Gaut Gurley; Or, the Trappers of Umbagog Part 5

It was now noon, and Claud, seeing no prospect of any immediate success in his piscatory employment, which had been made to appear to him, by the remarks of the hunter, more discouraging than ever, drew up his anchor, and rowed to a point of the sh.o.r.e which was embowered by a group of magnificent pines. Here, finding a cool spring, as well as a refreshing shade, he drew out his lunch, and very leisurely proceeded to discuss it, with the ice-cold water of the spring by which he had seated himself for the purpose. His fare was coa.r.s.e; but it was partaken with a relish of which those who have never experienced the effects of the air and exercise, incident to a life in the woods, can have no just conception; and to which the palled appet.i.te of the

"vain lords of luxury and ease, Whom slumber soothes not, pleasure cannot please,"

is poor in comparison, though all the king's banquets and metropolitan feasts in the world should vie together to make good the subst.i.tute.

Claud's life had thus far been, in the main, a quiet and commonplace one; nothing having occurred to him to arouse those strong and over-mastering pa.s.sions to which it is the lot of most of us, at some period of our lives, to become subjected. It had been checkered, however, by one bit of romance, which, to say the least, had greatly excited his imagination. About a year previous to the time of which we are now writing, and one day while he was walking the streets of Boston, a small, closely-enwrapped package was put in his hand by an unknown boy, who, with the simple announcement, "_For you, Sir_," turned quickly away, and made off with the air of one who has completed his mission, and would avoid being questioned. Glancing within the wrapper, and perceiving it inclosed a small encased picture, or likeness, of some female, which he thought must have been delivered to him through mistake, Claud looked hastily round for the messenger, and, not seeing him, he walked backward and forward along the street, and lingered some time in the vicinity, still expecting the boy would soon return to claim the package. But, being disappointed in this, he went home, and, retiring to his room, undid the wrapper, which he carefully but vainly examined for some name, mark, or other clue to the mystery; and then, with much interest, fell to inspecting the picture. It was, obviously, a well-painted miniature likeness of a fair, dark-eyed girl, but representing no remembered face, except in the peculiar expression of the strong and commanding countenance; which, he thought, either in man or woman, he must have somewhere before encountered. The whole likeness, indeed, together with the circ.u.mstances under which it came into his hands, made, at the time, a lively impression on his mind; and, keeping the affair wholly to himself, he often contemplated that fair face in private; and, for months afterwards, he never was in a public a.s.sembly, where the s.e.x were present, without running his eye over it in search of the original. But, as he never found it, the impression gradually wore away, and, in the exciting changes that had occurred in the fortunes of his family, it had been nearly obliterated from his mind; when, that morning, while searching his trunk for some implement belonging to his gun, he came across the miniature, and put it in his pocket. And now, in the leisure that followed his repast, he bethought him of it; and, laying it before him on the bed of moss on which he was reclining, he contemplated it with renewed interest, and that sort of dreamy enthusiasm which the sudden revival of old a.s.sociations in such solitudes is apt to awaken in the mind, especially when those a.s.sociations are connected, as now, with a matter of mystery and romance.

After indulging in his reveries a while, he put up his miniature, aroused himself from his day-dream, and rose to his feet when, feeling inclined for some kind of action, he decided on a short excursion in the woods, in the direction of the Magalloway, where probably he would fall in with Phillips, and return with him to the lake. Accordingly, after loading his gun with ball and buckshot, so as to be prepared for any large wild animals he might chance to encounter, he leisurely took his way through the heavy, ascending forest that lay in his course; here pausing to note the last night's bed of some solitary bear, and there to trace the marks of the death-struggle of a victim deer, that, with all its vigilance and wondrous agility, had been surprised and brought down by the stealthy and far-leaping catamount. The ever-varying tenants of the forest, also, were constantly presenting as he pa.s.sed on, some novelty to attract his unaccustomed eye; now in the smooth, tall shaft of the fusiform fir--the dandy of the forest--standing up with its beautiful cone-shaped top among its rougher neighbors, trim and straight as the bonneted cavalier of the old pictures, among the slouchy forms of his homelier but worthier opponents; now in the low and stocky birch standing on its broad, staunch pedestal of strongly-braced roots below, and throwing out widely above its giant arms, as if striving to shoulder and stay up the weight of the superinc.u.mbent forest; and now in the imperial pine, proudly lifting its tall form an hundred feet over the tops of the plebeian trees around, to revel in the upper currents of the air, or bathe its crowning plumes of living green in the clouds of heaven.

