Chapter III (2)

With a leisurely zest which turned Mahoney sick, the monster guzzled its meal, then swam up and nosed inquiringly along the fringe of barnacles. Nothing there seeming to interest him, he turned with a disdainful sweep of his huge flukes and bored his way slowly downwards toward the unknown deep whence he had so mysteriously come. Unstirring, held fast as if in a hideous dream, Mahoney watched the dull gray-black form grow green, and spectral, and faint till at last it vanished. For a brief space he continued to stare after it, picturing it in his fevered imagination when it had sunk far beyond any reach of sight. At last, as if tearing himself free from a horrid spell, he drew a long breath and lifted his eyes to the horizon.

There, in full view, but too far away to notice such a speck among the waves as Mahoney on his bit of wreck, was a small freight-boat, steaming past at a leisurely pace. Mahoney was himself in an instant. He realized that the sawfish had freed him from his dreadful jailer. With his knife between his teeth he dived beneath the upturned sloop and fell to cutting ropes and lashings with a cool but savage haste. In half a minute he reappeared, gasping, but not discouraged. After two or three deep breaths he dived again, and this time when he came up, he brought the long slender pole of the gaff with him. With frantic eagerness he hoisted the white pennon of his shirt and coat, thanking Heaven that the gaff was so long. He was about to lash the pole to the bulwarks with his belt, when he remembered that there was not wind enough to run out the signal. Lifting it in both hands as high as he could, he waved the flag wildly over his head in great arcs and sudden violent dips. Would the lookout on the steamer see? Or seeing, would he understand? Mahoney felt his strength suddenly failing, as a wave of despair sucked up at his heart. It was all he could do to keep the signal moving. Then, at last, he saw that the long line of the steamer's broadside was shortening. Yes,--she was coming, she was coming. Tremblingly, with fingers that fumbled, he lashed the staff to the bulwark, and sank panting upon the deck.

A Stranger to the Wild

As the vessel, a big three-masted schooner, struck again and lurched forward, grinding heavily, she cleared the reef by somewhat more than half her length. Then her back broke. The massive swells, pounding upon her from the rear, overwhelmed her stern and crushed it down inescapably upon the rock; and her forward half, hanging in ten fathoms, began to settle sickeningly into the loud hiss and chaos. Around the reef, around the doomed schooner, the lead-coloured fog hung thick, impenetrable at half a ship's length. Her crew, cool, swift, ready,--they were Gaspe and New Brunswick fishermen, for the most part,--kept grim silence, and took the sharp orders that came to them like gunshots through the din. The boats were cleared away forward, where the settling of the bow gave some poor shelter.

At this moment the fog lifted, vanishing swiftly like a breath from the face of a mirror. Straight ahead, not two miles away, loomed a high, black, menacing shore--black, scarred rock, with black woods along its crest and a sharp, white line of surf shuddering along its base. Between that shore and the shattered schooner lay many other reefs, whereon the swells boiled white and broke in dull thunder; but off to the southward was clear water, and safety for the boats. At a glance the captain recognized the land as a cape on the south coast of the Gaspe peninsula, so far from her course had the doomed schooner been driven. Five minutes more, and the loaded boats, hurled up from the seething caldron behind the reef, swung out triumphantly on a long, oil-dark swell, and gained the comparative safety of the open. Hardly had they done so when the broken bow of the schooner, with a final rending of timbers, settled in what seemed like a sudden hurry, pitched nose downward into the smother, and sank with a huge, startling sigh. The rear half of the hull was left lodged upon the reef, a kind of gaping cavern, with the surf plunging over it in cataracts, and a mad mob of boxes, bales, and wine-casks tumbling out from its black depths.

Presently the torrent ceased. Then, in the yawning gloom, appeared the head and fore-quarters of a white horse, mane streaming, eyes starting with frantic terror at the terrific scene that met them. The vision sank back instantly into the darkness. A moment later a vast surge, mightier than any which had gone before, engulfed the reef. Its gigantic front lifted the remnant of the wreck half-way across the barrier, tipping it forward, and letting it down with a final shattering crash; and the white horse, hurled violently forth, sank deep into the tumult behind the reef.

The schooner which had fallen on such sudden doom among the St. Lawrence reefs had sailed from Oporto with a cargo, chiefly wine, for Quebec. Driven far south of her course by a terrific northeaster roaring down from Labrador, she had run into a fog as the wind fell, and been swept to her fate in the grip of an unknown tide-drift. On board, as it chanced, travelling as an honoured passenger, was a finely bred, white Spanish stallion of Barb descent, who had been shipped to Canada by one of the heads of the great house of Robin, those fishing-princes of Gaspe. When the vessel struck, and it was seen that her fate was imminent and inevitable, the captain had loosed the beautiful stallion from his stall, that at the last he might at least have a chance to fight his own fight for life. And so it came about that, partly through his own agile alertness, partly by the singular favour of fortune, he had avoided getting his slim legs broken in the hideous upheaval and confusion of the wreck.

