Part 14
Holding across the wild country, therefore, within the hour I had picked up the forward trail of my cub-wolf. As I expected, he had followed a direct course till his trail joined that of the pack, some four or five miles from my camp. Here I made two heartening discoveries: the first, that the wolves had fed and were now roaming with slow feet and heavy stomachs; the second, that they had been joined by a huge wolf that was not with them when they crossed my snowshoe trail. “The loup-garou, and a monster!” I thought exultingly as I measured his tracks, the largest I have ever found. Folding my fingers flat at the second joint, I could drop my gloved hand into the print of his forefoot; where snow was soft he sank deep as a buck at every step. Best of all, he had fed, he was logy, he must soon grow sleepy; and, O day of good luck! I had yet six hours of sunlight. Before dark I would run into that pack, and then-- The revolver butt snuggled into my hand to say that we would then know whether the loup-garou had any medicine to compare with a long-barreled, target-sighted, velvet-triggered forty-four.
There was no call to hurry; the longer the wolves slept, the more secure they would feel; so to satisfy my curiosity, and prove or disprove my notion of wolf habits, I decided to follow my cub awhile more. Instead of running with the pack, he had taken their back trail; which told me that he expected to find food.
On the ice of a little pond I found a buck stretched out. The trail said that the wolves jumped him on the ridge above, caught him after a short run, ate what they wanted, and left the rest to the foxes. Here was abundance of good meat, enough to satisfy this pack for a week or two; yet to-night or to-morrow night, preferring warm flesh to cold, they would chivvy another deer. My gorge rose at the thought; for though a hungry beast must live, one must take sides with wolf or deer in the wilderness, as he must choose between cats and birds in his home orchard. If any excuse were needed for the joy of hunting, it seemed a desirable thing, like poetic justice, to lay this buck and the wolf that killed him side by side when the day was done.
From the pond I swung away rapidly after the pack, expecting to be near enough for a stalk within an hour or two; but had a man been hunting merely for heads or skins, the trail would have spelled hope, vexation and heartbreak in quick succession. For a time the wolves roamed lazily, but not aimlessly. They had in mind a day bed near the scene of the next hunting (wolves do not harry the same ground two nights in succession), and though they were constantly making detours, following an easy runway between hills or seeking a safe crossing of swift water, they held a westward direction as true as a compass. I was glad of that course, because it might bring me near a chain of lakes where I had a snowshoe trail, one that I could follow homeward after dark if need be. To the south also the lay of the land was familiar; but northward stretched a wild country which I had never entered.
The trail of a wolf pack is never a dull trail, and at first I gave myself up to full enjoyment of it, here puzzling over a record that I could not understand, there finding another so typical that at times I seemed to be trailing a band of roving dogs. Wolves do not blunder through a region; they are alive and inquisitive every moment, the youngsters especially. In this pack the loup-garou and a big female held together (it was the end of winter, near the mating season), while the cubs and yearlings were continually going off on side tours of investigation. To follow these excursions, learning what pleased or puzzled the intelligent brutes, was part of the fun of trailing; yes, and a better part than pushing blindly ahead, intent on a shot or a killing. I must give the wolves this credit, too, that though they crossed the deep paths of a deer yard, they made no attempt to harry the game. They rarely do so unless they are hungry, or unless (near settlements) they run into a herd of foolish domestic animals that do not know enough to scatter or be quiet when wolves appear.
So the pleasant trail ran on through the big woods, wonderfully white and still, and suddenly headed for a sheltered spot on a ridge overlooking a wide stretch of country. My heart jumped when I saw that spot, and the trail turning to its cover. It was an ideal place for wolves to “lie up” for the day; after testing the air, I approached the nest from leeward as stealthily as a hunting fox. It was empty; worse than that, it had not been occupied even for a moment’s halt. No sooner did the wolves enter the perfect cover than all the imps of uneasiness flew to their backs and drove them on. The trail was cold, showing no sign of alarm; but it said that the pack had shaken off laziness and was going somewhere without delay.
No more easy trailing now, and no more side excursions to learn what the cubs had been doing. The wolves headed into rough country northward; for miles I followed them where never a man went before, I think, and where no sensible man would go again. Only once have I experienced anything to compare with it and that was when I followed a bear that was making for his winter den through a foot of new-fallen snow. The bear had seen me, and took to rough country, knowing that I was hot on his trail; but all these cold signs said that the wolves were making medicine here while I was making coffee far away. In some uncanny way they seemed to have received a “tip” that they would be followed on this one day of all the year, and had laid out a trail that must break an enemy’s wind or heart. “Oh, that’s the loup-garou, all right,” I thought; “and some cunning devil is surely his master, as old books say. What else would lead this gorged pack to forsake its way of easy traveling and go through a breakneck country like this?”
