by Stan Krumm
As my thoughts became marginally more coherent, the outlook for the day deteriorated even further. The light that came through the cabin window had an unmistakeable pallid luminescence. I did not need to look outside to know that it had snowed.
Even with a treasure map in one’s possession, there are times when it is impossible to feel excited. I managed to pull on my boots, find a cup other than the one I had used the night before, and stumble and slide over the white-sheeted clearing to the creek, where there was hope that I might extinguish my flaming thirst.
The wind had blown in the cold of winter with this early snow, and the shallow creek—only an inch deep in most places where it needled its way between the rocks—was frozen. Desperately I bashed at the surface with my cup until I finally found a deep enough pocket of liquid water to yield a decent drink.
Standing there in my boots and underwear, cup in hand, I felt much closer to being a poor, sick beggar than a rich, young adventurer or a fearless bounty hunter.
It was at that point that I once again remembered that I had killed a man. The fact registered in my mind, then slowly curdled in my belly. It was no longer just the alcohol that sickened me. There was a disruption—an affliction of soul and spirit that could not help but manifest itself in bodily fashion. I had not broken the law of the land, if the truth were told, and before God, who presses a higher standard than any court of man, I could defend all my actions and most of my intentions. Still, there was a bleak uncertainty within me.
Through a screen of branches up the slope, I could see the outline of Ned’s body, and at that moment I was glad that I did not have to approach nearer. I had a sense that I had inadvertently become involved in matters too great for me, matters best left to God alone.
The mule had returned and was standing at the edge of the trees, watching me with laid-back ears and a solemn expression. I suppose a man has nearly hit bottom when he receives pity from a hungry mule.
I drank a couple of quarts of water and dragged on my trousers. Even the mental image of a pair of heavy gold bars was incapable of rousing any enthusiasm from me. Work was a better cure. Against one outside wall, between the woodpile and the cabin, was a large stack of dried marsh grass, which I took to be the animal’s winter feed. He seemed grateful for it, at any rate, and allowed me to tie him by a long rope to a stake near the cabin. I expected to use him soon, and I had no wish for him to try his chances in the bush again.
After that, I chopped some wood, forced myself to swallow a few bites of bannock, and felt a bit more human. The sun speared through the clouds from time to time, and it appeared that the snow might not last the day. I shouldered my rifle, folded the map into a shirt pocket, and started out for the trapper’s line of stars.
The near end of the dotted line lay due west of the cabin, but rough ground and dense underbrush forced me to circle south to approach it. Taking this route, I found that the bottom of my map roughly corresponded to the edge of a large marsh or shallow lake into which several of the creeks in that area flowed. Of necessity, I followed its meandering margin, although it was by no means easy walking. It was often a tangle of snaky willow and alder brush along with the dead spruce and balsam that some previous high water had smothered, and the light fall of snow added to my troubles by disguising the potholes and ditches full of icy water.
It took me two hours or so to negotiate the semicircle to the spot less than a mile from the cabin where the first star was marked. I suppose I was tired, and my feet were surely soaked, but in the full current of excitement I didn’t notice these details much.
The map gave me two points of reference with which to find my goal—the place where the creek met the swamp, and a well-travelled game trail, for that was what I discovered the dotted line to be.
I don’t know exactly what I expected to find when I got to that point. Obviously there would not be a sign saying Gold Hidden Here nailed to a tree, but I suppose I assumed that something obvious would present itself when I reached the general vicinity.
Several times I reviewed the map, even walking some distance down the game trail to ensure that it did indeed follow the route marked by a dotted line. The spot where I returned to stand was not large enough to call a clearing, but it was definitely the opening of the path where it met the swamp, and that was where the bright-red circled star was placed.
I criss-crossed the ground repeatedly, kicking at the snow, gazing up into every tree, and using my rifle butt as a broom to open up the smallest windfall, but I found not the slightest piece of evidence.
I was squatted down at the icy edge of the marsh, grumbling to myself, when I noticed a pair of beaver swimming through the shallows fifty feet from me. Standing up and looking farther into the water itself, I realized that Ned had set beaver traps almost within arm’s reach of where I crouched.
I was suddenly afraid that I had discovered the unpleasant truth about my treasure map.
I fairly ran down the game trail from there—a veritable Roman highway compared to what I had just struggled through—and within ten or fifteen minutes had reached the junction of the path and the creek, where another star had been sketched. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it took me no time at all to spot what I expected to find. A pair of marten or mink sets had been laid just up from the stream bank beside the trail.
What I had in my possession, it seemed, was not a guide to buried treasure, but a diagram of a dead man’s trapline. He had died, it seemed, defending the location of his traps.
I carried on farther down the rough track that corresponded with the dotted line, but no longer with hurried steps—no longer with eyes wide in anticipation.
