When Baree ventured forth from under his rock at the beginning of the
next day, he was a much older puppy than when he met Papayuchisew, the
young owl, in his path near the old windfall. If experience can be made
to take the place of age, he had aged a great deal in the last
forty-eight hours. In fact, he had passed almost out of puppyhood. He
awoke with a new and much broader conception of the world. It was a big
place. It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf were
not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit plot of
sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one greatest
instinct of beasts—the primal understanding that it is the strong that
prey upon the weak—was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he quite
naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size alone.
Thus the bear was more terrible than Kazan, and the moose was more
terrible than the bear.
It was quite fortunate for Baree that this instinct did not go to the
limit in the beginning and make him understand that his own breed—the
wolf—was most feared of all the creatures, claw, hoof, and wing, of the
forests. Otherwise, like the small boy who thinks he can swim before he
has mastered a stroke, he might somewhere have jumped in beyond his
depth and had his head chewed off.
Very much alert, with the hair standing up along his spine, and a little
growl in his throat, Baree smelled of the big footprints made by the
bear and the moose. It was the bear-scent that made him growl. He
followed the tracks to the edge of the creek. After that he resumed his
wandering, and also his hunt for food.
For two hours he did not find a crayfish. Then he came out of the green
timber into the edge of a burned-over country. Here everything was
black. The stumps of the trees stood up like huge charred canes. It was
a comparatively fresh “burn” of last autumn, and the ash was still soft
under Baree’s feet. Straight through this black region ran the creek,
and over it hung a blue sky in which the sun was shining. It was quite
inviting to Baree. The fox, the wolf, the moose, and the caribou would
have turned back from the edge of this dead country. In another year it
would be good hunting-ground, but now it was lifeless. Even the owls
would have found nothing to eat out there.
It was the blue sky and the sun and the softness of the earth under his
feet that lured Baree. It was pleasant to travel in after his painful
experiences in the forest. He continued to follow the stream, though
there was now little possibility of his finding anything to eat. The
water had become sluggish and dark; the channel was choked with charred
débris that had fallen into it when the forest had burned, and its
shores were soft and muddy. After a time, when Baree stopped and looked
about him, he could no longer see the green timber he had left. He was
alone in that desolate wilderness of charred tree-corpses. It was as
still as death, too. Not the chirp of a bird broke the silence. In the
soft ash he could not hear the fall of his own feet. But he was not
frightened. There was the assurance of safety here.
If he could only find something to eat! That was the master-thought that
possessed Baree. Instinct had not yet impressed upon him that this which
he saw all about him was starvation. He went on, seeking hopefully for
food. But at last, as the hours passed, hope began to die out of him.
The sun sank westward. The sky grew less blue; a low wind began to ride
over the tops of the stubs, and now and then one of them fell with a
startling crash.
Baree could go no farther. An hour before dusk he lay down in the open,
weak and starved. The sun disappeared behind the forest. The moon rolled
up from the east. The sky glittered with stars—and all through the night
Baree lay as if dead. When morning came, he dragged himself to the
stream for a drink. With his last strength he went on. It was the wolf
urging him—compelling him to struggle to the last for his life. The dog
in him wanted to lie down and die. But the wolf-spark in him burned
stronger. In the end it won. Half a mile farther on he came again to the
green timber.
In the forests as well as in the great cities fate plays its changing
and whimsical hand. If Baree had dragged himself into the timber half an
hour later he would have died. He was too far gone now to hunt for
crayfish or kill the weakest bird. But he came just as Sekoosew, the
ermine—the most bloodthirsty little pirate of all the wild—was making a
kill.
