CHAPTER XXIII
No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it is impinged upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him, sometimes, with the wind; most frequently it must come with the wind, and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swear that their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actually came; and there are many of these thousands who know from experience that their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a stranger cabin in which there is unburied dead.
Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without exactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he would never see Pierrot again; he would never hear his voice again; he would never hear again theswish-swish-swishof his snowshoes in the trail ahead, and so on the trap-line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot was gone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. He was filled with a great uneasiness; what came to him from out of the chasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense; he sensed the thrill of something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he had given the death-howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. For he believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that he would overtake her on the trap-line as he was positive yesterday that he would find her at the birch-bark tepee.
Since yesterday morning’s breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone without eating; to appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gone hungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a trap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was still alive, and he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss a trap. In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fisher-cat; out on the white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which lay the body of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot’s poison baits. Both the lynx and the fisher-cat were alive, and the steel chains of their traps clanked sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle. But Baree was uninterested. He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkened and he found no sign of the Willow.
It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm—cold and brilliant, with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The third idea came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of one idea at a time—a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed by a single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of the starlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of Pierrot’s two cabins on the trap-line. There he would find Nepeese!
We won’t call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a process of reasoning; instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed and positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss the traps in his haste to cover distance—to reach the cabin. It was twenty-five miles from Pierrot’s burned home to the first trap-cabin, and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen were the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft; frequently lie plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild pæan of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent—a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.
At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheatre in the forest where Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trap-line cabins. For at least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the air. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the log shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there; again he sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest. There was a disheartened slouch to his body as he made his way through the snow to the cabin door. He had travelled twenty-five miles, and he was tired.
The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and whined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours ago. Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour he sat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese might follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a hole deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy slumber.
With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not so alert this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which the Indians call theAkoosewin—the sign of the sick dog. And Baree was sick—not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, and he no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the far end of the trap-line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He travelled slowly and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the excitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot’s traps and deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs—once at a marten that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain. It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body through the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than to show his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.
There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot’s traps, and Baree did not go hungry. He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon, after ten hours of travelling. He met with no very great disappointment here, for he had not anticipated very much. The snow had banked this cabin even higher than the other. It lay three feet deep against the door, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost. At this place, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered by the thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for his firewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home. All the next day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap-line, skirting the edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozen traps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in which there had been many signs of lynx. It was the third day before he set out on his return to the Gray Loon.
He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering the twenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins. At the second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninth day that he reached the Gray Loon. There was no change. There were no tracks in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.
Baree’s quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sort of daily routine. For a week he made his burrow in the dog-corral, and at least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birch-bark tepee and the chasm. His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became as fixed as Pierrot’s trap-line. It cut straight through the forest to the tepee, swinging slightly to the east so that it crossed the frozen surface of the Willow’s swimming-pool. From the tepee it swung in a circle through a part of the forest where Nepeese had frequently gathered armfuls of crimson fire-flowers, and then to the chasm. Up and down the edge of the gorge it went, down into the little cup at the bottom of the chasm, and thence straight back to the dog-corral.
And then, of a sudden, Baree made a change. He spent a night in the tepee. After that, whenever he was at the Gray Loon, during the day he always slept in the tepee. The two blankets were his bed—and they were a part of Nepeese. And there, all through the long winter, he waited.
If Nepeese had returned in February and could have taken him unaware, she would have found a changed Baree. He was more than ever like a wolf; yet he never gave the wolf-howl now, and always he snarled deep in his throat when he heard the cry of the pack. For several weeks the old trap-line had supplied him with meat, but now he hunted. The tepee, in and out, was scattered with fur and bones. Once—alone—he caught a young deer in deep snow and killed it. Again, in the heart of a fierce February storm, he pursued a bull caribou so closely that it plunged over a cliff and broke its neck. He lived well, and in size and strength he was growing swiftly into a giant of his kind. In another six months he would be as large as Kazan, and his jaws were almost as powerful, even now.
