Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  I jogtrotted all the way back to the cabin, shaking my head as Lillian came to the door, eyes firing a question. “They’re gone.” And dully I added, “We’re afoot.”

  Lillian always looked on the brighter side of life. “They must be somewhere close by or you’d have surely seen their tracks down the road.” She stepped outside and stood there, listening. “Maybe they’re only a little ways off, standing still. If we both listen real hard we’ll maybe hear the bells.”

  So I listened real hard, and Lillian listened real hard, and sensing that something important was afoot, Veasy came out of the cabin, stark naked, for Lillian hadn’t yet dressed him, and listened real hard too. But we couldn’t hear the bells.

  Carelessly, trying to conceal my concern, I said, “Horses can’t fly. Wherever they’ve gone, they’ve left tracks behind them.” The smell of the coffee on the stove made me aware of the fact that I was hungry. “Make us a batch of hotcakes, about two dozen of them. And fix half a dozen rashers of bacon too. I’m that hungry I guess I could eat a parboiled pack rat.”

  Breakfast over with, I again cinched the halters around my waist and struck off into the woods to make a wide circle of the whole area within a mile’s radius of the cabin. I’d almost completed the circle before finding the tracks. They were, I judged, made quite some time before daylight. The horses were travelling one behind the other, as horses usually will when they are heading for faraway places. Now that I had the tracks to guide me I had to slacken pace and stick to them like a leech. If ever I lost those tracks I might have to cast about for an hour or longer before finding them again.

  They were lining due east, through thick lodgepole pine, and the fact that if they kept travelling thus they’d eventually come up against the barrier of the Fraser River gave me no comfort at all. To anything with wings, the river was at least forty miles away, half as far again to anything without them.

  Ahead of me now was a fringe of cottonwood surrounding a pool of water. I paused, listening, hoping that maybe the horses had taken time out to drink at the puddle, and then gone to grazing. But there wasn’t a horse bell within miles of me, at least none that I could hear. There was only the shiver of cottonwood leaves, and the rustling of the leaves kept telling me, “You’re afoot, you and the woman and child you left alone at your cabin. The horses have more sense than you. They want no part of this country.”

  The horses had passed within fifty yards of the water but hadn’t gone down to it to drink. That merely confirmed what I already suspected was fact: they’d pulled out sometime in the night, and maybe passed the water before dawn, and their bellies were full, and they weren’t thirsty, and only the Almighty knew where they were at right this very minute, and He wasn’t telling me.

  I quit the tracks, plunged through the cottonwoods and made a full circle of the lake, eyes riveted on its alkaline shoreline. If there were no horse tracks in the mud, there were others, left by a cloven hoof. First I thought that a half-dozen deer had been down at the pond watering, and within the last hour too. But no, the tracks had been made by a single deer, a buck, too, I guessed, maybe a three- or four-year-old. Maybe the buck was ranging in the surrounding woods and twice daily, morning and evening, he came down to the water to drink. I frowned, wondering if I would ever be able to find the puddle again. Well, I could at least try, so filing the buck tracks away in my mind for future reference, I struck up into the timber and again latched onto the horse tracks.

  About a mile east of the water they veered slightly southwest, then a mile farther on they struck due south. Now I knew that they had set their minds upon getting back to the open range, and that eventually, unless I caught up to them, they’d reach it.

  In the lodgepole pine, where the timber grass was lush, I was able to follow along at a fast walk, making perhaps three miles an hour. The crushed stems of grass were all the tracks I needed. But through scrub patches of aspen, or thickets of second-growth pine, where the soil was sandy and barren, I had difficulty seeing a track at all. Here my pace slackened, for I dared not lose those tracks.

