BY THE SAME AUTHOR
BY THE MARSHES OF MINAS
THE FORGE IN THE FOREST
A SISTER TO EVANGELINE
[Illustration: ‘Get off!’ she ordered sharply Page 153]
THE HEART OF THE
ANCIENT WOOD
BY
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
WITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1902
Copyright by Silver, Burdett & Company in the United States of America
_All rights reserved_
To
L. W. v. U.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. The Watchers of the Trail 1
II. The Cabin in the Clearing 18
III. The Exiles from the Settlement 30
IV. Miranda and the Furtive Folk 46
V. Kroof, the She-bear 64
VI. The Initiation of Miranda 76
VII. The Intimates 88
VIII. Axe and Antler 107
IX. The Pax Mirandæ 121
X. The Routing of the Philistines 133
XI. Miranda and Young Dave 145
XII. Young Dave at the Clearing 162
XIII. Milking-time 173
XIV. Moonlight and Moose-call 187
XV. A Venison Steak 203
XVI. Death for a Little Life 225
XVII. In the Roar of the Rapids 245
XVIII. The Forfeit of the Alien 262
ILLUSTRATIONS
“‘Get off!’ she ordered sharply” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“She . . . stood motionless, erect and formidable” 50
“She sprang up, . . . her whole weight straining on the tether” 102
“He ran wildly over the snow patches” 140
“The moose recognized her” 196
“‘Stroke on the right!’ came Dave’s sharp order” 250
THE HEART OF THE ANCIENT WOOD
Chapter I
The Watchers of the Trail
Not indolently soft, like that which sifts in green shadow through the
leafage of a summer garden, but tense, alertly and mysteriously
expectant, was the silence of the forest. It was somehow like a vast
bubble of glass, blown to a fineness so tenuous that a small sound, were
it but to strike the one preordained and mystic note, might shatter it
down in loud ruin. Yet it had existed there flawless for generations,
transmuting into its own quality all such infrequent and inconsequent
disturbance as might arise from the far-off cry of the panther, or the
thin chirp of the clambering nuthatch, the long, solemn calling of the
taciturn moose, twice or thrice repeated under the round October moon,
or the noise of some great wind roaring heavily in the remote tops of
pine and birch and hemlock. Few and slender were the rays of sun that
pierced down through those high tops. The air that washed the endless
vistas of brown-green shadow was of a marvellous clarity, not blurred by
any stain of dust or vapour. Its magical transparency was confusing to
an eye not born and bred to it, making the far branches seem near, and
the near twigs unreal, disturbing the accustomed perspective, and
hinting of some elvish deception in familiar and apparent things.
The trail through the forest was rough and long unused. In spots the
mosses and ground vines had so overgrown it that only the broad scars on
the tree trunks, where the lumberman’s axe had blazed them for a sign,
served to distinguish it from a score of radiating vistas. But just
here, where it climbed a long, gradual slope, the run of water down its
slight hollow had sufficed to keep its worn stones partly bare.
Moreover, though the furrowing steps of man had left it these many
seasons untrodden, it was never wholly neglected. A path once fairly
differentiated by the successive passings of feet will keep, almost
forever, a spell for the persuasion of all that go afoot. The old trail
served the flat, shuffling tread of Kroof, the great she-bear, as she
led her half-grown cub to feast on the blueberry patches far up the
mountain. It caught the whim of Ten-Tine, the caribou, as he convoyed
his slim cows down to occasional pasturage in the alder swamps of the
slow Quah-Davic.
On this September afternoon, when the stillness seemed to wait
wide-eyed, suddenly a cock-partridge came whirring up the trail,
alighted on a gnarled limb, turned his outstretched head twice from side
to side as he peered with his round beads of eyes, and then stiffened
into the moveless semblance of one of the fungoid excrescences with
which the tree was studded. A moment more and the sound of footsteps, of
the nails of heavy boots striking on the stones, grew conspicuous
against the silence. Up the trail came slouching, with a strong but
laborious stride, a large, grizzled man in grey home-spuns. His trousers
were stuffed unevenly into the tops of his rusty boots; on his head was
a drooping, much-battered hat of a felt that had been brown; from his
belt hung a large knife in a fur-fringed leather sheath; and over his
shoulder he carried an axe, from the head of which swung a large bundle.
