The Watchers of the Trails Part 12

He was standing in shallow water, digging out an obstinate, but tempting root, when there arose a sudden great outcry from all the birds. It meant "A hawk!--A hawk!--A hawk!--A hawk!" He understood it perfectly; but he never lifted his head from his task. Next moment there was a mighty rush of wind in his ears; a thunderbolt seemed to strike him, frightful claws gripped him, piercing his back, and he was swept into the air. But it was a young hawk, unversed in the way of the muskrat, which had seized him. What those steely claws really clutched was little more than a roll of loose skin. Hurt, but not daunted, the muskrat twisted his head up and back, and sank his long, punishing incisors into the enemy's thigh. He did not hang on, in bulldog fashion, but cut, cut, cut, deep through the bird's hard feather armour, and into the cringing red strata of veins and muscles.

With a scream of pain and fear, the bird dropped him, and he fell into the water. At first, he dived deep, fearing a second attack, and came up under a tangle of gra.s.ses, from which he could peer forth unseen.

Then, perceiving that the hawk had vanished, he, by and by, came out of the gra.s.s, and paddled to his favourite log. He was bleeding profusely, and his toilet that evening was long and painful. But in a few days he was as well as ever, with an added confidence.

About this time, however, a small, inquisitive, and particularly bloodthirsty mink came down from the upper waters of the creek, where game had grown scarce under the ravages of her insatiable and implacable family. One of her special weaknesses was for muskrat-meat, and many a muskrat house she had invaded so successfully that the long, smothering, black, drowned galleries had no more terrors for her.

She came to the house in the alders. She noted its size, and realized that here, indeed, was good hunting. She swam down to the water-gate at the bottom of the channel, poked her nose in, and returned to the surface for a full supply of air. Then, with great speed, she dived again, and disappeared within the blackness of the water-gate.

It chanced that the big muskrat was just descending. From the inner darkness he saw the enemy clearly, before her savage, little, peering eyes could discover him. He knew all the deadliness of the peril. He could easily have escaped, turning back and fleeing by the other pa.s.sage while the foe went on to her b.l.o.o.d.y work in the chambers.

There was no time to warn the rest.

But flight was far from the big muskrat's mind in that crucial moment.

Not panic, but a fierce hate blazed in his usually good-natured eyes.

With a swift, strenuous kick of his powerful hind legs, he shot downward upon the enemy, and grappled with her in the narrow tunnel.

The mink had seen him just before he fell upon her, and quicker than thought itself had darted up her snake-like jaws to gain the fatal throat-hold. But long success had made her over-confident. No muskrat had ever, within her experience, even tried to fight her. This present impetuous attack she mistook for a frantic effort to crowd past her and escape. Half careless, therefore, she missed the fatal hold, and caught only a mouthful of yielding skin. Before she could try again--borne down and hampered as she was by the muskrat's weight--a set of long, tenacious teeth, crunching and cutting, met in the side of her face, just at the root of the jaw.

This time the muskrat was wise enough to hold on. His deep grip held like a vise. The mink's teeth, those vindictive teeth that had killed and killed for the mere joy of killing, now gnashed impotently. In utter silence, there in the choking deep, the water in their eyes and ears and jaws, they writhed and strove, the mink's lithe body twisting around her foe like a snake. Then, with a convulsive shudder, her struggles ceased. Her lungs had refused to hold the strained breath any longer. They had opened--and the water had filled them. Her body trailed out limply; and the muskrat, still maintaining that inexorable grip, dragged her out through the water-gate which he had so well kept. Out in the brown, blurred light of the current he still held her down, jamming her head into a patch of bright sand, until the ache of his own lungs gave him warning. Then, carrying the body to the surface, he flung it scornfully over a root to await the revival of his appet.i.te, and proceeded to calm his excitement by a long, elaborate toilet. Steely dark and cold the waters of Bitter Creek slipped by between their leafless, bushy banks. And inside the dome of the house in the alders the thick-furred muskrat colony slept luxuriously, little dreaming of the doom just averted from their door.