The next two stars were placed quite close together at a point that, if Ned’s scale and bearings could be trusted, would be about a mile due north of the cabin. Again I found the traps without much difficulty. In the first, I discovered a marten peacefully stretched out, but I couldn’t be bothered to collect him at that moment. At the next star there were placed a pair of traps—one close to each side of the path.
These demanded more of my attention, but not because of any hope for gold.
Both traps were empty, but they had been sprung. Not only that, they had been dragged to the end of their restraining chains and thrust into the undergrowth. The ground around each was scratched up as if with some gardening tool, and dirt and snow were scattered on the traps. As if to provide a final insult, between the two was a pile of animal droppings, still steaming slightly.
Although I had never before seen the type of tracks that surrounded the spot—much like those of a marten, but larger, almost six inches in length—I could identify them easily enough. Even before I checked them, I knew that only one animal indigenous to that area would treat the work of human hands with such contempt.
Certain supposed experts would testify that the lower animals do not experience such emotions as anger, hatred, or malice. Such experts have had no contact with the wolverine. The Indians exhibited a deeper knowledge of the beast when they classed it as a fur-bearing devil—an evil spirit incarnated and set loose among the trees. Wolverine are not numerous in any region, but a trapper or a settler would readily decree that one wolverine in a thousand square miles is simply one too many. These creatures feed on whatever is available and will kill whatever crosses their path. Sixty pounds of wolverine is a match for any living thing in the wilderness, including man, for wolverines possess a demonic cleverness that compensates for any advantage that human intelligence might give.
I had no desire whatsoever to prove my manhood against such an adversary. I had barely survived my last attempt at tracking down a resident of that region, and my initial impulse was to return to the safety of the cabin to plan my next step carefully. A superstitious image crossed my mind—a bear-like wraith guarding the dead man’s cursed gold.
Common sense told me that I was a well-armed superior being and that the wolverine was only a potential hazard—a doomed one, if I kept my
eyes open. It was almost unavoidable that I should confront and destroy him, for we were quite close to the cabin, and there I had a dead body strung up a tree and a mule tethered to a post. I couldn’t have chosen better bait to draw him.
I make no pretence of being a master tracker, but with a fresh light snow and relatively open country, I had no trouble following him. As was evidenced by the still-warm droppings on the trap, he was no more than a few minutes ahead of me. I walked with my rifle at the ready—safety off, bullet in the chamber.
The beast’s tracks went up an incline in a generally northwest direction to begin with, then he circled back to his left—parallel to the game trail I had originally followed but skirting the ridge a quarter mile away and above it. His trail wandered back and forth as he sniffed and rooted into every windfall and hollow, and the expectation that I was probably gaining on him made my caution even keener.
A sort of bowl-shaped hollow filled with bog and bulrushes presented itself, and my quarry skirted its eastern side, rummaging for any sign of nest or burrow in the high leathery grasses. Even with the fresh snowfall I did not find it easy to discern his spoor through that rough vegetation. An amazing thing it is to me that a creature of such a stocky, bearish build can creep through the forest with only the occasional broken twig and split branch behind him.
I wasn’t much worried about losing my way, although I stopped to regain my bearings quite regularly, for I knew that travelling thus, either west or south, I would soon be intercepted by one of the bodies of water that could be followed back to the cabin. Should the animal decide to carry on north, I would follow him only long enough to see him out of my sphere of concern.
As it was, he turned to his left again and headed downhill and to the west. When his route crossed the trapline, he continued his counter-clockwise circuit, back towards the place I had begun to pursue him.
As I passed the third trap I saw the marten that had been held in its jaws when I first passed that way an hour earlier. It had been ripped in two. The wolverine had not stopped to eat it but had only paused before carrying on.
He was tracking other game—more lively and challenging to him. Once again my belly constricted.
I walked only a few more paces before I stopped to consider. I was now travelling a circular route, along with another well-armed killer, and exactly who was pursuing and who being pursued was a matter of arbitrary viewpoint. The main difference between the two of us was that he was in familiar territory and probably feeling in much better health. Viewed thus, the odds were definitely in his favour.
I gave up, turned around, and took two or, at the most, three steps towards home before I heard a sound like a low bark or a harsh cough—a sound that I couldn’t locate, unfortunately. Mentally, I had pictured the wolverine behind me at that stage, so I was starting to turn myself when he burst out of a thicket of juniper and willow ahead of me.
I was just able to shift and face the attack before the brute hit me, knocking me backwards so far that it felt as if I had fallen off the roof of a house. Even as I landed with all my wind burst out and my senses stunned, his jaws clamped into the flesh between my shoulder and my neck. The heavy cloth of my jacket might have been thin silk, so easily did those knife-sharp teeth shred it and pin themselves into my muscle and sinew.
The pain was overwhelming—a horrible fire bleeding down my back and up into my face, where I could feel the wiry fur of his cheek pressed against my own.
