During the next four years the king learned to grow such antlers as had
never before been seen in all the Tobique country. So tall, impetuous,
and masterful he grew, that the boldest bulls, recognising the vast
reverberations of his challenge, would smother their wrath and slip
noiselessly away from his neighbourhood. Rumours of his size and his
great antlers in some way got abroad among the settlements; but so crafty
was he in shunning men,—whom he did not really fear, and whom he was wont
to study intently from safe coverts,—that there was never a hunter who
could boast of having got a shot at him.
Once, and once only, did he come into actual, face to face conflict with
the strange man-creature. It was one autumn evening, at the first of the
season. By the edge of a little lake, he heard the call of a cow. Having
already found a mate, he was somewhat inattentive, and did not answer;
but something strange in the call made him suspicious, and he stole
forward, under cover, to make an observation. The call was repeated,
seeming to come from a little, rushy island, a stone’s throw from shore.
This time there came an answer,—not from the king, but from an eager bull
rushing up from the outlet of the lake. The king listened, with some lazy
interest, to the crashing and slashing of the impetuous approach,
thinking that if the visitor were big enough to be worth while he would
presently go out and thrash him. When the visitor did appear, however,
bursting from the underbrush and striding boldly down to the water’s
edge, a strange thing happened. From the rushy island came a spurt of
flame, a sharp detonating report. The bull jumped and wheeled in his
tracks. Another report, and he dropped without a kick. As he lay in the
pale light, close to the water, a canoe shot out from the rushy island
and landed some distance from the body. Two men sprang out. They pulled
up the canoe, leaving their rifles in it, and ran up to skin the prize.
The king in his hiding-place understood. This was what men could do,—make
a strange, menacing sound, and kill moose with it. He boiled with rage at
this exhibition of their power, and suddenly took up the quarrel of the
slain bull. But by no means did he lay aside his craft. Noiselessly he
moved, a vast and furtive shadow, down through the thickets to a point
where the underbrush nearly touched the water. This brought him within a
few yards of the canoe, wherein the hunters had left their rifles. Here
he paused a few moments, pondering. But as he pondered, redder and redder
grew his eyes; and suddenly, with a mad roar, he burst from cover and
charged.
Had the two men not been expert woodsmen, one or the other would have
been caught and smashed to pulp. But their senses were on the watch. Cut
off as they were from the canoe and from their weapons, their only hope
was a tree. Before the king was fairly out into view, they had understood
the whole situation, sprung to their feet, and sped off like hares. Just
within the nearest fringe of bushes grew a low-hanging beech-tree; and
into this they swung themselves, just as the king came raging beneath. As
it was, one of them was nearly caught when he imagined himself quite
safe. The king reared his mighty bulk against the trunk and with his
keen-spiked antlers reached upward fiercely after the fugitives, the
nearest of whom was saved only by a friendly branch which intervened.
For nearly an hour the king stamped and stormed beneath the branches,
while the trapped hunters alternately cursed his temper and wondered at
his stature. Then, with a swift change of purpose, he wheeled and charged
on the canoe. In two minutes the graceful craft was reduced to raw
material,—while the hunters in the tree-top, sputtering furiously, vowed
vengeance. All the kit, the tins, the blankets, the boxes, were battered
shapeless, and the rifles thumped well down into the wet sand. In the
midst of the cataclysm, one of the rifles somehow went off. The noise and
the flash astonished the king, but only added to his rage and made him
more thorough in his work of destruction. When there was nothing left
that seemed worth trampling upon, he returned to the tree,—on which he
had kept eye all the time,—and there nursed his wrath all night. At the
first of dawn, however, he came to the conclusion that the shivering
things in the tree were not worth waiting for. He swung off, and sought
his favourite pasturage, a mile or two away; and the men, after making
sure of his departure, climbed down. They nervously cut some steaks from
the bull which they had killed, and hurried away, crestfallen, on the
long tramp back to the settlements.
This incident, however, did not have the effect which it might have been
expected to have. It did not make the king despise men. On the contrary,
he now knew them to be dangerous, and he also knew that their chief power
lay in the long dark tubes which spit fire and made fierce sounds. It was
enough for him that he had once worsted them. Ever afterward he gave them
wide berth. And the tradition of him would have come at last to be
doubted in the settlements, but for the vast, shed antlers occasionally
found lying on the diminished snows of March.
But all the time, while the king waxed huge and wise, and overthrew his
enemies, and begot great offspring that, for many years after he was
dead, were to make the Mamozekel famous, there was one grave
incompleteness in his sovereignty. His old panic fear of bears still
shamed and harassed him. The whiff of a harmless half-grown cub,
engrossed in stuffing its greedy red mouth with blueberries, was enough
to turn his blood to water and send him off to other feeding-grounds. He
chose his ranges, indeed, first of all for their freedom from the dreaded
taint, and only second for the excellence of their pasturage. This one
unreasoning fear was the drop of gall which went far toward embittering
all the days of his singularly favoured life. It was as if the wood-gods,
after endowing him so far beyond his fellows, had repented of their
lavishness, and capriciously poisoned their gifts.
