to be alarmed, he could not but recognize that the cry upon his trail
was made up of a number of voices, and that a number of wolves might be
capable of making things very unpleasant for him. He remembered,
uncomfortably, that in this weather, with the snow so hard that the deer
could run their fastest upon it, the wolves must be extremely hungry.
The more he thought of this fact the more clearly he realized that the
wolves must be very hungry indeed, to dare to trail a man. He had been
walking as fast as he could; but now he broke into a long, swinging
lope, his moccasined feet padding with a soft whisper upon the snow. For
a moment he thought of ridding himself of the burden upon his back; but
this idea he rejected resentfully and with scorn. He was not going to be
robbed of his triumph by a bunch of rascally, interloping vermin like
wolves.
Meanwhile, the quavering high-pitched chorus was sweeping swiftly nearer
through the moonlight, and Logan put on a burst of speed in order to get
to a stretch of open burnt lands before his pursuers should come up with
him. If he was to have a fight forced upon him, he wanted plenty of room
and the chance to keep all his adversaries in plain view. He gained the
open, with its scattered black stumps and gaunt, ghostly "rampikes"
dotting the radiant silver of the snow, and was some eighty or a
hundred paces beyond the edge of the woods before the wolves appeared.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the gray forms of the pack halt, come
close together, then separate again, hesitating at the venture of the
open. The hesitation was only for a moment, however. Then, in formation
so close that one might have covered the whole pack with a bedquilt,
they came on again. His trained eye had counted six wolves in the pack;
and he was relieved to find that there were not more. From their cries
he had imagined there must have been thirty or forty.
Logan was too wise to run, now that he was in view of his foes. He
stalked on with haughty indifference, till the pack was within
twenty-five or thirty yards of his heels. Then he turned, and spoke,
with an air of sharp, confident authority. Even through their hunger and
their savage madness of pursuit the beasts felt the mastery of his
voice. They paused, irresolutely, then opened out and sat down on their
haunches to see what he would do.
[Illustration: "HE SAW THE GRAY FORMS OF THE PACK."]
After surveying them superciliously for a few seconds, the woodsman
turned again and stalked on, keeping, however, a keen watch over his
shoulder and his axe poised ready for instant use. As soon as he moved
on, the wolves followed, but no longer in their pack formation. Not yet
audacious enough to come within ten or twelve feet of this arrogantly
confident being, whose voice had power to daunt them in the very heat of
their onslaught, they spread out on either side of the trail,
half-surrounding him, and keeping pace with him at a skulking trot.
Their jaws were half-open, their long white fangs were bared in a
snarling grin, and their eyes, all fixed upon him unwinkingly, glinted a
green light of ferocity and hunger.
Little by little they drew closer in, while Logan pretended to ignore
them contemptuously. All at once he felt, almost more than saw, one of
the largest of the pack dart in to spring upon his back. Out went the
bright axe-blade like a flash of blue flame, as he whirled on his heel;
and the wolf dropped with a choked-off yelp, shorn through the neck.
Thrice around him he wheeled the circle of the deadly blade; and the
wolves deferentially slunk beyond reach of it, not yet ready to tempt
the fate of their comrade.
Five minutes more, however, and the wary beasts again drew closer and
Logan found that the strain of guarding himself on all sides at once
was overwhelming. At any moment, as he knew, those hungry eyes might all
close in on him together. A few hundred yards ahead, as he bethought
himself, the trail led under the foot of a high, almost perpendicular
rock; and he made up his mind that he must reach that rock as speedily
as possible. With his back against the steep face of it he could face
the charge of the pack to better advantage. Breaking into a long,
unhurried trot, he pressed on, swinging the axe from side to side in
swift, menacing sweeps, and uttering angry expletives which the wolves
seemed to respect as much as they did the gleaming weapon. Before he
gained the foot of the rock, however, the beasts had grown more
confident and more impatient, making little sudden leaps at him, from
one side or the other, so incessantly that his arm had not a moment's
rest; and he realized that the crisis of the adventure could not be much
longer delayed.
