THE INDIAN TRAPPER
It is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.
In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with
a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the
gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists
of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like
clouds of steam, will have cleared; and there will be nothing from
sky-line to sky-line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.
The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid-day. Then the sun
casts no man-shadow to scare game from his snares. Black is the flag of
betrayal in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye, glistening
on the snow like a black marble, that the trapper detects the white
hare; and a jet tail-tip streaking over the white wastes in dots and
dashes tells him the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts and diving
below the snow with the forward wriggling of a snake under cover. But
the moving man-shadow is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's
eye or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out in the gray
darkness of morning and must reach his hunting-grounds before high
noon.
With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts in swift, coasting
strides, he swings out in that easy, ambling, Indian trot, which gives
never a jar to the runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
beneath his tread.
The old musket, which he got in trade from the fur post, is over his
shoulder, or swinging lightly in one hand. A hunter's knife and
short-handled woodman's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy musk-rat gantlets are
attached to the cord about his neck; so without losing either he can
fight bare-handed, free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And
somewhere, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
_skipertogan_--a skin bag with amulet against evil, matches, touchwood,
and a scrap of pemmican. As he grows hot, he throws back his hood,
running bareheaded and loose about the chest.
Each breath clouds to frost against his face till hair and brows and
lashes are fringed with frozen moisture. The white man would hugger his
face up with scarf and collar the more for this; but the Indian knows
better. Suddenly chilled breath would soak scarf and collar wet to his
skin; and his face would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the keenest cold; so he
loosens his coat and runs the faster.
As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in the gray haze. Pine
groves emerge from the dark, wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and
domes and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spreading larch
boughs. Evergreens are edged with white. Naked trees stand like limned
statuary with an antlered crest etched against the white glare. The
snow stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that seem to
heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.
When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
the Northern Lights. He does not _see_ these things with the gabbling
exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist like a
sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.
Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
has seen; though he has not understood.
But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
of the Great Lakes, in the canons of the Rockies, and across that
northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay regions that the
Indian trapper will find his last hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes
the white man, and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring
before Columbus opened the doors of the New World to the hordes of the
Old; and here Indian trappers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When
there is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed; but that day is far
distant for the Hudson Bay region.
* * * * *
The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is midwinter; and by
December there is a curious lull in the hunting. All the streams are
frozen like rock; but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some foolish fish
always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice shuts them in. Then a strange
thing is seen--a kettle of living fish; fish gasping and panting in
ice-hemmed water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost freezes
another layer to the ice walls of their prison. The banks of such a pond
hole are haunted by the otter and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when
the pond is exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank and
forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.
The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and fastidious
choosing--for in trapper vernacular the bear takes a long time to please
himself--bruin found an upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes and went to sleep
under a snow blanket of gathering depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too,
have gone off to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by a
wolf-pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to move till this
ground is eaten over. Nor are many beaver seen now. They have long since
snuggled into their warm houses, where they will stay till their winter
store is all used; and their houses are now hidden under great depths of
deepening snow. But the fox and the hare and the ermine are at run; and
as long as they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx and
the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from the scarcity of other
game and greedy as spring crows.
That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's heels. The pelt of a
coyote--or prairie wolf--would scarcely be worth the taking. Even the
big, gray timber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot, except
for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic wolf would bring better
price. The enormous black or brown arctic wolf would be more valuable;
but the value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all these
worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps as keenly as the
trapper does; and would eat up a silver fox, that would be the fortune
of any hunter.
The Indian comes to the brush where he has set his rabbit snares across
a runway. His dog sniffs the ground, whining. The crust of the snow is
broken by a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit fur is
fluffed about. The game has been rifled away. The Indian notices several
things. The rabbit has been devoured on the spot. That is unlike the
wolverine. He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a guzzle
in his own lair. The footprints have the appearance of having been
brushed over; so the thief had a bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There
is no trail away from the snare. The marauder has come with a long leap
and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his dog make a circuit of the
snare till they come on the trail of the intruder; and its size tells
the Indian whether his enemy be fox or wolf.
He sets no more snares across that runway, for the rabbits have had
their alarm. Going through the brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a
new snare.
Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the drifts to the next trap. It
is a deadfall. Nothing is in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left
undisturbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to atoms from very
wickedness, chewed the bait in two, and spat it out lest there should be
poison. The fox would have gone in and had his back broken by the front
log. And there is the same brush work over the trampled snow, as if the
visitor had tried to sweep out his own trail; and the same long leap
away, clearing obstruction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
scent. This time the Indian makes two or three circuits; but the snow is
so crusted it is impossible to tell whether the scratchings lead out to
the open or back to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal had
followed the line of the traps by running just inside the brush, the
Indian would know. But the midwinter day is short, and he has no time to
explore the border of the thicket.
Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that number he hardly
expects game in more than a dozen. If six have a prize, he has done
well. Each time he stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with castoreum, or
pomatum, or bears' grease; sweeping the snow over every spot touched by
his hand; dragging the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.
Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and the Indian trapper has
found not a thing in his traps. He only knows that some daring enemy has
dogged the circle of his snares. That means he must kill the marauder,
or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt about swift vengeance for
the loss of a rabbit, he has none when he comes to the next trap. He
sees what is too much for words: what entails as great loss to the poor
Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white man. One of his best
steel-traps lies a little distance from the pole to which it was
attached. It has been jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained and covered with
gray fur as soft and silvery as chinchilla. In the trap is a little paw,
fresh cut, scarcely frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of
which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and speculators of stocks,
and actors of fame. But the wolves, the great, black wolves of the Far
North, with eyes full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not an hour before the
trapper came.
He knows now what his enemy is; for he has come so suddenly on their
trail he can count four different footprints, and claw-marks of
different length. They have fought about the little fox; and some of the
smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the blood-marks, he can
tell they have got under cover of the shrub growth to the right.
The Indian says none of the words which the white man might say; but
that is nothing to his credit; for just now no words are adequate. But
he takes prompt resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
which somehow is written on the very face of the wilderness as one of
its necessities, he decides that only life for life will compensate such
loss. The danger of hunting the big, brown wolf--he knows too well to
attempt it without help. He will bait his small traps with poison; take
out his big, steel wolf traps to-morrow; then with a band of young
braves follow the wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting
season.
But the animal world knows that old trick of drawing a herring scent
across the trail of wise intentions; and of all the animal world, none
knows it better than the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the same pricking
forward of sharp, erect ears, the same crouching trot, the same
sneaking, watchful green eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to
brush out every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop of the
gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among wolves.
* * * * *
The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keeping to the open, where
he can travel fast on the long snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap.
The man-shadow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then all the
shadows merge into the purple gloom of early evening; but the Indian
travels on; for the circuit of traps leads back to his lodge.
The wolf thief may not be far off; so the man takes his musket from the
case. He may chance a shot at the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves
run under cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward. The wind
carries scent of danger from the open, and the brush forms an ambuscade.
Man tracks, where man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if he can; and if he
can't, crouches low till he has passed the exposure.
The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides, wasting not an
inch of ground, deviating neither to right nor left by as much space as
a white man takes to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog
utters a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward towards the
brush. At the same moment the Indian, who has been keeping his eyes on
the woods, sees a form rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is
not surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and the fox trap
could not have been robbed more than an hour ago. The man thinks he has
come on the thieves going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means
him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as he looks the form
fades into the gloom, and he decides to run on parallel to the
brushwood, with his gun ready. Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery.
At the clearing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he is
heading home there is little danger.
But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes off to the woods
with wild barking, and the trapper scans the long, white stretch leading
back between the bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
grays of twilight.
Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
wolfish figure looms black against the snow--and stands! The dog prances
round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
and the Indian calculates--" After all, there is only one."
What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.
One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
The man runs faster now, determined to get abreast of the wolf and
utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
front and shoot.
But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
the very real substance of that fox.
The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
the trapper's very feet.
Then the man knows that he has been tricked.
The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
and prairie hold in deadly fear--fire. Two or three shots ring into the
darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells him there is one wolf
less, and the others will hold off at a safe distance. Contrary to the
woodman's traditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian whips
out his axe and chops with all his might till he has wood enough for a
roaring fire. That will keep the rascals away till the pack goes off in
full cry, or daylight comes.
Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the Indian hastily makes a
bow, and shoots arrow after arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air,
hoping to signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear. The sky
is silver with stars, and moonlight and reflected snowglare, and the
Northern Lights flicker and wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy
that dims the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising from his
fire in a straight column falls at the height of the trees, for the
frost lies on the land heavy, palpable, impenetrable. And for all the
frost is thick to the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air seems to become
absolutely compressed with the cold; but that same cold freezes out and
precipitates every particle of floating moisture till earth and sky,
moon and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.
A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a gale, comes
through the tightening silence. The intelligent half-breed says this is
from the Northern Lights. The white man says it is electric activity in
compressed air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter the
words of the braves in death chant:
"If I die, I die valiant,
I go to death fearless.
I die a brave man.
I go to those heroes who died without fear."
Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire arrows into the air. He
heaps his fire and watches, musket in hand. The light of the moon is
white like statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-edged trees
are chiselled clear like statuary; and the silence is of stone. Only
the snap of the blaze, the crackling of the frosted air, the break of a
twig back among the brush, where something has moved, and the little,
low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.
* * * * *
By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases; and the dog at last
lowers his ears and lies quiet. The trapper throws a stick into the
woods and sends the dog after it. The dog comes back without any
barkings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have drawn off. Will he
wait out that long Northern night? He has had nothing to eat but the
piece of pemmican. The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run will carry him
home; but to make speed with the snow-shoes he must run in the open,
exposed to all watchers.
When an Indian balances motives, the motive of hunger invariably
prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting in the caribou coat and kicking
up the dog, the trapper strikes out for the open way leading back to the
line of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been built for
shelter against wind. There is another reason for building lodges in a
hollow. Sound of the hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
sound of the game carry to the hunter.
And if the game should turn hunter and the man turn hunted! The trapper
speeds down the snowy slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over
hummocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping rather than
running. The frosty air acts as a conductor to sound, and the frost
films come in stings against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and
touch are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the first
breath of peril, uttering a smothered "_woo! woo!_" The trapper tries to
persuade himself the alarm was only the far scream of a wolf-hunted
lynx; but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a dome. One
glance over his shoulder shows him black forms on the snow-crest against
the sky.
He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox feels before the dogs
in full cry.
The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted thing with terror crazing
his blood and the sleuth-hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something
goes wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-strings, he
sees that the dog's feet have been cut by the snow crust and are
bleeding. It is life for life now; the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law,
that has no new dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.
One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.
The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exultant bay. The wolf-pack
are in full cry. The man has rounded the open alley between the trees
and is speeding down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the pack
pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite. The moon is behind,
and the man-shadow flits before on the snow like an enemy heading him
back. The deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer! He
feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause. A great drift thrusts
across his way and the shadow in front runs slower. They are gaining on
him. He hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings for breath
are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest of the drift he braces
himself and goes to the bottom with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.
The slant moonlight throws another shadow on the snow at his heels.
It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and tosses up his arms--an
Indian trick to stop pursuit. Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man
that has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with a piercing
howl.
The man is off and away.
If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men and a body-guard of
guides hunt down a single quarry, he would be safe enough now. But the
old musket is slow loading, and speed will serve him better than another
shot.
Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his instep to his ankle,
throwing the racquet on edge and clogging him back. Before he can right
it they are upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face and fight
to the last breath. His hood falls back, and he wheels with the
moonlight full in his eyes and the Northern Lights waving their mystic
flames high overhead. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-wreathed trees, like
funeral watchers--watchers of how many brave deaths in a desolate,
lonely land where no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
without fear!
The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by burying the red-gummed
fangs in the victim's throat; in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the
runner's legs--called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teaches the Indian to be
as merciless as he is brave--hunger!
[Illustration: They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm.]
Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the snapping red mouths
with the butt of his weapon; and the foremost beasts roll under.
But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase now, as much as from
hunger. Leaping over their dead fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of
the uplifted arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching for
the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks to the rear of the
hunter's fighting shadow. When the man swings his arm and draws back to
strike, this miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.
Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf has bitten the knee
sinews to the bone. The pack leap up, and the man goes down.
* * * * *
And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the heavy snow that fell
over the northland that night, the Indians travelling to their summer
hunting-grounds found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones of
three dead wolves; and farther up the hill were the bleaching remains of
a fourth.[35]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 35: A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay
occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few
years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the
dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt--which
tells its own story.]