Shortly after nine o'clock, Whisperfoot encountered his first herd of
deer. But they caught his scent and scattered before he could get up to
them. He met Woof, grunting through the underbrush, and again he
punctiliously, but with wretched spirit, left the trail. A fight with
Woof the bear was one of the most unpleasant experiences that could be
imagined. He had a pair of strong arms of which one embrace of a
cougar's body meant death in one long shriek of pain. Of course they
didn't fight often. They had entirely opposite interests. The bear was a
berry-eater and a honey-grubber, and the cougar cared too much for his
own life and beauty to tackle Woof in a hunting way.
A fawn leaped from the thicket in front of him, startled by his sound in
the thicket. The truth was, Whisperfoot had made a wholly unjustified
misstep on a dry twig, just at the crucial moment. Perhaps it was the
fault of Woof, whose presence had driven Whisperfoot from the trail,
and perhaps because old age and stiffness was coming upon him. But
neither of these facts appeased his anger. He could scarcely suppress a
snarl of fury and disappointment.
He continued along the ridge, still stealing, still alert, but his anger
increasing with every moment. The fact that he had to leave the trail
again to permit still another animal to pass, and a particularly
insignificant one too, didn't make him feel any better. This animal had
a number of curious stripes along his back, and usually did nothing more
desperate than steal eggs and eat bird fledglings. Whisperfoot could
have crushed him with one bite, but this was one thing that the great
cat, as long as he lived, would never try to do. He got out of the way
politely when Stripe-back was still a quarter of a mile away; which was
quite a compliment to the little animal's ability to introduce himself.
Stripe-back was familiarly known as a skunk.
Shortly after ten, the mountain lion had a remarkably fine chance at a
buck. The direction of the wind, the trees, the thickets and the light
were all in his favor. It was old Blacktail, wallowing in the salt lick;
and Whisperfoot's heart bounded when he detected him. No human hunter
could have laid his plans with greater care. He had to cut up the side
of the ridge, mindful of the wind. Then there was a long dense thicket
in which he might approach within fifty feet of the lick, still with the
wind in his face. Just beside the lick was another deep thicket, from
which he could make his leap.
Blacktail was wholly unsuspecting. No creature in the Oregon woods was
more beautiful than he. He had a noble spread of antlers, limbs that
were wings, and a body that was grace itself. He was a timid creature,
but he did not even dream of the tawny Danger that this instant was
creeping through the thickets upon him.
Whisperfoot drew near, with infinite caution. He made a perfect stalk
clear to the end of the buckbrush. Thirty feet more--thirty feet of
particularly difficult stalking--and he would be in leaping range. If he
could only cross this last distance in silence, the game was his.
His body lowered. The tail lashed back and forth, and now it had begun
to have a slight vertical motion that frontiersmen have learned to watch
for. He placed every paw with consummate grace, and few sets of human
nerves have sufficient control over leg muscles to move with such
astounding, exacting patience. He scarcely seemed to move at all.
The distance slowly shortened. He was almost to the last thicket, from
which he might spring. His wild blood was leaping in his veins.
But when scarcely ten feet remained to stalk, a sudden sound pricked
through the darkness. It came from afar, but it was no less terrible. It
was really two sounds, so close together that they sounded as one.
Neither Blacktail nor Whisperfoot had any delusions about them. They
recognized them at once, in strange ways under the skin that no man may
describe, as the far-off reports of a rifle. Just to-day Blacktail had
seen his doe fall bleeding when this same sound, only louder, spoke from
a covert from which Bert Cranston had poached her,--and he left the lick
in one bound.
Terrified though he was by the rifle shot, still Whisperfoot sprang. But
the distance was too far. His outstretched paw hummed down four feet
behind Blacktail's flank. Then forgetting everything but his anger and
disappointment, the great cougar opened his mouth and howled.
Howling, the forest people know, never helped one living thing. Of
course this means such howls as Whisperfoot uttered now, not that
deliberate long singsong by which certain of the beasts of prey will
sometimes throw a herd of game into a panic and cause them to run into
an ambush. All Whisperfoot's howl of anger achieved was to frighten all
the deer out of his territory and render it extremely unlikely that he
would have another chance at them that night. Even Dan and Lennox, too
far distant to hear the shots, heard the howl very plainly, and both of
them rejoiced that he had missed.
The long night was almost done when Whisperfoot even got sight of
further game. Once a flock of grouse exploded with a roar of wings from
a thicket; but they had been wakened by the first whisper of dawn in the
wind, and he really had no chance at them. Soon after this, the moon
set.