Three times that winter Baree fought—once with a lynx that sprang down upon him from a windfall while he was eating a freshly killed rabbit, and twice with two lone wolves. The lynx tore him unmercifully before it fled into the windfall. The younger of the wolves he killed; the other fight was a draw. More and more he became an outcast, living alone with his dreams and his smouldering hopes.
And Baree did dream. Many times, as he lay in the tepee, he would hear the voice of Nepeese. He would hear her sweet calling, her laughter, the sound of his name, and often he would start up to his feet—the old Baree for a thrilling moment or two—only to lie down in his nest again with a low, grief-filled whine. And always when he heard the snap of a twig or some other sound in the forest, it was thought of Nepeese that flashed first into his brain. Some day she would return. That belief was a part of his existence as much as the sun and the moon and the stars.
The winter passed, and spring came, and still Baree continued to haunt his old trails, even going now and then over the old trap-line as far as the first of the two cabins. The traps were rusted and sprung now; the thawing snow disclosed bones and feathers between their jaws; under the deadfalls were remnants of fur, and out on the ice of the lakes were picked skeletons of foxes and wolves that had taken the poison-baits. The last snow went. The swollen streams sang in the forests and cañons. The grass turned green, and the first flowers came.
Surely this was the time for Nepeese to come home! He watched for her expectantly. He went still more frequently to their swimming-pool in the forest, and he hung closely to the burned cabin and the dog-corral. Twice he sprang into the pool and whined as he swam about, as though she surely must join him in their old water frolic. And now, as the spring passed and summer came, there settled upon him slowly the gloom and misery of utter hopelessness. The flowers were all out now, and even the bakneesh vines glowed like red fire in the woods. Patches of green were beginning to hide the charred heap where the cabin had stood, and the blue-flower vines that covered the princess mother’s grave were reaching out toward Pierrot’s, as if the princess mother herself were the spirit of them.
All these things were happening, and the birds had mated and nested, and still Nepeese did not come! And at last something broke inside of Baree, his last hope, perhaps, his last dream; and one day he bade good-bye to the Gray Loon.
No one can say what it cost him to go; no one can say how he fought against the things that were holding him to the tepee, the old swimming-pool, the familiar paths in the forest, and the two graves that were not so lonely now under the tall spruce. He went. He had no reason—simply went. It may be that there is a Master whose hand guides the beast as well as the man, and that we know just enough of this guidance to call it instinct. For, in dragging himself away, Baree faced the Great Adventure.
It was there, in the north, waiting for him—and into the north he went.
CHAPTER XXIV
It was early in August when Baree left the Gray Loon. He had no objective in view. But there was still left upon his mind, like the delicate impression of light and shadow on a negative, the memories of his earlier days. Things and happenings that he had almost forgotten recurred to him now, as his trail led him farther and farther away from the Gray Loon; and his earlier experiences became real again, pictures thrown out afresh in his mind by the breaking of the last ties that held him to the home of the Willow. Involuntarily he followed the trail of these impressions—of these past happenings, and slowly they helped to build up new interests for him. A year in his life was a long time—a decade of man’s experience. It was more than a year ago that he had left Kazan and Gray Wolf and the old windfall, and yet now there came back to him indistinct memories of those days of his earliest puppyhood, of the stream into which he had fallen, and of his fierce battle with Papayuchisew. It was his later experiences that roused the older memories. He came to the blind cañon up which Nepeese and Pierrot had chased him. That seemed but yesterday. He entered the little meadow, and stood beside the great rock that had almost crushed the life out of the Willow’s body; and then he remembered where Wakayoo, his big bear friend, had died under Pierrot’s rifle—and he smelled of Wakayoo’s whitened bones where they lay scattered in the green grass, with flowers growing up among them. A day and night he spent in the little meadow before he went back out of the cañon and into his old haunts along the creek, where Wakayoo had fished for him. There was another bear here now, and he also was fishing. Perhaps he was a son or a grandson of Wakayoo. Baree smelled where he had made his fish caches, and for three days he lived on fish before he struck into the North.
And now, for the first time in many weeks, a bit of the old-time eagerness put speed into Baree’s feet. Memories that had been hazy and indistinct through forgetfulness were becoming realities again, and as he would have returned to the Gray Loon had Nepeese been there so now, with something of the feeling of a wanderer going home, he returned to the old beaver-pond.