The bundle was tied up in a soiled patchwork quilt of gaudy colours, and
from time to time there came from it a flat clatter suggestive of tins.
At one side protruded the black handle of a frying-pan, half wrapped up
in newspaper.
Had he been hunter or trapper, Dave Titus would have carried a gun. Or
had he been a townsman, a villager, or even an ordinary small country
farmer, he would have taken care to be well armed before penetrating a
day’s journey into the heart of the ancient wood. But being a lumberman,
he was neither quite of the forest nor quite of the open. His winters he
spent in the very deep of the wilderness, in a log camp crowded with his
mates, eating salt pork, beans, hot bread; and too busy all day long
with his unwearying axe to wage any war upon the furred and feathered
people. His summers were passed with plough and hoe on a little
half-tilled farm in the Settlements. He had, therefore, neither the
desire to kill nor the impulse to fear, as he traversed, neutral and
indifferent, these silent but not desolated territories. Not desolated;
for the ancient wood was populous in its reserve. Observant, keen of
vision, skilled in woodcraft though he was, the grave-faced old
lumberman saw nothing in the tranquillity about him save tree trunks,
and fallen, rotting remnants, and mossed hillocks, and thickets of
tangled shrub. He noted the difference, not known to the general eye,
between white spruce, black spruce, and fir, between grey birch and
yellow birch, between withe-wood and viburnum; and he read
instinctively, by the lichen growth about their edges, how many seasons
had laid their disfeaturing touch upon those old scars of the axe which
marked the trail. But for all his craft he thought himself alone. He
guessed not of the many eyes that watched him.
In truth, his progress was the focus of an innumerable attention. The
furtive eyes that followed his movements were some of them timorously
hostile, some impotently vindictive, some indifferent; but all alien.
All were at one in the will to remain unseen; so all kept an unwinking
immobility, and were swallowed up, as it were, in the universal
stillness.
The cock-partridge, a well-travelled bird who knew the Settlements and
their violent perils, watched with indignant apprehension. Not without
purpose had he come whirring so tumultuously up the trail, a warning to
the ears of all the wood-folk. His fear was lest the coming of this grey
man-figure should mean an invasion of those long, black sticks which
went off with smoky bang when they were pointed. He effaced himself till
his brown mottled feathers were fairly one with the mottled brown bark
of his perch; but his liquid eyes lost not a least movement of the
stranger.
The nuthatch, who had been walking straight up the perpendicular trunk
of a pine when the sound of the alien footsteps froze him, peered
fixedly around the tree. His eye, a black point of inquiry, had never
before seen anything like this clumsy and slow-moving shape, but knew it
for something dangerous. His little slaty head, jutting at an acute
angle from the bark, looked like a mere caprice of knot or wood fungus;
but it had the singular quality of moving smoothly around the trunk, as
the lumberman advanced, so as to keep him always in view.
Equally curious, but quivering with fear, two wood-mice watched him
intently, sitting under the broad leaf of a skunk-cabbage not three feet
from the trail. Their whiskers touched each other’s noses, conveying
thrills and palpitations of terror as he drew near, drew nearer,
came—and passed. But not unless that blind, unheeding heel had been on
the very point of crushing them would they have disobeyed the prime law
of their tribe, which taught them that to sit still was to sit unseen.
A little farther back from the trail, under a spreading tangle of
ironwood, on a bed of tawny moss crouched a hare. His ears lay quite
flat along his back. His eyes watched with aversion, not unmixed with
scorn, the heavy, tall creature that moved with such effort and such
noise. “Never,” thought the hare, disdainfully, “would he be able to
escape from his enemies!” As the delicate current of air which pulses
imperceptibly through the forest bore the scent of the man to the hare’s
hiding-place, the fine nostrils of the latter worked rapidly with
dislike. On a sudden, however, came a waft of other scent; and the
hare’s form seemed to shrink to half its size, the nostrils rigidly
dilating.
