by John Kulish
What should I do? Where could I get another gun? How long would it take? Would the dogs remain at the tree after I left? If Chocolate, young and impatient, left, would Jiggs stay behind? But leave the tree I must. Never had the bitter truth of “so near and yet so far” been more clearly understood. A rawhide thong was pulled from my game pocket and fastened around Junior’s collar. My only hope to use him as staying power was to tie him to a nearby tree. But how long would any dog remain under these circumstances? Jiggs should stay for some time, for he had learned from previous experience but, veteran that he was, here was an area that remained untested. The useless gun was hung onto one of the lower branches of Tom’s roost. If both dogs deserted, the cat might still be unwilling to come down past a gun reeking of man. This was a wild gamble; bobcats are notorious for their poor “smellers.”
Where could a weapon be found? No one in the vicinity knew me. Then a thought cheered me. The reservoir was formed by a federal flood control dam. A permanent dam tender is always stationed at such installations. Perhaps he would have a gun that I could borrow. The dam waited three miles below. My snowshoes waited a quarter of a mile above, where I had so optimistically left them. Climbing up the cliff would eat up precious time. Suddenly, looking down at the reservoir, it didn’t look that far away. Mirages never do.
Although two feet of snow had covered the icy base formed when winter’s first snows had melted, it was but a camouflage for the treachery below. Because of the sheer pitch, some cliffs could only be traversed. Sliding down others, I would gather up momentum and crash violently into a tree. After several bruising collisions, I began to pick out certain trees that loomed closer, and by plunging from one to another, I ricocheted down the mountain.
I had but a few moments to relish the thought that only a quarter-mile of level ground separated me from the reservoir, when Chocolate, pink tongue lolling, wig-wagged down to me. Was mine to be a fool’s errand?
Wallowing in thigh-deep snow, I thought that the pond would never be reached. The windswept mantle on the reservoir was just as deep. It could not hold me. As soon as all my weight was placed on one foot, I would sink almost to my crotch. The gate house wavered miles away. Stopping to rest, the weak baying of a hound could be heard far up on the mountain. It seemed like hours before I made my way with a jerky, muscle-tearing stride up the riprap to the top of the dam. The plowed road brought tears to my eyes.
I flew over the half-mile to the gate house. In the maintenance building, a man was working. He turned out to be the assistant dam tender and, as such, did not live on the government premises. My predicament was explained. He did not seem sympathetic, even when interjecting that his superior had a shotgun, although he didn’t know what kind. In typical Yankee fashion, it was only when I said I would hurry along to the dam tender’s house that he told me his boss was out of town and would not return until late that night. Would he get me the gun? No? He didn’t want to go into his boss’s house? Disheartened, I started down the road. Surely, someone would help me.
A half-mile below the dam, I knocked on a front door. A dog barked from a shed. I knocked on the side door. I knocked on the back door. Wasn’t anyone in Cheshire County home? A desperate half-mile farther brought me to the next house. Judging by winter sign, it didn’t seem to be used a great deal, but a car was parked in front. A middle-aged woman answered my knock. My troubles were dumped onto her solid shoulders. It took the better part of five minutes. After I had finished, she told me that the owners were down South. She checked the house once a week. No, she didn’t know anything about guns and cared less. Refusing to consider myself the victim of a plot, I continued down the road. Chocolate jogged along beside me. No one answered at the next door. The knowledge that I was going farther and farther away from my cache on the mountain maddened me. The empty highway stretched ahead.
Suddenly, a vehicle approached from behind. It was the assistant dam tender, driving a government truck. He had decided to chance his supervisor’s ire. While I waited, he unlocked a door and went into the house. Ten minutes later, he reappeared. He held a rusty, double-barreled, twelve-gauge, hammer shotgun. He had no shells. He had looked everywhere. Driving into Keene with a government truck was out of the question. One man in trouble was enough. Then he recalled once seeing a shell or two lying around in the maintenance building, so we drove there. Again I waited. It seemed like a long time. When he came out, he held up four shells. I grinned. It wouldn’t take four shots to shoot a cat out of a tree.
