Chapter XIII: Winter Comes with the 'wavies'

The loss of Tony was a loss which the whole ranche felt. Had he died in the full swing of work, the machine must almost have broken down. But Toby never wanted his spell of rest except when there was nothing much to do, and he had chosen to take his 'big spell of rest' in the same way. Still, even in the winter season, his loss made a great deal of difference to Snap. With Tony the ranche was full-handed, and the boy was really more or less superfluous. Now he had his hands full. There was a man's place to supply, and he worked hard and uncomplainingly to fill it. There are a thousand things to be done about a ranche in winter: cattle to feed and water, wood to hew, repairs about the ranche which want attending to, supplies to be fetched from the nearest town. At all these things Snap took his turn. No one cares to turn out first in the morning with a bitter frost outside and make up the fire for the benefit of the rest. Even strong, hard men will lie watching to see if someone else won't volunteer, and hug themselves for their smartness when someone else turns out before them, so that they may get up in the glow of a fire which others have made. The 'boys' might well have insisted on Snap's doing this, but he was popular, and no one fagged him. They knew he was a good plucked one, so nobody bullied him. That being so, Snap set himself the work to do, and nine mornings out of ten it was Snap who raked up the ashes and blew the fire into a blaze, who woke the sleepers with a joke, and had coffee ready for the elder men. It was Snap, too, who sang the best song round the wood-fire at night; and be sure there was nothing that went straighter to the hearts of the cowboys than his fresh young voice rattling out the well-remembered words of 'The Hounds of the Meynell' or Whyte Melville's 'Place where the old Horse died.'

Some of the boys had never been in England, and knew nothing of fox-hunting, but all loved a good horse and entered heartily into the spirit of the song. And so it was that in the early morning, and late in the fire-lit evening, Snap won his way to his companions' favour. Though gently bred, they recognised him as being not only game to the backbone, but ready and willing to do a man's work. That once understood, they were his friends through thick and thin, always ready to teach him anything, to make room for him in a hunting-party, or to chaff his head off if he made a hash of either work or play. By spring Snap was in a fair way to be a useful hand upon the ranche.

And now winter was coming down upon Rosebud in real earnest. The first 'cold snap,' as it is called, had caught our friends as they crossed the Rockies, and, intensified by the height at which they were travelling, had seemed very bitter indeed. After the cold snap, which only lasted from a week to ten days, came as it were an aftermath of summer, a second season of sunshine and delight, which the natives call the Indian summer. Snap began to think that the severities of a Canadian winter were all bunkum, invented as a background for all the terrible stories of the fur-traders of old days. This Indian summer was just the loveliest October weather which a healthy man could wish for, a little crisper and keener at night than our own Octobers, but in the day so bright, so clear, so sunny, that life (however hard the work) seemed to go to dance-music all day long. Later on, however, there began to be signs of a change. One by one and in little groups all the cattle had come in of their own accord from the distant ranges. Some of them had been feeding above the foot-hills on the sweet grass of the mountain slopes, where in two months' time even the bighorn would not be able to exist. As Snap rode out to shoot for the pot, or on any work about the ranche, he would meet fresh companies of them, feeding slowly downhill towards the low land and the river bottoms. They were in no hurry, picking the tenderest 'feed' as they strolled along, and camping every night wherever they happened to find themselves, but still pressing steadily on to the warmer lands below. As the beasts stopped and stared at the boy with great, solemn, brown eyes of inquiry, he used to wonder at them at least as much as they at him. How came it, he thought, that they knew the bitter white winter was coming, although the sun was still so bright, and the uplands flooded with golden light? Who told them? or did they remember from the years before?

Nature, too, had put on her last robe but one. In a month, save for the dark green of the funereal pines, it would be white everywhere. Now, just for a season, there was colour everywhere as bright as rainbow tints, and as short-lived. The maples were clear gold or vivid crimson; the sugar maples often showing both colours side by side in one gracefully pointed leaf. The hazels were red and gold, or, like the long oval leaves of the sumach-bush, had already turned from brilliant lake to a dull, blackish purple. They were all ready to drop and die, but their death would be as beautiful and becoming as their birth in spring-time, when birds were mating and woods a tender green, or as their life among the flowers and cool, green shadows of the luxurious summer.

As Snap lay awake at night he heard far up among the stars the clang, it seemed to him, of trumpets, as if an army passed by to battle; or, again, a strange, solemn cry, not from quite such a height, smote his ear: 'honk, honk, ha, ha,' it seemed to say--a strange, unearthly call, from things passing and unseen.