It was that most glorious hour of a summer’s day—sunset—when he reached it. He stopped a hundred yards away, with the pond still hidden from his sight, and sniffed the air, and listened. The pond was there. He caught the cool, honey smell of it. But Umisk, and Beaver-tooth, and all the others? Would he find them? He strained his ears to catch a familiar sound, and after a moment or two it came—a hollow splash in the water. He went quietly through the alders and stood at last close to the spot where he had first made the acquaintance of Umisk. The surface of the pond was undulating slightly; two or three heads popped up; he saw the torpedo-like wake of an old beaver towing a stick close to the opposite shore—he looked toward the dam, and it was as he had left it almost a year ago. He did not show himself for a time, but stood concealed in the young alders. He felt growing in him more and more a feeling of restfulness, a relaxation from the long strain of the lonely months during which he had waited for Nepeese. With a long breath he lay down among the alders, with his head just enough exposed to give him a clear view. As the sun settled lower the pond became alive. Out on the shore where he had saved Umisk from the fox came another generation of young beavers—three of them, fat and waddling. Very softly Baree whined.
All that night he lay in the alders. The beaver-pond became his home again. Conditions were changed, of course, and as days grew into weeks the inhabitants of Beaver-tooth’s colony showed no signs of accepting the grown-up Baree as they had accepted the baby Baree of long ago. Hewasbig, black, and wolfish now—a long-fanged and formidable looking creature, and though he offered no violence he was regarded by the beavers with a deep-seated feeling of fear and suspicion. On the other hand, Baree no longer felt the old puppyish desire to play with the baby beavers, so their aloofness did not trouble him as in those other days. Umisk was grown up, too, a fat and prosperous young buck who was just taking unto himself this year a wife, and who was at present very busy gathering his winter’s rations. It is entirely probable that he did not associate the big black beast he saw now and then with the little Baree with whom he had smelled noses once upon a time, and it is quite likely that Baree did not recognize Umisk except as apartof the memories that had remained with him.
All through the month of August Baree made the beaver-pond his headquarters. At times his excursions kept him away for two or three days at a time. These journeys were always into the north, sometimes a little east and sometimes a little west, but never again into the south. And at last, early in September, he left the beaver-pond for good.
For many days his wanderings carried him in no one particular direction. He followed the hunting, living chiefly on rabbits and that simple-minded species of partridge known as the “fool hen.” This diet, of course, was given variety by other things as they happened to come his way. Wild currants and raspberries were ripening, and Baree was fond of these. He also liked the bitter berries of the mountain ash, which, along with the soft balsam and spruce pitch which he licked with his tongue now and then, were good medicine for him. In shallow water he occasionally caught a fish; now and then he hazarded a cautious battle with a porcupine, and if he was successful he feasted on the tenderest and most luscious of all the flesh that made up his menu. Twice in September he killed young deer. The big “burns” that he occasionally came to no longer held terrors for him; in the midst of plenty he forgot the days in which he had gone hungry. In October he wandered as far west as the Geikie River, and then northward to Wollaston Lake, which was a good hundred miles north of the Gray Loon. The first week in November he turned south again, following the Canoe River for a distance, and then swinging westward along a twisting creek called The Little Black Bear With No Tail. More than once during these weeks Baree came into touch with man, but, with the exception of the Cree hunter at the upper end of Wollaston Lake, no man had seen him. Three times in following the Geikie he lay crouched in the brush while canoes passed; half a dozen times, in the stillness of night, he nosed about cabins and tepees in which there was life, and once he came so near to the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Wollaston that he could hear the barking of dogs and the shouting of their masters. And always he was seeking—questing for the thing that had gone out of his life. At the thresholds of the cabins he sniffed; outside of the tepees he circled close, gathering the wind; the canoes he watched with eyes in which there was a hopeful gleam. Once he thought the wind brought him the scent of Nepeese, and all at once his legs grew weak under his body and his heart seemed to stop beating. It was only for a moment or two. She came out of the tepee—an Indian girl with her hands full of willow-work—and Baree slunk away unseen.