A second glance revealed that two of the shells were useless. They were No. 8’s, dud shot for killing sparrows. The other two were 00 Bucks, a coarse pattern used for deer. The nine individual balls have such a dispersion that one can miss a moose at fifteen yards. Compelled to become a reluctant chooser, this beggar took the 00 Bucks. Putting the ancient blunderbuss under my arm, I hurried across the dam.
Climbing a steep mountain without snow is difficult. Climbing a steep mountain with snowshoes is worse. Climbing a steep mountain in deep snow without snowshoes is a horrible experience. My best bet was to intercept my own snowshoe trail somewhere on the east slope, follow it to the dropoff, and thence down to the cat. After an enervating struggle, the summit was mine. No barking could be heard. Dejected, I slipped and slid down past my snowshoes still stuck in the snow, to reach the rock shelf. During the cautious approach toward the pine, I suddenly heard a hoarse bark. Ol’ Kitty Guy had passed another test.
My broken shotgun still hung over a broken branch. A twenty-dollar bill still glared down at the hound. Jiggs had done his job; the rest was up to me. I opened up the breech of the old double-barrel, loaded both chambers, and snapped it shut. What if I fired one shot and missed? What if only a single pellet grazed or struck the cat? Past experience had taught that such a cat would leap out of a tree, no matter how high, and disappear down the cliff below into any one of a hundred rock piles. The most important decision in a day full of decisions was made. Eighteen pellets are twice as many as nine. Both triggers must be pulled at the same time.
A steadying boulder was essential. I did not trust an offhand shot. The hand supporting the barrel resting on a rock, both hammers at full cock, I took careful aim. A roar shook the mountain. The cat spiraled through the air end over end, and disappeared into a coniferous thicket below. Dashing to the foot of the pine, and dropping to my knees, I peered down the cliff to where my day’s pay had disappeared. The mountain was so steep that when the cat hit the snow seventy-five yards below, it slipped out of sight like a toboggan. Jiggs leaped after his trophy, be it dazed, wounded, or dead. The empty weapon was leaned against a tree. Lying on my back, my spread-eagled arms and legs as brakes, I slid down 300 feet.
I had a cat all right, but even as Jiggs extracted payment, the problem of dragging it back up prevailed, for Chocolate had broken the leather thong used for that contingency. A rawhide lace was removed from one of my hunting pacs, a loop formed, and a noose fastened snugly around Tom’s neck. Crawling, reaching, slipping, grabbing, it seemed as if the pine where two shotguns waited was beyond my capacity. A desperate heave lunged me up onto the narrow ledge. I lay on my belly, fighting for breath. The two weapons were added to my load and the final assault begun.
Both hands busy with bulky burdens, I had to resort to creeping, sometimes almost losing a shotgun. My heart pounded whenever one began slipping out of my hands. I didn’t know which gun to throw away. Somehow or other, my snowshoes were reached. Encumbered with one thirty-five-pound bobcat, two five-foot-long snowshoes, two ten-pound shotguns, two large dogs, and one unlaced, snow-filled boot, I finally conquered the pinnacle. Under the first stars, I flopped down onto the snow to rest and to think. What had promised to be a beautiful, forty-dollar day had turned into a tortured nightmare. I felt like a man who had been out hunting for the first time.
As an imperfect perfectionist, I hunt alone, taking pride in the orderly sign left by snowshoes that, forming a giant loop, make but one tidy, continuous t
rail. That day, the whole mountain was covered with tracks: all made by one man. What was it that Henry David Thoreau had said about “most men leading lives of quiet desperation”? I wish he could have been with me that day on Surry Mountain.
11. Give Your Heart to a Dog
The relationship between Jiggs and myself deepened. With every passing day, we understood each other better. I was more than just a man to him. He was more than just a dog to me. During the fifth year of our partnership, high up on the ice-covered cliffs of Mt. Monadnock, I discovered how much the Ol’ Guy had come to mean to me.
As a woodsman, I frequently faced physical danger. When face to face, the fear I felt was usually sudden and short-lived. It demanded instant action, while adrenalin applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to ebbing courage. But that dark day on the mountain, fear of the unknown, fed by uncertainty, made my very heart buckle.
