Pekompf the wildcat is one of the savage beasts that have not yet
vanished from the haunts of men. Sometimes, as you clamber up the
wooded hillside above the farm, you will come suddenly upon a
fierce-looking, catlike creature stretched out on a rock sunning
himself. At sight of you he leaps up with a snarl, and you have a
swift instant in which to take his measure. He is twice as big as a
house-cat, with round head and big expressionless eyes that glare
straight into yours with a hard, greenish glitter. His reddish-brown
sides are spotted here and there, and the white fur of his belly is
blotched with black--the better to hide himself amid the lights and
shadows. A cat, sure enough, but unlike anything of the kind you have
ever seen before.
As you look and wonder there is a faint sound that you will do well to
heed. The muscles of his long thick legs are working nervously, and
under the motion is a warning purr, not the soft rumble in a contented
tabby's throat, but the cut and rip of ugly big claws as they are
unsheathed viciously upon the dry leaves. His stub tail is
twitching--you had not noticed it before, but now it whips back and
forth angrily, as if to call attention to the fact that Nature had not
altogether forgotten that end of Pekompf. Whip, whip,--it is a
tail--k'yaaaah! And you jump as the fierce creature screeches in your
face.
If it is your first wildcat, you will hardly know what to do,--to
stand perfectly quiet is always best, unless you have a stick or gun
in your hand,--and if you have met Pekompf many times before, you are
quite as uncertain what he will do this time. Most wild creatures,
however fierce, prefer to mind their own business and will respect the
same sentiment in you. But when you stumble upon a wildcat you are
never sure of his next move. That is because he is a slinking,
treacherous creature, like all cats, and never quite knows how best to
meet you. He suspects you unreasonably because he knows you suspect
him with reason. Generally he slinks away, or leaps suddenly for
cover, according to the method of your approach. But though smaller he
is naturally more savage than either the Canada lynx or the panther,
and sometimes he crouches and snarls in your face, or even jumps for
your chest at the first movement.
Once, to my knowledge, he fell like a fury upon the shoulders of a man
who was hurrying homeward through the twilight, and who happened to
stop unawares under the tree where Pekompf was watching the runways.
The man had no idea that a wildcat was near, and he probably never
would have known had he gone steadily on his way. As he told me
afterwards, he felt a sudden alarm and stopped to listen. The moment
he did so the savage creature above him thought himself discovered,
and leaped to carry the war into Africa. There was a pounce, a
screech, a ripping of cloth, a wild yell for help; then the answering
shout and rush of two woodsmen with their axes. And that night
Pekompf's skin was nailed to the barn-door to dry in the sun before
being tanned and made up into a muff for the woodsman's little girl to
warm her fingers withal in the bitter winter weather.
Where civilization has driven most of his fellows away, Pekompf is a
shy, silent creature; but where the farms are scattered and the
hillsides wild and wooded, he is bolder and more noisy than in the
unpeopled wilderness. From the door of the charcoal-burner's hut in
the Connecticut hills you may still hear him screeching and fighting
with his fellows as the twilight falls, and the yowling uproar causes
a colder chill in your back than anything you will ever hear in the
wilderness. As you follow the trout stream, from which the charcoal
man daily fills his kettle, you may find Pekompf stretched on a fallen
log under the alders, glaring intently into the trout pool, waiting,
waiting--for what?
It will take many seasons of watching to answer this natural question,
which every one who is a follower of the wild things has asked himself
a score of times. All the cats have but one form of patience, the
patience of quiet waiting. Except when hunger-driven, their way of
hunting is to watch beside the game paths or crouch upon a big limb
above the place where their game comes down to drink. Sometimes they
vary their programme by prowling blindly through the woods, singly or
in pairs, trusting to luck to blunder upon their game; for they are
wretched hunters. They rarely follow a trail, not simply because
their noses are not keen--for in the snow, with a trail as plain as a
deer path, they break away from it with reckless impatience, only to
scare the game into a headlong dash for safety. Then they will crouch
under a dwarf spruce and stare at the trail with round unblinking
eyes, waiting for the frightened creatures to come back, or for other
creatures to come by in the same footprints. Even in teaching her
young a mother wildcat is full of snarling whims and tempers; but now
let a turkey gobble far away in the woods, let Musquash dive into his
den where she can see it, let but a woodmouse whisk out of sight into
his hidden doorway,--and instantly patience returns to Pekompf. All
the snarling ill-temper vanishes. She crouches and waits, and forgets
all else. She may have just fed full on what she likes best, and so
have no desire for food and no expectation of catching more; but she
must still watch, as if to reassure herself that her eyes are not
deceived and that Tookhees is really there under the mossy stone where
she saw the scurry of his little legs and heard his frightened squeak
as he disappeared.
