Part 15

Before sunrise I was ready for the trail. Daylight is brave stuff. The tingle in my skin was now one of joy at being alive on a hunting morning, a joy that laughs aloud at oldwives’ fables. A few winter birds, brave little northern birds, were greeting the new day cheerily; the soundless woods were beautiful beyond words; the keen air was like old wine in its effect, with this added virtue, that one could take as much exhilaration as he pleased and still remain gloriously sober. So, until night should again fall and catch me in the forest, my ancient spine and modern brain agreed that the loup-garou was a myth, but that out yonder was a wolf to challenge any man’s wind or woodcraft. Ordinarily I let wild animals alone, preferring the work of God to that of the taxidermist; but to-day some hunter was stalking in my moccasins and, to say truth, rejoicing from toe to finger tip. “Not that I love wolves less, but deer more. If I find that big brute, I will make an end of his howling and deer killing.” Thus I promised myself, slipping a heavy revolver on one side of my belt to balance an ax on the other. Then, with a touch on various pockets to be sure that compass, knife, matches and emergency ration were in place, I was off for a day in the big woods alone. There was a vague “feel” of coming change in the air; later I noticed that deer or birds were foretelling a storm; but the sun rose on as sweet a tracking morning as heart could wish.

On the day before this hunt I had been fishing through the ice; and the first leg of my present course took me northward along my incoming snowshoe trail as far as a certain lake, halfway to my fishing ground. From the lake I would follow a wolf runway till I came near the ridge where, as I judged, the loup-garou had been howling. I was resolved to pay no heed to any other trail than his; but hardly had I entered the woods when I noticed the fresh track of a wolf beside my own of yesterday. “Too small for the loup-garou,” I said at a glance; “but what is he doing here, so near my camp?”

Only the trail could answer that question; but all the trail said was that a young wolf had cat-footed through the woods till he came within sight of my camp, half buried in snow. There he stood behind a bush, evidently watching, and then loped away to the northwest.

Here was a pretty puzzle at the outset. A wolf does not approach a camp of men unless he has an extraordinary reason; I must find out what caused a wary brute to change his lifelong habit. Among wolves, as among other gregarious creatures, there are occasional hermits or outcasts whose ways are not the ways of their kind; they are less wild, more daring or more trustful than their fellows, and perhaps this cub was one of them. Luckily he had come from northward, the direction in which I was heading; I could run his back trail and pick up information without losing precious time.

My first discovery, a surprising one, was that the wolf had been following me when I came home after dark, dragging a moose sled on which were a catch of trout, a coat, a bundle of tilts, and a duffle bag of such odds and ends as fishermen carry, all snugly lashed because of the rough going. My first notion, that the hungry brute was attracted by the trout, was promptly discarded. A timber wolf might eat a fish that he found on the shore; but nothing could induce him to go near food that lay amid human belongings. A second notion, that the cub was following me with ferocious intent, was more nearly preposterous. Not even when running in a hungry pack will these northern wolves approach a man; on the contrary, they avoid him so carefully that he is lucky to catch a fleeting glimpse of them. Occasionally, when a wolf finds you in the woods at dusk, he may follow at a distance to learn who you are or what you are doing. He is like a farm dog in that he must have a look at every stranger who crosses his range; but he differs from the dog in that he gives no challenge, and is very quiet in his investigations. It was this last motive of curiosity, I thought, which had brought the wolf sniffing along the trail behind me.

The story became more fascinating as I unrolled it from the snow. For miles the cub had followed me closely, rarely coming into the trail, where I might have seen him had I turned, but keeping to one side in thick cover. When I entered camp he had hidden and watched till the smoky smells or terrifying sounds of a hungry man getting supper sent him off on the jump. Instead of retracing his course, he had headed away to the northwest, probably to rejoin his pack at a distance from where he left it.

As I ran his trail across the first lake, another little comedy came to light. The first intimation I had of it was when I saw that the cub had been digging under a bank, and went over and found--But let me tell the tale as it happened to the wolf, not as I learned it from the snow, where the end puzzled me before I had seen the beginning.

