F. St. Mars - The Way of the Wild

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[Frontispiece: "Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged
confusion"]

THE WAY OF THE WILD

BY

F. ST. MARS

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY ROUNTREE

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE TITLE "PINION AND PAW"

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

I GULO THE INDOMITABLE
II BLACKIE AND CO.
III UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG
IV NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
V PHARAOH
VI THE CRIPPLE
VII "SET A THIEF"----
VIII THE WHERE IS IT?
IX LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE
X THE KING'S SON
XI THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH
XII THE FURTIVE FEUD
XIII THE STORM PIRATE
XIV WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD
XV FATE AND THE FEARFUL
XVI THE EAGLES OF LOCH ROYAL
XVII RATEL, V.C.
XVIII THE DAY

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged confusion" . . .
_Frontispiece_

"The owl had lost a foot on the turn

"A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"

"This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"

"Landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!"

"A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for him"

"An angry eagle-owl"

"Turning over and over, in one long, sickening dive back to earth"

"That little black-headed fellow doing the stalking act upon that
python was great"

"Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared to have been a
submarine mine in a mild form"

"He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"

"All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"

THE WAY OF THE WILD

I

GULO THE INDOMITABLE

If his father had been a brown bear and his mother a badger, the result
in outward appearance would have been Gulo, or something very much like
him. But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for
his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master. Gulo,
however, was not a cross. He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, _alias_
glutton, _alias_ carcajou, _alias_ quick-hatch, _alias_ fjeldfras in
the vernacular, or, officially, _Gulo luscus_. But, by whatever name
you called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character, too, was of
a bad odor. A great man once said that he was like a bear cub with a
superadded tail; but that great man cannot have seen his face. If he
had, he would have looked for his double among the fiends on the top of
Notre Dame. There was, in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only
in a very hot place not on the earth.

He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man, and no beast,
ought to be trusted with; and he had no soul. God alone knows if love,
which softens most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior
seemed to show that it had not. Perhaps love was afraid of him. And,
upon my soul, I don't wonder.

It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place in the pine-forest
where Gulo stood, and the unpitying moon cast a dainty tracery through
the tasseled roof upon the new and glistening snow around him--the snow
that comes early to those parts--and the north-east wind cut like
several razors. But Gulo did not seem to care. Wrapped up in his
ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black cloak--just his
gray-sided, black fiend's face poking out--he seemed warm enough. When
he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the murderous, scraping,
long claws of him were nearly white; and as he set his lips in a
devilish grin, his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.

Verily, this was no beast--he would have taped four feet and a quarter
from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure
him--no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves. Things
were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other
living creature--awful things.

Suddenly he looked up. The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as
if an army were asleep there. And an army was--of wood-pigeons.
Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head,
come from Heaven knows where, going to--who could tell in the end?

All at once one fell. Without apparent reason or cause, it fell. And
the wolverine, with his quick, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from
branch to branch, turning over and over--oh! so softly--to the ground.
When he had poked his way to it--walking flat-footed, like a bear or a
railway porter--it was dead. Slain in a breath! Without a flutter,
killed! By what? By disease--diphtheria. But not here would the
terrible drama be worked out. This was but an isolated victim, first
of the thousands that would presently succumb to the fell disease far,
far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and
Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.

But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of
no use to the wolverine. As he sniffed it he found that out. The
thing was wasted to the bones even. And turning away from it--he
suddenly "froze" in his tracks where he stood.

One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a
forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as
if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his
wet muzzle; and its touch spelt--"Man!"

If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have
affected him more. He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as
hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and
on end.

Animals have no counting of time. In the wild, things happen as
swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a
night, or a day, or half a week. Therefore I do not know exactly how
long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a
certain spot--himself unseen. All animals, almost, can do that, but
none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine. He
is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure
with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been. He
found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one
after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth;
and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for
digging.

He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have
known it. He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and
precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches,
and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his
lowering, low-browed fashion.

Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an
elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a
moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting
motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its
eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of
wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox,
somewhere in the utter silence of the forest depths, barked a hoarse,
sharp, malicious sound; and once, hoarser still and very hollowly, a
great horned owl hooted with disconcerting suddenness. (The scream of
a rabbit followed these two, but whether fox or owl had been in at that
killing the wolverine never knew.) Twice a wood-hare turning now to
match the whiteness of its surroundings, finicked up one of the still,
silent forest lanes towards him, stopped, faced half-round, sat
"frozen" for a fraction, and vanished as if it were a puff of
wind-caught snow. (And, really, one had no idea till now that the
always apparently lifeless forest could have been so full of life in
the dark hours.)

But all these things made no difference to the wolverine, to Gulo,
though he "froze" with habitual care to watch them--for your wild
creature rarely takes chances. Details must never be overlooked in the
wild. He dug on, and in digging came right to the _cache_, roofed and
anchored all down, safe beyond any invasion, with tree-trunks.
And--and, mark you, not being able to pull tree-trunks out of the
ground, and being too large to squeeze between them, he gnawed through
one! Gnawed through it, he did, and came down to the bazaar below.

