Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  In 1941 almost any well-furred coyote pelt could be sold for ten or fifteen dollars, cash or trade, so consequently every trapper and homesteader in the country was out hunting his skin. But in 1943 coyote fur went out of fashion and the fur trade no longer wanted their pelts. The fact that now the coyote’s pelt had little cash value automatically brought to a halt the hunting and trapping to which he had been subjected for so many years gone. This resulted in a spontaneous increase of coyotes. And the more coyotes, the more beavers they killed.

  Reluctantly, perhaps, for he had meant so much to us in the early days of our exploits on the creek, and by use of every trick that we could devise, we now waged merciless war against the coyotes. Once again the matter of survival hung in the balance, not our survival, but that of the beavers. After a short period of preliminary skirmishing, testing different ammunition, so to speak, we came to the conclusion that poison bait was the most efficient, if not the fairest, means with which to decimate the ranks of our adversaries. But no matter how heavy might be the casualties we inflicted upon them, we never lacked coyotes. Now, with the many beaver dams and different species of wildlife around them, Meldrum Creek had indeed become a land of milk and honey for all carnivorous predators. Hundreds of young ducks were now hatching on the marshes, and practically every beaver pond had its goose nest. Every acre of water with a food supply for them now teemed with muskrats. And then of course there were the beavers. In 1943 the pelt of an average beaver was worth from forty to fifty dollars, so whenever a coyote killed one he was helping himself to a somewhat expensive meal at cost to no one at all but us. With such a seemingly inexhaustible larder for them to draw upon, it was hard to keep the coyotes in reasonable check. The tracks of one were soon filled by those of another. But through spring, summer and fall there was never a moment of truce, and slowly but surely the beaver colonies increased, though at but half the rate they would have had there been no coyotes to reckon with at all.

  And there were timber wolves, too. Perhaps it was the moose herds wintering in the second-growth beaver cuttings along the creek and ponds that attracted so many wolves to the scene. Moose or beaver, it mattered not to a timber wolf; the flesh of the one would fill their gut as quickly as that of the other.

  We quite often chanced upon the rotting carcass of a timber wolf that had gulped down one of the poison baits and trotted off through the forest to drop dead in his tracks perhaps three miles from where he swallowed the bait. There might have been a shade of regret but certainly not of pity in us as we gazed at the fly-blown carcass. By this time we’d often sat on top of a beaver lodge in late spring, listening to the pitiful whimper of some three or four kits within, huddled in the lodge together, starving, waiting in vain for a suck at the dugs of a mother who would never come back to the lodge. Timber wolf or coyote, it was all a pattern to us. Now we were learning how harsh at times the wilderness can really be. And a lot of its iron was in our souls too when it came down to the matter of protecting the beavers from predators. Timber wolf or coyote, it mattered not a bit. It was a job and one that had to be done.

  I don’t know how many timber wolves were accounted for by the use of poison bait and rifle in the years that the war raged on, but recollection of one certain wolf is still vivid in my mind, as it rightly should be. I never had a more skillful opponent. It took all of four years and every bit of woods knowledge that I possessed to settle accounts with him.

  Chapter 21

  There was black rage born in my heart, an oath on my lips, the day I stalked broodily around one of our finest beaver colonies and marked the telltale evidence of the havoc that Wolf’s penchant for murder had wreaked upon the beavers. There was the offal of one’s guts here, a few bedraggled scraps of fur there. There was the half-eaten carcass of an old buck beaver alongside a recently felled cottonwood tree, and that was ample indication to me that Wolf was almost full of belly before ever he sank teeth into that one.

  But it was the killing of the old mother beaver that fanned my rage into wild and terrible flame. There she lay, belly to the sun, not more than a dozen steps from the lodge, bloated and stinking, dark underfur speckled white with blowfly eggs. She was an old beaver, true, but right in her very prime where motherhood is concerned. She was an old sow beaver who could be reckoned upon to give birth to four or five sturdy kits each June for many a year to come. But now she was dead, killed by a single crunch of Wolf’s rapacious jaws. Yet not an ounce of her flesh had Wolf eaten. Here before me was the wilderness in its sourest mood: a mother beaver killed for no useful purpose whatsoever—at least, none that I could think of.

