CHAPTER XXVMAN AND BEAST IN THE FAR NORTH—TRAPS THAT ARE SEEN THROUGH—A NEW DISCOVERY—CUNNING OF ARCTIC FOXES—THE TRAPPER AND THE WOLVERINE.
MAN AND BEAST IN THE FAR NORTH—TRAPS THAT ARE SEEN THROUGH—A NEW DISCOVERY—CUNNING OF ARCTIC FOXES—THE TRAPPER AND THE WOLVERINE.
The various ruses mentioned in the preceding chapter were all of an offensive character, employed, that is to say, by one animal in order to entrap and prey upon another. But as much cunning may be shown by a creature in avoiding death as in inflicting it, or in securing its food. The two kinds, indeed, are often combined, as was seen in the last case mentioned, where, but for its ingenious method of attack, the dog must soon have been impaled on the horns of the sable antelope, an animal in comparison with whose size and strength its own are quite insignificant.
The same remark applies to those crowning instances of animal strategy in which the endeavour—constantly successful—is to avoid the artifices of man himself, since the successful springing of the trap is followed by a triumphant meal upon the bait with which it is set. There is nothing, in its way, more interesting than that keen, hard, close competition between the brain of man and beast that is going on day by day and year by year in the fur-bearing regions of the North, especially overthe snowy wastes of the Hudson Bay territories in the far north of North America. The cunning shown by the arctic foxes, especially in avoiding the various kinds of snares laid by the trappers for their destruction, is truly wonderful, and we should be justified in disbelieving many of the facts narrated were they not well authenticated and, indeed, notorious in those parts.
It is, for instance, quite a common “dodge” for a trapper to set his spring-jaw traps upside-down, and the reason for his doing so is that the foxes, having discovered the principle of the mechanism, are accustomed to scratch away the earth from under the trap, and then, putting their paw up—through the jaws, indeed, but from the outside, so that it cannot be enclosed between them, as they fly up—to press upon the pan and start the trap. When the trap is set upside-down, therefore, the fox is taken by surprise, and for a short time the trapper may have success. But very quickly the new experience is gained, and the traps are now started from above instead of from below. Another change may be resorted to, but this is not likely to be successful unless some time has gone by, and, of course, the natural result of continued variation in the way of setting the traps, is to make the foxes more and more observant of the way in which they lie. They become, therefore, more and more difficult to catch, and the trapper’s best plan is to keep moving from one part of the country to another, in the hope of getting a few skins in each. The reason why the foxes learn so quickly by experience is that they are not solitary-living animals, but go about either in pairs or small companies.When, therefore, one is caught, its mate or its fellows are witness of its misfortune, and have the dreadful incident stamped upon their memory, not only by reason of the fear which it inspires on their own account, but also through the sorrow and sympathy which the sight of a suffering and often, perhaps, a tenderly loved companion arouses in them.
Another way of trapping, or of trying to trap, the foxes is by setting a loaded gun, with a string tied, at one end, to the trigger, and, at the other, to a piece of meat. The meat lies some thirty yards from the muzzle of the gun, with which, of course, it is in a straight line, and the string, for the whole distance, is buried under the snow, the gun being also concealed, either in the same or some other way. All that appears is the piece of meat, which lies, by itself, on the snow, as if it had nothing to do with anything. When the fox seizes it, however, he pulls the string, which in its turn pulls the trigger, and the gun, going off, shoots him dead[16]—a very humane sort of trap indeed. But it is just the same as with the other kinds. After a very few foxes, or, sometimes, after only a single one has been shot, no more are to be got in this way. The first poor victim lies upon the bloodstained snow, but over him bends his affectionate consort, whining and wretched, yet not so given up to grief but that the intellectual faculties are rather sharpened thanobscured by the bitterness of the loss. The fatal cord attached to the meat, which, in despite of tears, she has perhaps managed to swallow down, lies now exposed. She follows it up, sniffing it and sometimes touching it with her paw, and soon arrives at the evil-looking object, which she knows has, for the time, exhausted its death-dealing power. A careful examination imprints it on her memory, and through life, now, in particular, she carries a picture in her mind of that string attached to the trigger. It was the pull that did it. With that there came a sudden flame, and the roar of death was in her ears. Three feet, at least, she leaped into the air—higher, possibly, if perchance a pellet or two struck her—and then raced away over the snow that was her husband’s winding-sheet. She returned to find him dead, and there, from his very jaws, from the protruded tongue that would never be passed over her in kindness and affection again, lay that thin dark line upon the snow, that connected him visibly with death. Never, in all her