So far, he had been only beast. Now we see why I said he had more
brains than were good for any animal except man.

He bit through the canvas, or whatever it was that protected the
_cached_ articles. He got his head inside. He felt about
purposefully, and backed out, dragging a trap with him. With it he
removed into the inky shadows, and it was never found again.

He returned. He thrust his head in a second time, got hold of
something, and backed out. It was another trap, and with it he
vanished also; and it, too, was never found. He returned, and went,
and a third trap went with him.

The fourth investigation revealed an ax. It he partly buried. The
fifth yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over
the place. The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he
dined. The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere
unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.

What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he
defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
_cache_, but a third-rate _debacle_, he sauntered, always slouching,
always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and
droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the
darkness of the night, under the trees.

By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more. Heaven knows where he was!

Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting
up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.
A man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.

A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal
against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.

But Gulo was taking no notice of them. He was used to attentions of
that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him. He
was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the
buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist,
southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something
was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of
whisper in that direction for some time. Now it was unmistakable.

A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by,
her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like
some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up,
hackles alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look
back, a wild reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he
seemed to be--all these passed, now on one side, now on the other,
often only glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up
and shaded his eyes with his paws. Something was moving those beasts,
those haunters of the forest, and no little thing either. Something?
What?

Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now--
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.

Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his domestic
arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool hard by.
The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf and stone,
with fine green moss of incomparable softness. He drank swiftly and
long, then flung about with a half-insolent, half-aggressive wave of
his tail, and set off at a rolling, clumsy, shuffling shamble.

At ordinary times that deceiving gait would have left nearly everything
behind, but this afternoon it was different. Gulo had barely shed the
shelter of the dotted thickets before he realized, and one saw, the
fact. He broke his trot. He began to plunge. Nevertheless, he got
along. There was pace, of a sort. Certainly there was much effort.
He would have outdistanced you or me easily in no time, but it was not
you or I that came, and who could tell how fast that something might
travel?

The trouble was the snow--that was the rub, and a very big and serious
rub, too, for him. Now, if the snow had been a little less it would
not have mattered--a little more, and he could have run easily along
the hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just
enough to retard him, and no more. And it is then, when the snow is
like that, just above a couple of feet deep, that man can overtake
friend wolverine--if he knows the way. Most men don't. On that he
trusted. At any other time--but this was not any other time.

Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo
heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a
cock-capercailzie--the feathered giant of the woods--rising. It was
only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite
enough, for him. Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of
the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more
than enough. He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone
in his eyes--it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.

A lynx passed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs. It looked
all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he
cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of
its long, springing hindlegs. Something, too--the same something--must
have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.

Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the
miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his
character. Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all
alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding
along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.

At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up. A gray-blue haze,
like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except
in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that
foretold frost. It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite
left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes. The
silence was almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his
rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very
faintly--a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away
again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little,
wide-set eyes. It was the unmistakable sound of a horse
sneezing--once. Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice. He was
gone in an instant. Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering
that challenge of the _cache_ escapade.

After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting
succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran
when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that
glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.)
It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely
dealt in it, to know fear.

Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a
dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his
hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him.
At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back
along the trail.

Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of
an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a
ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out
upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more
than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked
like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping
hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no
bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace was wanted here, and
the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the
required speed under such conditions.

The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place
where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was being
followed. Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and teeth
showing, had never ceased to gallop. This, apparently, was not the
first wolverine that horse had trailed. It seemed to have a personal
grudge against the whole fell clan of wolverine, and to be bent upon
trampling Gulo to death.

Gulo watched it for about one quarter of a second. Then he quitted,
and the speed he had put up previously was nothing to that which he
showed now--uselessly. And, far behind him, the man in the sleigh drew
out his rifle from under the fur rugs. He judged that the time had
about come. The end was very near.

But he judged wrong. Gulo made the wood at length. With eyes of dull
red, and breath coming in short, rending sobs, he got in among the
trees. He did it, though the feat seemed impossible, for the trees had
been so very far away. Got in among the trees--yes, but dead-beat,
and--to what end? To be "treed" ignominiously and calmly shot down,
picked off like a squirrel on a larch-pole. That was all. And that
was the orthodox end, the end the man took for granted.

In a few minutes the horse was in the forest too, was close behind
Gulo. In spite of the muffling effect of snow, his expectant ears
could hear the quadruple thud of the galloping hoofs, and--

Hup! Whuff! Biff-biff! Grrrrrr! Grr-ur-ururrh! Grrrr-urr!

It had all happened quick as a flash of light. A huge, furry, reeking
mass rising right in the wolverine's path from behind a tree, towering
over him, almost mountainous to his eyes, like the very shape of doom!
Himself hurling sideways, and rolling over and over, snarling, to
prevent the crowning disaster of collision with this terrible portent!
A blow, two blows, with enormous paws whose claws gleamed like skewers,
whistling half-an-inch above his ducked head! Jaws, monstrous and wet,
grabbing at him in enraged confusion, and rumblings deep down in the
inside of the thing that ran cold lightning-sparks all up his spine.
That was what Gulo saw and heard.

