They could hear the distant murmuring roar of the fire now. Ahead of it came the wild things. Moose, caribou, and deer plunged into the water of the streams and swam to the safety of the opposite side. Out upon a white finger of sand lumbered a big black bear with two cubs, and even the cubs took to the water, and swam across easily. Kazan watched them, and whined to Gray Wolf.
And then out upon that white finger of sand came other things that dreaded the water as Gray Wolf dreaded it: a big fat porcupine, a sleek little marten, a fisher-cat that sniffed the air and wailed like a child. Those things that could not or would not swim outnumbered the others three to one. Hundreds of little ermine scurried along the shore like rats, their squeaking little voices sounding incessantly; foxes ran swiftly along the banks, seeking a tree or a windfall that might bridge the water for them; the lynx snarled and faced the fire; and Gray Wolf’s own tribe—the wolves—dared take no deeper step than she.
Dripping and panting, and half choked by heat and smoke, Kazan came to Gray Wolf’s side. There was but one refuge left near them, and that was the sand bar. It reached out for fifty feet into the stream. Quickly he led his blind mate toward it. As they came through the low bush to the river-bed, something stopped them both. To their nostrils had come the scent of a deadlier enemy than fire. A lynx had taken possession of the sand bar, and was crouching at the end of it. Three porcupines had dragged themselves into the edge of the water, and lay there like balls, their quills alert and quivering. A fisher-cat was snarling at the lynx. And the lynx, with ears laid back, watched Kazan and Gray Wolf as they began the invasion of the sand bar.
Faithful Gray Wolf was full of fight, and she sprang shoulder to shoulder with Kazan, her fangs bared. With an angry snap, Kazan drove her back, and she stood quivering and whining while he advanced. Light-footed, his pointed ears forward, no menace or threat in his attitude, he advanced. It was the deadly advance of the husky trained in battle, skilled in the art of killing. A man from civilization would have said that the dog was approaching the lynx with friendly intentions. But the lynx understood. It was the old feud of many generations—made deadlier now by Kazan’s memory of that night at the top of the Sun Rock.
Instinct told the fisher-cat what was coming, and it crouched low and flat; the porcupines, scolding like little children at the presence of enemies and the thickening clouds of smoke, thrust their quills still more erect. The lynx lay on its belly, like a cat, its hindquarters twitching, and gathered for the spring. Kazan’s feet seemed scarcely to touch the sand as he circled lightly around it. The lynx pivoted as he circled, and then it shot in a round snarling ball over the eight feet of space that separated them.
Kazan did not leap aside. He made no effort to escape the attack, but met it fairly with the full force of his shoulders, as sledge-dog meets sledge-dog. He was ten pounds heavier than the lynx, and for a moment the big, loose-jointed cat with its twenty knife-like claws was thrown on its side. Like a flash Kazan took advantage of the moment, and drove for the back of the cat’s neck.
In that same moment blind Gray Wolf leaped in with a snarling cry, and fighting under Kazan’s belly, she fastened her jaws in one of the cat’s hind legs. The bone snapped. The lynx, twice outweighed, leaped backward, dragging both Kazan and Gray Wolf. It fell back down on one of the porcupines, and a hundred quills drove into its body. Another leap and it was free—fleeing into the face of the smoke. Kazan did not pursue. Gray Wolf came to his side and licked his neck, where fresh blood was crimsoning his tawny hide. The fisher-cat lay as if dead, watching them with fierce little black eyes. The porcupines continued to chatter, as if begging for mercy. And then a thick black suffocating pall of smoke drove low over the sand bar, and with it came air that was furnace-hot.
At the uttermost end of the sand bar Kazan and Gray Wolf rolled themselves into balls and thrust their heads under their bodies. The fire was very near now. The roar of it was like that of a great cataract, with now and then a louder crash of falling trees. The air was filled with ash and burning sparks, and twice Kazan drew forth his head to snap at blazing embers that fell upon and seared him like hot irons.
Close along the edge of the stream grew thick green bush, and when the fire reached this, it burned more slowly, and the heat grew less. Still, it was a long time before Kazan and Gray Wolf could draw forth their heads and breathe more freely. Then they found that the finger of sand reaching out into the river had saved them. Everywhere in that triangle between the two rivers the world had turned black, and was hot underfoot.