Proceeding in this manner, he at length found himself gradually descending the western slope of the hill; when he soon arrived in the vicinity of the river, a glimpse of which, together with a small clearing and a tidy-looking cottage on its banks, he now caught through the tops of the intervening trees. While still walking on, his attention was attracted to a comparatively open place in the woods, where, at some previous period, a severe fire had killed all the smaller trees, and consumed the underbrush, which had been replaced by scattering shrubs of the white poplar intermingled with a plentiful growth of the black-raspberry, whose luscious fruit--the first to reward the pioneer, and for which he has to contend sharply with the birds and bears to obtain his share--was now beginning to ripen. As he was entering this open s.p.a.ce, which appeared to extend some distance round the point of a screening knoll, he was suddenly brought to a stand by a noise somewhere in the bushes or woods ahead, such as had never before saluted his ears. It was like nothing else, or _if any_ thing else, like the wild snorting of a frightened horse prolonged into the dying note of the steam whistle. Claud recoiled a step before the unaccustomed sound, and involuntarily c.o.c.ked and raised his gun to his shoulder. But he was allowed no time to speculate. The next instant, the loud and piercing shriek of a female, nearer but in the same direction, rose and rang through the forest. With a speed quickened at every step by the rapidly repeated cry of distress, he bounded towards the spot, when, turning the point of the knoll, he suddenly found himself in full view of the object of his solicitude,--a girl, in the full bloom of youthful beauty, who, with bonnet thrown back and her loosened hair streaming in wild disorder over her shoulders, instantly rushed forward for his protection. Claud stopped short, in mute surprise at the unexpected apparition; for the first glance at her face told him that the original of his mysterious miniature was before him,--before him, here in the woods! Breathless and speechless in her wild affright, she pointed, with a glance over her shoulder, to a thick, high tangle of large, strongly limbed, knotty, windfallen trees, a short distance behind her, and fled past him to the rear. Looking in the indicated direction, the startled and perplexed young man distinguished the outlines of a monstrous moose madly plunging at the woody barrier, and trying to force his enormous antlers through the unyielding limbs preparatory to leaping it in pursuit of his victim, who had eluded the infuriated animal, and barely escaped the fatal blows of his uplifted hoofs, by creeping under the providentially placed obstruction. Claud instantly raised his piece, when, feeling uncertain of his aim, he withheld his fire, and stood waiting for a fairer view. But, before he could obtain it, the moose, tired of vain attempts to force his pa.s.sage through the bristling barricade of logs and limbs before him, disappeared for one moment, but the next came crashing round the nearest end of it, and, with renewed demonstrations of rage and hostility, made directly for the new opponent he beheld in his way. Still unalarmed for his own safety, Claud waited with levelled gun till his formidable a.s.sailant was within forty yards of him, when he took a quick aim and fired. Reeling under the discharge of his heavily loaded piece, and blinded by the smoke, he could not, at first, see the effect of his fire; but when he did so, the next instant, it was only to behold the monster brute, maddened, not stopped, by the flesh wounds inflicted, rushing on him with a force and fury which compelled him to leap suddenly aside, to avoid being beat into the earth by those terrible hoofs, which he saw lifted higher and higher, at each approaching step, for his destruction. Mindful, in his peril, of the precautions already learned from the hunters, Claude, while the moose, whose tremendous impetus was driving him straight ahead, could break up, so as to turn in the pursuit,--Claud made, with all the speed of which he was master, for a huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great distance on his right; a course which he thought would divert the monster from pursuit of the maiden, and, at the same time, best insure his own safety. But, so prodigious was the rushing speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated moose, that the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at his heels, rasping and tearing with his spiked antlers the rough bark of the tree, in his attempts to follow round it near and fast enough to overtake and strike down his intended victim. Round and round then sped both pursuer and pursued, as fast as the frantic rage of the one, and the keen instinct of self-preservation in the other, could impel them. Although the moose, from the great width of his interfering horns, was compelled to sweep round the tree in a circle requiring him to go over double the distance travelled by Claude, yet so much greater was his speed, that it called for the utmost exertions of the latter to keep clear of the battle-axe blows which he heard falling every instant with fatal force behind him. His gun had already been struck, shivered, and beat from his hand; and, as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the fierce and glaring eyes of his ruthless pursuer, and his uplifted and forward-thrown hoofs striking closer and closer to his heels at every bound, a sense of his deadly peril flashed over his mind with that strange and paralyzing effect which the first full conviction of impending death often produces on the stoutest hearts. He felt his strength giving way, his brain beginning to whirl, and he was on the point of yielding himself to his fate; when a stream of smoke and flame accompanied the startling report of a rifle, shot out from the edge of a neighboring thicket. The moose gave a convulsive start, floundered forward on his knees, swayed backward and forward an instant, then fell over broad-side into the bushes with a heavy crash, straightened out, gasped, and died.

