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Page 62
It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of
McTaggart's line. McTaggart's trail was fresh in the snow about the
cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his
body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps
half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate
itself with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute
there rumbled in Baree's chest a deep and sullen growl. For many
minutes after that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the
cabin.
Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer,
until at last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of
life came from inside, but he could smell the old smell of McTaggart.
Then he faced the wilderness--the direction in which the trap line ran
back to Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles twitched. He whined.
Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind--the fight
in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm's
edge--even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had
caught him in the rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great
yearning, almost expectation. Then it died slowly away. After all, the
scent in the snow was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill,
and not of anything that he had loved. For an instant nature had
impressed on him the significance of associations--a brief space only,
and then it was gone. The whine died away, but in its place came again
that ominous growl.
Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin
struck the first trap on the line. Hunger had caved in his sides until
he was like a starved wolf. In the first trap house McTaggart had
placed as bait the hindquarter of a snowshoe rabbit. Baree reached in
cautiously. He had learned many things on Pierrot's line: he had
learned what the snap of a trap meant. He had felt the cruel pain of
steel jaws; he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would
do when the trigger was sprung--and Nepeese herself had taught him that
he was never to touch a poison bait. So he closed his teeth gently in
the rabbit flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself
could have done. He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five
baits without springing a pan. The sixth was a deadfall. He circled
about this until he had beaten a path in the snow. Then he went on into
a warm balsam swamp and found himself a bed for the night.
The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow
between the wits of man and beast. To Baree the encroachment of Bush
McTaggart's trap line was not war; it was existence. It was to furnish
him food, as Pierrot's line had furnished him food for many weeks. But
he sensed the fact that in this instance he was lawbreaker and had an
enemy to outwit. Had it been good hunting weather he might have gone
on, for the unseen hand that was guiding his wanderings was drawing him
slowly but surely back to the old beaver pond and the Gray Loon. As it
was, with the snow deep and soft under him--so deep that in places he
plunged into it over his ears--McTaggart's trap line was like a trail
of manna made for his special use.
He followed in the factor's snowshoe tracks, and in the third trap
killed a rabbit. When he had finished with it nothing but the hair and
crimson patches of blood lay upon the snow. Starved for many days, he
was filled with a wolfish hunger, and before the day was over he had
robbed the bait from a full dozen of McTaggart's traps. Three times he
struck poison baits--venison or caribou fat in the heart of which was a
dose of strychnine, and each time his keen nostrils detected the
danger. Pierrot had more than once noted the amazing fact that Baree
could sense the presence of poison even when it was most skillfully
injected into the frozen carcass of a deer. Foxes and wolves ate of
flesh from which his supersensitive power of detecting the presence of
deadly danger turned him away.
So he passed Bush McTaggart's poisoned tidbits, sniffing them on the
way, and leaving the story of his suspicion in the manner of his
footprints in the snow. Where McTaggart had halted at midday to cook
his dinner Baree made these same cautious circles with his feet.
The second day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated
smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive. McTaggart
was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands
from the traps and "houses," and every now and then the smell of him
was strong in Baree's nose. This wrought in Baree a swift and definite
antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred where a few days before hatred
was almost forgotten.
There is, perhaps, in the animal mind a process of simple computation
which does not quite achieve the distinction of reason, and which is
not altogether instinct, but which produces results that might be
ascribed to either. Baree did not add two and two together to make
four. He did not go back step by step to prove to himself that the man
to whom this trap line belonged was the cause of all hit, griefs and
troubles--but he DID find himself possessed of a deep and yearning
hatred. McTaggart was the one creature except the wolves that he had
ever hated. It was McTaggart who had hurt him, McTaggart who had hurt
Pierrot, McTaggart who had made him lose his beloved Nepeese--AND
McTAGGART WAS HERE ON THIS TRAP LINE! If he had been wandering before,
without object or destiny, he was given a mission now. It was to keep
to the traps. To feed himself. And to vent his hatred and his vengeance
as he lived.
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