For five years the big panther, who ruled the ragged plateau around the
head waters of the Upsalquitch, had been well content with his
hunting-ground. This winter, however, it had failed him. His tawny sides
were lank with hunger. Rabbits—and none too many of them—were but thin
and spiritless meat for such fiery blood as his. His mighty and restless
muscles consumed too swiftly the unsatisfying food; and he was compelled
to hunt continually, foregoing the long, recuperative sleeps which the
tense springs of his organism required. Every fibre in his body was
hungering for a full meal of red-blooded meat, the sustaining flesh of
deer or caribou. The deer, of course, he did not expect on these high
plains and rough hills of the Upsalquitch. They loved the well-wooded
ridges of the sheltered, low-lying lands. But the caribou—for five years
their wandering herds had thronged these plains, where the mosses they
loved grew luxuriantly. And now, without warning or excuse, they had
vanished.
The big panther knew the caribou. He knew that, with no reason other than
their own caprice, the restless gray herds would drift away, forsaking
the most congenial pastures, journey swiftly and eagerly league upon
inconsequent league, and at last rest seemingly content with more
perilous ranges and scanter forage, in a region remote and new.
He was an old beast, ripe in the craft of the hunt; and the caribou had
done just what he knew in his heart they were likely to do. Nevertheless,
because the head waters of the Upsalquitch were much to his liking,—the
best hunting-ground, indeed, that he had ever found,—he had hoped for a
miracle; he had grown to expect that these caribou would stay where they
were well off. Their herds had thriven and increased during the five
years of his guardianship. He had killed only for his needs, never for
the lust of killing. He had kept all four-foot poachers far from his
preserves; and no hunters cared to push their way to the inaccessible
Upsalquitch while game was abundant on the Tobique and the Miramichi. He
knew all these wilderness waters of northern New Brunswick, having been
born not far from the sources of the Nashwaak, and worked his way
northward as soon as he was full-grown, to escape the hated neighbourhood
of the settlements. He knew that his vanished caribou would find no other
pastures so rich and safe as these which they had left. Nevertheless,
they had left them. And now, after a month of rabbit meat, he would
forsake them, too. He would move down westward, and either come upon the
trail of his lost herds, or push over nearer to the St. John valley and
find a country of deer.
[Illustration: “HIS BIG, SPREADING PAWS CARRIED HIM OVER ITS SURFACE AS
IF HE HAD BEEN SHOD WITH SNOW-SHOES.”]
The big panther was no lover of long journeyings, and he did not travel
with the air of one bent on going far. He lingered much to hunt rabbits
on the way; and wherever he found a lair to his liking he settled himself
as if for a long sojourn. Nevertheless he had no idea of halting until he
should reach a land of deer or caribou, and his steady drift to westward
carried him far in the course of a week. The snow, though deep, was well
packed by a succession of driving winds, and his big, spreading paws
carried him over its surface as if he had been shod with snow-shoes.
By the end of a week, however, the continuous travelling on the
unsubstantial diet of rabbit meat had begun to tell upon him. He was
hungry and unsatisfied all the time, and his temper became abominable.
Now and then in the night he was fortunate enough to surprise a red
squirrel asleep in its nest, or a grouse rooting in its thicket; but
these were mere atoms to his craving, and moreover their flesh belonged
to the same pale order as that of his despised rabbits. When he came to a
beaver village, the rounded domes of the houses dotting the snowy level
of their pond, a faint steam of warmth and moisture arising from their
ventilating holes like smoke, he sometimes so far forgot himself as to
waste a few minutes in futile clawing at the roofs, though he knew well
enough that several feet of mud, frozen to the solidity of rock,
protected the savoury flat-tails from his appetite.
Once, in a deep, sheltered river-valley, where a strong rapid and a
narrow deep cascade kept open a black pool of water all through the
winter frost, his luck and his wits working together gained him a
luncheon of fat porcupine. Tempted from its den by the unwonted warmth of
noonday, the porcupine had crawled out upon a limb to observe how the
winter was passing, and to sniff for signs of spring in the air. At the
sight of the panther, who had climbed the tree and cut off its retreat,
it bristled its black and white quills, whirled about on its branch, and
eyed its foe with more anger than terror, confident in its pointed
spines.
The panther understood and respected that fine array of needle-points,
and ordinarily would have gone his way hungry rather than risk the peril
of getting his paws and nose stuck full of those barbed weapons. But just
now his cunning was very keenly on edge. He crawled within striking
distance of the porcupine, and reached out his great paw, gingerly
enough, to clutch the latter’s unprotected face. Instantly the porcupine
rolled itself into a bristling ball of needle-points and dropped to the
ground below.
The panther followed at a single bound; but there was no need whatever of
hurry. The porcupine lay on the snow, safely coiled up within its citadel
of quills; and the panther lay down beside it, waiting for it to unroll.
But after half an hour of this vain waiting, patience gave out and he
began experimenting. Extending his claws to the utmost, so that the
quill-points should not come in contact with the fleshy pads of his foot,
he softly turned the porcupine over. Now it chanced that the hard, glassy
snow whereon it lay sloped toward the open pool, and the bristling ball
moved several feet down the slope. The panther’s pale eyes gleamed with a
sudden thought. He pushed the ball again, very, very delicately. Again,
and yet again; till, suddenly, reaching a spot where the slope was
steeper, it rolled of its own accord, and dropped with a splash into the
icy current.
