The Wolver/Chapter 2
II
Having spied out the land and roughly laid out his trap-line trails, the trapper returned to Otter Cove. After looking to right and left, he picked a camp-site beside a little spring that poured down over a ledge of rocks. All around were spruce and fir trees six or seven inches in diameter. White birches grew thickly above the ledge.
He set himself against the trees with single cross-cut saw and ax. He leaped and cut and sawed, cackling and screaming till all the blue jays within a mile came screaming and fluttering to see what new phenomenon had arrived among them.
Scolding the blue jays and being scolded in turn, French Louie put down trees, logged them off, and, having notched them, built them up in a crib twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and five feet high on each side. He peak-roofed the shack with scoops—logs split in two and gouged down the inside, and then laid round down, round up, so that the rain and melting snow would run down the troughs. He filled in the spaces in the roof where air might enter with thick caribou moss. He chinked the walls of his cabin with moss and clay. Happily he found a clay-bank, or what served as clay.
He built his cabin in three days. He put in a split-plank door and two windows, one in front and one on the side to the south. He rigged up a stove pedestal, and put upon it a good cast-iron stove. He ran a pipe through a large sheet of iron in the roof.
"By gar! I don' want my cabin to burn down!"
He dug a root-cellar and a fur-shed, dug out the spring, and put in a trough that led the water into the corner of his cabin, where it ran out under the side through a hollow log spout, carefully banked up so that no wind could come through it. He cut ten cords of wood up on the rock—good birch and maple body wood—stacked it on both sides of his cabin, and covered it with pole sheds, thatched with spruce and balsam boughs.
"By gar! I want my main camp all right!" he declared.
When he had finished his main camp, it was all right. It would stand against any blizzard, because no gale could reach it. It was down out of the cold. It was stored and supplied for the winter campaign, except for "roots"—potatoes, carrots, turnips—and supplies that he would put in later in the fall.
The same day that he finished his cabin he headed back into the woods, "to feex 'em op a bit."
He peeked and peered to right and left, picking up the places he had seen before with unerring memory. He avoided rock ledges, circled back to clear river gorges, and traversed stone gullies, over some of which he made a bridge by felling tall spruces. He wallowed through the deep moss of dark swamps, and surprised himself, as he pretended, by discovering little ponds where moose stood and gazed sedately at the intruder.
"I don' see how I missed gettin' an introduction to yo' fellers!" he said to them. "I was here once before, an' yo' was not at home! Mebby I was over yon side, an' yo' not have the street cleared fo' me to walk!"
All the way out he zigzagged back and forth, except in long stretches where he asked no better lay of land, or where he knew he could not do better. He called the country a thousand names. He declared aloud that in such a rough hole a man could not travel ten miles in a week. He swore that a trap-line could not be blazed through it if a trapper worked a year, and he complained that a wolf would be lost every day of his life; but when the sun told him that it was time to return he blazed the broken trail and filled in the open places, along ridges, across flats, and landed himself in his own back yard at dusk.
It was five miles of trail, which, when he had cut out a few dead trees and slapped off a number of twigs and branches, was as good walking as one could wish, for woods traveling. French Louie pretended to be surprised to find it so good when he went back with a pack-load the following day, and extended it six miles farther into the wild, blazing it as he traveled, picking the route as he strode along.
He stopped in another low swamp, and built himself a wigwam of birch bark. It was a beautiful little cone-shaped camp, laid up on poles. Inside there hung a curtain over the doorway, and he festooned it with pails, cups, and bark baskets to contain tea, baking-powder, salt, and other necessities, out of the way of pesky squirrels and unprincipled mice.
From this camp he ran a line northward to Twin Falls River, and another southward to Pukaso River. On each of those streams he built a bark wigwam, and supplied it with necessities. Out from each of the river camps he made loop lines around the hills, and cleared the lines of logs and limbs and twigs, so that he could walk freely along them, carrying a heavy pack. He blazed the trees in line, mile after mile, the blaze-marks shining light yellow against the dark bark of the spruces, like street-lights in the gloom of the deep woods.
Day after day French Louie toiled. He worked, as it seemed, harder than even youth and strength could stand; but if a man laughs all day long, keeps up a running interchange of insults with blue jays and ravens, and bluffs bull moose out of their natural environment—why, he could do almost anything. Not one of Louie's antics was a wasted motion!
Nothing escaped his eyes. He saw and remembered the runways of the wild creatures. Here was a rock ledge, and along the foot of it he picked up a gray hair or two.
"By gar! Loup-cervier—lynx! By gar! I don' forget heem, no, by gar! Twenty—thirty dollaire!"