When he reached the foot of the rock and turned at bay, the wolves drew
back once more and formed a half-circle before him, a moving,
interweaving half-circle that drew closer and grew smaller stealthily.
Suddenly the wolf which seemed the leader sprang straight in. But the
woodsman seemed to divine the move even before it began, so sharply did
he meet it with a step forward and a savage axe-stroke; and the wolf
sprang back just in time to save its skull.
And now, in the clutch of the final trial, Logan had an inspiration.
With all the doggedness of the backwoods will he had vowed that he would
not give up the rich booty on his back. But the question had at last, as
he saw, become one of giving up his own life. In this crisis, his
backwoods understanding and sympathy suddenly went out toward the plucky
but helpless captive in the sack on his back. It would be quite too bad
that the splendid lynx, with all his fighting equipment of fangs and
claws, should be torn to pieces in his bonds without a chance to make a
fight for life. Moreover, as he realized with the next thought, here was
perhaps a chance to create an effective diversion in his own favour.
With a shout and a mad whirling of the axe, he once more drew back the
narrowing crescent of the wolves. The next instant he swung the bag from
his back, ripped open the mouth of it, and emptied out the writhing roll
of blanket upon the snow at his feet,--while the wolves, eyeing this
new procedure with suspicion, held back a few moments before again
closing in. As the bundle fell, Logan seized one corner of the blanket,
and with a dexterous twist and throw unrolled it, landing the prisoner
almost under the noses of the wolves.
Bewildered for an instant, the lynx had no time to bound back and scurry
up the steep face of the rock to safety. He had no sooner gained his
feet than the whole pack was upon him. With a screech of fury he
proclaimed his understanding of the crisis, and turned every tooth and
claw into the fray. His fangs, of course, were no match for those of any
one of his assailants; but his claws were weapons of such quality that
no single wolf could have withstood him. As it was, the wolves in their
eagerness got in one another's way; and as the mass of them smothered
the lynx down, more than one got eviscerating slashes that sent them
yelping out of battle.
For a few breathless seconds Logan watched the fight, glowing with
excited approval over his late captive's prowess. Then he realized the
time had come when he must take a hand, or find himself again at a
disadvantage. Silently he darted upon the screeching, growling heap
with his light axe. So skilled was he in all the woodsman's sleights,
that even in so brief time as takes to tell it, three more of the pack
were down, kicking and dying silently on the snow. The leader of the
pack, the side of his neck redly furrowed and the lust of battle hot in
his veins, wheeled, and jumped madly at Logan's throat. But the woodsman
met him with a terrific short-handled upward stroke, which fairly split
his ribs and hurled him over backwards. On the instant the remaining
wolves, who had each suffered something in the melee, concluded that the
game was up. Leaping away from the reach of those deadly-ripping claws,
they turned and ran off like whipped dogs.
Bleeding from a dozen gashes, bedraggled and battered, but still full of
fight to every outspread claw, the lynx crouched and glared at the man,
with ears flattened back and eyes shooting pallid flame. For some
seconds the two faced each other, the man grinning with approval. Then
it occurred to him that the maddened beast, in despair of escape, might
spring at him and compel him to strike, which, in his present
sympathetic and grateful mood, he was most unwilling to do. Cautiously,
keeping his eyes on the sinister flaring orbs that faced him, he took a
step backwards. Still the lynx crouched, ready to spring. Then Logan
spoke, in quiet expostulation.
"Don't ye go for to fight _me_, now! I never done ye no hurt!" he argued
mendaciously. "It's them durn wolves, that was after the both of us; an'
it was me got ye out of that scrape. Don't ye come lookin' fer trouble,
for I don't want to hurt ye!"
At the sound of the quiet voice, soothing yet commanding, the tension of
the beast's madness seemed to relax. The fixity of his glare wavered.
Then his eyes shifted; and the next moment, turning with a movement so
quick that the woodsman's eyes could hardly follow it, he was away like
a gray shadow among the stumps and trunks, not leaping, but running
belly to ground like a cat. Logan watched him out of sight, then
nonchalantly put two wounded wolves out of their misery, whetted his
knife on his larrigans, and settled down to the task of stripping the
pelts.
