Part 18

Meanwhile, the quavering high-pitched chorus was sweeping swiftly nearer through the moonlight, and Logan put on a burst of speed in order to get to a stretch of open burnt lands before his pursuers should come up with him. If he was to have a fight forced upon him, he wanted plenty of room and the chance to keep all his adversaries in plain view. He gained the open, with its scattered black stumps and gaunt, ghostly "rampikes" dotting the radiant silver of the snow, and was some eighty or a hundred paces beyond the edge of the woods before the wolves appeared. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the gray forms of the pack halt, come close together, then separate again, hesitating at the venture of the open. The hesitation was only for a moment, however. Then, in formation so close that one might have covered the whole pack with a bedquilt, they came on again. His trained eye had counted six wolves in the pack; and he was relieved to find that there were not more. From their cries he had imagined there must have been thirty or forty.

Logan was too wise to run, now that he was in view of his foes. He stalked on with haughty indifference, till the pack was within twenty-five or thirty yards of his heels. Then he turned, and spoke, with an air of sharp, confident authority. Even through their hunger and their savage madness of pursuit the beasts felt the mastery of his voice. They paused, irresolutely, then opened out and sat down on their haunches to see what he would do.

After surveying them superciliously for a few seconds, the woodsman turned again and stalked on, keeping, however, a keen watch over his shoulder and his axe poised ready for instant use. As soon as he moved on, the wolves followed, but no longer in their pack formation. Not yet audacious enough to come within ten or twelve feet of this arrogantly confident being, whose voice had power to daunt them in the very heat of their onslaught, they spread out on either side of the trail, half-surrounding him, and keeping pace with him at a skulking trot. Their jaws were half-open, their long white fangs were bared in a snarling grin, and their eyes, all fixed upon him unwinkingly, glinted a green light of ferocity and hunger.

Little by little they drew closer in, while Logan pretended to ignore them contemptuously. All at once he felt, almost more than saw, one of the largest of the pack dart in to spring upon his back. Out went the bright axe-blade like a flash of blue flame, as he whirled on his heel; and the wolf dropped with a choked-off yelp, shorn through the neck. Thrice around him he wheeled the circle of the deadly blade; and the wolves deferentially slunk beyond reach of it, not yet ready to tempt the fate of their comrade.

Five minutes more, however, and the wary beasts again drew closer and Logan found that the strain of guarding himself on all sides at once was overwhelming. At any moment, as he knew, those hungry eyes might all close in on him together. A few hundred yards ahead, as he bethought himself, the trail led under the foot of a high, almost perpendicular rock; and he made up his mind that he must reach that rock as speedily as possible. With his back against the steep face of it he could face the charge of the pack to better advantage. Breaking into a long, unhurried trot, he pressed on, swinging the axe from side to side in swift, menacing sweeps, and uttering angry expletives which the wolves seemed to respect as much as they did the gleaming weapon. Before he gained the foot of the rock, however, the beasts had grown more confident and more impatient, making little sudden leaps at him, from one side or the other, so incessantly that his arm had not a moment's rest; and he realized that the crisis of the adventure could not be much longer delayed.

When he reached the foot of the rock and turned at bay, the wolves drew back once more and formed a half-circle before him, a moving, interweaving half-circle that drew closer and grew smaller stealthily. Suddenly the wolf which seemed the leader sprang straight in. But the woodsman seemed to divine the move even before it began, so sharply did he meet it with a step forward and a savage axe-stroke; and the wolf sprang back just in time to save its skull.

And now, in the clutch of the final trial, Logan had an inspiration. With all the doggedness of the backwoods will he had vowed that he would not give up the rich booty on his back. But the question had at last, as he saw, become one of giving up his own life. In this crisis, his backwoods understanding and sympathy suddenly went out toward the plucky but helpless captive in the sack on his back. It would be quite too bad that the splendid lynx, with all his fighting equipment of fangs and claws, should be torn to pieces in his bonds without a chance to make a fight for life. Moreover, as he realized with the next thought, here was perhaps a chance to create an effective diversion in his own favour.

With a shout and a mad whirling of the axe, he once more drew back the narrowing crescent of the wolves. The next instant he swung the bag from his back, ripped open the mouth of it, and emptied out the writhing roll of blanket upon the snow at his feet,--while the wolves, eyeing this new procedure with suspicion, held back a few moments before again closing in. As the bundle fell, Logan seized one corner of the blanket, and with a dexterous twist and throw unrolled it, landing the prisoner almost under the noses of the wolves.

Bewildered for an instant, the lynx had no time to bound back and scurry up the steep face of the rock to safety. He had no sooner gained his feet than the whole pack was upon him. With a screech of fury he proclaimed his understanding of the crisis, and turned every tooth and claw into the fray. His fangs, of course, were no match for those of any one of his assailants; but his claws were weapons of such quality that no single wolf could have withstood him. As it was, the wolves in their eagerness got in one another's way; and as the mass of them smothered the lynx down, more than one got eviscerating slashes that sent them yelping out of battle.

