eye saw something which interested him. His great wings flapped heavily,
checking his course. He tipped suddenly, half-shut his wings, and shot
straight downward perhaps a thousand feet. Here he stopped his descent
with a sharp upward turn which made the wind whistle harshly in his
wings. And here he hung, hovering, watching, waiting for the opportunity
that now seemed close at hand.
II
In the heart of the cedar swamp the silence was thick, brooding, and
imperishable. One felt that if ever any wandering sound, any lost
bird-cry or call of wayfaring beast, should drop into it, the intruding
voice would be straightway engulfed, smothered, and forgotten.
The ground beneath the stiff branches and between the gray, ragged,
twisted trunks was grotesquely humped with moss-grown roots and pitted
with pools of black water. Here and there amid the heavy moss fat
fungoid growths thrust up their heads, dead white, or cold red, or pink,
or spotted orange. The few scattered herbs that flourished among the
humped and dangerous pools were solitary in habit, broad of leaf, tall
and succulent of stalk. Not one of them bore any gay or perfumed
blossom, to lure into the swamp the brightness of a butterfly or the
homely humming of wild bees.
The only bird that habitually endured the stillness and the gloom of the
cedar swamp was a shadowy, silent, elusive little nuthatch, which spent
its time slipping up and down the ragged trunks, uttering at wide
intervals its faint, brief note. So furtive a being, and so shy and rare
a voice, only made the silence more impressive, the solitude more
profound.
A great black bulk, moving noiselessly as a shadow hither and thither
among the shadows, seemed the spirit of the swamp made palpable. The
old bear, having learned that certain of the big toadstools growing in
the swamp were very good to eat, had taken to haunting the silence of
the glooms in the season when the fungoids flourished. The solitude and
the stillness suited his morose temper; and for all his seeming
awkwardness he moved as delicately as a cat. His great sharp-clawed feet
seemed shod with velvet, and never a twig snapped under his stealthy
tread. It was not through fear that he went thus softly, for he feared
no creature of the wilderness. But the heavy silence was attuned to his
mood; and besides, he never knew when he might surprise some mouse,
water-rat, or mink that would furnish variety to his toadstool diet.
Such a fortunate surprise, however, could befall him but seldom in the
empty solitude of the swamp. So it happened that, one day when he tired
of the fat, insipid fungoids, his thought turned to the lake, on whose
shores he had sometimes found dead fish. He remembered, with watering
chops, that he had even once or twice been able to catch live fish,
close in shore, by lying in wait for them with exhaustless patience and
scooping them up at last with a lightning sweep of the paw.
[Illustration: "FOR ALL HIS SEEMING AWKWARDNESS HE MOVED AS DELICATELY
AS A CAT."]
Ignoring the toadstools, he turned straight south, and made his way
toward the lake. He travelled swiftly, winding this way and that between
the green, humped roots, the gray trunks, and the black water-pits. But
swiftly as he went, his movement left no trail of sound behind it. A
shadow could not have moved more noiselessly. It was as if the age-old
silence simply seized and folded away for ever the impact of his great
footfalls on the moss. When at length he caught the flash of the bright
water ahead of him through the trees, he moved even more cautiously, so
extreme was his circumspection. Reaching the edge of the cedar growth,
he slipped unseen into a thicket of red willows which afforded a
convenient ambush, and peered out warily to assure himself as to what
might be going on around the shores. For a long while he crouched there
as moveless as a stone, that if by mischance his coming had given alarm
to any of the wilderness folk, suspicion might have time to die away.
III
In the mid-deep of the lake the silence was absolute. There was no hiss
of tense feathers to accentuate it, as in the upper vast of air. There
was no fading and elusive bird-note to measure it by, as in the gloom of
the cedar swamp. Down in the gold-brown glimmer the fine silt lay
unstirred on the stones. There was no movement, except the delicate,
almost imperceptible waving of the great trout's coloured fins.
In the shallower water along the edges of the lake there was always a
faint confusion of small sounds. The slow breathing of the lake, as it
were, kept up a rhythmic, almost invisible motion among the smaller
pebbles, making a crisp whisper which the water carried far beneath the
surface while it could not be heard at all in the air above. But none of
this stir reached the silent deeps where the big trout, morose and
enamoured of his solitude, lay lazily opening and shutting his crimson
gills.
