KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT
Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
that he _feels_ his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
as _that_--jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.
So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
valley--but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first _explored_ the
Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
Company was the first Canadian to _explore_ the lower Columbia; but
before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
her young?
Something, which may be the result of generations of accumulated
observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
brute. It is not sharp-sightedness--though no man is sharper of sight
than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing--though the trapper
learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
is not touch--in the sense of tactile contact--any more than it is touch
that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
senses, a sixth sense--a sense of _feel_, without contact--a sense on
which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of _feel_, his weapon
against the instinct of the brute. What part it plays in the life of
every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.
* * * * *
When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
supplied by "wahboos--little white chap," which is the Indian name for
rabbit.
And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimming over the snow for all
the world like a bouncing football done up in gray fur--all members of
the cat tribe running wherever the "little white chaps" run.
So when the lull fell on the hunt and the mink trapping was well over
and marten had not yet begun, Koot gathered up his traps, and getting a
supply of provisions at the fur post, crossed the white wastes of
prairie to lonely swamp ground where dwarf alder and willow and
cottonwood and poplar and pine grew in a tangle. A few old logs
dovetailed into a square made the wall of a cabin. Over these he
stretched the canvas of his tepee for a roof at a sharp enough angle to
let the heavy snow-fall slide off from its own weight. Moss chinked up
the logs. Snow banked out the wind. Pine boughs made the floor, two logs
with pine boughs, a bed. An odd-shaped stump served as chair or table;
and on the logs of the inner walls hung wedge-shaped slabs of cedar to
stretch the skins. A caribou curtain or bear-skin across the entrance
completed Koot's winter quarters for the rabbit-hunt.
Koot's genealogy was as vague as that of all old trappers hanging round
fur posts. Part of him--that part which served best when he was on the
hunting-field--was Ojibway. The other part, which made him improvise
logs into chair and table and bed, was white man; and that served him
best when he came to bargain with the chief factor over the pelts. At
the fur post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field,
when suddenly menaced by some great danger, he would cry out in the
Indian tongue words that meant "O Great Spirit!" And it is altogether
probable that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was
worshipping the same Being. When he swore--strange commentary on
civilization--he always used white man's oaths, French _patois_ or
straight English.
Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the Rockies,
Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not usually go to the
wilds alone; but there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that
Koot had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog that had drawn
his provisions from the fort on a sort of toboggan sleigh.
The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write their daily
record for those who can read. All over the white swamp were little deep
tracks; here, holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks as
from the bound--bound--bound of something soft; then, again, where the
thicket was like a hedge with only one breach through, the footprints
had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light--the
rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.
All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his
cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful--as they always were
in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest--Koot's circuit of snares
would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
numerous, the foragers that prey--wolf and wolverine and lynx and
bob-cat--will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon--the Indian's hour of the
short shadow--is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
to his cabin, and in it--instead of caching in a tree--keeps fish or
bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.
Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
twine, and traps, and set out in the evening to make the round of his
snares, unaccompanied by the dog. Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and
white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in
the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his
shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin
when that strange sense of _feel_ told him that he was being followed.
What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled--he called it by name.
In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet
as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall.
By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, or the snowbuntings
chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to hedge-top, or the saucy
jay shriek some scolding impudence. A squirrel may chatter out his noisy
protest at some thief for approaching the nuts which lie cached under
the rotten leaves at the foot of the tree, or the sun-warmth may set the
melting snow showering from the swan's-down branches with a patter like
rain. But at nightfall the frost has stilled the drip of thaw. Squirrel
and bird are wrapped in the utter quiet of a gray darkness. And the
marauders that fill midnight with sharp bark, shrill trembling scream,
deep baying over the snow are not yet abroad in the woods. All is
shadowless--stillness--a quiet that is audible.
Koot turned sharply and whistled and called his dog. There wasn't a
sound. Later when the frost began to tighten, sap-frozen twigs would
snap. The ice of the swamp, frozen like rock, would by-and-bye crackle
with the loud echo of a pistol-shot--crackle--and strike--and break as
if artillery were firing a fusillade and infantry shooters answering
sharp. By-and-bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the
shadows dancing; and the wail of the cougar would be echoed by the
lifting scream of its mate. But now, was not a sound, not a motion, not
a shadow, only the noiseless stillness, the shadowless quiet, and the
_feel_, the _feel_ of something back where the darkness was gathering
like a curtain in the bush.