The smoke cleared away. The wind changed again, and swung down cool and fresh from the west and north. The fisher-cat was the first to move cautiously back to the forests that had been, but the porcupines were still rolled into balls when Gray Wolf and Kazan left the sand bar. They began to travel upstream, and before night came, their feet were sore from hot ash and burning embers.
The moon was strange and foreboding that night, like a spatter of blood in the sky, and through the long silent hours there was not even the hoot of an owl to give a sign that life still existed where yesterday had been a paradise of wild things. Kazan knew that there was nothing to hunt, and they continued to travel all that night. With dawn they struck a narrow swamp along the edge of the stream. Here beavers had built a dam, and they were able to cross over into the green country on the opposite side. For another day and another night they traveled westward, and this brought them into the thick country of swamp and timber along the Waterfound.
And as Kazan and Gray Wolf came from the west, there came from the Hudson’s Bay post to the east a slim, dark-faced French half-breed by the name of Henri Loti, the most famous lynx hunter in all the Hudson’s Bay country. He was prospecting for “signs,” and he found them in abundance along the Waterfound. It was a game paradise, and the snowshoe rabbit abounded in thousands. As a consequence, the lynxes were thick, and Henri built his trapping shack, and then returned to the post to wait until the first snows fell, when he would come back with his team, supplies, and traps.
And up from the south, at this same time, there was slowly working his way by canoe and trail a young university zoologist who was gathering material for a book on The Reasoning of the Wild. His name was Paul Weyman, and he had made arrangements to spend a part of the winter with Henri Loti, the half-breed. He brought with him plenty of paper, a camera, and the photograph of a girl. His only weapon was a pocket-knife.
And meanwhile Kazan and Gray Wolf found the home they were seeking in a thick swamp five or six miles from the cabin that Henri Loti had built.
Chapter XI: Always Two by Two
It was January when a guide from the post brought Paul Weyman to Henri Loti’s cabin on the Waterfound. He was a man of thirty-two or three, full of the red-blooded life that made Henri like him at once. If this had not been the case, the first few days in the cabin might have been unpleasant, for Henri was in bad humor. He told Weyman about it their first night, as they were smoking pipes alongside the redly glowing box stove.
“It is damn strange,” said Henri. “I have lost seven lynx in the traps, torn to pieces like they were no more than rabbits that the foxes had killed. Nothing—not even bear—have ever tackled lynx in a trap before. It is the first time I ever see it. And they are torn up so bad they are not worth one half dollar at the post. Seven!—that is over two hundred dollar I have lost! There are two wolves who do it. Two—I know it by the tracks—always two—an’—never one. They follow my trap line an’ eat the rabbits I catch. They leave the fisher-cat, an’ the mink, an’ the ermine, an’ the marten; but the lynx—sacré an’ damn!—they jump on him an’ pull the fur from him like you pull the wild cotton balls from the burn-bush! I have tried strychnine in deer fat, an’ I have set traps and deadfalls, but I cannot catch them. They will drive me out unless I get them, for I have taken only five good lynx, an’ they have destroyed seven.”
This roused Weyman. He was one of that growing number of thoughtful men who believe that m
an’s egoism, as a race, blinds him to many of the more wonderful facts of creation. He had thrown down the gantlet, and with a logic that had gained him a nation-wide hearing, to those who believed that man was the only living creature who could reason, and that common sense and cleverness when displayed by any other breathing thing were merely instinct. The facts behind Henri’s tale of woe struck him as important, and until midnight they talked about the two strange wolves.
“There is one big wolf an’ one smaller,” said Henri. “An’ it is always the big wolf who goes in an’ fights the lynx. I see that by the snow. While he’s fighting, the smaller wolf makes many tracks in the snow just out of reach, an’ then when the lynx is down, or dead, it jumps in an’ helps tear it into pieces. All that I know by the snow. Only once have I seen where the smaller one went in an’ fought with the other, an’ then there was blood all about that was not lynx blood; I trailed the devils a mile by the dripping.”