But why should a cat watch at a trout pool, out of which nothing ever
comes to reward his patience? That was a puzzling question for many
years. I had seen Pekompf many times stretched on a log, or lying
close to a great rock over the water, so intent on his watching that
he heard not my cautious approach. Twice from my canoe I had seen
Upweekis the lynx on the shore of a wilderness lake, crouched among
the weather-worn roots of a stranded pine, his great paws almost
touching the water, his eyes fixed with unblinking stare on the deep
pool below. And once, when trout fishing on a wild river just opposite
a great jam of logs and driftwood, I had stopped casting suddenly with
an uncanny feeling of being watched by unseen eyes at my solitary
sport.
It is always well to heed such a warning in the woods. I looked up and
down quickly; but the river held no life above its hurrying flood. I
searched the banks carefully and peered suspiciously into the woods
behind me; but save for the dodging of a winter wren, who seems always
to be looking for something that he has lost and that he does not want
you to know about, the shores were wild and still as if just created.
I whipped out my flies again. What was that, just beyond the little
wavelet where my Silver Doctor had fallen? Something moved, curled,
flipped and twisted nervously. It was a tail, the tip end that cannot
be quiet. And there--an irrepressible chill trickled over me as I made
out the outlines of a great gray beast stretched on a fallen log, and
caught the gleam of his wild eyes fixed steadily upon me. Even as I
saw the thing it vanished like a shadow of the woods. But what was the
panther watching there before he watched me?
The answer came unexpectedly. It was in the Pemigewasset valley in
midsummer. At daybreak I had come softly down the wood road to the
trout pool and stopped to watch a mink dodging in and out along the
shore. When he passed out of sight under some logs I waited quietly
for other Wood Folk to show themselves. A slight movement on the end
of a log--and there was Pekompf, so still that the eye could hardly
find him, stretching a paw down cautiously and flipping it back with a
peculiar inward sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long curved
claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched wide out of their sheaths. He was
fishing, spearing his prey with the patience of an Indian; and even as
I made the discovery there was a flash of silver following the quick
jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped to the shore and crouched over the
fish that he had thrown out of the water.
So Pekompf watches the pools as he watches a squirrel's hole because
he has seen game there and because he likes fish above everything else
that the woods can furnish. But how often must he watch the big trout
before he catches one? Sometimes, in the late twilight, the largest
fish will move out of the pools and nose along the shore for food,
their back fins showing out of the shallow water as they glide along.
It may be that Pekompf sometimes catches them at this time, and so
when he sees the gleam of a fish in the depths he crouches where he is
for a while, following the irresistible impulse of all cats at the
sight of game. Herein they differ from all other savage beasts, which,
when not hungry, pay no attention whatever to smaller animals.
[Illustration: "A flash of silver following the quick jerk of his
paw"]
It may be, also, that Pekompf's cunning is deeper than this. Old Noel,
a Micmac hunter, tells me that both wildcat and lynx, whose cunning is
generally the cunning of stupidity, have discovered a remarkable way
of catching fish. They will lie with their heads close to the water,
their paws curved for a quick grab, their eyes half shut to deceive
the fish, and their whiskers just touching and playing with the
surface. Their general color blends with that of their surroundings
and hides them perfectly. The trout, noticing the slight crinkling of
the water where the long whiskers touch it, but not separating the
crouching animal from the log or rock on which he rests, rise to the
surface, as is their wont when feeding, and are snapped out by a
lightning sweep of the paws.
Whether this be so or not I am not sure. The raccoon undoubtedly
catches crabs and little fish in this way; and I have sometimes
surprised cats--both wildcats and Canada lynxes, as well as domestic
tabbies--with their heads down close to the water, so still that they
seemed part of the log or rock on which they crouched. Once I tried
for five minutes to make a guide see a big lynx that was lying on a
root in plain sight within thirty yards of our canoe, while the guide
assured me in a whisper that he could see perfectly and that it was
only a stump. Then, hearing us, the lynx rose, stared, and leaped for
the brush.