For a few breathless seconds Logan watched the fight, glowing with excited approval over his late captive's prowess. Then he realized the time had come when he must take a hand, or find himself again at a disadvantage. Silently he darted upon the screeching, growling heap with his light axe. So skilled was he in all the woodsman's sleights, that even in so brief time as takes to tell it, three more of the pack were down, kicking and dying silently on the snow. The leader of the pack, the side of his neck redly furrowed and the lust of battle hot in his veins, wheeled, and jumped madly at Logan's throat. But the woodsman met him with a terrific short-handled upward stroke, which fairly split his ribs and hurled him over backwards. On the instant the remaining wolves, who had each suffered something in the mêlée, concluded that the game was up. Leaping away from the reach of those deadly-ripping claws, they turned and ran off like whipped dogs.

Bleeding from a dozen gashes, bedraggled and battered, but still full of fight to every outspread claw, the lynx crouched and glared at the man, with ears flattened back and eyes shooting pallid flame. For some seconds the two faced each other, the man grinning with approval. Then it occurred to him that the maddened beast, in despair of escape, might spring at him and compel him to strike, which, in his present sympathetic and grateful mood, he was most unwilling to do. Cautiously, keeping his eyes on the sinister flaring orbs that faced him, he took a step backwards. Still the lynx crouched, ready to spring. Then Logan spoke, in quiet expostulation.

"Don't ye go for to fight me, now! I never done ye no hurt!" he argued mendaciously. "It's them durn wolves, that was after the both of us; an' it was me got ye out of that scrape. Don't ye come lookin' fer trouble, for I don't want to hurt ye!"

At the sound of the quiet voice, soothing yet commanding, the tension of the beast's madness seemed to relax. The fixity of his glare wavered. Then his eyes shifted; and the next moment, turning with a movement so quick that the woodsman's eyes could hardly follow it, he was away like a gray shadow among the stumps and trunks, not leaping, but running belly to ground like a cat. Logan watched him out of sight, then nonchalantly put two wounded wolves out of their misery, whetted his knife on his larrigans, and settled down to the task of stripping the pelts.

When the Tide Came Over the Marshes

A perfect dome of palest blue, vapourous but luminous. To northward and southeastward a horizon line of low uplands, misty purple. Along the farthest west a glimmer and sparkle of the sea. Everywhere else, wide, wind-washed levels of marsh, pallid green or ochre yellow, cut here and there with winding tide-channels and mud-flats of glistening copper red. Twisting this way and that in erratic curves, the unbroken, sodded lines of the dyke, fencing off the red flats and tide-channels, and dividing the green expanses of protected dyke-marsh from the ochre yellow stretches of the salt marsh, as yet but half-reclaimed from the sea.

At this autumn season the hay had all been cut and cured and most of it hauled away to safe storage in far-off, upland barns. But on the remoter and wetter marshes some of it had been piled in huge yellow-gray, cone-peaked stacks, to await the easier hauling of winter. The solitary, snug-built stacks, towering above the dyke-tops and whistled over ceaselessly by the long marsh winds, were a favoured resort of the meadow-mice. These adaptable little animals were able to endure with equanimity the inevitable annual destruction of their homes in the deep grass, seeing that the haymakers were so thoughtful as to afford them much dryer and more secure abodes in the heart of the stacks, where neither the keen-nosed fox nor the keen-eyed marsh-owl could get at them.

Past the foot of a certain lonely stack by the outer dyke, within sound of the rushing tide, ran an old drainage ditch, at this time of year almost dry. Its bottom, where tiny puddles were threaded on a trickle of running water, was now a thronged resort of water-loving insects, and small frogs, and imprisoned shiners. To a wandering mink, driven down by drought from the uplands, it was a wonderful and delightful place, which he adopted at once as his own particular range. The main ditch, with its system of lateral feeders, furnished several miles of runway, and the whole of this rich domain the newcomer preempted, patrolling it methodically, devoting his whole attention to it, and ready to defend it against any rival claimant who might appear.

The mink was a male, about twenty inches long, with his rich dark coat in perfect condition. His pointed, sinister, quietly savage face and head were set on a long but heavy-muscled neck, almost as thick as the thickest part of his body. The body itself was altogether snake-like in its lithe sinuousness, and supported on legs so ridiculously short that when he was not leaping he seemed to writhe and dart along on his belly after the fashion of a snake. In spite of this shortness of the legs, however, his movements, when he had any reason for haste, were of an almost miraculous swiftness, his whole form seeming to be made up of subtle and tireless steel springs. When he did not care to writhe and dart along like a snake, he would arch his long back like a measuring-worm and go leaping over the ground in jumps of sometimes four or five feet in length. This method of progression he probably adopted for the fun of it, in the main; for his hunting tactics were usually those of stealthy advance and lightning-like attack. Once in a long while, indeed, by lucky chance he would succeed in catching in one of these wild leaps, a snipe which flew too low over the ditch or paused on hovering wing before alighting to forage on the populous ooze. Such an achievement would afford a pleasant variation to his customary diet of fish, frogs, beetles, and occasional muskrat.

