Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  “That’s not giving me much time to get things ready,” she complained.

  No, it wasn’t. “If we don’t get down there right away,” I explained, “the son-of-a-gun might be clear out of the country when we do.” For time, tide and timber wolves wait for no man.

  “I’ll have to bake bread, make up some pies and do a lot of other cooking,” groused Lillian. “Drat the timber wolves anyway. Why don’t they behave themselves?”

  “They are behaving themselves,” Veasy slipped in. “They’re doing what comes naturally.”

  Veasy was a realist. At fourteen years of age he could run a line of traps as competently as men with a lifetime of experience at the job. Seldom did a buck deer get away from him once he latched onto its tracks. Of course, Veasy had a little Indian blood in his veins and sometimes that blood asserted itself. He could find his way out of the deep woods in the middle of the night if need be, and without trail or star to steer him. To Veasy, trapping was a means of making money, hunting a means of getting meat. Both were just a part of the daily chores, like packing water or splitting wood. Another job to be done, and the sooner done the better.

  His mind was miles ahead of his years. At an age when other children were still reading comics, Veasy was reading Karl Marx (though not agreeing with all that he read). And instead of giving his mind to whodunits, he gave it to Lewis’ s Theory of Economic Growth.

  By the time he was fifteen Veasy had killed three timber wolves and collected a forty-dollar government bounty on their scalps. A coyote that came within the sights of his gun was dead when he touched off the trigger. But he got no enjoyment out of killing either. At a very early age, the granite realism of his wilderness upbringing taught him that every muskrat killed by an owl, or beaver by a coyote, was a financial loss to us. Yet he knew that all predators were born to fulfill a purpose, and that when taking the life of another creature they were merely “doing what comes naturally.”

  The trapline cabin was only four or five miles away. The road we had cut to it followed the downward course of the creek, and when the ice of the beaver ponds was safe we travelled it where possible.

  Five miles! I could snowshoe there in an hour and a half given the right kind of snow, yet it was to take me all of three days to get there with a loaded sleigh. I struck out at sunup in the morning, riding my saddle horse and driving the harnessed team ahead of me. They weren’t hitched to anything, just breaking out the track. The front legs of the horses were bandaged in canvas wraps, much as the traps were bandaged when we live-trapped the beavers. If they hadn’t been, the crust would have slashed their skin and drawn blood within a half-mile of leaving the house.

  Travel was woefully slow, for the full depth of the snow hit the horses at the point of their shoulders. Coyote tracks criss-crossed the road every few yards, and about a mile out from home I cut the track of a single deer. On the windward side of the deep furrow he’d left behind in the snow were the claw marks of three or four loping coyotes. I thought, “They’ll haul up to the critter before it’s gone a mile.” By now there’d be a crimson splash or two on the snow here, a few scraps of hide there, and maybe a thin scattering of offal. But no more. The deer had no chance at all.

  It took four hours to get through to the cabin, and the horses were gray with frosted sweat when I hitched them to a cottonwood tree close to the building. The wrappings on their legs were slashed to ribbons, but that didn’t matter now that the track was broken out.

  I took a half-dozen pack rats out of the traps that had been left set for them, and cursed those that hadn’t been caught but had left their droppings all over the table. I started a fire in the sheet-iron cookstove and fried a half-dozen rashers of bacon. The bacon was hanging on a wire from the ridge logs where pack rats couldn’t get at it. The cold had given me an appetite, and after mopping up the grease with soda biscuits, the world seemed a whole lot brighter, and I was ready for the trip back.

  Before I could haul a load down, though—hay and oats for the horses, bedding and provisions for ourselves—I first had to plow out the track with the front runners of the sleigh. This took most all of a second day, so it was close to light-the-lamp time on the third day when we reined a tired team alongside the cabin door and began tossing out gear.

  Late the previous October I’d killed a bull moose about a mile and a half from the cabin. After quartering the bull out and loading the meat on pack horses, I’d liberally sprinkled poison bait around the innards and other offal in certain expectation that either a wolf or a coyote would happen along for a meal. And that is what had lured me to the cabin now: the slender chance that perhaps acute hunger had brought Wolf to the leftovers, and that when pawing in the snow he’d make a mistake and swallow one of the baits.