  How many miles now was I from the cabin? A hard question to answer, but a squint at the sun, now well over in the west, told me perhaps all of a dozen. And what of Lillian and Veasy? Well, Veasy was far too young to worry about truant horses and whether or not his father would get turned around in the woods and become hopelessly lost hunting them. But with Lillian it was different. Now there was a girl who understood how tricky the everlasting forest can sometimes be. She knew how easy it is, when the sun goes down and night changes everything, for a body to get off course and turned around, and perhaps start travelling in circles, not knowing east from west, north from south, and not caring either. When one is badly turned around in the deep woods, and getting more so all the time, it is only a short step from cool sanity to a state of feverish panic. And a madness of sorts besets you, and now running, now tripping over the windfalls and falling headlong to the ground, you go on and on, indifferent to direction, until finally physical and mental exhaustion is complete, and you lack either will or strength to go a step farther.

  Lillian was aware of all such things as these, and at sundown she’d be standing at the cabin door, very still, listening real hard for the sound of the horse bells coming, or my step snapping a twig or knocking on a windfall. And worry of it all would linger in her eyes for many a day to come.

  I climbed a rock-studded hogback and dropped down the other side, freezing suddenly in my tracks as a large, dark form took shape in a clump of spruces fifty yards beyond. One of the work horses was a dark brown, almost black, in fact, and the thing there in the spruces too was dark, and stood as high as any horse of ours.

  “There they are,” I cried aloud in relief. But it wasn’t a horse at all; it was only an old cow moose without a calf at her heels. The cow stood there for all of ten seconds, then her head turned away from me and her ears dropped, and she took off through the spruces, with only the occasional rattle of hoof against windfall to tell me where she was going.

  The sun was close to setting when at last I heard the faraway ring of the bells. I stopped, listening to make sure that the woods weren’t fooling me, that instead of horse bells it was only the “belling” of some flying squirrel. The shrill bark of a flying squirrel sometimes sounds like the ring of a distant bell.

  Satisfied that it was the horse bells, I broke into a run. The horses were out on a bit of meadow, grazing, and while they threw up their heads at my approach, they quickly lowered them again when they saw who it was. One of the horses had broken its hobble straps, and no doubt he was the leader who’d taken the others so far away. Unbuckling all the hobbles and strapping the lot to the neck of one horse, I caught three of the others and tied two of them, head to tail, to the tail of the one I was going to ride. Then, jumping on it bareback, I shot a glance at what was left of the sun, which was really nothing but an aftermath. It would be dark in another hour, so I started off at a sharp trot, aiming northwest, figuring that if I held that course I would eventually come to the creek.

  It was inky dark when I got back to the cabin. Veasy had been in bed for three or more hours, but Lillian stood outside, a few yards from the door, and as I slid from the back of the horse, almost at her feet, I heard her murmur, “Thank God you’re back.”

  “You weren’t worrying, were you?” I scoffed, giving her a hug and a kiss. For if there are moments when such is warranted between any man and woman, this was surely one.

  “A little,” she confessed.

  “There was nothing to worry about. I was just getting acquainted with some of these woods. Found a water hole too.” Then, in a more serious tone, I promised, “Come hell or high water we’ll start on a fence in the morning.”

  The matter of a horse pasture was soon solved. Two hundred yards downstream from the cabin, the creek dumped into a two-hundred-acre lake. The ever-present decayed beaver dam stood at the mouth of the lake, and the creek crept through the dam to meet y
et another lake a few hundred yards farther on. This lake, Meldrum by name, lies north to south, and a half-mile from where the creek tips into it makes a decided bulge eastward. By erecting a pole fence from the lake by the cabin across country to this bulge in Meldrum, we shut in a hundred and fifty acres of good horse pasture. Once again it was a case of helping ourselves to what we needed, unruffled by any thought about our lawful rights in doing so. Now, the fence has been there for twenty-seven years, and in summer the horses we now have still pasture within it.

  With the fence up we were able to take the hobbles from the horses and turn them loose, and go to sleep at night without having nasty dreams over where they might be in the morning.

  If eaten once a day, say for breakfast, with an egg or two to keep it company on the plate, a lean rasher of bacon is one product of the pig very easily digested. But if bacon, fried, boiled, baked or otherwise, is on one’s plate three times a day, you soon lose all respect for a pig. For over two weeks there had been no other meat but bacon for Lillian to cook. Not even a ruffed grouse or snowshoe rabbit. Work had claimed almost every minute of our time and there had been none left over for hunting. But now we had a home, and the horses had a pasture. And I was tired of bacon, and Lillian was tired of bacon, and even Veasy pushed the rasher aside when it was put on his plate.

