The Wolver/Chapter 7
VII
Two Toes and his band liked not the presence of a man in their territory, in a land which for ages had been reserved to the uses and purposes of animals that walked or ran on four paws and birds that flew on wings. The appearance in that region of a thing which walked on two legs and left a trail that never wore out, that smelled of steel and tobacco and burned powder and brass or copper cartridges, was an insult and an outrage. Every wolf knew, too, that it was a menace.
The intruder was a man, and he was a thoroughly bad man. That was demonstrated by the fact that one day he left the carcasses of three skinned wolves in the crotches of young birch-trees, carried the skins home, and hung them up in his den of chopped tree-trunks built upon the ground.
The man scented the woods over several hundred square miles. He filled the balsam breeze out of the swamps with a mean and disgusting odor. He appeared in the highways of the wilderness, just where a wolf would naturally roam, and spoiled them for any self-respecting animal with a nose for anything at all. He left his footprints in the sand beside streams, in the deep moss across runways, where a wolf pursuing a rabbit was sure to come upon it, and to be scared out of his wits, not knowing whether it was a trap or a snack of poison.
Take it up the Twin Falls River. There was a delightful rabbit swamp up there, and one evening Two Toes was in full cry after a big rabbit. His pack was scattered around, lurking beside runways, waiting for the quarry to dash by close enough to catch. Two Toes had nothing on his mind except that rabbit. Suddenly, right under his nose, there was the scent of a human—that Otter Cove human!
Two Toes rose seven feet in the air and returned to the earth struggling as he fell, fearful that he would land in a steel trap of some kind. The rabbit cut a corner and escaped.
All the joy of the chase, all lust for rabbit food, went out of the wolf's mind in an instant. He couldn't smell anything but that human for days, every time he thought about it. His followers were vastly annoyed, too—except two of them who licked their chops when they passed the trail of the man.
These two had eaten man. Though the liking for man meat is an acquired taste, and a wolf must be very, very hungry indeed to overcome his loathing and horror for the human odor, once one has bored through and wrenched out a good, smoking chunk of flesh—ignoring the strange hide over most of a human's carcass, and getting right in to the warm blood—once tasted, one never forgets the savor of it!
So if Two Toes had no memory of a feast to offset the horror of his own remembered experience in a steel trap, he had two followers who did not loathe a human with the same sensation that he did. Their horror of guns, poisons, steel, and all those deadly perils was tempered by the taste that they had acquired. They lingered in the neighborhood of the tracks, and from their example Two Toes reasoned that the tracks in themselves were not dangerous.
Having made that observation. Two Toes immediately changed his tactics. Instead of shunning the man-trail, he searched along it, seeking knowledge of its peculiarities.
He found that the steel which bit so cruelly appeared only at intervals, and that between the huts that contained steel were those suspicious yellow blazes on the spruce-trees. Giving these trees a wide berth, Two Toes nevertheless found the range of the man, and made up his mind that as a rule the human stuck as close to his trail as a fisher or an otter to its runway.
Having made up his mind to this, Two Toes ventured in closer to the steel. His first real venture with the thing was when he saw a rabbit struggling and dangling at the end of a chain on a pole. With infinite caution, running his paws under the dirt, boring along, he arrived within snapping distance of that rabbit, and he risked a tentative bite.
Having cautiously pulled the rabbit, and nothing having happened, he tried it again and again, till finally the rabbit fell out of the chain. Two Toes carried it away from the trail and from the steel, and he and his band cautiously dissected it, to make sure that there was nothing in the warm meat to injure a wolf. They ate the rabbit, but can hardly be said to have enjoyed the meal.
That night it snowed, and the snow covered the work of the wolf, so that the man did not discover what had happened to the rabbit in his trap.
The wolves, working around, after they had caught enough wild game to satisfy them, watched Two Toes try further experiments with death along the trapper's trail. They sat back, or lay with their jaws on their forepaws, watching their leader creep up to the line. They saw him walk along right in the man's trail— walk with the slow gait of a bear, putting down his paws and boring under the surface, looking for a hidden trap. They saw him study a trap-line cubby for an hour, pointing at it as motionless as a cat waiting for game.
They saw him go up to a fighting pekan—a foolish creature as regards traps—which was hanging in the air, dangling at the end of a chain. Two Toes killed the fisher with a bite, and then pulled it away. He brought it out to the other members of the pack, and they tore it to pieces.
