The Way of the Wild.

by F. St. Mars.

I

GULO THE INDOMITABLE

If his father had been a brown bear and his mother a badger, the result in outward appearance would have been Gulo, or something very much like him. But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master. Gulo, however, was not a cross. He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, _alias_ glutton, _alias_ carcajou, _alias_ quick-hatch, _alias_ fjeldfras in the vernacular, or, officially, _Gulo luscus_. But, by whatever name you called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character, too, was of a bad odor. A great man once said that he was like a bear cub with a superadded tail; but that great man cannot have seen his face. If he had, he would have looked for his double among the fiends on the top of Notre Dame. There was, in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only in a very hot place not on the earth.

He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man, and no beast, ought to be trusted with; and he had no soul. G.o.d alone knows if love, which softens most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior seemed to show that it had not. Perhaps love was afraid of him. And, upon my soul, I don't wonder.

It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place in the pine-forest where Gulo stood, and the unpitying moon cast a dainty tracery through the ta.s.seled roof upon the new and glistening snow around him--the snow that comes early to those parts--and the north-east wind cut like several razors. But Gulo did not seem to care. Wrapped up in his ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black cloak--just his gray-sided, black fiend's face poking out--he seemed warm enough. When he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the murderous, sc.r.a.ping, long claws of him were nearly white; and as he set his lips in a devilish grin, his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.

Verily, this was no beast--he would have taped four feet and a quarter from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure him--no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves. Things were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other living creature--awful things.

Suddenly he looked up. The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as if an army were asleep there. And an army was--of wood-pigeons.

Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head, come from Heaven knows where, going to--who could tell in the end?

All at once one fell. Without apparent reason or cause, it fell. And the wolverine, with his quick, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from branch to branch, turning over and over--oh! so softly--to the ground.

When he had poked his way to it--walking flat-footed, like a bear or a railway porter--it was dead. Slain in a breath! Without a flutter, killed! By what? By disease--diphtheria. But not here would the terrible drama be worked out. This was but an isolated victim, first of the thousands that would presently succ.u.mb to the fell disease far, far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.

But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of no use to the wolverine. As he sniffed it he found that out. The thing was wasted to the bones even. And turning away from it--he suddenly "froze" in his tracks where he stood.

One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his wet muzzle; and its touch spelt--"Man!"

If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have affected him more. He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and on end.

Animals have no counting of time. In the wild, things happen as swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a night, or a day, or half a week. Therefore I do not know exactly how long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a certain spot--himself unseen. All animals, almost, can do that, but none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine. He is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been. He found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth; and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for digging.

He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have known it. He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches, and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his lowering, low-browed fashion.

Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox, somewhere in the utter silence of the forest depths, barked a hoa.r.s.e, sharp, malicious sound; and once, hoa.r.s.er still and very hollowly, a great horned owl hooted with disconcerting suddenness. (The scream of a rabbit followed these two, but whether fox or owl had been in at that killing the wolverine never knew.) Twice a wood-hare turning now to match the whiteness of its surroundings, finicked up one of the still, silent forest lanes towards him, stopped, faced half-round, sat "frozen" for a fraction, and vanished as if it were a puff of wind-caught snow. (And, really, one had no idea till now that the always apparently lifeless forest could have been so full of life in the dark hours.)

But all these things made no difference to the wolverine, to Gulo, though he "froze" with habitual care to watch them--for your wild creature rarely takes chances. Details must never be overlooked in the wild. He dug on, and in digging came right to the _cache_, roofed and anch.o.r.ed all down, safe beyond any invasion, with tree-trunks.

And--and, mark you, not being able to pull tree-trunks out of the ground, and being too large to squeeze between them, he gnawed through one! Gnawed through it, he did, and came down to the bazaar below.

So far, he had been only beast. Now we see why I said he had more brains than were good for any animal except man.

He bit through the canvas, or whatever it was that protected the _cached_ articles. He got his head inside. He felt about purposefully, and backed out, dragging a trap with him. With it he removed into the inky shadows, and it was never found again.

