The trap-line of Pierre Eustach ran thirty miles straight west of Lac
Bain. It was not as long a line as Pierrot’s had been, but it was like a
main artery running through the heart of a rich fur country. It had
belonged to Pierre Eustach’s father, and his grandfather, and his
great-grandfather, and beyond that it reached, Pierre averred, back to
the very pulse of the finest blood in France. The books at McTaggart’s
post went back only as far as the great-grandfather end of it, the older
evidence of ownership being at Churchill. It was the finest game country
between Reindeer Lake and the Barren Lands. It was in December that
Baree came to it.
Again he was travelling southward in a slow and wandering fashion,
seeking food in the deep snows. The _Kistisew Kestin_, or Great Storm,
had come earlier than usual this winter, and for a week after it
scarcely a hoof or claw was moving. Baree, unlike the other creatures,
did not bury himself in the snow and wait for the skies to clear and
crust to form. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two
years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and
wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute’s, heavy and yet
muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed
husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of the _Wuttooi_, or
blood-film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His
jaws were like Kazan’s, perhaps even more powerful. Through all that
week of the Big Storm he travelled without food. There were four days of
snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and after that three days
of intense cold in which every living creature kept to their warm
dugouts in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed themselves in. One
might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose and not have guessed
it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of the storm but did not
allow the snow to gather over him.
Every trapper from Hudson’s Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew
that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking food,
and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the biggest
chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over their
trap-lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on the
eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over
Pierre Eustach’s line, which was now his own for the season. It took him
two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the
fallen “trap-houses,” and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was
back at Lac Bain.
It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of
McTaggart’s line. McTaggart’s trail was fresh in the snow about the
cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his
body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps
half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate itself
with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute there
rumbled in Baree’s chest a deep and sullen growl. For many minutes after
that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the cabin. Then
slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer, until at
last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of life came
from inside, but he could smell the _old_ smell of McTaggart. Then he
faced the wilderness—the direction in which the trap-line ran back to
Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles twitched. He whined. Pictures
were assembling more and more vividly in his mind—the fight in the
cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm’s edge—even
the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the
rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great yearning, almost
expectation. Then it died slowly away. After all, the scent in the snow
was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill, and not of anything
that he had loved. For an instant nature had impressed on him the
significance of associations—a brief space only, and then it was gone.
The whine died away, but in its place came again that ominous growl.
Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin
struck the first trap on the line. Hunger had caved in his sides until
he was like a starved wolf. In the first trap-house McTaggart had placed
as bait the hind-quarter of a snowshoe rabbit. Baree reached in
cautiously. He had learned many things on Pierrot’s line: he had learned
what the snap of a trap meant; he had felt the cruel pain of steel jaws;
he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would do when the
trigger was sprung—and Nepeese herself had taught him that he was never
to touch a poison-bait. So he closed his teeth gently in the rabbit
flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself could have
done. He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five baits without
springing a pan. The sixth was a deadfall. He circled about this until
he had beaten a path in the snow. Then he went on into a warm balsam
swamp and found himself a bed for the night.
The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow
between the wits of man and beast. To Baree the encroachment of Bush
McTaggart’s trap-line was not war; it was existence. It was to furnish
him food, as Pierrot’s line had furnished him food for many weeks. But
he sensed the fact that in this instance he was law-breaker and had an
enemy to outwit. Had it been good hunting weather he might have gone on,
for the unseen hand that was guiding his wanderings was drawing him
slowly but surely back to the old beaver pond and the Gray Loon. As it
was, with the snow deep and soft under him—so deep that in places he
plunged into it over his ears—McTaggart’s trap-line was like a trail of
manna made for his special use. He followed in the factor’s snowshoe
tracks, and in the third trap killed a rabbit. When he had finished with
it nothing but the hair and crimson patches of blood lay upon the snow.
Starved for many days, he was filled with a wolfish hunger, and before
the day was over he robbed the bait from a full dozen of McTaggart’s
traps. Three times he struck poison-baits—venison or caribou fat in the
heart of which was a dose of strychnine, and each time his keen nostrils
detected the danger. Pierrot had more than once noted the amazing fact
that Baree could sense the presence of poison even when it was most
skillfully injected into the frozen carcass of a deer. Foxes and wolves
ate of flesh from which his super-sensitive power of detecting the
presence of deadly danger turned him away. So he passed Bush McTaggart’s
poisoned tidbits, sniffing them on the way, and leaving the story of his
suspicion in the manner of his footprints in the snow. Where McTaggart
had halted at midday to cook his dinner Baree made these same cautious
circles with his feet.
The second day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated
smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive. McTaggart
was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands
from the traps and “houses,” and every now and then the smell of him was
strong in Baree’s nose. This wrought in Baree a swift and definite
antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred where a few days before hatred
was almost forgotten. There is, perhaps, in the animal mind a process of
simple computation which does not quite achieve the distinction of
reason, and which is not altogether instinct, but which produces results
that might be ascribed to either. Baree did not add two and two together
to make four; he did not go back step by step to prove to himself that
the man to whom this trap-line belonged was the cause of all his griefs
and troubles—but he _did_ find himself possessed of a deep and yearning
hatred. McTaggart was the one creature except the wolves that he had
ever hated; it was McTaggart who had hurt him, McTaggart who had hurt
Pierrot, McTaggart who had made him lose his beloved Nepeese—_and
McTaggart was here on this trap-line_! If he had been wandering before,
without object or destiny, he was given a mission now. It was to keep to
the traps. To feed himself. And to vent his hatred and his vengeance as
he lived.
