Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  But we needed cash as well as goods. “Make it two hundred twenty-five, half cash, half trade.”

  And with a “I’m losing good money on the whole damned transaction” complaint, the trader nodded and began sweeping up the skins in his arms.

  So the furs were sold, and back through the snow, butt chains jingling, sleigh runners screeching, over a hundred dollars in the pocketbook, and enough of almost everything in the sleigh to last until spring. “Damn it, we’re rich,” I told the horses, flicking their rumps with the whip.

  Also in the sleigh box, concealed in a gunny sack from Veasy’s inquisitive eyes, were one or two small and mysterious boxes for the Christmas tree we aimed on cutting on the way home. Not until a few years later did Veasy solve the riddle of how Santa Claus managed to squeeze his little round belly down our six-inch stovepipe. But squeeze it down he did.

  Christmas Day came in clear and bright, the thermometer at ten below zero, the spruces and willows along the creek a-glitter with spangles of frost. Breakfast eaten, we gave our attention to the tree. For Veasy, Santa had left a toy violin, a stocking of candy, nuts and oranges, and a popgun. For Lillian there was a fur-lined pair of bedroom slippers, and a musical sewing box that gave off with a little tune whenever its lid was raised. And for me there was a watch, the very same kind of a pocket watch that the trader displayed on his shelves with a price tag of two dollars and fifty cents. I wound the watch to make sure that it really would tick, and then glanced suspiciously at Lillian. Her face betrayed nothing, but somehow or other I immediately coupled my Christmas present with what she had received for the mink skin.

  Small gifts these, but gifts just the same. It wasn’t their value in dollars and cents that counted, and dollars and cents counted an awful lot to us then, but the thoughts that were a part of the giving. Gifts which, if soon to be broken or forgotten, knitted the three of us a little tighter to one another.

  By nine A.M. the violin had lost two of its strings, the popgun its cork. The mercury stood at an even zero, so pulling on my mackinaw coat and fur hat, I bundled Veasy up in a heavy woollen sweater, pulled the parka down over his cheeks and ears and said, “Let’s you and me go down the creek and set ourselves some rabbit snares.” It wasn’t that we needed the rabbits—we had moose and deer meat, as well as ducks and geese all frozen stiff under the spruce tree—but because right this very minute I knew that Lillian didn’t want either of us in her way while she went about preparing the dinner. For the past month, since she had begun making the puddings and cakes, Lillian had had her mind fixed on the Christmas dinner. She loved to cook anyway—that is, when she had what she wanted to cook with. And this was Christmas morning, one morning in the year when I knew she’d like the cabin all to herself, for an hour or so anyway.

  With Veasy plodding along behind me, I followed the ice of the creek, pausing where a rabbit path crossed it and setting a snare in the willows. So we came to the lake that had flooded when the first heavy snowfall straddled it. But now the flood water was frozen solid again and we could walk down the centre of the lake as if the smooth ice were hard cement. We investigated a couple of muskrat houses, stared long, hard and thoughtfully at the track of a timber wolf that had crossed the ice in the night. Then we moved over to the timber, sat on a fallen spruce and watched a squirrel shucking a cone on the limb of a nearby tree. “Wonder if the squirrel knows it’s Christmas Day?” I thought. Probably not. The squirrel didn’t give a hoot what day it was so long as there was no shortage of cones to twiddle around in his paws.

  Lillian’s face was deeply flushed when I led Veasy back to the cabin. Flushed from leaning over the hot stove, basting the goose, from lifting the lid of the kettle and peeking at the plum pudding, and from opening the door of her oven just to see if the mince pies were the colour mince pies should be when they’re baked to a turn.

  Although the Colliers usually had an abundance of moose, deer, duck and goose meat, they sometimes set rabbit snares. Veasy is pictured here with snowshoe rabbits taken from his snares.

  “I’m that hungry I could eat a parboiled owl,” I declared as the aroma of her cooking reached me.

  “The goose won’t be ready for another twenty minutes,” she grumbled. “Why don’t you set another couple of rabbit snares?”