It was almost December when Lerue, a halfbreed from Lac Bain, saw Baree’s footprints in freshly fallen snow, and a little later caught a flash of him in the bush.
“Mon Dieu, I tell you his feet are as big as my hand, and he is as black as a raven’s wing with the sun on it!” he exclaimed in the Company’s store at Lac Bain. “A fox?Non!He is half as big as a bear. A wolf—oui! And black as the devil, M’sieus.”
McTaggart was one of those who heard. He was putting his signature in ink to a letter he had written to the Company when Lerue’s words came to him. His hand stopped so suddenly that a drop of ink spattered on the letter. Through him there ran a curious shiver as he looked over at the halfbreed. Just then Marie came in. McTaggart had brought her back from her tribe. Her big, dark eyes had a sick look in them, and some of her wild beauty had gone since a year ago.
“He was gone like—that!” Lerue was saying, with a snap of his fingers. He saw Marie, and stopped.
“Black, you say?” McTaggart said carelessly, without lifting his eyes from his writing. “Did he not bear some dog mark?”
Lerue shrugged his shoulders.
“He was gone like the wind, M’sieu. But he was a wolf.”
With scarcely a sound that the others could hear Marie had whispered into the Factor’s ear, and folding his letter McTaggart rose quickly and left the store. He was gone an hour. Lerue and the others were puzzled. It was not often that Marie came into the store; it was not often that they saw her at all. She remained hidden in the Factor’s log house, and each time that he saw her Lerue thought that her face was a little thinner than the last, and her eyes bigger and hungrier looking. In his own heart there was a great yearning. Many a night he passed the little window beyond which he knew that she was sleeping; often he looked to catch a glimpse of her pale face, and he lived in the one happiness of knowing that Marie understood, and that into her eyes there came for an instant a different light when their glances met. No one else knew. The secret lay between them—and patiently Lerue waited and watched. “Someday,” he kept saying to himself—“Someday”—and that was all. The one word carried a world of meaning and of hope. When that day came he would take Marie straight to the Missioner over at Fort Churchill, and they would be married. It was a dream—a dream that made the long days and the longer nights on the trap-line patiently endured. Now they were both slaves to the environing Power. But—someday——
Lerue was thinking of this when McTaggart returned at the end of the hour. The Factor came straight up to where the half dozen of them were seated about the big box stove, and with a grunt of satisfaction shook the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders.
“Pierre Eustach has accepted the Government’s offer, and is going to guide that map-making party up into the Barrens this winter,” he announced. “You know, Lerue—he has a hundred and fifty traps and deadfalls set, and a big poison-bait country. A good line, eh? And I have leased it of him for the season. It will give me the outdoor work I need—three days on the trail, three days here. Eh, what do you say to the bargain?”
“It is good,” said Lerue.
“Yes, it is good,” said Roget.
“A wide fox country,” said Mons Roule.
“And easy to travel,” murmured Valence in a voice that was almost like a woman’s.
CHAPTER XXV
The trap-line of Pierre Eustach ran thirty miles straight west of Lac Bain. It was not as long a line as Pierrot’s had been, but it was like a main artery running through the heart of a rich fur country. It had belonged to Pierre Eustach’s father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and beyond that it reached, Pierre averred, back to the very pulse of the finest blood in France. The books at McTaggart’s post went back only as far as the great-grandfather end of it, the older evidence of ownership being at Churchill. It was the finest game country between Reindeer Lake and the Barren Lands. It was in December that Baree came to it.
Again he was travelling southward in a slow and wandering fashion, seeking food in the deep snows. TheKistisew Kestin, or Great Storm, had come earlier than usual this winter, and for a week after it scarcely a hoof or claw was moving. Baree, unlike the other creatures, did not bury himself in the snow and wait for the skies to clear and crust to form. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute’s, heavy and yet muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of theWuttooi, or blood-film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His jaws were like Kazan’s, perhaps even more powerful. Through all that week of the Big Storm he travelled without food. There were four days of snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and after that three days of intense cold in which every living creature kept to their warm dugouts in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed themselves in. One might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose and not have guessed it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of the storm but did not allow the snow to gather over him.
