly much too
large to be a trap, that had been left at the set from the previous
trapping season.
“Lift it,” Doomsdorf advised. Ned bent, finding the iron itself heavy in
his arms.
“No creature’s going to walk away with that on his leg, is he?”
“No? That’s all you know about it. I’ll admit that you wouldn’t care to
walk with it very far. You would see why I didn’t take it into shelter
at the close of the season—although of course it’s easy enough to haul
on a sled. You notice it’s attached to a chain, and that chain to a
toggle.”
“Toggle” was a word that Ned had never heard before, but which plainly
represented a great log, or drag, to which the trap chain was attached.
Ned gazed, and another foolish question came to his lips. “You use that
because there isn’t a tree handy?” he asked.
“If there was a tree handy, I’d use it just the same,” Doomsdorf
explained. “There’s no holding the animal I catch in that trap by
chaining him fast. No matter how big the tree or how stout the chain,
he’d break loose—or else he’d pull out his foot. You’ve got to give him
play. That’s why we use a toggle.”
“You don’t mean he drags that great thing——”
“No, only about halfway across the island before I can possibly overtake
him and shoot him, bellowing like a devil every step of the way.
Moreover, the toggle has to be chained near the end, rather than in the
middle—otherwise he’ll catch the ends back of a couple of tree trunks
and break loose. Now set the trap.”
It took nearly all of Ned’s strength to push down the powerful springs
and set the great jaws. The fact that he didn’t know just how to go
about it impeded him too. And when he stood erect again, he found
Doomsdorf watching him with keenest interest.
“I didn’t think you were man enough to do it,” he commented. “You’ll say
that’s quite a trap, won’t you?”
“It’s quite a trap,” Ned agreed shortly. “What kind of an elephant do
you take in it?”
“No kind of an elephant, but one of the grandest mammals that ever
lived, at that. I don’t trap them much, because I hardly get enough for
their skins to pay for handling them—you can guess they’re immensely
bulky. There’s a fair price for their skulls, too, but the skull alone
is a fair load for a weak back. Last year I needed a few hides for the
cabin. Did you ever hear of the Kodiac bear?”
“Good Lord! One bear can’t move all that.”
Doomsdorf stood erect, and his eyes gleamed. Evidently the great, savage
monarch of the islands of which he spoke was some way close to his own
savage heart. “He can move your heart into your throat just to look at
him!” he said. “One of the grandest mammals that ever lived—the great,
brown bear of the islands. Of course, you ought to know he’s by all odds
the biggest bear on earth, he and the polar bear just north of here—and
the biggest carnivorous animal on earth, for that matter. Your lions,
your tigers wouldn’t last a minute under those great hooks of his. He’d
tear your whole chest out in one swipe. This seems to be about the
northern limit of his range—the big brownies go all the way from
Admiralty Islands, in the south, clear up to here, with very little
variation as to size and color. There are not many on the Skopins—but
going around with just an axe and a hunting knife for weapons, you’ll be
glad there aren’t any more. At this point their range begins to
coincide, to some slight degree, with the polar bear—but of course just
a stray gets down below the Arctic circle. You’ve got to have a whole
caribou carcass to interest the old devil in the way of bait. And now
I’ll show you how to outfox him.”
He cut a slender whip, about half an inch in diameter, from a near-by
willow, and thrusting both ends into the ground in front of the trap,
made an arch. “When the old boy comes along, he’ll lift his front foot
right over that arch, to avoid stepping on anything that looks so
unstable, and then straight down into the trap,” Doomsdorf explained.
“If it was heavy wood, he’d rest his foot on it and miss the trap.”
A few minutes later they came to what seemed to Ned a new and
interesting geological formation. It seemed to be a noisy waterfall of
three or four feet, behind which the creek was dammed to the proportions
of a small, narrow lake. Yet the dam itself didn’t appear to be a
natural formation of rock. It looked more like driftwood, but it was
inconceivable that mere drift could be piled in this ordered way.