earthly pilgrimage, hereafter, will she forget that lumps of meat, though seeming to lie loose upon the ground, may yet make part of a trap, full twenty-five or thirty yards away, and that to touch them, whilst they do make part of it, means swift and certain death. But they may be disconnected. That thin and subtle ligament from which the whole danger proceeds is easy to sever; but how to sever it without setting in motion the thing to which it is attached—that little, insignificant-looking thing, which, as it is the part that the string touches, must be the key to set in motion the whole infernal machine? Smaller even than the panof the well-known toothed trap, which, by being pressed on, causes the jaws to fly up, it must act on the same diabolical principle. Something is set loose by it—something that flies out to where the meat is, and kills the fox that is eating it. Something—but what? No matter; whatever it is, it is death. It comes and it kills, and it can only come from that long, ominous-looking tube, which is hollow at one end, and only one. Just from that end it was—quite a long way in front of the trigger—that the flame of fire flashed out. To be in front of that, then, and to pull the string, is death; but once behind it, the string may be pulled with impunity. Still, there is the trigger. To be behind that must be safer still, and if the string can be gnawed so as not to pull the trigger at all, that will be the safest of all. As for the string, there is no danger init. It is to start the trap merely. It is not the trap itself.Thatis obvious. Even a cub might see that. The whole thing lies in the trigger. If you pull that, you let off the trap: but if you can gnaw through the string without pulling it, you can take the meat without the trap going off, or if you can let the trap off without its hurting you, you can take the meat afterwards.
It may be thought that not even foxes, though they are known to be cunning, could reason in this way; but if facts are to be taken as evidence, they must reason still more strongly. Not only do they draw the conclusion that to be behind the muzzle of the gun is to be in safety, but they even adopt a plan by which they are able, with almost equal safety, to go up to the meat and let the gunoff, by taking it in their mouth. In the latter case, of course, the string need not be cut at all—except, indeed, afterwards, to eat the meat—but when it has to be, it is always that part of it which is near the trigger, that the fox gnaws through. This shows plainly that the danger must be connected in the animal’s mind not only with the string and trigger, but with the muzzle of the gun; but though it must, therefore, know that, being where it is the gun might be fired with impunity, the fox, having decided to sever the string before seizing the bait, does not do this, but leaves the trigger still on the cock. Now, as it must be as easy to gnaw through the string without discharging the gun, at one part as at another, it must be as a precaution against a possible accident that the fox does so at a point where, if it did go off, it could not hurt him: since it assures itself doubly, it cannot be said that it has not room for more than one idea in its head, at the same time.[17]
But now comes the second plan—not quite so perfect as the other, as the fox may get a pellet or two in its skin, but, perhaps, involving even a greater degree of intelligence. Instead of going to the gun, the fox, in this case, digs a trench in the snow up to the meat, which it then seizes and pulls into the trench, where it lies flat. The gun goes off, but the fox is not hurt, for—and this is themost wonderful part of it—it has drawn the trench at right angles to the muzzle of the gun—to the line of fire, that is to say—so that the shot, instead of raking the channel, as it would do if it were in a straight line with the gun and string, only strikes the edge of the cutting, and goes flying over it. If men were besieging a hostile town, and wished to approach it under cover of a trench, so as to avoid, as much as possible, the bullets from the walls, this is just how they would manage it. They would not, any more than the foxes, draw it all in one line with the line of fire, for then the bullets would fly down, instead of over it, and every man in it would be killed. The brain of the fox, therefore, as far as this particular thing is concerned, is equal to that of man, and as the trench is always drawn in the same way, we may be sure that mere chance has nothing to do with it. The reason why the fox is able to draw the meat into the trench before the gun goes off, is that the cord which connects the bait with the trigger is always a little longer than the distance between the two, for if it were not, as it is liable to shrink during changes of the atmosphere, when the weather changes from dry to moist, the gun would sometimes go off of itself. As a rule, therefore, the meat can be moved five or six inches, without anything happening, and this just allows the fox to pull it down into the ditch, where he lies with it, out of harm’s way. So here are two quite different ways—each as cunning as can well be imagined—by which the fox gets the better of the trapper, and though the human element enters into such episodes as these, they still make part of the romance ofanimal life, seeing that the life of an animal whose skin is in demand is one long pitched battle with man.