Every trapper from Hudson’s Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking food, and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the biggest chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over their trap-lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on the eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over Pierre Eustach’s line, which was now his own for the season. It took him two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the fallen “trap-houses,” and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was back at Lac Bain.
It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of McTaggart’s line. McTaggart’s trail was fresh in the snow about the cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate itself with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute there rumbled in Baree’s chest a deep and sullen growl. For many minutes after that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the cabin. Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer, until at last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of life came from inside, but he could smell theoldsmell of McTaggart. Then he faced the wilderness—the direction in which the trap-line ran back to Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles twitched. He whined. Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind—the fight in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm’s edge—even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great yearning, almost expectation. Then it died slowly away. After all, the scent in the snow was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill, and not of anything that he had loved. For an instant nature had impressed on him the significance of associations—a brief space only, and then it was gone. The whine died away, but in its place came again that ominous growl.
Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin struck the first trap on the line. Hunger had caved in his sides until he was like a starved wolf. In the first trap-house McTaggart had placed as bait the hind-quarter of a snowshoe rabbit. Baree reached in cautiously. He had learned many things on Pierrot’s line: he had learned what the snap of a trap meant; he had felt the cruel pain of steel jaws; he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would do when the trigger was sprung—and Nepeese herself had taught him that he was never to touch a poison-bait. So he closed his teeth gently in the rabbit flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself could have done. He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five baits without springing a pan. The sixth was a deadfall. He circled about this until he had beaten a path in the snow. Then he went on into a warm balsam swamp and found himself a bed for the night.
The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow between the wits of man and beast. To Baree the encroachment of Bush McTaggart’s trap-line was not war; it was existence. It was to furnish him food, as Pierrot’s line had furnished him food for many weeks. But he sensed the fact that in this instance he was law-breaker and had an enemy to outwit. Had it been good hunting weather he might have gone on, for the unseen hand that was guiding his wanderings was drawing him slowly but surely back to the old beaver pond and the Gray Loon. As it was, with the snow deep and soft under him—so deep that in places he plunged into it over his ears—McTaggart’s trap-line was like a trail of manna made for his special use. He followed in the factor’s snowshoe tracks, and in the third trap killed a rabbit. When he had finished with it nothing but the hair and crimson patches of blood lay upon the snow. Starved for many days, he was filled with a wolfish hunger, and before the day was over he robbed the bait from a full dozen of McTaggart’s traps. Three times he struck poison-baits—venison or caribou fat in the heart of which was a dose of strychnine, and each time his keen nostrils detected the danger. Pierrot had more than once noted the amazing fact that Baree could sense the presence of poison even when it was most skillfully injected into the frozen carcass of a deer. Foxes and wolves ate of flesh from which his super-sensitive power of detecting the presence of deadly danger turned him away. So he passed Bush McTaggart’s poisoned tidbits, sniffing them on the way, and leaving the story of his suspicion in the manner of his footprints in the snow. Where McTaggart had halted at midday to cook his dinner Baree made these same cautious circles with his feet.
The second day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive. McTaggart was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands from the traps and “houses,” and every now and then the smell of him was strong in Baree’s nose. This wrought in Baree a swift and definite antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred where a few days before hatred was almost forgotten. There is, perhaps, in the animal mind a process of simple computation which does not quite achieve the distinction of reason, and which is not altogether instinct, but which produces results that might be ascribed to either. Baree did not add two and two together to make four; he did not go back step by step to prove to himself that the man to whom this trap-line belonged was the cause of all his griefs and troubles—but hedidfind himself possessed of a deep and yearning hatred. McTaggart was the one creature except the wolves that he had ever hated; it was McTaggart who had hurt him, McTaggart who had hurt Pierrot, McTaggart who had made him lose his beloved Nepeese—and McTaggart was here on this trap-line! If he had been wandering before, without object or destiny, he was given a mission now. It was to keep to the traps. To feed himself. And to vent his hatred and his vengeance as he lived.