On the farther side of the lake, where yesterday I came out on the ice at nightfall, my old moose sled had threatened to go to pieces, and I had stopped to tinker it for the last stage of the journey. It was dark when I made an end of the lashing; as I went forward once more, a bit of rope that I had not used lay unnoticed beside the trail. From the nearby woods the wolf had watched me at my work, keeping hidden till I was well across the lake. Then he ventured shyly into the open, and the first thing he ran against was this queer piece of rope.

Here was a new thing, a rare thing, a thing no wolf had ever before seen; and the cub must find out about it. He studied it gingerly, thrusting out his nose, circling to the other side, till he nerved himself to give it a pull. The end squirmed like a snake, making him hop away; but in a moment he came creeping back. This time he gave the rope a shake, and a free end whipped over his head or flicked an ear, to judge by the tremendous side jump he took to escape the thing. With a sudden access of courage he pounced on his find, tussled it, whirled it up in the air, scampered hither and yon like a playing kitten. Remembering suddenly what he was following, he started after me; but after a dozen steps he went back, and came trotting along the trail with the rope in his mouth. All the way across the lake he played with it at intervals, dropping it whenever some rumor of me came to his nose or ears, but always going back to fetch it again. When I entered the woods he ran quickly to one side and buried his plaything, and then followed me to camp, growing more wary till the wood-splitting, door-slamming, pan-rattling sound of a hasty supper frightened him away.

[Illustration: “_With a sudden access of courage he pounced on his find, whirled it up in the air, scampered hither and yon like a playing kitten._”]

Still back-tracking the cub into the woods beyond the lake, I found where a pack of eight or ten wolves had crossed my snowshoe trail the evening before. They approached it warily, for either they had seen me or else I had just passed, leaving every track reeking with the man scent. Every wolf had put his nose to my footing before leaping over it. While the pack swept on for the night’s hunting, a single wolf turned to follow me, and probably had me in sight all the way to camp, keeping himself hidden in the dusk of the winter woods.

There were some big wolves in this pack, two especially; but none left a track large enough for the loup-garou. My imagination, having drawn that fellow on a grand scale, was hard to satisfy. He had howled farther to the north and east, I judged; yet there was better chance to find him with the pack at this hour than to pick up his trail by casting about the vast forest. On that chance I followed the pack, only to meet with endless difficulty. The wolves were hunting keenly, scattering in such devious fashion that I abandoned their trail with the thought that I would find them by aid of the inquisitive cub. After leaving me, you remember, he had headed away to the northwest; as I was now well north of camp, I need go only a few miles westward in order to cross his trail.

Should you be interested enough in woodcraft to ask a reason for this departure, the answer is that I wanted to get quickly to where the wolves had killed and eaten; after which it would be easier to follow them, since they grow lazy after feeding, and travel by runways instead of sweeping the whole country. It might take hours of hard trailing to find their kill; but the cub-wolf would go to it like a homing bee the moment he felt hungry. And that suggests another curious bit of animal lore (one which may be questioned, but of which I had myself no doubt), that a lone wolf always knows where his pack is feeding or resting. They may be asleep in their day bed far away, after roving uncounted miles since he left them; yet by some instinct or extra sense he seems able to go straight to them at any hour of the day or night.

Holding across the wild country, therefore, within the hour I had picked up the forward trail of my cub-wolf. As I expected, he had followed a direct course till his trail joined that of the pack, some four or five miles from my camp. Here I made two heartening discoveries: the first, that the wolves had fed and were now roaming with slow feet and heavy stomachs; the second, that they had been joined by a huge wolf that was not with them when they crossed my snowshoe trail. “The loup-garou, and a monster!” I thought exultingly as I measured his tracks, the largest I have ever found. Folding my fingers flat at the second joint, I could drop my gloved hand into the print of his forefoot; where snow was soft he sank deep as a buck at every step. Best of all, he had fed, he was logy, he must soon grow sleepy; and, O day of good luck! I had yet six hours of sunlight. Before dark I would run into that pack, and then-- The revolver butt snuggled into my hand to say that we would then know whether the loup-garou had any medicine to compare with a long-barreled, target-sighted, velvet-triggered forty-four.

There was no call to hurry; the longer the wolves slept, the more secure they would feel; so to satisfy my curiosity, and prove or disprove my notion of wolf habits, I decided to follow my cub awhile more. Instead of running with the pack, he had taken their back trail; which told me that he expected to find food.