But cunning as are these arctic foxes, there is one animal which seems to outdo even them in its instinct, as one may almost call it, for avoiding all danger, and especially snares, traps, or pitfalls of any and every description. This is the celebrated glutton or wolverine, an animal which, as it is not only never to be taken itself, but enjoys nothing so much as destroying all traps that it finds set for other animals, is the very despair of the trapper. It belongs to the weasel family, but in form and general appearance is more like a bear than one of these animals, being stout in the body, with long large limbs and shaggy fur, whilst it walks on the soles of its feet, which is an ursine mode of progression. Its tail, however, is a conspicuous feature, being thick and bushy, though short. In size it surpasses every other member of the family to which it belongs, so that it is able to make so large and strong an animal as the beaver its prey. It is even said that it will occasionally attack and overpower some of the larger species of deer, dropping upon them from out of the branches of trees, and then tearing at their throats. Whether this is true, however, I do not know, nor, for our present purposes, does it much matter, for it is only from the standpoint of its cunning, or, perhaps one should rather say, of its intellectual competition with man, that I am going to discuss the wolverine here.
It is not that the trapper has any wish to catch him—not for his fur, at least, which is worth little or nothing. The wolverine is not wanted, and would be let alone if hewould let other people alone, but this he will not do. Nothing pleases him better than to come across a trapper engaged in his occupation, for then he knows that for some time to come he can have meat without the trouble of killing it. Where he lives—in the great pine forests of North America—the marten lives, too, and the fur of the marten is very valuable indeed. The trapper goes through the woods setting a long line of traps, and when once the wolverine has come upon this line, he follows it day by day, and never leaves off doing so till he has destroyed every trap, eaten the bait, and sometimes the marten that he finds inside it. These traps are not the steel ones that are set for the foxes, nor are they the spring guns either. The marten’s skin is so valuable and, at the same time, so small, that the trapper does not want it to be injured anywhere. The skin of a fox that has been shot in the head or caught by one of the legs, is almost as valuable as if it had not been damaged at all, but it is not the same with the marten. His skin is wanted intact—without a flaw upon any part of it. The trapper, therefore, makes a curious trap of branches—or “poles,” as he calls them—which are set in the ground, so as to make a sort of little chamber or wigwam, which has only one way into it, and across that way a noose, or something, is arranged—I am not quite sure what; they never tell one in the books—so as to kill the marten, but without injuring his skin, as he gets inside.
The wolverine comes to one of these little wigwams, and knows exactly what it means. There is something inside to be got, and a door to walk in by. That somethinghe means to have, but he is not going in by the door. He knows what would happen if he did. That is one of man’s horrible treacheries—pretending to be kind and nice to animals, but meaning to destroy them all the while. It is a trap, and the way to get the better of a trap is never to do what it asks you to do, or, at least, not in the way that it asks you to do it. So, being asked to go in by the door, the wolverine pulls out some of the poles at the other end, and goes in that way, taking the bait from behind. Having done this, he generally proceeds to show his contempt of the whole thing, and especially, perhaps, of the man who thought he could take him in, by destroying the trapin toto, scattering the poles all about, and then going off to do the same with the next. In this way the whole line of traps are treated one after another, and if a marten has been caught in any of them, the wolverine eats as much as he wants and hides the rest—for he is very fond of taking things away and hiding them. One may imagine the rage of the trapper when he comes back to look at his traps. Either he must get rid of the wolverine in some way, or leave that part of the country altogether. To lie in wait with a gun, himself, would be a tedious business, and the chances are that the wolverine would either smell him or find out his whereabouts in some other way, and so take care not to come near. He determines to trap him, or at least to try to. Half a dozen traps of different sorts—acting upon different principles of destruction—he makes himself, with all the skill and ingenuity that his own cunning, sharpened by a lifelong experience, can suggest,and he sets several steel ones as well. Every three or four days he comes to look at them, but always, if the wolverine has been there at all, he finds one of two things. Either the baits have been taken and the traps pulled to pieces, or else both trap and bait have been left severely alone. In this latter case the cunning animal has feared to touch them. There are his tracks all about, and in some places the marks of his body, where he has lain down and gazed intently at the things he was trying to understand. But he was not quite satisfied, had not entirely grasped the principle, not penetrated as deeply into the matter as, under the circumstances, he would like to do. Therefore he would not touch it. Until he saw clearly just what the idea was, the trapper must really excuse him: he would much rather leave it alone. As soon as he had discovered it, he might be relied upon—the bait was most attractive—but until then he preferred to go on with the marten-traps. They were quite simple: no difficulty at all about them. For, of course, all the while, the trapper, who cannot afford to lose time, and hopes every day to catch the wolverine, keeps setting his marten-traps as before.
