The young fir wood covered a tract of poor land some miles in width,
between the outskirts of the ancient forest and a small settlement known
as Far Bazziley. In the best house of Far Bazziley—that of the parish
clergyman—there lived a boy whom chance, and the capricious destiny of
the wild folk, led to take a sudden lively interest in the moonlight
trails. Belonging to a different class from the other children of the
settlement, he was kept from the district school and tutored at home,
with more or less regularity, by his father. His lesson hours, as a rule,
fell when the other boys were busy at their chores—and it was the
tradition of Far Bazziley that boys were born to work, not play. Thus it
happened that the boy had little of the companionship of his fellows.
Being of too eager and adventurous a spirit to spend much of his leisure
in reading, he was thrown upon his own resources, and often found himself
hungry for new interests. Animals he loved, and of all cruelty toward
them he was fiercely intolerant. Great or small, it hurt him to see them
hurt; and he was not slow to resent and resist that kind of discomfort.
On more than one occasion he had thrashed other boys of the settlement
for torturing, with boyish playfulness and ingenuity, superfluous kittens
which thrifty housewives had confided to them to drown. These rough
interferences with custom did him no harm, for the boys were forced to
respect his prowess, and they knew well enough that kittens had some kind
of claim upon civilisation. But when it came to his overbearing
championship of snakes, that was another matter, and he made himself
unpopular. It was rank tyranny, and disgustingly unnatural, if they could
not crush a snake’s back with stones and then lay it out in the sun to
die gradually, without the risk of getting a black eye and bloodied nose
for it.
It was in vain the boy explained, on the incontrovertible authority of
his father, that the brilliant garter-snake, the dainty little green
snake, and indeed all the snakes of the neighbourhood without exception,
were as harmless as lady-bugs. A snake was a snake; and in the eyes of
Far Bazziley to kill one, with such additions of painfulness in the
process as could be devised on the moment, was to obey Biblical
injunction. The boy, not unnaturally, was thrust more and more into the
lonely eminence of his isolation.
But one unfailing resource he had always with him, and that was the hired
man. His mother might be, as she usually was, too absorbed in household
cares to give adequate heed to his searching interrogations. His father
might spend huge blanks of his time in interminable drives to outlying
parts of his parish. But the hired man was always at hand. It was not
always the same hired man. But whether his name were Bill or Tom, Henry
or Mart or Chris, the boy found that he could safely look for some
uniformity of characteristics, and that he could depend upon each in turn
for some teaching that seemed to him more practical and timely than
equations or the conjugation of _nolo_, _nolle_, _nolui_.
At this particular time of the frequenting of the moonlight trails, the
boy was unusually fortunate in his hired man. The latter was a boyish,
enthusiastic fellow, by the name of Andy, who had an interest in the kind
of things which the boy held important. One morning as he was helping
Andy with the barn work, the man said:
“It’s about full moon now, and right handy weather for rabbit-snarin’.
What say if we git off to the woods this afternoon, if your father’ll let
us, an’ set some snares fer to-night, afore a new snow comes and spiles
the tracks?”
The silent and mysterious winter woods, the shining spaces of the snow
marked here and there with strange footprints leading to unknown lairs,
the clear glooms, the awe and the sense of unseen presences—these were
what came thronging into the boy’s mind at Andy’s suggestion. All the
wonderful possibilities of it! The wild spirit of adventure, the hunting
zest of elemental man, stirred in his veins at the idea. Had he seen a
rabbit being hurt he would have rushed with indignant pity to the rescue.
But the idea of rabbit-snaring, as presented by Andy’s exciting words,
fired a side of his imagination so remote from pity as to have no
communication with it whatever along the nerves of sympathy or
association. He was a vigorous and normal boy, and the jewel of
consistency (which is usually paste) was therefore of as little
consequence to him as to the most enlightened of his elders. He threw
himself with fervour into Andy’s scheme, plied him with exhaustive
questions as to the methods of making and setting snares, and spent the
rest of the morning, under direction, in whittling with his pocket-knife
the required uprights and cross-pieces, and twisting the deadly nooses of
fine copper wire. In the prime of the afternoon the two, on their
snowshoes, set off gaily for the wood of the young fir-trees.
Up the long slope of the snowy pasture lots, where the drifted hillocks
sparkled crisply, and the black stumps here and there broke through in
suggestive, fantastic shapes, and the gray rampikes towered bleakly to
the upper air, the two climbed with brisk steps, the dry cold a tonic to
nerve and vein. As they entered the fir woods a fine, balsamy tang
breathed up to greet them, and the boy’s nostrils took eager note of it.
The first tracks to meet their eyes were the delicate footprints of the
red squirrel, ending abruptly at the foot of a tree somewhat larger than
its fellows. Then the boy’s sharp eyes marked a trail very slender and
precise—small, clear dots one after the other; and he had a feeling of
protective tenderness to the maker of that innocent little trail, till
Andy told him that he of the dainty footprints was the bloodthirsty and
indomitable weasel, the scourge of all the lesser forest kin.
The weasel’s trail led them presently to another track, consisting of
those triplicate clusters of prints, dropped lightly and far apart; and
Andy said, “Rabbits! and the weasel’s after them!” The words made a swift
picture in the boy’s imagination; and he never forgot the trail of the
wild rabbit or the trail of the weasel.
Crossing these tracks, they soon came to one more beaten, along which it
was plain that many rabbits had fared. This they followed, one going on
either side of it that it might not be obliterated by the broad trail of
their snowshoes; and in a little time it led them out upon the sheltered
glade whereon the merrymakers of the night before had held their revels.
In the unclouded downpour of the sunlight the tracks stood forth with
emphasised distinctness, a melting, vapourous violet against the
gold-white of the snowy surface; and to the boy’s eyes, though not to the
man’s, was revealed a formal and intricate pattern in the tangled
markings. To Andy it was incomprehensible; but he saw at once that in the
ways leading to the open it would be well to plant the snares. The boy,
on the other hand, had a keener insight, and exclaimed at once, “What fun
they must have been having!” But his sympathy was asleep. Nothing, at
that moment, could wake it up so far as to make him realise the part he
was about to play toward those childlike revellers of the moonlight
trails.
Skirting the glade, and stepping carefully over the trails, they
proceeded to set their snares at the openings of three of the main
alleys; and for a little while the strokes of their hatchets rang out
frostily on the still air as they chopped down fragrant armfuls of the
young fir branches.
Each of the three snares was set in this fashion: First they stuck the
fir branches into the snow to form a thick green fence on both sides of
the trail, with a passage only wide enough for one rabbit at a time to
pass through. On each side of this passageway they drove securely a
slender stake, notched on the inner face. Over the opening they bent down
a springy sapling, securing its top, by a strong cord, to a small wooden
cross-piece which was caught and held in the notches of the two uprights.
From the under side of this cross-piece was suspended the easy-running
noose of copper wire, just ample enough for a rabbit’s head, with the
ears lying back, to enter readily.
By the time the snares were set it was near sundown, and the young
fir-trees were casting long, pointed, purple shadows. With the drawing on
of evening the boy felt stirrings of a wild, predatory instinct. His skin
tingled with a still excitement which he did not understand, and he went
with a fierce yet furtive wariness, peering into the shadows as if for
prey. As he and Andy emerged from the woods, and strode silently down the
desolate slopes of the pasture lots, he could think of nothing but his
return on the morrow to see what prizes had fallen to his snares. His
tenderness of heart, his enlightened sympathy with the four-footed
kindred, much of his civilisation, in fact, had vanished for the moment,
burnt out in the flame of an instinct handed down to him from his
primeval ancestors.