Chapter IV: Part 4

These deer are but types of many other timid animals that may be met after darkness has fallen, at such close range that one who has known them only by daylight is amazed at their boldness. As a rule, the so-called savage beasts are always difficult of approach, being more shy than any rabbit; while harmless creatures that we imagine to be governed by terror give the impression at night that they are frolicsome rather than fearful. Even the wood mice--clean, beautiful little creatures, so delicately balanced that the sudden appearance of danger may paralyze or kill them--seem to lose much of their natural timidity as they run about among the twilight shadows. By day you see them, if at all, only as vanishing streaks; by night you may hear them climbing up one side of your tent and sliding down the other. They will enter freely and, as I have often tested, will sit in your open palm, as at a friendly table, and eat what you offer them.

Two rules of courtesy must be observed, however, when you entertain such little guests. You must eschew mental excitement, which is contagious; and you must never make a sudden motion.

One reason for the boldness of animals at night is that they apparently recognize man’s helplessness, his lack of confidence in his own senses. At times one may even think that an animal is playing with him, as children are moved to play with one who is blindfolded. Such was my impression, at least, when I went astray one night in making my way back to camp. A half-moon was shining, giving enough light in the open places, but sadly confusing matters in the forest depths, where one’s eyes were never quite sure whether they were looking upon substance or shadow. I had missed the trail, and was casting for it in circles, hurrying as one does when lost, blundering through the woods with the clumsiness that distinguishes man from all other creatures. Down into a valley of gloom I went, only to find myself in surroundings that were all strange and wild. Next I floundered through a stream, and was climbing the bank when I saw something in front of me, something big, motionless, and misty-white.

Now I had been seeing white things for an hour past, bleached rocks, spots of moonlight, silver birches; but this was different. I knew instantly that the thing was alive; for there is something in a living animal that makes itself known, though your ordinary senses cannot tell you why or how you know. For a long moment I faced the thing steadily; but it was dead-still, and I could make nothing of it. As I started forward, the misty-white spot enlarged to twice its size, narrowed again, drifted away among the trees like a ghost. When I followed, straining my eyes after it, I fell into a hidden branch of the stream where water was deep and the mud bottomless. The white thing stood, as if watching me, only a few yards beyond.

Yes, it was rather creepy just then. The chill in my spine was not of the cold water when all the grisly doings of ha’nts, wanderlights and banshees (tales that I heard in childhood and forgotten) came back in a vivid troop. For a time I was as pagan as any of my old ancestors, and as ready to believe in any kind of hobgoblin; only I must find out what the mysterious thing was.

When I struggled out of the pool, the white spot floated up a hill in front of me, noiselessly as an owl, and vanished in a thicket of fir. As I smashed in after it, out it blew on the opposite side, making me feel creepy again till a twig cracked. That was the first sound I heard, and it told me that the thing had legs long enough to reach the ground. Twice afterward I saw it close ahead, broadening, narrowing, drifting away; but except that it was an animal, and a large one, I had no notion of what I was following. Then it vanished for good, and on my right was a gleam of the lake. I had my bearings then, and turning to the left I soon found the lost trail, making an Indian compass of broken twigs as I went.

At daybreak I was back at the place and following my Indian compass. Near the fir thicket I found the track of a large deer, but was unable to follow it on the hard ground. An hour later, as I watched the lake shore, a buck white as snow stepped out. He was an albino, the first I had ever met, and to this day I have never again seen so magnificent a specimen. It was he, undoubtedly, who had played with me in the dark woods, waiting till I came close to him, then moving on to watch my flounderings from another vantage ground. The widening of the white spot, which had so completely mystified me, was due to a momentary glimpse of his broadside as he turned away.

A second reason for the animal’s boldness has already been suggested; namely, that at night a man’s feeling undergoes a change. He is no longer confident of his superior power; as eyes fail him he grows doubtful of himself; and the wild animal is like certain dogs in that he seems able to recognize one’s mental attitude. Hunters who call moose will tell you that the bulls are extraordinarily wary after dark, and that is often true; but for this wariness the hunter, not the moose, is responsible. In the first place, your modern hunter goes out with a guide; and two men make ten times as much noise as one, and spread far more terror. Next, the hunter is eager to see, to shoot, to kill; his excitement gets into his skin, gets into the guide and the call, and a sensitive moose probably feels this contagion of excitement as he draws near it; though it might be hard to explain why or how. As Simmo the Indian says, “Moose don’t know _how_ he know somet’ing; he jus’ know.”