"Dunno but you'll think I waited too long, young man," cried Phillips, now advancing with a quick, leaping step from his covert. "The fact was, I felt, on seeing you getting into such close quarters, that I had better be rather particular about my aim, so as to stop him at once; besides that, I was at first a little out of breath. I had heard the fellow blow when an hundred rods off,--then the woman scream,--then your gun; and, thinking like enough there would be trouble, I legged it for the spot, and got to my stand just as he treed you."

"I feel very grateful to you, Mr. Phillips, for this timely rescue,"

responded Claud, recovering his composure. "This, I suppose, is the far-famed moose?"

"Yes, and a bouncer at that," replied the hunter, going up and, placing his foot on the broad and still quivering flank of the huge animal. "Good twenty hands high, and weighs, well, not much short of fifteen hundred, I should say."

"But are they often thus dangerous?" asked Claud.

"Not very often, perhaps," rejoined the hunter. "But still the bull moose, at this season of the year, is sometimes, when wounded, about as ugly a customer as you meet with in the woods. This fellow I judge to have been _oncommon_ vicious, as he begun his tantrums before he was touched at all, it seems. I dunno but 'twas the woman put the devil into him, as women do into two-legged animals sometimes,--don't they, young man?"

"The woman? O yes, the young lady," said Claud, reminded of his duty as a gallant by the remark, though unwilling to appropriate to himself the prophetic joke with which it was coupled. "Where is she? I must go and see to her."

"She has already seen to herself, I guess," said the hunter. "As I was coming up, I glimpsed her cutting round and running, like a wild turkey, for the clearing, to which the moose had cut off her retreat. She has reached the house by this time, doubtless; for it is hard by, down on the river here, a hundred rods or such a matter."

"Who is she? Do you know the family?" eagerly inquired the young man.

"No," answered the hunter. "They are new-comers in these parts."

"What could have brought her here so far into the woods?" persisted Claud.

"The raspberries, very likely," said the other, indifferently, while taking out and examining the edge of his knife. "But come, we must get this moose into some condition, so that he will keep; then be off to let the settlers know of our luck. And early to-morrow morning, we will, all hands, come up the river in boats, and distribute him. He will make fresh meat enough to supply the whole settlement."

The hunter now, with the a.s.sistance of his new pupil in the craft, proceeded to dressing the moose, the process of which, bleeding, disemboweling, and partially skinning, was soon completed; when, cutting some stout green skids with the hatchet he ever carried in his belt, and inserting the ends under the bulky carca.s.s, the two contrived to raise it, by means of old logs rolled up for the purpose, several feet from the ground, so as to insure a free circulation of air beneath it. This being done, the hunter kindled two log fires, one on each side, to keep off, he said, the wolves and other carnivorous animals. They then, after cutting out the tongue and lip, which are esteemed the tidbits of this animal, took up their line of march for the lake, which, with the long, rapid lope of the woodsman, measured off, as usual, in Indian file, and with little or no interrupting conversation, they reached in a short time, and without further adventure.

"Now," said the hunter, as he reached the spot where his canoe was tied, and turned round towards his lagging companion,--"now, sir, what say you to taking a five-pound trout?"

"Perfectly willing," replied Claud, smiling; "and I would even take up with a smaller one."

