messengers was by this time less than a mile away and straight ahead.
When they left it with the machine-gun that morning, it had seemed a
little haven of peace. Now the battle was raging all about it. The tall
church spire, which had risen serenely above its embosoming trees, had
vanished, blown off by a shell. A cottage was burning merrily. Those
harmless-looking puffs of cotton-wool were opening out plenteously above
the clustered roofs. But all these things made no difference to these
two four-footed dispatch-bearers who carried the destiny of the bridge
beneath their collars. They had been ordered to take their dispatches to
the village, and to the village they would go, whether it had become an
inferno or not.
But now the spectacle of the two dogs racing desperately toward the
village under the storm of lead and shell had caught the attention of
both sides. There was no mistaking them now for frolicsome puppies.
There was no question, either, as to which side they belonged to. The
German bullets began to lash the ground like hail all about them. Leo,
true to his principles, stopped at a tiny depression and once more, with
feverish eagerness, began to dig himself in. The earth flew from his
desperate paws. In another minute he would have achieved something like
cover. But a German sharpshooter got the range of him exactly. A bullet
crashed through his sagacious brain, and he dropped, with his muzzle
between his legs, into his half-dug burrow.
But Dirck, meanwhile, had for once refused to follow his leader's
example. His goal was too near. He saw the familiar uniforms. Above the
din he could detect the cries and calls of encouragement from his
people. Every faculty in his valiant and faithful being bent itself to
the accomplishment of his errand. The bullets raining about him
concerned him not at all. The crash of a shrapnel shell just over him
did not even make him cock an eye skyward. The shrapnel bullets raised
jets of dust before and behind him and on either side. But not one
touched him. He knew nothing of them. He only knew his lines were close
ahead, and he must reach them.
The Belgians cheered and yelled, and poured in a concentrated fire on
that section of the enemy which was attacking the dog. For a few seconds
that small, insignificant, desperate four-footed shape drew upon itself
the undivided attention of several thousand men. It focussed the battle
for the moment. It was only a brindled dog, yet upon its fate hung
immense and unknown issues. Every one knew now that the devoted animal
was carrying a message. The Germans suddenly came to feel that to
prevent the delivery of that message would be like winning a battle. The
Belgians turned a battery from harrying a far-off squadron of horse to
shell the lines opposite, in defence of the little messenger. Men fell
by the score on both sides to decide that unexpected contest.
[Illustration: He only knew his lines were close ahead, and he must
reach them.]
And still Dirck raced on, heedless of it all.
Then, within fifty yards of the goal, he fell. A bullet had smashed one
of his legs. He picked himself up again instantly and hobbled forward,
trailing the mangled limb. But the moment he fell, a score of riflemen
had leapt from their lines and dashed out to rescue him. Three dropped
on the way out. Half a dozen more fell on the way back. But Dirck,
whining and licking his rescuers' hands, was carried to shelter behind
the massive stone wall of the inn yard, where the Brigadier and his
officers were receiving and sending out dispatches.
An aide drew the message from under Dirck's collar and handed it, with a
word of explanation, to the General. The latter read it, glanced at the
time on the dispatch and then at his watch, and gave hurried orders for
strong reinforcements to be rushed up to the old bridge. Then he looked
at Dirck, whose shattered leg was being dressed by an orderly.
"That dog," he growled, "has been worth exactly three regiments to us.
He's saved the bridge and he's saved three regiments from being cut off.
See that he's well looked after, and cured as soon as possible. He's a
good soldier, and we'll want him again."
The Calling of the Lop-horned Bull
I
The harvest moon hung globed and honey-coloured over the glassy
wilderness lake. In the unclouded radiance the strip of beach and the
sand-spit jutting out from it were like slabs of pure ivory between the
mirroring steel-blue of the water and the brocaded dark of the
richly-foliaged shore.
Behind a screen of this rich foliage--great drooping leaves of water-ash
and maple--sat the figure of a man with his back against a tree, almost
indistinguishable in the confusion of velvety shadows. His rifle leaning
against the tree-trunk beside him, a long, trumpet roll of birch-bark in
his hands, he peered forth through the leaves upon the shining
stillness, while his ears listened so intently that every now and then
they would seem to catch the whisper of his own blood rushing through
his veins. But from the moonlit wilds came not a sound except, from
time to time, that vast, faint, whispering sigh, inaudible to all but
the finest ears, in which the ancient forest seems to breathe forth its
content when there is no wind to jar its dreams.