When the Moose Cow Calls

The smell of the burning rubbish heaps--the penetrating November smell--spread up from the clearings and filled the chilly, windless evening air. It seemed a sort of expression of the cold sky, those pale steel-gray and sea-green wastes, deepening into sharp straight bands of orange and smoke colour along the far horizon. It seemed equally an expression of the harsh, darkening upland pastures, dotted with ragged stumps and backed by ragged forests. It was the distinctive autumn smell of the backwoods settlements, that smell which, taken into the blood in childhood, can never lose its potency of magic, its power over the most secret springs of memory and longing.

On the rude snake fence at the back of the pasture sat a boy, with a roll of birch bark in his hands. The bark was fashioned into the shape of a fish-horn, and the boy handled it proudly. He took deep breaths of the pungent-smelling air, and felt an exciting thrill as he glanced over his shoulder at the dark woods just behind him. It was for the sake of this thrill, this delicious though unfounded apprehension, that he had come here to the very back of the pasture, in the twilight, after bringing up the cows from the milking. The cows he couldn't see, for they were feeding in the lower pasture, just under the rise of the hill. The lights beginning to glimmer in the farmhouse were very far down in the valley; and very far down were the little creeping flames whence came that pungent smell pervading the world; and the boy felt his spirit both expand and tremble before the great s.p.a.ces of the solitude.

It was for the purpose of practising privately the call of the cow-moose that the boy had betaken himself to the lonely back pasture.

On the previous evening an old hunter, just back from a successful "calling" over on Nictau Lake, had given the boy some lessons in this alluring and suggestive department of woodcraft, and had made his joy complete by the gift of the bark "moose-call" itself, a battered old tube with many "kills" to its credit. The boy, with his young voice just roughening toward the ba.s.s of manhood, had proved an apt pupil.

And the hunter had not only told him that practice would make him a first-cla.s.s "caller," but had promised to take him hunting next season. This promise had set the boy's imagination aflame, and all day he had been dreaming of tall moose-bulls, wide-antlered, huge-belled, black of mane and shoulder.

Of course, when he went up to the fence of the back pasture to practise his new accomplishment, the boy had no idea of being heard by anything in the shape of a bull-moose, still less of being able to deceive that crafty animal. Had he imagined the possibility of gaining any response to his call, he would have come well-armed, and would have taken up his post in the branches of some safe tree. But it was getting near the end of the season, and what was more to the purpose, there ran a tradition in the settlement that the moose never came east of Five Mile Creek, a water-course some four miles back from the fence whereon the boy was sitting. Such traditions, once established in a backwoods village, acquire an authority quite superior to fact and proof against much ocular refutation. The boy had an unwavering faith that, however seductively he might sound the call of the cow, never a moose bull would hear him, because never a moose bull could be found this side of Five Mile Creek. It was fascinating to pretend,--but he had no will to evoke any monstrous apparition from those dark woods behind him, on which he found it so thrillingly hard to keep his back turned.

After sitting silent and moveless for a few minutes, listening to the vague, mysterious stir of the solitude till his eyes grew wide as a watching deer's, the boy lifted his birchen tube in both hands, stretched his neck, and gave forth the harsh, half-bleating bellow, or bray, with which the cow-moose signals for a mate. It was a good imitation of what the old hunter had done, and the boy was proud of it. In his exultation he repeated it thrice. Then he stopped to listen,--pretending, as boys will, that he expected an answer.

The silence following upon that sonorous sound seemed startling in its depth; and the boy held his breath lest he should mar it. Then came an unexpected noise, at which the boy's heart jumped into his throat,--a sharp crashing and rattling of branches, as if somebody was thrashing the underbrush with sticks. It seemed to be some hundreds of yards away, beyond the farthest fence of the pasture. For a moment the boy wondered tremulously what it could be. Then he thought he understood.

