Kitabı oku: «The Prairie Chief», sayfa 6
Bruin seemed to entertain suspicions of some sort, for he sniffed the tainted air once or twice, and looked inquiringly round. Coming to the conclusion, apparently, that his suspicions were groundless, he walked straight up to the lump of buffalo-meat and sniffed it. Not being particular, he tried it with his tongue.
“Good!” said the bear—at least if he did not say so, he must have thought so, for next moment he grasped it with his teeth. Finding it tethered hard and fast, he gathered himself together for the purpose of exercising main force.
Now was Little Tim’s opportunity. Slipping a cord by which the net was suspended to the four stakes, he caused it to descend like a curtain over the bear. It acted most successfully, insomuch that the animal was completely enveloped.
Surprised, but obviously not alarmed, Bruin shook his head, sniffed a little, and pawed the part of the net in front of him. The hunter wasted no time. Seeing that the net was all right, he pulled with all his might on the main rope, which partly drew the circumference of the net together. Finding his feet slightly trammelled, the grizzly tried to move off, but of course trod on the net, tripped, and rolled over. In so doing he caught sight of the hunter, who was now enabled to close the mouth of the net-purse completely.
Being by that time convinced, apparently, that he was the victim of foul play, the bear lost his temper, and tried to rise. He tripped as before, came down heavily on his side, and hit the back of his head against a stone. This threw him into a violent rage, and he began to bounce.
At all times bouncing is ineffectual and silly, even in a grizzly bear. The only result was that he bruised his head and nose, tumbled among stones and stumps, and strained the rope so powerfully that the limb of the tree to which it was attached was violently shaken, and Little Tim was obliged to hold on to avoid being shaken off.
Experience teaches bears as well as fools. On discovering that it was useless to bounce, he sat down in a disconsolate manner, poked as much as he could of his nose through one of the meshes, and sniggered at Little Tim, who during these outbursts was naturally in a state of great excitement. Then the bear went to work leisurely to gnaw the mesh close to his mouth.
The hunter was not prepared for this. He had counted on the creature struggling with its net till it was in a state of complete exhaustion, when, by means of additional ropes, it could be so wound round and entangled in every limb as to be quite incapable of motion. In this condition it might be slung to a long pole and carried by a sufficient number of men to the small, but immensely strong, cage on wheels which the agent had brought with him.
Not only was there the danger of the bear breaking loose and escaping, or rendering it necessary that he should be shot, but there was another risk which Little Tim had failed at first to note. The scene on which he had decided to play out his little game was on the gentle slope of a hill, which terminated in a precipice of considerable height, and each time the bear struggled and rolled over in his network purse, he naturally gravitated towards the precipice, over which he was certain to go if the rope which held him to the tree should snap.
The hunter had just become thoroughly alive to this danger when, with a tremendous struggle, the bear burst two of the meshes in rear, and his hind-quarters were free.
Little Tim seized his gun, feeling that the crisis had come. He was loath to destroy the creature, and hesitated. Instead of backing out of his prison, as he might easily have done, the bear made use of his free hind legs to make a magnificent bound forward. He was checked, of course, by the rope, but Tim had miscalculated the strength of his materials. A much stronger rope would have broken under the tremendous strain. The line parted like a piece of twine, and the bear, rolling head over heels down the slope, bounded over the precipice, and went hurling out into space like a mighty football!
There was silence for a few seconds, then a simultaneous thud and bursting cry that was eminently suggestive.
“H’m! It’s all over,” sighed Little Tim, as he slid down the branch to the ground.
And so it was. The bear was effectually killed, and the poor hunter had to return to the Indian village crestfallen.
“But hold on, stranger,” he said, on meeting the agent; “don’t you give way to despair. I said there was lots of ’em in these parts. You come with me up to a hut my son’s got in the mountains, an’ I’ll circumvent a b’ar for you yet. You can’t take the cart quite up to the hut but you can git near enough, at a place where there’s a Injin’ friend o’ mine as’ll take care of ye.”
The agent agreed, and thus it came to pass that at the time of which we now write, Little Tim was doing his best to catch a live bear, but, not liking to be laughed at even by his son in the event of failure, he had led him and his bride to suppose that he had merely gone out hunting in the usual way.
It was on this expedition that Little Tim had set forth when Whitewing was expected to arrive at Tim’s Folly—as the little hut or fortress had come to be named—and it was the anxiety of his friends and kindred at his prolonged absence which resulted, as we have seen, in the formation and departure of a search expedition.
Chapter Nine.
A Daring Exploit
To practised woodsmen like Whitewing and Big Tim it was as easy to follow the track of Little Tim as if his steps had been taken through newly-fallen snow, although very few and slight were the marks left on the green moss and rugged ground over which the hunter had passed.
Six picked Indians accompanied the prairie chief, and these marched in single file, each treading in the footsteps of the man in front with the utmost care.