  The weather sided with me that night. Half an inch of powdery snow fell that would allow me to follow clear-cut sign on the crust. I knew I could make far better tracking time on snowshoes than on horseback, so I softened up the snowshoe harness with coyote grease, pocketed the venison sandwiches Lillian had packaged for me and struck off through the woods, rifle cradled in my arm, hope warming my heart. The crust under my webs was as solid as set cement, and I clipped along at a good three miles an hour.

  I braked up a little as I neared the site of the kill, for now I was cutting coyote tracks, lots of them. There was little left of the guts. Coyotes had dug down in the snow and got most of them. I didn’t take time out to circle for dead coyotes. About a hundred yards from the old kill was a bare knoll with a single massive fir tree growing square on the top. I knew that wolves have a penchant for lying in such spots, where they can see all that is going on around them. So I moved over to the knoll.

  I was almost on top of it when I stopped the soft swish of my snowshoes. I was looking down on a track that had not been made by any coyote.

  “Wolf!” I said slowly. For by now I knew his track when I saw it as well as I knew that of my own saddle horse. I was looking at the pad marks of the wolf that had been cheating me out of my beavers, the wolf that had killed countless scores of moose and deer, that had robbed our traps of their catch whenever he came across them. He’d bellied at the foot of the tree long enough for the heat of his body to melt the crusted snow. He knew exactly where the moose guts were, but he hadn’t come closer than a hundred yards of them. Oh, he was crafty, ever suspicious of any meat he hadn’t just killed himself.

  I circled the knoll and picked up his tracks leading away to the north. He travelled the length of a pothole meadow, wove through a stand of spruce as thick as the fur on a lynx. He climbed a drear, timberless hogback, dropped down the other side and suddenly swung sharp east into scattered pine timber. Here he stopped abruptly and crouched down in the snow.

  Fifty yards ahead of me a single deer had furrowed through the snow. Thin lines of blood on either side of its trail were visible from where I stood. “The crust,” I told myself. “It’s slicing the deer’s legs.”

  Wolf had trotted up to the deer’s trail and nosed the blood. Then he broke into a lope, keeping on the windward side of the sign. The one-sided contest had commenced.

  Beneath a huge pine I was able to read the deer’s tracks clearly. They had been made by either a very large buck or an equally large doe. Wolf’s tracks lengthened, and a half-mile farther on I came to where the deer was jumped. Wolf’s stride let out a little. The deer bounded off through the crust in lunges twenty feet apart. Wolf’s stride let out still more. The deer tracks began to weave crazily; here and there the doomed animal had staggered. Now Wolf was loping with every ounce of speed he could summon.

  He caught up to the deer as it broke out of the timber and started across a clearing. There it piled up in a ten-foot snowdrift. It may have died from fright and exertion even before Wolf’s teeth ripped through its liver. Anyway, I hoped so.

  Wolf had eaten the heart and the liver, strewn guts over the snow and chewed off most of one hindquarter. That was all he ate, so by that I knew that th
is wasn’t his only kill since the snow crusted. A really hungry timber wolf will eat a deer at a meal.

  I judged that the deer had been killed around daybreak, so Wolf had at least a four-hour start on me and might now be a dozen or more miles away. But the whole afternoon was ahead of me, so I ate my sandwiches, sucked at a mouthful of snow and inspected my snowshoe webbing. Then I slipped forward on the tracks.

  Wolf had bedded down under a tree for maybe an hour, then struck east again at a steady trot.

  “He’ll come out at the Big Lakes if he holds in that direction,” I calculated aloud. The Big Lakes, six miles long, marked the eastern boundary of our trapline.

  As I neared the lakes I saw considerable moose sign. The lakeshore was heavily fringed with willow, and here the moose were yarded up. Though some of the tracks were quite fresh, Wolf paid them no attention as he moved steadily eastward.