At morning, too, before dawn, he heard these cries, and a strange, swift, whistling sound would rush over the roof of the log-house. The sky seemed haunted in these late autumn days. One morning as the mists rose Snap got a glimpse of these passing armies of the air. Far away up in the clouds was a great V-shaped body of birds, the point of the V a single swan cleaving his way westward from his summer haunts in the Arctic Circle to the warmer regions of British Columbia and the mud-flats of the mouth of the Frazer River. On other days he saw Canada geese in thousands, and snow geese (or wavies) in hundreds of thousands, all passing on the same great high-road from Hudson Bay to the West.

'Snap,' said old Wharton one morning, 'hurry up, I've just seen a gang of wavies go up the crik, flying pretty low down. I reckon they aren't going far, and young wavy is mighty good eating.'

Snap was not long getting the big duck-gun down from its peg on the beam, nor long in loading it with a great charge of shot as big as small peas.

'It ain't like shooting quail, you see,' said Wharton, 'these wavies want almost as much killing as a grizzly.'

'What are you going to take, Dick?' asked Snap.

'Oh, I'll just take the Winchester,' replied his friend; 'you let me have the first cut at them with a ball, and then as they get up let 'em have both barrels of your blunderbuss right in the thick of them.'

'All right, come along,' urged Snap.

'No hurry, my boy; they have come a longish way, those wavies, and I guess they'll take a goodish time lunching on them mud-flats and beaver meadows,' replied his less excitable companion, whose eyes nevertheless gleamed with all the excitement of a genuine wild-fowler.

By-and-by, as the two hurried down the river-bed, they could hear a loud and excited gabbling, a thousand geese all talking at once.

'Talking like senators,' muttered old Dick; 'one would think they were paid for the job, but I expect as they've seen some country to talk about in the last day or two, between this and Hudson.'

'Last two or three days! why, how fast do they fly, Dick?' whispered Snap.

'Wal,' replied he, 'I guess I never travelled with them much, but I should say about sixty miles more or less an hour, and they'll keep it up too; but dry up now, for the cunning varmint put out regular scouts, and they'll hear us talking a quarter of a mile off.'

Round the mud-flats and hollows which the geese were on was a fringe of brush and reeds. Through this the two gunners forced their way. As they did so the gabbling ceased as if by magic.

'Quick, quick,' whispered Wharton, pressing forward, and as they reached the edge Snap caught a glimpse of a huge bunch of geese, all drawn together on a little bare island in the stream, their long necks stretched to the utmost, their whole attitude one of suspicion and anxiety, and the wings of one or two of them half lifted for flight. Old Dick's rifle rang out the signal for them to go--all but two, that is to say--for the old man's bullet stopped the wanderings of two of them for ever. As they rose in a cloud Snap clapped the big gun to his shoulder and let drive amongst them.

'Not bad, my boy,' cried Wharton, 'but why in thunder don't you shoot again? Hulloa! well, I am sugared, ha, ha, ha!' laughed the old man as, turning round, he saw Snap slowly picking himself up out of a mud-hole in which he had lately lain full length. 'Why, does that gun kick,' continued Wharton, 'or what's the matter? How much had it in it, I wonder?'

'Well,' replied Snap, 'I put about three and a half drams of powder and a good lot of shot into it, but I've fired as big a charge before at home.'

'You put a charge in, did you?' asked Dick; 'then that explains it, because I put one in too when you went back into the house for caps. I didn't know as you'd loaded her. No wonder she kicked; the wonder is that she didn't bust.'

Remembering the charge which he had put in for the benefit of the geese, Snap quite agreed with his friend, and, rubbing his shoulder somewhat ruefully, proceeded to collect the dead. Five geese lay outstretched on the mud island, one with his head cut clean off by Wharton's bullet, and another knocked into a cocked hat by the same missile. Three were Snap's birds, and three or four more 'winged' ones were scattered about on the stream and river-banks.

Having retrieved these, they turned home, well loaded and highly pleased with themselves. On the way back Snap noticed two more geese floating down with the stream, close under the bank. In spite of the kick he had received from his gun at the last discharge, Snap could not resist the temptation to bag another brace, and was creeping up for a shot when Wharton stopped him with:

'Hold hard, you've shot them birds once; they are both winged birds, and if we can catch 'em alive they will be worth a lot to us.'

It was soon evident that Wharton was right, for, though the geese saw their enemies and tried to hide their heads under the opposite bank, they could not rise from the water. And then began a chase which wore out Dick's temper and Snap's wind before it was over. Although the men plunged into the water, and kept both sides of the stream guarded, they couldn't for the life of them get hold of the wily ganders, who flapped and swam, dodging cleverly, or hissing with outstretched necks and angry yellow eyes, unceasingly. When they had caught them at last it was late in the afternoon, and by the time they had gone back to fetch the dead geese which they had abandoned during the chase, and walked with them to the ranche, it was already getting dark. As they left the river a whistling sound overhead made them look up.