Because the water of the lake was dark,--amber-tinted from the swamps
about its shores,--the colours of the trout were dark, strong, and
vivid. His strangely patterned back was almost black, yet brilliant,
like some kinds of damascened steel. His belly was bright pink. His
sides had a purplish hue, on which the rows of intense vermilion spots
stood out almost incongruously. His fins were as gaudy as the petals of
some red-and-white flower.
The trout was staring upward with his blank, lidless eyes. He was
hungry, and he felt that it was from that direction that food was like
to come to him most easily. Smaller fish had learned, from the fate of
so many of their fellows, to shun the haunted stillness of this mid-lake
depth; and the big trout was growing tired of caddis bait and such small
game.
The surface of the lake, as he looked up at it, presented to him a sort
of semitransparent mirror, thronged with reflections, yet allowing the
sky overhead, and the shadows of many dreaming insects, to show through.
If a swallow, for instance, or a low-winged snipe, flew over, the trout
could see not only the bird itself, and the shadow of the bird on the
bottom, but also a dim, swift-moving reflection of the shadow, on the
silvery mirror above. If a swallow's wing-tip flicked the surface,
sending down a bright little jet of bubbles, these bubbles also would
double themselves in reflections as they darted up again and vanished in
the mirroring ripples.
All this, however, was of little interest to the hungry trout, till he
caught sight of a large butterfly zigzagging languidly close above the
water. Its flight was so feeble that the big fish's expectations were
aroused. Slowly he started upwards, to be on hand for whatever favour
fortune might have in store for him.
As he swam up out of the gloom, the butterfly flickered above him, and
its big shadow danced along the bottom beside his own. A small beetle,
its wings all outspread, struck the surface violently close by,
shattering the mirror for a second, then starting a series of tiny
ripples. The big trout paid no heed to the convulsive gyrations of the
beetle. He was wholly intent upon the butterfly, whose faltering flight
drooped ever nearer and nearer to the shining flood. At last, the
splendid painted wings failed to flutter; and lightly, softly, like a
leaf, the gorgeous insect sank upon the water, hardly marring the
surface. Without a struggle, without even a quiver. They rested,--for
perhaps a second. Then, there was a heavy boil in the water immediately
beneath. A pair of black jaws opened. The dead butterfly was sucked
down. With a wanton flick of his broad, powerful tail, just above the
surface, the big trout turned to sink back into the watery silence with
his spoils.
[Illustration: "THE WATER SPLASHED HIGH AND WHITE ABOUT HIM."]
IV
There was a harsh, strong hissing in the air, and a dark body fell out
of the sky. Fell? Rather it seemed to have been shot downward from a
catapult. No mere falling could be so swift as that sheer yet governed
descent. Just at the surface of the water the wedge of the eagle's body
turned, his snow-white head and neck bent upwards, his broad wings
spread, and beat heavily. In spite of the terrific force of his descent,
his body did not go wholly under water, but the water splashed high and
white about him. The next instant he rose clear, flapping ponderously.
In the iron clutch of his talons writhed the great trout, gripped behind
the head and by the middle of the back, its tail thrashing
spasmodically.
Never before had this fierce and majestic visitant from the upper
silence fallen upon so difficult a prey. Its weight, alone, was all that
his mighty wings could lift; and its vehement writhings were so full of
energy that it was all he could do to hold it. With his most strenuous
flapping, he could hardly lift the victim clear of the water. To bear it
off to his lonely rock-ledge on the peak was manifestly impossible.
After a few moments of laborious indecision he beat his way heavily
toward shore. Nowhere, up and down the beach, in the thickets, or in the
dark corridors of the forest, could his piercing eyes detect any foe.
The nearest point of land was an arrow ribbon of clean white rock with a
screen of Indian willow close behind it. This point he made for. A few
feet above the water's edge he alighted. For a moment he stood
haughtily, his hard, implacable yellow eyes challenging the wilderness.
Then, his snake-like white head stooped quickly forward, and his
powerful beak bit clear through to the victim's backbone, a little
behind the spot where it joined the neck. The trout's body stiffened
straight out, with a strong shudder, then lay limp and still. Very
deliberately, as if scorning to display his hunger, the royal bird began
to make his meal.