Joe Peddler had settled himself in a comfortable position in his
hiding-place in order that he might not have to move. He was out to call
moose, and he knew the need of stillness. He knew how far and how
inexplicably the news of an intruder would travel through the wild; but
he knew also how quickly the wild forgets that news, if only the
intruder has craft enough to efface himself. If only he keeps quite
still for a time, the vigilant life of the wild seems to conclude that
he is dead, and goes once more about its furtive business.
Presently Joe Peddler reached out for his rifle and laid it across his
knees. Then he raised the trumpet of birch-bark to his lips and uttered
through it the strange, hoarse cry of the cow-moose calling to her mate.
It was a harsh note and discordant, a sort of long-drawn, bleating
bellow; yet there was a magic in its uncouth appeal which made it seem
the one appropriate voice of those rude but moon-enchanted wilds.
Joe Peddler was such an expert with the birch-bark horn that his
performance with it could deceive not only the bull, but also the wary
cow, or a cow-stalking bear, or, at times, even an experienced and
discriminating fellow-woodsman. He would call twice or thrice, and stop
and listen for several minutes, confident that on such a glamorous night
as this he would not have long to wait for a response to his lying call.
And he had not. When the bull-moose comes to the call of the cow, he
comes sometimes noisily and challengingly, with a crashing of underbrush
and a defiant thrashing of his great antlers upon branch and tree as he
pounds through them. At other times he comes as softly as the flight of
an owl.
Peddler looked out upon the empty whiteness of the beach. He dropped his
eyes for a second to the velvet shadows beside him, where a wood-mouse,
blundering almost upon his outstretched leg, had fled with a tiny squeak
of terror. When he looked out again, there in the centre of the beach,
black and huge against the pallid radiance, towered a moose bull, with
his great overhanging muzzle uplifted as he peered about him in search
of the utterer of that call.
The great bull had a noble pair of antlers, a head for any hunter to be
proud of, but Joe Peddler never raised his rifle. Instead of rejoicing
at this response to his deceitful lure, a frown of impatience crossed
his face. The strict New Brunswick game laws allowed but one bull in a
season to fall to the rifle of any one hunter. Joe Peddler was in search
of one particular bull. He had no use for the great beast towering so
arrogantly before him, and nothing was further from his thoughts than to
put a bullet into that wide-antlered head.
[Illustration: Black and huge against the pallid radiance towered a
moose bull.]
The bull was plainly puzzled at finding no cow upon the beach to greet
him, after all those calls. Presently he grew angry, perhaps thinking
that a rival had reached the scene ahead of him. He fell to pawing the
sand with one great, clacking hoof, grunting and snorting so loudly that
any rival within half a mile of the spot would have heard him and
hastened to accept the challenge. Then he strode up to the nearest bush
and began thrashing at it viciously with his antlers.
The disappointed animal now had his back toward the thicket wherein
Peddler lay hidden. Yielding to his humour, the woodsman once more
lifted the birch-bark tube to his lips, with a sly grin, and gave
another call.
He was hardly prepared for the effect. The bull wheeled like a flash,
and instantly, with not a half second's hesitation, came charging upon
the thicket at full run.
The situation was an awkward one, and Peddler cursed himself for a
blundering idiot. He sprang noiselessly to his feet and raised his
rifle. But first he would try an experiment, in the hope of saving the
beast from his bullet.
"You git out o' that!" he ordered very sharply and clearly. "_Git_, I
tell ye!"
The bull stopped so abruptly that his hooves ploughed up the sand.
Decidedly there was something very strange about that thicket. First it
gave forth the call of his mate. Then it spoke to him with the voice of
a man. And there was something in that voice that chilled him. While one
might, perhaps, count ten, he stood there motionless, staring at the
inexplicable mass of foliage. The arrogant light in his eyes flickered
down into fear. And then, his heart crumbling with panic, he leapt aside
suddenly with a mighty spring and went crashing off through the woods as
if all the fiends were clawing at his tail.