On the ice of a little pond I found a buck stretched out. The trail said that the wolves jumped him on the ridge above, caught him after a short run, ate what they wanted, and left the rest to the foxes. Here was abundance of good meat, enough to satisfy this pack for a week or two; yet to-night or to-morrow night, preferring warm flesh to cold, they would chivvy another deer. My gorge rose at the thought; for though a hungry beast must live, one must take sides with wolf or deer in the wilderness, as he must choose between cats and birds in his home orchard. If any excuse were needed for the joy of hunting, it seemed a desirable thing, like poetic justice, to lay this buck and the wolf that killed him side by side when the day was done.

From the pond I swung away rapidly after the pack, expecting to be near enough for a stalk within an hour or two; but had a man been hunting merely for heads or skins, the trail would have spelled hope, vexation and heartbreak in quick succession. For a time the wolves roamed lazily, but not aimlessly. They had in mind a day bed near the scene of the next hunting (wolves do not harry the same ground two nights in succession), and though they were constantly making detours, following an easy runway between hills or seeking a safe crossing of swift water, they held a westward direction as true as a compass. I was glad of that course, because it might bring me near a chain of lakes where I had a snowshoe trail, one that I could follow homeward after dark if need be. To the south also the lay of the land was familiar; but northward stretched a wild country which I had never entered.

The trail of a wolf pack is never a dull trail, and at first I gave myself up to full enjoyment of it, here puzzling over a record that I could not understand, there finding another so typical that at times I seemed to be trailing a band of roving dogs. Wolves do not blunder through a region; they are alive and inquisitive every moment, the youngsters especially. In this pack the loup-garou and a big female held together (it was the end of winter, near the mating season), while the cubs and yearlings were continually going off on side tours of investigation. To follow these excursions, learning what pleased or puzzled the intelligent brutes, was part of the fun of trailing; yes, and a better part than pushing blindly ahead, intent on a shot or a killing. I must give the wolves this credit, too, that though they crossed the deep paths of a deer yard, they made no attempt to harry the game. They rarely do so unless they are hungry, or unless (near settlements) they run into a herd of foolish domestic animals that do not know enough to scatter or be quiet when wolves appear.

So the pleasant trail ran on through the big woods, wonderfully white and still, and suddenly headed for a sheltered spot on a ridge overlooking a wide stretch of country. My heart jumped when I saw that spot, and the trail turning to its cover. It was an ideal place for wolves to “lie up” for the day; after testing the air, I approached the nest from leeward as stealthily as a hunting fox. It was empty; worse than that, it had not been occupied even for a moment’s halt. No sooner did the wolves enter the perfect cover than all the imps of uneasiness flew to their backs and drove them on. The trail was cold, showing no sign of alarm; but it said that the pack had shaken off laziness and was going somewhere without delay.

No more easy trailing now, and no more side excursions to learn what the cubs had been doing. The wolves headed into rough country northward; for miles I followed them where never a man went before, I think, and where no sensible man would go again. Only once have I experienced anything to compare with it and that was when I followed a bear that was making for his winter den through a foot of new-fallen snow. The bear had seen me, and took to rough country, knowing that I was hot on his trail; but all these cold signs said that the wolves were making medicine here while I was making coffee far away. In some uncanny way they seemed to have received a “tip” that they would be followed on this one day of all the year, and had laid out a trail that must break an enemy’s wind or heart. “Oh, that’s the loup-garou, all right,” I thought; “and some cunning devil is surely his master, as old books say. What else would lead this gorged pack to forsake its way of easy traveling and go through a breakneck country like this?”

For hours the trail held to broken ground, telling its lively tale. When the wolves drew near a steep hill or a stiff cobble, instead of rounding it by an easy runway they would corkscrew up one side and tumble down the other. In one place they would climb a sharp pitch like goats; in another, with discouraging ease, they would crouch under a ledge and take it with a catlike spring. When they topped ridge or hill, the leader would pick out a smooth pitch, sit on his tail, and slide down the other side, leaving a chute in the snow which might be ten or thirty feet long, and steep as a church roof. Here a few of the wolves might select individual slides; as a rule, they sat on their tails and tobogganed down after the leader.