The larger creatures of the forest are almost as helpless in absolute
darkness as human beings. It is very well to talk of seeing in the dark,
but from the nature of things, even vertical pupils may only respond to
light. No owl or bat can see in absolute darkness. Although the stars
still burned, and possibly a fine filament of light had spread out from
the East, the descending moon left the forest much too dark for
Whisperfoot to hunt with any advantage. It became increasingly likely
that he would have to retire to his lair without any meal whatever.
But still he remained, hoping against hope. After a futile fifteen
minutes of watching a trail, he heard a doe feeding on a hillside. Its
footfall was not so heavy as the sturdy tramp of a buck, and besides,
the bucks would be higher on the ridges this time of morning. He began a
cautious advance toward it.
For the first fifty yards the hunt was in his favor. He came up wind,
and the brush made a perfect cover. But the doe unfortunately was
standing a full twenty yards farther, in an open glade. For a long
moment the tawny creature stood motionless, hoping that the prey would
wander toward him. But even in this darkness, he could tell that she was
making a half-circle that would miss him by forty yards, a course that
would eventually take her down wind in almost the direction that
Whisperfoot had come.
Under ordinary circumstances, Whisperfoot would not have made an attack.
A cougar can run swiftly, but a deer is light itself. The big cat would
have preferred to linger, a motionless thing in the thickets, hoping
some other member of the deer herd to which the doe must have belonged
would come into his ambush. But the hunt was late, and Whisperfoot was
very, very angry. Too many times this night he had missed his kill.
Besides, the herd was certainly somewhere down wind, and for certain
very important reasons a cougar might as well hunt elephants as try to
stalk down wind. The breeze carries his scent more surely than a servant
carries a visiting card. In desperation, he leaped from the thicket and
charged the deer.
In spite of the preponderant odds against him, the charge was almost a
success. He went fully half the distance between them before the deer
perceived him. Then she leaped. There seemed to be no interlude of time
between the instant that she beheld the dim, tawny figure in the air and
that in which her long legs pushed out in a spring. But she didn't leap
straight ahead. She knew enough of the cougars to know that the great
cat would certainly aim for her head and neck in the same way that a
duck-hunter leads a fast-flying duck,--hoping to intercept her leap.
Even as her feet left the ground she seemed to whirl in the air, and the
deadly talons whipped down in vain. Then, cutting back in front, she
raced down wind.
It is usually the most unmitigated folly for a cougar to chase a deer
against which he has missed his stroke; and it is also quite fatal to
his dignity. And whoever doubts for a minute that the larger creatures
have no dignity, and that it is not very dear to them, simply knows
nothing about the ways of animals. They cling to it to the death. And
nothing is quite so amusing to old Woof, the bear--who, after all, has
the best sense of humor in the forest--as the sight of a tawny, majestic
mountain lion, rabid and foaming at the mouth, in an effort to chase a
deer that he can't possibly catch. But to-night it was too dark for Woof
to see. Besides, one disappointment after another had crumbled, as the
rains crumble leaves, the last vestige of Whisperfoot's self-control.
Snarling in fury, he bounded after the doe.
She was lost to sight at once in the darkness, but for fully thirty
yards he raced in her pursuit. And it is true that deep down in his own
well of instincts--those mysterious waters that the events of life can
hardly trouble--he really didn't expect to overtake her. If he had
stopped to think, it would have been one of the really great surprises
of his life to hear the sudden, unmistakable stir and movement of a
large, living creature not fifteen feet distant in the thicket.
He didn't stop to think at all. He didn't puzzle on the extreme
unlikelihood of a doe halting in her flight from a cougar. It is
doubtful whether, in the thickets, he had any perceptions of the
creature other than its movements. He was running down wind, so it is
certain that he didn't smell it. If he saw it at all, it was just as a
shadow, sufficiently large to be that of a deer. It was moving, crawling
as Woof sometimes crawled, seemingly to get out of his path. And
Whisperfoot leaped straight at it.
It was a perfect shot. He landed high on its shoulders. His head lashed
down, and the white teeth closed. All the long life of his race he had
known that pungent essence that flowed forth. His senses perceived it, a
message shot along his nerves to his brain. And then he opened his mouth
in a high, far-carrying squeal of utter, abject terror.
He sprang a full fifteen feet back into the thickets; then crouched. The
hair stood still at his shoulders, his claws were bared; he was prepared
to fight to the death. He didn't understand. He only knew the worst
single terror of his life. It was not a doe that he had attacked in the
darkness. It was not Urson, the porcupine, or even Woof. It was that
imperial master of all things, man himself. Unknowing, he had attacked
Landy Hildreth, lying wounded from Cranston's bullet beside the trail.