I think Simmo is right, and that he has an explanation of the fact that a sportsman who is most keen to kill in the calling season is often the one who must wait longest for his chance; while to the man who goes out unarmed opportunity comes with both hands full. Though I am a very poor caller, measured by Simmo’s art, I have seldom found much difficulty in bringing out a bull; but this may be due to the fact that most of my calling has been done far from settlements, in regions where moose are seldom hunted. Yet even in Maine, where moose are literally hunted to death, during the summer or “closed” season they have no more fear than in the remote wilderness. If you meet one on the trail at night, he may come quite as near as you care to have him; and in the early part of the mating season it is not unusual to have two or three bulls answer the call. After the hunting season opens, it is much more difficult to deceive the ungainly brutes; but the difficulty is largely due to the fact that, because of the law which protects cows and so makes them abundant, the bulls are already mated and no longer interested in your wailing.

In the wilder region of northern New Brunswick, the first time I ever tried to call moose a truculent old bull burst out of the woods and chased me into my canoe. On another occasion I was sitting on a big rock in the moonlight, “talking” to a young bull that answered but was shy of showing himself, when a huge brute with magnificent antlers came silently behind me, and would, I think, have poked me off my rock had I not made a hasty exit. As I have never done any shooting at such times, I do not know whether bulls would come as readily to my call if there were a rifle behind it; but I do know, from repeated experiment, that when I take others with me it is much harder to bring a bull into the open than when I call alone.

Perhaps the chief reason for the fearlessness of wild beasts at night is that their senses then become so acute as to produce almost perfect self-reliance. In the daytime your eyes are better than theirs; but after nightfall they have you at a disadvantage, and they seem to know it. Not only do their eyes or ears tell them of your coming, but their nostrils seem to detect your very quality or condition. This is not theory, but experience. Repeatedly animals that run from me by day have at night stood quietly beside the trail till I was almost upon them.

The nose of a beast is wonderful enough at any hour; but at night it is to him what a lamp is to you, because the moist air is then laden with odors which are quenched by the dry sunlight. No sooner does twilight fall than the forest becomes a huge bouquet. If you test the matter, you can soon learn to recognize every tree or shrub you pass by its characteristic fragrance. You can wind a beast before you see him, and can pick up from the dewy grass the musky odor of a deer, the heavy smell of a moose, the pungent reek of a fox, long after one of these animals has crossed the trail. Curiously enough, the pine and balsam needles call in their odorous messengers with the night; many flowers suspend their fragrant activity when they close their petals, and not till the sun rises will they be known once more.

From such human experience one may judge what the sense of smell must be to wild animals, which are better endowed in this respect, and which daily cultivate a gift that we neglect. Watch any beast, your dog for example, and note that he does not trust even his master till his nose brings its perfect message. When a deer with his exquisite nostrils passes through the night woods, finding at every step odors which invite or check or warn him, the sensation must be like that of a keen-eyed man who looks upon a landscape flooded with sunshine. Because a man trusts only his sight (the least trustworthy of the senses) he is timid in the darkness, and grows bold with the morning. For the same psychological reason an animal, which trusts his nose, is wary in the dry sunshine when odors are faintest, but grows confident when night falls and the woods fill with messages that he understands perfectly.

The night is better also for hearing. Sounds travel farther, more clearly and more accurately in the elastic air, and the animal’s keen ears are then like another pair of eyes. Even a man’s ears grow sensitive to the meaning of sounds that are mere cries or noises by day, calling of owls far or near, hunting calls, assembly calls, food calls, rain calls; hail or farewell of loons, answered by hail or farewell from another lake far away over the hills; eager or querulous barking of a mother fox, calling her cubs to the feast or chiding them for their clumsy hunting. Above these and a hundred other wild calls is that rushing sound of music which sweeps over the listening night woods, like the surge and swell of a mighty organ at an immeasurable distance.

It is commonly believed that this thrilling harmony of the night is from within, from overstrained nerves of the ear; but I think, on the contrary, that it is wholly objective, as real as the vibration of a wind harp or a ’cello string or any other instrument. I take one person into the big woods at night, and say to him: “Listen; what do you hear?” And he answers, “I hear nothing.” I take another person, and say: “Listen; what do you hear?” And a great wonder comes into his face as he answers: “I hear music. What is it?” When I am alone in the woods my ears are always tense; but on some nights the rushing harmony is everywhere, while on other nights I cannot hear it, listen as I will. Only when conditions are just right, when the air is like a stretched wire, do the woods begin to sing. Then from a distance comes a faint vibration; from the waterfall, it may be, or from some mountain edge purring under a current of air, or from ten-million trembling needles in a swaying grove of pines. The hanging leaves feel it and begin to stir rhythmically; shells of hardwood, dry and resonant as violins, fall to humming with the movement, and suddenly all the forest is musical. The strangest thing about this eerie, wonderful melody is that, when you change position to hear better, it vanishes altogether, and hours may pass before you hear it again.