It might, of course, be only a silly long-ears loping under cover
parallel to the man, looking with rabbit curiosity at this strange
newcomer to the swamp home of the animal world. Koot's sense of _feel_
told him that it wasn't a rabbit; but he tried to persuade himself that
it was, the way a timid listener persuades herself that creaking floors
are burglars. Thinking of his many snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
Then it came again, that _feel_ of something coursing behind the
underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
short--and listened--and listened--listened to a snow-muffled silence,
to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.
The sense of _feel_ that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.
That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
lodge. Once his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
the sniff--sniff--sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
answering scream--a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.
"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."
* * * * *
Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
hour of the short shadow.
It did not surprise the trapper after he had heard the lifting wail from
the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of _feel_, but he couldn't
make this thing out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
from the sky and gone back to the sky.
Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
mark like that shuffling padded print.
"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
Koot told himself.
The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
benighted hunters.
This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
there--oh!--I'll be _on_ to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
and his ears failed to localize, to _real_-ize, to visualize what those
little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he marched off very matter
of fact to the next snare.
But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of _feel_ and he had
glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just above the
snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade
something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear-tufts
caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow-crust. Then
the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form hardly differing
from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed to a tiny
blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell-tale light. The big round
body mottled gray and white like the snowy tree
widened--stretched---flattened till it was almost a part of the tossing
pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had passed far
beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward and the owl eyes open and
the big body bunch out like a cat with elevated haunches ready to
spring.
But by-and-bye the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. They grew
scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew
hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming across the
billowy drifts, something black far ahead bounced up, caught a bunting
on the wing, and with another bounce disappeared among the trees.
Koot said one word--"Cat!"--and the dog was off full cry.
Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, he had
known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still hunters
among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail of their ravages,
rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even the remains of a fox
or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from the printings on the white
page that the still hunter had been hunted full cry by coyote or
timber-wolf. Against these wolfish foes the cat had one sure refuge
always--a tree. The hungry coyote might try to starve the bob-cat into
surrender; but just as often, the bob-cat could starve the coyote into
retreat; for if a foolish rabbit darted past, what hungry coyote could
help giving chase? The tree had even defeated both dog and man that
first week when Koot could not find the cat. But a dog in full chase
could follow the trail to a tree, and a man could shoot into the tree.
As the rabbits decreased, Koot set out many traps for the bob-cats now
reckless with hunger, steel-traps and deadfalls and pits and log pens
with a live grouse clucking inside. The midwinter lull was a busy season
for Koot.
Towards March, the sun-glare has produced a crust on the snow that is
almost like glass. For Koot on his snow-shoes this had no danger; but
for the mongrel that was to draw the pelts back to the fort, the snow
crust was more troublesome than glass. Where the crust was thick, with
Koot leading the way snow-shoes and dog and toboggan glided over the
drifts as if on steel runners. But in midday the crust was soft and the
dog went floundering through as if on thin ice, the sharp edge cutting
his feet. Koot tied little buckskin sacks round the dog's feet and made
a few more rounds of the swamp; but the crust was a sign that warned
him it was time to prepare for the marten-hunt. To leave his furs at the
fort, he must cross the prairie while it was yet good travelling for the
dog. Dismantling the little cabin, Koot packed the pelts on the
toboggan, roped all tightly so there could be no spill from an upset,
and putting the mongrel in the traces, led the way for the fort one
night when the snow-crust was hard as ice.
* * * * *
The moon came up over the white fields in a great silver disk. Between
the running man and the silver moon moved black skulking forms--the
foragers on their night hunt. Sometimes a fox loped over a drift, or a
coyote rose ghostly from the snow, or timber-wolves dashed from wooded
ravines and stopped to look till Koot fired a shot that sent them
galloping.
In the dark that precedes daylight, Koot camped beside a grove of
poplars--that is, he fed the dog a fish, whittled chips to make a fire
and boil some tea for himself, then digging a hole in the drift with his
snow-shoe, laid the sleigh to windward and cuddled down between
bear-skins with the dog across his feet.