'More geese,' said Wharton: 'I guess they're making for them mud-flats too--please the pigs, we'll have a good time to-morrow evening.'

And so they had for a good many evenings, the two winged geese being used as decoys, and Snap and Wharton (the latter now armed with a gun) being hidden carefully in reedy ambushes hard by. It was intensely exciting work, sitting there waiting until one of the many legions of birds which passed incessantly overhead lowered to the water on which the decoy sat. At first Snap could make nothing of the shooting, and, to tell the truth, Wharton was not a bit better. He wasn't used, he said, 'to these blessed scatter-guns,' which 'weren't of no account alongside of a rifle.' If a single duck came along, Snap never hit it. If a long string passed over him, and he fired at the leading bird, sometimes nothing happened, but oftener the fourth or fifth bird, at an interval of several yards, came down with a thump, gratifying to the pot-hunter, but not complimentary to the young gunner, who felt that he had missed his mark by as many yards as there were birds in front of the one which he bagged. After a good deal of practice he began to learn not only how far to shoot in front of the swift-flying birds, but how to swing with them, _i.e._ to keep his gun moving as he fired. Being younger than Wharton, and having shot a little at home, he soon learnt to beat the old man, who, if he could possibly help it, would not waste powder on a flying shot at all.

What most astonished Snap in this wonderful migration was that all the birds killed in the first day or two were young birds. Later on, flocks of old ones began to arrive, but all the advance guard, as it were, of the bird army, whether wavies or brent, swans or duck, were birds of that season only; birds who had never, could never, have travelled that road before. 'It is wonderful enough,' thought Snap, 'to see the cattle all come wandering in with no one to drive them from the pastures, which will soon be all snow and ice; it is wonderful that the birds should know that winter is coming, and be able to find their way from the bleak, frost-bound north to the more genial climates in which they winter; but that the bird-babies, born this summer only, should lead the way, is most wonderful of all. They can't remember! Who is it who leads them?' And, so thinking, the boy lay down to rest, and the loud clanging of the swans, and the call of the geese, and sharp whistling of the ducks' wings all told the same story, and if even a sparrow can't fall to the ground without His knowing, Snap thought he didn't fear the future so long as the One who guided the swans through the night and the darkness would guide him too.

This migration, which took place in November, lasted only a week or ten days, though a few late detachments kept passing perhaps for a week after the main body had gone over.

There were ten 'wavies,' or snow-geese, for every other bird which passed, and next to them in number were the Canadian geese and brent. The brent we know at home, or at least all dwellers by the shore know him, for he is the chief object of the punt-gunner's pursuit, and was at one time so common in England that up in Lancashire, where they thought he grew from the barnacles which cover ships' bottoms and breakwaters, a brace of brent were sold for three-pence. If he was as good then as a corn-fed Canada goose is now, I should like to have lived in those days, but I fancy he never was so dainty a bird as his Canadian cousin. The wavy, or snow-goose, is so numerous that the Canadian Acts of Parliament, which protect all other ducks and geese, leave this poor fellow unprotected; but then the snow-goose is like the sands on the sea-shore for number, and most of the year he dwells either in the frozen North or on Siberian tundras where gunners can't get at him.

He is a handsome bird, the snow-goose, and the older he gets the handsomer he is. As a youngster he is white all over, except his head and the tips of his wings, his head being yellowish-red and his wing-tips black. As he grows older his head grows whiter, until at last there is nothing to mark him out from the icebergs and snow amongst which his life is passed, except those two or three black feathers in his wing.

The Canada goose is almost as black as his fellow-traveller is white; a dark, smart-looking, and jauntily moving bird, not much unlike a brent, with a neat white collar round his neck.

These two species, together with swans of two sorts, 'trumpeters' and 'whistlers,' and half a dozen kinds of duck--widgeon and shoveller, pochard, pintail, and wood-duck--kept Snap, gun and mind, busy for a fortnight, and if the bag was not always heavy the pleasure was great, for Snap was what every really good sportsman is, more a naturalist than a mere shooter, and loved to watch the birds, even though they never came within range.

One evening the darkness came on without even a single wing to break the stillness. As he came down to the 'hide,' as his ambuscade was called, he put up one of those quaintly-named little ducks, a 'buffle-headed butter-ball,' but, disdaining to fire at this, he never fired a shot all night.

It was the final warning that winter was coming at last. Next day the clouds were low and yellow. Towards evening the big flakes came floating down. Next morning the world was white from river to mountain-top. The pines were snow-plumed, the rivers frost-bound; a bitter cold seemed to sting you as you put your face out of doors; the whole five blankets and the rug were wanted above you at night. Winter had come!