When the white stallion came to the surface, snorting with terror and blowing the salt from his wide nostrils, he struck out desperately, and soon cleared the turmoil of the breakers. Over the vast, smooth swells he swam easily, his graceful, high head out of water. But at first, in his bewilderment and panic, he swam straight seaward. In a few moments, however, as he saw that he seemed to be overcoming disaster very well, his wits returned, and the nerve of his breeding came to his aid. Keeping on the crest of a roller, he surveyed the situation keenly, observed the land, and noted the maze of reefs that tore the leaden surges into tumult. Instead of heading directly shoreward, therefore,--for every boiling whiteness smote him with horror,--he shaped his course in on a long slant, where the way seemed clear.

Once well south of the loud herd of reefs, he swam straight inshore, until the raving and white convulsion of the surf along the base of the cliff again struck terror into his heart; and again he bore away southward, at a distance of about three hundred yards outside the breakers. Strong, tough-sinewed, and endowed with the unfailing wind of his far-off desert ancestors, he was not aware of any fatigue from his long swim. Presently, rounding a point of rock which thrust a low spur out into the surges, he came into a sheltered cove where there was no surf. The long waves rolled on past the point, while in the cove there was only a measured, moderate rise and fall of the gray water, like a quiet breathing, and only a gentle back-wash fringed the black-stoned, weedy beach with foam. At the head of the cove a shallow stream, running down through a narrow valley, emptied itself between two little red sand-spits.

Close beside the stream the white stallion came ashore. As soon as his feet were quite clear of the uppermost fringe of foam, as soon as he stood on ground that was not only firm, but dry, he shook himself violently, tossed his fine head with a whinny of exultation, and turned a long look of hate and defiance upon the element from which he had just made his escape. Then at a determined trot he set off up the valley, eager to leave all sight and sound of the sea as far as possible behind him.

Reared as he had been on the windy and arid plateau of Northern Spain, the wanderer was filled with great loneliness in these dark woods of fir and spruce. An occasional maple in its blaze of autumn scarlet, or a clump of white birch in shimmering, aerial gold, seen unexpectedly upon the heavy-shadowed green, startled him like a sudden noise. Nevertheless, strange though they were, they were trees, and so not altogether alien to his memory. And the brook, with its eddying pools and brawling, shallow cascades, that seemed to him a familiar, kindly thing. It was only the sea that he really feared and hated. So long as he was sure he was putting the huge surges and loud reefs farther and farther behind him, he felt a certain measure of content as he pushed onward deeper and deeper into the serried gloom and silence of the spruce woods. At last, coming to a little patch of brook-side meadow where the grass kept short and sweet and green even at this late season, he stopped his flight, and fell to pasturing.

Late in the afternoon, the even gray mass of cloud which for days had veiled the sky thinned away and scattered, showing the clear blue of the north. The sun, near setting, sent long rays of cheerful light down the narrow valley, bringing out warm, golden bronzes in the massive, dull green of the fir and spruce and hemlock, and striking sharp flame on the surfaces of the smooth pools. Elated by the sudden brightness, the white stallion resumed his journey at a gallop, straight toward the sunset, his long mane and tail, now dry, streaming out on the light afternoon breeze that drew down between the hills. He kept on up the valley till the sun went down, and then, in the swiftly deepening twilight, came to a little grassy point backed by a steep rock. Here where the rippling of the water enclosed him on three sides, and the rock, with a thick mass of hemlocks, surmounting it, shut him in on the fourth, he felt more secure, less desolate, than when surrounded by the endless corridors of the forest; and close to the foot of the rock he lay down, facing the mysterious gloom of the trees across the stream.

Just as he was settling himself, a strange voice, hollow yet muffled, cried across the open space "_Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo!_" and he bounded to his feet, every nerve on the alert. He had never in his life before heard the voice of the great horned owl, and his apprehensive wonder was excusable. Again and yet again came the hollow call out of the deep dark of the banked woods opposite. As he stood listening tensely, eyes and nostrils wide, a bat flitted past his ears, and he jumped half around, with a startled snort. The ominous sound, however, was not repeated, and in a couple of minutes he lay down again, still keeping watchful eyes upon the dark mass across the stream. Then, at last, a broad-winged bird, taking shape softly above the open, as noiseless as a gigantic moth, floated over him, and looked down upon him under his rock with round, palely luminous eyes. By some quick intuition he knew that this visitor was the source of the mysterious call. It was only a bird, after all, and no great thing in comparison with the eagles of his own Pyrenean heights. His apprehensions vanished, and he settled himself to sleep.

Worn out with days and nights of strain and terror, the exile slept soundly. Soon, under the crisp autumn starlight, a red fox crept down circumspectly to hunt mice in the tangled dry grasses of the point. At sight of the strange white form sleeping carelessly at the foot of the rock he bounded back into cover, startled quite out of his philosophic composure. He had never before seen any such being as that; and the smell, too, was mysterious and hostile to his wrinkling fastidious nostrils. Having eyed the newcomer for some time from his hiding-place under the branches, he crept around the rock and surveyed him stealthily from the other side. Finding no enlightenment, or immediate prospect of it, he again drew back, and made a careful investigation of the stranger's tracks, which were quite unlike the tracks of any creature he knew. Finally he made up his mind that he must confine his hunting to the immediate neighbourhood, keeping the stranger under surveillance till he could find out more about him.