One autumn night, just at the beginning of the calling season, this
weakness of his betrayed the king to the deepest humiliation which had
ever befallen him. He was then nearly seven years old; and because his
voice was known to every bull in the Tobique country, there was never
answer made when his great challenge went stridently resounding over the
moonlit wastes. But on this particular night, when he had roared perhaps
for his own amusement, or for the edification of his mate who browsed
near by, rather than with any expectation of response, to his
astonishment there came an answering defiance from the other side of the
open. A big, wandering bull, who had strayed up from the Grand River
region, had never heard of the king, and was more than ready to put his
valour to test. The king rushed to meet him. Now it chanced that between
the approaching giants was an old ash-tree growing out of a thicket. In
this thicket a bear had been grubbing for roots. When he heard the king’s
first roar, he started to steal away from the perilous proximity; but the
second bull’s answer, from the direction in which he had hoped to
retreat, stopped him. In much perturbation he climbed the ash-tree to a
safe distance, and curled himself into a black, furry ball, in a fork of
the branches.
The night was still, and no scents wafting to sensitive nostrils. With
short roars, and much thrashing of the underbrush, the two bulls drew
near. When the king was just about abreast of the bear’s hiding-place,
his arrogance broke into fury, and he charged upon the audacious
stranger. Just as he did so, and just as his foe sprang to meet him, a
wilful night-wind puffed lightly through the branches. It was a very
small, irresponsible wind; but it carried sharply to the king’s nostrils
the strong, fresh taint of bear.
[Illustration: “WAS OFF THROUGH THE UNDERBRUSH IN IGNOMINIOUS FLIGHT.”]
The smell was so strong, it seemed to the king as if the bear must be
fairly on his haunches. It was like an icy cataract flung upon him. He
shrank, trembled,—and the old wounds twinged and cringed. The next
moment, to the triumphant amazement of his antagonist, he had wheeled
aside to avoid the charge, and was off through the underbrush in
ignominious flight. The newcomer, who, for all his stout-heartedness, had
viewed with concern the giant bulk of his foe, stopped short in his
tracks and stared in bewilderment. So easy a victory as this was beyond
his dreams,—even beyond his desires. However, a bull moose can be a
philosopher on occasion, and this one was not going to quarrel with good
luck. In high elation he strode on up the meadow, and set himself, not
unsuccessfully, to wooing the deserted and disgusted cow.
His triumph, however, was short-lived. About moon-rise of the following
night the king came back. He was no longer thinking of bears, and his
heart was full of wrath. His vast challenge came down from the near-by
hills, making the night resound with its short, explosive thunders. His
approach was accompanied by the thrashing of giant antlers on the trees,
and by a crashing as if the undergrowths were being trodden by a
locomotive. There was grim omen in the sounds; and the cow, waving her
great ears back and forward thoughtfully, eyed the Grand River bull with
shrewd interest. The stranger showed himself game, no whit daunted by
threatenings and thunder. He answered with brave roarings, and manifested
every resolution to maintain his conquest. But sturdy and valorous though
he was, all his prowess went for little when the king fell upon him,
thrice terrible from the memory of his humiliation. There was no such
thing as withstanding that awful charge. Before it the usurper was borne
back, borne down, overwhelmed, as if he had been no more than a yearling
calf. He had no chance to recover. He was trampled and ripped and thrust
onward, a helpless sprawl of unstrung legs and outstretched, piteous
neck. It was luck alone,—or some unwonted kindness of the
wood-spirits,—that saved his life from being trodden and beaten out in
that hour of terror. It was close to the river-bank that he had made his
stand; and presently, to his great good fortune, he was thrust over the
brink. He fell into the water with a huge splash. When he struggled to
his feet, and moved off, staggering, down the shallow edges of the
stream, the king looked over and disdained to follow up the vengeance.
Fully as he had vindicated himself, the king was never secure against
such a humiliation so long as he rested thrall to his one fear. The
threat of the bear hung over him, a mystery of terror which he could not
bring himself to face. But at last, and in the season of his weakness,
when he had shed his antlers, there came a day when he was forced to face
it. Then his kingliness was put to the supreme trial.
He was now at the age of nine years, in the splendour of his prime. He
stood over seven feet high at the shoulders, and weighed perhaps thirteen
hundred pounds. His last antlers, those which he had shed two months
before, had shown a gigantic spread of nearly six feet.
It was late April. Much honeycombed snow and ice still lingered in the
deeper hollows. After a high fashion of his own, seldom followed among
the moose of the Tobique region, the king had rejoined his mate when she
emerged from her spring retreat with a calf at her flank. He was too
lordly in spirit to feel cast down or discrowned when his head was shorn
of its great ornament; and he never felt the spring moroseness which
drives most bull moose into seclusion. He always liked to keep his little
herd together, was tolerant to the yearlings, and even refrained from
driving off the two-year-olds until their own aggressiveness made it
necessary.