At last he gives up what he has been trying, and determines to set a spring-gun—not in such a way as he might hope that an ordinary animal would get shot by it, but more cunningly than he has ever done it before. So not only does he lay the gun amidst bushes, so that it is quite concealed by them, but blockades the way to it, as it were, with a small pine-tree, so that it is neither to be seen nor got at. The bait—a nice juicy piece of meat—liestemptingly just on the top of a bank that rises from a little lake where the wolverine goes sometimes—when the trapper is not there—to drink. As he turns to walk up the bank, he is sure to see it, and likely this time—as the trapper would fain hope—to take it, too. So he arranges everything, obliterates his footmarks by trailing a bush over them, as he goes away, and comes again, a day or two afterwards. There lies the bait, just as it was, and close beside it are the tracks of the wolverine, where he has stood and looked at it. It was a sore temptation, doubtless, so near his nose, but he has resisted it, and gone away to get a meal that is safe, though hard earned.
A Mischievous Beast.A wolverine, finding a backwoodsman’s house empty, will clear it of everything movable down to the gridiron.
A Mischievous Beast.A wolverine, finding a backwoodsman’s house empty, will clear it of everything movable down to the gridiron.
A Mischievous Beast.
A wolverine, finding a backwoodsman’s house empty, will clear it of everything movable down to the gridiron.
Still the memory of such a lump of meat as that will be sure to linger, so next day the trapper comes again, hoping that the wolverine will have been there before him. And so he has been, but he has gone, again, with the bait, having first drawn the pine-tree out of the way, and then cut the string—which, if pulled, would have fired off the gun—only just behind the muzzle. His tracks lead down to the shores of the lake, at a part where it stretches out widely, so as to give a good view all round. There he has eaten the meat, and there the trapper finds his string, which he can use again if he likes. He does use it again two or three times, first tying it where it has been bitten through, and then arranging things in the same way. But each time it all happens over again, just as before, except that now the wolverine is careful to gnaw the string a little behind the knot, where it has, each time, been tied, as if it had thought that it might be as dangerous to be in front of this as in front ofthe muzzle of the gun. So the trapper, at last, thinking that there must be a human spirit in the body of the wolverine—and a very cunning and malicious one, too—gives it up, and goes into another part of the country, so far away that he is not likely to be followed.
It is not only traps that the wolverine is fatal to. If he finds the house of a backwoodsman empty, he will get into it through a hole which he makes in the wall—never through the door, even if this should be open—and then takes away whatever there may be inside. It does not matter what the things are. Guns, kettles, knives, axes, blankets, boxes, or cans of tinned meat, it is all the same to the wolverine, he carries them all off or pushes them along with his paws, to hide them in different places—for he is like the magpie or the bizcacha in this; whatever he sees seems to have an attraction for him. Thus it has sometimes happened that a hunter and his family, having been so imprudent as to leave their “lodge” unguarded for a day or two—or perhaps having to go and there being no one to leave there—have come back and found it quite empty, only the bare walls with nothing inside them. The misfortune, however, is not so great as it seems, for the tracks of the wolverine, or sometimes the pair of them, can be followed up, and, little by little, everything is found hidden about in the bushes. It is not often, however, that the animal itself is discovered.
Indeed the wolverine’s presence is much more often felt than seen. One ill deed after another comes to light, and is surely traced to his door, but their author remains, for long periods, invisible. With a cunning that seems human,he devises, plans, and executes, and with equal astuteness he chooses his time. When he does happen to meet a man, how does he act? He sits up on his haunches, like a dog begging, and holding one of his big, flat fore paws just above his eyes, so as to shade them from the light, looks long and earnestly at the intruder—for as such he considers him. This he will do, sometimes, three or four times, before deciding that he had better go, unless, indeed, he sees any special reason for alarm, in which case he quickly disappears. There is no other known animal, as far as I am aware, that has this odd human-like habit. No wonder the American backwoodsman, besides looking upon the wolverine (or carcajou as he calls him) as a very malignant animal, thinks him a little uncanny as well.