That was fully a hundred yards from where Baree lay stretched out under
a spruce, almost ready to give up the ghost. Sekoosew was a mighty
hunter of his kind. His body was about seven inches long, with a tiny
black-tipped tail appended to it, and he weighed perhaps five ounces. A
baby’s fingers could have encircled him anywhere between his four legs,
and his little sharp-pointed head with its beady red eyes could slip
easily through a hole an inch in diameter. For several centuries
Sekoosew had helped to make history. It was he—when his pelt was worth a
hundred dollars in king’s gold—that lured the first shipload of
gentlemen adventurers over the sea, with Prince Rupert at their head; it
was little Sekoosew who was responsible for the forming of the great
Hudson’s Bay Company and the discovery of half a continent; for almost
three centuries he had fought his fight for existence with the trapper.
And now, though he was no longer worth his weight in yellow gold, he was
the cleverest, the fiercest, and the most merciless of all the creatures
that made up his world.
As Baree lay under his tree, Sekoosew was creeping on his prey. His game
was a big fat spruce-hen standing under a thicket of black currant
bushes. The ear of no living thing could have heard Sekoosew’s movement.
He was like a shadow—a gray dot here, a flash there, now hidden behind a
stick no larger than a man’s wrist, appearing for a moment, the next
instant gone as completely as if he had not existed. Thus he approached
from fifty feet to within three feet of the spruce-hen. That was his
favourite striking distance. Unerringly he launched himself at the
drowsy partridge’s throat, and his needle-like teeth sank through
feathers into flesh.
Sekoosew was prepared for what happened then. It always happened when he
attacked Napanao, the wood-partridge. Her wings were powerful, and her
first instinct when he struck was always that of flight. She rose
straight up now with a great thunder of wings. Sekoosew hung tight, his
teeth buried deep in her throat, and his tiny, sharp claws clinging to
her like hands. Through the air he whizzed with her, biting deeper and
deeper, until a hundred yards from where that terrible death-thing had
fastened to her throat, Napanao crashed again to earth.
Where she fell was not ten feet from Baree. For a few moments he looked
at the struggling mass of feathers in a daze, not quite comprehending
that at last food was almost within his reach. Napanao was dying, but
she still struggled convulsively with her wings. Baree rose stealthily,
and after a moment in which he gathered all his remaining strength, he
made a rush for her. His teeth sank into her breast—and not until then
did he see Sekoosew. The ermine had raised his head from the death-grip
at the partridge’s throat, and his savage little red eyes glared for a
single instant into Baree’s. Here was something too big to kill, and
with an angry squeak the ermine was gone. Napanao’s wings relaxed, and
the throb went out of her body. She was dead. Baree hung on until he was
sure. Then he began his feast.
With murder in his heart, Sekoosew hovered near, whisking here and there
but never coming nearer than half a dozen feet from Baree. His eyes were
redder than ever. Now and then he emitted a sharp little squeak of rage.
Never had he been so angry in all his life! To have a fat partridge
stolen from him like this was an imposition he had never suffered
before. He wanted to dart in and fasten his teeth in Baree’s jugular.
But he was too good a general to make the attempt, too good a Napoleon
to jump deliberately to his Waterloo. An owl he would have fought. He
might even have given battle to his big brother—and his deadliest
enemy—the mink. But in Baree he recognized the wolf-breed, and he vented
his spite at a distance. After a time his good sense returned, and he
went off on another hunt.
Baree ate a third of the partridge, and the remaining two thirds he
cached very carefully at the foot of the big spruce. Then he hurried
down to the creek for a drink. The world looked very different to him
now. After all, one’s capacity for happiness depends largely on how
deeply one has suffered. One’s hard luck and misfortune form the
measuring-stick for future good luck and fortune. So it was with Baree.
Forty-eight hours ago a full stomach would not have made him a tenth
part as happy as he was now. Then his greatest longing was for his
mother. Since then a still greater yearning had come into his life—for
food. In a way it was fortunate for him that he had almost died of
exhaustion and starvation, for his experience had helped to make a man
of him—or a wolf-dog, just as you are of a mind to put it. He would miss
his mother for a long time. But he would never miss her again as he had
missed her yesterday, and the day before.
