The Wolver/Chapter 8
VIII
The wolves could not find any land free from menace. On the southeast side they ran into a human who came up close to Dog River from Michipicoten. On the east side there was a line blazed clear through for a hundred miles or so, from Michipicoten up to the railroad. On the north there were traps for twenty miles below Pic River.
No flight could take them out of the reach of humans. They hunted up and down, crossing the hated trails and sniffing the victims skinned at almost every trap.
If they found dead meat, they circled around it, and tore it to pieces before venturing to eat any of it. But they had to eat some dead meat. The snow was growing deeper, and live game held its scent, so that their keen noses could hardly find it.
Grouse, while storms blew, buried themselves in the loose snow. If one did not happen to pass within a foot or two of the hiding-place, no trace of the bird was wafted down the wind, for the snow held back the scent. Rabbits sat under little balsams for days, without moving, in stormy weather. The hunter beasts, growing hungrier and hungrier, wallowed up and down, nibbling birch twigs, and descending to gummy lichens to fill their aching stomachs.
More and more reckless, the fisher, mink, and marten ran into the trap-line. Abandoning their caution—if they ever had any—they yielded to its temptations and were swung up by the heels. The foxes, too, ventured in close, and some of them were caught. The wolves, including Two Toes, who for a time had grown brash stealing baits, shrank from the fear of death that encircled them.
They found a slain moose near the man's runway. They dug up the remains, but backed away, for the carcass smelled of death. They backed out of the vicinity. Following the trail of the man, they came to great chunks of moose meat hung up in trees. Under the chunks, where the delicious drips were, they smelled steel—the cold steel that would seize upon them without mercy.
Ravenous with hunger, bolder than his mates, Two Toes essayed to reach one of the chunks of meat. He worked his way up to one of the trees, a low-limbed balsam, and crept up out of the snow into the branches, pulling himself up by contortions of his back and scrambling with all his legs. He reached the level of the meat and snapped into it, where blue jays had been working. No trace of poison hurt his nose, and he chanked at the frozen game again. He pulled it and shook it.
Suddenly the moose ham jerked down, and Two Toes plunged yelping with it. The meat fell upon the trap that had been set under the drips, and for a moment the dull clank of closing jaws gave Two Toes the wolf equivalent of heart failure. He was not caught, however, and the closed trap lay in plain view. Traps in plain view are not dreaded. It is the unseen trap that catches wolves!
The hungry pack fell upon the meat salvaged from among the branches, and found no ill effects from gorging it. From that fact they inferred the probable safety of meat swung high in trees. They tore down two other hams in the same way. Two Toes cutting off the meat and letting it fall, not even finding a trap anywhere around those two pieces.
The wolves did not find any more meat hung up in that way, though they followed the trap-lines for some distance, crossing them here and there; so they returned to robbing the snares of animals caught in them. It seemed safe to pull mink or fisher out of the traps.
One of them was so hungry that he ate a fish which he found on the edge of the Pukaso River. He bolted it whole. Suddenly the fires of the damned struck through him, and Two Toes saw another of his mates tumbling and whirling wildly in the snow. The other wolves set upon the unfortunate victim, trying to steady him, but they only succeeded in biting him. He struggled deliriously till he fell and died.
Two Toes and the survivors fled from the place as accursed. A human—the man whose scent they knew so well—had placed another fatal temptation in their path. Knock Knee moved up a place in the line of the pack. The dead wolf had once helped to eat a man, and now a man had slain him!
Two Toes led his band out into the mid-wilderness, and they ran up to one of the dark, cold wigwams in the green timber. Around the little shelter were odors that reminded the wolves of summer and forest-fires. Two Toes, creeping in, halted within a yard of the pathway by which the human entered his den.
At the very spot where Two Toes stopped were fragments of things to eat. It was meat in a strange form, but so tempting that he tasted it. The meat was in little crumbs, except some big bones. Two Toes nibbled the bones, and then carried one away; for a wolf may as well die of poison as of hunger.
Two Toes ate the marrow and pulled off the gristle. He felt no monitory pangs. He tasted nothing that raised suspicion in his mind. Then one of his pack tried the same trick and came away with another bone.
There were some dead rabbits and grouse hanging on a long pole near the bark wigwam. The wolves dared one another to try to get them. Two Toes took a short run and a flying leap, and the next instant he thought that he was caught in traps and deadfalls, for the birds and animals all came falling down upon him; but he scrambled loose, struggling mightily, his jaws clenched.
He rushed fifty yards away toward his companions, who turned and started to run with him, snapping at his head. They were after the rabbit, which, without knowing it, he had carried away with him. Before he realized the situation his less venturesome mates had taken the head and all four legs, leaving him only the part of the backbone remaining in his jaws. He ate that, and they all sneaked back to eat the other birds and rabbits which the trapper had hung, up there for his own use, or for bait.
Their meal finished, the wolves ran away two or three miles and sat around, or lay around, waiting for something to happen to them. Nothing happened, except that their hunger was appeased, and they enjoyed a sense of comfort which they had not known for a long time. Indeed, they felt so comfortable that they dozed off to sleep.
The following night they began to hunt with something like their old-time spirits. They ran down rabbits, and hunted out two or three partridges in the snow. The remnants of another pack of wolves joined them, making a welcome addition to their fighting force. It was like the triumphant, care-free days of old!
They ran up to the trap-line and yelped at it, jeering. They found a fresh human track, and followed it up to another wigwam. Here they smelled the fire, the sweet things that a man eats, and they howled at him in the gloom. They defied him, dared him to come out and run a romp with them. They said they would eat the hams off him, and would carry his bones out into the dark places to bury, for a chew some other time. In this grim badinage a wolf who had once helped to kill a trapper took the lead.
Nor did their challenge go unanswered. The human appeared out of his wigwam and yelled back at them. What he said was not in their language, but something of his tone they understood, and they laughed with him.
"By gar!" he shrieked. "How can a man sleep wit' you fellers make such a hullybub aroun'? Shut up, you gray ghosts, shut up! Or, by gar, I shoot de stuffin' out of you!"
They interchanged compliments for a while; then, tiring of the noisy talk, the man returned into his wigwam, while the wolves withdrew mile by mile till their howls had awakened the other hunting tribes. They had had enough to eat, and they went to their rest.
Before they went to sleep they heard other wolves in full chase in two directions—the Swallow River pack and the Pukaso tribe.
"Now, if we were hungry," Two Toes and his mates said to themselves, "we would go and help them to hunt, but we have had plenty to eat, and are warm and sleepy. To-morrow we shall have to keep our eyes open, for that human might follow our tracks!"
They were not followed that day, and the next night, circling around to see what the man had been up to, they found a place where he had hung up more meat. He had killed a young moose, and they longed to eat some of it, but a suspicious odor betrayed the purpose to which he had put it. Passing again two days later, just to take a look at it, they found that the Pukaso wolves had come that way, and four of them were stretched dead in the snow.
"You see how it is!" Two Toes indicated with a growl.
They retreated and, being lucky, killed a hungry deer which had wandered up from around the Soo woods. They ate him to the marrow. They could stand it for a week now.
As they headed away, looking for a good place to lie down, they heard the rattle of a chain. Turning that way with utmost caution, they discovered a lynx in a trap. Could anything be funnier than that?
With a rush they started in to plague the big cat; but before ever they reached the lynx Knock Knee and another wolf were tripped up and held fast, yelping with agonized fear. The Iynx was a deadly live bait for playful wolves!
Two Toes and the others turned at the sound of closing steel jaws and rattling chains, leaving their luckless companions to be skinned in a day or two.