When the Tide Came Over the Marshes
A perfect dome of palest blue, vapourous but luminous. To northward and
southeastward a horizon line of low uplands, misty purple. Along the
farthest west a glimmer and sparkle of the sea. Everywhere else, wide,
wind-washed levels of marsh, pallid green or ochre yellow, cut here and
there with winding tide-channels and mud-flats of glistening copper red.
Twisting this way and that in erratic curves, the unbroken, sodded lines
of the dyke, fencing off the red flats and tide-channels, and dividing
the green expanses of protected dyke-marsh from the ochre yellow
stretches of the salt marsh, as yet but half-reclaimed from the sea.
At this autumn season the hay had all been cut and cured and most of it
hauled away to safe storage in far-off, upland barns. But on the remoter
and wetter marshes some of it had been piled in huge yellow-gray,
cone-peaked stacks, to await the easier hauling of winter. The solitary,
snug-built stacks, towering above the dyke-tops and whistled over
ceaselessly by the long marsh winds, were a favoured resort of the
meadow-mice. These adaptable little animals were able to endure with
equanimity the inevitable annual destruction of their homes in the deep
grass, seeing that the haymakers were so thoughtful as to afford them
much dryer and more secure abodes in the heart of the stacks, where
neither the keen-nosed fox nor the keen-eyed marsh-owl could get at
them.
Past the foot of a certain lonely stack by the outer dyke, within sound
of the rushing tide, ran an old drainage ditch, at this time of year
almost dry. Its bottom, where tiny puddles were threaded on a trickle of
running water, was now a thronged resort of water-loving insects, and
small frogs, and imprisoned shiners. To a wandering mink, driven down by
drought from the uplands, it was a wonderful and delightful place, which
he adopted at once as his own particular range. The main ditch, with its
system of lateral feeders, furnished several miles of runway, and the
whole of this rich domain the newcomer preempted, patrolling it
methodically, devoting his whole attention to it, and ready to defend
it against any rival claimant who might appear.
The mink was a male, about twenty inches long, with his rich dark coat
in perfect condition. His pointed, sinister, quietly savage face and
head were set on a long but heavy-muscled neck, almost as thick as the
thickest part of his body. The body itself was altogether snake-like in
its lithe sinuousness, and supported on legs so ridiculously short that
when he was not leaping he seemed to writhe and dart along on his belly
after the fashion of a snake. In spite of this shortness of the legs,
however, his movements, when he had any reason for haste, were of an
almost miraculous swiftness, his whole form seeming to be made up of
subtle and tireless steel springs. When he did not care to writhe and
dart along like a snake, he would arch his long back like a
measuring-worm and go leaping over the ground in jumps of sometimes four
or five feet in length. This method of progression he probably adopted
for the fun of it, in the main; for his hunting tactics were usually
those of stealthy advance and lightning-like attack. Once in a long
while, indeed, by lucky chance he would succeed in catching in one of
these wild leaps, a snipe which flew too low over the ditch or paused
on hovering wing before alighting to forage on the populous ooze. Such
an achievement would afford a pleasant variation to his customary diet
of fish, frogs, beetles, and occasional muskrat.
The mink had been nearly three weeks on his new range, and enjoying
himself hugely in his devastating way, before he observed the big yellow
stack beside the ditch. It was on a day of driving rain-squalls and
premature cold that he first took note of its possibilities. Gliding
furtively around its base, his bright, fierce eyes detected a tiny hole,
the imperfectly hidden entrance to a mouse-tunnel. He thrust in his head
at once to investigate. It was a close squeeze; but where his head and
neck could go his slender body could follow, and he dearly loved the
exploring of just such narrow passages.
A little way in, the tunnel branched; but the mink made no mistake. The
gallery which he selected to follow ended in a mouse-nest, with the mice
at home. There in the dry, warm, sweet-scented dark there was a brief
tragedy, with shrill squeaks and a rustling struggle. Two mice escaped
the slaughter, but the other three were caught. The invader sucked the
blood of all three while they were warm, ate one, and then curled
himself up for sleep in his new and delightful quarters. This stack was
all that the new range needed to make it the very choicest that a mink
could possess.