Peddler chuckled, stretched himself, and settled down to try his luck
again. For another couple of hours he kept it up patiently, calling at
intervals, and throwing his utmost art into the modulations of the
raucous tube. But never a reply could he charm forth from the moonlit
solitudes. At last he grew intolerably sleepy.
"Guess old lop-horn must be off on some other beat to-night," he
muttered, getting to his feet with a mighty yawn. "It's me fer me
bunk." And with the rifle under one arm, the birch-bark tube under the
other, he strode off down the shining beach to the alder-fringed inlet
where his canoe was hidden.
As he paddled swiftly through the moonlight down toward the lower end of
the lake, where he had his camp on a high, dry knoll beside the outlet,
Peddler mused upon the object of his quest. It was no ordinary moose,
however noble of antler, that had brought him out here to the remote and
all but unknown tangle of lakes and swamps which formed the source of
the north fork of the Ottanoonsis. This bull, according to the stories
of two Indian trappers, was of a size quite unprecedented in the annals
of the modern moose; and Peddler, who had seen its mighty hoof-prints in
the mud beside the outlet, was quite ready to credit the tale. They were
like the tracks of a prehistoric monster. But it was not for the stature
of him that Peddler was hunting the giant bull. According to the story
of the Indians, the beast's antlers were like those of no other
bull-moose ever seen. The right antler was colossal in its reach and
spread, a foot or more, at least, beyond the record, but quite normal in
its shape. The left, on the contrary, was not only dwarfed to less than
half the normal size, but was so fantastically deformed as to grow
downwards instead of upwards. Of a head such as this, Joe Peddler was
determined to possess himself before some invading sportsman from
England or the States should forestall him.
Arriving at the outlet of the lake, he pulled up the canoe at a natural
grassy landing-place below his camp, and pushed his way some hundred
yards or so along the shore through the bushes to a spring which he had
discovered that morning. Your woodsman will go far out of his way to
drink at a cold spring, having a distaste for the rather vapid water of
the lakes and streams. He threw himself flat upon the stony brink and
reached down his thirsty lips.
But just as he swallowed the first delicious gulp of coolness, there
came a sudden huge crashing in the brushwood behind him. In one breath
he was on his feet. In the next he had cleared the pool in a leap, and
was fleeing madly for the nearest tree, with a moose that looked as big
as an elephant at his heels.
The nearest tree, a young birch, was not as big as he could have wished,
but he was not taking time just then to pick and choose. He whirled
himself round the trunk, sprang to the first branch, swung up, and
scrambled desperately to gain a safe height. He gained it, but literally
by no more than a hair's breadth. As the black monster reached the tree,
it checked itself abruptly, and in almost the same instant lifted its
right fore-hoof high above its head and struck like a flash at Peddler's
foot just disappearing over a branch. It missed the foot itself, but it
shaved the stout cowhide larrigan that covered the foot, slicing it as
if with a knife. Peddler drew himself farther up and then looked down
upon his assailant with interest.
"I guess I've found ye all right, old lop-horn," he drawled, and spat
downward, not scornfully, but contemplatively, as if in recognition,
upon that strangely stunted and deformed left antler. "But gee! Them
Injuns never said nothin' about yer bein' so black an' so almighty spry.
I wisht, now, ye'd kindly let me go back to the canoe an' git me gun!"
But any such quixotic courtesy seemed far from the giant's intention. As
soon as he realized that his foe was beyond the reach of striking hoof
or thrusting antler, he set himself, in the pride of his strength and
weight, to the task of pushing the tree over. Treating it as if it were
a mere sapling, he reared himself against it, straddling it with his
fore-legs, and thrust at it furiously in the effort to ride it down. As
the slim young trunk shook and swayed beneath the passion of the
onslaught, Peddler clung to his perch with both arms and devoutly wished
that he had had time to choose a sturdier refuge.