That afternoon Baree took a long nap close to his cache. Then he
uncovered the partridge and ate his supper. When his fourth night alone
came, he did not hide himself as he had done on the three preceding
nights. He was strangely and curiously alert. Under the moon and the
stars he prowled in the edge of the forest and out on the burn. He
listened with a new kind of thrill to the far-away cry of a wolf-pack on
the hunt. He listened to the ghostly _whoo-whoo-whoo_ of the owls
without shivering. Sounds and silences were beginning to hold a new and
significant note for him.
For another day and night Baree remained in the vicinity of his cache.
When the last bone was picked, he moved on. He now entered a country
where subsistence was no longer a perilous problem for him. It was a
lynx country, and where there are lynx, there are also a great many
rabbits. When the rabbits thin out, the lynx emigrate to better
hunting-grounds. As the snowshoe rabbit breeds all the summer through,
Baree found himself in a land of plenty. It was not difficult for him to
catch and kill the young rabbits. For a week he prospered and grew
bigger and stronger each day. But all the time, stirred by that seeking,
Wanderlust spirit—still hoping to find the old home and his mother—he
travelled into the north and east.
And this was straight into the trapping country of Pierrot, the
halfbreed.
Pierrot, until two years ago, had believed himself to be one of the most
fortunate men in the big wilderness. That was before _La Mort Rouge_—the
Red Death—came. He was half French, and he had married a Cree chief’s
daughter, and in their log cabin on the Gray Loon they had lived for
many years in great prosperity and happiness. Pierrot was proud of three
things in this wild world of his: he was immensely proud of Wyola, his
royal-blooded wife; he was proud of his daughter; and he was proud of
his reputation as a hunter. Until the Red Death came, life was quite
complete for him. It was then—two years ago—that the smallpox killed his
princess-wife. He still lived in the little cabin on the Gray Loon, but
he was a different Pierrot. The heart was sick in him. It would have
died, had it not been for Nepeese, his daughter. His wife had named her
Nepeese, which means the Willow. Nepeese had grown up like the willow,
slender as a reed, with all her mother’s wild beauty, and with a little
of the French thrown in. She was sixteen, with great, dark, wonderful
eyes, and hair so beautiful that an agent from Montreal passing that way
had once tried to buy it. It fell in two shining braids, each as big as
a man’s wrist, almost to her knees. “_Non, M’sieu_,” Pierrot had said, a
cold glitter in his eyes as he saw what was in the agent’s face. “It is
not for barter.”
Two days after Baree had entered his trapping-ground, Pierrot came in
from the forests with a troubled look in his face.
“Something is killing off the young beavers,” he explained to Nepeese,
speaking to her in French. “It is a lynx or a wolf. To-morrow——” He
shrugged his thin shoulders, and smiled at her.
“We will go on the hunt,” laughed Nepeese happily, in her soft Cree.
When Pierrot smiled at her like that, and began with “To-morrow,” it
always meant that she might go with him on the adventure he was
contemplating.
* * * * *
Still another day later, at the end of the afternoon, Baree crossed the
Gray Loon on a bridge of driftwood that had wedged between two trees.
This was to the north. Just beyond the driftwood bridge there was a
small open, and on the edge of this Baree paused to enjoy the last of
the setting sun. As he stood motionless and listening, his tail drooping
low, his ears alert, his sharp-pointed nose sniffing the new country to
the north, there was not a pair of eyes in the forest that would not
have taken him for a young wolf.
From behind a clump of young balsams, a hundred yards away, Pierrot and
Nepeese had watched him come over the driftwood bridge. Now was the
time, and Pierrot levelled his rifle. It was not until then that Nepeese
touched his arm softly. Her breath came a little excitedly as she
whispered:
“Nootawe, let me shoot. I can kill him!”
With a low chuckle Pierrot gave the gun to her. He counted the whelp as
already dead. For Nepeese, at that distance, could send a bullet into an
inch square nine times out of ten. And Nepeese, aiming carefully at
Baree, pressed steadily with her brown forefinger upon the trigger.