The mink had been nearly three weeks on his new range, and enjoying himself hugely in his devastating way, before he observed the big yellow stack beside the ditch. It was on a day of driving rain-squalls and premature cold that he first took note of its possibilities. Gliding furtively around its base, his bright, fierce eyes detected a tiny hole, the imperfectly hidden entrance to a mouse-tunnel. He thrust in his head at once to investigate. It was a close squeeze; but where his head and neck could go his slender body could follow, and he dearly loved the exploring of just such narrow passages.

A little way in, the tunnel branched; but the mink made no mistake. The gallery which he selected to follow ended in a mouse-nest, with the mice at home. There in the dry, warm, sweet-scented dark there was a brief tragedy, with shrill squeaks and a rustling struggle. Two mice escaped the slaughter, but the other three were caught. The invader sucked the blood of all three while they were warm, ate one, and then curled himself up for sleep in his new and delightful quarters. This stack was all that the new range needed to make it the very choicest that a mink could possess.

After this the mink occupied the stack in bad weather, but ranged the ditches, as usual, when it was pleasant. The stack was full of mouse-galleries, and when he wanted a change he hunted mice. But it was the outdoor, wide-ranging life that best contented him, so the mice were by no means all driven out. Being a happy-go-lucky tribe, the survivors continued to occupy their nests in spite of their terrible new neighbour, trusting that doom would overlook them.

But neither men nor mice nor minks can be prepared against all the caprices of Nature. That fall, Nature suddenly took it into her head to try the dykes, of which the men had for a generation or more been so boastful. She rolled in from the sea a succession of tremendous tides, backing them up with a mighty and unrelenting wind out of the southwest, and piled the tide-channels to the brim with buffeting floods. For a time the dykes withstood the assault valiantly. But again and again, ever fiercer and fiercer, came the besieging tides; and finally they made a breach. In rushed a red and foaming torrent, devouring the clay walls on either side with a roar, and drowning the long-protected dyke-marsh under a seething chaos of muddy waves and débris.

The first breach occurred at daybreak; and the stack stood right in the way. The huge flood poured in in angry glory, almost blood-red in the first gush of a blazing crimson sunrise. In that unnatural and terrifying light, which swiftly softened to a mocking delicacy of pink and lilac, the stack was torn from its foundations and borne revolving up the tide.

The nest of the mink, being low in the stack, was promptly flooded, driving the angry tenant out. He ran up to the dry top of the stack, and surveyed the wild scene with surprise. Water, of course, had no terrors for him; but this tumultuous flood seemed a good thing to keep out of. He would stay by his refuge for the present, at least. Meanwhile, there were mice!

The mice, indeed, panic-stricken and forced from their lower nests, were fairly swarming in the top of the stack. The mink first satiated his thirst with blood. Next he glutted his hunger with the brains of his victims. Then, seeing their numbers apparently undiminished, he got wild with excitement and blood-lust. Darting hither and thither, madly joyous, he killed, and killed, and killed, for the joy of killing; while the stack, with its freight of terror and death, went whirling majestically along the now broader and quieter flood.

How long the slaughter of the helpless mice would have continued, before the slaughterer tired of the game and crept into a nest to sleep, cannot be known. By another of Nature's whims, concerned equally with great matters and with little, it was not left to the joyous mink to decide. His conspicuous dark body, darting over the light surface of the stack, caught the eye of a great hawk soaring high above the marshes. Lower and lower sank the bird, considering,--for the mink was larger game than he usually chose to hunt. Then, while still too high in the blue to attract attention from the busy slayer, he narrowed his wings, hardened his plumage, and shot downward. At a strange sound in the air the mink looked up,--but not in time to meet that appalling attack. One great set of talons, steel-strong and edged like knives, clutched him about the throat, strangling him to helplessness, while another set crushed his ribs and cut into his vitals. The wise hawk had struck with a thorough comprehension of the enemy's fighting powers; and had taken care that there should be no fight. Flying heavily, he carried the long, limp body off to his high nest in the hills; and the stack drifted on with the tiny terrified remnant of the mouse-people, till the ebbing tide left it stranded on a meadow near the foot of the uplands.

Under the Ice-roof

Filtering thinly down through the roof of snow and clean blue ice, the sharp winter sunshine made almost a summer's glow upon the brown bottom of the pond. Beneath the ice the water was almost as warm now as in summer, the pond being fed by springs from so deep a source that their temperature hardly varied with the seasons. Here and there a bit of water-weed stood up from the bottom, green as in June. But in the upper world, meanwhile, the wind that drove over the ice and snow was so intensely cold that the hardy northern trees snapped under it, and few of the hardy northern creatures of the wilderness, though fierce with hunger, had the fortitude to face it. They crouched shivering in their lairs, under fallen trunks or in the heart of dense fir thickets, and waited anxiously for the rigour of cold and the savagery of wind to abate. Only down in the pond, in the generous spaces of amber water beneath the ice-roof, life went on busily and securely. The wind might rage unbridled, the cold might lay its hand of death heavily on forest and hill; but the beavers in their unseen retreat knew nothing of it. All it could do was to add an inch or two of thickness to the icy shelter above them, making their peaceful security more secure.