It was the scent of the weasel—to the hare it was the very essence of
death. But it passed in an instant, and then the hare’s exact vision saw
whence it came. For the weasel, unlike all the other folk of the wood,
was moving. He was keeping pace with the man, at a distance of some ten
feet from the trail. So fitted, however, was his colouring to his
surrounding, so shadow-like in its soundless grace was his motion, that
the man never discerned him. The weasel’s eyes were fixed upon the
intruder with a malignancy of hate that might well have seared through
his unconsciousness. Fortunately for the big lumberman, the weasel’s
strength, stupendous for its size, was in no way commensurate with its
malice; or the journey would have come to an end just there, and the
gaudy bundle would have rested on the trail to be a long wonder to the
mice.
The weasel presently crossed the yet warm scent of a mink, whereupon he
threw up his vain tracking of the woodman and turned off in disgust. He
did not like the mink, and wondered what that fish-eater could be
wanting so far back from the water. He was not afraid exactly,—few
animals know fear so little as the weasel,—but he kept a small shred of
prudence in his savage little heart, and he knew that the mink was
scarcely less ferocious than himself, while nearly thrice his size.
From the mossy crotch of an old ash tree, slanting over the trail, a
pair of pale, yellow-green eyes, with fine black slits for pupils,
watched the traveller’s march. They were set in a round, furry head,
which was pressed flat to the branch and partly overhung it. The
pointed, tufted ears lay flat back upon the round brown head. Into the
bark of the branch four sets of razor-edged claws dug themselves
venomously; for the wild-cat knew, perhaps through some occult
communication from its far-off domesticated kin of hearth and door-sill,
that in man he saw the one unvanquishable enemy to all the folk of the
wood. He itched fiercely to drop upon the man’s bowed neck, just where
it showed, red and defenceless, between the gaudy bundle and the rim of
the brown hat. But the wild-cat, the lesser lynx, was heir to a ferocity
well tempered with discretion, and the old lumberman slouched onward
unharmed, all ignorant of that green gleam of hate playing upon his
neck.
It was a very different gaze which followed him from the heart of a
little colony of rotting stumps, in a dark hollow near the trail. Here,
in the cool gloom, sat Kroof, the bear, rocking her huge body
contemplatively from side to side on her haunches, and occasionally
slapping off a mosquito from the sensitive tip of her nose. She had no
cub running with her that season, to keep her busy and anxious. For an
hour she had been comfortably rocking, untroubled by fear or desire or
indignation; but when the whirring of the cock-partridge gave her
warning, and the grating of the nailed boots caught her ear, she had
stiffened instantly into one of the big brown stumps. Her little red
eyes followed the stranger with something like a twinkle in them. She
had seen men before, and she neither actively feared them nor actively
disliked them. Only, averse to needless trouble, she cared not to
intrude herself on their notice; and therefore she obeyed the custom of
the wood, and kept still. But the bear is far the most human of all the
furry wood-folk, the most versatile and largely tolerant, the least
enslaved by its surroundings. It has an ample sense of humour, also,
that most humane of gifts; and it was with a certain relish that Kroof
recognized in the grey-clad stranger one of those loud axemen from whose
camp, far down by the Quah-Davic, she had only last winter stolen
certain comforting rations of pork. Her impulse was to rock again with
satisfaction at the thought, but that would have been out of keeping
with her present character as a decaying stump, and she restrained
herself. She also restrained a whimsical impulse to knock the gaudy
bundle from the stranger’s back with one sweep of her great paw, and see
if it might not contain many curious and edifying things, if not even
pork. It was not till she had watched him well up the trail and fairly
over the crest of the slope that, with a deep, non-committal grunt, she
again turned her attention to the mosquitoes, which had been learning
all the tenderness of a bear’s nose.