Keenly interested, he bent to examine it. Farther up the creek some
heavy body struck the water with a mighty splash. It was too swift,
however, for him to see what it was. There were no power plants or mill
wheels here, and thus it was difficult to believe that human hands had
gone to the great labor of building such a dam. Only one explanation
remained.
“It must be a beaver dam,” he said.
“You’re right for once,” Doomsdorf agreed. “Did you ever see better
engineering? Even the dam is built in an arch—the strongest formation
known to man—to withstand the waters. Sometime I’ll tell you how they
do it—there isn’t as much premeditated cunning in it as you think. Do
you know what a beaver looks like?”
“Got big teeth——”
“Correct. It has to have ’em to cut all this wood. Likely enough the
little devils go considerable distances up and down this creek to get
their materials. Sometimes they’ll dig great canals for floating the
sticks they use in their dams.
“A big beaver weighs about fifty pounds—and he’s about the handiest boy
to trap there is. You’ll wonder what the purpose of these dams is. As
far as I can make out, simply to keep the water at one level. You know
these little streams rise and fall like the tides. They’ve learned, in a
few hundred thousand years of their development, that it doesn’t pay to
build a nice house and then have the creek come up and wash it away and
drown them out. When they put down their winter food, they want to be
sure it’s going to be there when they want it—neither washed away nor
high and dry out of water. The solution was—to build a dam. Now I’ll
show you how to catch a beaver.”
It seemed to Ned that the logical place to lay the trap was on the
beaver house itself—a great pile of sticks and mud. But Doomsdorf
explained that a trap set on the house itself so alarmed the animals
that the entire colony was likely to desert the dam. Instead, the trap
was set just below the surface of the water at a landing,—a place where
the beaver went in and out of the water in the course of their daily
work.
No bait was used this time. The trap was covered with fine mud with the
idea that the beaver would blunder into it either on leaving or entering
the water. A heavy sack of little stones from the creek bed was attached
to the chain, and a long wire, leading from this, was fastened securely
to a tree on the creek bank. The arrangement was really a merciful one
to the beaver. The instant the trap was sprung, the animal’s instinct
was to dive into deep water. Of course he dragged the heavy sack with
him and was unable to rise again. The beaver, contrary to expectations,
can not live in water indefinitely. An air-breathing mammal, he drowns
almost as quickly as a human being would under the same circumstances.
They placed a second trap on the dam itself, then encircling the meadow,
continued on up the stream. From time to time they made their sets, as
this was a favorable region for mink and otter, two of the most
beautiful and valuable furs.
Time was passing swiftly for Ned. There was even a quality of enjoyment
in his reaction to the day’s toil. Now as they mounted to the higher
levels, he was ever more impressed by the very magnitude of the
wilderness about—stretching for miles in every direction to the shores
of the sea. The weary wastes got to him and stirred his imagination as
never before. He found, when he paused to make the sets, that a certain
measure of excitement was upon him. Evidently there was a tang and
flavor in this snow-swept wilderness through which he moved to make the
blood flow swiftly in the veins.
Partly it lay in the constant happening of the unexpected. Every few
rods brought its little adventure: perhaps a far-off glimpse of a fox;
perhaps a flock of hardy waterfowl, tardy in starting south, flushing up
with a thunderous beat of wings from the water; perhaps the swift dive
of that dreadful little killer, the mink; possibly the track of a
venerable old bear, already drowsy and contemplating hibernation, who
had but recently passed that way. But perhaps the greater impulse for
excitement lay in the expectation of what the next turn in the trail
might bring forth. There were only tracks here, but the old bear himself
might launch forth into a deadly charge from the next thicket of birch
trees. The fox was only a fleet shadow far away, but any moment they
might run into him face to face, in the act of devouring his prey. Ned
found that his senses had miraculously sharpened, that many little
nerves of which hitherto he had been unaware had wakened into life and
were tingling just under the skin. Until fatigue came heavily upon
him—only the first hint of it had yet come to his thighs and back—this
particular part of his daily duties need never oppress him.