The wolverine rolled, clawing and biting, three times, and without a
pause sprang to his feet again, and leapt madly clear, stumbled on a
hidden tree-root, rolled over again twice, and up, and hurled,
literally with his last gasp and effort, headlong through the air
behind a tree-bole, where he remained all asprawl and motionless,
except for his heaving sides, too utterly done at last for _any_ terror
to move him.

There followed instantly a horse's wild snort; another; a shout; the
crack of a rifle cutting the silence as a knife cuts a taut string;
another crack; an awful, hoarse growl; the furious thudding of horse's
hoofs stampeding and growing fainter and fainter; and an appalling
series of receding, short, coughing, terrifying, grunting roars. Then
silence and utter stillness only, and the cold, calm moon staring down
over all.

Gulo picked himself up after a bit, and slouched round the tree to
investigate. He found tracks there, and blood; and the tracks were the
biggest footprints of a bear--a brown bear--that he had ever come
across, and I suppose that he must have sniffed at a few in his time.

Presumably the man had fired at the bear when the startled horse shied.
Presumably, too, the bear was hit. He had gone straight away in the
track of horse and man, anyway, and--he had saved the wolverine's life,
after, with paw and teeth, doing his best to end it. Possibly he had
been disturbed in the process of making his winter home.

Gulo lay low, or hunted very furtively, after that for some time, until
it was little less dark in the east than it had been, and the gaunt
tree-trunks were standing out a fraction from the general gloom. The
moon had apparently nearly burnt itself out. Still, it yet appeared to
be night.

Gulo was a long way out of his own hunting-district, and guessed that
it was about time for him to get himself out of sight. He had a
passionate hatred of the day, by the way, even beyond most night
hunters.

On the way he smelt out and dug up a grouse beneath the snow.

Dawn found him, or, rather, failed to find him, hidden under a tangled
mass that was part windfall, part brush-wood, and part snow. The place
had belonged to a fox the night before, and that red worthy returned
soon after dawn. He thrust an inquiring sharp muzzle inside, took one
sniff, and, with every hair alift, retired in haste, without waiting to
hear the villainous growl that followed him. The smell was enough for
him--a most calamitous stink.

It snowed all that day, and things grew quieter and quieter, except in
the tree-tops, where the wind spoke viciously between its teeth. When
Gulo came out that evening, he had to dig part of the way, and he
viewed a still and silent, white world, under a sky like the lid of a
lead box, very low down. He stood higher against the tree-trunks than
he had done the night before, and, though he did not know it, was safe
from any horse, for the snow was quite deep. The cold was awful, but
it did not seem to trouble him, as he slouched slowly southward.

There appeared to be nothing alive at all throughout this white land,
but you must never trust to that in the wild. Things there are very
rarely what they seem. For instance, Gulo came into a clearing, dim
under the night sky, though it would never be dark that night. To the
ear and the eye that clearing was as empty as a swept room. To Gulo's
nose it was not, and he was just about to crouch and execute a stalk,
when half the snow seemed to get up and run away. The runners were
wood-hares. They had "frozen" stiff on the alarm from their sentries.
But it was not Gulo who had caused them to depart. Him, behind a tree,
they had not spotted. Something remained--something that moved. And
Gulo saw it when it moved--not before. It was an ermine, a stoat in
winter dress, white as driven snow. Then it caught sight of Gulo, or,
more likely, the gleam of his eyes, and departed also.

Gulo slouched on, head down, back humped, tail low, a most
dejected-looking, out-at-heels tramp of the wilderness.

Once he came upon a wild cat laying scientific siege to a party of
grouse. The grouse were nowhere to be seen; nor was the wild cat,
after Gulo announced his intention to break his neutrality. Gulo knew
where the grouse were. He dug down into the snow, and came upon a
tunnel. He dug farther, and came upon other tunnels, round and clean,
in the snow. All the tunnels smelt of grouse, but devil a grouse could
he find. He had come a bit early. It was as yet barely night, and he
should have waited till later, when they would be more asleep.
However, he dug on along the tunnels, driving the grouse before him.
And then a strange thing happened. About three yards ahead of him the
snow burst--burst, I say, like a six-inch shell, upwards. There was a
terrific commotion, a wild, whirring, whirling smother, a cloud of
white, and away went five birds, upon heavily beating wings, into the
gathering gloom. Gulo went away, too, growling deep down inside of,
and to, himself.

He was hungry, was Gulo. Indeed, there did not seem to be many times
when he was not hungry. Also, being angry--not even a wild animal
likes failure--he was seeking a sacrifice; but he had crossed the
plain, which the night before had been as a nightmare desert to him,
and the moon was up before his chance came.

He crossed the trail of the reindeer. He did not know anything about
those reindeer, mark you, whether they were wild or semi-tame; and _I_
do not know, though _he_ may have done, how old the trail was. It was
sufficient for him that they _were_ reindeer, and that they had
traveled in the general direction that he wanted to go. For the
rest--he had the patience, perhaps more than the patience, of a cat,
the determination of a bulldog, and the nose of a bloodhound. He
trailed those reindeer the better part of that night, and most of the
time it snowed, and part of the time it snowed hard.

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