Along every brook, on every rapid, in every gravel-bar, he picked up the traces of mink, otter, and beaver. He saw the very animals many times. In the gaps of the stone ridges he found paths cut deep by hoofs and paws. He exulted in the evidence that fisher and marten had passed that way.
In the little patch of yellow sand a few hundred feet north of the old log-camp cabins at Pukaso Bay, French Louie found the track of a wolf. Two claws and part of the toes of a forefoot were missing, and served to identify the brute for all time. The track was large, but not gigantic—just over four inches in length.
French Louie stared at that track for a long time. Something about it stirred his mind. He was trying to place his thoughts upon that something.
He had pinched a wolf's toes in a steel trap more than once; but he knew that he had never seen this track before. He had followed the trails of wolf-packs, and of lone wolves. He knew the she wolf's den and the dog wolf's lair. He knew wolves so very well, indeed, that now he looked at this wolf track without any of his usual antics—without a grin, or a kick, or a gesture. He stood still, without a quiver, his eyes resting upon the print of a pad in a patch of hard, wet, yellow sand, so sterile that nothing grew in it.
It is a fact that the footprints of a man in the snow or dirt tell what kind of a man he is—a lazy man, scuffling along; a nervous man, twisting the ball of his foot; a strong man, pounding the surface; a crafty man, stepping lightly; a careless giant slumping along—each leaves his own mark, and no other could leave the same mark.
French Louie felt in his bones that this two-toed wolf was a better wolf than any other of his tribe. The old man himself could not tell why he thought so, but it was there in the print of the paw in the sand. Of course, the wolf now knew enough to avoid a steel trap! No doubt he also knew the deadly nature of hydrocyanic acid, of strychnin, and of other poisons. The track looked just right for a strong, wise wolf.
"He not so heavy as mos' wolfs of hees size," said French Louie, shaking his head. "A lean, gaunt wolf, heem! He step soft, crafty like. I bet I make hees acquaintance these wintair, by gar! All aroun' heem iss other wolf-track, but see heem walk! He go straight, an' he hol' hees haid low, hees ear op, his eyes bloodshot, purple like fire! By gar, he's one beeg feller in hees haid!"
That wolf-trail, driving straight through all the careless, wandering, snuffling pack, was as plain as day to French Louie. He saw the other wolves for what they were—young pups, old rompers, a growling, snarling, hungry pack, leaving everything big to the wolf that traveled straight.
"No, by gar! Dat's too bad!" French Louie grumbled. "Dat feller raise one combamba wit' my trap-lines! Dey raise trouble wit' me, too, if dey catch me in the dark of the moon! By gar, I bet I climb a tree like porcupine—no, by gar! I run up like I wass a marten or a squirrel, in one mighty beeg hurry!"
He laughed aloud, thinking what a spectacle he would make, with wolves leaping to seize his trousers, while he was shinning up the tree, ejaculating and shaking his long gray hair and whiskers with Gallic anger and excitement.
"By gar!" he laughed. "I bet dat ole feller make me so mad I don' get my compose back in a week, by gar!"
He fixed up one of the old cabins for a line camp, picking the strongest cabin there, not the most inviting. He set up poles to make bars for the windows, and he looked well at the door, bracing it and making sure that it would be ready to resist a siege.
Besides this tribute to the wolf-pack's menace, he had in mind the wind which would sweep down over the Pukaso flats with all the stinging, bitter breath of midwinter and arctic blizzard, or the dreadful meteorological phenomenon of cold that looks up to zero as warm, that freezes alcohol and splits timber, that heaves the ice up in hummocks and burns the skin like a hot iron.
Thus the days went by, and each day French. Louie did some work for his winter campaign. He followed up his lines and put up trap cubbies—beautiful little huts, thatched with evergreens, whose gates would be death for any creatures trying to cross them. He built them against big stumps, against dry boulders, on hummocks, and against the banks of streams.
He would put one trap beside the blazed line. Another he would set down in a hollow, fifty yards away on a streamside. Still another he would plant on the other side, against a sheer wall of rock. Some were in the midst of swamps, where every tree looked like every other tree. Some were in the gaps of mountain ridges, landmarks of the broken land. He marked each trap cubby by a diagonal blaze on a tree, so that he would not forget it.
By each trap cubby he hung a trap on a long pole, like a well-sweep, resting in a birch or maple fork. The trap was ready to set; and as if to make his cubbies the more fatal, he tossed into each one a chunk of fish, so that the animal yielding to the first temptation with caution would rush in with delight and expectation to the second taste—and taste death then!
The frosts fell lower and lower, and when ice remained all day in one little pool, French Louie shouted, for now it was time to trap.