These were but a few of the watchers of the trail, whose eyes,
themselves unseen, scrutinized the invader of the ancient wood. Each
step of all his journey was well noted. Not so securely and
unconsideringly would he have gone, however, had he known that only the
year before there had come a pair of panthers to occupy a vacant lair on
the neighbouring mountain side. No, his axe would have swung free, and
his eyes would have scanned searchingly every overhanging branch; for
none knew better than old Dave Titus how dangerous a foe was the tawny
northern panther. But just now, as it chanced, the panther pair were
hunting away over in the other valley, the low, dense-wooded valley of
the Quah-Davic.
As matters stood, for all the watchers that marked him, the old
lumberman walked amid no more imminent menace than that which glittered
down upon him from four pairs of small bright eyes, high up among the
forking limbs of an old pine. In a well-hidden hole, as in a nursery
window, were bunched the smooth heads of four young squirrels,
interested beyond measure in the strange animal plodding so heavily
below them. Had they been Settlement squirrels they would, without
doubt, have passed shrill comments, more or less uncomplimentary; for
the squirrel loves free speech. But when he dwells among the folk of the
ancient wood he, even he, learns reticence; and, in that neighbourhood,
if a young squirrel talks out loud in the nest, the consequences which
follow have a tendency to be final. When the old lumberman had passed
out of their range of view, the four little heads disappeared into the
musky brown depths of the nest, and talked the event over in the
smallest of whispers.
As the lumberman journeyed, covering good ground with his long,
slouching stride, the trail gradually descended through a tract where
moss-grown boulders were strown thick among the trees. Presently the
clear green brown of the mid-forest twilight took a pallor ahead of him,
and the air began to lose its pungency of bark and mould. Then came the
flat, soft smell of sedge; and the trees fell away: and the traveller
came out upon the shores of a lake. Its waters were outspread
pearly-white from a fringe of pale green rushes, and the opposite shore
looked black against the pale, hazy sky. A stone’s throw beyond the
sedge rose a little naked island of black rock, and in the sheen of
water off its extremity there floated the black, solitary figure of a
loon.
As the lumberman came out clear of the trees, and the gaudy colours of
his bundle caught its eye, the bird sank itself lower in the water till
only its erect neck and wedge-shaped head were in view. Then, opening
wide its beak, it sent forth its wild peal of inexplicable and
disconcerting laughter—an affront to the silence, but a note of monition
to all the creatures of the lake. The loon had seen men before, and
despised them, and found pleasure in proclaiming the scorn. It despised
even the long, black sticks that went off with smoky bang when pointed;
for had it not learned, in another lake near the Settlement, to dive at
the flash and so elude the futile, spattering pellets that flew from the
stick.
The lumberman gave neither a first nor a second thought to the loon at
all, but quickened his pace in the cheerful open. The trail now led some
way along the lake-side, till the shore became higher and rougher, and
behind a cape of rock a bustling river emptied itself, carrying lines of
foam and long ripples far out across the lake’s placidity. From the cape
of rock towered a bleak, storm-whitened rampike, which had been a pine
tree before the lightning smote it. Its broken top was just now serving
as the perch of a white-headed eagle. The great bird bent fierce yellow
eyes upon the stranger,—eyes with a cruel-looking, straight overhang of
brow,—and stretched its flat-crowned, snake-like head far out to regard
him. It opened the rending sickle of its beak and yelped at him—three
times at deliberated interval. Then the traveller vanished again into
the gloom of the wood, and the arrogant bird plumed himself upon a
triumph.
The trail now touched the river, only to forsake it and plunge into the
heart of a growth of young Canada balsam. This sweet-smelling region
traversed, the soft roar of the stream was left behind, and the forest
resumed its former monumental features. For another hour the man tramped
steadily, growing more conscious of his load, more and more uninterested
in his surroundings; and for another hour his every step was noted by
intent, unwinking eyes from branch and thicket. Then again the woods
fell apart with a spreading of daylight. He came out upon the spacious
solitude of a clearing; pushed through the harsh belt of blackberry and
raspberry canes, which grew as a neutral zone between forest and open;
picked his way between the burned stumps and crimson fireweeds of a long
desolate pasture; and threw down his bundle at the door of the loneliest
cabin he had ever chanced to see.