The Strength of the Pines Part 10

All these hunts were progressing famously when there came a curious interruption. It was just a sound at first. And strangely, not one of the forest creatures that heard it had ears sharp enough to tell exactly from what direction it had come. And that made it all the more unpleasant to listen to.

It was a peculiar growl, quite low at first. It lasted a long time, then died away. There was no opposition to it. The forest creatures had paused in their tracks at its first note, and now they stood as if the winter had come down upon them suddenly and frozen them solid. All the other sounds of the forest--the little whispering noises of gliding bodies and fluttering feet, and perhaps a bird's call in a shrub--were suddenly stilled. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then the sound commenced again.

It was louder this time. It rose and gathered volume until it was almost a roar. It carried through the silences in great waves of sound. And in it was a sense of resistless power; no creature in the forest but what knew this fact.

"The Gray King," one could imagine them saying among themselves. The effect was instantaneous. The little racc.o.o.n halted in his descent, then crept out to the end of a limb. Perhaps he knew that the gray monarch could not climb trees, but nevertheless he felt that he would be more secure clear at the swaying limb-tip. The marten forgot his curiosity in regard to the nest of the magpie. The gopher snake coiled, then slipped away silently through the gra.s.s.

The coyote, an instant before crawling with body close to the earth, whipped about as if he had some strange kind of circular spring inside of him. His nerves were always rather ragged, and the sound had frightened out of him the rigid control of his muscles that was so necessary if he were to make a successful stalk upon the fawn. The spotted creature bleated in terror, then darted away; and the coyote snarled once in the general direction of the Gray King. Then he lowered his head and skulked off deeper into the coverts.

The blacktail deer, the gray wolf, even the stately Tawny One, stretched in grace in his lair, wakened from sleep. The languor died quickly in the latter's eyes, leaving only fear. These were braver than the Little People. They waited until the thick brush, not far distant from where the bull elk slept, began to break down and part before an enormous, gray body.

No longer would an observer think of the elk as the forest monarch. He was but a pretender, after all. The real king had just wakened from his afternoon nap and was starting forth to hunt.

Even his little cousins, the black bears (who, after all is said and done, furnish most of the comedy of the deadly forest drama) did not wait to make conversation. They tumbled awkwardly down the hill to get out of his way. For the ma.s.sive gray form--weighing over half a ton--was none other than that of the last of the grizzly bears, that terrible forest hunter and monarch, the Killer himself.

XIV

Long ago, when Oregon was a new land to white men, in the days of the clipper ships and the Old Oregon Trail, the breed to which the Killer belonged were really numerous through the little corner north of the Siskiyous and west of the Cascades. The land was far different then. The transcontinental lines had not yet been built; the only settlements were small trading posts and mining camps, and people did not travel over paved highways in automobiles. If they went at all it was in a prairie-schooner or on horseback. And the old grizzly bears must have found the region a veritable heaven.

They were a worthy breed! It is doubtful if any other section of the United States offered an environment so favorable to them. Game was in abundance, they could venture down into the valleys at the approach of winter and thus miss the rigors of the snow, and at first there were no human enemies. Unfortunately, stories are likely to grow and become sadly addled after many tellings; but if the words of certain old men could be believed, the Southern Oregon grizzly occasionally, in the bountiful fall days, attained a weight of two thousand pounds. No doubt whatever remains that thousand-pound bears were fairly numerous. They trailed up and down the brown hillsides; they hunted and honey-grubbed and mated in the fall; they had their young and fought their battles and died, and once in a long while the skeleton of a frontiersman would be found with his skull battered perfectly flat where one of the great beasts had taken a short-arm pat at him.

But unlike the little black bears, the grizzlies developed displeasing habits. They were much more carnivorous in character than the blacks, and their great bodily strength and power enabled them to master all of the myriad forms of game in the Oregon woods. By the same token, they could take a full-grown steer and carry it off as a woman carries her baby.

It couldn't be endured. The cattlemen had begun to settle the valleys, and it was either a case of killing the grizzlies or yielding the valleys to them. In the relentless war that followed, the breed had been practically wiped out. A few of them, perhaps, fled farther and farther up the Cascades, finding refuges in the Canadian mountains. Others traveled east, locating at last in the Rocky Mountains, and countless numbers of them died. At last, as far as the frontiersmen knew, only one great specimen remained. This was a famous bear that men called Slewfoot,--a magnificent animal that ranged far and hunted relentlessly, and no one ever knew just when they were going to run across him. It made traveling in the mountains a rather ticklish business. He was apt suddenly to loom up, like a gray cliff, at any turn in the trail, and his disposition grew querulous with age. In fact, instead of fleeing as most wild creatures have learned to do, he was rather likely to make sudden and unexpected charges.

He was killed at last; and seemingly the Southern Oregon grizzlies were wiped out. But it is rather easy to believe that in some of his wanderings he encountered--lost and far in the deepest heart of the land called Trail's End--a female of his own breed. There must have been cubs who, in their turn, mated and fought and died, and perhaps two generations after them. And out of the last brood had emerged a single great male, a worthy descendant of his famous ancestor. This was the Killer, who in a few months since he had left his fastnesses, was beginning to ruin the cattle business in Trail's End.