[Illustration: "A SNIPE WHICH FLEW TOO LOW OVER THE DITCH."]
After this the mink occupied the stack in bad weather, but ranged the
ditches, as usual, when it was pleasant. The stack was full of
mouse-galleries, and when he wanted a change he hunted mice. But it was
the outdoor, wide-ranging life that best contented him, so the mice were
by no means all driven out. Being a happy-go-lucky tribe, the survivors
continued to occupy their nests in spite of their terrible new
neighbour, trusting that doom would overlook them.
But neither men nor mice nor minks can be prepared against all the
caprices of Nature. That fall, Nature suddenly took it into her head to
try the dykes, of which the men had for a generation or more been so
boastful. She rolled in from the sea a succession of tremendous tides,
backing them up with a mighty and unrelenting wind out of the southwest,
and piled the tide-channels to the brim with buffeting floods. For a
time the dykes withstood the assault valiantly. But again and again,
ever fiercer and fiercer, came the besieging tides; and finally they
made a breach. In rushed a red and foaming torrent, devouring the clay
walls on either side with a roar, and drowning the long-protected
dyke-marsh under a seething chaos of muddy waves and debris.
The first breach occurred at daybreak; and the stack stood right in the
way. The huge flood poured in in angry glory, almost blood-red in the
first gush of a blazing crimson sunrise. In that unnatural and
terrifying light, which swiftly softened to a mocking delicacy of pink
and lilac, the stack was torn from its foundations and borne revolving
up the tide.
The nest of the mink, being low in the stack, was promptly flooded,
driving the angry tenant out. He ran up to the dry top of the stack, and
surveyed the wild scene with surprise. Water, of course, had no terrors
for him; but this tumultuous flood seemed a good thing to keep out of.
He would stay by his refuge for the present, at least. Meanwhile, there
were mice!
[Illustration: "MADLY JOYOUS, HE KILLED, AND KILLED, AND KILLED, FOR THE
JOY OF KILLING."]
The mice, indeed, panic-stricken and forced from their lower nests, were
fairly swarming in the top of the stack. The mink first satiated his
thirst with blood. Next he glutted his hunger with the brains of his
victims. Then, seeing their numbers apparently undiminished, he got
wild with excitement and blood-lust. Darting hither and thither, madly
joyous, he killed, and killed, and killed, for the joy of killing; while
the stack, with its freight of terror and death, went whirling
majestically along the now broader and quieter flood.
How long the slaughter of the helpless mice would have continued, before
the slaughterer tired of the game and crept into a nest to sleep, cannot
be known. By another of Nature's whims, concerned equally with great
matters and with little, it was not left to the joyous mink to decide.
His conspicuous dark body, darting over the light surface of the stack,
caught the eye of a great hawk soaring high above the marshes. Lower and
lower sank the bird, considering,--for the mink was larger game than he
usually chose to hunt. Then, while still too high in the blue to attract
attention from the busy slayer, he narrowed his wings, hardened his
plumage, and shot downward. At a strange sound in the air the mink
looked up,--but not in time to meet that appalling attack. One great set
of talons, steel-strong and edged like knives, clutched him about the
throat, strangling him to helplessness, while another set crushed his
ribs and cut into his vitals. The wise hawk had struck with a thorough
comprehension of the enemy's fighting powers; and had taken care that
there should be no fight. Flying heavily, he carried the long, limp body
off to his high nest in the hills; and the stack drifted on with the
tiny terrified remnant of the mouse-people, till the ebbing tide left it
stranded on a meadow near the foot of the uplands.
