The Haunters of the Silences Part 10

A moment later came a huge lynx, padding softly but fearlessly straight out into the revealing light, as if he knew that at this season, when the bears were asleep and the bull moose, bereft of their antlers, had lost their interest in combat, there was none of all the forest kindreds to challenge his supremacy. He was stealthy, of course, in every movement, and his round, sinister eyes glared palely into every covert, but that was merely because he dreaded to frighten off a possible quarry, not because he feared a lurking foe. The frozen fish, however, showed no signs of flight at his approach; so he fell upon the nearest fragment and bolted it ravenously.

Having thus eagerly disposed of several substantial lumps, the great lynx became more critical, and went sniffing fastidiously from morsel to morsel as if he revelled in such unexpected abundance. Suddenly there was a vicious _click_; and with a spit and a yowl the lynx started as if to jump into the air. Instead of rising, however, some six or seven feet, under the propulsion of his mighty, spring-like muscles, he merely bowed his back and strained tremendously. In response, a small thing of dark steel emerged from the snow, followed closely by a log of heavy wood. The lynx was caught in a trap by his right fore foot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HIS ROUND, SINISTER EYES GLARED PALELY INTO EVERY COVERT."]

For a minute or two the panic-stricken beast went through a number of more or less aimless contortions, spitting and screeching, biting at the trap, and clawing frantically at the log. Presently, however, finding that his contortions only made the thing that had him grip the harder and hurt him the more savagely, he halted to consider his predicament.

Consideration not appearing to ease that urgent anguish in his paw, he began to strain steadily backward, hoping, if he could not free himself, at least to drag his captor into the woods and perhaps lose it among the trees. The log, however, was very heavy, and his best efforts could move it but a few inches at a time. When, at the end of an hour of fierce struggle, he lay down utterly exhausted, he was still in the full glare of the moon, still several feet from the shelter of the branches. But no sooner had he lain down, than the crunching of a footstep on the crisp snow brought him to his feet again; and with every hair on end along his back, his eyes ablaze with rage and fear, he turned to face the tall figure of a backwoodsman, who stood gazing at him with a smile of satisfaction from the other side of the glade.

Just about three hours earlier, on his way into the Cross Roads Settlement, Pete Logan had set that trap with particular care, and with the definite purpose of capturing that particular lynx. With all his cunning, little did the great tuft-eared cat suspect that for weeks the backwoodsman had been watching him, noting his haunts and trails, observing his peculiarities, and laying plans for his capture. That very evening, at the Cross Roads, Logan had boasted that single-handed he would bring the big lynx into the Settlement, alive and undamaged. He wanted the splendid animal to sell to an American who was collecting wild beasts for menageries; and to avoid injuring the captive's fine gray fur he had partly m.u.f.fled the cruel teeth of the trap, that they might take hold without tearing.

Having no dread of anything that inhabited the wilds, Logan had left his rifle at home, and carried no weapon but the knife in his belt and his light, straight-hafted axe. In the pack on his back, however, he brought what he intended should serve him better than any weapon,--a thick blanket, and a heavy canvas sack. Now, as he stood eying the frightened and furious captive, he undid the pack and shook the big blanket loose.

The lynx glared with new terror at the ample folds. He had seen men before, but he had never seen one shaking out a blanket, which looked to him like a kind of gigantic and awful wings.

Logan had made his plans with careful foresight; and now it was with the deliberation of absolute confidence that he went about the execution of them. His axe gripped in readiness for any unforeseen piece of strategy on the part of the foe, he advanced with the blanket outspread before him like a s.h.i.+eld. Back and back, to the limit of his bonds, cowered the lynx, glaring defiance and inextinguishable hate. Slowly the man drew near, till, just barely within reach of the beast's spring, he stopped.