As he came growling from his bed this September evening he was not a creature to speak of lightly. He was down on all fours, his vast head was lowered, his huge fangs gleamed in the dark red mouth. The eyes were small, and curious little red lights glowed in each of them. The Killer was cross; and he didn't care who knew it. He was hungry too; but hunger is an emotion for the beasts of prey to keep carefully to themselves. He walked slowly across the little glen, carelessly at first, for he was too cross and out of temper to have the patience to stalk. He stopped, turning his head this way and that, marking the flight of the wild creatures. He saw a pair of blacktail bucks spring up from a covert and dash away; but he only made one short, angry lunge toward them. He knew that it would only cost him his dignity to try to chase them. A grizzly bear can move astonishingly fast considering his weight--for a short distance he can keep pace with a running horse--but a deer is light itself. He uttered one short, low growl, then headed over toward a great wall of buckbush at the base of the hill.

But now his hunting cunning had begun to return to him. The sun was setting, the pines were growing dusky, and he began to feel the first excitement and fever that the fall of night always brings to the beasts of prey. It is a feeling that his insignificant cousins, the black bears, could not possibly have,--for the sole reason that they are berry-eaters, not hunters. But the cougar, stealing down a deer trail on the ridge above, and a lean old male wolf--stalking a herd of deer on the other side of the thicket--understood it very well. His blood began to roll faster through his great veins. The sullen glare grew in his eyes.

It was the beginning of the hunting hour of the larger creatures. All the forest world knew it. The air seemed to throb and tingle, the shadowing thickets began to pulse and stir with life. The Fear--the age-old heritage of all the hunted creatures--returned to the deer.

The Killer moved quite softly now. One would have marveled how silently his great feet fell upon the dry earth and with what slight sound his heavy form moved through the thickets. Once he halted, gazing with reddening eyes. But the coyote--the gray figure that had broken a twig on the trail beside him--slipped quickly away.

He skirted the thicket, knowing that no successful stalk could be made where he had to force his way through dry brush. He moved slowly, cautiously--all the time mounting farther up the little hill that rose from the banks of the stream. He came to an opening in the thicket, a little brown pathway that vanished quickly into the shadows of the coverts.

The Killer slipped softly into the heavy brush just at its mouth. It was his ambush. Soon, he knew, some of the creatures that had bowers in the heart of the thicket would be coming along that trail toward the feeding grounds on the ridge. He only had to wait.

As the shadows grew and the twilight deepened, the undercurrent of savagery that is the eternal quality of the wilderness grew ever more p.r.o.nounced. A thrill and fever came in the air, mystery in the deepening shadows, and brighter lights into the eyes of the hunting folk. The dusk deepened between the trees; the distant trunks dimmed and faded quite away. The stars emerged. The nightwind, rising somewhere in the region of the snow banks on the highest mountains, blew down into the Killer's face and brought messages that no human being may ever receive. Then his sharp ears heard the sound of brush cracked softly as some one of the larger forest creatures came up the trail toward him.

The steps drew nearer and the Killer recognized them. They were plainly the soft footfall of some member of the deer tribe, yet they were too p.r.o.nounced to be the step of any of the lesser deer. The bull elk had left his bed. The red eyes of the grizzly seemed to glow as he waited.

Great though the stag was, only one little blow of the ma.s.sive forearm would be needed. The huge fangs would have to close down but once. The long, many-tined antlers, the sharp front hoofs would not avail him in a surprise attack such as this would be. Best of all, he was not suspecting danger. He was walking down wind, so that the pungent odor of the bear was blown away from him.

The bear did not move a single telltale muscle. He scarcely breathed.

And the one movement that there was was such that not even the keen ears of an elk could discern, just a curious erection of the gray hairs on his vast neck.

The bull was almost within striking range now. The wicked red eyes could already discern the dimmest shadow of his outline through the thickets.

But all at once he stopped, head lifting.

Perhaps a grizzly bear does not have mental processes as human beings know them. Perhaps all impulse is the result of instinct alone,--instinct tuned and trained to a degree that human beings find hard to imagine. But if the bear couldn't understand the sudden halt just at the eve of his triumph, at least he felt growing anger. He knew perfectly that the elk had neither detected his odor nor heard him, and he had made no movements that the sharp eyes could detect. Just a glimpse of gray in the heavy brush would not have been enough in itself to arouse the stag's suspicions. For the lower creatures are rarely able to interpret outline alone; there must be movement too.

Yet the bull was evidently alarmed. He stood immobile, one foot lifted, nostrils open, head raised. Then, the wind blowing true, the grizzly understood.

A pungent smell reached him from below,--evidently the smell of a living creature that followed the trail along the stream that flowed through the glen. He recognized it in an instant. He had detected it many times, particularly when he went into the cleared lands to kill cattle. It was man, an odor almost unknown in this lonely glen. Dave Turner, brother of Simon, was walking down the stream toward Hudson's camp.