Under the Ice-roof
I
Filtering thinly down through the roof of snow and clean blue ice, the
sharp winter sunshine made almost a summer's glow upon the brown bottom
of the pond. Beneath the ice the water was almost as warm now as in
summer, the pond being fed by springs from so deep a source that their
temperature hardly varied with the seasons. Here and there a bit of
water-weed stood up from the bottom, green as in June. But in the upper
world, meanwhile, the wind that drove over the ice and snow was so
intensely cold that the hardy northern trees snapped under it, and few
of the hardy northern creatures of the wilderness, though fierce with
hunger, had the fortitude to face it. They crouched shivering in their
lairs, under fallen trunks or in the heart of dense fir thickets, and
waited anxiously for the rigour of cold and the savagery of wind to
abate. Only down in the pond, in the generous spaces of amber water
beneath the ice-roof, life went on busily and securely. The wind might
rage unbridled, the cold might lay its hand of death heavily on forest
and hill; but the beavers in their unseen retreat knew nothing of it.
All it could do was to add an inch or two of thickness to the icy
shelter above them, making their peaceful security more secure.
The pond was a large one, several acres in extent, with a depth of fully
five feet in the deeper central portions, which were spacious enough to
give the beavers room for play and exercise. Around the shallow edges
the ice, which was fully fifteen inches thick beneath its blanket of
snow, lay solid on the bottom.
The beavers of this pond occupied a lodge on the edge of the deep water,
not far above the dam. This lodge was a broad-based, low-domed house of
mud, turf, and sticks cunningly interwoven, and rising about four feet
above the surface of the ice-roof. The dome, though covered deep with
snow, was conspicuous to every prowler of the woods, who would come at
times to sniff greedily at the warm smell of beaver steaming up from
the minute air-vents in the apex. But however greedy, however ravenous,
the prowling vagrants might be, the little dome-builders and
dam-builders within neither knew nor cared about their greed. The dome
was fully two feet thick, built solidly, and frozen almost to the
hardness of granite. There were no claws among all the ravening forest
kindred strong enough to tear their way through such defences. In the
heart of the lodge, in a dry grass-lined chamber just above high-water
level, the beavers dwelt warm and safe.
But it was not from the scourge of the northern cold alone, and the
ferocity of their enemies, that the beavers were protected by their
ice-roof and their frozen dome. The winter's famine, too, they had well
guarded themselves against. Before the coming of the frost, they had
gnawed down great quantities of birch, poplar, and willow, cut them into
convenient, manageable lengths, and dragged them to a spot a little
above the centre of the dam, where the water was deepest. Here the store
of logs, poles, and brush made a tangled mass from the bottom up to the
ice. When it was feeding-time in the hidden chamber of the lodge, a
beaver would swim to the brush pile, pull out a suitable stick, and drag
it into the chamber. Here the family would feast at their ease, in the
dry, pungent gloom, eating the bark and the delicate outer layer of
young wood. When the stick was stripped clean, another beaver would drag
it out and tow it down to the dam, there to await its final use as
material for repairs. Every member of the colony was blest with a good
appetite, and there was nearly always at least one beaver to be seen
swimming through the amber gloom, either with a green stick from the
brush pile, or a white stripped one to deposit on the base of the dam.
For these most diligent of all the four-foot kindreds this was holiday
time. Under the ice-roof they had no dam-building, no tree-cutting, no
house-repairing. There was nothing to do but eat, sleep, and play. There
was not much variety to their play, to be sure; but the monotony of it
did not trouble them. Sometimes two would indulge in a sort of mad game
of tag, swimming at marvellous speed close beneath the ice, their
powerful hind legs propelling them, their tiny little fore paws held up
demurely under their chins, and their broad, flat, hairless tails
stretched straight out behind to act as rudders. As they swam this way
and that, they loosed a trail of silvery bubbles behind them, from the
air carried under their close fur. At last one of the players, unable
to hold his breath any longer, would whisk sharply into the mouth of the
black tunnel leading into the lodge, scurry up into the chamber, and lie
there panting, to be joined a moment later by his equally breathless
pursuer. One by one the other members of the colony would dip in, till
the low chamber was full of furry, snuggling warmth and well-fed
content. Little cared the beavers whether it was night or day in the
wide, frozen, perilous world above the ice-roof, whether the sun shone
from the bitter blue, or the wolf-haunted moonlight lay upon the snow,
or the madness of the blizzard made the woods cower before its fury.
[Illustration: "WOULD WHISK SHARPLY INTO THE MOUTH OF THE BLACK
TUNNEL."]