The second day, in the centre of a lake, he came upon the body of a wolf that had died of one of the poison-baits. For a half-hour he mauled the dead beast until its skin was torn into ribbons. He did not taste the flesh. It was repugnant to him. It was his vengeance on the wolf breed. He stopped when he was half a dozen miles from Lac Bain, and turned back. At this particular point the line crossed a frozen stream beyond which was an open plain, and over that plain came—when the wind was right—the smoke and smell of the Post. The second night Baree lay with a full stomach in a thicket of banksian pine; the third day he was travelling westward over the trap-line again.
Early on this morning Bush McTaggart started out to gather his catch, and where he crossed the stream six miles from Lac Bain he first saw Baree’s tracks. He stopped to examine them with sudden and unusual interest, falling at last on his knees, whipping off the glove from his right hand, and picking up a single hair.
“The black wolf!”
He uttered the words in an odd, hard voice, and involuntarily his eyes turned straight in the direction of the Gray Loon. After that, even more carefully than before, he examined one of the clearly impressed tracks in the snow. When he rose to his feet there was in his face the look of one who had made an unpleasant discovery.
“A black wolf!” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders. “Bah! Lerue is a fool. It is a dog.” And then, after a moment, he muttered in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “her dog.”
He went on, travelling in the trail of the dog. A new excitement possessed him that was more thrilling than the excitement of the hunt. Being human, it was his privilege to add two and two together, and out of two and two he made—Baree. There was little doubt in his mind. The thought had flashed on him first when Lerue had mentioned the black wolf. He was convinced after his examination of the tracks. They were the tracks of a dog, and the dog was black. Then he came to the first trap that had been robbed of its bait.
Under his breath he cursed. The bait was gone, and the trap was unsprung. The sharpened stick that had transfixed the bait was pulled out clean.
All that day Bush McTaggart followed a trail where Baree had left traces of his presence. Trap after trap he found robbed. On the lake he came upon the mangled wolf. From the first disturbing excitement of his discovery of Baree’s presence his humour changed slowly to one of rage, and his rage increased as the day dragged out. He was not unacquainted with four-footed robbers of the trap-line, but usually a wolf or a fox or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps. But in this case Baree was travelling straight from trap to trap, and his footprints in the snow showed that he stopped at each. There was, to McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work. He evaded the poisons. Not once did he stretch his head or paw within the danger zone of a deadfall. For apparently no reason whatever he had destroyed a splendid mink, whose glossy fur lay scattered in worthless bits over the snow. Toward the end of the day McTaggart came to a deadfall in which a lynx had died. Baree had torn the silvery flank of the animal until the skin was of less than half value. McTaggart cursed aloud, and his breath came hot.
At dusk he reached the shack Pierre Eustach had built midway of his line, and took inventory of his fur. It was not more than a third of a catch; the lynx was half ruined, a mink was torn completely in two. The second day he found still greater ruin, still more barren traps. He was like a madman. When he arrived at the second cabin, late in the afternoon, Baree’s tracks were not an hour old in the snow. Three times during the night he heard the dog howling.
The third day McTaggart did not return to Lac Bain, but began a cautious hunt for Baree. An inch or two of fresh snow had fallen, and as if to take even greater measure of vengeance from his man-enemy Baree had left his footprints freely within a radius of a hundred yards of the cabin. It was half an hour before McTaggart could pick out the straight trail, and he followed this for two hours into a thick banksian swamp. Baree kept with the wind. Now and then he caught the scent of his pursuer; a dozen times he waited until the other was so close he could hear the snap of brush, or the metallic click of twigs against his rifle barrel. And then, with a sudden inspiration that brought the curses afresh to McTaggart’s lips, he swung in a wide circle and cut straight back for the trap-line. When the Factor reached the line, along toward noon, Baree had already begun his work. He had killed and eaten a rabbit; he had robbed three traps in the distance of a mile, and he was headed again straight over the trap-line for Post Lac Bain.