They did the same to another fisher. Two Toes had a scare as he bit into that second pekan, for something pierced and hurt his paw as he chanked against the tough meat. He snapped at the place that hurt, and pulled out the quill of a porcupine. Every one knows that pekans eat porcupines, and in devouring a pekan a wolf is likely to find porcupine-quills in its hide and hair.
The other wolves would not take any such chances as Two Toes ran. They let him go in and make the kills. They sat back, their mouths watering, as Two Toes tore the trap cubbies to pieces, one by one, and pulled out of them sweet morsels of rabbit meat, or grouse, or squirrel. Two Toes ate these himself, having bitten them through and through to make certain that they did not contain any bitter flavor or questionable taste of any kind. He was well warned about the strange things that men left around in chunks of meat, waiting for wolves to eat them and die.
He found none of these bitter things until they ran across a young moose that lay dead near a little pond in a swamp of balsams. Moose die once in a while, and the wolves walked in to this one with care, but with no extraordinary suspicion, till they caught the unappetizing whiff of a man's trail. They could see the track in the snow, too.
As they circled by, they came upon a wolf-track, made by one of those Twin Falls River wolves. Following it, they found the wolf dead a few jumps out in the swamp. His jaws had a violent odor—an odor which, as Two Toes learned from his more experienced mates, always appeared in the jaws of wolves that died thus. It was the same that was sometimes perceptible on the carcass of a kill, or on chunks of tallow and fat spread temptingly about. This moose was a kill, for there was much blood around, which does not appear when an animal has died some natural death in the woods.
All of Two Toes's pack ventured up to the carcass of the moose, and made tentative sniffs and nibbles at it. They ate with great caution, and did not once lose their watchfulness in their hunger. Then, having eaten a good meal, two of them turned away and trotted toward the outlet of the pond.
There was a little draw or gully between two very low knolls in the swamp. Here an opening broke through a little thicket of balsam and spruce treelets, on the way to water.
The leading wolf, thirsty after his meal, stretched his head out and forced his way through the branches of those little treelets. Suddenly a bent birch sapling straightened up. With a harsh gurgle, the wolf was jerked six feet clear of the ground and hung there struggling helplessly in mid air.
Instantly the other wolves understood what had happened. They had entered among a nest of snares and poisons.
They dashed away in panic fear. Twenty jumps away one of them was rushing between two rocks, where the ground was sheltered by a thick mass of spruce and balsam branches overhead. There something closed on his forepaw and tripped him up, throwing him with an agonized yelp upon the ground. All the wolves heard the clank of steel and the rattle of chain.
Two Toes and the four remaining animals made their escape. They ran for miles away from the scene of the disaster. They cowered in the densest thickets they could find; they hid in rock crevices; they drank water out of brooks with suspicion. When trying to run down a rabbit they would leap sidewise with a sudden yelp of terror as some branch brushed them or moss slipped under their paws.
Knock Knee, the latest recruit of the pack, who had been following in the rear, moved up during these hard days so that he ran third. He chased rabbits around to his waiting mates, and he caught grouse from low branches in the evergreens.
For days and days Two Toes and his unhappy crew slunk and crouched in the most remote parts of their rang&in the deepest timber and among the roughest stones. But hunger pressed more and more upon them; they were obliged to wander forth seeking meat to eat. They could not go far without crossing the runway of the man. They leaped over it six feet in the air, voicing their terror as they landed on the ground, not knowing what pitfall would open under them, what thing would close on their paws and envelope their necks.
They met other wolves in their flights and on their hunts. Panic had seized them all. The taint in the air was sufficient to make them full of the fear of the arch-enemy.
The man's success against them was clear on every loop of his long runway. He hung up wolf after wolf, skinned them, and carried the pelts to the log cabin which smelled more and more of the villainies he had wrought in the happy hunting country of the wolves. Not only wolves, but mink, marten, fisher, lynx, and other creatures added their pelts to that open shack where the trapper hung the skins of his victims.
No sooner had a pack of wolves relaxed its caution ever so little than something happened. Two Toes guarded his own fairly well after the crash that deprived him of two followers. They hunted as far as they could from the trail of the white man, and they ate their meat fresh and smoking.
They caught a young moose and threw him down. They were so hungry that they ate him almost clean. The next time they happened by that way they found that two other wolves, pariahs, had eaten some of what remained of the kill—and both lay stark, with their lips drawn from their teeth. Two Toes and his pack fled from the place!