The Wolver/Chapter 12
XII
When French Louie heard the wolf-pack pouring by between him and the lake, he nodded with satisfaction. The wolves were not all dead, he told himself gleefully. If the sleet had killed them, he would have had no satisfaction in life to speak of.
Now he must go forth to fix up his traps and to clear out the trails where the ice had broken down tops and branches into his right of way. In the morning, before dawn, he was eating breakfast, and with the first streak of light he set out. He carried his pack on his back, his game-bag, with a stock of poison capsules and poisoned tallow pills in it, his snowshoes, and his bait and belt guns, with plenty of ammunition.
"By gar!" he grinned. "A feller don' know when he meet some bad t'ings runnin' aroun'!"
Trotting out on the crust, he stopped at the first trap on his line toward the main cabin, to cut out the well-sweep trigger, which was cased in ice. The trap was ready for its cruel work, since it was under the porch of the cubby.
The next trap was frozen in solid, and he had to cut it out and shake in a new bed of balsam needles. The third trap contained a mink, which had entered after the well-sweep was frozen to its trigger.
In the hollow just beyond he found that a large pack of wolves had swept by, headed toward Pukaso. They had run down a long, gentle slope, and where they jumped their claws had scratched the crust. Those scratches on the crust made French Louie pause, for they dulled the light of the ice over a wide surface.
"By gar!" he cried, grimacing. "A hundred wolfs! Mebby two hundred wolfs! Wen dem fellers come to visit me, I clim', yo' bet! I clim' like a chickaree, an' I do my squeakin' from up in a tree-top, by gar!"
French Louie followed the trail of the pack backward for a few hundred yards, and then turned and followed it forward for the same distance. He could see where the wolves had bitten off birch-buds as they passed the shrubs in full cry. In the summer-time a wolf will dine on blueberries and other wild fruit, even when meat is plentiful. Now meat was not plentiful, and there was no doubt that the animals were hunting at speed, driven by fierce hunger.
French Louie returned to his trap-line and trotted along it, fixing the traps and shaking his head. He heard the squeaks of little birds which had survived the sleet and were now working in close to the tree-trunks, trying to find bare places from which they could extract their pitiful little supply of food.
At one place he turned from his line and with his trapping-ax released three grouse whose pecking at the ice be had heard. They had buried themselves in the snow, and now they were making futile efforts to pick their way out.
The old trapper carefully chipped out the ice, fearful lest a hard blow might stun the weakened birds. He broke the three grouse out, and two of them flew away. The other bird lay on its side in his hand for a little while, gasping, before it, too, managed to fly a few rods to perch on one of the ice-clad limbs.
"By gar! Dem birds have a hard time findin' grub!" he said, shaking his head.
It was not all tragedy in the wilderness, however. French Louie startled a red squirrel as it sat upon a branch, eating cones which it had thriftily stored away the previous autumn. He was within five feet of the squirrel before it heard him, and then he squeaked like a weasel.
The squirrel leaped, struck an icy limb, lost its footing, and fell to the ice. Then it raced away in panic flight, up the lee side of a balsam, where the ice had not stuck fast. Seeing French Louie laughing and hearing him jeer, it chattered and burred and scolded, fairly jumping up and down, following the man for a hundred yards, angry at the trick that he had played.
The walking was so good that French Louie covered two sections of his trap-line, a long one and a loop, making about twenty miles in all. On the following day he covered about the same distance. He was well pleased with the prospect for a good and profitable season. All the weasel tribe were abroad, and he knew that from now on the hungry fur-bearers would come to his traps, tempted beyond endurance by the baits which he had placed just beyond the pans that released the jaws.
A less keen perception, a less acute vision than his, would have missed the faint scratches on the crust where the hungry creatures ran. French Louie could even see, if the slant of the sun was right, the faint blemish on the ice where the soft pads of foxes slightly stained the perfect polish.
Then the snow fell and covered the crust with a soft fluff, through which the survivors lunged and pounded. Foxes roamed far and wide; pekans plunged along, their short jumps showing how tired they were. The rabbits made deep runways, and the few grouse which had found shelter under tight balsams, instead of diving into the snow, flew around seeking birch and other buds that were not incased in the ice.