"Well, I won't,--that is, not much smaller; and I think I'll have one of at least the size I named."

"What makes you so confident?"

"Because, it being a hot, shiny morning, they took to their coverts early, and must be sharp-set, by this time. Besides that, it is just about the best time for them that could be got up: a deep cloud, as you see, is coming over the sun, and this wind is moving the water to the bottom. All sizes will now be coming out, and the big ones, like big folks, will make all the little ones stand back till their betters are served."

Each now taking to his canoe, they pushed out some twenty or thirty rods into the lake, cast anchor, and threw out their lines. Claud, who baited with grubs, soon had drawn in two, weighing as many pounds a piece, and began to feel disposed to banter the hunter, who had baited with a flap of moose-skin, which he had brought along with him, and which, to Claud, seemed little likely to attract the fishes to his hook. But he soon found himself mistaken; for, turning to give utterance to what was pa.s.sing in his mind, he beheld the other dallying with a trout, which he had hooked, and now held flapping on the surface of the water, evidently much larger than either of his own.

"That is a fine one!" cried Claud. "Why don't you pull him in?"

"Not big enough," said the hunter, in reply to the question; while he turned to the fish with an impatient "Pshaw! what work the cretur makes of it! Hop off, hop off, you fool! There," he added, as the trout at length broke away and disappeared, "there, that is right. Now be off with yourself till you grow bigger, and give me a chance at the fine fellow whose tail I saw swashing up round here just now."

The hunter then carefully adjusted his bait, and threw out the whole lingth of his line. After alternately sinking his hook, and then drawing it to the surface, for two or three throws, the line suddenly straightened, moved slowly backward at first, then swept rapidly round and round, or darted off in sharp short angles, with downward and forward plunges so quick and powerful as to make the stout sapling pole sway and bend, like a whipstock, in the steadying hands of the hunter. For four or five minutes he made no attempt to draw in his prize, but let the fish have full play to the length of its tether, till its efforts had become comparatively feeble; when, slowly bringing it alongside, he took the line in his hand, and, with a quick jerk, landed the n.o.ble fellow safely on the bottom of the canoe.

"There, sir!" exclaimed the hunter, seizing the trout by the gills, and triumphantly holding it up to view, "there is about what I bargained for: two feet long, not an inch shorter,--seven pounds weight, and not an ounce lighter! Now, being satisfied, I am done."

"What, leave off with such luck?" asked Claud in surprise.

"Yes, young man," said the other, "I hold it all but a downright sin to draw from G.o.d's storehouse a single pound more than is really needed. This will last my family as long as it will keep, this warm weather, with the plenty of moose-meat we shall have. Any thing more is a waste, which _I_ will not commit. And _you_, sir, who have just hauled in your third and largest one, I perceive, and have now nearly as many pounds as I have,--what can _you_ want of more? Come, let us pull up and off for our homes. It is nearly time, any way."

Although loth to break off his sport, yet inwardly acknowledging the justness of the hunter's philosophy, Claud reluctantly drew in and wound up his line, hauled in his anchor, and, handling his oar, shot out abreast of the other, who had already got under way, into the heaving waters of the now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the view of the lower end of the lake.

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Claud, starting back, with suspended oar, as now, coming out in view of the lake, his eye fell on the huge pillar of smoke, which, deeply enshrouding that part of the distant forest lying east of the outlet of the lake with its expanded base, was rolling upward its thousand dark, doubling folds; "good Heavens, Phillips, look yonder! Where and what is it? It looks like a burning city."

"It is a fire, of course, and no small one, either; but where, I can't exactly make out," slowly responded the hunter, intently fixing his keen eyes on the magnificent spectacle which had thus unexpectedly burst on their view in the distance. "Let me see," he continued, running his eye along the border of the lake in search of his old landmarks: "there is the tall stub that stands half a mile down on the west bank of the river, and is now just visible in the edge of the smoke; but where is the king pine, that stands nearly against it, over in your slash? Young man," he added, with a startled air, "was your father calculating to burn that slash to-day?"

"No, unless it looked likely to rain."

"Well it _does_ look likely to rain, in the shape of a shower gathering yonder, which has already given out one or two grumbles of distant thunder, if my ears served me as well as usual."

"Yes; but such a smoke and fire can't come from our slash. It must be a larger and more distant one."