  Having made up my mind to do something about the situation, I said to Lillian, “You’d like a roast of real meat, wouldn’t you?”

  Lillian aimed a glance at a half slab of bacon sitting on a shelf, wrinkled her nose and said, “Anything but bacon.”

  “How about a deer?”

  “I’d sure like to smell a deer steak frying in a good hot pan. We could keep one quarter fresh and salt the rest down in my crocks. That is, if we had the deer.”

  “I know where to find tracks,” I confided, remembering the watering hole in the lodgepole pine.

  Lillian wasn’t too impressed. “I can’t fry tracks.”

  “Maybe I can’t find that puddle again, but I’m sure going to try,” I said after telling her of the water hole. “I’ll go out on one of the horses this evening, and if I can locate the place again I’ll squat down in the cottonwoods and maybe shoot us a deer.”

  “Can I come too?”

  I let on I was thinking that over, though all the time I wanted her to go with me. “I guess so. But you’ll have to sit mighty still.”

  She pouted. “I can sit just as quiet as you. Quieter perhaps, because you can’t sit down for the wink of a cat’s eye without starting to fidget.”

  “Can when I’m hunting.” Then, looking toward the other member of the family, I asked, “But how about Veasy?”

  “Good a time as any for him to learn,” she said practically.

  We left the cabin at five in the afternoon, I on my chestnut gelding and Lillian on one of the work horses. Behind her on the horse’s rump rode Veasy, arms around her waist, feet stirruped in the knotted saddle strings. Every once in a while his legs swung forward and he kicked the horse in the belly and chortled, “Giddup!”

  “Shush!” admonished Lillian. “You’ll scare all the deer.”

  There had been no rain to obliterate the horse tracks that I’d followed five days ago, and I had no trouble finding my way back to the watering hole. I tied the horses to a couple of pines a hundred yards from the water, then. slipping five shells into the magazine of the rifle, I inched cautiously toward the puddle, Lillian, holding Veasy firmly by the hand, inching along behind me.

  A drake teal had the puddle all to itself. Maybe the hen bird wasn’t far away, sitting on her eggs. I sat down behind a bush, and Lillian dropped alongside me. The teal paddled off to the opposite shore, stretched its wings and then, inquisitively and in half-circles, began swimming toward us. It came almost to water’s edge, and was so close to us that Veasy struggled to free himself from Lillian’s iron grip to run into the water and catch it.

  “Keep still,” Lillian warned. “Daddy’s going to shoot a deer.”

  From somewhere off in the woods a ruffed grouse started to drum. It was late in the season for grouse to be drumming, for nearly all the hen birds were sitting now. But the cock bird had probably been there on the same log, morning and evening since the snow went off, drumming away for a hen bird to come along and accept him for a mate.

  “Sit still.” Lillian was having her troubles with Veasy, for where he was concerned there was neither work nor play to sitting behind a willow bush watching the sun go down. Far more fun to be tearing an anthill down or romping in the water trying to catch a teal.

  We’d been there for over an hour when the buck finally came. Lillian heard it seconds before I saw it. She suddenly stiffened and whispered, “I heard a stick crack.”

  With scarce a movement I picked up the rifle and slid a shell into the breech. “Whereabouts?”

  She gestured across the pond. “Somewhere over there.”

  The buck stepped mincingly away from the cottonwoods, out into the water. The gun eased into my shoulder. But I didn’t touch off the trigger, not while he was knee-deep in water. Having satisfied his thirst the buck stood there, staring off into space and thinking about things buck deer usually think about when they’re standing out in the water. It seemed a pity to shoot such a harmless and graceful fellow as he, but if I didn’t shoot him, who knows, maybe tomorrow night a timber wolf or coyote might snuff out his life. And we needed the meat mortal bad.

  I shot him through the base of the skull as he turned away from the water to go back into the woods. And Lillian helped me skin back the hide from his belly and gut him. Then, putting liver, kidneys and heart in a clean flour sack, we heaved the carcass onto my saddle, lashed it down and backtracked to the cabin.