Soon after the fox's going a tuft-eared lynx came out on the top of the rock, and with round, bright, cruel eyes glared down upon the grassy point, half-hoping to see some rabbits playing there. Instead, she saw the dim white bulk of the sleeping stallion. In her astonishment at this unheard-of apparition, her eyes grew wider and whiter than before, her hair stood up along her back, her absurd little stub of a tail fluffed out to a fussy pompon, and she uttered a hasty, spitting growl as she drew back into the shelter of the hemlocks. In the dreaming ears of the sleeper this angry sound was only a growl of the seas which had for days been clamouring about the gloom of his stall on the ship. It disturbed him not at all.

At about two o'clock in the morning, at that mystic hour when Nature seems to send a message to all her animate children, preparing them for the advent of dawn, the white stallion got up, shook himself, stepped softly down to the brook's edge for a drink, and then fell to cropping the grass wherever it remained green. The forest, though to a careless ear it might have seemed as silent as before, had in reality stirred to a sudden, ephemeral life. Far off, from some high rock, a she-fox barked sharply. Faint, muffled chirps from the thick bushes told of junkos and chickadees waking up to see if all was well with the world. The mice set up a scurrying in the grass. And presently a high-antlered buck stepped out of the shadows and started across the open toward the brook.

The dark buck, himself a moving shadow, saw the stallion first, and stopped with a loud snort of astonishment and defiance. The stallion wheeled about, eyed the intruder for a moment doubtfully, then trotted up with a whinny of pleased interrogation. He had no dread of the antlered visitor, but rather a hope of companionship in the vast and overpowering loneliness of the alien night.

The buck, however, was in anything but a friendly mood. His veins aflame with the arrogant pugnacity of the rutting season, he saw in the white stranger only a possible rival, and grew hot with rage at his approach. With an impatient stamping of his slim fore hoofs, he gave challenge. But to the stallion this was an unknown language. Innocently he came up, his nose stretched out in question, till he was within a few feet of the motionless buck. Then, to his astonishment, the latter bounced suddenly aside like a ball, stood straight up on his hind legs, and struck at him like lightning with those keen-edged, slim fore hoofs. It was a savage assault, and two long, red furrows--one longer and deeper than the other--appeared on the stallion's silky, white flank.

In that instant the wanderer's friendliness vanished, and an avenging fury took its place. His confidence had been cruelly betrayed. With a harsh squeal, his mouth wide open and lips drawn back from his formidable teeth, he sprang at his assailant. But the buck had no vain idea of standing up against this whirlwind of wrath which he had evoked. He bounded aside, lightly but hurriedly, and watched for an opportunity to repeat his attack.

The stallion, however, was not to be caught again; and the dashing ferocity of his rushes kept his adversary ceaselessly on the move, bounding into the air and leaping aside to avoid those disastrous teeth. The buck was awaiting what he felt sure would come, the chance to strike again; and his confidence in his own supreme agility kept him from any apprehension as to the outcome of the fight.

But the buck's great weakness lay in his ignorance, his insufficient knowledge of the game he was playing. He had no idea that his rushing white antagonist had any other tactics at command. When he gave way, therefore, he went just far enough to escape the stallion's teeth and battering fore feet. The stallion, on the other hand, soon realized the futility of his present method of attack against so nimble an adversary. On his next rush, therefore, just as the buck bounced aside, he wheeled in a short half-circle, and lashed out high and far with his steel-shod heels. The buck was just within the most deadly range of the blow. He caught the terrific impact on the base of the neck and the forward point of the shoulder, and went down as if an explosive bullet had struck him. Before he could even stir to rise, the stallion was upon him, trampling, battering, squealing, biting madly; and the fight was done. When the wanderer had spent his vengeance, and paused, snorting and wild-eyed, to take breath, he looked down upon a mangled shape that no longer struggled or stirred or even breathed. Then the last of his righteous fury faded out. The sight and smell of the blood sickened him, and in a kind of terror he turned away. For a few hesitating moments he stared about his little retreat and then, finding it had grown hateful to him, he forsook it, and pushed onward up the edge of the stream, between the black, impending walls of the forest.

About daybreak he came out on the flat, marshy shores of a shrunken lake, the unstirred waters of which gleamed violet and pale-gold beneath the twisting coils and drifting plumes of white vapour. All around the lake stood the grim, serried lines of the firs, under a sky of palpitating opal. The marshes, in their autumn colouring of burnt gold and pinky olive, with here and there a little patch of enduring emerald, caught the wanderer's fancy with a faint reminder of home. Here was pasture, here was sweet water, here was room to get away from the oppressive mystery of the woods. He halted to rest and recover himself; and in the clear, tonic air, so cold that every morning the edges of the lake were crisped with ice, the aching red gashes on his flank speedily healed.