Amid such conditions, which awaken even human senses from their long sleep, the animal is at home, and his ability to locate sounds is almost beyond belief. You may have heard much of moose-calling, the wailing of the guide, the tingling answer, the approach, the shot, the barbarous end; but the most astonishing thing about moose-calling I have never heard mentioned; namely, that the distant bull seems to locate your first call as accurately as if he had watched you all the way to your chosen position. And this is the way of it:

You leave camp at moonrise and make your way silently to a little bog lying amid endless barrens, lakes, forests,--an unmapped wilderness without road or trail, in which one might lose a city. From your hiding place, a thicket exactly like a thousand others near or far, you begin to call, very softly at first, because a bull may be near and listening. When nothing stirs to your trumpet you grow bolder, sending forth the weird bellow of a cow-moose. Away it goes, whining over forest and barren, rousing up innumerable echoes; in the tense, startled air it seems that such a cry must carry to the ends of the earth. The silence grows more pronounced after that; it begins to be painful when, from a mountain looming far away against the sky, there floats down the ghost of a sound, _quoh!_ so small that the buzz of a chilled mosquito fairly drowns it. You strain your ears, thinking you were deceived; but no, the bull answers again; he is beginning to talk. Listen!

Now you can hear his voice and something else, something almost fairylike,--a rustling, faint as the stir of a mouse in the grass, and _tock!_ an elfin report, as the bull hits a stub in his rush and sends it crackling down.

That fellow will come if you coax him properly. Indeed, if he is not mated, he is bound to come and is already on his way. But the moon is obscured now, and the light very dim. If you would see your bull clearly, or measure his antlers, or learn a new thing, go away quickly without another sound. At daybreak you shall find him not only on this particular bog, which is as a pin point in the vast expanse, but waiting expectantly near the very thicket where you were calling.

With such senses to guide him, to tell him of your every step as you go blundering through the night, no wonder that a wild animal grows serenely confident. Even the black bear, more timid than deer or moose, sheds something of his aloofness when night falls and his nose or ears become as penetrating searchlights. Ordinarily a bear avoids you; should you meet him accidentally his every action says, “I do desire that we may be better strangers.” But if you enter his territory without disturbing him, he will sometimes let curiosity get the better of discretion, and draw near to question you in the friendly darkness.

Once on a canoe journey I found myself breaking all rules of travel by making a belated camp, having passed the sunset hour and crossed a large lake in order to sleep at an old camp ground of mine, a lovely spot, endeared by happy memories. The night was chill, the moon shining full and clear, when I arrived at the familiar place and searched it all over, as a man always searches a place where he once camped, looking for something that he never finds, that he does not even name. Then I repaired my old “Commoosie,” made a fragrant bed of fir boughs, and was thinking of supper when, on the farther side of a bay, two bull-moose started a rumpus, grunting, smashing brush, clanging their antlers like metal blades as they charged each other savagely; all this to win the favor of a mate that cared nothing for either of them.

Silently I paddled over in my canoe, ran close to the fighting brutes, and watched till one drove the other out of hearing. When I returned it was over-late for cooking; so I supped of pilot-bread with dried fruit, and turned in to sleep without lighting a fire. The splash of a feeding trout in the shallows and the wild call of a bear, _hey’-oo!_ like a person lost or demented, were the last sounds I heard.

A man in the open sleeps lightly, in some subconscious way keeping track of what goes on around him. Suddenly, as if someone had touched me, I was broad awake with every sense alert. Behind the great log which lay as a threshold across the open front of the “Commoosie” something moved; a shadow rose up, and there, sharply defined in the moonlight, stood a huge bear. His forepaws rested lightly on the log; his head was raised, his whole body drawn to its utmost tension. Eyes, ears, nose, every sense and fiber of him seemed to question the sleeper with intense wonder.

When you surprise a brute like that, or especially when he surprises you, the rule is to freeze in your tracks; but you need not memorize it, since instinct will attend to the matter perfectly if you follow it without question. If you must move before he does, ignore the animal; turn half away (never move directly toward or from him) and walk quietly off at a tangent, as if going about your own affairs. But here the bear had me wholly at a disadvantage. Except to start fair upright, any move was impossible under the blankets, and a sudden motion would certainly throw the brute into a panic; in which event he might bolt away or bolt into the “Commoosie.” You can never be sure what a startled animal will do at close quarters. So I lay still, following an instinctive rather than a rational decision.

Presently the bear glided away, but falteringly, and I knew that he was not satisfied. Without a sound I reached for my heavy revolver, gripped it, and lay as I was before. Very soon the bear’s head reappeared; like a shadow his bulk moved across the opening, and again he raised himself on the threshold for a look. He probably smelled me, as I certainly smelled him, rank and doggy; but a sleeping man gives off very little scent (of a non-alarming kind, I think), and Mooween’s inquisitiveness had made a bold beast out of a timid one. He had a fine autumn coat; the short velvety fur rippled or gleamed as the moonlight touched it, giving to its lustrous black an apparent fringe of frosty white, like the pelt of a silver fox.

