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Page 63
The second day, in the center of a lake, he came upon the body of a
wolf that had died of one of the poison baits. For a half-hour he
mauled the dead beast until its skin was torn into ribbons. He did not
taste the flesh. It was repugnant to him. It was his vengeance on the
wolf breed. He stopped when he was half a dozen miles from Lac Bain,
and turned back. At this particular point the line crossed a frozen
stream beyond which was an open plain, and over that plain came--when
the wind was right--the smoke and smell of the Post. The second night
Baree lay with a full stomach in a thicket of banksian pine; the third
day he was traveling westward over the trap line again.
Early on this morning Bush McTaggart started out to gather his catch,
and where he crossed the stream six miles from Lac Bain he first saw
Baree's tracks. He stopped to examine them with sudden and unusual
interest, falling at last on his knees, whipping off the glove from his
right hand, and picking up a single hair.
"The black wolf!"
He uttered the words in an odd, hard voice, and involuntarily his eyes
turned straight in the direction of the Gray Loon. After that, even
more carefully than before, he examined one of the clearly impressed
tracks in the snow. When he rose to his feet there was in his face the
look of one who had made an unpleasant discovery.
"A black wolf!" he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders. "Bah! Lerue is
a fool. It is a dog." And then, after a moment, he muttered in a voice
scarcely louder than a whisper, "HER DOG."
He went on, traveling in the trail of the dog. A new excitement
possessed him that was more thrilling than the excitement of the hunt.
Being human, it was his privilege to add two and two together, and out
of two and two he made--Baree. There was little doubt in his mind. The
thought had flashed on him first when Lerue had mentioned the black
wolf. He was convinced after his examination of the tracks. They were
the tracks of a dog, and the dog was black. Then he came to the first
trap that had been robbed of its bait.
Under his breath he cursed. The bait was gone, and the trap was
unsprung. The sharpened stick that had transfixed the bait was pulled
out clean.
All that day Bush McTaggart followed a trail where Baree had left
traces of his presence. Trap after trap he found robbed. On the lake he
came upon the mangled wolf. From the first disturbing excitement of his
discovery of Baree's presence his humor changed slowly to one of rage,
and his rage increased as the day dragged out. He was not unacquainted
with four-footed robbers of the trap line, but usually a wolf or a fox
or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps. But
in this case Baree was traveling straight from trap to trap, and his
footprints in the snow showed that he had stopped at each one. There
was, to McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work. He evaded
the poisons. Not once did he stretch his head or paw within the danger
zone of a deadfall. For apparently no reason whatever he had destroyed
a splendid mink, whose glossy fur lay scattered in worthless bits over
the snow. Toward the end of the day McTaggart came to a deadfall in
which a lynx had died. Baree had torn the silvery flank of the animal
until the skin was of less than half value. McTaggart cursed aloud, and
his breath came hot.
At dusk he reached the shack Pierre Eustach had built midway of his
line, and took inventory of his fur. It was not more than a third of a
catch; the lynx was half-ruined, a mink was torn completely in two. The
second day he found still greater ruin, still more barren traps. He was
like a madman. When he arrived at the second cabin, late in the
afternoon, Baree's tracks were not an hour old in the snow. Three times
during the night he heard the dog howling.
The third day McTaggart did not return to Lac Bain, but began a
cautious hunt for Baree. An inch or two of fresh snow had fallen, and
as if to take even greater measure of vengeance from his man enemy
Baree had left his footprints freely within a radius of a hundred yards
of the cabin. It was half an hour before McTaggart could pick out the
straight trail, and he followed it for two hours into a thick banksian
swamp. Baree kept with the wind. Now and then he caught the scent of
his pursuer. A dozen times he waited until the other was so close he
could hear the snap of brush, or the metallic click of twigs against
his rifle barrel. And then, with a sudden inspiration that brought the
curses afresh to McTaggart's lips, he swung in a wide circle and cut
straight back for the trap line. When the factor reached the line,
along toward noon, Baree had already begun his work. He had killed and
eaten a rabbit. He had robbed three traps within the distance of a
mile, and he was headed again straight over the trap line for Post Lac
Bain.
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