by John Kulish
Since their last visit, they found the beaver pond had been abandoned. The water level had dropped. For lack of regular reinforcing, the dam had crumbled. Undismayed, the otter had gone under sagging ice to reach the inlet. Emerging from the tiny spring-brook, they set a northwest compass course, and took to the woods. They skied cross-country over a 1,600-foot-high ridge about a mile long. They had to cross an abandoned tote road, but, at twilight, they risked it. The isolated, overgrown road was unmarked by human sign. Usually, whenever otter approach humans, houses, or highways, they tarry, waiting for the cover of night before pushing on. No wise traveler moves through enemy territory by day.
Numerous slopes had provided the season’s first exhilarating slalom and downhill runs. The last schuss had ended in Bog Brook, just in time for a big supper. Appetites appeased, they continued three miles down the brook into Halfmoon Pond. Now they were in the north branch of the Contoocook. Now they had a tripping choice. They could return to the main branch of the Contoocook via big Highland Lake and Jackman Reservoir, or the voyageurs could swim up Bog Brook to travel up the outlet to Frog Pond. A portage through the woods for less than a mile would take them to Bacon Pond, which is the headwaters of the Ashuelot River, a tributary of the big Connecticut.
If otter had not been designed with built-in compasses, consider the alternative journey: fifteen twisted miles backtracking down Woodward and Beards Brook to reach the Contoocook River on the outskirts of Hillsboro; a mile and a half to Jackman Reservoir; three miles to cross it; eight miles up North Branch River to reach the outlet to Island Pond; five miles up through Mill Village; eight miles plus up the length of Highland Lake; two and a half miles up the inlet into Halfmoon Pond: a forty-one-mile trip by water. How did they know?
Countless generations of otter have made that one-mile portage. When now-extinct birds were soaring over primeval forests, otter were using the same shortcuts. A thousand years from now, if we do not wipe them from the earth, future generations of otter will climb over hidden hills in the middle of the night to do what no civil engineer could do without schooling and instruments. Such a mystery can only lift one’s eyes upward.
Sign to a professional woodsman is what a book is to a scholar. A scholar must be able to read and to understand words. A good woodsman must learn to read and to comprehend sign. Both take time, thought, and tenacity. When a scholar goes to a library and picks out a book, he begins to read. When he cannot understand, he studies until he comprehends it. When a person who cannot read sign walks through the woods, it is as though he were walking through a foreign land. All he sees are trees, brush, and ground. He is like an illiterate who picks up a book, glances at it, thumbs through its pages, and discards it. Because the strange marks mean nothing to him, he might even contemplate a page upside down. History’s tragedies, comedies, ironies, and mysteries are lost to him, because he has never studied enough to comprehend what he might read.
To a person who has learned, not only nature’s mother tongue, but most of her dialects, a walk through the woods is like reading a great novel. Every few steps, new characters are introduced. The plot changes and develops; the tempo increases or subsides. Climax follows climax. One can hardly wait to turn the page. One walks only a short distance before uncovering new and exciting volumes in nature’s library. All of them have “footnotes.”
One does not need a library card to borrow nature’s books. They are ours for the searching. Like all great literature, they touch the heart. Educating the heart stretches one’s character much tighter than schooling the brain. In His acre, God is not dead. There are no atheists in the woods.
5. Untamed Affections: Compassion Among Wild Animals
I still remember the first wild animal I caught. It was a coney rabbit that had been strangled in my snare. The elation and pride of accomplishment, added to the knowledge that this creature would be a welcome and tasty addition to an otherwise meager supper table, struggled with an uneasy curiosity in my nine-year-old heart. What would the rabbit’s mother say when he didn’t come home for supper?
For many years, unanswered questions troubled me. Whenever I trapped a mink or an otter, or shot a fox, a bobcat, or a deer, I couldn’t help but wonder how the creature’s peers and family were being affected. Or were they? Whenever a member of my own family or a friend dies, I grieve in the same measure I have loved. How about wild animals? Do they love? Do they grieve? Four decades of observation has uncovered knowledge which I have never been able to find in any books.