But one palpitating morsel had gone down his outstretched, snowy throat,
when it seemed to him that a leaf whispered in the willow thicket behind
him. There was no air stirring, so why should a leaf whisper? His claws
relaxed their grip upon the prey; his wings shot out and gave one
powerful flap; he bounced lightly upward and aside. At the same moment a
black bulk burst out from the willow thicket, and a great black paw
smote at him savagely.
The eagle had sprung aside just in time. Had that terrific buffet fairly
reached him, never again would he have mounted to his aerial haunts of
silence. But as it was, the sweep of the black paw just touched the
bird's tail. Two or three dark, regal feathers fluttered to the ground.
His spacious pinions caught the air and winnowed out a few feet over the
water. The bear, content at having captured the prize, paid no more
attention to him, but greedily fell upon the prey.
Ordinarily, an eagle would no more think of interfering with a bear than
of assailing a granite boulder. But in this case the aggravation was
unprecedented. Never before had the "King of the Air" known what it was
to have his lawful prey and hard-won spoils snatched from him. With a
sudden sharp yelp of rage he whirled, shot upward, and swooped, with a
twang of stiff-set feathers, straight at his adversary's head. Totally
unprepared for such a daring assault, the bear could not ward it off.
Several sudden red gashes on his head showed where those knife-like
talons had struck. "_Wah!_" he bawled, half-rising on his haunches and
throwing up a great forearm in defence. The eagle, swooping upward out
of reach, swung round and hovered as if about to repeat the attack.
As the bear crouched, half-sitting, one paw on the mangled prey, the
other uplifted in readiness for stroke or parry, the furious bird
hesitated. He knew the full menace of that massive upraised paw, which,
clumsy though it looked, could strike as swiftly as the darting head of
a snake. For all his rage, he had no mind to risk a maimed wing. In a
second or two he swooped again, this time as if to catch the foe in the
back; but he took care not to come too close. The bear whirled on his
haunches, and struck viciously; but his claws met nothing but empty air,
while a stiff wing-tip brushed smartingly across his eyes.
Again, and yet again, the eagle swooped, never coming quite within
reach. Again and yet again the bear, boiling with embarrassed fury,
whirled and struck, but in vain. He struck nothing more tangible than
air. The sharp indignant yelps of the great bird flapping close above
him were a defiance which he could not answer. He had the prize, but he
could not enjoy it. For a few moments he hesitated. Then doggedly he
crouched down, with his head partly shielded between his fore paws, and
fell to eating hurriedly. Before he could fairly swallow one mouthful,
the air again hissed ominously in his ears, and those clutching talons
tore at his neck. With a roar of pain, and wrath, and discomfiture, he
snatched the prey up in his jaws, and plunged into the thicket with his
head well down between his legs. As he vanished the implacable talons
struck once more, ripping red furrows in the black fur of his rump.
Smarting, and grumbling heavily, the bear lay down in the heart of the
willow thicket, and finished devouring the great trout. Still yelping,
the eagle circled above the thicket. Through the leafy branches he could
see the black form of his adversary; but into the thicket he dared not
swoop lest he should be caught at a disadvantage there. For a long time
he circled, hoping that his enemy would come out and give him another
opportunity of vengeance. Then, seeing that the bear lay motionless,
apparently asleep, his rage wore itself out. Higher he whirled, and yet
higher, while the wary beast in the thicket watched patiently for his
going. Then suddenly he changed his course. With long, splendid sweep of
wing he made off in direct flight, slanting swiftly upward toward the
blue silence above the peak.
On the Night Trail
The radiant, blue-white, midwinter moonlight, flooding the little open
space of white in the blackness of the spruce forest, revealed the
frozen fragments of a big lake trout scattered over the snow. They stood
out sharply, so that no midnight forager of the wilds, prowling in the
fringes of the shadow and peering forth in the watch for prey or foe,
could by any possibility fail to sight them.