Two facts loomed clearly enough in those long seconds to take control of my consciousness. First, I recognized that the animal was trying to get a grip on my body with his forepaws. After that, he would either chew out my throat or scrabble my intestines onto the ground with the claws of his hind legs. To stop this, I tried to keep rolling, batting at him with my free left arm, hoping to stop him from gaining any firm purchase.
Secondly, I realized that I still held my rifle. My hand was on the trigger and my grip was firm, amazingly enough, but as we rolled around I had no way of telling for sure where the barrel was pointing. My right arm and the gun were both sandwiched between our bodies. In that death grip there was no chance of working it free to aim it, nor would there be any second shot to fire. One of us would die before then. As pain and fear became unbearable, I knew that I would have to fire and hope for the best, but years of practice and instinct made it very difficult, even at that critical moment, for me to discharge a firearm that seemed to be pointed quite directly at my own head.
Whichever of our heads the bullet contacted, I would gain from the outcome.
I fired and immediately realized that I had lost in my gamble and had shot myself in the belly. New fire burned my flesh, making me squirm and writhe in wild twists. I rolled and crawled and pawed at my chest. It took a long moment to reach the knowledge that I was not only still alive, but free of the carnivore that had sought my life.
The wolverine lay about three feet distant, his back to me. The two yellowish stripes that ran the length of his black body seemed to be pointing at a reddish tuft of fur hanging to one side at the base of the animal’s skull, still dripping blood.
I looked down at the powder burns where the muzzle of the Winchester had lain against my chest and considered that I was on the better end of the exchange.
Then, for a time, I was unconscious.
WHEN I AWOKE I SAW broad spatters of blood on the snow, and a good deal more had soaked my shirt and coat. Not much of this belonged to my erstwhile friend of long tooth and fur. I was badly injured, and on this I blame the irrationality of my next decision—to depart from my roundabout route and head across country, straight south to the cabin.
Soldiers wounded in the war with the South were known to do much the same sort of thing—begin to walk aimlessly and without fear of being lost, until they simply dropped dead in their tracks. It is a physical sickness that infects the mind, a delirium that caused me on that occasion to lose much of my sensation of pain, while robbing me of my intellect. At the best of times I would have had to be very careful in that trackless bush to avoid losing myself forever, but when I left the dead wolverine behind me, I stumbled straight forward—down ravine-side and up again, through bog and bramble with no caution and no reference to guide me except the vague feeling that home was somewhere up ahead.
It is to this day miraculous to me that I reached my destination.
So vague was my grasp of reality during that trek that, as I staggered down the creek-side, I eventually encountered, looking only at the rocks and gravel under my boots, I stumbled right past the cabin—thirty feet away—without recognizing the spot. Luckily the mule began to bray loudly enough to catch my attention. I’m not sure whether it was the odour of blood or the scent of the wolverine on me that frightened him so, but I mumbled deep thanks to the poor creature as I tottered past and into the cabin.
Reaching that refuge revived my faculties to some degree—at least long enough for me to use my good arm to throw a few more pieces of wood onto the coals that remained in the heater.
I pulled off my clothes and was about to collapse onto the bed, but a glance at my bloody and unclean shoulder convinced me of one more thing I ought first to do. Returning to the tag end of the bottle of whisky I had befriended the night before, I poured a full cup. Half of that I downed in a couple of graceless gulps. The other half I poured into the open wound at the base of my neck.
I gave voice to my pain loudly and poetically for a few moments, then coiled my body into the blankets on the bed, where I spent the rest of that day and night.
All I remember of those hours is successively being very hot, then freezing cold. Later, in the blackness of the cabin, with only orange needles of half-light escaping from the cracks in the stove, my fever gave me visions of devils and leaping carnivores at the foot of my bed.
Morning found me miserably weak and consumed by thirst, but with my coherence returned, at least. Whatever poison had been spat into my body by the villainous wolverine had wor
ked its way through without killing me, and now all I needed was a day or two to regain my strength.
Virtually all my clothing except my trousers, socks, and boots had been destroyed in the attack—shredded, bloodsoaked, or lost on the path. I was forced to rummage among Dead Ned’s effects and to wear what I could of his clothes, wishing at the time that cleanliness was rated a little higher among the priorities of trappers and miners.
He was a shorter man than myself, but thankfully his second pair of underdrawers was a two-piece set—not the combination type that I normally preferred. Undersize combinations would have put a pressure on my shoulders that I could not have endured, but since he was a heavier man than I, his chemise draped over my injury quite loosely. It was short, of course, and my navel was exposed to drafts, but beggars, as they say, must not be choosy.
My entire upper body ached and protested at the slightest movement. My left arm and side were frozen and useless. Already, though, the open flesh had begun to crust over and there were no signs of it becoming septic—none of the angry redness that signals poison working its way into the blood. I considered dousing it with alcohol again, but even the thought of that brought tears to my eyes, and I promised myself to wash it when I had hot water.
Once I had managed to dress, I set about the necessary chores with Spartan dedication and frequent rest stops when I became tired and dizzy.