  Taking the hint I told Veasy, “Let’s you and me go feed the horses some more hay. They’re hungry too.”

  In England, the morning service in church was as much a part of Christmas as turkey and plum pudding. But there are no churches in the wilderness, not in our part of the world. But just the same, the wilderness need not be altogether devoid of religion. Though there is no hassock to kneel upon, no choir to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” no parson, pastor or priest to preach a sermon from the pulpit, one has but to stand amid the calm, deep quiet of the forest for only a few moments to understand that there is indeed a Creator of all things bright and beautiful, and that His presence is everywhere at the same time.

  There in our one-roomed cabin on the headwaters of Meldrum Creek this late Christmas afternoon in 1931, the sun about gone, night closing in, I knew, and Lillian knew, as indeed Veasy was soon to know, that we were as near to Almighty God as we’d be were we kneeling in some pew, faces in the palms of our hands.

  Chapter 9

  Bitter January! Eight hours of daylight, sixteen hours of night. Thirty inches of powdery snow concealing every game trail, weighting down the branches of the larger trees, bending, crushing and stifling the seedlings. Wind keening down from the north, sharp as porcupine needles, not enough to blow the snow from the trees but more than enough to worry and prick at the skin when you faced it head on. Chestnut saddle horse fretting outside the cabin, hitched to the snubbing post, waiting, ears flat on mane, right front foot pawing uneasily at the snow. Me pulling into heavy woollen sweater and equally heavy sheepskin coat, buckling my high-top overshoes, working my legs into a mangy pair of bearskin chaps. But at least they’ll keep the snow off my legs, will the chaps. Lillian busy fixing me up a lunch, then wrapping it in a square of waterproof canvas, handing it to me, trying all the time to make out she’s not worrying a bit, but making a very poor job of it. “For God’s sake be careful.” The tone of her words themselves is sure enough proof that she’s fretting. And maybe with some justification, for the chore ahead of me today is as bitter as the wind.

  Since New Year’s not a single coyote had got tangled up in the traps. Of course, there was reason for this. In northern climes the trapping of any coyote after Christmas is a questionable matter indeed. In January the annual rut or breeding season begins, and now all coyotes, male or female, steer sharply away from any meat that they haven’t just killed for themselves. And of course they’ll have nothing to do with any artificial scent or lure. Some there are who say that the fox is the smartest animal in the north woods, but the fox is plain stupid when ranked with the coyote. If the coyote is one predatory animal that man has so far been unable to wipe from the face of the American continent, this may be because the coyote is wiser than man himself.

  I know quite a lot about the coyote. During those first few years at the head of the creek our economic security hinged entirely upon my ability somehow to keep coyote pelts on the stretcher boards as long as their fur was prime. There was little other fur to rely on. During spring, summer and early fall, it was a matter of paying out with nothing coming in. We lacked a good many things. We needed lumber to floor the cabin. We needed a horse-drawn mower and rake, and I had an idea where they could be bought secondhand for an outlay of sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! A modest fortune, that. I also needed a great many more traps, and Lillian more pots and pans, and linoleum to cover the floor when we finally got a floor. And the coyote must pay the score for all.

  Shortly after Christmas I had pulled the coyote traps and hung them up in the spruce trees beneath which they had been set. The pulling of the traps was the cue for me to double up on Mr. Binks’s daily ration of oats. Now that the trap
s were of no further use, a lot depended upon Mr. Binks. Mr. Binks was a chestnut gelding, standing fifteen hands, weighing about twelve hundred pounds. Out of a half-breed Arabian mare, by a wild unbranded stallion, he ranged with a band of wild horses until seven years old. When a wild-horse chaser corralled the bunch, the chestnut suffered the dual indignities of castration and branding, both at the same time. Shortly thereafter, in exchange for four prime coyote skins, he became mine, and I began gentling him to the feel of cinch and bit.

  Since Christmas there had been a period of intermittent snowfall. So long as the snow continued to fall the coyotes would stay close to their dens, teasing a ravenous appetite with meatless scraps of skin and bone cached nearby. And so long as that snow continued to fall I too stayed fairly close to my own den, for on any wilderness trapline, only matters of life and death will coax any man far from the cabin to face the whip of an arctic blizzard without.