It was the fifth day that Bush McTaggart returned to his post. He was in an ugly mood. Only Valence of the four Frenchmen was there, and it was Valence who heard his story, and afterward heard him cursing Marie. She came into the store a little later, big-eyed and frightened, one of her cheeks flaming red where McTaggart had struck her. While the storekeeper was getting her the canned salmon McTaggart wanted for his dinner Valence found the opportunity to whisper softly in her ear:
“M’sieu Lerue has trapped a silver fox,” he said with low triumph. “He loves you,Mon ami, and he will have a splendid catch by spring—and sends you this message from his cabin up on The Little Black Bear With No Tail:Be ready to fly when the soft snows come!”
Marie did not look at him, but she heard, and her eyes shone so like stars when the young storekeeper gave her the salmon that he said to Valence, when she had gone:
“Blue Death, but she is still beautiful at times. Valence!”
To which Valence nodded with an odd smile.
CHAPTER XXVI
By the middle of January the war between Baree and Bush McTaggart had become more than an incident—more than a passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elementalraison d’etreof their lives. Baree hung to the trap-line. He haunted it like a devastating spectre, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the Factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted McTaggart; he continued to strip his traps of their bait; the humour grew in him more strongly to destroy the fur he came across; his greatest pleasure came to be—not in eating—but in destroying. The fires of his hatred burned fiercer as the weeks passed, until at last he would snap and tear with his long fangs at the snow where McTaggart’s feet had passed. And all of the time, away back of his madness, there was a vision of Nepeese that continued to grow more and more clearly in his brain. That first Great Loneliness—the loneliness of the long days and longer nights of his waiting and seeking on the Gray Loon, oppressed him again as it had oppressed him in the early days of her loss. On starry or moonlit nights he sent forth his wailing cries for her again, and Bush McTaggart, listening to them in the middle of the night, felt strange shivers run up his spine.
The man’s hatred was different than the beast’s, but perhaps even more implacable. With McTaggart it was not hatred alone. There was mixed with it an indefinable and superstitious fear, a thing he laughed at, a thing he cursed at, but which clung to him as surely as the scent of his trail clung to Baree’s nose. Baree no longer stood for the animal alone;he stood for Nepeese. That was the thought that insisted in growing in McTaggart’s ugly mind. Never a day passed now that he did not think of the Willow; never a night came and went without a visioning of her face. He even fancied, on a certain night of storm, that he heard her voice out in the wailing of the wind—and less than a minute later he heard faintly a distant howl out in the forest. That night his heart was filled with a leaden dread. He shook himself. He smoked his pipe until the cabin was blue. He cursed Baree, and the storm—but there was no longer in him the bullying courage of old. He had not ceased to hate Baree; he still hated him as he had never hated a man, but he had an even greater reason now for wanting to kill him. It came to him first in his sleep, in a restless dream, and after that it lived, and lived—the thought that the spirit of Nepeese was guiding Baree in the ravaging of his trap-line!
After a time he ceased to talk at the Post about the Black Wolf that was robbing his line. The furs damaged by Baree’s teeth he kept out of sight, and to himself he kept his secret. He learned every trick and scheme of the hunters who killed foxes and wolves along the Barrens. He tried three different poisons, one so powerful that a single drop of it meant death; he tried strychnine in gelatin capsules, in deer fat, caribou fat, moose liver, and even in the flesh of porcupine. At last, in preparing his poisons, he dipped his hands in beaver oil before he handled the venoms and flesh so that there could be no human smell. Foxes, wolves, and even the mink and ermine died of these baits, but Baree came always so near—and no nearer. In January McTaggart poisoned every bait in his trap-houses. This produced at least one good result for him. From that day Baree no longer touched his baits, but ate only the rabbits he killed in the traps.
It was in January that McTaggart caught his first glimpse of Baree. He had placed his rifle against a tree, and was a dozen feet away from it at the time. It was as if Baree knew, and had come to taunt him; for when the Factor suddenly looked up Baree was standing out clear from the dwarf spruce not twenty yards away from him, his white fangs gleaming and his eyes burning like coals. For a space McTaggart stared as if turned into stone. It was Baree. He recognized the white star, the white-tipped ear, and his heart thumped like a hammer in his breast. Very slowly he began to creep toward his rifle. His hand was reaching for it when like a flash Baree was gone.