But this dim, faltering hope was forgotten in the travail of the next
few hours. The load of heavy traps on his back; the labor of tramping
through the snow; most of all the loss of bodily heat through his
flimsy, snow-wet clothes soon rewarded him for daring to seek happiness
on this desert of despair. As the gray afternoon advanced, his quickened
spirit fell again: once more his senses were dulled, and the crooked,
boyish half-smile that had begun to manifest itself faded quickly from
his lips. Doomsdorf still marched in his easy, swinging gait; and ever
it was a harder fight to keep pace. Yet he dared not lag behind. His
master’s temper was ever uncertain in these long, tired hours of
afternoon.
Tired out, weakened, aching in every muscle and not far from the
absolute limit of exhaustion, Ned staggered to the cabin door at last.
He had put out all the traps he had brought from the home cabin: thence
his course lay along a blazed trail that skirted the edge of the narrow
timber belt, over the ridge to the Forks cabin. Doomsdorf entered, then
in the half-light stood regarding the younger man who had followed him
in.
Ned tried to stand erect. He must not yield yet to the almost
irresistible impulse to throw himself down on the floor and rest. He
dared not risk Doomsdorf’s anger; how did he know what instruments of
torture the latter’s satanic ingenuity might contrive in this lonely
cabin! Nor was his mood to be trusted to-night. His gray eyes shone with
suppressed excitement; and likely enough he would be glad of an excuse
for some diversion to pass the hours pleasantly. It was very lonely and
strange out here, in the open, in the full sweep of the wind over the
barren lands.
But Ned wasn’t aware of Doomsdorf’s plans. The great blond man stretched
his arms, yawning, buttoned his coat tighter about him, and turned to
go. “I’ll see you in about five days,” he remarked laconically.
Ned wakened abruptly from his revery. “You mean—you aren’t going to
show me anything more?”
“There’s nothing more you can’t learn by yourself—by hard experience.
I’ve given you your map and your directions for the trap line. A baby
couldn’t miss it. There’s traps on the wall—scatter ’em along between
here and the Forks cabin. There you will find another bunch to put
between there and Thirty-Mile cabin. So on clear around. Over your head
you see the stretchers.”
Ned looked up, and over the rafters, among other supplies, were laid a
large number of small boards, planed smooth and of different sizes.
“I’ve shown you how to set your traps, for every kind of an animal,”
Doomsdorf went on. “You ought to be able to do the rest. By the time you
come around, we’ll likely have freezing weather—that means you’ll have
to thaw out your animals before you skin them. If it’s a big animal,
dead in the trap, too heavy to carry into camp, you’ll have to make a
fire in the snow and thaw him out there. Otherwise bring ’em in. You saw
me skin that otter I shot—skin all the smaller animals the same way.
Simply split ’em under the legs and peel ’em out toward the head, as you
would a banana. Of course you’ll spoil plenty of skins at first, so far
as market value is concerned, but they’ll be all right for your own use.
The closer you can skin them, the less fat you leave on the pelts, the
less you’ll have to flesh them when you get to your cabin. When you
can’t strip off any more fat, turn ’em wrong side out on one of those
boards—stretching them tight. Use the biggest board you can put in.
Then hang ’em up in the cabin to dry. A skin like a beaver, that you
slit up the belly and which comes off almost round, nail on the wall.
All the little tricks of the trade will come in time.
“Here and here and here”—he paused, to put in Ned’s hands a clasp
hunting knife, razor sharp, a small pocket hone to whet his tools, and a
light axe that had been hanging back of the stove—“are some things
you’ll need. The time will come when you’ll need snowshoes, too. I ought
to make you make them yourself, but you’d never get it done and I’d
never get any furs. There’s a pair on the rafters. Now I’m going to
tramp back to the cabin to spend the night—in more agreeable company.”