When I marked that perfect fur I knew it was what I had long wanted as a rug. It needed only the pressure of a finger to make it mine, and the finger was curling on the trigger when, unfortunately, I began to think.

Silence enfolded the earth in its benediction, and I must shatter that blessed silence by gunpowder. Like a veil let down from heaven the moonlight rested on every tree, on the rough ground, on my old “Commoosie,” making all things beautiful; and I must spatter that pure veil with red. No, it was not a pleasant notion; night and solitude make a man sensitive, averse to noise, violence, discord of every kind. Even a bear might have some rights, if one were fair with him. He had done no harm in the woods, and meant no harm when he came to my camp. He was simply curious, like all natural beasts. Somehow it began to appear as a greedy, an atrocious thing to kill him just for his skin; at my own door, too, where he stood timidly looking in. Besides, a dead animal is no longer interesting. In the back of my head was the desire, always present when a wild beast appears, to know what he thinks or, if that be impossible, to know at least what he does. The experience, startling enough at first, had now turned to comedy, and I wanted to see how it would end.

Thus a small moment passed, while I tried the great beast for his life; through it ran a river of thought or sentiment with the rush and dance of rapids.

Once during the trial Mooween turned away, only to return quickly. I had moved a trifle, and he heard it. When he turned a second time something in his gait or motion said that he would not come back, that he no longer dared trust his neighborhood. As he disappeared I peeked around the corner of the “Commoosie.” Straight off he went to the edge of the clearing, where he sat upon his haunches, feeling safer with the woods only a jump away, and rocked his nose up and down to catch air from different currents, still hoping for some message that would tell him who or what I was. It was a wild region; he had probably never before met a man. Then he stood erect on his hind legs for a last look, dropped on all-fours, and vanished silently among the shadows. A moment later panic struck him like a bomb; away he ran with a great smashing of brush, as if all the dogs of a parish were after him.

* * * * *

If you are desirous of meeting or knowing wild animals, the hour following the evening twilight is the best time to be abroad. Toward midnight the wood folk all rest, as a rule, and through the small hours the coverts are profoundly quiet till just before the dawn. On a moonlit night birds and beasts are apt to be stirring at all hours, and then is the time to learn the language of the wild, the cries, barks, hootings, yellings, rustlings, which come to you as mere noises at first, but which have all definite meaning when you learn to interpret them. Yet even on moonlit nights such voices are rather exceptional. Wild birds and beasts go their ways in silence for the most part; the typical wilderness night is so quiet, so peaceful, that an occasional cry seems part of a mighty stillness.

On other than moonlit nights you will do well to travel by canoe, keeping close to shore so as to get the fragrance of the breathing woods. They are wonderful in darkness; but if you enter them, your chief concern will probably be to find your way out again, because the depths of a primeval forest are so pitch dark that human eyes are useless. Even on a trail you must look up steadily, keeping your course by the heavens, which are always lighter than the earth. If you strive to look ahead, you will certainly lose the narrow way; but to look up is to see between the black forest bulks on either hand a pathway of light, which corresponds to every turn and winding of the trail beneath. Better still, if you are in danger of losing the path, shut your eyes; keep them shut, and trust to the guidance of your own feet. They are more familiar with the touch of mother earth than you are aware, and they will tell you instantly when you are departing from a beaten trail. But avoid burglar-proof shoes, of the absurd “sportsman” variety, when you try this enlightening experiment.

There are other things than animals, you see, to be met in the night. Perhaps the most interesting creature you will ever meet is your natural self, which lies buried but not dead under a crust of artificial habit. To break that crust and come forth, like a moth from its dry chrysalis; to feel again the joy of human senses, awakened, vibrant, responsive to every message of earth; to cast aside unworthy fear and walk in one’s birthright of confidence; to know the companionship of the night, more mysterious and more lovely than the day,--all this is waiting for you in the darkened woods. Try it and see. Leave your camp on the first still, moonlit evening to follow the trail alone. Look up at the trees, all fairylike, with leaves of burnished silver set amid luminous shadows, and confess that you never saw a tree in its beauty before. Smell the fragrance of the moistened woods, like an old-fashioned garden of thyme and mignonette. Listen to the night, to its small voices, to its rushing harmonies, above all to its silences. Grow accustomed to a world on which darkness has fallen like refreshing rain, until you cast aside all hallucinations of terror or struggle, and learn for yourself how friendly, how restful nature is. And when the right night comes, when the tense stillness begins to tremble and all the woods grow musical, then you will wish that some great composer could hear what you hear, and put it upon the stringed instruments, and call it his symphony of silence.

STORIES OF THE TRAIL

Dawn comes to the big woods, a winter dawn, fair and wondrous still. It finds our little “Commoosie” nestled among the evergreens, its back to a protecting ledge, its open front to the lake. We are half asleep after restful hours of sleeping when a persistent hammering floats through our dreams and rouses us as the day is breaking.