  It was mid-June, and the aspens and willows were properly leafed out. Water lilies and similar aquatic plants pushed their stems to the surface of the water, and a raft of newly hatched geese had been perched on the beaver house when first it came into my view. Young wilderness life was everywhere, and rotten though the underbelly of the old sow was, I knew that her udder had been full of milk when Wolf snuffed out her life. I stepped on to the lodge, reluctantly, and stood there a few moments, listening for what I knew I must hear. Then suddenly I heard it, the faint whimper from deep within the lodge that told me of the kits, dying the lingering, bitter death of starvation.

  That’s when I lifted my face to the sky and vowed, “I’ll get you if it takes until the crack of doom to do it!” But it was a threat easily spoken, not quite so easily fulfilled.

  Despite all the damage he did us in the four years of our feuding, never at any time was I able to consider him entirely an enemy. There was a bond linking us together that the whole bloody score of his crimes could not altogether sever: we were both a part of the wilderness, both reliant upon the wilderness for our daily bread. Whenever I took a mink, muskrat or otter from a trap, I was killing. The wilderness insisted that I kill or else pack up and leave it and never come back. No man can hope to survive long in a wilderness without killing.

  That’s how it was with Wolf. He could no more deny himself the pleasure (or the need) of killing than a bull moose can deny the fever of the mating season. His sanguinary lust for destruction was his by right of heritage, born in him and nurtured in him at the dugs of the shaggy furred bitch that whelped him.

  His huge footprint in mud or snow where he ranged will-’o-the-wisp over our trapline often stared me in the face during those four years that I hunted him, yet only once did I catch sight of him in the living flesh. That was in mid-December when I was trapping for mink and otter in a warm spring of water that boiled up unfrozen among the spruce trees girding a muskrat marsh. Such springs are not uncommon on any northern trapline, and their water stays open even at a chill forty below. I had ridden a horse down to the edge of the marsh but then tied it to a tree and crossed the ice on foot. My heavy gun was in its scabbard on the saddle, a single-shot .22 slung over my shoulder in case there should be a live mink or otter in the traps.

  A gray form suddenly took shape among the bulrushes, so large that at first I thought it was a deer. But as it turned to run I knew that at long last Wolf and I had met, with only one hundred twenty yards of ice between us. For a half-dozen seconds the killer wolf stood broadside to me, a capital shot for any rifle powerful enough to drop him. But the .22 on my shoulder might as well have been a slingshot for all the good it was. Then his head turned and he broke into swift flight, an elusive flash of gray in the blinding winter sunlight, and melted from sight beneath the vague shadows of the spruces.

  I angled over to the bulrushes to see what he had been up to now. The answer glared at me from the ice. The roofs of four muskrat houses were levelled to the ice, which to my reckoning meant that four muskrats had died limp and bleeding in Wolf’s jaws.

  The total sum of the losses he occasioned us in the four years that I hunted him is beyond reasonable tally. Some of his crimes were minor affairs—for a wolf—but they hurt just the same.

  Such as the time he happened onto my sets in the spruce timber and without so much as a by-your
-leave devoured two prime mink that were dead in the traps. Mink pelts at the time were in very active demand, worth fifty dollars apiece. He stole one hundred dollars from us then with a couple of licks of his jaws, and, to show there was no ill feeling on his part about it, cocked his leg and urinated on the empty traps to boot.

  Oh, he was sharp, as sharp as the keenest razor ever honed. If I carefully concealed three No. 4½ wolf traps under the dry spruce needles and tied the head of a deer above them for bait, what did he do? He circled the whole package, cocked his leg against a bush and moved on to kill a deer of his own. Yet if a lynx or a mink were caught in the traps, he’d walk in, scornful of the scent of steel, and stow the fur-bearers away in his own cavernous gut. According to Indian folklore, all cultus (bad) Indians returned to Earth after they’d died in the form of a timber wolf. If that is really so, the reincarnated Indian who had taken on the form of our wolf must have been a very cultus one indeed. Clever, too.