The elk was widely traveled too, and he also realized the proximity of man. But his reaction was entirely different. To the grizzly it was an annoying interruption to his hunt; and a great flood of rage swept over him. It seemed to him that these tall creatures were always crossing his path, spoiling his hunting, even questioning his rule of the forests.

They did not seem to realize that he was the wilderness king, and that he could break their slight forms in two with one blow of his paw. It was true that their eyes had strange powers to disquiet him; but his isolation in the fastnesses of Trail's End had kept him from any full recognition of their real strength, and he was unfortunately lacking in the awe with which most of the forest creatures regard them. But to the elk this smell was Fear itself. He knew the ways of men only too well.

Too many times he had seen members of his herd fall stricken at a word from the glittering sticks they carried in their hands. He uttered a far-ringing snort.

It was a distinctive sound, beginning rather high on the scale as a loud whistle and descending into a deep ba.s.s bawl. And the Killer knew perfectly what that sound meant. It was a simple way of saying that the elk would progress no further down _that_ trail. The bear leaped in wild fury.

A growl that was more near a puma-like snarl came from between the bared teeth, and the great body lunged out with incredible speed. Although the distance was far, the charge was almost a success. If one second had intervened before the elk saw the movement, if his muscles had not been fitted out with invisible wings, he would have fought no more battles with his herd brethren in the fall. The bull seemed to leap straight up.

His muscles had been set at his first alarm from Turner's smell on the wind, and they drove forth the powerful limbs as if by a powder explosion. He was full in the air when the forepaws battered down where he had been. Then he darted away into the coverts.

The grizzly knew better than to try to overtake him. Almost rabid with wrath he turned back to his ambush.

XV

Simon Turner had given Dave very definite instructions concerning his emba.s.sy to Hudson. They were given in the great house that Simon occupied, in the same room, lighted by the fire's glow, from which instructions had gone out to the clan so many times before. "The first thing this Bruce will do," Simon had said, "is to hunt up Hudson--the one living man that witnessed that agreement between Ross and old Folger. One reason is that he'll want to verify Linda's story. The next is to persuade the old man to go down to the courts with him as his witness. And what you have to do is line him up on our side first."

Dave had felt Simon's eyes upon him, so he didn't look straight up. "And that's what the hundred is for?" he asked.

"Of course. Get the old man's word that he'll tell Bruce he never witnessed any such agreement. Maybe fifty dollars will do it; the old trapper is pretty hard up, I reckon. He'd make us a lot of trouble if Bruce got him as a witness."

"You think--" Dave's eyes wandered about the room, "you think that's the best way?"

"I wouldn't be tellin' you to do it if I didn't think so." Simon laughed,--a sudden, grim syllable. "Dave, you're a blood-thirsty devil.

I see what you're thinking of--of a safer way to keep him from telling.

But you know the word I sent out. 'Go easy!' That's the wisest course to follow at present. The valley people pay more attention to such things than they used to; the fewer the killings, the wiser we will be. If he'll keep quiet for the hundred let him have it in peace."

Dave hadn't forgotten. But his features were sharper and more ratlike than ever when he came in sight of Hudson's camp, just after the fall of darkness of the second day out. The trapper was cooking his simple meal,--a blue grouse frying in his skillet, coffee boiling, and flapjack batter ready for the moment the grouse was done. He was kneeling close to the coals; the firelight cast a red glow over him, and the picture started a train of rather pleasing conjectures in Dave's mind.

He halted in the shadows and stood a moment watching. After all he wasn't greatly different from the wolf that watched by the deer trail or the Killer in his ambush, less than a mile distant in the glen. The same strange, dark pa.s.sion that was over them both was over him also. One could see it in the almost imperceptible drawing back of his dark lips over his teeth. There was just a hint of it in the lurid eyes.

Dave's thought returned to the hundred dollars in his pocket,--a good sum in the hills. A bra.s.s rifle cartridge, such as he could fire in the thirty-thirty that he carried in the hollow of his arm, cost only about six cents. The net gain would be--the figures flew quickly through his mind--ninety-nine dollars and ninety-four cents; quite a good piece of business for Dave. But the trouble was that Simon might find out.

It was not, he remembered, that Simon was adverse to this sort of operation when necessary. Perhaps the straight-out sport of the thing meant more to him than to Dave; he was a braver man and more primitive in impulse. There were certain memory pictures in Dave's mind of this younger, more powerful brother of his; and he smiled grimly when he recalled them. They had been wild, strange scenes of long ago, usually in the pale light of the moon, and he could recall Simon's face with singular clearness. There had always been the same drawing back of the lips, the same gusty breathing, the same strange little flakes of fire in the savage eyes. He had always trembled all over too, but not from fear; and Dave remembered especially well the little drama outside Matthew Folger's cabin in the darkness. He was no stranger to the blood madness, this brother of his, and the clan had high hopes for him even in his growing days. And he had fulfilled those hopes. Never could the fact be doubted! He could still make a fresh notch in his rifle stock with the same rapture. But the word had gone out, for the present at least, to "go easy." Such little games as occurred to Dave now--as he watched the trapper in the firelight with one hundred dollars of the clan's money in his own pocket--had been prohibited until further notice.

The thing looked so simple that Dave squirmed all over with annoyance.