"So I thought at first; but I begin to think different. Do you see that perpendicular, broken line of light, occasionally flashing out from the smoke, and extending upward to a height that no ground fire ever reached?

That is your king pine in a blaze from bottom to top. Hark! why, I can hear it roaring clear here, like a distant hurricane. It must be a prodigious hot fire to make all that show and noise."

"Can it endanger our buildings?" asked Claud, in alarm.

"I am afraid so," replied the other, with a dubious shake of the head. "But hark again! 'tis your father's horn blowing for help."

"Let us row, then, as for our lives!" cried the now thoroughly aroused and agitated young man. "If any thing happens before I get there, I shall never forgive myself for my prolonged absence, to the last day of my life. You will join me in going there, will you not?"

"Yes, and outstrip you by half a mile. But that won't be the best way.

Throw your anchor into the stern of my canoe, and fall in behind. There; now keep the anchor-line slack between us, if you can," rapidly said the hunter, bending his sinewy form to the work, with a power that sent his canoe half out of the water at every stroke of his swiftly-falling oar.

Leaving them to bound over the billowy waters of the lake towards their destination, with all the speed which strong arms and nerves made tense with excitement could impart, let us antic.i.p.ate their arrival, to note what befell the objects of their anxieties, whom we so abruptly left in their perils from the fire, to bring up the other incidents of the day having an equal bearing on the story, with which we have thus far occupied the present somewhat extended chapter.

The immediate danger to their house from the fire, with which we left the alarmed Elwood and his wife contending, was, indeed, easily overcome by dashing pails of water over the roof. But scarcely had they achieved this temporary triumph in one place over an element proverbially terrible when it becomes master, before it was seen kindling into flickering blazes on the roof of the barn and the locks of hay protruding from its windows and the crevices between the logs of which it was built. Here, also, they soon succeeded in extinguishing the fire in the same manner. They were not, however, allowed a moment's respite from either their labors or alarms. The fences were by this time on fire in numerous places; and the chips and wood in the door-yard were seen to be igniting from the sparks and cinders which, every instant, fell thicker and hotter around their seemingly devoted domicil. The fences, after a few vain attempts to save them, were given up a prey to the devouring element, and the whole exertions of the panting and exhausted sufferers were turned to saving their buildings; and even at that they had no time to spare; for, so hot had the air become from the burning slash, which, through its whole length, was now glowing with the red heat of a furnace, that every vestige of moisture had soon disappeared from the drenched roofs, and they were again on fire.

"Is there no way of raising help?" exclaimed Mrs. Elwood, in her extremity, as she witnessed these increasing manifestations of danger.

"I never thought of that," said Elwood. "Hand me the dinner-horn. If there are any within hearing, they will understand, with the appearance of this fire, that we are calling for a.s.sistance."

With a few sharp, loud blasts, Elwood threw aside the horn, and again flew to the work of extinguishing the fires where they became most threatening.

And thus, for nearly another hour, the distressed settler and his heroic wife, suffering deeply from heat and exhaustion, toiled on, without gaining the least on the fearful enemy by which they were so closely encompa.s.sed.

And they were on the point of giving up in despair, when the welcome shout of "Help at hand!" from the ringing voice of the hunter, then just entering the opening, revived hope in their sinking hearts. The next moment that help was on the spot; but it was unnecessary. A mightier Hand was about to interpose. From the bold, black van of the hurrying and deeply-charged rack of cloud, that had now unheeded gained the zenith, a stream of fire, before which all other fires paled into nothing, at that instant descended on the top of the burning pine, and, rending it from top to bottom by the single explosion, sent its wide-flying fragments in blazing circles to the ground.

A sharp, rattling sound, terminating in a cannon-like report, followed, shaking the rent and crashing heavens above, and the bounding earth beneath, in the awful concussion. Before the stunned and blinded settlers had recovered from the shock, or the deep roll of the echoing thunder had died away among the distant mountains, another and more welcome roar saluted their ears. It was that of the rapidly-approaching rain striking the foliage of the neighboring forest; and, scarcely had they time to gain the cover of the house, before the deluging torrents poured over it with a force and fury beneath which the quelled fires speedily sunk, hissing, into darkness and death.