The stillness of the solitude was intense, breathless, as if sealed to
perpetual silence by the bitter cold. At last, at one corner of the
open, a spruce branch that leaned upon the snow stirred ever so
slightly; and from its shelter a little gray-brown nose, surmounted by a
pair of tiny eyes like black beads, anxiously surveyed the perilous
space of illumination. For perhaps half a minute there was not another
movement. Then the shrew-mouse, well aware that death might be watching
him from under every tree, plucked up a desperate valour and darted
out into the light. The goad of his winter hunger driving him, he seized
the nearest bit of fish that was small enough for him to handle, and
scurried back with it to his safe hole under a fir-root. It was brave
adventure, and deserved its success.
[Illustration: "THE SHREW-MOUSE ... DARTED OUT INTO THE LIGHT."]
For ten minutes more nothing happened to break the stillness. Then again
the little shrew-mouse peered from the covert of his hanging branch.
This time, however, he drew back instantly. He had caught sight of a
pointed black head and snake-like neck stealthily reconnoitring from the
opposite side of the open. A hungry mink was making ready to appropriate
some of the fish; but since he knew that a forest glade, far from the
water, was not a customary resort of fish, alive or frozen, he was
inclined to be suspicious of some kind of trap or ambuscade. Instead of
looking at the delicious morsels, there in plain, alluring view, he
scanned piercingly the shadows and drooping branches which encircled the
glade. Suddenly he seemed to detect something to his distaste. A red
gleam of anger and ferocity flared into his eyes, and he sank back
noiselessly into covert.
A moment later came a huge lynx, padding softly but fearlessly straight
out into the revealing light, as if he knew that at this season, when
the bears were asleep and the bull moose, bereft of their antlers, had
lost their interest in combat, there was none of all the forest kindreds
to challenge his supremacy. He was stealthy, of course, in every
movement, and his round, sinister eyes glared palely into every covert,
but that was merely because he dreaded to frighten off a possible
quarry, not because he feared a lurking foe. The frozen fish, however,
showed no signs of flight at his approach; so he fell upon the nearest
fragment and bolted it ravenously.
Having thus eagerly disposed of several substantial lumps, the great
lynx became more critical, and went sniffing fastidiously from morsel to
morsel as if he revelled in such unexpected abundance. Suddenly there
was a vicious _click_; and with a spit and a yowl the lynx started as if
to jump into the air. Instead of rising, however, some six or seven
feet, under the propulsion of his mighty, spring-like muscles, he merely
bowed his back and strained tremendously. In response, a small thing of
dark steel emerged from the snow, followed closely by a log of heavy
wood. The lynx was caught in a trap by his right fore foot.
[Illustration: "HIS ROUND, SINISTER EYES GLARED PALELY INTO EVERY
COVERT."]
For a minute or two the panic-stricken beast went through a number of
more or less aimless contortions, spitting and screeching, biting at the
trap, and clawing frantically at the log. Presently, however, finding
that his contortions only made the thing that had him grip the harder
and hurt him the more savagely, he halted to consider his predicament.
Consideration not appearing to ease that urgent anguish in his paw, he
began to strain steadily backward, hoping, if he could not free himself,
at least to drag his captor into the woods and perhaps lose it among the
trees. The log, however, was very heavy, and his best efforts could move
it but a few inches at a time. When, at the end of an hour of fierce
struggle, he lay down utterly exhausted, he was still in the full glare
of the moon, still several feet from the shelter of the branches. But no
sooner had he lain down, than the crunching of a footstep on the crisp
snow brought him to his feet again; and with every hair on end along his
back, his eyes ablaze with rage and fear, he turned to face the tall
figure of a backwoodsman, who stood gazing at him with a smile of
satisfaction from the other side of the glade.
Just about three hours earlier, on his way into the Cross Roads
Settlement, Pete Logan had set that trap with particular care, and with
the definite purpose of capturing that particular lynx. With all his
cunning, little did the great tuft-eared cat suspect that for weeks the
backwoodsman had been watching him, noting his haunts and trails,
observing his peculiarities, and laying plans for his capture. That very
evening, at the Cross Roads, Logan had boasted that single-handed he
would bring the big lynx into the Settlement, alive and undamaged. He
wanted the splendid animal to sell to an American who was collecting
wild beasts for menageries; and to avoid injuring the captive's fine
gray fur he had partly muffled the cruel teeth of the trap, that they
might take hold without tearing.