Word of the arson ring would never reach the settlements, after all.
And as for Whisperfoot,--the terror that choked his heart with blood
began to wear off in a little while. The man lay so still in the
thickets. Besides, there was a strange, wild smell in the air.
Whisperfoot's stroke had gone home so true there had not even been a
fight. The darkness began to lift around him, and a strange exultation,
a rapture unknown before in all his hunting, began to creep into his
wild blood. Then, as a shadow steals, he went creeping back to his
dead.
V
Dan Failing had been studying nature on the high ridges; and he went
home by a back trail that led to old Bald Mountain. Many a man of longer
residence in the mountains wouldn't have cared to strike off through the
thickets with no guide except his own sense of direction. The ridges are
too many, and they look too much alike. It is very easy to walk in a
great circle--because one leg tires before the other--with no hope
whatever of anything except the spirit ever rising above the barrier of
the pines. But Dan always knew exactly where he was. It was part of his
inheritance from his frontiersmen ancestors, and it freed his wings in
the hills.
The trail was just a narrow serpent in the brush; and it had not been
made by gangs of laborers, working with shovels and picks. Possibly half
a dozen white men, in all, had ever walked along it. It was just the
path of the wild creatures, worn down by hoof and paw and cushion since
the young days of the world.
It was covered, like a sheep lane, with little slit triangles in the
yellow dirt. Some of them were hardly larger than the print of a man's
thumb, and they went all the way up to a great imprint that Dan could
scarcely cover with his open hand. All manner of deer, from seasonal
fawns with spotted coats and wide, startled eyes to the great bull elk,
monarch of the forest, had passed that way before him. Once he found the
traces of an old kill, where a cougar had dined and from which the
buzzards had but newly departed. And once he saw where Woof had left his
challenge in the bark of a great pine.
This is a very common thing for Woof to do,--to go about leaving
challenges as if he were the most warlike creature in the world. In
reality, he never fights until he is driven to it, and then his big,
furry arms turn out to be steel compressors of the first order; he is
patient and good-natured and ordinarily all he wants to do is sleep in
the leaves and grunt and soliloquize and hunt berries. But woe to the
man or beast who meets him in a rough-and-tumble fight. Unlike his great
cousin the Grizzly, that American Adamzad that not only walks like a man
but kills cattle like a butcher, he almost never eats meat. No one ever
pays any attention to his challenges either, and likely he never
thought any one would. They seemed to be the result of an inherited
tendency with him, just as much as to grow drowsy in winter, or to
scratch fleas from his furry hide.
He sees a tree that suits his fancy and immediately stands on his hind
legs beside it. Then he scratches the bark, just as high up as he can
reach. The idea seemed to be that if any other bear should journey along
that way, should find that he couldn't reach as high, he would
immediately quit the territory. But it doesn't work out in practice.
Nine times out of ten there will be a dozen Woofs in the same
neighborhood, no two of equal size, yet they hunt their berries and rob
their bee trees in perfect peace. Perhaps the impulse still remains, a
dim, remembered instinct, long after it has outlived its
usefulness,--just as man, ten thousand years after his arboreal
existence, will often throw his arms into the air as if to seize a tree
branch when he is badly frightened.
It was a roundabout trail home, but yet it had its advantages. It took
him within two miles of Snowbird's lookout station, and at this hour of
day he had been particularly fortunate in finding her at a certain
spring on the mountain side. It was a rather singular coincidence. Along
about four he would usually find himself wandering up that way.
Strangely enough, at the same time, it was true that she had an
irresistible impulse to go down and sit in the green ferns beside the
same spring. They always seemed to be surprised to see one another. In
reality, either of them would have been considerably more surprised had
the other failed to put in an appearance. And always they had long
talks, as the afternoon drew to twilight.
"But I don't think you ought to wait so late before starting home," the
girl would always say. "You're not a human hawk, and it is easier to get
lost than you think."
And this solicitude, Dan rightly figured, was a good sign. There was
only one objection to it. It resulted in an unmistakable inference that
she considered him unable to take care of himself,--and that was the
last thing on earth that he wanted her to think. He understood her well
enough to know that her standards were the standards of the mountains,
valuing strength and self-reliance above all things. He didn't stop to
question why, every day, he trod so many weary miles to be with her.