Such hiding would easily deceive even a trout, for I have often taken
my position at the edge of a jam and after lying perfectly still for
ten minutes have seen the wary fish rise from under the logs to
investigate a straw or twig that I held in my fingers and with which I
touched the water here and there, like an insect at play.
So Old Noel is probably right when he says that Pekompf fishes with
his whiskers, for the habits of both fish and cats seem to carry out
his observations.
But deeper than his cunning is Pekompf's inborn suspicion and his
insane fury at being opposed or cornered. The trappers catch him, as
they catch his big cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the
rabbit paths that he nightly follows. Opposite the noose and attached
to the other end of the cord is a pole, which jumps after the cat as
he starts forward with the loop about his neck. Were it a fox, now,
he would back away out of the snare, or lie still and cut the cord
with his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats when trapped, Pekompf
flies into a blind fury. He screeches at the unoffending stick, claws
it, battles with it, and literally chokes himself in his rage. Or, if
he be an old cat and his cunning a bit deeper, he will go off
cautiously and climb the biggest tree he can find, with the
uncomfortable thing that he is tied to dangling and clattering behind
him. When near the top he will leave the stick hanging on one side of
a limb while he cunningly climbs down the other, thinking thus to fool
his dumb enemy and leave him behind. One of two things always happens.
Either the stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf hangs himself on
his own gibbet, or else it comes over with a sudden jerk and falls to
the ground, pulling Pekompf with it and generally killing him in the
fall.
It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best, and fortunately for the
cat tribe has almost vanished from the northern woods, except in the
far Northwest, where the half-breeds still use it for lynx
successfully. But as a study of the way in which trappers seize upon
some peculiarity of an animal and use it for his destruction, it has
no equal.
That Pekompf's cunning is of the cat kind, suspicious without being
crafty or intelligent like that of the fox or wolf, is curiously shown
by a habit which both lynx and wildcat have in common, namely, that of
carrying anything they steal to the top of some lofty evergreen to
devour it. When they catch a rabbit or fish fairly themselves, they
generally eat it on the spot; but when they steal the same animal from
snare or cache, or from some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion
returns--together with some dim sense of wrongdoing, which all animals
feel more or less--and they make off with the booty and eat it
greedily where they think no one will ever find them.
Once, when watching for days under a fish-hawk's nest to see the
animals that came in shyly to eat the scraps that the little
fish-hawks cast out when their hunger was satisfied, this cat habit
was strikingly manifest. Other animals would come in and quietly eat
what they found and slip away again; but the cats would seize on a
morsel with flashing eyes, as if defying all law and order, and would
either growl horribly as they ate or else would slink away guiltily
and, as I found out by following, would climb the biggest tree at hand
and eat the morsel in the highest crotch that gave a foothold. And
once, on the Maine coast in November, I saw a fierce battle in the
tree-tops where a wildcat crouched, snarling like twenty fiends, while
a big eagle whirled and swooped over him, trying to take away the game
that Pekompf had stolen.
By far the most curious bit of Pekompf's cunning came under my eyes,
one summer, a few years ago. Until recently I had supposed it to be a
unique discovery; but last summer a friend, who goes to Newfoundland
every year for the salmon fishing, had a similar experience with a
Canada lynx, which emphasizes the tendency of all cats to seek the
tree-tops with anything that they have stolen; though curiously enough
I have never found any trace of it with game that they had caught
honestly themselves. It was in Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing
for a little season, and where I had no idea of meeting Pekompf, for
the winters are severe there and the wildcat is supposed to leave such
places to his more powerful and longer-legged cousin, the lynx, whose
feet are bigger than his and better padded for walking on the snow.
Even in the southern Berkshires you may follow Pekompf's trail and see
where he makes heavy weather of it, floundering belly-deep like a
domestic tabby through the soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse
and rabbits, and lying down in despair at last to wait till the snow
settles. But to my surprise Pekompf was there, bigger, fiercer, and
more cunning than I had ever seen him; though I did not discover this
till after a long search.