For a moment the two men stood regarding each other in absolute silence.
Then Doomsdorf’s keen ears, eager for such sounds, caught the whisper of
Ned’s troubled breathing. Presently a leering smile flashed through the
blond beard.
It was as he thought. Ned’s mind was no longer on furs. His face had
been drawn and dark with fatigue, but now a darker cloud spread across
it, like a storm through open skies, as some blood-curdling thought made
ghastly progress through his brain. At first it was only startled
amazement, then swift disbelief—the manifestation of that strange quirk
in human consciousness that ever tries to shield the spirit from the
truth—and finally terror, stark and without end. It showed in the
tragic loosening of every facial muscle; in the cold drops that came out
at the edge of the brown, waving hair; in the slow, fixed light in his
eyes.
This was what Doomsdorf loved. He had seen the same look in the faces of
prisoners—newly come to a stockade amid the snow and still hopeful that
the worst they had heard had been overdrawn—on seeing certain
implements of initiation; and it had been a source of considerable
amusement to him. This was the thing that his diseased soul craved. As
the young man reached imploring hands to his own great forearms, he
hurled him away with a ringing laugh.
“You mean—you and Lenore will be alone——” Ned asked.
“You saw the squaw start out with Bess?” was the triumphant answer. “But
why should you care? It was Lenore’s own wish to stay. She’d take me and
comfort any time, sooner than endure the cold with you. Of such stuff,
my boy, are women made.”
The hands reached out again, clasping tight upon Doomsdorf’s forearms.
Ned’s face, lifeless and white as a stone, was no longer loose with
terror. A desperate fury had brought him to the verge of madness.
“That’s a foul lie!” he shouted, reckless of Doomsdorf’s retaliation.
“She didn’t dream that you would do that——”
Doomsdorf struck him off, hurling him against the wall; but it was not
with the idea of inflicting punishment. Amused at his impotent rage, his
blow was not the driving shoulder blow which, before now, had broken a
human jaw to fragments. Nor did he carry through, hammering his victim
into insensibility at his leisure.
“That gets you a little, doesn’t it?” he taunted. Ned straightened,
staring at him as if he were a ghost. “Your sweetheart—that you’d sworn
was yours to the last ditch! I don’t mean that she’d give herself
willingly to me—yet. She’s just the kind of girl I’d expect a weakling
like yourself to pick out—the type that would sooner go wrong than
endure hardship. And that’s why she’s more or less safe, for the time
being at least, from me. Even if Sindy wasn’t coming back home
to-night—probably already there—you wouldn’t have to fear.”
Ned could not speak, but Doomsdorf looked at him with the fire of a
zealot in his eyes.
“I don’t want anything that’s that easy,” he said with infinite
contempt. “Sometimes the game is harder. I take back something I
inferred a moment ago—that _all_ women would do the same. The best of
them, the most of them, still will go through hell for an idea; and
that’s the kind whose spirit is worth while to break. Do you know any
one who right now, likely enough, is trudging along through this hellish
snow with forty pounds of traps over her back?”
Ned shuddered, hurling off his doubt, believing yet in the fidelity of
his star. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he answered.
“That’s what Bess Gilbert is doing, and you know it. There, young man,
is a woman worthy of my steel!”
He turned and strode out the door. Ned was left to his thoughts and the
still, small voices of the waste places, alone with the wilderness night
whose word was the master word of life, and with the wind that sobbed
unhappy secrets as it swept his cabin roof. He couldn’t help but listen,
there in the twilight. Thus the work of training Ned Cornet’s soul went
on, strengthening him to stand erect when that stern officer, the Truth,
looked into his eyes; teaching him the mastery of that bright sword of
fortitude and steadfastness whereby he could parry the most pitiless
blows of fate.