This gave McTaggart his new idea. He blazed himself a fresh trail through the forests parallel with his trap-line but at least five hundred yards distant from it. Wherever a trap or deadfall was set this new trail struck sharply in, like the point of a V, so that he could approach his line unobserved. By this strategy he believed that in time he was sure of getting a shot at the dog. Again it was the man who was reasoning, and again it was the man who was defeated. The first day that McTaggart followed his new trail Baree also struck that trail. For a little while it puzzled him. Three times he cut back and forth between the old and the new trail. Then there was no doubt. The new trail was thefreshtrail, and he followed in the footsteps of the Factor from Lac Bain. McTaggart did not know what was happening until his return trip, when he saw the story told in the snow. Baree had visited each trap, and without exception he had approached each time at the point of the inverted V. After a week of futile hunting, of lying in wait, of approaching at every point of the wind—a period during which McTaggart had twenty times cursed himself into fits of madness, another idea came to him. It was like an inspiration, and so simple that it seemed almost inconceivable that he had not thought of it before.
He hurried back to Post Lac Bain.
The second day after he was on the trail at dawn. This time he carried a pack in which there were a dozen strong wolf traps freshly dipped in beaver oil, and a rabbit which he had snared the previous night. Now and then he looked anxiously at the sky. It was clear until late in the afternoon, when banks of dark clouds began rolling up from the east. Half an hour later a few flakes of snow began falling. McTaggart let one of these drop on the back of his mittened hand, and examined it closely. It was soft and downy, and he gave vent to his satisfaction. It was what he wanted. Before morning there would be six inches of freshly fallen snow covering the trails.
He stopped at the next trap-house and quickly set to work. First he threw away the poisoned bait in the “house” and replaced it with the rabbit. Then he began setting his wolf traps. Three of these he placed close to the “door” of the house, through which Baree would have to reach for the bait. The remaining nine he scattered at intervals of a foot or sixteen inches apart, so that when he was done a veritable cordon of traps guarded the house. He did not fasten the chains, but let them lay loose in the snow. If Baree got into one trap he would get into others and there would be no use of toggles. His work done, McTaggart hurried on through the thickening twilight of winter night to his shack. He was highly elated. This time there could be no such thing as failure. He had sprung every trap on his way from Lac Bain. In none of those traps would Baree find anything to eat until he came to the “nest” of twelve wolf traps.
Seven inches of snow fell that night, and the whole world seemed turned into a wonderful white robe. Like billows of feathers the snow hung to the trees and shrubs; it gave tall white caps to the rocks, and underfoot it was so light that a cartridge dropped from the hand sank to the bottom of it. Baree was on the trap-line early. He was more cautious this morning, for there was no longer the scent or snowshoe track of McTaggart to guide him. He struck the first trap about halfway between Lac Bain and the shack in which the Factor was waiting. It was sprung, and there was no bait. Trap after trap he visited, and all of them he found sprung, and all without bait. He sniffed the air suspiciously, striving vainly to catch the tang of smoke, a whiff of the man-smell. Along toward noon he came to the “nest”—the twelve treacherous traps waiting for him with gaping jaws half a foot under the blanket of snow. For a full minute he stood well outside the danger line, sniffing the air, and listening. He saw the rabbit, and his jaws closed with a hungry click. He moved a step nearer. Still he was suspicious—for some strange and inexplicable reason he sensed danger. Anxiously he sought for it with his nose, his eyes, and his ears. And all about him there was a great silence and a great peace. His jaws clicked again. He whined softly. What was it stirring him? Where was the danger he could neither see nor smell? Slowly he circled about the trap-house; three times he circled round it, each circle drawing him a little nearer—until at last his feet almost touched the outer cordon of traps. Another minute he stood still; his ears flattened; in spite of the rich aroma of the rabbit in his nostrilssomething was drawing him away. In another moment he would have gone, but there came suddenly—and from directly behind the trap-house—a fierce little rat-like squeak, and the next instant Baree saw an ermine whiter than the snow tearing hungrily at the flesh of the rabbit. He forgot his strange premonition of danger. He growled fiercely, but his plucky little rival did not budge from his feast.
And then he sprang straight into the “nest” that Bush McTaggart had made for him.