To follow them in such places (warily, because the pack might be jumped at any moment) you had to rise on tiptoe, driving moccasins down through toe-holes in the snowshoe webs for a grip on the slippery incline, and make use of every bush or root to give yourself a helpful upward pull. When you reached the top and made cautious survey, you had to take off snowshoes and slide or scramble down the wolf chute. Meanwhile the thermometer was near zero, and you wished it were lower, for a little of this kind of work left you hot as a haymaker. Your wind-proof coat was tied in a snug bundle at your back; you were gloveless, in shirt-sleeves, and still too warmly dressed. When you stopped to breathe after a tough climb, the keen air promptly chilled you to the bone.

What between laborious ups and breathless downs, the afternoon passed all too quickly away; the last precious hour of daylight struck, and still there was no sign to indicate how far ahead the wolves might be resting. The trail was still cold, calling for haste if one expected to run into the pack; yet calling also for alertness, since the next step might bring one into sense range of the keenest of wild animals. A wolf may sleep, but never his ears or his nose; that is the fascination of trailing him to his day bed.

I was resting on the crest of a ridge, the trail stretching northward along the summit, when a gloom swept over the woods, as if they had been brushed by a cloud. Then a breeze stirred, making moan in the evergreens, and a snowstorm came creeping up from the south. In a moment my good luck was changed; the wind had turned behind me while the game was still ahead, and one might as well climb after a squirrel as to stalk a wolf pack from windward.

“No use! this loup-garou is too much for you,” I told myself, almost ready to acknowledge his superior medicine or magic. Ordinarily I might have been homeward bound with a wolf skin on my back at this hour; but now, empty handed, I must find a sheltered spot, build a “Commoosie” and gather wood for a night’s fire. Somewhere to the westward was a snowshoe trail; but a storm was coming, the country was strange, and to find the trail or retrace my course before dark was out of the question. Yes, I must spend the night here; but first, as a man waits another hopeful minute after a poor day’s fishing, I would run the trail a little farther.

That was a fortunate last-minute decision. I had followed the ridge only a few steps when I saw the face of a pond far below on my left, and recognized it as one I had crossed when a wolf pack led me a long chase hither from a different direction. No cheerless night for me now, and no more climbing every heartbreak hill between here and camp! The trail had borne more to the westward than I thought; the pond below was near a chain of lakes, and from it I could quickly reach my snowshoe trail and easy traveling.

The wooded ridge on which I stood had a sharp drop of twenty yards toward the pond. Along the foot of this drop grew clumps of bushes (of the dwarf-laurel family, I think), bearing shiny green leaves that appeared very beautiful when all other leaves were dead under the snow; and below that was an immense hillside stretching down to the valley. The wolves had slid down the first pitch, and turned sharp to the north again, still keeping to the heights, seeking even rougher country before calling halt for the day. So I judged, my eyes following the tireless trail, which went weaving in and out of the laurel bushes. That thicket yonder was a good wolf nest, excellent; but so were twenty others I had found empty that day; and see, a trail going out on the farther side!

As I stole along the summit, scanning the cover below in lingering hope, a snowflake touched my cheek with unmistakable warning. Others came whirling among the trees, like little white birds seeking a place to light; the great valley at my feet began to fill and darken. “No time to lose,” I thought; “not a minute, if I am to reach camp before this storm gets too thick to see through it. So, till next time, loup-garou! You have given me a great hunt; but I wish I could have seen your eyes.” Then I took off my snowshoes, picked a smooth pitch with a snowdrift below, and went down like a shot.

That was a short slide, hardly more than a second; but it was crammed full of surprises and wild emotions. Before it fairly started I had a startling glimpse of something big and gray popping above the laurels, like a jack-in-a-box. Another and another gray thing flew up and down. As each topped the cover I had instantaneous picture of a convulsed body with dangling legs, above which gleaming white fangs and fierce eyes were turned in my direction. Every wolf in the pack must have leaped straight up from his sleep, so as to look clear of the bushes and see what was coming. When I struck the drift with the rumble of a small avalanche, the landscape was full of wolves, some jumping up wildly to see, others streaking away through the woods like scared cats.