He returned. He thrust his head in a second time, got hold of something, and backed out. It was another trap, and with it he vanished also; and it, too, was never found. He returned, and went, and a third trap went with him.

The fourth investigation revealed an ax. It he partly buried. The fifth yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over the place. The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he dined. The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away, bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea, which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.

What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly _cache_, but a third-rate _debacle_, he sauntered, always slouching, always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the darkness of the night, under the trees.

By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no more. Heaven knows where he was!

Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon, beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.

A man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.

A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks from time to time.

But Gulo was taking no notice of them. He was used to attentions of that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him. He was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the b.u.t.tressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist, southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of whisper in that direction for some time. Now it was unmistakable.

A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by, her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up, hackles alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look back, a wild reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he seemed to be--all these pa.s.sed, now on one side, now on the other, often only glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up and shaded his eyes with his paws. Something was moving those beasts, those haunters of the forest, and no little thing either. Something?

What?

Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade, And the whisper spreads and widens far and near; And the sweat is on thy brow, for he pa.s.ses even now-- He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.

Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his domestic arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool hard by.

The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf and stone, with fine green moss of incomparable softness. He drank swiftly and long, then flung about with a half-insolent, half-aggressive wave of his tail, and set off at a rolling, clumsy, shuffling shamble.

At ordinary times that deceiving gait would have left nearly everything behind, but this afternoon it was different. Gulo had barely shed the shelter of the dotted thickets before he realized, and one saw, the fact. He broke his trot. He began to plunge. Nevertheless, he got along. There was pace, of a sort. Certainly there was much effort.

He would have outdistanced you or me easily in no time, but it was not you or I that came, and who could tell how fast that something might travel?

The trouble was the snow--that was the rub, and a very big and serious rub, too, for him. Now, if the snow had been a little less it would not have mattered--a little more, and he could have run easily along the hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just enough to r.e.t.a.r.d him, and no more. And it is then, when the snow is like that, just above a couple of feet deep, that man can overtake friend wolverine--if he knows the way. Most men don't. On that he trusted. At any other time--but this was not any other time.

Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a c.o.c.k-capercailzie--the feathered giant of the woods--rising. It was only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite enough, for him. Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more than enough. He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone in his eyes--it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.

A lynx pa.s.sed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs. It looked all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of its long, springing hindlegs. Something, too--the same something--must have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.

Half-an-hour pa.s.sed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his character. Nothing had pa.s.sed him for quite a while, and he was all alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.

At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up. A gray-blue haze, like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that foretold frost. It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes. The silence was almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very faintly--a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little, wide-set eyes. It was the unmistakable sound of a horse sneezing--once. Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice. He was gone in an instant. Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering that challenge of the _cache_ escapade.

After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.) It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded, the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely dealt in it, to know fear.

Hours pa.s.sed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him.

At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back along the trail.

Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace was wanted here, and the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the required speed under such conditions.

The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was being followed. Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and teeth showing, had never ceased to gallop. This, apparently, was not the first wolverine that horse had trailed. It seemed to have a personal grudge against the whole fell clan of wolverine, and to be bent upon trampling Gulo to death.

Gulo watched it for about one quarter of a second. Then he quitted, and the speed he had put up previously was nothing to that which he showed now--uselessly. And, far behind him, the man in the sleigh drew out his rifle from under the fur rugs. He judged that the time had about come. The end was very near.

But he judged wrong. Gulo made the wood at length. With eyes of dull red, and breath coming in short, rending sobs, he got in among the trees. He did it, though the feat seemed impossible, for the trees had been so very far away. Got in among the trees--yes, but dead-beat, and--to what end? To be "treed" ignominiously and calmly shot down, picked off like a squirrel on a larch-pole. That was all. And that was the orthodox end, the end the man took for granted.

In a few minutes the horse was in the forest too, was close behind Gulo. In spite of the m.u.f.fling effect of snow, his expectant ears could hear the quadruple thud of the galloping hoofs, and--