For perhaps half a minute more neither man nor beast stirred a muscle,--till the tension of the captive's nerves must have neared the breaking-point. Then, as if his own nerves knew by sympathy the exactly proper moment for the next move in the game, Logan made a swooping forward plunge with the blanket. With a screech of fury the lynx sprang to the grapple,--to find himself, in half a second, rolled over and tangled up and swathed helpless in the smothering woollen folds. In vain he bit, and spat, and yowled, and tore. His keen white fangs caught nothing but choking wool; his rending claws had no chance to do their work; and the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the woodsman's st.u.r.dy body was bearing him down into the snow. In a few moments, daunted by the thick darkness over his eyes and exhausted by the impotence of his efforts, he lay still, quivering with rage. Then, with the most delicate caution, working through a couple of folds of the blanket, Logan released the jaws of the trap and slipped it warily from the imprisoned paw. To remove it from within the perilous paral was, of course, not to be thought of; but he feared to damage the joint by leaving it in that inexorable clutch a moment longer than was necessary. This done, he deftly whipped a las.h.i.+ng of cod-line about the bundle, binding the legs securely, but leaving a measure of freedom about the head and neck. Then he thrust the bundle into the canvas bag, slung it over his back, and started on the five-mile tramp back to his camp.

Logan travelled without snow-shoes, because there was just now little snow on the trails, or even in the deep woods. What snow there was, moreover, was frozen almost as hard as rock, except for an inch or two of fluffy stuff which had fallen leisurely within a couple of days. An extraordinarily heavy and prolonged January thaw, followed by fierce and sudden frost, had brought about this unusual condition, making something like a famine among the hunting kindreds of the forest, whose light-footed quarry, the eaters of bark and twig and bud, now found flight easy over the frozen surfaces.

The complacent trapper, ruminating pleasantly over his triumph and the handsome price his captive was to bring him, had covered perhaps a mile of his homeward journey when from far behind him came to his ears a novel sound, faintly pulsing down the still night air. Without seeming to pay it any attention whatever, he nevertheless was instantly and keenly concerned; and he perceived that the uneasy bundle on his back was interested too, for it stopped its indignant wrigglings to listen.

Up to this moment Logan had believed that there was no voice in all the wilderness unfamiliar to his ears, no speech of all the wild kindreds which he could not in rough fas.h.i.+on interpret. But this cry he did not understand. Presently it was repeated, a little nearer, and a little more convincingly strange to him. He knotted his rugged brows. A few moments more and again it floated down the moonlight, high, quavering, musical, yet carrying in its mysterious cadences an unmistakable menace.

Logan knew now to a certainty that it was a sound he had never heard before; and he knew what it was, though he refused to acknowledge it to himself, because it was a refutation of many of his most dogmatic p.r.o.nouncements.

"It _ain't_ wolves!" He muttered to himself obstinately. "Ther' ain't never been a wolf in New Brunswick!"

But even as he spoke, the sinister cry arose again, nearer and yet nearer; and he was obliged to confess to himself that, whatever it was, it was on his trail, and he was likely to know more about it within a few minutes. He was not alarmed, but he was annoyed, both at the upsetting of his theories and at the absence of his gun. Undoubtedly, these Charlotte County romancers had been right. There _were_ wolves in New Brunswick. He was ready to apologize for having so sarcastically questioned it.

In spite of the fact that his dignity as a woodsman would not permit him to be alarmed, he could not but recognize that the cry upon his trail was made up of a number of voices, and that a number of wolves might be capable of making things very unpleasant for him. He remembered, uncomfortably, that in this weather, with the snow so hard that the deer could run their fastest upon it, the wolves must be extremely hungry.

The more he thought of this fact the more clearly he realized that the wolves must be very hungry indeed, to dare to trail a man. He had been walking as fast as he could; but now he broke into a long, swinging lope, his moccasined feet padding with a soft whisper upon the snow. For a moment he thought of ridding himself of the burden upon his back; but this idea he rejected resentfully and with scorn. He was not going to be robbed of his triumph by a bunch of rascally, interloping vermin like wolves.

Meanwhile, the quavering high-pitched chorus was sweeping swiftly nearer through the moonlight, and Logan put on a burst of speed in order to get to a stretch of open burnt lands before his pursuers should come up with him. If he was to have a fight forced upon him, he wanted plenty of room and the chance to keep all his adversaries in plain view. He gained the open, with its scattered black stumps and gaunt, ghostly "rampikes"

dotting the radiant silver of the snow, and was some eighty or a hundred paces beyond the edge of the woods before the wolves appeared.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the gray forms of the pack halt, come close together, then separate again, hesitating at the venture of the open. The hesitation was only for a moment, however. Then, in formation so close that one might have covered the whole pack with a bedquilt, they came on again. His trained eye had counted six wolves in the pack; and he was relieved to find that there were not more. From their cries he had imagined there must have been thirty or forty.