  Almost within sight of the ice I came out on a narrow avenue that I had cut through the thick spruce as a trail for saddle horses and pack animals when scattering traps out along the lakeshore. Coyotes, foxes and an occasional wolf travelled this easy path through the spruce, so I had a few snares set out on it now that had been there since late fall. They were beneath the heavy overhang of leaning trees, where a deep fall of snow wouldn’t put them out of action.

  Wolf’s tracks shortened as he came in sight of the snow-covered ice. I noted where he had bellied down in the snow a moment before getting up and moving on. At the edge of the ice he stopped again and I wondered, “What’s on his mind now?” Then, as my eyes swept the ice, I exploded, “You damned murderer!”

  Tufts of dark hair were scattered over the ice ahead, and the snow was spangled with blood, as if a half-dozen moose and as many wolves had battled there at the same time. But at closer range I saw that a single calf moose and the one wolf had made all the sign.

  Wolf had played with and tortured the calf as a cat plays with a mouse. On a full stomach, too. I wouldn’t have begrudged Wolf even that calf if his belly was truly empty. But he had already gorged himself at the carcass of the deer.

  The tufts of hair and blood in the snow told their own sordid tale of what had happened next. The calf moose was about to cross the ice when Wolf darted out between it and the shore. The killer drove the calf still farther out on the ice, then headed it off as a cow pony heads a steer. And every now and then, whenever the fancy struck him, Wolf closed in on the calf’s flanks, leaping up at it with slashing fangs that drew blood with every leap. Wolf could have finished the job quickly there on the ice, but he preferred to prolong the calf’s agony and his own sport.

  Following the tracks on the lake I saw where Wolf had bellied down in the snow and allowed the calf to lurch ashore. I studied the belly mark in the snow a moment. I could picture Wolf lying there, an unholy grin on his face. And I thought, “You know the calf can’t get far. You’ll let him get into the timber, then you’ll haul up on him and enjoy another round of blood-letting.”

  I followed the calf’s tracks into the timber. There Wolf’s sign cut in again, in long lopes. Up through dense willow and thinning poplar the tracks took me, and spruce loomed ahead. I could see the blazed trees that denoted my trapping trail, along which snares were set.

  I moved onto the trail, glanced along it and suddenly rooted down in my tracks. My eyes bulged, and my heart beat slightly faster. “The snare!” The cry that leaped from my lips was one of surprise, and pent-up excitement. “Ye gods, he hit the snare.” Then the huge gray body dangling at the end of the snare seemed to move. “He’s alive!” I muttered aloud. And quickly I bolted a cartridge into my rifle and snapped the gun into my shoulder. Then slowly and foolishly lowered it. “He’s dead as salt salmon,” I told myself. It was the gentle movement of the tree to which the spring pole was fastened that swung his body to and fro as if indeed there were life in him yet.

  Then I saw the calf, down in the snow thirty feet beyond the snare. I forgot for the moment about Wolf and slid past his dangling body to look at the mangled calf. It would never come to its feet again, even though a beat or two of life was yet left in it. So I put the muzzle of the gun behind its ears and gently squeezed the trigger. It was better thus.

  Eric poses with the hide of a wolf that had ranged their trapline for four years; when it killed an old mother beaver for what appeared to be sport, Eric became determined to hunt him down.

  Again I turned to Wolf. I judged his weight at one hundred and ten pounds. Certainly he was the largest dead wolf I’d ever seen. I squatted slowly back on my snowshoes, grappling with the question of how and why he had blundered. In cold blood Wolf would never have thrust his head into that snare, camouflaged though it might be. Wolf had smelled the steel of too many snares for that. Perhaps it was the old, old story of a pitcher going to the well just once too often. Momentarily blinded to all else but his desire to haul up to the calf, Wolf had thrust his head into the snare without having time to scent its whereabouts. His first frantic lunge had released the trigger that held the tip of the twenty-five-foot pole to which the snare was fastened. As the pole raised, Wolf was lifted into the air, and though he struggled to escape the clutch of the thing that was choking away his life, the snare, like Wolf himself, knew nothing at all of pity. All that it caught it killed.

  Thus Wolf died. A murderer all his life, he died a murderer’s death. With wind sobbing mournfully through the treetops, and moon’s first crescent staring sardonically down, seeing much, saying nothing.