I had fished from dawn till almost six o'clock, one morning, and had
taken two good trout, which were all that the stream promised to yield
for the day. Then I thought of a little pond in the woods over the
mountain, which looked trouty when I had discovered it and which, so
far as I knew, had never been fished with a fly. Led more by the fun
of exploring than by the expectation of fish, I started to try the new
waters.
The climb through the woods promised to be a hard one, so I left
everything behind except rod, reel, and fly-book. My coat was hung on
the nearest bush; the landing-net lay in the shade across a rock, the
end of the handle wedged under a root, and I dropped my two trout into
that and covered them from the sun with ferns and moss. Then I started
off through the woods for the little pond.
When I came back empty-handed, a few hours later, trout and
landing-net were gone. The first thought naturally was that some one
had stolen them, and I looked for the thief's tracks; but, save my
own, there was not a footprint anywhere beside the stream up or down.
Then I looked beside the rock more carefully and found bits of moss
and fish-scales, and the pugs of some animal, too faint in the gravel
to make out what the beast was that made them. I followed the faint
traces for a hundred yards or more into the woods till they led me to
a great spruce tree, under which every sign disappeared utterly, as if
the creature had suddenly flown away net and all, and I gave up the
trail without any idea of what had made it.
For two weeks that theft bothered me. It was not so much the loss of
my two trout and net, but rather the loss of my woodcraft on the trail
that had no end, which kept me restless. The net was a large one,
altogether too large and heavy for trout fishing. At the last moment
before starting on my trip I found that my trout net was rotten and
useless, and so had taken the only thing at hand, a specially made
forty-inch net which I had last used on a scientific expedition for
collecting specimens from the lakes of northern New Brunswick. The
handle was long, and the bow, as I had more than once tested, was
powerful enough to use instead of a gaff for taking a twenty-five
pound salmon out of his pool after he had been played to a standstill;
and how any creature could drag it off through the woods without
leaving a plain trail for my eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a
most lively curiosity to know who he was and why he had not eaten the
fish where he found them. Was it lynx or stray wolf, or had the
terrible Injun Devil that is still spoken of with awe at the winter
firesides returned to his native woods? For a week I puzzled over the
question; then I went back to the spot and tried in vain to follow the
faint marks in the moss. After that whenever I wandered near the spot
I tried the trail again, or circled wider and wider through the woods,
hoping to find the net or some positive sign of the beast that had
stolen it.
One day in the woods it occurred to me suddenly that, while I had
followed the trail three or four times, I had never thought to examine
the tree beneath which it ended. At the thought I went to the big
spruce and there, sure enough, were flecks of bright brown here and
there where the rough outer shell had been chipped off. And there
also, glimmering white, was a bit of dried slime where a fish had
rested for an instant against the bark. The beast, whatever he was,
had climbed the tree with his booty; and the discovery was no sooner
made than I was shinning up eagerly after him.
Near the scraggy top I found my net, its long handle wedged firmly in
between two branches, its bow caught on a projecting stub, its bag
hanging down over empty space. In the net was a big wildcat, his round
head driven through a hole which he had bitten in the bottom, the
tough meshes drawn taut as fiddle-strings about his throat. All four
legs had clawed or pushed their way through the mesh, till every kick
and struggle served only to bind and choke him more effectually.
From marks I made out at last the outline of the story. Pekompf had
found the fish and tried to steal them, but his suspicions were roused
by the queer net and the clattering handle. With true lynx cunning,
which is always more than half stupidity, he had carried it off and
started to climb the biggest tree he could find. Near the top the
handle had wedged among the branches, and while he tried to dislodge
it net and fish had swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below the
handle I found where he had clung to the tree boll and tried to reach
the swinging trout with his paw; and on a branch above the bow were
marks which showed where he had looked down longingly at the fish at
the bottom of the net, just below his hungry nose. From this branch he
had either fallen or, more likely, in a fit of blind rage had leaped
into the net, which closed around him and held him more effectually
than bars of iron. When I came under for the first time, following his
trail probably crouched on a limb over my head watching me steadily;
and when I came back the second time he was dead.
That was all that one could be sure about. But here and there, in a
torn mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of a claw against a swaying
twig, were the marks of a struggle whose savage intensity one could
only imagine.