For hours the trail held to broken ground, telling its lively tale. When the wolves drew near a steep hill or a stiff cobble, instead of rounding it by an easy runway they would corkscrew up one side and tumble down the other. In one place they would climb a sharp pitch like goats; in another, with discouraging ease, they would crouch under a ledge and take it with a catlike spring. When they topped ridge or hill, the leader would pick out a smooth pitch, sit on his tail, and slide down the other side, leaving a chute in the snow which might be ten or thirty feet long, and steep as a church roof. Here a few of the wolves might select individual slides; as a rule, they sat on their tails and tobogganed down after the leader.
To follow them in such places (warily, because the pack might be jumped at any moment) you had to rise on tiptoe, driving moccasins down through toe-holes in the snowshoe webs for a grip on the slippery incline, and make use of every bush or root to give yourself a helpful upward pull. When you reached the top and made cautious survey, you had to take off snowshoes and slide or scramble down the wolf chute. Meanwhile the thermometer was near zero, and you wished it were lower, for a little of this kind of work left you hot as a haymaker. Your wind-proof coat was tied in a snug bundle at your back; you were gloveless, in shirt-sleeves, and still too warmly dressed. When you stopped to breathe after a tough climb, the keen air promptly chilled you to the bone.
What between laborious ups and breathless downs, the afternoon passed all too quickly away; the last precious hour of daylight struck, and still there was no sign to indicate how far ahead the wolves might be resting. The trail was still cold, calling for haste if one expected to run into the pack; yet calling also for alertness, since the next step might bring one into sense range of the keenest of wild animals. A wolf may sleep, but never his ears or his nose; that is the fascination of trailing him to his day bed.
I was resting on the crest of a ridge, the trail stretching northward along the summit, when a gloom swept over the woods, as if they had been brushed by a cloud. Then a breeze stirred, making moan in the evergreens, and a snowstorm came creeping up from the south. In a moment my good luck was changed; the wind had turned behind me while the game was still ahead, and one might as well climb after a squirrel as to stalk a wolf pack from windward.
“No use! this loup-garou is too much for you,” I told myself, almost ready to acknowledge his superior medicine or magic. Ordinarily I might have been homeward bound with a wolf skin on my back at this hour; but now, empty handed, I must find a sheltered spot, build a “Commoosie” and gather wood for a night’s fire. Somewhere to the westward was a snowshoe trail; but a storm was coming, the country was strange, and to find the trail or retrace my course before dark was out of the question. Yes, I must spend the night here; but first, as a man waits another hopeful minute after a poor day’s fishing, I would run the trail a little farther.
That was a fortunate last-minute decision. I had followed the ridge only a few steps when I saw the face of a pond far below on my left, and recognized it as one I had crossed when a wolf pack led me a long chase hither from a different direction. No cheerless night for me now, and no more climbing every heartbreak hill between here and camp! The trail had borne more to the westward than I thought; the pond below was near a chain of lakes, and from it I could quickly reach my snowshoe trail and easy traveling.
The wooded ridge on which I stood had a sharp drop of twenty yards toward the pond. Along the foot of this drop grew clumps of bushes (of the dwarf-laurel family, I think), bearing shiny green leaves that appeared very beautiful when all other leaves were dead under the snow; and below that was an immense hillside stretching down to the valley. The wolves had slid down the first pitch, and turned sharp to the north again, still keeping to the heights, seeking even rougher country before calling halt for the day. So I judged, my eyes following the tireless trail, which went weaving in and out of the laurel bushes. That thicket yonder was a good wolf nest, excellent; but so were twenty others I had found empty that day; and see, a trail going out on the farther side!
As I stole along the summit, scanning the cover below in lingering hope, a snowflake touched my cheek with unmistakable warning. Others came whirling among the trees, like little white birds seeking a place to light; the great valley at my feet began to fill and darken. “No time to lose,” I thought; “not a minute, if I am to reach camp before this storm gets too thick to see through it. So, till next time, loup-garou! You have given me a great hunt; but I wish I could have seen your eyes.” Then I took off my snowshoes, picked a smooth pitch with a snowdrift below, and went down like a shot.
That was a short slide, hardly more than a second; but it was crammed full of surprises and wild emotions. Before it fairly started I had a startling glimpse of something big and gray popping above the laurels, like a jack-in-a-box. Another and another gray thing flew up and down. As each topped the cover I had instantaneous picture of a convulsed body with dangling legs, above which gleaming white fangs and fierce eyes were turned in my direction. Every wolf in the pack must have leaped straight up from his sleep, so as to look clear of the bushes and see what was coming. When I struck the drift with the rumble of a small avalanche, the landscape was full of wolves, some jumping up wildly to see, others streaking away through the woods like scared cats.