She was as natural as a fawn; and many times she had quite taken away
his breath. And once she did it literally. He didn't think that so long
as death spared him he would ever be able to forget that experience. It
was her birthday, and knowing of it in time he had arranged for the
delivery of a certain package, dear to a girlish heart, at her father's
house. In the trysting hour he had come trudging over the hills with it,
and few experiences in his life had ever yielded such unmitigated
pleasure as the sight of her, glowing white and red, as she took off its
wrapping paper. It was a jolly old gift, he recollected.--And when she
had seen it, she fairly leaped at him. Her warm, round arms around his
neck, and the softest, loveliest lips in the world pressed his. But in
those days he didn't have the strength that he had now. He felt he could
endure the same experience again with no embarrassment whatever. His
first impression then, besides abounding, incredible astonishment, was
that she had quite knocked out his breath. But let it be said for him
that he recovered with notable promptness. His own arms had gone up and
closed around,--and the girl had wriggled free.
"But you mustn't do that!" she told him.
"But, good Lord, girl! You did it to me! Is there no justice in women?"
"But I did it to thank you for this lovely gift. For remembering me--for
being so good--and considerate. You haven't any cause to thank me."
He had many very serious difficulties in thinking it out. And only one
conclusion was obtainable,--that Snowbird kissed as naturally as she did
anything else, and the kiss meant exactly what she said it did and no
more. But the fact remained that he would have walked a good many miles
farther if he thought there was any possibility of a repeat.
But all at once his fantasies were suddenly and rudely dispelled by the
intrusion of realities. Even a man in the depths of concentration cannot
be inattentive to the wild sounds of the mountains. They have a
commanding, a penetrating quality all their own. A mathematician cannot
walk over a mountain trail pondering on the fourth dimension when some
living creature is consistently cracking brush in the thickets beside
him. Human nature is directly opposed to such a thing, and it is too
much to expect of any man. He has too many race memories of saber-tooth
tigers, springing from their lairs, and likely he has heard too many
bear stories in his youth.
Dan had been walking silently himself in the pine needles. As Lennox had
wondered at long ago, he knew how by instinct; and instinctively he
practiced this attainment as soon as he got out into the wild. The
creature was fully one hundred yards distant, yet Dan could hear him
with entire plainness. And for a while he couldn't even guess what
manner of thing it might be.
A cougar that made so much noise would be immediately expelled from the
union. A wolf pack, running by sight, might crack brush as freely; but a
wolf pack would also bay to wake the dead. Of course it might be an elk
or a steer, and still more likely, a bear. He stood still and listened.
The sound grew nearer.
Soon it became evident that the creature was either walking with two
legs, or else was a four-footed animal putting two feet down at the same
instant. Dan had learned to wait. He stood perfectly still. And
gradually he came to the conclusion that he was listening to the
footfall of another man.
But it was rather hard to imagine what a man might be doing on this
lonely hill. Of course it might be a deer hunter; but few were the
valley sportsmen who had penetrated to this far land. The footfall was
much too heavy for Snowbird. The steps were evidently on another trail
that intersected his own trail one hundred yards farther up the hill. He
had only to stand still, and in an instant the man would come in sight.
He took one step into the thickets, prepared to conceal himself if it
became necessary. Then he waited. Soon the man stepped out on the
trail.
Even at the distance of one hundred yards, Dan had no difficulty
whatever in recognizing him. He could not mistake this tall, dark form,
the soiled, slouchy clothes, the rough hair, the intent, dark features.
It was a man about his own age, his own height, but weighing fully
twenty pounds more, and the dark, narrow eyes could belong to no one but
Bert Cranston. He carried his rifle loosely in his arms.
He stopped at the forks in the trail and looked carefully in all
directions. Dan had every reason to think that Cranston would see him at
first glance. Only one clump of thicket sheltered him. But because Dan
had learned the lesson of standing still, because his olive-drab
sporting clothes blended softly with the colored leaves, Cranston did
not detect him. He turned and strode on down the trail.
He didn't move quite like a man with innocent purposes. There was
something stealthy, something sinister in his stride, and the way he
kept such a sharp lookout in all directions. Yet he never glanced to the
trail for deer tracks, as he would have done had he been hunting.
Without even waiting to meditate on the matter, Dan started to shadow
him.
Before one hundred yards had been traversed, he could better understand
the joy the cougar takes in his hunting. It was the same process,--a
cautious, silent advance in the trail of prey. He had to walk with the
same caution, he had to take advantage of the thickets. He began to feel
a curious excitement.
Cranston seemed to be moving more carefully now, examining the brush
along the trail. Now and then he glanced up at the tree tops. And all at
once he stopped and knelt in the dry shrubbery.
At first all that Dan could see was the glitter of a knife blade.
Cranston seemed to be whittling a piece of dead pine into fine shavings.
Now he was gathering pine needles and small twigs, making a little pile
of them. And then, just as Cranston drew his match, Dan saw his purpose.
Cranston was at his old trade,--setting a forest fire.