Each day I hunted a different township, visiting a certain area but once a week. Mt. Monadnock was on my regular schedule. In late autumn, bobcats had hunted the foothills of the 3,200-foot peak, but during deer season, they had withdrawn to timber-line.
Before daybreak, Jiggs and I left a dead-end road that winds partway up the mountain, and started a two-mile climb toward the ice-encrusted, bald summit that dominates the region. Four inches of fluffy, new snow covered two feet of packed powder. Rabbits and deer had taken advantage of perfect feeding conditions during the night, but cats had not. Jiggs left me regularly for ten- or fifteen-minute intervals as he made consecutive circles. Two hours later, we had climbed within a quarter-mile of tree line. As I scaled the ledges on the steep east slope, I murmured a thank-you to the small, tough saplings that held firm, though supporting my full weight.
Jiggs had been gone for a half-hour. Perhaps he had found a track made early last night and was trying to get Tom up. For almost an hour I waited restlessly, all the while studying the weirdly beautiful snow formations the winter gales had sculptured along the ledges. The frozen sun and my grumbling stomach told me it was noon. Still no Jiggs. Had he jumped his quarry and taken it over the mountain out of hearing? To keep from freezing, I continued to climb slowly toward the summit until, an hour and a half later, I stood on top of Pumpelly Ridge. Unmarked, the snowy rock fields undulated north, west, and northeast. Puzzled, I snowshoed north along the slippery crest for another hour, searching either side for a clue, stopping regularly to listen. Never before had I stood here without fighting the wind. It had retreated completely. Not a puff stirred the snow. The unnatural quiet disquieted me. Pacing back and forth, I watched and listened atop the northernmost peak of the ridge until the numbing cold drove me back.
Gathering clouds obscured the setting sun. I could wait no longer. Before dark, I must try to reach the place where Jiggs had left me. I began a cautious descent; haste could result in disaster. Thoughts kept my mind as busy as the tricky ledges kept my legs.
Jiggs had been my partner and constant companion for five years. I knew him inside out. Never before had he behaved like this. Could he have jumped a cat on the south slopes of the summit and run it off toward Gap Mountain? But why had he broken precedent to range so far way from me?
It was almost dark when I reached our parting place. Only this morning’s tracks marred the snow. It was too late to search further. Descending the cliffs at night would be perilous as it was. As I slipped and slid downward, hope and fear chewed at my guts. Maybe Ol’ Kitty Guy was waiting at the truck. At seven o’clock I snowshoed into the unplowed, silent parking lot. I was still alone.
Early in our partnership, when he discovered that, after dark, I couldn’t shoot the way he could run, he would abandon the hottest chase. Sometime during the homeward trek, out of the darkness, a warm muzzle would suddenly push into my hand. Because he got his sleep and I got mine, we greeted each morning with gusto. As I waited in the frosty truck, I began to think. Today had been unusual weatherwise. Up on the summit’s bony ridges, laid waste by fires a century ago, hardly a day passes when the wind doesn’t blow with near-hurricane force. Right now, Jiggs’s tracks were still visible, but even a little eddy of wind would fill in the imprints. The sun had gone to bed in a heavy bank of clouds and I could almost taste snow. At eleven o’clock I drove home for hot coffee, then returned to wait until after two in the morning. Falling into bed for a few fitful hours, I prayed the wind would extend the truce.
When I once again reached the spot where Jiggs had left me, the grotesque shapes of the stunted spruces were barely discernible. The forest of ice was ominously still. The wind still waited. I cut a circle around the tracks, casting off sharply a half-mile to the west, thence north of Pumpelly Ridge, to finally close the ring a full half-mile from the south. I did not cross Jiggs’s tracks. Somewhere within this one-mile circle above tree line lay the answer.