  Chapter 22

  Half a roasted mallard resting easily inside me, a quarter of blueberry pie there to keep it company. Old sun about ready to quit for the day, old moon, fat as a fall turnip, awaiting his cue to hoist up above the treetops in another part of the world altogether. This was the hour I liked best.

  A flock of noisy bluebills scolding one another in the cattails, doe and fawn deer standing belly deep in the water just across the pond from me, quenching an evening thirst.

  The evening patrol coming away from the lodge, floating down the pond to make professional scrutiny of the dam. I thought, “There must be a dozen beavers in that colony this year if there’s one.”

  Another day’s toil behind me, and something accomplished, something done. Maybe another cord of wood sawed, split and piled in readiness for the winter ahead. Or the head of an old beaver run located at the other end of Meldrum Lake, now occupied by a pair of otters. Likely as not they’d be visiting that run when the lake was again shut by ice, and most any man of the woods knows how to chop a hole through the ice at the underwater entrance to an otter hideaway, drive a couple of poles down into the mud and set a trap. A well-primed otter pelt was worth twenty-five dollars.

  Or maybe a half-dozen horned owls thrown out of the traps, for the owls had to be kept in check too; they preyed upon the muskrats. Or accounts finally settled with an old dog coyote who’d killed many a beaver in his time but would never kill another. Trivial chores these, but chores just the same. But they added to something accomplished, something done, and that’s what counts in any man’s life.

  Eventide. Half the wilderness about ready to put on its nightcap, the other half just taking it off. The wilderness is never altogether asleep. It labours all day and it labours all night; the wilderness is never altogether still.

  The young ones came out to play early this evening. Usually the mother tells them better stay in the house until night shuts down proper, and peering predacious eyes can’t see, but tonight they slipped away from the lodge a few minutes after sunset, and all four of them trailed one another to the rock.

  Maybe they think they’re fooling their mother tonight, that they slipped away from the lodge without her being any the wiser. If so, they are only fooling themselves. She’s there, lying still as a water-logged stick in the middle of the pond, and she knows right where the little ones are too. Can’t fool an old mother beaver when it comes to watching out for the youngsters.

  Let me see now: it’ll be five
years come next September since they first came back to the irrigation dam and Meldrum Creek. Maybe the old female beaver out there now is one of the original pairs, but it can’t be proved by me. Some trappers say that an old sow beaver will live for twenty years or more if they keep clear of traps and predators, though how they figure that I don’t rightly know. Our first two pairs of beavers took to the waters of Meldrum Creek in 1941. Nine years in all were to pass before we set our first trap and caught our first beaver. By that time not only was the creek itself stocked to carrying capacity with beavers, but many of the landlocked lakes about it too. Other creeks, other lakes, miles from our trapline had their beavers back too. As the throwing of a pebble on water spreads ever widening ripples, so, by 1950, did the beavers spread over much of the Chilcotin.

  There’s hardly room on the rock for more than one of the kits at a time, and each seems to think that he’s the chosen one. They’re ten weeks old now, thrice the weight of a muskrat, and when their tails pound the water you’d swear it was only the splash of some mighty trout rising to a fly. They learned that trick from watching and hearing the older beavers splash their tails on the water, and it’s one they’ll never forget.

  Now one has all of the rock to itself and for fifteen or twenty seconds manages to hold his own against the combined efforts of the other three to crawl up and push it head over heels into the water. But they know a thing or two about make-believe warfare, do the young ones. While two of them wage a frontal attack, the third steals in from behind, sneaks stealthily up the rock and, with one sudden rush, tosses the tough guy off the rock and back into the water.

  It all reminds me of a game I used to play as a boy long years ago in England, when all I knew of the Canadian wilderness came to me by way of James Oliver Curwood or Fenimore Cooper. To a boy crowding nine or ten, make-believe is often far more real than life. A field of ripening wheat is an endless and mysterious forest, a brook some mighty river that somehow has to be forded. And if you close your eyes long enough and squeeze them real shut, those little mounds of earth aren’t mole hills at all: they’re beaver lodges heaving up from the water of some lonely mountain lake.