In the woods, animals with full bellies also tend to have full hearts. The ones I know about are the beaver and the otter. The creatures who must scrounge for every mouthful to survive, especially during long and bitter winters, fight any competitor for the scant food supply, even in their immediate families. As living links in nature’s food chain, all wild creatures live on borrowed time. The usury rate in nature’s commissary is high.
How different are we from wild animals? Does appetite shape our thinking? Do we make the same choices whether our bellies are full or empty? Do well-fed humans always show compassion for those who are hungry, or love for those who have alien ideas?
We have split the atom. We breakfast in Boston and lunch in San Francisco. We orbit in outer space. Yet, in the most important area of all, we have feet and hearts of lead. What good to fly to the ends of the universe if we do not understand our place in it? What good to kneel in churches when we do not know how to love one another at home? What good to land on the moon while we still kill each other for power, for pleasure, and for profit?
In many ways, life among animals in the woods makes more sense than life in “civilization” among human beings. Do you suppose a wood mouse says, “Some of my best friends are meadow mice, but—”? Do you suppose starlings envy the scarlet tanager his fancy “mod” jacket? Do you suppose sparrows attack crows because they are black? Animal behavior is logical; wild creatures don’t know how to rationalize.
Most wild creatures kill only to eat. Once they have eaten, they will not eat again until they are hungry. A bobcat, whose belly is full of varying hare, could come upon a bunny bebop session in a swamp he was passing through. He wouldn’t give the dancers a second look.
A great horned owl sleeps all day. After dark, it sits up in a tree, its head turning continually, like a gun turret on a capital ship. It spots a hare hopping along a bunny trail, swoops down, scoops up its supper and returns to a tree. Holding onto a branch with one talon, it devours the animal down to the last hair and bone. Then it flies to another, bigger tree to sit and to burp. Along comes a whole band of bunnies. Their arch enemy ignores them. He is still burping varying hare.
Even those creatures who, in the merciless struggle to stay alive, fight their own kinfolk, maintain a sense of basic decency many human beings lack-or choose to ignore. Buck deer, dog foxes, wild tomcats, even domesticated male dogs show a moral sense many men are lacking. Animals do not fight their rivals to the death. The moment one of the contenders growls or bleats “uncle,” the struggle ends. Knowing nothing about theology or religion, and without either the ability to reason or the conscience to feel guilt, most wild creatures fulfill God’s plan more honestly than we do.
In the spring, when snow melts and the world turns green, wild creatures once more begin to eat regularly and without a struggle. A hundred different flavors of mice scamper across nature’s smorgasbord. Insects and beetles grow with the grass. Wild strawberries stain fallow fields. In July, a sweet indigo carpet covers old pastures and forest openings. Underfoot, frogs, lizards, toads, and snakes hop and crawl. With the waning of summer, grasshoppers and crickets combine food with frolic. Choppings turn red and then black with raspberries and blackberries. In the woods, wild apples, acorns, and beechnuts roll underfoot.
Then winter sets in. Frozen apples and nuts are sealed under layers of frozen snow and ice. Mice huddle, hidden under the snow. No longer do little birds fall out of nests. No longer does the forest floor offer
red-spotted newts as delectable tidbits. Berries and grasshoppers are only an agonizing memory. By midwinter, as much as four feet of snow buries the universal pantry. The thermometer shivers outside a north window. Sometimes, at night, it lurches down to thirty below. There is no central heating in animal homes. All heat must come from a little boiler room that can be stoked only through the esophagus. It cries constantly for fuel-any kind at all, just as long as it keeps the pilot light burning.
To stay alive, a fox must forage afar. Night after night, its tracks come out of the woods to a tree whose stiff fingers still grasp five or six rotted, frozen apples. He circles the tree. Perhaps a provident wind blew one of the bitter fruit to the ground. When he finds nothing, he trots off toward another tree he remembers several miles away. Night after night he returns. When an apple finally does fall, it may well be the first morsel of food he has tasted in more than two weeks. In mid-November, a mature dog fox weighs thirteen to fourteen pounds. His orange coat is glossy and a little tight over a paunch. Three months later, he is a bone rack. He barely tips the scales at five pounds. With several feet of snow under his still nimble feet, he sinks less than two inches. By February, the thread of life is stretched taut.