On this particular April day, the king was bestriding a tall poplar
sapling, which he had borne down that he might browse upon its tender,
sap-swollen tips. By the water’s edge the cow and the yearling were
foraging on the young willow shoots. The calf, a big-framed, enterprising
youngster two weeks old, almost as fine a specimen of young moosehood as
the king had been at his age, was poking about curiously to gather
knowledge of the wilderness world. He approached a big gray-white
boulder, whose base was shrouded in spruce scrub, and sniffed
apprehensively at a curious, pungent taint that came stealing out upon
the air.
He knew by intuition that there was peril in that strange scent; but his
interest overweighed his caution, and he drew close to the spruce scrub.
Close, and yet closer; and his movement was so unusual that it attracted
the attention of the king, who stopped browsing to watch him intently. A
vague, only half-realised memory of that far-off day when he himself, a
lank calf of the season, went sniffing curiously at a thicket, stirred in
his brain; and the stiff hair along his neck and shoulder began to
bristle. He released the poplar sapling, and turned all his attention to
the behaviour of the calf.
The calf was very close to the green edges of the spruce scrub, when he
caught sight of a great dark form within, which had revealed itself by a
faint movement. More curious than ever, but now distinctly alarmed, he
shrank back, turning at the same time, as if to investigate from another
and more open side of the scrub.
The next instant a black bulk lunged forth with incredible swiftness from
the green, and a great paw swung itself with a circular, sweeping motion,
upon the retreating calf. In the wilderness world, as in the world of
men, history has a trick of repeating itself; and this time, as on that
day nine years before, the bear was just too late. The blow did not reach
its object till most of its force was spent. It drew blood, and knocked
the calf sprawling, but did no serious damage. With a bleat of pain and
terror, the little animal jumped to its feet and ran away.
The bear would have easily caught him before he could recover himself;
but another and very different voice had answered the bleat of the calf.
At the king’s roar of fury the bear changed his plans and slunk back into
hiding. In a moment the king came thundering up to the edge of the
spruces. There, planting his fore-feet suddenly till they ploughed the
ground, he stopped himself with a mighty effort. The smell of the bear
had smitten him in the face.
The moment was a crucial one. The pause was full of fate. Turning his
head in indecision, he caught a cry of pain from the calf as it ran to
its mother; and he saw the blood streaming down its flank. Then the
kingliness of his heart arose victorious. With a roar, he breasted
trampling into the spruce scrub, heedless at last of the dreaded scent.
The bear, meanwhile, had been seeking escape. He had just emerged on the
other side of the spruces, and was slipping off to find a secure tree. As
the king thundered down upon him, he wheeled with a savage growl, half
squatted back, and struck out sturdily with that redoubtable paw. But at
the same instant the king’s edged hoofs came down upon him with the
impact of a battering ram. They smashed in his ribs. They tore open his
side. They hurled him over so that his belly was exposed. He was at a
hopeless disadvantage. He had not an instant for recovery. Those avenging
hoofs, with the power of a pile-driver behind them, smote like lightning.
The bear struck savagely, twice, thrice; and his claws tore their way
through hide and muscle till the king’s blood gushed scarlet over his
prostrate foe’s dark fur. Then, the growls and the claw-strokes ceased;
and the furry shape lay still, outstretched, unresisting.
[Illustration: “IT WAS FEAR ITSELF THAT HE WAS WIPING OUT.”]
For a moment or two the king drew off, and eyed the carcass. Then the
remembrance of all his past terror and shame surged hotly through him. He
pounced again upon the body, and pounded it, and trampled it, and ground
it down, till the hideous mass bore no longer a resemblance to any thing
that ever carried the breath of life. It was not his enemy only, not only
the assailant of the helpless calf, that he was thus completely blotting
from existence, but it was fear itself that he was wiping out.
At last, grown suddenly tired of rage, and somewhat faint from the red
draining of his veins, the king turned away and sought his frightened
herd. They gathered about him, trembling with excitement,—the
light-coated cow, the dark yearling, the lank, terrified calf. They
stretched thin noses toward him, questioning, wondering, troubled at his
hot, streaming wounds. But the king held his head high, heeding neither
the wounds nor the herd. He cast one long, proud look up the valley of
the Mamozekel, his immediate, peculiar domain. Then he looked southward
over the lonely Serpentine, northward across the dark-wooded Nictau, and
westward down the flood of the full, united stream. He felt himself
supreme now beyond challenge over all the wild lands of Tobique.
For a long time the group stood so, breathing at last quietly, still with
that stillness which the furtive kindreds know. There was no sound save
the soft, ear-filling roar of the three rivers, swollen with freshet,
rushing gladly to their confluence. The sound was as a background to the
cool, damp silence of the April wilderness. Some belated snow in a shaded
hollow close at hand shrank and settled, with a hushed, evasive whisper.
Then the earliest white-throat, from the top of a fir-tree, fluted across
the pregnant spring solitudes the six clear notes of his musical and
melancholy call.
[Illustration: IN PANOPLY OF SPEARS]