  Wherever the phantom killer journeyed, you could be sure that at least a half-dozen coyotes would be padding along at a safe but respectful distance in his backtracks. Opportunists that they were, coyotes are ever willing to let a wolf do the actual killing while they bring up the rear to feed at the leftovers when the wolf moves on. There was no lack of leftovers while Wolf ranged our trapline.

  I was running a line of traps up the shoreline of Meldrum Lake. The lake ice, eight inches thick, was clear as a sheet of glass. I could look down out of the saddle and see shoals of fat squawfish beneath the horse’s hoofs as if there were no ice at all. But the caulks in my horse’s shoes were new, so there was little danger of the horse skidding and spilling me on the ice.

  A sliver of land jutted out into the lake, and there an inch or two of snow covered the frozen ground. I left the ice to shortcut over the peninsula, and as soon as my horse was on snow, I knew there had been murder committed somewhere close by. The coyote tracks on the peninsula told me that. Just before hitting ice again, I cut a track that dwarfed those of the coyote’s as a cougar’s would a house cat’s. I knew who had made those tracks as soon as I saw them. “He’s at it again,” I bleakly informed the horse. “Wonder where?”

  It was a question answered as soon as I rode onto ice again.

  I’d seen the two deer, a doe and a fawn, sunning themselves on the spine of a ridge above the lake a couple of days earlier. All that was left of them now was a crimson smudge on the ice and a tuft or two of hair. Force of habit impelled me to drop seven or eight strychnine baits on the frozen blood and scrape deer hair over them with a stick so that magpies or blue jays wouldn’t find them and haul them away to the top of some nearby tree. Since Wolf had begun raiding our trapline, I always carried a few poison baits in my travels, spurred by the hope that someday he’d blunder and gobble one or two down.

  Then I neck reined away from the ice and circled up into the timber. I located the fir tree beneath which the doe and fawn had bedded. Their tracks in the snow led in wild leaps to the lake, Wolf’s loping prints moving in behind. The deer had no hope of survival when they began skidding crazily on the ice.

  Two days later I was again tending the Meldrum Lake traps with but slender hope that Wolf might have returned to the scene of the kill and picked up one of the baits. As I hove in sight of X marks the spot, I saw two coyotes forty yards from the kill, stiff in death. Just where timber and ice met was a third coyote that had also fallen victim to one of the baits. But Wolf hadn’t been back. He was perhaps forty or fifty miles away by now, for distance mattered little to him in a few inches of snow. He travelled here and travelled there, moving all the time, as if the guilt of his many crimes would not allow him to rest.

  As time went on I lost all count of the coyotes that perished in traps, snares or from poison bait set expressly for Wolf. But not for a moment did I swerve from my vow to bring him to justice.

  The fourth winter of my hunt was a “heller,” as we call such winters back here. I’ve lived through a half-dozen such winters, and each has left its claw mark on me somewhere. As usual, Wolf had been ranging our trapline all fall. I was only a hundred or so yards behind him the day he chased a two-year-old cow moose out of a litter of windfalls and pulled her down on the edge of a two-hundred-acre beaver pond. I arrived on the scene in time to find her guts beginning to ooze through the gash he’d ripped in her flanks. But of course he heard me coming and was a half-mile away, maybe, when I got there.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s Day a muddy overcast shoved in from the north. About midnight I was awakened by the banshee howling of wind. I got up and right then and there knew we were in for a “heller.” I could feel the bitterness of the wind seeping in through the house logs. I loaded the heater stove with wood and crawled back into bed, thinking about all the traps that were set and wondering when I’d get to visit them again.