  For three days and nights the snow slanted in from the north, a dry, sanded snow. Then abruptly, the gray overcast began to lighten and a silver-pale moon grinned down at the white world beneath. I measured the depth of the snow against the handle of a double-bitted axe and reckoned it at thirty inches. In that depth of virgin snow, any coyote out for a kill must follow a rabbit’s padded path through second-growth thickets if he wants to stoke his gut. If crowded out of the thickets and into more scattered timber where there were no rabbit paths, his every yard of travel is one of maximum effort. Now that the skies had cleared, the joint task of myself and Mr. Binks was to crowd the coyote off the rabbit trails, away from the thickets, into the scattering timber. And then stay doggedly on his tracks until sheer physical exhaustion undid him. It was cruel and tiring work for both hunter and hunted alike. Yet it was work that had to be done if we were to survive in the wilderness.

  Often the evasive tactics of the coyote played me or Mr. Binks out, and so he lived to save his brush for some other day. But sometimes he blundered, and then it fared him ill.

  There was a hump in the chestnut’s back as the cinch tightened on his girth. He squaw-hopped a time or two as I eased myself gingerly into the cold saddle, but as I reined him away from the cabin, the playfulness went out of him and he pricked up his ears and settled down to the grim business ahead.

  Eric with two of the coyotes that “had to pay.” The pelts were traded for goods needed to survive in the wilderness, but Eric considered the business of getting the coyotes cruel and tiring work for both the hunter and the hunted.

  When hunting coyotes upon a saddle horse in snow almost to the animal’s chest, unnecessary haste is a poor sort of an ally. For fruitful victory or barren defeat hinges a lot upon having a final spark of strength and speed in the horse at a moment when most needed. I allowed Mr. Binks to pick his own slow way through the scattering of fir timber as we moved toward the thickets of second-growth higher up the hillside. Here and there the smooth surface of the snow was plowed by a moose track. Once, but for a swift second only, I saw a cow and a calf silhouetted against the skyline, then they were gone. I came to the first of the thickets—copses, we called them in the old country—only to find that it held nothing but rabbits and a couple of weasel. So I reined the chestnut away from it toward a larger acreage of brush ahead.

  The brush was from five to seven feet high, dense as an uncut oat field, and every branch bowing beneath its weight of snow. I had almost circled the thicket when I found myself staring down at the track of a lone coyote, made, I judged, shortly after daylight. I sighed, buttoned the collar of my sheepskin coat tighter around my neck and turned Mr. Binks into the brush. Lumps of frigid snow fell into the saddle when we brushed the branches, and as I lifted in the stirrups to brush it away I found myself thinking what a hell of a way this was for a man to earn an honest dollar.

  It was impossible to keep the saddle seat dry when forcing through the thicket, and soon the leather was groaning and squeaking with the frost and the cold that was in it. My coat and fur chaps became sodden with water as my body heat melted the snow on them. Soon the water would become ice.

  In the deep heart of the thicket, close to a well-packed rabbit trail, I saw where the coyote had killed. I leaned over the side of the saddle and poked speculatively at the rabbit blood with a short stick carried expressly for that purpose. While the blood was frozen, there was a certain freshness about it that labelled the kill as very recent. Daybreak that morning, probably, for the coyote usually hunts with the dawn and dusk and beds during the brighter hours of the short winter day.

  The size of the pad marks told me that I was dealing with no adolescent animal but a coyote that was old in years and wisdom. “Yo ho,” I warned Mr. Binks, “we’re in for a run this time.” Coming down from the saddle and taking a reef or two on the latigo so there’d be no danger of the saddle turning when we began jumping windfalls, I heaved back into the seat and moved off on the track.

  A half-mile later, under the boughs of a stunted spruce, I squinted down at the coyote’s fresh bed. And then nodded; the tracks leading away from it were not those of a coyote taking his own sweet and leisurely time getting from one point to another; in fact, there were no pad marks at all. There were lunging pits in the snow, ten feet apart, deep and loose, the telltale sign left by a coyote who, in two or more feet of snow, is running to save his hide.