"Some fool steer's got through the fence and gone stumbling through the brush piles," he muttered to himself. The explanation had the merit of explaining; and when the sound had ceased the boy once more set the bark trumpet to his lips and sounded its harsh appeal.

This time he called twice. As he paused to draw breath, a little creepy feeling on the skin of his cheeks and about the roots of his hair made him turn his head and fix his eyes upon a dense spruce thicket some twenty paces behind him. Surely there was a movement among the young spruce tops. Almost as smoothly as a mink slips from a rock the boy slipt down from his too conspicuous perch and crouched behind the fence. Peering between the rails he saw a tall, dark shape, with gigantic head, vast antlers, and portentous bulk of shoulder, step noiselessly from the thicket and stand motionless. With a heart that throbbed in mingled exultation and terror, the boy realized that he had called a bull-moose.

Huge as seemed its stature to the boy's excited vision, the moose was in reality a young and rather small bull, who had been forced by stronger rivals to go unmated. Driven by his restless desire, he had wandered beyond his wonted range. Now he stood like a statue, head uplifted, peering on every side to catch sight of the mate whose voice had so resistlessly summoned him. Only his wide ears moved, waving inquisitively. His nostrils, ordinarily his chief source of information, were dulled almost to obtuseness by that subtly acrid perfume of the smoke.

The boy in his fence corner, with a gray stump beside him, shrank within himself and stared through half-closed eyes, trembling lest the mighty stranger should detect him. He had a very reasonable notion that the mighty stranger might object to the deception which had been practised upon his eager emotions, and might not find the old rail fence much barrier to his righteous wrath. For all his elation, the boy began to wish that he had not been in such haste to learn moose-calling. "Don't call till you've some idea who'll answer!" was a rule which he deduced from that night's experience.

It is possible that the bull, during those few minutes while he stood waiting and watching, saw the dim figure of the boy behind the fence.

If so, the figure had no concern for him. He caught nothing of the dreaded man-smell; and he had no reason to a.s.sociate that small, harmless creature with the mate to whose calling he had sped so eagerly. But there was no doubt that the calling had come from this very place. Was it possible that the cow, more coquettish than her kind are apt to be, had hidden herself to provoke him? He came closer to the fence, and uttered a soft grumble in his throat, a sound both caressing and appealing. "My! how disappointed he'll be!" thought the boy, and devoutly wished himself safe at home.

At this trying moment came relief from an unexpected quarter. That distant threshing of the bushes which the boy had heard after his first calling had not been a stray steer. Not by any means. It was the response of another young wandering moose bull, beating on the underbrush with his ill-developed, but to himself quite wonderful, antlers. He, too, was seeking a mate in a region far remote from that where ruled the tyrannous elder bulls. Silently and swiftly, a.s.sured by the second summons, he had hurried to the tryst; and now, to his ungovernable rage, what he saw awaiting him in the dusk was no mate at all, but a rival. Pausing not to consider the odds, he burst from the covert and rushed furiously to the attack.

The first bull, though somewhat the larger of the two, and by far the better antlered, was taken at a disadvantage. Before he could whirl and present his formidable front to the charge, the newcomer caught him on the flank, knocked him clear off his feet, and sent him crashing into the fence. The fence went down like stubble; and the boy, his eyes starting with astonished terror, scurried like a rabbit for the nearest tree. Climbing into the branches with an agility which surprised even himself, he promptly recovered from his panic and turned to watch the fight.

The first bull, saved from serious injury by the defects of his adversary's antlers, picked himself up from the wreckage of the fence, and, grunting with anger, plunged back to meet his a.s.sailant. The latter, somewhat puzzled by the fence and its zig-zag twistings, had drawn a little to one side, and so it happened that when the first bull rushed at him, the angle of a fence corner intervened. When the opposing antlers came together, they met harmlessly between the heavy rails, and got tangled in a way that seemed to daunt their owners'

rage. In the pushing and struggling the top rail was thrown off and fell smartly across the newcomer's neck. At the same time one of the stakes flew up and caught the first bull fairly on the sensitive muzzle. Sneezing violently, he jumped back; and the two stood eyeing each other with fierce suspicion over the top of the fence.