He had been at the lake about ten days, and was beginning to grow restlessly impatient of the unchanging solitude, before anything new took place. A vividly conspicuous object in his gleaming whiteness as he roamed the marshes, pasturing or galloping up and down the shore with streaming mane and tail, he had been seen and watched and wondered at by all the wild kindreds who had their habitations in the woods about the lake. But they had all kept carefully out of his sight, regarding him with no less terror than wonder; and he imagined himself utterly alone, except for the fish-hawks, and the southward journeying ducks, which would drop with loud quacking and splashing into the shallows after sunset, and the owls, the sombre hooting of which disturbed him every night. Several times, too, from the extreme head of the lake he heard a discordant call, a great braying bellow, which puzzled him, and brought him instantly to his feet by a note of challenge in it; but the issuer of this hoarse defiance never revealed himself. Sometimes he heard a similar call, with a difference--a longer, less harshly blatant cry, the under note of which was one of appeal rather than of challenge. Over both he puzzled in vain; for the moose, bulls and cows alike, had no wish to try the qualities of the great white stranger who seemed to have usurped the lordship of the lake.

At last, one violet evening in the close of the sunset, as he stood fetlock-deep in the chill water, drinking, a light sound of many feet caught his alert ear. Lifting his head quickly, he saw a herd of strange-looking, heavy-antlered, whitish-brown deer emerging in long line from the woods and crossing the open toward the foot of the lake. The leader of the caribou herd, a massive bull, nearly white, with antlers almost equal to those of a moose, returned the stallion's inquiring stare with a glance of mild curiosity, but did not halt an instant. It was plain that he considered his business urgent; for the caribou, as a rule, are nothing if not curious when confronted by any strange sight. But at present the whole herd, which journeyed, in the main, in single file, seemed to be in a kind of orderly haste. They turned questioning eyes upon the white stallion as they passed, then looked away indifferently, intent only upon following their leader on his quest. The stallion stood watching, his head high and his nostrils wide, till the very last of the herd had disappeared into the woods across the lake. Then the loneliness of his spacious pasture all at once quite overwhelmed him. He did not want the company of the caribou, by any means, or he might have followed them as they turned their backs toward the sunset; but it was the dwellings of men he wanted, the human hand on his mane, the provendered stall, the voice of kindly command, and the fellowship of his kindred of the uncleft hoof. In some way he had got it into his head that men might be found most readily by travelling toward the southwest. Toward the head of the lake, therefore, and just a little south of the sunset's deepest glow, he now took his way. He was done with the lake and the empty marshes.

From the head of the lake he followed up a narrow still-water for perhaps half a mile, crashing his way through a difficult tangle of fallen, rotting trunks and dense underbrush, till he came out upon another and much smaller lake, very different from the one he had just left. Here were no meadowy margins; but the shores were steep and thick-wooded to the water's edge. Diagonally thrust out across the outlet, and about a hundred yards above it, ran a low, bare spit of white sand, evidently covered at high water. Over the black line of the woods hung a yellow crescent moon, only a few nights old and near setting.

Coming suddenly from the difficult gloom of the woods, where the noise of his own movements kept his senses occupied to the exclusion of all else, the wanderer stopped and stood quite still for a long time under the shadow of a thick hemlock, investigating this new world with ear and eye and nostril. Presently, a few hundred yards around the lake shore, to his left, almost opposite the jutting sand-spit, arose a noisy crashing and thrashing of the bushes. As he listened in wonder, his ears erect and eagerly interrogative, the noise stopped, and again the intense silence settled down upon the forest. A minute or two later a big, high-shouldered, shambling, hornless creature came out upon the sand-spit, stood blackly silhouetted against the moonlight, stretched its ungainly neck, and sent across the water that harsh, bleating cry of appeal which he had been hearing night after night. It was the cow moose calling for her mate. And in almost instant answer arose again that great crashing among the underbrush on the opposite shore.

With a certain nervousness added to his curiosity, the white stallion listened as the crashing noise drew near. At the same time something in his blood began to tingle with the lust of combat. There was menace in the approaching sounds, and his courage arose to meet it. All at once, within about fifty yards of him, and just across the outlet, the noise ceased absolutely. For perhaps ten minutes there was not a sound,--not the snap of a twig or the splash of a ripple,--except that twice again came the call of the solitary cow standing out against the moon. Then, so suddenly that he gave an involuntary snort of amazement at the apparition, the wanderer grew aware of a tall, black bulk with enormous antlers which took shape among the undergrowth not ten paces distant.

The wanderer's mane rose along his arched neck, his lips drew back savagely over his great white teeth, fire flamed into his eyes, and for a score of seconds he stared into the wicked, little, gleaming eyes of the bull moose. He was eager for the fight, but waiting for the enemy to begin. Then, as noiselessly and miraculously as he had come, the great moose disappeared, simply fading into the darkness, and leaving the stallion all a-tremble with apprehension. For some minutes he peered anxiously into every black thicket within reach of his eyes, expecting a rushing assault from some unexpected quarter. Then, glancing out again across the lake, he saw that the cow had vanished from the moonlit point. Bewildered, and in the grasp of an inexplicable trepidation, he waded out into the lake belly-deep, skirted around the south shore, climbed the steep slope, and plunged straight into the dark of the woods. His impulse was to get away at once from the mysteries of that little, lonely lake.

The deep woods, of course, for him were just as lonely as the lake, for his heedless trampling and conspicuous colouring made a solitude all about him as he went. At last, however, he stumbled upon a trail. This he adopted gladly as his path, for it led away from the lake and in a direction which his whim had elected to follow.