The hammering comes from the birds’ table, now bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, where a woodpecker is impatiently calling for his daily fare. Chickadees repeat his call softly, and a pine grosbeak, perched on a projecting roof pole, bends his head to look into the “Commoosie” with its two lazy sleepers. Outside, the snow is four feet deep; the mercury huddles below the zero mark; the dead fire sends a thin column of smoke straight up into air that sparkles with frost as the light runs in through the evergreens. It is early spring by the almanac, but the world we look on gives no sign of it.

“Hello!” says Bob, poking a head out of his sleeping bag as a louder reveille rattles on the table. “Your friends out there want their breakfast.”

“Well, breakfast is a good thing,” I answer, “and hospitality is here the chief of virtues. Suppose you stir the fire and cook a bite for them. Trout, bacon, toast and coffee will just suit that woodpecker, and I’ll be content with whatever he leaves.” Then we crawl forth to rub our faces with snow, a tribute to civilization which has the effect of shocking sleep out of us, and take a look at the woods, the sky, the lake all white and still under its soft mantle.

Oh, but it is good to be alive in such an hour; good to be awakened by birds that brave the northern winter cheerfully; good to breathe deep of this keen air that blows over miles of spruce and balsam, uncontaminated by any smell of man, sniffed only by the wild things! So our day begins naturally with joy, as a day should begin which promises good hunting.

An hour later we say good-by and good luck on the lake shore, my friend heading northeast, and I due south, each with an ample wilderness to himself. Bob swings off in front of a moose sled, to which is strapped a camera and other duffle. While shooling through the woods a few days ago we discovered a colony of beaver in a beautiful spot, with a playground of open water in front of their lodges; now he will arrange a booth, a string, and other mysteries of his craft, and perhaps get a rare winter picture of the animals. Meanwhile I shall get many pictures of the kind that a man carries with him forever, but cannot show; for I travel light, with both hands free, having no other object than to follow any inviting trail wherever it may lead. There are stories with every one of these pictures--but first an explanation.

Since I am hunting alone to-day, bagging as game any woodsy impression of the trail, the personal pronouns of this narrative will become sadly jumbled before the day is done; and especially will the familiar “you” or convenient “we” replace the obtrusive “I.” Such pronouns are always used vaguely by a solitary man, for two reasons: first, because the woods discourage all self-assertion, telling one through his natural instincts to go softly, to merge himself bodily in his environment, to be in spiritual harmony with his visible or invisible audience; and second, because every wilderness voyageur, as a protection against the overwhelming silence, has the habit of talking to that other self, at once friendly and critical, who goes with him over every lonely way for good company.

That last is natural enough, and wholesome so long as one does not talk aloud or address that other self as a stranger. When a man in the woods suddenly hears the sound of his own voice, or catches himself asking that other, “Who are you?” it is a bad sign. It means that he has been alone too much, that solitude is getting the best of him, that he needs the medicine of human society. And now for the trail!

* * * * *

A fall of snow last night has wrought marvelous transformation in the familiar world. The word of the Apocalypse, “Behold, I make all things new,” is written on the face of the whole earth, which is like a book fresh and clean from the press. Across its white pages go many tracks, each telling its story or leading to some other story beyond; and to read such records, even as a neophyte, is to enter into one of the pleasures of the winter woods. The snow is a greater telltale than any newspaper, and all its tales are true. No matter how shy the wood folk may be, each must leave a trail, whether straight or crooked; and the trails are ready to tell who passed this way, how he fared, what adventure befell him, and how he played his big or little part in the endless comedy of the woods.

The sun is rising as we strap on snowshoes and head blithely down the lake, keeping close to the eastern shore with its deep shadows; for you shall learn little of the wood folk until you learn to imitate them by making yourself inconspicuous. A great tide of light rolls over the level expanse and ripples up the western hills, showing rank upon rank of giant spruces, each bearing his burden of new snow tenderly, as if he loved it. Suddenly the morning breeze shakes them, filling the air with diamond dust, through which the sunshine breaks in a thousand fleeting rainbows.

Near at hand, under the hardwoods of this sheltered shore, the snow has taken many shapes, noble or fantastic, at the hands of the eddying wind; here a smooth page to catch the tale of wandering feet; there a great dome, glistening white, which hides some shapeless thing beneath; beyond that a shadowy cave with doorway light as air, into which leads a single delicate track; and under the cliff, where the wind recoiled, a fairyland of arches, towers, battlements, all fretted more delicately than any lace. Every ugly or unsightly thing has been beautified, every unclean thing washed whiter than wool. All this beautiful world, breathless with the wonder of creation still upon it, this newborn world over which the Infinite broods silently, is wholly ours to enter, to possess, and to enjoy. Expectantly, as if something fair and good must come to-day, and on tiptoe, as if any noise must profane such a world of splendor and silence, we slip along between lake and woods, marveling once more at the magic of the winter wilderness.