Daylight came in a blinding glare of sunshine and white snow. The way
was untrodden. Koot led at an ambling run, followed by the dog at a fast
trot, so that the trees were presently left far on the offing and the
runners were out on the bare white prairie with never a mark, tree or
shrub, to break the dazzling reaches of sunshine and snow from horizon
to horizon. A man who is breaking the way must keep his eyes on the
ground; and the ground was so blindingly bright that Koot began to see
purple and yellow and red patches dancing wherever he looked on the
snow. He drew his capote over his face to shade his eyes; but the pace
and the sun grew so hot that he was soon running again unprotected from
the blistering light.
Towards the afternoon, Koot knew that something had gone wrong. Some
distance ahead, he saw a black object against the snow. On the unbroken
white, it looked almost as big as a barrel and seemed at least a mile
away. Lowering his eyes, Koot let out a spurt of speed, and the next
thing he knew he had tripped his snow-shoe and tumbled. Scrambling up,
he saw that a stick had caught the web of his snow-shoe; but where was
the barrel for which he had been steering? There wasn't any barrel at
all--the barrel was this black stick which hadn't been fifty yards away.
Koot rubbed his eyes and noticed that black and red and purple patches
were all over the snow. The drifts were heaving and racing after each
other like waves on an angry sea. He did not go much farther that day;
for every glint of snow scorched his eyes like a hot iron. He camped at
the first bluff and made a poultice of cold tea leaves which he laid
across his blistered face for the night.
Any one who knows the tortures of snow-blindness will understand why
Koot did not sleep that night. It was a long night to the trapper, such
a very long night that the sun had been up for two hours before its heat
burned through the layers of his capote into his eyes and roused him
from sheer pain. Then he sprang up, put up an ungantled hand and knew
from the heat of the sun that it was broad day. But when he took the
bandage off his eyes, all he saw was a black curtain one moment,
rockets and wheels and dancing patches of purple fire the next.
Koot was no fool to become panicky and feeble from sudden peril. He knew
that he was snow-blind on a pathless prairie at least two days away from
the fort. To wait until the snow-blindness had healed would risk the few
provisions that he had and perhaps expose him to a blizzard. The one
rule of the trapper's life is to go ahead, let the going cost what it
may; and drawing his capote over his face, Koot went on.
The heat of the sun told him the directions; and when the sun went down,
the crooning west wind, bringing thaw and snow-crust, was his compass.
And when the wind fell, the tufts of shrub-growth sticking through the
snow pointed to the warm south. Now he tied himself to his dog; and when
he camped beside trees into which he had gone full crash before he knew
they were there, he laid his gun beside the dog and sleigh. Going out
the full length of his cord, he whittled the chips for his fire and
found his way back by the cord.
On the second day of his blindness, no sun came up; nor could he guide
himself by the feel of the air, for there was no wind. It was one of the
dull dead gray days that precedes storms. How would he get his
directions to set out? Memory of last night's travel might only lead him
on the endless circling of the lost. Koot dug his snow-shoe to the base
of a tree, found moss, felt it growing on only one side of the tree,
knew that side must be the shady cold side, and so took his bearings
from what he thought was the north.
Koot said the only time that he knew any fear was on the evening of the
last day. The atmosphere boded storm. The fort lay in a valley.
Somewhere between Koot and that valley ran a trail. What if he had
crossed the trail? What if the storm came and wiped out the trail before
he could reach the fort? All day, whisky-jack and snow-bunting and fox
scurried from his presence; but this night in the dusk when he felt
forward on his hands and knees for the expected trail, the wild
creatures seemed to grow bolder. He imagined that he felt the coyotes
closer than on the other nights. And then the fearful thought came that
he might have passed the trail unheeding. Should he turn back?
Afraid to go forward or back, Koot sank on the ground, unhooded his face
and tried to _force_ his eyes to see. The pain brought biting salty
tears. It was quite useless. Either the night was very dark, or the eyes
were very blind.
And then white man or Indian--who shall say which came uppermost?--Koot
cried out to the Great Spirit. In mockery back came the saucy scold of a
jay.
But that was enough for Koot--it was prompt answer to his prayer; for
where do the jays quarrel and fight and flutter but on the trail?
Running eagerly forward, the trapper felt the ground. The rutted marks
of a "jumper" sleigh cut the hard crust. With a shout, Koot headed down
the sloping path to the valley where lay the fur post, the low hanging
smoke of whose chimneys his eager nostrils had already sniffed.