During the two weeks that followed, Weyman found much to add to the material of his book. Not a day passed that somewhere along Henri’s trap line they did not see the trails of the two wolves, and Weyman observed that—as Henri had told him—the footprints were always two by two, and never one by one. On the third day they came to a trap that had held a lynx, and at sight of what remained Henri cursed in both French and English until he was purple in the face. The lynx had been torn until its pelt was practically worthless.
Weyman saw where the smaller wolf had waited on its haunches, while its companion had killed the lynx. He did not tell Henri all he thought. But the days that followed convinced him more and more that he had found the most dramatic exemplification of his theory. Back of this mysterious tragedy of the trap line there was a reason.
Why did the two wolves not destroy the fisher-cat, the ermine, and the marten? Why was their feud with the lynx alone?
Weyman was strangely thrilled. He was a lover of wild things, and for that reason he never carried a gun. And when he saw Henri placing poison-baits for the two marauders, he shuddered, and when, day after day, he saw that these poison-baits were untouched, he rejoiced. Something in his own nature went out in sympathy to the heroic outlaw of the trap line who never failed to give battle to the lynx. Nights in the cabin he wrote down his thoughts and discoveries of the day. One night he turned suddenly on Henri.
“Henri, doesn’t it ever make you sorry to kill so many wild things?” he asked.
Henri stared and shook his head.
“I kill t’ousand an’ t’ousand,” he said. “I kill t’ousand more.”
“And there are twenty thousand others just like you in this northern quarter of the continent—all killing, killing for hundreds of years back, and yet you can’t kill out wildlife. The war of Man and the Beast, you might call it. And, if you could return five hundred years from now, Henri, you’d still find wildlife here. Nearly all the rest of the world is changing, but you can’t change these almost impenetrable thousands of square miles of ridges and swamps and forests. The railroads won’t come here, and I, for one, thank God for that. Take all the great prairies to the west, for instance. Why, the old buffalo trails are still there, plain as day—and yet, towns and cities are growing up everywhere. Did you ever hear of North Battleford?”
“Is she near Montreal or Quebec?” Henri asked.
Weyman smiled, and drew a photograph from his pocket. It was the picture of a girl.
“No. It’s far to the west, in Saskatchewan. Seven years ago I used to go up there every year, to shoot prairie chickens, coyotes, and elk. There wasn’t any North Battleford then—just the glorious prairie, hundreds and hundreds of square miles of it. There was a single shack on the Saskatchewan River, where North Battleford now stands, and I used to stay there. In that shack there was a little girl, twelve years old. We used to go out hunting together—for I used to kill things in those days. And the little girl would cry sometimes when I killed, and I’d laugh at her.
“Then a railroad came, and then another, and they joined near the shack, and all at once a town sprang up. Seven years ago there was only the shack there, Henri. Two years ago there were eighteen hundred people. This year, when I came through, there were five thousand, and two years from now there’ll be ten thousand.
“On the ground where that shack stood are three banks, with a capital of forty million dollars; you can see the glow of the electric lights of the city twenty miles away. It has a hundred-thousand-dollar college, a high school, the provincial asylum, a fire department, two clubs, a board of trade, and it’s going to have a streetcar line within two years. Think of that—all where the coyotes howled a few years ago!
“People are coming in so fast that they can’t keep a census. Five years from now there’ll be a city of twenty thousand where the old shack stood. And the little girl in that shack, Henri—she’s a young lady now, and her people are—well, rich. I don’t care about that. The chief thing is that she is going to marry me in the spring. Because of her I stopped killing things when she was only sixteen. The last thing I killed was a prairie wolf, and it had young. Eileen kept the little puppy. She’s got it now—tamed. That’s why above all other wild things I love the wolves. And I hope these two leave your trap line safe.”
Henri was staring at him. Weyman gave him the picture. It was of a sweet-faced girl, with deep pure eyes, and there came a twitch at the corners of Henri’s mouth as he looked at it.
“My Iowaka died t’ree year ago,” he said. “She too loved the wild thing. But them wolf—damn! They drive me out if I cannot kill them!” He put fresh fuel into the stove, and prepared for bed.