The second day, in the centre of a lake, he came upon the body of a wolf
that had died of one of the poison-baits. For a half-hour he mauled the
dead beast until its skin was torn into ribbons. He did not taste the
flesh. It was repugnant to him. It was his vengeance on the wolf breed.
He stopped when he was half a dozen miles from Lac Bain, and turned
back. At this particular point the line crossed a frozen stream beyond
which was an open plain, and over that plain came—when the wind was
right—the smoke and smell of the Post. The second night Baree lay with a
full stomach in a thicket of banksian pine; the third day he was
travelling westward over the trap-line again.
Early on this morning Bush McTaggart started out to gather his catch,
and where he crossed the stream six miles from Lac Bain he first saw
Baree’s tracks. He stopped to examine them with sudden and unusual
interest, falling at last on his knees, whipping off the glove from his
right hand, and picking up a single hair.
“The black wolf!”
He uttered the words in an odd, hard voice, and involuntarily his eyes
turned straight in the direction of the Gray Loon. After that, even more
carefully than before, he examined one of the clearly impressed tracks
in the snow. When he rose to his feet there was in his face the look of
one who had made an unpleasant discovery.
“A black wolf!” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders. “Bah! Lerue is
a fool. It is a dog.” And then, after a moment, he muttered in a voice
scarcely louder than a whisper, “_her dog_.”
He went on, travelling in the trail of the dog. A new excitement
possessed him that was more thrilling than the excitement of the hunt.
Being human, it was his privilege to add two and two together, and out
of two and two he made—Baree. There was little doubt in his mind. The
thought had flashed on him first when Lerue had mentioned the black
wolf. He was convinced after his examination of the tracks. They were
the tracks of a dog, and the dog was black. Then he came to the first
trap that had been robbed of its bait.
Under his breath he cursed. The bait was gone, and the trap was
unsprung. The sharpened stick that had transfixed the bait was pulled
out clean.
All that day Bush McTaggart followed a trail where Baree had left traces
of his presence. Trap after trap he found robbed. On the lake he came
upon the mangled wolf. From the first disturbing excitement of his
discovery of Baree’s presence his humour changed slowly to one of rage,
and his rage increased as the day dragged out. He was not unacquainted
with four-footed robbers of the trap-line, but usually a wolf or a fox
or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps. But
in this case Baree was travelling straight from trap to trap, and his
footprints in the snow showed that he stopped at each. There was, to
McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work. He evaded the
poisons. Not once did he stretch his head or paw within the danger zone
of a deadfall. For apparently no reason whatever he had destroyed a
splendid mink, whose glossy fur lay scattered in worthless bits over the
snow. Toward the end of the day McTaggart came to a deadfall in which a
lynx had died. Baree had torn the silvery flank of the animal until the
skin was of less than half value. McTaggart cursed aloud, and his breath
came hot.
At dusk he reached the shack Pierre Eustach had built midway of his
line, and took inventory of his fur. It was not more than a third of a
catch; the lynx was half ruined, a mink was torn completely in two. The
second day he found still greater ruin, still more barren traps. He was
like a madman. When he arrived at the second cabin, late in the
afternoon, Baree’s tracks were not an hour old in the snow. Three times
during the night he heard the dog howling.
The third day McTaggart did not return to Lac Bain, but began a cautious
hunt for Baree. An inch or two of fresh snow had fallen, and as if to
take even greater measure of vengeance from his man-enemy Baree had left
his footprints freely within a radius of a hundred yards of the cabin.
It was half an hour before McTaggart could pick out the straight trail,
and he followed this for two hours into a thick banksian swamp. Baree
kept with the wind. Now and then he caught the scent of his pursuer; a
dozen times he waited until the other was so close he could hear the
snap of brush, or the metallic click of twigs against his rifle barrel.
And then, with a sudden inspiration that brought the curses afresh to
McTaggart’s lips, he swung in a wide circle and cut straight back for
the trap-line. When the Factor reached the line, along toward noon,
Baree had already begun his work. He had killed and eaten a rabbit; he
had robbed three traps in the distance of a mile, and he was headed
again straight over the trap-line for Post Lac Bain.
It was the fifth day that Bush McTaggart returned to his post. He was in
an ugly mood. Only Valence of the four Frenchmen was there, and it was
Valence who heard his story, and afterward heard him cursing Marie. She
came into the store a little later, big-eyed and frightened, one of her
cheeks flaming red where McTaggart had struck her. While the storekeeper
was getting her the canned salmon McTaggart wanted for his dinner
Valence found the opportunity to whisper softly in her ear:
“M’sieu Lerue has trapped a silver fox,” he said with low triumph. “He
loves you, _Mon ami_, and he will have a splendid catch by spring—and
sends you this message from his cabin up on The Little Black Bear With
No Tail: _Be ready to fly when the soft snows come!_”
Marie did not look at him, but she heard, and her eyes shone so like
stars when the young storekeeper gave her the salmon that he said to
Valence, when she had gone:
“Blue Death, but she is still beautiful at times. Valence!”
To which Valence nodded with an odd smile.