  In the morning, as I headed for the barn, I faced a north wind that almost cut me in two. Slanting in with the wind was a pitiless lash of snow. When snow falls in wet, feathery flakes, I know that the storm will soon blow over. It’s the harsh granulated fall carried by screeching arctic winds that gives me cause for concern. You never know when it will quit or what its depth will be when it does.

  For three days there was scarce a let-up to the blizzard. Perhaps there was a lull of sorts around lamp-lighting time, but after supper we could again hear the snow spitting against the kitchen window.

  Lillian’s flower garden was fenced by mesh wire, five feet high, and I sat broodily watching the snow inch steadily up the wire. When only a little of the fence showed above snow level, I decided I’d better jar myself loose, saddle up the horse and go pull some traps set in the overflow of the beaver dams to the west.

  Despite the sheepkin coat, fur chaps and moosehide mittens with woollen ones inside, I came near to freezing solid as I went from dam to dam. It was only twenty-three below when I pulled away from the house, but the drive of the wind and snow chilled the marrow in my bones. I bucked the storm for eight cruel hours, pulled my traps and was rewarded with a couple of mink and an otter. In all that bitter travel I never cut the track of a single animal, never set eyes upon a bird. It was like riding through a kingdom of the dead.

  Only a few inches of the wire fence were in sight when the snow ceased falling. The overcast broke and by night a swollen bitter moon bathed the forest in frigid light. The air became deathly still, not a single branch moving beneath its weight of snow, and a silent, searing cold stalked remorselessly across the wilderness. Water buckets in the kitchen froze overnight, and cans of milk and jars of fruit were frozen up too. The sting of the cold made me retch and cough as I went about the outside chores. Frost covered the horses when I opened the barn door in the morning, and at any moment of the night we could hear the monotonous crunch of snow outside as moose moved to and fro, trying to keep warm by the simple process of forever keeping moving. Our thermometer ceases registering at fifty below. For six mornings in a row the mercury was cuddled despondently at the bottom of the glass, unable to go any lower. Was it sixty below or sixty-five? That’s a question I’ll never be able to answer, but there were moments when I’d have sworn it was eighty.

  January was almost spent when the chinook finally came. A warm wind spewed in from the Pacific, driving back the mass of polar air that had crucified the wilderness for so long. For thirty hours the mild air pushed in from the ocean, licking at the snow, moistening it, yet barely lessening its depth. Then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the wind died, stars pricked the heavens, and the snow started to freeze.

  “The snow will hold a twenty-five-pound coyote by morning,” I uneasily remarked to Lillian. “And by the following morning, a full-grown wolf.” I might have added that it would give beneath the hoofs of a moose or deer, but that would have been superfluous; Lillian knew all about that.

  That evening, when filling the water buckets at the water hole in the ice, I suddenly tensed, listening. What I heard welled up faintly from out of the
east, mournful and eerie. It wasn’t exactly an oath and it wasn’t exactly a prayer; it was just the dismal, spine-chilling anthem of a timber wolf hunkered back on its haunches, howling at the moon. And I shook my head; death was again unleashed upon the land.

  Was it our wolf? That I couldn’t say, but I had every intention of soon finding out. The cry came from downcreek, in the neighbourhood of our trapping cabin, I judged. By the time the water buckets were filled, I knew just what we had to do and returned to the cabin and conveyed my thoughts to Lillian and Veasy.

  “Timber wolf on the loose somewhere around the cabin downcreek,” I said. “Reckon we’ll pack up and move down there for a few days of look-see.”

  At the slight lift of Lillian’s eyebrows, I went on, “There’ll be blood on the crust come morning, maybe deer, maybe moose, but one or the other for sure. Maybe—” I shrugged and shifted course. “Might just as well be down there as up here.”

  “Just when are we going to move down?” Lillian asked with a frown.

  “Day after tomorrow. I’ll bust a track through in the morning.” I knew the sheer impossibility of ever getting through to the cabin with a loaded sleigh unless I first broke out a track with the loose horses.