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Page 57
It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm--cold and brilliant,
with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The third
suggestion came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of one
idea at a time--a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed
by a single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of the
starlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of
Pierrot's two cabins on the trap line. There he would find Nepeese!
We won't call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a
process of reasoning. Instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed
and positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss the
traps in his haste to cover distance--to reach the cabin. It was
twenty-five miles from Pierrot's burned home to the first trap cabin,
and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen
were the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and
soft. Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few moments
he was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree
heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of
triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile
away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was
repellent--a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard
it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.
At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheater in the forest where
Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trapline cabins. For at
least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very
alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the
air. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the
log shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there. Again
he sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest.
There was a disheartened slouch to his door. He had traveled
twenty-five miles, and he was tired.
The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and
whined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours
ago. Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour he
sat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit
wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese
might follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a hole
deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy
slumber.
With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not so
alert this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which
the Indians call the Akoosewin--the sign of the sick dog. And Baree was
sick--not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, and
he no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the far
end of the trap line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the
enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He traveled slowly
and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the
excitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot's traps and the
deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs--once at a marten
that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in
which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had
come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain.
It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still
remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that
night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body
through the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than to
show his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.
There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot's traps, and Baree did not go
hungry. He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon,
after ten hours of traveling. He met with no very great disappointment
here, for he had not anticipated very much. The snow had banked this
cabin even higher than the other. It lay three feet deep against the
door, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost. At this
place, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered by
the thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for his
firewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home. All the
next day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap line, skirting
the edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozen
traps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in which
there had been many signs of lynx. It was the third day before he set
out on his return to the Gray Loon.
He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering the
twenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins. At
the second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninth
day that he reached the Gray Loon. There was no change. There were no
tracks in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.
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