For perhaps five minutes the giant pushed and battered furiously against
the tree, grunting like a locomotive and tearing up the earth in
furrows with his hinder hooves. At length, however, he seemed to
conclude that this particular tree was too strong for him. He backed off
a few yards and stood glaring up at Peddler among the branches, snorting
contemptuously and shaking his grotesquely misshapen antlers as if
daring his antagonist to come down. Peddler understood the challenge
just as clearly as if it had been expressed in plainest King's English.
"Oh, yes," said he grimly, "I'll come down all right, bime-by. An' ye
ain't agoin' to like it one leetle bit when I do; now, mind, I'm tellin'
ye!"
For perhaps a half-hour the giant bull continued to rave and grunt and
paw about the tree with a tireless vindictiveness which filled his
patient prisoner with admiration, and hardened him inexorably in his
resolve to possess himself of that unparalleled pair of antlers. At
last, however, the furious beast stopped short and stood motionless,
listening intently. Peddler wondered what he was listening to. But
presently his own ears also caught it--the faint and far-off call of a
cow-moose from the upper end of the lake. Forgetting his rage against
Peddler, the bull wheeled about with the agility of a cat and went
crashing off up the lake shore as fast as he could run. Stiff and
chilled--for the air of that crisp October night had a searching bite in
it--Peddler climbed down from his perch. First, being tenacious of
purpose, he hurried to the spring and finished his interrupted drink.
Then, returning to the canoe, he stood for a few moments in hesitation.
Should he follow up the trail at once? But it was already near morning,
and he was both dead-tired and famished. He believed that the bull, not
being in any alarm, would not journey far that night after meeting his
mate, but rather would seek some deep thicket for a few hours' sleep. He
picked up the rifle and strode off to his camp, resolved to fortify
himself well for a long trail on the morrow.
II
Wise though Peddler was in the ways of the wild folk, he found himself
at fault in regard to this particular bull, whose habits seemed to be no
less unique than his stature and his antlers. Taking up the trail soon
after sunrise, he came in due time to the spot, near the head of the
lake, where the bull had joined the calling cow. From this point the
trail of the pair had struck straight back from the lake towards the
range of low hills which formed the watershed between the eastern and
south-westward flowing streams. About noon Peddler came to the place
where the cow, wearied out by so strenuous a pace, had lain down to
sleep in a thicket. The bull, however, driven by his vehement spirit,
had gone on without a pause.
All day Peddler followed doggedly upon that unwavering trail. He crossed
the ridge, descended to the broken and desolate eastern levels, and
came, towards sunset, upon another wide and tranquil lake. Feeling sure
that his quarry, unaware of the pursuit, would linger somewhere about
this pleasant neighbourhood, Peddler found himself a mossy nest on the
cup-shaped top of a boulder and settled down for a couple of hours'
sleep. He little guessed that the bull, having doubled back on a
parallel with his own trail, had been following him stealthily for a
good half hour, not raging now, but consumed with curiosity.
Just as the moon was rising over the low black skyline, jagged with
fir-tops, Peddler woke up. Creeping through the bushes, he betook
himself to a hiding-place which his quick eye had already marked down,
close to the beach, a roomy, flat ledge at the foot of a rock, with a
screen of young spruce before it. From behind another clump of spruce,
not fifty paces distant, the lop-horned bull, standing moveless as a
dead tree, watched him with an intense and inquiring interest. His fury
of the preceding night, and even the memory of it, seemed to have been
blotted from his mind.
But when, a few minutes later, from that shadowy covert, where he could
just make out the crouching form of the man, the call of a cow breathed
forth upon the stillness, the great bull's eyes and nostrils opened wide
in amazement. What could a moose-cow be thinking about to remain so near
the dangerous neighbourhood of a man? But, no, his eyes assured him that
there was no cow in the man's hiding-place. Where, then, could she be?
He stared around anxiously. She was nowhere in sight. He sniffed the
windless night air. It bore no savour of her. He waved forward his
great, sensitive ears to listen. And again came the call, the voice,
undoubtedly, of the moose-cow.
There could be no question about it this time. It came from the thicket.