Out of the corner of an eye I saw these vanishing shapes, my whole heart and attention being fastened on one enormous wolf that jumped from under me and went whisking down the slope in astonishing-high bounds, as if he rode a witch’s broomstick. It was the loup-garou, the terrible, the enchanted beast! I could have laughed or yelled at his flight had I not wanted to bemoan my own blunder. After throwing me off his trail he had gone to sleep in the laurels under the ridge, where he was sure no enemy could approach unnoticed; and after trailing him uncounted miles with endless caution, I had tumbled down like a sack almost on top of him. It was such an ending as makes one a believer in luck, especially bad luck.
And speaking of luck, it was, after all, fairly distributed, with such waggish humor that no reasonable creature had any cause to grumble. The lucky thing for me was the panic that gets into a wild beast’s legs whenever a startling thing happens. I knew the power of a timber wolf, that he can throw a buck by a twist of the head, and paralyze him or open his throat by a snap of the terrible fangs; and I had roused a dozen such brutes, every one within springing distance. Had they whirled on me in the drift, my sky would have been no bigger than my hat; I would have had no more fighting chance than a rabbit. Yet they lost nerve and scattered like flushed quail when a snowball came blundering down into their day bed.
In the other scale of fortune’s balance, it was lucky for the wolves that I was as much surprised and generally stood-on-my-head as they were. After an all-day chase, here was one rewardful moment when a man needed just three things: solid footing, clear eyes, a steady hand. In that moment I was sprawling like an upset turtle, one hand brushing snow out of my face, the other tugging at a revolver, which took that particular occasion to jam in the holster. Somehow, with loss of the only precious second, I was on my feet to send one hasty shot at the loup-garou, flying off on his broomstick with trees flitting past him in dizzy procession, and another at a big dog wolf that, confused by the roaring echo, turned and came streaking past me up the ridge.
It was all over before there was time to pick a target or even to think. The dog wolf jumped high at the shot, showing he had no magic; but as I gazed ruefully after the loup-garou I had a last glimpse of his plume waving _au revoir_ as he sailed over a windfall. Whatever loup-garouishness that fellow ever had is still with him.
FROM A BEAVER LODGE
To look into a house is one thing; to look out of it is another. The difference between the two views is the difference between strangeness and familiarity, between guessing and knowing. This is an attempt to look forth from a beaver’s house and see the world as a beaver sees it.
When you stand for the first time beside a beaver lodge you front a disappointment, then a doubt, finally a battery of questions. You are gliding down a wilderness stream, your senses joyously alert, in your heart a curious feeling that you are an intruder, when your eye catches a thing which is neither alive nor quite natural. It is a mass of sticks, gray, like all jetsam of the shore; but it stands in a circle of cut glass overlooking a bend where the stream broadens into a little pond. Quietly the canoe turns in, touching the bank as noiselessly as a floating leaf. As you step ashore, an odor of musk tells you that you are at last in beaver land.
All around you is beauty, quietude, immensity; upon you is the spell of the silent places. The wild meadow with its blossoming grass, over which the wind runs in waves of light and shadow; the big woods, which seem always to be listening; the everlasting hills with their sentinel pines,--all these remind you of a day when God looked upon a new creation, “and behold, it was very good.” Even the graceful canoe, which has borne you silently through a vast silence, seems part of a harmonious landscape. But that crude heap yonder, surely that is not the famous dwelling you have read about and longed to see! One look at the formless thing is enough to dispel all your illusions of beaver intelligence. You expected something rare, an abode finely or wonderfully wrought; you see a pile of sticks, big and scraggly, as if a huge hawk’s nest had tumbled out of a tree and landed upside down.
Such is your first impression of a beaver’s winter house, making you doubt whether the maker of such a poor abode has any more brains in his head than a delving woodchuck. But when you push the sticks aside and find that they conceal a careful work beneath; when you reflect that the beaver gave a cunning last touch to his handiwork in order to make it look like drift stuff cast up by the waters; when you slowly uncover dam, transportation canal, emergency burrows, storehouse, and other works of which this rude house was once the hopeful center,--then your illusions come back multiplied, and you ask questions of a different kind, no longer scornful, but truth-seeking. Your first view discloses only a formless heap of sticks, because you view it from without as a stranger; your last view, as you turn away regretfully, brings sympathetic understanding of the brave little pioneer who looks out from the sticks as from a familiar home, and is well content with what he sees because he has proved himself master of circumstance.