As it came to the surface the porcupine straightened itself out to swim
for the opposite shore. But like a flash the panther’s paw scooped under
it, and the long keen claws caught it in the unshielded belly. Unavailing
now were those myriad bristling spear-points; and when the panther
continued his journey he left behind him but a skin of quills and some
blood-stains on the snow, to tell the envious lucifees that one had
passed that way who knew how to outwit the porcupine.
On the following day, about noon, he came across an astonishing and
incomprehensible trail, at the first sight and scent of which the hair
rose along his backbone.
[Illustration: “HE PUSHED THE BALL AGAIN, VERY, VERY DELICATELY.”]
The scent of the strange trail he knew,—and hated it, and feared it. It
was the man-scent. But the shape and size of the tracks at first appalled
him. He had seen men, and the footprints of men; but never men with feet
so vast as these. The trail was perhaps an hour old. He sniffed at it and
puzzled over it for a time; and then, perceiving that the man-scent clung
only in a little depression about the centre of each track, concluded
that the man who had made the track was no bigger than such men as he had
seen. The rest of the trail was a puzzle, indeed, but it presently ceased
to appal. Thereupon he changed his direction, and followed the man’s
trail at a rapid pace. His courage was not strung up to the pitch of
resolving to attack this most dangerous and most dreaded of all
creatures; but his hunger urged him insistently, and he hoped for some
lucky chance of catching the man at a disadvantage. Moreover, it would
soon be night, and he knew that with darkness his courage would increase,
while that of the man—a creature who could not see well in the
dark—should by all the laws of the wilderness diminish. He licked his
lean chops at the thought of what would happen to the man unawares.
For some time he followed the trail at a shambling lope, every now and
then dropping into an easy trot for the easement of the change.
Occasionally he would stop and lie down for a few minutes at full length,
to rest his overdriven lungs, being short-winded after the fashion of his
kind. But when, toward sundown, when the shadows began to lengthen and
turn blue upon the snow, and the western sky, through the spruce-tops,
took upon a bitter wintry orange dye, he noticed that the trail was
growing fresher. So strong did the man-scent become that he expected
every moment to catch a glimpse of the man through the thicket. Thereupon
he grew very cautious. No longer would he either lope or trot; but he
crept forward, belly to the ground, setting down each paw with delicacy
and precaution. He kept turning the yellow flame of his eyes from side to
side continually, searching the undergrowth on every hand, and often
looking back along his own track. He knew that men were sometimes
inconceivably stupid, but at other times cunning beyond all the craft of
the wood folk. He was not going to let himself become the hunted instead
of the hunter, caught in the old device of the doubled trail.
At last, as twilight was gathering headway among the thickets, he was
startled by a succession of sharp sounds just ahead of him. He stopped,
and crouched motionless in his tracks. But presently he recognised and
understood the sharp sounds, especially when they were followed by a
crackling and snapping of dry branches. They were axe-strokes. He had
heard them in the neighbourhood of the lumber camps, before his five
years’ retirement on the head waters of the Upsalquitch. With
comprehension came new courage,—for the wild folk put human wisdom to
shame in their judicious fear of what they do not understand. He crept a
little nearer, and from safe hiding watched the man at his task of
gathering dry firewood for the night. From time to time the man looked
about him alertly, half suspiciously, as if he felt himself watched; but
he could not discover the pale, cruel eyes that followed him unwinking
from the depths of the hemlock thicket.
In a few minutes the panther was surprised to see the man take one of his
heavy snow-shoes and begin digging vigorously at the snow. In a little
while there was a circular hole dug so deep that when the man stood up in
it little more than his head and shoulders appeared over the edge. Then
he carried in a portion of the wood which he had cut, together with a big
armful of spruce boughs; and he busied himself for awhile at the bottom
of the hole, his head appearing now and then, but only for a moment. The
panther was filled with curiosity, but restrained himself from drawing
nearer to investigate. Then, when it had grown so dark that he was about
to steal from his hiding and creep closer, suddenly there was a flash of
light, and smoke and flame arose from the hole, throwing a red, revealing
glare on every covert; and the panther, his lips twitching and his hair
rising, shrank closer into his retreat.
The smoke, and the scent of the burning sticks, killed the scent of the
man in the panther’s nostrils. But presently there was a new scent, warm,
rich, and appetising. The panther did not know it, but he liked it. It
was the smell of frying bacon. Seeing that the man was much occupied over
the fire, the hungry beast made a partial circuit of the camp-fire, and
noiselessly climbed a tree whence he could look down into the mysterious
hole.
From this post of vantage he watched the man make his meal, smoke his
pipe, replenish the fire, and finally, rolling himself in his heavy
blanket, compose himself to sleep. Then, little by little, the panther
crept nearer. He feared the fire; but the fire soon began to die down,
and he despised it as he saw it fading. He crept out upon a massive
hemlock limb, almost overlooking the hole, but screened by a veil of fine
green branches. From this post he could spring upon the sleeper at one
bound,—as soon as he could make up his mind to the audacious enterprise.
He feared the man, even asleep; in fact, he stood in strange awe of the
helpless, slumbering form. But little by little he began to realise that
he feared his own hunger more. Lower and lower sank the fainting fire;
and he resolved that as soon as the sleeper should stir in his sleep,
beginning to awake, he would spring. But the sleeper slept unstirring;
and so the panther, equally unstirring, watched.