The boy was trembling with excitement there in his tree, eager for the fight to go on and eager to see which would win. But in this he was doomed to disappointment. The end came in a most unlooked-for fashion.

It chanced that the boy's "calling" had deceived others besides the two young bulls. The old hunter, in his cabin under the hill, had heard it. He had s.n.a.t.c.hed his rifle from behind the door, and stolen swiftly up to the back pasture.

From a clump of hemlock not fifty yards away came a red flash and a sharp report. The bull on the near side of the fence sprang into the air with a gasping cough, and fell. The smaller bull, who knew what guns meant, simply vanished. It was as if the dusk had blotted him out, so noiselessly and instantaneously did he sink back into the thickets; and a moment later he was heard crashing away through the underbrush in mad flight. As the hunter stepped up to examine his prize, the boy dropped from the tree, grabbed his birch-bark tube, and came forward proudly.

"There wasn't any cow at all,--'cept me!" he proclaimed, his voice ringing with triumph.

The Pa.s.sing of the Black Whelps

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OVER THE CREST OF THE RIDGE, INKY BLACK FOR AN INSTANT AGAINST THE MOON, CAME A LEAPING DEER"]

I.

A lopsided, waning moon, not long risen, looked over the ragged crest of the ridge, and sent long shadows down the spa.r.s.ely wooded slope.

Though there was no wind, and every tree was as motionless as if carved of ice, these spare, intricate shadows seemed to stir and writhe, as if instinct with a kind of sinister activity. This confusion of light and dark was increased by the patches of snow that still clung in the dips and on the gentler slopes. The air was cold, yet with a bitter softness in it, the breath of the thaw. The sound of running water was everywhere--the light clamour of rivulets, and the rush of the swollen brooks; while from the bottom of the valley came the deep, pervading voice of the river at freshet, labouring between high banks with its burden of sudden flood.

Over the crest of the ridge, inky black for an instant against the moon, came a leaping deer. He vanished in a patch of young firs. He shot out again into the moonlight. Down the slope he came in mighty bounds, so light of foot and so elastic that he seemed to float through the air. From his heaving sides and wild eyes it was evident that he was fleeing in desperation from some appalling terror.

Straight down the slope he came, to the very brink of the high bluff overlooking the river. There he wheeled, and continued his flight up the valley, his violent shadow every now and then, as he crossed the s.p.a.ces of moonlight, projecting grotesquely out upon the swirling flood.

Up along the river bluff he fled for perhaps a mile. Then he stopped suddenly and listened, his sensitive ears and dilating nostrils held high to catch the faintest waft of air. Not a sound came to him, except the calling of the waters; not a scent, save the raw freshness of melting snow and the balsamic tang of buds just beginning to thrill to the first of the rising sap. He bounded on again for perhaps a hundred yards, then with a tremendous leap sprang to one side, a full thirty feet, landing belly-deep in a thicket of scrub juniper. Another leap, as if he were propelled by steel springs, carried him yet another thirty feet aside. Then he turned, ran back a couple of hundred yards parallel to his old trail, and lay down in a dense covert of spruces to catch breath and ease his pounding heart. He was a very young buck, not yet seasoned in the craft of the wilderness, and his terror shook him. But he knew enough to take his s.n.a.t.c.hed rest at the very edge of his covert, where his eyes could watch the back trail. For a quarter of an hour, however, nothing appeared along that staring trail. Then he got up nervously and resumed his flight, still ascending the valley, but now slanting away from the river, and gradually climbing back toward the crest of the ridge. He had in mind a wide reach of swales and flooded meadows, still miles away, wherein he might hope to elude the doom that followed him.