A wavy line of blue shadows under the western shore beckons us, and we cross over to pick up our first trail. A curious trail it is, showing a few deep tracks close together, followed by a long groove in the snow; then more tracks, another groove, and so up the lake as far as you can see. Keeonekh the otter left that record; there is no other like it in the woods. He is wooing a mate now, and being a young otter, as the tracks show, he is looking for her in distant places. Thus instinctively he avoids the danger of inbreeding with otters that are more or less related to him; and in this he is like most other wild animals and birds, which scatter widely when looking for their mates.

Wherever you go at this season in this untraveled wilderness, you find Keeonekh neglecting his habitual play (he is the most playful of all wild creatures) for endless, erratic journeys over the ice or through the woods, where he seems a little out of place. Being a fisherman, he is at home only in the water, where he is all celerity and grace; but his legs are short and his body heavy for traveling on dry land. On the snow he does better, and puts rhythm into his motion by taking two or three quick jumps to get momentum, and then sliding forward on his belly. Where the surface is level his slides are short, from two to six feet, according to the speed at which he is going; but he takes advantage of every slope to make much longer distances.

Once I trailed an otter that went over a high bluff to the river below; his trail showed a clean slide of two hundred feet, and the pitch was so steep that I dared not follow. Keeonekh was in a hurry that time, for I was too close behind him for comfort. He hurled himself at top speed over the bluff, and went down like a bolt. In the intervals of travel or fishing he may seek his favorite bank, where he slides for hours at a stretch just for the fun of the thing. That explains why every otter caught in the spring has the glistening outer hairs, or king fur, completely worn away on the under side of his body: he has been sliding downhill too much from a furrier’s viewpoint.

For a mile or more we follow the otter’s trail up the lake, slide-jump-jump, slide-jump-jump, as if he were moving to waltz music. “You are taking your time, Keeonekh,” I say; “but you are leaving an uncommonly crooked trail, dodging in and out like a thieving mink; which is not like you or your breed. Why are you at such pains to hide your tracks? Ah, yes, I remember; last night when you passed this way the wolves were howling.”

As a rule the otter travels boldly, being well able to take care of himself; but here the trail holds close to shore, curving in or out with the banks, taking advantage of every bush or ledge to keep under cover. Suddenly Keeonekh begins to hurry; he is alarmed, no doubt about it. See, his jumps lengthen, he spatters the snow wildly, making us cast about for the cause. There is nothing here to account for his flight; but yonder, over under the eastern shore, are blue shadows wide apart in the snow, which show where some other beast came leaping down from the woods. We shall name that beast presently, for where the lake narrows far ahead his trail sweeps into the one we are following. Holding to the otter’s course, our stride lengthens as we see how desperately he is running. No waltz time now, but a headlong rush for safety.

Near the inlet, whither he has been heading since he struck the lake, Keeonekh darts to a projecting stub, where black ice and moist snow speak of moving water, and begins to dig furiously. Here is one of his refuge holes, such as otters keep open in winter near good fishing grounds; but the frost has sealed it since his last visit, and he has no time now to break through. The other trail veers round this spot in a great curve, the flying arc of which betokens speed, and we go over to find the tracks of a wolf coming at a fast clip up the inlet, sixteen feet to the jump. No wonder Keeonekh hurries; that wolf is after him. But why does he not head straight for open water, where he will be safe? A brook enters the lake ahead; one can both see and hear that it is free of ice.

Turning sharply from his course, leaving lake and open inlet behind him, Keeonekh streaks away for the woods of the eastern shore. Surely he has lost his head; he has no chance either at running or fighting with a brute of that stride and fang behind him. It’s all over with him now, you think, and you are sorry; for though you try to keep open mind for all creatures, when it comes to a choice between wolf and otter your sympathy is wholly with the fisherman. But spare your feelings a moment; you never know the end of a story till you come to the end of the trail. To follow Keeonekh is to learn that he still has his head on, and that he knows the country more intimately than we do.

Just over the low ridge yonder is another lake; and under the ledge which you see cropping out is a spring-hole that never freezes. It is nearer than the mouth of the inlet, though the traveling looks much harder, uphill through deep snow. With the wolf in sight, coming up the lake like a cyclone, Keeonekh takes a desperate chance, knowing his advantage if he can top the ridge. Both trails go up the bank by a natural runway, otter and wolf sinking shoulder-deep at every jump. The wolf is gaining here at a frightful rate, one of his flying leaps covering two or three of the otter’s. Nose to tail, they reach the top, where Keeonekh springs aside from the runway and plunges headlong over the ledge. One clean slide of thirty feet, and with a final convulsive leap he lands on the edge-ice of the spring-hole. It breaks under his impact; down he goes in a swirl of black water.