Moving now on the deep turf, with little sound save the occasional swish of branches that brushed his flanks, he began to realize that the woods were not as empty as he had thought. On each side, in the soft dark, he heard little squeaks and rustlings and scurryings. Rabbits went bounding across the trail, just under his nose. Once a fox trotted ahead of him, looking back coolly at the great, white stranger. Once a small, stripe-backed animal passed leisurely before him, and a whiff of pungent smell annoyed his sensitive nose. Wide wings winnowed over him now and then, making him jump nervously; and once a pouncing sound, followed by a snarl, a squeal, and a scuffle, moved him to so keen an excitement that he swerved a few steps from the trail in his anxiety to see what it was all about. He failed to see anything, however, and after much stumbling was relieved to get back to the easy trail again. With all these unusual interests the miles and the hours seemed short to him; and when the gray of dawn came filtering down among the trees, he saw before him a clearing with two low-roofed cabins in the middle of it. Wild with delight at this evidence of man's presence, he neighed shrilly, and tore, up to the door of the nearest cabin at full gallop, his hoofs clattering on the old chips which strewed the open.

To his bitter disappointment, he found the cabin, which was simply an old lumber-camp, deserted. The door being ajar, he nosed it open and entered. The damp, cheerless interior, with no furnishing but a rusty stove, a long bench hewn from a log, and a tier of bunks along one side, disheartened him. The smell of human occupation still lingered about the bunks, but all else savoured of desertion and decay. With drooping head he emerged, and crossed over to the log stable. That horses had occupied it once, though not recently, was plain to him through various unmistakable signs; but it was more in the hope of sniffing the scent of his own kind than from any expectation of finding the stable occupied that he poked his nose in through the open doorway.

It was no scent of horses, however, which now greeted his startled nostrils. It was a scent quite unfamiliar to him, but one which, nevertheless, filled him with instinctive apprehension. At the first whiff of it he started back. Then, impelled by his curiosity, he again looked in, peering into the gloom. The next instant he was aware of a huge black shape leaping straight at him. Springing back with a loud snort, he wheeled like lightning, and lashed out madly with his heels.

The bear caught the blow full in the ribs, and staggered against the door-post with a loud, grunting cough, while the stallion trotted off some twenty yards across the chips and paused, wondering. The blow, in all probability, had broken several of the bear's ribs, but without greatly impairing his capacity for a fight; and now, in a blind rage, he rushed again upon the intruder who had dealt him so rude a buffet. The stallion, however, was in no fighting mood. Depressed as he was by the desolation of the cabin, and daunted by the mysterious character of this attack from the dark of the stable, he was now like a child frightened of ghosts. Not the bear alone, but the whole place, terrified him. Away he went at full gallop across the clearing, by good fortune struck the continuation of the loggers' road, and plunged onward into the shadowy forest.

For a couple of miles he ran, then he slowed down to a trot, and at last dropped into a leisurely walk. This trail was much broader and clearer than the one which had led him to the camp, and a short, sweet grass grew along it, so that he pastured comfortably without much loss of time. The spirit of his quest, however, was now so strong upon him that he would not rest after feeding. Mile after mile he pressed on, till the sun was high in the clear, blue heavens, and the shadows of the ancient firs were short and luminous. Then suddenly the woods broke away before him.

Far below he saw the blue sea sparkling. But it was not the beauty of the sea that held his eyes. From his very feet the road dropped down through open, half-cleared burnt lands, a stretch of rough pasture-fields, and a belt of sloping meadow, to a little white village clustering about an inlet. The clutter of roofs was homelike to his eyes, hungry with long loneliness; the little white church, with shining spire and cross, was very homelike. But nearer, in the very first pasture-field, just across the burnt land, was a sight that came yet nearer to his heart. There, in a corner of the crooked snake-fence, stood two bay mares and a foal, their heads over the fence as they gazed up the hill in his direction. Up went mane and tail, and loud and long he neighed to them his greeting. Their answer was a whinny of welcome, and down across the fields he dashed at a wild gallop that took no heed of fences. When, a little later in the day, a swarthy French-Canadian farmer came up from the village to lead his mares down to water, he was bewildered with delight to find himself the apparent master of a splendid white stallion, which insisted on claiming him, nosing him joyously, and following at his heels like a dog.

When the Logs Come Down

It was April, and the time of freshet, when

"Again the last thin ice had gone
To join the swinging sea."

After the ice was all away the river had risen rapidly, flooding the intervale meadows, till in some places the banks, deep under water, were marked only by the tops of the alder and willow bushes, and by a line of elms growing, apparently, in the middle of a lake. Behind these elms the water was as still as a lake; but in front of them it rushed in heavy swirls, swaying the alders and willows, and boiling with swish and gurgle around the resolutely opposing trunks.

Above the swollen flood of water,--the hurried retreat of the last snow from a thousand forest valleys converging around the river's far-off source,--washed softly the benign and illimitable flood of the April air. This air seemed to carry with reluctance a certain fluctuating chill, caught from the icy water. But in the main its burden was the breath of willows catkin and sprouting grass and the first shy bloom on the open edges of the uplands. It was the characteristic smell of the northern spring, tender and elusive, yet keenly penetrating. If gems had perfumes, just so might the opal smell.