At first the party maintained absolute silence. Their way lay for some distance along the margin of the brawling stream which drained the gorge at the entrance of which Tim’s Folly stood. The scenery around them was wild and savage in the extreme, for the higher they ascended, the narrower became the gorge, and the masses of rock which had fallen from the frowning cliffs on either side had strewn the lower ground with shapeless blocks, and so impeded the natural flow of the little stream that it became, as it were, a tormented and foaming cataract.
At the head of the gorge the party came to a pass or height of land, through which they went with caution, for, although no footsteps of man had thus far been detected by their keen eyes save those of Little Tim, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that foes might be lurking on the other side of the pass. No one, however, was discovered, and when they emerged at the other end of the pass it was plain that, as Big Tim remarked, the coast was clear, for from their commanding position they could see an immeasurable distance in front of them, over an unencumbered stretch of land.
The view from this point was indeed stupendous. The vision seemed to range not only over an almost limitless world of forests, lakes, and rivers—away to where the haze of the horizon seemed to melt with them into space—but beyond that to where the great backbone of the New World rose sharp, clear, and gigantic above the mists of earth, until they reached and mingled with the fleecy clouds of heaven. To judge from their glittering eyes, even the souls of the not very demonstrative Indians were touched by the scene. As for the prairie chief, who had risen to the perceptions of the new life in Christ he halted and stood for some moments as if lost in contemplation. Then, turning to the young hunter at his side, he said softly—
“The works of the Lord are great.”
“Strange,” returned Big Tim, “that you should use the very same words that I’ve heard my daddy use sometimes when we’ve come upon a grand view like that.”
“Not so strange when I tell you,” replied Whitewing, “that these are words from the Book of Manitou, and that your father and I learned them together long ago from the preacher who now lies wounded in your hut.”
“Ay, ay! Daddy didn’t tell me that. He’s not half so given to serious talk as you are, Whitewing, though I’m free to admit that he does take a fit o’ that sort now an’ again, and seems raither fond of it. The fact is, I don’t quite understand daddy. He puzzles me.”
“Perhaps Leetil Tim is too much given to fun when he talks with Big Tim,” suggested the red chief gravely, but with a slight twinkle in his eyes, which told that he was not quite destitute of Little Tim’s weakness—or strength, as the reader chooses.
After a brief halt the party descended the slope which led to the elevated valley they had now reached, and, having proceeded a few miles, again came to a halt because the ground had become so rocky that the trail of the hunter was lost.
Ordering the young men to spread themselves over the ground, Whitewing went with Big Tim to search over the ridge of a neighbouring eminence.
“It is as I expected,” he said, coming to a sudden stand, and pointing to a faint mark on the turf. “Leetil Tim has taken the short cut to the Lopstick Hill, but I cannot guess the reason why.”
Big Tim was down on his knees examining the footprints attentively.
“Daddy’s futt, an’ no mistake,” he said, rising slowly. “I’d know the print of his heel among a thousand. He’s got a sort o’ swagger of his own, an’ puts it down with a crash, as if he wanted to leave his mark wherever he goes. I’ve often tried to cure him o’ that, but he’s incurable.”
“I have observed,” returned the chief, with, if possible, increased gravity, “that many sons are fond of trying to cure their fathers; also, that they never succeed.”
Big Tim looked quickly at his companion, and laughed.
“Well, well,” he said, “the daddies have a good go at us in youth. It’s but fair that we should have a turn at them afterwards.”
A sharp signal from one of the young Indians in the distance interrupted further converse, and drew them away to see what he had discovered. It was obvious enough—the trail of the Blackfoot Indians retiring into the mountains.
At first Big Tim’s heart sank, for this discovery, coupled with the prolonged absence of his father, suggested the fear that he had been waylaid and murdered. But a further examination led them to think—at least to hope—that the savages had not observed the hunter’s trail, owing to his having diverged at a point of the track further down, where the stony nature of the ground rendered trail-finding, as we have seen, rather difficult. Still, there was enough to fill the breasts of both son and friend with anxiety, and to induce them to push on thereafter swiftly and in silence.
Let us once again take flight ahead of them, and see what the object of their anxiety is doing.
True to his promise to try his best, the dauntless little hunter had proceeded alone, as before, to a part of the mountain region where he knew from past experience that grizzlies were to be easily found. There he made his preparations for a new effort on a different plan.
The spot he selected for his enterprise was an open space on a bleak hillside, where the trees were scattered and comparatively small. This latter peculiarity—the smallness of the trees—was, indeed, the only drawback to the place, for few of them were large enough to bear his weight, and afford him a secure protection from his formidable game. At last however, he found one,—not, indeed, quite to his mind, but sufficiently large to enable him to get well out of a bear’s reach, for it must be remembered that although some bears climb trees easily, the grizzly bear cannot climb at all. There was a branch on the lower part of the tree which seemed quite beyond the reach of the tallest bear even on tiptoe.