Logan was too wise to run, now that he was in view of his foes. He stalked on with haughty indifference, till the pack was within twenty-five or thirty yards of his heels. Then he turned, and spoke, with an air of sharp, confident authority. Even through their hunger and their savage madness of pursuit the beasts felt the mastery of his voice. They paused, irresolutely, then opened out and sat down on their haunches to see what he would do.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE SAW THE GRAY FORMS OF THE PACK."]

After surveying them superciliously for a few seconds, the woodsman turned again and stalked on, keeping, however, a keen watch over his shoulder and his axe poised ready for instant use. As soon as he moved on, the wolves followed, but no longer in their pack formation. Not yet audacious enough to come within ten or twelve feet of this arrogantly confident being, whose voice had power to daunt them in the very heat of their onslaught, they spread out on either side of the trail, half-surrounding him, and keeping pace with him at a skulking trot.

Their jaws were half-open, their long white fangs were bared in a snarling grin, and their eyes, all fixed upon him unwinkingly, glinted a green light of ferocity and hunger.

Little by little they drew closer in, while Logan pretended to ignore them contemptuously. All at once he felt, almost more than saw, one of the largest of the pack dart in to spring upon his back. Out went the bright axe-blade like a flash of blue flame, as he whirled on his heel; and the wolf dropped with a choked-off yelp, shorn through the neck.

Thrice around him he wheeled the circle of the deadly blade; and the wolves deferentially slunk beyond reach of it, not yet ready to tempt the fate of their comrade.

Five minutes more, however, and the wary beasts again drew closer and Logan found that the strain of guarding himself on all sides at once was overwhelming. At any moment, as he knew, those hungry eyes might all close in on him together. A few hundred yards ahead, as he bethought himself, the trail led under the foot of a high, almost perpendicular rock; and he made up his mind that he must reach that rock as speedily as possible. With his back against the steep face of it he could face the charge of the pack to better advantage. Breaking into a long, unhurried trot, he pressed on, swinging the axe from side to side in swift, menacing sweeps, and uttering angry expletives which the wolves seemed to respect as much as they did the gleaming weapon. Before he gained the foot of the rock, however, the beasts had grown more confident and more impatient, making little sudden leaps at him, from one side or the other, so incessantly that his arm had not a moment's rest; and he realized that the crisis of the adventure could not be much longer delayed.

When he reached the foot of the rock and turned at bay, the wolves drew back once more and formed a half-circle before him, a moving, interweaving half-circle that drew closer and grew smaller stealthily.

Suddenly the wolf which seemed the leader sprang straight in. But the woodsman seemed to divine the move even before it began, so sharply did he meet it with a step forward and a savage axe-stroke; and the wolf sprang back just in time to save its skull.

And now, in the clutch of the final trial, Logan had an inspiration.

With all the doggedness of the backwoods will he had vowed that he would not give up the rich booty on his back. But the question had at last, as he saw, become one of giving up his own life. In this crisis, his backwoods understanding and sympathy suddenly went out toward the plucky but helpless captive in the sack on his back. It would be quite too bad that the splendid lynx, with all his fighting equipment of fangs and claws, should be torn to pieces in his bonds without a chance to make a fight for life. Moreover, as he realized with the next thought, here was perhaps a chance to create an effective diversion in his own favour.

With a shout and a mad whirling of the axe, he once more drew back the narrowing crescent of the wolves. The next instant he swung the bag from his back, ripped open the mouth of it, and emptied out the writhing roll of blanket upon the snow at his feet,--while the wolves, eyeing this new procedure with suspicion, held back a few moments before again closing in. As the bundle fell, Logan seized one corner of the blanket, and with a dexterous twist and throw unrolled it, landing the prisoner almost under the noses of the wolves.

Bewildered for an instant, the lynx had no time to bound back and scurry up the steep face of the rock to safety. He had no sooner gained his feet than the whole pack was upon him. With a screech of fury he proclaimed his understanding of the crisis, and turned every tooth and claw into the fray. His fangs, of course, were no match for those of any one of his a.s.sailants; but his claws were weapons of such quality that no single wolf could have withstood him. As it was, the wolves in their eagerness got in one another's way; and as the ma.s.s of them smothered the lynx down, more than one got eviscerating slashes that sent them yelping out of battle.