Among New England foxes, mating begins anytime after the first of January. It is usually during that month that their tracks first appear in pairs. Some naturalists claim that foxes are monogamous. If they are, theirs is not my idea of monogamy. The dog and the vixen have nothing to do with each other except during the rut and for a few brief weeks around the first of April, after the pups are born. Usually, snow still covers the ground, and food is hard to find. For a short time, papa hangs around the borrowed burrow. Once in a while, he halfheartedly helps with the groceries, but it is mama who carries the major burden. It is she who looks haggard. The old man is as dapper and as peppy as ever. Obviously, he eats his fill first. His devotion rarely lasts out a month. Then he abruptly shakes the pine needles of domesticity from his heels. It is the vixen who teaches the puppies how to be foxes. Is it she who teaches them never to share food, even while mating?
The rutting season for foxes had begun after a harsh winter when, week after week, the temperature had hovered around zero, and four feet of snow covered the mountainous landscape. I was snowshoeing along an old tote road on my way out of the woods. The sun had set. Already, darkness gripped the forest. Only the sky remained free. Suddenly, in the gloom ahead, appeared the shape of a large porcupine. Scratching noises followed as it climbed up a juicy hemlock tree for its supper of bark. I waited until it was silhouetted against the sky, shot it, and slung the carcass over a crotch in the tree high enough off the ground so that no dog could reach it. At daybreak, I was back following the trail where I had come out the night before. Today, the second leaf of my standard “three-leaf clover” pattern of hunting would unfurl.
During the night, a dog fox, accompanied by his lady friend, had come out of the forest to walk up my webbed trail. Even though the size of the tracks in the soft snow told me the owners were large, they were sinking less than three inches. When had these two had their last meal?
About a quarter-mile from yesterday’s “porcupine tree,” the foxes had smelled food. The tracks began to weave about, then to zigzag wildly. A hundred yards from the tree, they went berserk. Back and forth they ran, without either pattern or design. It looked as though a thousand foxes had been there. The hedgehog was gone. The tote road, including my snowshoe tracks which still had held my scent captive, was covered by a maze of tracks, clumps of hair, and tufts of quills. What perplexed me was that more fox hair was strewn about than were porcupine quills.
Savagely attacking each other, though it was during the rut, these two had fought over the hedgehog. The bloody battle continued for a hundred yards up the road. There, among a confusion of tracks, blood, fox hair, and broken quills lay a battle-frayed souvenir, the porcupine’s most cherished possession, its tail. Completely encompassed with spears, even deadlier than those that armor its back, it is the ultimate weapon, its lethal power to be unleashed only when all else fails. A battered tail was all that remained of a twenty-pound animal. From the way that loaded weapon had been punted around, it was obvious the foxes had fought over trying to make both ends meat, even though they couldn’t possibly have swallowed any of it. In the throes of courtship, even a selfish man or woman sometimes does unselfish things. Not so the fox!
Bobcats hate competition even more than foxes do. They tolerate one another only while they are little, and that tolerance never develops into affection. Like foxes, bobcats get together only during the rut. Even when driven by nature’s strongest urge, a cat will not share its food. Once the female is impregnated, togetherness ends. A tom’s role as a father lasts only for moments. (How like some people!) Under no circumstances, will a female allow a tom to come near a litter. No doubt, she knows him better than you or I! I believe that one of the reasons bobcats are not more plentiful is because, given the opportunity, the mature males kill and eat their own kittens. Under certain circumstances, they will even eat their peers.
One late February day, high up on Lovewell Mountain, I found an astonishing amount of cat sign concentrated in one small area. The tracks had all been made by the same cat. Why were some of them two weeks old? Why had others been made only seconds before my hound and I barged in? Why was Tom moving around in the middle of the day instead of sleeping? What was he doing? Why had this particular cat forsaken its roaming ways to remain in this particular area for several weeks? Searching for answers, I climbed up onto a ledge, then followed a path leading from it into a thicket. The well-worn route had been made personally by the cat. As I emerged into a small opening, I almost stumbled over the frozen body of a bigger-than-average cat. It had been partially devoured.