Besides the fragrance and the faint chill, the air carried an April music, a confusion of delicate sounds that seemed striving to weave a tissue of light melody over the steady, muffled murmur of the freshet. In this melody the ear could differentiate certain notes,--the hum of bees and flies in the willow bloom, the staccato _chirr_, _chirr_ of the blackbirds in the elm-tops, the vibrant yet liquid _kong-kla-lee_ of the redwings in the alders, the intermittent ecstasy of a stray song-sparrow, the occasional long flute-call of a yellowhammer across the flood, and, once in awhile, a sudden clamour of crows, a jangle of irrelevant, broken chords. From time to time, as if at points in a great rhythm too wide for the ear to grasp, all these sounds would cease for a second or two, leaving the murmur of the flood strangely conspicuous.

The colours of the world of freshet were as delicately thrilling as its scents and sounds. The veiled blue pallor of the sky and the milky, blue-gray pallor of the water served as neutral background to innumerable thin washes and stains of tint. Over the alders a bloom of lavender and faint russet, over the willows a lacing of pale yellow, over the maples a veiling of rose-pink, over the open patches on the uplands a mist that hinted of green, and over the further hills of the forest, broad, smoky smudges of indigo. Here and there, just above the reach of the freshet, a pine or spruce interrupted the picture emphatically with an intrusion of firm green-black.

Into this opalescent scene, some days before the freshet reached its height, the logs began to come down. In the upper country every tributary stream was pouring them out in shoals,--heavy, blind, butting, and blundering shoals,--to be carried by the great river down to the booms and saws above its mouth. Some, caught in eddies, were thrust aside up the bank to lie and slowly rot among the living trees. But most, darting and wallowing through mad rapids, or shooting falls, or whirling and circling dully down the more tranquil reaches of the tide, made shift to accomplish their voyage. They would blacken the broad river for acres at a time; and then again straggle along singly, or by twos and threes. It was a good run of logs and the scattered dwellers along the river forgave the unusual excesses of the freshet, because to them it was chiefly important that all the logs of the winter's chopping should be got out.

On a single log, at a most daunting distance from either shore, came voyaging a lonely and bedraggled little traveller. This particular red squirrel had been chattering gaily in the top of an old tree on the river-bank, when misfortune took him unawares. The tree was on a bluff just where a small but very turbulent and overswollen stream flowed in. The flood had stealthily undermined the bluff. Suddenly the squirrel had felt the tree sway ominously beneath him. He had leaped for safety, but too late! The whole bank had melted into the current. By great luck, the squirrel had managed to swim to a passing log. Breathless and all but drowned, he had clambered upon it. Before he could recover his wits enough to make a venture for shore, the vehement lesser stream had swept his log clean out into mid-channel. Though a bold enough swimmer, he had seen that he could not face that boiling tide with any hope of success; so he had clung to his unstable refuge and waited upon fate.

For perhaps an hour the squirrel journeyed thus without incident or further adventure. Then, in a wide, comparatively sluggish reach of the river, some whimsical cross-current had borne his log over to the neighbourhood of a whole, voyaging fleet of brown timbers. Unable to see how far this group extended, the squirrel inferred that it might possibly afford him passage to the shore. With a tremendous leap he gained the nearest of the timber. Thence he went skipping joyously, now up river and now down, skirting wide spaces of clear water, and twice swimming open lanes too broad to jump, till he was not more than a hundred yards from the line of trees that marked the flooded bank. Some thirty feet beyond, and that much nearer safety, one more log floated alone. The plucky little animal jumped as far as he could, landed with a splash, and swam vigorously for this last log. He gained it, and was just dragging himself out upon it, when there was a rush and heavy break in the water, and a pair of big jaws snapped close behind him. An agonized spring saved him, and he clung flat, quivering, on the top of the log. But the hungry pickerel had captured nearly half his tail.

A minute or two later he had recovered from this shock; and thereupon he sat up and chattered shrill indignation, twitching defiantly the sore and bleeding stump. This outburst perhaps relieved his feelings a little; for apparently the red squirrel needs to give his emotions vent more than any other member of the wild kindreds. But he had learned a lesson. He would not again try swimming in a water which pickerel inhabited. Then, a little later, he learned another. A fish-hawk passed overhead. The fish-hawk would not have harmed him under any circumstances. But the squirrel thought of other hawks, less gentle-mannered; and he realized that the loud volubility which in the security of his native trees he might indulge would never do out here on his shelterless log. He stopped his complaints, crouched flat, and scanned the sky anxiously for sign of other hawks. He had suddenly realized that he was now naked to the eyes of all his enemies.

Presently a new terror came to sap his courage. A little way ahead the banks were high and the channel narrow; and the river, no longer able to relieve the freshet strain by spreading itself over wide meadows, became a roaring rapid. The squirrel heard that terrifying roar. He noted how swiftly it was approaching. In a half-panic he stared about, almost ready to dare the pickerel and make a try for shore, rather than be carried through those rapids.

In this extremity of terror he saw what, at other times, would have frightened him almost as much as hawk or pickerel. A rowboat slowly drew near, picking its way through the logs. The one rower, a grizzled old river-man, was surging vigorously, to avoid being swept down into the thunderous narrows. But as he approached, he noticed the trembling squirrel on the log. In a flash he took in the situation. With a sheepish grin, as if ashamed of himself for troubling about a "blame squirrel," he thrust out the tip of an oar toward the log, with a sort of shy invitation.