For a few breathless seconds Logan watched the fight, glowing with excited approval over his late captive's prowess. Then he realized the time had come when he must take a hand, or find himself again at a disadvantage. Silently he darted upon the screeching, growling heap with his light axe. So skilled was he in all the woodsman's sleights, that even in so brief time as takes to tell it, three more of the pack were down, kicking and dying silently on the snow. The leader of the pack, the side of his neck redly furrowed and the l.u.s.t of battle hot in his veins, wheeled, and jumped madly at Logan's throat. But the woodsman met him with a terrific short-handled upward stroke, which fairly split his ribs and hurled him over backwards. On the instant the remaining wolves, who had each suffered something in the melee, concluded that the game was up. Leaping away from the reach of those deadly-ripping claws, they turned and ran off like whipped dogs.

Bleeding from a dozen gashes, bedraggled and battered, but still full of fight to every outspread claw, the lynx crouched and glared at the man, with ears flattened back and eyes shooting pallid flame. For some seconds the two faced each other, the man grinning with approval. Then it occurred to him that the maddened beast, in despair of escape, might spring at him and compel him to strike, which, in his present sympathetic and grateful mood, he was most unwilling to do. Cautiously, keeping his eyes on the sinister flaring orbs that faced him, he took a step backwards. Still the lynx crouched, ready to spring. Then Logan spoke, in quiet expostulation.

"Don't ye go for to fight _me_, now! I never done ye no hurt!" he argued mendaciously. "It's them durn wolves, that was after the both of us; an'

it was me got ye out of that sc.r.a.pe. Don't ye come lookin' fer trouble, for I don't want to hurt ye!"

At the sound of the quiet voice, soothing yet commanding, the tension of the beast's madness seemed to relax. The fixity of his glare wavered.

Then his eyes s.h.i.+fted; and the next moment, turning with a movement so quick that the woodsman's eyes could hardly follow it, he was away like a gray shadow among the stumps and trunks, not leaping, but running belly to ground like a cat. Logan watched him out of sight, then nonchalantly put two wounded wolves out of their misery, whetted his knife on his larrigans, and settled down to the task of stripping the pelts.

When the Tide Came Over the Marshes

A perfect dome of palest blue, vapourous but luminous. To northward and southeastward a horizon line of low uplands, misty purple. Along the farthest west a glimmer and sparkle of the sea. Everywhere else, wide, wind-washed levels of marsh, pallid green or ochre yellow, cut here and there with winding tide-channels and mud-flats of glistening copper red.

Twisting this way and that in erratic curves, the unbroken, sodded lines of the d.y.k.e, fencing off the red flats and tide-channels, and dividing the green expanses of protected d.y.k.e-marsh from the ochre yellow stretches of the salt marsh, as yet but half-reclaimed from the sea.

At this autumn season the hay had all been cut and cured and most of it hauled away to safe storage in far-off, upland barns. But on the remoter and wetter marshes some of it had been piled in huge yellow-gray, cone-peaked stacks, to await the easier hauling of winter. The solitary, snug-built stacks, towering above the d.y.k.e-tops and whistled over ceaselessly by the long marsh winds, were a favoured resort of the meadow-mice. These adaptable little animals were able to endure with equanimity the inevitable annual destruction of their homes in the deep gra.s.s, seeing that the haymakers were so thoughtful as to afford them much dryer and more secure abodes in the heart of the stacks, where neither the keen-nosed fox nor the keen-eyed marsh-owl could get at them.

Past the foot of a certain lonely stack by the outer d.y.k.e, within sound of the rus.h.i.+ng tide, ran an old drainage ditch, at this time of year almost dry. Its bottom, where tiny puddles were threaded on a trickle of running water, was now a thronged resort of water-loving insects, and small frogs, and imprisoned s.h.i.+ners. To a wandering mink, driven down by drought from the uplands, it was a wonderful and delightful place, which he adopted at once as his own particular range. The main ditch, with its system of lateral feeders, furnished several miles of runway, and the whole of this rich domain the newcomer preempted, patrolling it methodically, devoting his whole attention to it, and ready to defend it against any rival claimant who might appear.