The snow ate the ice off the branches, and gradually the limbs shook it clear. On the ground, the snow first absorbed the polish of the ice-crust and then granulated it, and only a line indicated where the frozen sheet had been. Then French Louie had to put on his snow-shoes, and the trip from camp to camp along his line strained his tendons and dragged heavily upon the muscles of his back.
The snow had circled into some of his cubbies, covering the mat of balsam needles. He had to brush it out, which took time. Moreover, his snow-shoes hooked into some of the fallen branches along the trail, impeding his progress. He was late making the midway point on his line from Otter Cove over the divide into the valley of Twin Falls River. He had only walked a short way from where he ate his lunch when the webbing of the snow-shoe on his right foot suddenly sagged down. When he looked to see what had happened, he uttered a screech of astonishment.
"Dat snow-shoe, dat good racket, new las' fall, break? Dat webbin' bruck up? No good, by gar!"
He stared at the snow-shoe, and then he swore loudly.
"Wen I knock de wet snow off, I bruise de rawhide!" he exclaimed. "Ain' dat an ole fool's trick, by gar! Me trap feefty year, an' I do dat mos' every winter, by gar! It make a feller sick. I got to feex it, jus' w'en I'm all hurry-up an' late, by gar!"
He sat down and proceeded to repair the snow-shoe webbing with pieces of rawhide string and light cotton trot-line. It was the only thing he could do. He worked fast, but that was not very rapidly. More than an hour went by, and he still had work to do.
At last he had the snow-shoe ready to walk upon, but the day was near its end, and there was no time for him to fix his traps along the rest of his line. He must hurry on to reach shelter.
Dusk came early, but lasted long. Night fell, and still French Louie was tramping stolidly on his trail. He had been over it times enough now to have the feel of it under his feet, and to know it by its shadow. He had to favor his snow-shoes, for the left one was weak, too, where he had unthinkingly pounded the webbing to rid it of the weight of damp snow.
His ears were out in the night, listening. He heard owls, flying squirrels, and the unfreezing rifts of Twin Falls River, which flowed down in the gorge on his left, to the north. The line, following the river ridges and crossing the knobs of glacier-worn granite, had been cunningly picked so that be had good walking, except for the branches not yet cut out; but the snow sank under him with lumpy jerks, so that he did not know when it would hold him up and when it would let him down several inches or even a foot.
Then, in the far distance, he heard a tremolo of sound, rising and falling, like the beat of the waves down the river rifts. He stopped and listened, but did not say a word.
He listened for a minute or two, and then started on along his line again, taking long steps, fairly running. He had not gone far when he stopped and swung his pack up on a tree-limb. When he resumed his running, he did not sink so far in the snow, his steps were longer, and he held his bait-rifle in his left band, swinging free.
He said nothing at all to himself, and uttered no sound. He was thinking, but only such thoughts as related intimately to the run that he was making. He watched the snow ahead, to make sure that he would not trip. He turned his left ear back, to hear what was coming in the wind.
He detected instantly when the wolves turned on the ridge-back behind him and took up his trail. The howling of the hungry pack ascended to a crescendo of eager squeals, and then fell back to the long blood-cry of the fresh track in the snow.
"Now, by gar, French Louie look up a good tree, dat he will!" the trapper exclaimed immediately. It was futile to try to reach his wigwam. Perhaps he was a lucky man that he had not sought shelter in the little bark tent up in the balsam swamp barely a mile ahead of him.
He stooped, pulled the slip-knots of his snowshoe-strings, and kicked his moccasins out of the toe-clips. He had his eye on a spruce-tree firmly rooted in a crevice on the top of one of the rocky knobs, around which the snow was bare for thirty or forty feet to the edge of the woods. The rock supported only a few low shrubs and, under the snow, moss and lichens.
French Louie easily drew himself up into the tree, and tied the snow-shoes over a branch eighteen or twenty feet from the ground. He cut away several of the lower branches, leaving three, almost on a level, to form a seat for him, about twelve feet above the ground. He had a good branch to rest his moccasins on, and he cut the ends of some of the other limbs which he could reach, so that he could look down at the snow all around the tree.
There were no theatricals, no lightsomeness of Gallic exclamation, during those few minutes of active preparation for a siege. The old trapper faced a peril too deadly, too imminent, for him to neglect any precaution or to waste a moment in playfulness.