Not long after the buck had vanished there arose a strange sound upon the still, wet air. It came in a rising and falling cadence from far behind the ridge, under the lopsided moon. It was a high, confused sound, not unmusical, but terrifying--a cry of many voices. It drifted up into the silvery night, wavered and diminished, swelled again, and then died away, leaving a sense of fear upon the quiet that followed.

The soft clamour of the waters, when one noticed them again, seemed to have taken a new note from the menace of that cadenced cry.

Presently over the top of the ridge, at the gap wherein had first appeared the form of the leaping buck, a low, dark shape came, moving sinuously and with deadly swiftness. It did not bound into the air and float, as the buck had seemed to do, but slid smoothly, like a small, dense patch of cloud-shadow--a direct, inevitable movement, wasting no force and fairly eating up the trail of the fleeing deer.

As it came down the slope, disappearing in the hemlock groves and emerging upon the bright, snowy hollows, the dread shape resolved itself into a pack of seven wolves. They ran so close, so evenly, with fanged muzzles a little low, and ample, cloudy tails a little high, that one might have almost covered the whole deadly pack with a table-cloth. Their tongues were hanging out, and their eyes shot green fire. They were fiercely hungry, for game was scarce and cunning that winter on their much ravaged range, and this chase was already a long one. When the trail of the buck wheeled at the river-brink, the leader of the pack gave one short howl as he turned, barely escaping the abyss. It seemed to him that the buck must have been nearly winded, or he would not, even for an instant, have contemplated taking to such mad water. With the renewed vigour of encouragement, he swept his pack along up the edge of the bluff.

On the pack-leader's right flank ran a st.u.r.dy wolf of a darker colour than his fellows--nearly black, indeed, on the top of his head, over his shoulders, and along his stiff-haired backbone. Not quite so tall or so long-flanked as the leader, he had that greater breadth of skull between the eyes which betokens the stronger intelligence, the more individualized resourcefulness. He had a look in his deep-set, fierce eye which seemed to prophesy that unless the unforeseen should happen he would ere long seize the leadership to himself.

But--the unforeseen did happen, at that moment. The trail, just there, led across a little dip wherein the snow still lingered. Thinly covered by the snow lay a young pine-tree, lightning shivered and long dead. Thrust up from the trunk was a slim, sharp-pointed stub, keen and hard and preserved by its resin. Upon this hidden dagger-point, as he ran, the dark wolf planted his right fore foot--planted it fair and with a mighty push. Between the spreading toes, between the fine bones and sinews and the cringing nerves of the foot, and out by the first joint of the leg it thrust its rending way.

At the suddenness of the anguish the dark wolf yelped, falling forward upon his muzzle as he did so, and dropping from his place as the pack sped on. But as he wrenched his foot free and took one stumbling stride forward, the pack stopped, and turned. Their long white fangs snapped, and the fire in their eyes took a different hue.

Very well the dark wolf knew the meaning of the halt, the turn, the change in his fellows' eyes. He knew the stern law of the pack--the instant and inevitable doom of its hurt member. The average gray wolf knows how to accept the inevitable. Fate itself--the law of the pack--he does not presume to defy. He will fight--to justify his blood, and, perhaps, to drug his despair and die in the heat of the struggle. But he does not dream of trying to escape.

And in this fashion, fighting in silence, this dark wolf would have died at the brink of the river bluff, and been eaten by his fellows ere they continued their chase of the leaping buck--in this fashion would he have died, but for that extra breadth of skull between the eyes, that heightened individualism and resourcefulness. Had there been any chance to escape by fighting, fighting would have been the choice of his fierce and hardy spirit. But what was he against six?

Defying the fiery anguish in his foot, he made a desperate leap which took him to the extreme overhanging edge of the bluff. Already the jaws of the executioners were gnashing at his heels. A second more and they would have been at his throat. But before that second pa.s.sed he was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not far ahead?