In December, before the snows came, the frozen cat had been wounded by a deer hunter. It had crawled up onto the mountain to die. During the ensuing weeks, the continuous cycle of snow, freeze, and thaw had encased half of the carcass in solid ice. Another cat, while hunting the mountain for hare, had come upon its buddy in cold storage. It could even have been its brother. The parts not encased in ice made good eating, but as the meals progressed, so did the effort needed to get them. Finally, the cannibal had to tear at the remains with its claws as well as with its fangs. As I stood on the windswept ledge, my thoughts flew across a century and a continent to Donner Pass. The will to survive has burned as strongly in the hearts of some men as it does in the hearts of most cats.
A spiteful disposition seems to be as much a mink’s heritage as is its sleek, shiny fur. In the spring, the female bears two to five young in an abandoned muskrat den, a natural hole in a riverbank, or, sometimes in an abandoned beaver lodge. Although most encyclopedias claim litters with as many as eight, I have yet to see more than five. No mink ever knows what it is to have a father, for mink are raised by their mothers without any help from the males. Ma herself has only a perfunctory maternal instinct, and abandons her children just as soon as they can fend for themselves. In midsummer, I have frequently seen three little mink from the same litter, hunting along a brook together. Mother Mink was nowhere around. By late summer the siblings themselves split up. Mink are loners. They share nothing. Rarely, and only under certain unusual circumstances, are they ever drawn together, and then only for a brief period.
The winter of 1933 was one of frostbite and chilblains, as any alumnus of the WPA or any woodsman could testify. During all of January, the thermometer never rose above zero, neither by night nor by day. Late in the fall, a small, isolated pond had been drained in anticipation of repairing a crumbling stone dam in the spring. When the pond had shrunk to its lowest level, the brook below the dam boiled with fish. The news ran quickly along the animal grapevine. Because, long ago, I had broken their code, the message reached me almost as quickly as it did seven mink. I arrived at the gold mine only a day after they did. (They were prospecting for fish.)
The assemblage had calle
d a nervous truce and taken up temporary residence among the stones in the dam. Each had a private room with a picture window overlooking the restaurant. Love for food, rather than for one another was the common denominator. Whenever they weren’t eating, they explored the corridors and nooks of their granite motel.
Among the large base stones along either side of the brook below the dam, I searched for places to set traps. Suddenly, my curiosity was excited by sign it had never seen before.
Moving backwards, a three-pound mink had dragged something much heavier than itself almost fifty feet from between two of the huge granite blocks. Several times, it had stopped to rest. My eyes followed the drag mark across the length of the dam and thence across an opening, up a slope, to disappear under a snow-covered brush pile. What had been worth such an unminklike struggle?
Removing my pack, I dropped to my knees and began to tear apart the pile of brush. To my amazement, I found a five-foot-long, forearm-thick, black water snake. It had been frozen solidly into the form of a shepherd’s crook. The head and ten inches of the torso were missing. Tooth marks were etched into the last pink bite. The snake, hibernating in the old rock dam, had been discovered by a marauding mink. Needless to say, when the mink had made its find, it hadn’t shouted, “Hey, fellas, come see what I found!” After stuffing itself in secret, it had buried its treasure like any pirate. To me, it was a big black water snake. To a mink, it had been a big black popsicle.
The whitetail deer has a gentle disposition, especially when compared to that of the fox, the mink, or the bobcat. But when that timid tail is pressed hard against the winnowing wall of winter, self-preservation prevails.
Doe drop their fawns in late May or in early June-one year, a single; twins, or even triplets, the next. Throughout the summer months, the doe cares devotedly for her little fawn. The latest I have seen a fawn nursing was in mid-September. During the fall, food is plentiful, varied, and delicious. The usual “meat and potatoes” diet of second growth twigs, buds, and berries of wild shrubs and red maples is supplemented with juicy wild apples, crunchy acorns, and toothsome beechnuts. Fawns remain with their mothers throughout autumn. It is then that doe teach their young how to avoid the thunderbolts who walk on two legs. If the young learn their lessons well, they survive, to enter a winter yard with their ma’s. After three months of feasting at nature’s harvest table, they are all fat and strong.