The squirrel, fortunately for himself, was one of those animals which are sometimes open to a new idea. He did not trust the man, to be sure. But he trusted him more than he did the rapids ahead, and feared him less than he feared the pickerel. Promptly he skipped aboard the boat, and perched himself on the bow, as far away as possible from his rescuer. The man wasted no time on sentimentalizing, but pulled as hard as he could for shore. When near the bank, however, and out of the stress of the current, he permitted himself what he considered a piece of foolishness. He turned the boat about, and backed in till the stern touched land. He wanted to see what the squirrel, up there in the bow, was going to do about it.

The little animal made up his mind quickly. Scared but resolute, he darted along the gunwale. The rower, with both arms outspread, was directly in his way. He hesitated, gave a nervous chirrup, then launched himself high into the air. His little feet struck smartly on the top of the man's head. Then he was off up the bank as if hawk and pickerel and rapids were all after him together. A moment later from the thick top of a fir-tree came his shrill chatter of triumph and defiance.

"Sassy little varmint!" muttered the old river-man, looking up at him with indulgent eyes.

A Duel in the Deep

Though there was no wind, the wide surface of the estuary was curiously disturbed. In from the open sea came swiftly as it were a wedge of roughness, its edges lightly dancing, sparkling with blue-and-silver flashes. The strange disturbance kept on straight up the channel, leaving the placid shoals along-shore to shine unruffled in the low, level-glancing Arctic sun.

Down along the flat, interminable shore, picking his way watchfully among the ragged ice-cakes of the tempestuous spring, came a huge white bear. His small, snaky, cruel head was bent downwards, while his fierce little eyes peered among the tumbled ice blocks for possible dead fish. His long, loose-jointed body twisted sinuously as he moved--the only living creature to be seen up and down the level desolation of those bleak shores.

The white bear was an old male, restless, and of savage temper. Like many of his fellows among the older males, he had not been so fortunate as to slumber away the long, terrific, Arctic winter in the shelter of a snow-buried rock. All through the months of dark and tempest, of ghostly auroras and cold unspeakable, he had roamed the dead world and fought his fight with hunger. His craft, his strength, his fierce desperation in attack, had pulled him through. Lean and savage, he sniffed the oncoming of spring, and watched the ice go grinding out.

Presently his keen ears noted a faint sound, which seemed to blow in from the sea. As there was no wind, this was worthy of note. Lifting his black nose high above the ice-cakes, he sniffed and peered intently at the inrushing wedge of tumbled water. His uncertainty was not for long. The salmon were returning. This was the vanguard of the spring run.

For a few seconds the great white shape stood as if turned to stone, watching the radiant confusion. Here and there he saw a slender body flash forth for an instant, half its length above the sparkling water, as if striving to escape some unseen enemy. The school was making for the main channel, which ran between two low, naked islets of rock, perhaps half a mile apart. The nearest of these was about three hundred yards from the shore. As soon as the bear made sure that the salmon were taking this course, he galloped at top speed--a long, loose, shambling, but rapid pace--down along the shore till just abreast of the islet. Then he plunged in and swam for it, his sharp black muzzle and narrow white head cleaving the smooth flood with almost incredible swiftness, and throwing off an oily, trailing ripple on either side. When he reached the islet the front of the salmon school was still some forty or fifty paces distant. He crossed the rocks, slipped smoothly down into the water again, and waited for the shining turmoil to break upon him.

For some reason known only to the hosts of the salmon themselves, however, the shining turmoil swerved as it approached the islet, crowding over toward the other side of the channel. The bear's hungry little eyes blazed savagely at this. He imagined the hordes had taken alarm at his dread presence,--a natural imagining on his part, since he knew of nothing but the old bull walrus that dared ever await his approach. But as a matter of fact the eager myriads of the salmon, thrilling with life and vigour and the mating fire of spring, were no more conscious of the savage animal than if he had been a rock or an ice-floe. The joy of the incoming rush was in their splendid sinews, and the lure of the shallow, singing rapids in their veins. To that exultant host an enemy, however formidable, was but an incident. The exhaustless fertility of their race derided fate.

With a grunt the bear launched himself through the whitish flood. On the flanks of the flashing host he dived, swimming sinuously and with extraordinary swiftness like a seal. Rising gradually toward the surface, he struck this way and that, with wide jaws and armed fore paws, among the crowded ranks of the salmon. His object was to kill, kill, kill, before the opportunity passed by, in order that there should be many dead fish to drift ashore and be picked up at his leisure.

After a minute or two of this savage work, which turned the thronged tide crimson all about him, he came to the surface for breath. The upper ranks of the salmon were still flashing on every side, and half-leaping out of water within the very sweep of his deadly paw, heedless of his presence. His hunger being fierce upon him, he now seized a good-sized fish, bit its backbone through to put an end to its troublesome struggling, and devoured it as he swam along slowly with the host.