The trail now brings a smile or a chuckle, for we follow Malsun the wolf. Here he hesitates at the brink of the ledge, slippery where snow has melted by day or frozen by night; looking down the almost perpendicular slope, he sees the glistening body of Keeonekh glance away from under his nose. Malsun will sit on his tail and slide down an ordinary bank, but he balks at this icy ledge. It is too steep; and the black ice below, with water lapping over its broken edges, looks dangerous. Turning from the ledge, he leaps down the runway and creeps around to the farther side of the spring-hole, where he stands waiting expectantly. Keeonekh is under water, and can go where he pleases; he can even cross the lake to another spring-hole, if need be, since he has learned the trick of breathing under the ice. But the wolf, who has no notion of such possibilities in a mere beast, thinks that whoever goes into water must soon come out again, and waits for Keeonekh to reappear.

Malsun is not a patient waiter, being too much like a dog. Soon a doubt enters his head, then a suspicion which sends him sniffing around the edges of the spring-hole to be sure the game did not slip away while he was coming down the runway. “No, nothing went away from here,” he says. “Nothing could possibly go away without telling my nose about it.”

The uneasy trail, weaving here and there, shows that Malsun is more puzzled than ever. Suddenly a notion strikes him, a cunning notion that his game is hiding somewhere, waiting for a chance to continue the flight. He trots off to the woods, as if going away; but no sooner is he hidden than he creeps back behind a stump, where he can see the spring-hole without being seen. He is a young wolf, sure enough; the cub habit of stalking things, like a cat, is still strong in him; but his patience is no better than before. He fidgets, changes position; after watching awhile, as you see by a depression in the snow, he goes to have another sniff around the spring-hole. Then he turns away reluctantly and lopes off eastward, probably to rejoin the pack, which we heard howling in this direction last night.

We shall follow him later, to see what else he chased and how he fared; but now a heavy blue shadow drawn across the second lake demands attention. It is trail of some kind; but most wilderness trails are devious, and this goes straight as a string from one wooded point to another on the opposite shore. From this distance it looks like an artificial roadway; we must see who made it.

The shadow, as we draw near it, turns into a path beaten deep in the snow; so deep that, in places near shore, it would easily hide the animals that made use of it. On either side are curious marks or scratches, all slanting one way; in the fresh snow at the bottom are tracks which say that a pair of large beavers have gone back and forth many times. That is an amazing thing, since Hamoosabik the builder, as Simmo calls him, ought now to be safe in his winter lodge, especially in a wolf and lynx country like this. He is a clumsy creature on land or ice; he is courting sudden death to be more than a few jumps from open water at this hungry time of year.

Following the path to the nearer woods, on our right, we find that the beavers have been felling poplar trees and trimming branches into convenient lengths for transportation. The heavy butts lie where they fell, but all smaller pieces have disappeared, showing that the animals are gathering a new supply of food. I have known beavers, driven by necessity, to leave their winter lodge and forage in the woods, eating where they could; but here are no signs of feeding, and no peeled sticks such as a beaver leaves when he has eaten the good bark.

The cutting has been done near a brook, which you hear singing to itself under its blanket of snow and ice. To the brook go several snow tunnels, each starting beside the stump of a fallen poplar, and examination brings out this interesting bit of animal foresight: wherever the beavers fell a tree, they also dig a tunnel leading to the unseen brook. The digging was first in order, and its purpose was to furnish a way of escape should the beavers be surprised at their work.

It is plain now that we are following an uncommonly cunning pair of animals; that they are working in great danger to transport food-wood to their lodge (which must be on the other side of the lake), and that the curious marks beside their path were made by projecting ends of sticks that they carried crosswise in their teeth. Since beavers store an ample food supply in autumn, some misfortune must have sent this pair abroad in the snow; but why do they not eat their bark where they find it? That they know the danger of crossing an expanse of ice, where they may be caught under their burden by prowling enemies, becomes increasingly apparent as we follow the trail. It heads straight across the narrowest part of the lake to a wooded point, where it turns southward, hiding under banks or underbrush, and then cuts across a bay to the open mouth of a large brook.

Here the beavers have their winter home in a great domed lodge. Around the open water are tracks made by three generations of beaver, and these with the uncommonly big house tell us that the family is a large one. Probably their bark soured under water, the wood having been cut early with too much sap, and they were compelled to go afield for a fresh supply. It is hard, perhaps impossible, for a man to judge what went on in their troubled heads when the need of food grew imperative; but a little memory and some study of the trail bring out two facts to make one thoughtful. The first fact, from memory, is that old and young members of a beaver family habitually work together in gathering their winter store of food; the second, from the trail, is that this particular family is not following its habitual or instinctive custom. Though there are kits and well-grown yearlings in the lodge, only two of the largest beavers have gone forth on their dangerous foraging.