Having made his disposition very much as on the former occasion, Little Tim settled himself on this branch, and awaited the result.
He did not, however, sit as comfortably as on the previous occasion, for the branch was small and had no fork. Neither did he proceed to sup as formerly, for it was yet too early in the day to indulge in that meal.
His plan this time was, not to net, but to lasso the bear; and for that purpose he had provided four powerful ropes made of strips of raw, undressed buffalo hide, plaited, with a running noose on each.
“Now,” said Little Tim, with a self-satisfied smirk, as he seated himself on the branch and surveyed the four ropes complacently, “it’ll puzzle the biggest b’ar in all the Rocky Mountains to break them ropes.”
Any one acquainted with the strength of the material which Tim began to uncoil would have at once perceived that the lines in question might have held an elephant or a small steamer.
“I hope,” murmured Tim, struggling with a knot in one of the cords that bound the coils, “I hope I’ll be in luck to-day, an’ won’t have to wait long.”
Little Tim’s hope reached fruition sooner than he had expected—sooner even than he desired—for as he spoke he heard a rustle in the bushes behind him. Looking round quickly, he beheld “the biggest b’ar, out o’ sight, that he had iver seen in all his life.” So great was his surprise—we would not for a moment call it alarm—that he let slip the four coils of rope, which fell to the ground.
Grizzly bears, it must be known, are gifted with insatiable curiosity, and they are not troubled much with the fear of man, or, indeed, of anything else. Hearing the thud of the coils on the ground, this monster grizzly walked up to and smelt them. He was proceeding to taste them, when, happening to cast his little eyes upwards, he beheld Little Tim sitting within a few feet of his head. To rise on his hind legs, and solicit a nearer interview, was the work of a moment. To the poor hunter’s alarm, when he stretched his tremendous paws and claws to their utmost he reached to within a foot of the branch. Of course Little Tim knew that he was safe, but he was obliged to draw up his legs and lay out on the branch, which brought his head and eyes horribly near to the nose and projecting tongue of the monster.
To make matters worse, Tim had left his gun leaning against the stem of the tree. He had his knife and hatchet in his belt, but these he knew too well were but feeble weapons against such a foe. Besides, his object was not to slay, but to secure.
Seeing that there was no possibility of reaching the hunter by means of mere length of limb, and not at that time having acquired the art of building a stone pedestal for elevating purposes, the bear dropped on its four legs and looked round. Perceiving the gun, it went leisurely up and examined it. The examination was brief but effective. It gave the gun only one touch with its paw, but that touch broke the lock and stock and bent the barrel so as to render the weapon useless.
Then it returned to the coil of ropes, and, sitting down, began to chew one of them, keeping a serious eye, however, on the branch above.
It was a perplexing situation even for a backwoodsman. The branch on which Tim lay was comfortable enough, having many smaller branches and twigs extending from it on either side, so that he did not require to hold on very tightly to maintain his position. But he was fully aware of the endurance and patience of grizzly bears, and knew that, having nothing else to do, this particular Bruin could afford to bide his time.
And now the ruling characteristic of Little Tim beset him severely. His head felt like a bombshell of fermenting ingenuity. Every device, mechanical and otherwise, that had ever passed through his brain since childhood, seemed to rush back upon him with irresistible violence in his hopeless effort to conceive some plan by which to escape from his present and pressing difficulty—he would not, even to himself, admit that there was danger. The more hopeless the case appeared to him, the less did reason and common-sense preside over the fermentation. When he saw his gun broken, his first anxiety began. When he reflected on the persistency of grizzlies in watching their foes, his naturally buoyant spirits began to sink and his native recklessness to abate. When he saw the bear begin steadily to devour one of the lines by which he had hoped to capture it, his hopes declined still more; and when he considered the distance he was from his hut, the fact that his provision wallet had been left on the ground along with the gun, and that the branch on which he rested was singularly unfit for a resting-place on which to pass many hours, he became wildly ingenious, and planned to escape, not only by pitching his cap to some distance off so as to distract the bear’s attention, and enable him to slip down and run away, but by devising methods of effecting his object by clockwork, fireworks, wings, balloons—in short, by everything that ever has, in the history of design, enabled men to achieve their ends.
His first and simplest method, to fling his cap away, was indeed so far successful that it did distract the bear’s attention for a moment, but it did not disturb his huge body, for he sat still, chewing his buffalo quid leisurely, and, after a few seconds, looked up at his victim as though to ask, “What d’you mean by that?”
When, after several hours, all his attempts had failed, poor Little Tim groaned in spirit, and began to regret his having undertaken the job; but a sense of the humorous, even in that extremity, caused him to give vent to a short laugh as he observed that Bruin had managed to get several feet of the indigestible rope down his throat, and fancied what a surprise it would give him if he were to get hold of the other end of the rope and pull it all out again.