Had there been any least note of fear in that call, the giant bull would
have rushed at once to the rescue of the unseen fair, concluding that
the man had her hidden. But now, the utterance was simply that of an
untroubled cow. Therefore, for the moment, the great bull was chiefly
puzzled. Keeping within the shadows, and moving as imperceptibly as if
he were himself but one of the blackest of them, he stole nearer and
nearer yet, till he could plainly see every detail within the man's
hiding-place. There was assuredly nothing there but rock and moss and
bush and the crouching figure of the man himself, staring forth upon the
moonlit beach and holding a curious roll of bark to his mouth.
Nevertheless, in that same moment there came again the hoarse cry of the
cow.
It came indisputably from that crouching form of a man, from that roll
of bark at the man's mouth.
This was a mystery, and the wiry black hair along the neck and shoulders
of the bull began to rise ominously. A slow, wondering rage awoke in his
heart. It was that element of wonder alone which for the moment
restrained him from rushing forward and trampling the mysterious cheat
beneath his hooves. A red spark kindled in his eyes.
All undreaming of the dread watcher so close behind him, Peddler set his
lips to the lying tube of bark and gave his call again and yet again,
with all the persuasiveness of his backwoods art. He felt sure that his
efforts were convincing. They were, indeed, all of that. They were so
consummate a rendering of the cow-moose's voice that they perfectly
convinced a huge and hungry bear, which was at that moment creeping up
from the other side of the rock upon the unsuspecting hunter's
hiding-place.
The bear knew that its only chance of capturing so swift and nimble a
quarry as the moose-cow lay in stealing upon her like a cat and taking
her by surprise in one instantaneous rush. He never doubted for a moment
that the cow was there behind the rock. When he was within a dozen feet
of those persuasive sounds, his crouched form suddenly rose up,
elongated itself like a dark and terrible jack-in-the-box, and launched
itself with a swish through the encircling branches.
Before Peddler's wits had time fully to take in what was happening, his
trained instinct told him what to do. Half rising to his feet as he
snatched up his rifle, he swung about and fired from the hip at the
vague but monstrous shape which hung for an instant above him. The shot
went wide, for just as his finger pressed the trigger, a great black paw
smote the weapon from his grasp and hurled it off among the bushes.
With a contortion that nearly dislocated his neck, Peddler hurled
himself frantically backwards and aside, and so just escaped the
pile-driver descent of the other paw.
He escaped it for the instant; but in the effort he fell headlong, and
jammed himself in a crevice of the rock so awkwardly that he could not
at once extricate himself. He drew up his legs with an involuntary
shudder, and held his breath, expecting to feel the merciless claws rake
the flesh from his thighs.
But nothing touched him; and the next moment there broke out an
astounding uproar behind him, a very pandemonium of roars and windy
gruntings, while the crashing of the bushes was as if the forest were
being subdued beneath a steam-roller. Consumed with amazement, he
wrenched himself from the crevice and glanced round. The sight that met
his eyes made him clamber hastily to the top of the rock, whence he
might look down from a more or less safe distance upon a duel of giants
such as he had never dared hope to witness.
When the bear found that it was no cow-moose, but a man that he was
springing upon, he was so taken aback that, for a second or two, he
forbore to follow up his advantage. To those two seconds of hesitation
Joe Peddler owed his escape.
Before the massive brute, now boiling with rage at having been so
deceived, had sufficiently made up his mind to fall upon that prostrate
figure in the crevice, something that seemed to him like a tornado of
hooves and antlers burst out of the bushes and fell upon him. The next
moment, with a long, red gash half-way down his flank, he was fighting
for his life.
The gigantic moose had been just upon the verge of rushing in to silence
those incomprehensible and deceiving calls, when the towering form of
the bear burst upon his vision. Here at last was something to focus his
wrath. Already angry, but still dampened by bewilderment, his anger now
exploded into a very madness of rage. There was the ancient, inherited
feud between his tribe and all bears. As a youngster, he had more than
once escaped, as by a miracle, from the neck-breaking paw of a bear, had
more than once seen a young cow struck down and ripped to pieces. Now to
this deep-seated hate was added another incentive. His mind confused by
fury to protect his mate, he dimly felt that the mystery which had been
tormenting him was the fault of this particular bear. The man was
forgotten. A cow had been calling to him. She had disappeared. Here was
the bear. The bear had probably done away with the cow. The cow should
be terribly avenged.