The mink was a male, about twenty inches long, with his rich dark coat in perfect condition. His pointed, sinister, quietly savage face and head were set on a long but heavy-muscled neck, almost as thick as the thickest part of his body. The body itself was altogether snake-like in its lithe sinuousness, and supported on legs so ridiculously short that when he was not leaping he seemed to writhe and dart along on his belly after the fas.h.i.+on of a snake. In spite of this shortness of the legs, however, his movements, when he had any reason for haste, were of an almost miraculous swiftness, his whole form seeming to be made up of subtle and tireless steel springs. When he did not care to writhe and dart along like a snake, he would arch his long back like a measuring-worm and go leaping over the ground in jumps of sometimes four or five feet in length. This method of progression he probably adopted for the fun of it, in the main; for his hunting tactics were usually those of stealthy advance and lightning-like attack. Once in a long while, indeed, by lucky chance he would succeed in catching in one of these wild leaps, a snipe which flew too low over the ditch or paused on hovering wing before alighting to forage on the populous ooze. Such an achievement would afford a pleasant variation to his customary diet of fish, frogs, beetles, and occasional muskrat.

The mink had been nearly three weeks on his new range, and enjoying himself hugely in his devastating way, before he observed the big yellow stack beside the ditch. It was on a day of driving rain-squalls and premature cold that he first took note of its possibilities. Gliding furtively around its base, his bright, fierce eyes detected a tiny hole, the imperfectly hidden entrance to a mouse-tunnel. He thrust in his head at once to investigate. It was a close squeeze; but where his head and neck could go his slender body could follow, and he dearly loved the exploring of just such narrow pa.s.sages.

A little way in, the tunnel branched; but the mink made no mistake. The gallery which he selected to follow ended in a mouse-nest, with the mice at home. There in the dry, warm, sweet-scented dark there was a brief tragedy, with shrill squeaks and a rustling struggle. Two mice escaped the slaughter, but the other three were caught. The invader sucked the blood of all three while they were warm, ate one, and then curled himself up for sleep in his new and delightful quarters. This stack was all that the new range needed to make it the very choicest that a mink could possess.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A SNIPE WHICH FLEW TOO LOW OVER THE DITCH."]

After this the mink occupied the stack in bad weather, but ranged the ditches, as usual, when it was pleasant. The stack was full of mouse-galleries, and when he wanted a change he hunted mice. But it was the outdoor, wide-ranging life that best contented him, so the mice were by no means all driven out. Being a happy-go-lucky tribe, the survivors continued to occupy their nests in spite of their terrible new neighbour, trusting that doom would overlook them.

But neither men nor mice nor minks can be prepared against all the caprices of Nature. That fall, Nature suddenly took it into her head to try the d.y.k.es, of which the men had for a generation or more been so boastful. She rolled in from the sea a succession of tremendous tides, backing them up with a mighty and unrelenting wind out of the southwest, and piled the tide-channels to the brim with buffeting floods. For a time the d.y.k.es withstood the a.s.sault valiantly. But again and again, ever fiercer and fiercer, came the besieging tides; and finally they made a breach. In rushed a red and foaming torrent, devouring the clay walls on either side with a roar, and drowning the long-protected d.y.k.e-marsh under a seething chaos of muddy waves and debris.

The first breach occurred at daybreak; and the stack stood right in the way. The huge flood poured in in angry glory, almost blood-red in the first gush of a blazing crimson sunrise. In that unnatural and terrifying light, which swiftly softened to a mocking delicacy of pink and lilac, the stack was torn from its foundations and borne revolving up the tide.

The nest of the mink, being low in the stack, was promptly flooded, driving the angry tenant out. He ran up to the dry top of the stack, and surveyed the wild scene with surprise. Water, of course, had no terrors for him; but this tumultuous flood seemed a good thing to keep out of.

He would stay by his refuge for the present, at least. Meanwhile, there were mice!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MADLY JOYOUS, HE KILLED, AND KILLED, AND KILLED, FOR THE JOY OF KILLING."]

The mice, indeed, panic-stricken and forced from their lower nests, were fairly swarming in the top of the stack. The mink first satiated his thirst with blood. Next he glutted his hunger with the brains of his victims. Then, seeing their numbers apparently undiminished, he got wild with excitement and blood-l.u.s.t. Darting hither and thither, madly joyous, he killed, and killed, and killed, for the joy of killing; while the stack, with its freight of terror and death, went whirling majestically along the now broader and quieter flood.