One day the big idea came to Henri.
Weyman was with him when they struck fresh signs of lynx. There was a great windfall ten or fifteen feet high, and in one place the logs had formed a sort of cavern, with almost solid walls on three sides. The snow was beaten down by tracks, and the fur of rabbit was scattered about. Henri was jubilant.
“We got heem—sure!” he said.
He built the bait-house, set a trap, and looked about him shrewdly. Then he explained his scheme to Weyman. If the lynx was caught, and the two wolves came to destroy it, the fight would take place in that shelter under the windfall, and the marauders would have to pass through the opening. So Henri set five smaller traps, concealing them skillfully under leaves and moss and snow, and all were far enough away from the bait-house so that the trapped lynx could not spring them in his struggles.
“When they fight, wolf jump this way an’ that—an’ sure get in,” said Henri. “He miss one, two, t’ree—but he sure get in trap somewhere.”
That same morning a light snow fell, making the work more complete, for it covered up all footprints and buried the telltale scent of man. That night Kazan and Gray Wolf passed within a hundred feet of the windfall, and Gray Wolf’s keen scent detected something strange and disquieting in the air. She informed Kazan by pressing her shoulder against his, and they swung off at right angles, keeping to windward of the trap line.
For two days and three cold starlit nights, nothing happened at the windfall. Henri understood, and explained to Weyman. The lynx was a hunter, like himself, and also had its hunt-line, which it covered about once a week. On the fifth night the lynx returned, went to the windfall, was lured straight to the bait, and the sharp-toothed steel trap closed relentlessly over its right hind foot. Kazan and Gray Wolf were traveling a quarter of a mile deeper in the forest when they heard the clanking of the steel chain as the lynx fought to free itself. Ten minutes later they stood in the door of the windfall cavern.
It was a white clear night, so filled with brilliant stars that Henri himself could have hunted by the light of them. The lynx had exhausted itself, and lay crouching on its belly as Kazan and Gray Wolf appeared. As usual, Gray Wolf held back while Kazan began the battle. In the first or second of these fights on the trap line, Kazan would probably have been disemboweled or had his jugular vein cut open, had the fierce cats been free. They were more
than his match in open fight, though the biggest of them fell ten pounds under his weight. Chance had saved him on the Sun Rock. Gray Wolf and the porcupine had both added to the defeat of the lynx on the sand bar. And along Henri’s hunting line it was the trap that was his ally. Even with his enemy thus shackled, he took big chances. And he took bigger chances than ever with the lynx under the windfall.
The cat was an old warrior, six or seven years old. His claws were an inch and a quarter long, and curved like scimitars. His forefeet and his left hind foot were free, and as Kazan advanced, he drew back, so that the trap-chain was slack under his body. Here Kazan could not follow his old tactics of circling about his trapped foe, until it had become tangled in the chain, or had so shortened and twisted it that there was no chance for a leap. He had to attack face to face, and suddenly he lunged in. They met shoulder to shoulder. Kazan’s fangs snapped at the other’s throat, and missed. Before he could strike again, the lynx flung out its free hind foot, and even Gray Wolf heard the ripping sound that it made. With a snarl Kazan was flung back, his shoulder torn to the bone.
Then it was that one of Henri’s hidden traps saved him from a second attack—and death. Steel jaws snapped over one of his forefeet, and when he leaped, the chain stopped him. Once or twice before, blind Gray Wolf had leaped in, when she knew that Kazan was in great danger. For an instant she forgot her caution now, and as she heard Kazan’s snarl of pain, she sprang in under the windfall. Five traps Henri had hidden in the space in front of the bait-house, and Gray Wolf’s feet found two of these. She fell on her side, snapping and snarling. In his struggles Kazan sprung the remaining two traps. One of them missed. The fifth, and last, caught him by a hind foot.
This was a little past midnight. From then until morning the earth and snow under the windfall were torn up by the struggles of the wolf, the dog, and the lynx to regain their freedom. And when morning came, all three were exhausted, and lay on their sides, panting and with bleeding jaws, waiting for the coming of man—and death.
The Dog Megapack Page 45