  By the time the deer was skinned out and quartered, and the meat hung in the spruce behind the cabin to cool off, Lillian had to light the coal-oil lamp to see to undress Veasy and tuck him away in his bed. Within seconds the child was fast asleep, maybe dreaming of buck deer treading the game paths, or of willow grouse drumming on their logs.

  Then Lillian made a pot of coffee and we sat together at the table, slowly sipping it down. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll salt three of the quarters down in my crocks.” She fixed a thoughtful eye on me. “Then what?”

  “The trapline,” I promptly replied. “Day after tomorrow we’ll load a camp outfit on a pack horse and strike out through the woods and find out just what that one hundred and fifty thousand acres of creek, muskeg and forest contains in the way of worldly wealth.”

  Chapter 5

  “They don’t smell very nice, do they?” said Lillian of the marshes, when the wind carried their stench into camp.

  I wasn’t so choosey about words. Wrinkling my nose, I scowled, “They stink like hell.”

  The whole watershed, at least what we had so far seen of it, stank of aquatic vegetation in various stages of death and decomposition, of mud and, here and there, of the putrid flesh of cattle that had bogged down and perished in the muck while trying to slake their thirst at a puddle of slimy water that was beyond possible reach. Though not too heavily grazed as yet, a few cattle wandered back from the open range, cropping the pea vines and vetches that grew lush in the forests about the creek.

  And that, I figured, was how such a deplorable state of affairs would continue unless every stinking decadent acre of marshland was again inundated by sweet, cool water.

  “How in the devil do we go about reflooding all these marshes, filling up the lakes?” I had acquired the habit of asking Lillian’s advice on a great many things, and often she had it to give. But this time she only shook her head and said, “I don’t know.”

  For the last twenty minutes Lillian’s attention had been given to her needle and thread, and the job of repairing Veasy’s shoes. The boy was forever getting his feet wet, what with paddling in the lakes or the shallow water of the creek. The shoes weren’t built to take that sort of treatment, and now their stitching was rotting, the sole
s parting company from the uppers. After a little while she replaced needle and thread in her holdall and, glancing disapprovingly at the footwear, commented, “I’ll have to try my hand at tanning the deer hide and make him some moccasins.”

  Skirt had again given way to overalls. Slacks, Lillian called them, but to me overalls are overalls by no other name. Overalls—or slacks— didn’t suit Lillian; she looked far more feminine in a skirt as of course she properly should. But still, I had to admit that skirts aren’t very handy to ride in, or comfortable either, perhaps, so whenever she went places on horseback I figured yes, she could wear the overalls—or slacks—if she wished.

  For five days we’d been wandering like gypsies, merely to ascertain what assets we possessed on our wilderness trapline. The game trails were our only paths, the horses our only mode of transport, and the tent our only roof. Every game trail we came to presented a challenge of sorts, since we didn’t have the faintest idea where it came from or where it went. So we’d turn and follow it, and maybe after a while emerge at some pothole meadow or small lake. And if the day was about spent, we’d stake the horses in the swamp grass and fix a camp for the night. Or if the sun said it was only two or three o’clock, we’d file the meadow or lake away in our minds and then cast about like a hound dog for scent, for another trail to explore. There was no lack of game trails.

  But we’d covered a lot of ground in the last four days and seen a lot of country that not too many whites had seen. And at first sight nothing that we saw seemed to offer much promise of better things to come. “We’re not going to get rich in a hurry anyway,” I confided to Lillian.

  There were the remnants of two score beaver dams without any beavers. There were several hundred acres—or was it several thousand?— of stinking, semidry marshland, which, if giving vague promise of a muskrat left here and there, lacked the water necessary for the production of muskrats in numbers that warranted their trapping. And we had an assortment of landlocked lakes (there had been beavers in them too once upon a time) woefully in need of water with which to raise their levels to their original banks. This then, apart from the limitless forest itself, was all that we had on which to build some measure of security and prosperity. If there have been less modest starts in life, I want no part of them.