Suddenly, not a dozen feet ahead of his nose, a huge salmon seemed to be lifted horizontally almost clear of the water. It writhed and thrashed for a second in a sort of convulsion, then sank with a heavy swirl. The bear stared curiously. He had never seen anything like that before. The salmon had not jumped of its own accord, that was evident. It had apparently been held up from below, firmly and steadily sustained as it struggled, for that brief space of moments. To the wild creatures anything new, anything unknown, is always either interesting or terrifying. The white bear was unacquainted with terror, but he was interested instantly. He swam toward the spot where the salmon had sunk.

The next moment something still more strange arrested him. A little to one side of the spot where the salmon had behaved so curiously, a great sharp-pointed spike of yellow horn, massive and twisted, was thrust up about three feet above the water and instantly withdrawn. Blood clung thinly in the convolutions of the horn. It was a mysterious and menacing weapon. Filled with a curiosity that was now warming into wrath, the bear made for the spot. There was something like defiance in that sudden upthrust. Moreover, it seemed that some stranger was poaching on his fishing-grounds. The bear's wrath flamed into fury in a few seconds. Unable to see down into the disturbed and discoloured tide, he dived deep, to get below the salmon and the blood, and see what manner of rival it was with which he had to deal. Whatever it was, he was going to drive it off or kill it. He would share his salmon with no one.

Meanwhile, just beneath the lowermost ranks of the horde, a big, pallid-skinned, fish-like creature was swimming slowly this way and that. Shaped something like a porpoise, with a big bluff head and tremendously powerful flukes, it belonged evidently to the great kinship of the whales. Its massive body was about fourteen feet in length. But the strange thing about it, setting it wide apart from all its cetacean kin, was a long, heavy, twisted horn or tusk, of yellow ivory, jutting straight out from its upper jaw to a length of about four feet. It was that most peculiar of all the whales, a narwhal.

From time to time this ominous shape would launch itself upward among the salmon, transfixing some of the largest fish with lightning thrusts of its tusk, and killing others by terrible, thrashing side-blows of the weapon. Sometimes it would open its great mouth and engulf the most convenient victim; but it did not seem ravenous. Its hunger was already all but glutted, and its purpose seemed to be, mainly, to kill, in order that food might still be abundant after the salmon had passed on up the river beyond his reach.

When the white bear, swimming under water outstretched like an otter, saw this threatening form, his veins ran fire. Darting downward, easily as a mink might have done, he struck the unsuspecting narwhal in the middle of the back just between the flippers. His mighty fore paws, armed with claws like knife-blades, tore two gaping wounds in the narwhal's hide, and the dark blood jetted forth. But the wounds went little below the blanket of blubber which enclosed the narwhal underneath his hide. Beyond the pain of those two tearing buffets, the great sea-beast was little the worse of them. With a surge of his tail he lunged forward, and turned furiously upon his assailant.

The bear, though rash in his arrogance and rage, was no mere headlong blunderer. Though he mistook the narwhal for some kind of gigantic seal, and therefore scorned him, he had not missed the possibilities of that long, menacing horn. He was upon his foe again in an instant, not giving him time to charge, and successfully planted another rending stroke which disabled the narwhal's right flipper. Then, however, finding that he could hold his breath no longer after such terrific exertion, he darted to the surface, and hurriedly refilled his lungs.

To regain his breath took him but a moment, and instantly aware of his peril while at the surface, he dived again to renew his attack. As he dived, either his own craft or some subtle forewarning led him to twist sharply to one side. But for this, his fighting would have ended then and there, his heart split by the thrust of that giant tusk. As it was, the mad upward rush of the narwhal missed its aim. The bear felt a couple of salmon hurled in his face. Then the horn shot past his neck; and a black mass smote him full in the chest, with a force that knocked the wind out of him, and bore him, clawing and biting passionately, back to the surface. His blows, of course, were delivered blindly, but one struck home just above the narwhal's sinister little eye, wiping it out of existence.

As the bear got his head above water, he choked and gasped, swimming high for a few seconds in the struggle to recover his breath. Realizing now to the full how dangerous an adversary he had challenged, he knew that every second he remained at the surface was a deadly peril. But, at first, the breath would not return to his buffeted lungs. With his nose high in air he gave a longing look away across the tumult of the journeying host, across the tranquil white water beyond, to the low, desolate shore with its dirty ice-cakes. For the moment, he wished himself back there. Then, as he regained his breath, and his great, bellows-like lungs resumed their function, his courage and his fighting fury also returned. The red light of battle blazed up again in his eyes, and wheeling half-about with a violence that sent the water swirling and foaming from his mighty shoulders and hurled a score of salmon upon each other's backs, he dropped his head to dive once more into the fight.

The narwhal, for his part, had fared badly in that last encounter. With one eye blinded, his head badly clawed, and the tough cartilage about his blow-holes torn deeply by his adversary's teeth, he was bewildered for the moment. But he was not daunted. His sluggish blood only boiled to a blacker fury. Never before had he met anything like serious opposition. The colossal sperm-whale, undisputed lord of the ocean, never came into these cold northern waters; and the huge, blundering whalebone whales he despised. He had transfixed and slaughtered the helpless calves of this species under the very fins of their gigantic but timorous mothers. He had pierced seals, and even, once, a walrus. Terribly armed as he was, and swift, and powerful, he had never yielded way to any other inhabitant of his cold and glimmering world.