Yesterday’s dog tracks wound up through scrubby spruces, then zigzagged along a ridge so narrow and steep that I could follow only by creeping along, peering down to make out the imprints almost two hundred feet below. On one of these roundabout casts, the false ice buttress of a rock chimney loomed ahead. I inched my way around it to peer over the edge. There, 250 feet down, Jiggs’s tracks went parallel to the cliff, to disappear behind a huge cornice of snow jutting out over a large boulder. The other side was clearly visible. No tracks emerged from behind the snowed-in rock. On all fours, I backed down the sheer cliff, to finally reach the tracks leading to the boulder. A heart-pounding, tightrope balancer’s walk ended at the cornice. Ahead, the cliff to be traversed slanted so steeply that the mere thought of crossing it upright made my legs rubbery. Off came my snowshoes. Into the harnesses went my mittened hands. Fingers clutched the crossbars tightly. Down on all fours for better traction, I finally gained the snow chimney and looked around to its farther side. No tracks. One snowshoe crept forward, then another. Suddenly, ten feet from me yawned an opening in the snow. It was barely a foot across. The tracks disappeared into it. Not a sound could be heard. Then, as I crept closer, hoarse barking funneled upward.
Wary, lest the same fate befall me, I pressed my hands hard onto the rawhide webs and, using them for support, straddled the hole and peered down. Brown eyes, alive with love, looked up at me. Jiggs stood on the floor of a bottle-shaped hole nine or ten feet deep. Scratch marks an inch deep, as high as he could jump, furrowed the curved, ice-encrusted stone walls. He had trampled the snow that had fallen in with him into a solid mass. It was red with blood. For almost thirty hours, he had been clawing the unassailable walls, while the small opening, hardly larger than the dog himself, had provided perfect soundproofing. From only a few feet away, one could never have heard his cries.
How could I get him out without help? It would be impossible to get into the cavern without a ladder, but that meant a perilous, two-mile trip down a glass mountain, followed by an eight-mile drive home. An east wind suddenly swirled snow. Time was against me. Even if I had a rope, there was neither a tree nor a rock to which it could be fastened. What about the leather leash in my game pocket? It wouldn’t be long enough, but it was strong. Swiftly, the snap hook was run through the hand loop and drawn tight enough to fashion a leather snare. Next, the lengths of rawhide thongs, used to drag out cats, were knotted together and fastened to the buckle end of the leash. Lowered into the cavern, the improvised lifeline dangled a few inches above the floor. It was long enough, but how to get the loop over Jiggs’s head? He hadn’t taken his lively eyes off me for a second.
My plan was risky. Once his head had been snared, the upward haul could break his neck. Could I be quick and sure enough? It took several tries before the snare settled over the upturned head. Startled, he turned, and the thong was drawn tight enough to make it secure. Realizing his life was in my hands, I pulled as I had never pulled before. Up came seventy pounds of hound. His eyes were bulging painfully when he reached the small opening. I grabbed for his collar and pulled him out. He lay on the snow. Had he been strangled as the final incident in our thirty hours o
f misery and uncertainty? He gasped for air. Moments later, he shook himself, wagged his tail, and bumped his head fondly against my chest. As I raised a grateful head, snowflakes stung my cheeks. It was going to be a good night to sit in front of a fire with my dog at my feet.
When April came, and my snowshoes were hung up, Jiggs turned to the family. During his first Kulish summer, as companion to a couple of horse-crazy little girls, he learned to submit to improvised martingales and bridles. His white chest and four white feet helped maintain the illusion. Because he responded so completely to their love, the girls struggled to make him human.
One day I arrived home unexpectedly in the early afternoon. As I walked by the dining room window, I glanced in. Jiggs was sitting upright in a chair at the table between two girls. A napkin had been tied around his neck. Four hands were trying to force a stiffly averted muzzle into a dish brimming with milk. He knew he didn’t belong at the table; it wasn’t his place. What a look of relief he gave when I suddenly stood at the open door. He didn’t want to be human. He liked being a dog.
At Christmastime, each girl gave him a present. He sat beside the tree with us while the packages were opened. When his name was called out, he stood up and sniffed hard at the gay offerings. He smelled what was in them but, because they were wrapped like ours, he refused to touch them. He’d wag his tail, look at the packages, and then at us. We had to open them to show him that the frankfurters inside were really his.