The first of your new questions deals with the height of the lodge, which is its most variable feature. One beaver builds a high lodge, another a low; or the same beaver may erect a six-foot house one season, and the next be content with a dwelling that will hardly be noticeable when the snow covers it. In your thought this varying height is associated with a strange weather prediction; for as in childhood you were told that a low or high muskrat’s house was sure sign of a mild or severe winter, so when you visit beaver land you shall hear that this relative of the muskrat is an unerring weather prophet. “When the beaver builds high and solid, look for deep snow and intense cold” runs the saying, and your proper state of mind is one of wonder at the mysterious instinct which enables the animal to know what kind of winter he is facing, and to build his house accordingly.
Now the beaver, like other wild creatures, is an excellent weather prophet. When you find him working leisurely by night, and sleeping from early dawn till the stars come out, you may confidently expect a continuation of Indian-summer weather; but when you find him rushing his work by day-and-night labor, it is time for you to head out of the woods (if you travel by canoe) before a freeze-up blocks all the waterways. From these and other signs, which woodsmen point out, one might judge that the beaver knows what kind of weather to expect for the next day or two; but there his foreknowledge stops, being sufficient for his needs. The weather of next winter cannot possibly concern him when he builds his house; the height or solidity of his walls is not determined by fear of cold or anticipation of a heavy snowfall. What should he care for cold who has the warmest of furs on his back, or for snow who has a weather-proof roof over his head?
No, the problem which a beaver faces is the single problem of rising or falling water. Therefore the height of his dwelling will never be determined by season, but always by locality. If he selects one place for a winter habitation, he will build a high lodge; if he decides that another place is better, he will be satisfied with a low lodge. In either place his house, whether high or low, will prove to be just the right height nine times out of ten, and perhaps oftener. Indians assert that a beaver never repeats a mistake. They seem to think of him as they think of themselves when they say, “If you fool-um Injun once, that’s your fault. If you fool-um twice, that’s Injun’s fault.”
To understand the problem as Hamoosabik faces it every autumn, we must remember that the lodge is to be his home during the winter, until streams are clear of ice and he can once more seek his food along the banks. He builds by choice on low ground, beside a quiet stream, because he finds there alders for building material, abundant mud for mortar, soft banks for refuge burrows, and broad levels through which to run his transportation canals. Such places are overflowed in the spring, some more, some less; and it is this varying overflow which the beaver anticipates by the height of his dwelling, as he provides against wolves or lynxes by thick walls that cannot be broken.
Near the top of the lodge is the living room, from which a tunnel leads down through lodge and bank to a store of food-wood under the ice. Since the water in this tunnel rises or falls with the level of the pond, it follows that the living room must be high enough to give assurance that the water will not enter and drown the beaver against his own roof. Once his living room is flooded, he must escape through the tunnel, find an opening in the ice of his pond, and take his chance with hungry enemies in the snow-filled woods. A beaver does that once in a lifetime, perhaps, when he builds a low lodge in a place which calls for a high one; but he will not do it a second time, or a first, if instinct can anticipate or industry prevent it.
We begin to understand now what is in the animal’s head while he speeds his work during the beautiful Indian-summer days, when a soft haze rests like a dream on the hills, and waters grow still as if to hold the reflection of tranquil skies, of russet meadows, of woods agleam with crimson and gold. He must abide here in a narrow room when all this beauty and tenderness have passed into the cold gray or gleaming white of winter; that the time is short he hears from the trumpets of wild geese wending southward over his head. Food for his growing family, a pond to store it in, a canal for transportation, a number of safety burrows,--all these must be provided not in haphazard fashion, but carefully and in order. If his food-wood be stored too early, it will hold enough sap to cause the bark to sour under water, which means calamity; or if it be gathered too late, a frost may close the canal through which it must be towed to the storehouse. Not till these preliminary works are finished does Hamoosabik rear his winter lodge, with its living room wherein his family may gather in comfort by day or sleep without fear at night, while trees crack under the intense cold, and the howl of a hungry wolf goes searching through the woods.
While beavers are building their lodge, the water in all wilderness streams is low, as a rule, for it is the end of the summer season; but before spring comes the water will be high, and much higher in some places than in others. The important matter, therefore, is to plan a house suitable for the locality in which it stands; high enough, that is, to prevent rising water from flooding the living room, but not a handbreadth higher than the place demands for security. An overhigh house is too noticeable, too glaring; and Hamoosabik is like other wood folk in that he strives to be inconspicuous. The last thing any bird or beast cares to do is to draw attention to the place where he lives; that is as true of eagle or bear as of hummingbird or chipmunk.
Weighing these matters as we stand beside a beaver lodge, our question returns in another form. It is no longer a question of foretelling winter weather, but of anticipating early-spring conditions of land and water, and it reads, By what strange instinct does the beaver build now high, now low, and always just high enough to keep his living room above the crest of the coming floods? That is the rule in beaver land, with enough exceptions in the way of drowned lodges and homeless beavers to make it an interesting rule, not a mere “dead” certainty.