Having no dread of anything that inhabited the wilds, Logan had left his
rifle at home, and carried no weapon but the knife in his belt and his
light, straight-hafted axe. In the pack on his back, however, he brought
what he intended should serve him better than any weapon,--a thick
blanket, and a heavy canvas sack. Now, as he stood eying the frightened
and furious captive, he undid the pack and shook the big blanket loose.
The lynx glared with new terror at the ample folds. He had seen men
before, but he had never seen one shaking out a blanket, which looked to
him like a kind of gigantic and awful wings.
Logan had made his plans with careful foresight; and now it was with the
deliberation of absolute confidence that he went about the execution of
them. His axe gripped in readiness for any unforeseen piece of strategy
on the part of the foe, he advanced with the blanket outspread before
him like a shield. Back and back, to the limit of his bonds, cowered the
lynx, glaring defiance and inextinguishable hate. Slowly the man drew
near, till, just barely within reach of the beast's spring, he stopped.
For perhaps half a minute more neither man nor beast stirred a
muscle,--till the tension of the captive's nerves must have neared the
breaking-point. Then, as if his own nerves knew by sympathy the exactly
proper moment for the next move in the game, Logan made a swooping
forward plunge with the blanket. With a screech of fury the lynx sprang
to the grapple,--to find himself, in half a second, rolled over and
tangled up and swathed helpless in the smothering woollen folds. In vain
he bit, and spat, and yowled, and tore. His keen white fangs caught
nothing but choking wool; his rending claws had no chance to do their
work; and the crushing weight of the woodsman's sturdy body was bearing
him down into the snow. In a few moments, daunted by the thick darkness
over his eyes and exhausted by the impotence of his efforts, he lay
still, quivering with rage. Then, with the most delicate caution,
working through a couple of folds of the blanket, Logan released the
jaws of the trap and slipped it warily from the imprisoned paw. To
remove it from within the perilous paral was, of course, not to be
thought of; but he feared to damage the joint by leaving it in that
inexorable clutch a moment longer than was necessary. This done, he
deftly whipped a lashing of cod-line about the bundle, binding the legs
securely, but leaving a measure of freedom about the head and neck. Then
he thrust the bundle into the canvas bag, slung it over his back, and
started on the five-mile tramp back to his camp.
Logan travelled without snow-shoes, because there was just now little
snow on the trails, or even in the deep woods. What snow there was,
moreover, was frozen almost as hard as rock, except for an inch or two
of fluffy stuff which had fallen leisurely within a couple of days. An
extraordinarily heavy and prolonged January thaw, followed by fierce and
sudden frost, had brought about this unusual condition, making something
like a famine among the hunting kindreds of the forest, whose
light-footed quarry, the eaters of bark and twig and bud, now found
flight easy over the frozen surfaces.
The complacent trapper, ruminating pleasantly over his triumph and the
handsome price his captive was to bring him, had covered perhaps a mile
of his homeward journey when from far behind him came to his ears a
novel sound, faintly pulsing down the still night air. Without seeming
to pay it any attention whatever, he nevertheless was instantly and
keenly concerned; and he perceived that the uneasy bundle on his back
was interested too, for it stopped its indignant wrigglings to listen.
Up to this moment Logan had believed that there was no voice in all the
wilderness unfamiliar to his ears, no speech of all the wild kindreds
which he could not in rough fashion interpret. But this cry he did not
understand. Presently it was repeated, a little nearer, and a little
more convincingly strange to him. He knotted his rugged brows. A few
moments more and again it floated down the moonlight, high, quavering,
musical, yet carrying in its mysterious cadences an unmistakable menace.
Logan knew now to a certainty that it was a sound he had never heard
before; and he knew what it was, though he refused to acknowledge it to
himself, because it was a refutation of many of his most dogmatic
pronouncements.
"It _ain't_ wolves!" He muttered to himself obstinately. "Ther' ain't
never been a wolf in New Brunswick!"
But even as he spoke, the sinister cry arose again, nearer and yet
nearer; and he was obliged to confess to himself that, whatever it was,
it was on his trail, and he was likely to know more about it within a
few minutes. He was not alarmed, but he was annoyed, both at the
upsetting of his theories and at the absence of his gun. Undoubtedly,
these Charlotte County romancers had been right. There _were_ wolves in
New Brunswick. He was ready to apologize for having so sarcastically
questioned it.