An inviting trail leads up beside the brook, and we follow it to find where several of the family have been cutting a huge yellow birch this very morning. That this tree was intended for food is most improbable; the branches are untouched, and beavers do not care for yellow-birch bark at any season. Had they been driven to such fare by necessity, there are smaller trees with more tender bark near the lodge. They have cut this tough tree for exercise, I think. Their teeth grow rapidly, and unless cutting edges are worn down to the proper bevel they soon grow troublesome. That is why a beaver often comes out beside his lodge, if he can possibly reach open water, and cuts for an hour or two at the butt of a tree to keep his teeth in trim. If he is unable to reach open water, he may find himself in need of heroic treatment when the ice breaks up. I once found a beaver that had starved to death simply because his cutting teeth had grown so long, overlapping below and above, that he could not open his mouth wide enough to separate them and so peel the bark from his food-wood.

Farther up the brook the trail of a solitary beaver leaves the path and heads away into a swamp. Step by step we follow him, till he finds a young cedar tree and cuts it down. That is an odd proceeding, since beavers never eat cedar bark for food. See, as the tree falls he jumps aside to be clear of the butt, which has a trick of lashing out and knocking over anything in its path. Then he mogs around to the very tip, where he eats a few of the greenest sprays, filled with pungent oil of cedar. This for medicine, undoubtedly, which some beavers seem to need in winter, perhaps because of their scant exercise and restricted diet.

The lodge looms up finely across the stream, inviting a closer inspection. It is an enormous structure for a single family, higher than my head and full twelve feet in diameter. An old wolf trail leads to the top on one side, a fresh lynx trail on the other, showing where these hungry prowlers climbed up on tiptoe, as if stalking game, for a smell of the odors that steamed through the beavers’ ventilator. A ravenous smell it must have been to them, like the smell of frying onions to a hungry man. There is hardly a flesh-eating animal in the north that will not leave any other game for a taste of musky beaver. Neither wolf nor lynx attempted to dig the game out, you see; they merely sniffed and passed on; and that, too, tells a story. When they were cubs, perhaps, both animals tried to dig a beaver out of some other lodge like this, only to find that the thick walls of sticks and grass, cemented by frozen mud, were too strong to be breached by any beast in the wilderness.

At thought of these hungry brutes, some vague hint of a nearer hunger floats in and turns our mind to minnows; for that bit of open water looks fishy, and if we can catch a minnow there, we are sure of a good breakfast. There are plenty of trout in the lake by the home camp; but lately they have shown a capricious appetite for minnows, which are more precious here than rubies. To catch a trout is easy enough. All you need do is to place a slanting twig over the hole from which we get drinking water, tie a bit of cloth to your line for a flag, stick this into the split upper end of the twig, and sit comfortably by the fire till your flag is jerked into the hole; whereupon you run quickly and pull out your trout, a fat, delicious trout that tastes as if he had been raised on milk and honey. But first you must catch a minnow for bait, and that calls for a fisherman.

Spreading some brush to distribute my weight, for the ice here is dangerous, I crumble a bit of bread from our lunch into the open water--this to attract any minnow that happily may dwell in the beavers’ playground. Suddenly a flash of silver flickers in the black water amid the sinking crumbs. It inspires hope, tingling and electric, like that which thrills one when the swirl of a noble salmon follows his cast. Then for an hour, it seems, or until I am almost frozen, I use all my fisherman’s art with a bent pin, a morsel of meat, a thread and a moosewood twig; after which I wriggle ashore proudly, holding up one minnow a good inch-and-a-half long. Letting him freeze in the snow while we kindle a fire and brew a dipper of tea for lunch, I carry him off in an outside pocket, where he will keep cold enough until we need him. Sport is a matter of sentiment, and is nine-tenths imagination; but real enjoyment is born of necessity. Never a big salmon, of all that I have taken on the fly, was so well angled for or gave so much solid satisfaction as that tiny minnow.

* * * * *

We shall cruise in strange woods for the rest of the day, taking a hint from Malsun the wolf when he left the otter’s spring-hole. Turning away from the lake, we head rapidly northeast through broken country, on a course which may bring us to the trail of the wolves we heard howling in the night. Malsun was heading this way when we left his trail, and a wolf always knows where to find his pack.

Over a hillock we go, and across a white-faced bog bordered by ghostly larches, so wild, so lonely, that it seems nothing ever breathed here since the world began. Nature seems dead, her form shrouded in snow, her lips sealed with ice; but she is only playing with us, having slipped on another of her many masks. Though nothing moves here, though your snowshoes glide on hour after hour and start no bird or beast, there is life near you at every instant, an eager, abundant life, which finds health and cheerfulness in these apparently desolate places. That you cannot see it is part of the winter game; wild life is too alert now, and much too secretive, to reveal itself to any careless eye.