  “Ay ya!” As the challenge spilled from my throat, Mr. Binks broke into a trot. “Ay ya!” All bedlam was called for now to keep the coyote at full run, to addle his nimble wits and herd him away from any convenient thicket.

  The tracks took me back into the heart of that snow-laden thicket, and now the coyote was on the packed surface of a rabbit trail with nothing to hinder his stride. Mr. Binks’s ears were tilted slightly forward, his mouth champing the bit. But I curbed his wild impatience, husbanding his wind and strength against the moment when I hoped to come to grips with the coyote on ground of my own choosing.

  For the next several minutes there was no let-up to the relentless game of hide-and-seek going on in the thicket. At a slow but persistent trot, the chestnut crowded the coyote from one rabbit path to another. The coyote veered north, south, east and west, yet whenever I crowded him within sight of thinning timber he doubled back on his tracks and found yet another trail that would hold his weight.

  Looking back on it all now, when it is no longer an economic necessity for me to indulge in such outlandish means of earning a livelihood—and when sheer weight of years would restrain me if indeed it still were—I have dismal recollections of occasions when more than one coyote outwitted my every effort to crowd him out of the underbrush to which he so stubbornly clung. For the finest horseflesh bred can take only so much punishment, and in bitter contest such as this, once the horse is spent victory is claimed by the coyote, as it might well have gone to this one had he not blundered and given me the chance I desperately needed.

  At the western marge of the thicket a slim finger of seedling pine snaked out into more mature growth, and a well-travelled rabbit path branched off at an angle and came to an abrupt terminus at the far end of the seedlings. Perhaps I was too close to his tail, or perhaps my shouts were at least beginning to fluster him; anyway, the coyote tracks told me he’d made a beeline for the finger.

  “Mr. Binks!” It was a plea rather than a command, and one the chestnut understood. He hurled forward, and with gentle but compelling pressure of the rein I headed him into the pines.

  The bushes ahead of me, still swaying and shedding snow after being brushed by the running coyote, were ample signal that I was only a few horse lengths behind. But when I emerged from the end of the thicket, with thinning stands of mature pine and unbroken snow ahead, the lengths of the coyote’s jumps were sure indication that the animal still had a reserve of wind and strength sufficient to fortify him for another mile or two of chase.

  “Ay ya!” At a slight pressure from my knees Mr. Binks let out his stride. The urge was strong in me now to give the chestnut his head and t
ry to finish the job before the coyote beat me to another thicket. But experience whispered, “No.” I must conserve my horse’s staying power until the length of the coyote’s jumps showed signs of shortening. I had not only to weigh the coyote’s every strategy—and hope that I weighed rightly—but also to gauge to the very last ounce how much run was left in the chestnut.

  I looked around for landmarks that might tell me just where in the devil I was. A blaze here and there on the trees recalled to mind where I had packed out a yearling bull moose from an acre or two of fire-killed timber three months ago. The old burn would be a mile or two away to my right. This knowledge of exactly where I was bred within me the uneasy realization that if the coyote held fast to his present course for another fifteen minutes he’d be down at Meldrum Lake.

  The lake was in the process of flooding. I knew that. And until the flood water beneath the snow froze down to the old ice, I dare not put Mr. Binks out on the lake. But that flood water would not deter the coyote, for the frozen snow above it would hold his weight. Once he gained the lake he’d be across it and in the timber on the other side long before the chestnut could circle around the lake and take up the tracks again.

  I leaned low over the saddle and gave Mr. Binks his head. Now there was neither sense nor policy in following the tracks of the coyote. Instead, I must beat him to the ice, keep him away from the lake and force him back on top.

  The chestnut’s hoofs were plowing snow within sight of the lake. I turned and ran parallel to the ice, hugging its edge for almost a mile without cutting the coyote’s tracks. Breaking Mr. Binks into a trot, I left the ice and reined the horse back up the hill, for, balked in his plan to get to the lake, the coyote must now gamble his very all on regaining the upper rabbit pastures where dense brush would again slow up the hunt.