At last night descended on the scene, making the situation much more unpleasant, for the darkness tended to deceive the man as to the motions of the brute, and once or twice he almost leaped off the branch under the impression that his foe had somehow grown tall enough to reach him, and was on the point of seizing him with his formidable claws. To add to his troubles, hunger came upon Tim about his usual supper-time, and what was far worse, because much less endurable, sleep put in a powerful claim to attention. Indeed this latter difficulty became so great that hunger, after a time, ceased to trouble him, and all his faculties—even the inventive—were engaged in a tremendous battle with this good old friend, who had so suddenly been converted into an implacable foe. More than once that night did Little Tim, despite his utmost efforts, fall into a momentary sleep, from which each time he awoke with a convulsive start and sharp cry, to the obvious surprise of Bruin, who, being awakened out of a comfortable nap, looked up with a growl inquiringly, and then relapsed.
When morning broke, it found the wretched man still clutching his uneasy couch, and blinking like an owl at the bear, which still lay comfortably on the ground below him. Unable to stand it any longer, Tim resolved to have a short nap, even if it should cost him his life. With this end in view, he twined his arms and legs tightly round his branch. The very act reminded him that his worsted waistbelt might be twined round both body and branch, for it was full two yards long. Wondering that it had not occurred to him before, he hastily undid it, lashed himself to the branch as well as he could, and in a moment was sound asleep. This device would have succeeded admirably had not one of his legs slowly dropped so low down as to attract the notice of the bear when it awoke. Rising to its full height on its hind legs, and protruding its tongue to the utmost, it just managed to touch Tim’s toe. The touch acted liked an electric spark, awoke him at once, and the leg was drawn promptly up.
But Tim had had a nap, and it is wonderful how brief a slumber will suffice to restore the energies of a man in robust health. He unlashed himself.
“Good mornin’ to ’ee,” he said, looking down. “You’re there yet, I see.”
He finished the salutation with a loud yawn, and stretched himself so recklessly that he almost fell off the branch into the embrace of his expectant foe. Then he looked round, and, reason having been restored, hit upon a plan of escape which seemed to him hopeful.
We have said that the space he had selected was rather open, but there were scattered over it several large masses of rock, about the size of an ordinary cart, which had fallen from the neighbouring cliffs. Four of these stood in a group at about fifty yards’ distance from his tree.
“Now, old Caleb,” he said, “I’ll go in for it, neck or nothin’. You tasted my toes this mornin’. Would you like to try ’em again?”
He lowered his foot as he spoke, as far down as he could reach. The bear accepted the invitation at once, rose up, protruded his tongue as before, and just managed to touch the toe. Now it is scarcely needful to say that a strong man leading the life of a hunter in the Rocky Mountains is an athlete. Tim thought no more of swinging himself up into a tree by the muscular power of his arms than you would think of stepping over a narrow ditch. When the bear was standing in its most upright attitude, he suddenly swung down, held on to the branch with his hands, and drove both his feet with such force against the bear’s chin that it lost its balance and fell over backwards with an angry growl. At the same moment Tim dropped to the ground, and made for the fallen rocks at a quicker rate than he had ever run before. Bruin scrambled to his feet with amazing agility, looked round, saw the fugitive, and gave chase. Darting past the first rock, it turned, but Little Tim, of course, was not there. He had doubled round the second, and taken refuge behind the third mass of rock.
Waiting a moment till the baffled bear went to look behind another rock, he ran straight back again to his tree, hastily gathered up his ropes, and reascended to his branch, where the bear found him again not many minutes later.
“Ha! HA! you old rascal!” he shouted, as he fastened the end of a rope firmly to the branch, and gathered in the slack so as to have the running noose handy. “I’ve got you now. Come, come along; have another taste of my toe!”
This invitation was given when the bear stood in his former position under the tree and looked up. Once again it accepted the invitation, and rose to the hunter’s toe as a salmon rises to an irresistible fly.
“That’s it! Now, hold on—just one moment. There!”
As Tim finished the sentence, he dropped the noose so deftly over the bear’s head and paws that it went right down to his waist. This was an unlooked-for piece of good fortune. The utmost the hunter had hoped for was to noose the creature round the neck. Moreover, it was done so quickly that the monster did not seem to fully appreciate what had occurred, but continued to strain and reach up at the toe in an imbecile sort of way. Instead, therefore, of drawing the noose tight, Little Tim dropped a second noose round the monster’s neck, and drew that tight. Becoming suddenly alive to its condition, the grizzly made a backward plunge, which drew both ropes tight and nearly strangled it, while the branch on which Tim was perched shook so violently that it was all he could do to hold on.
For full half an hour that bear struggled fiercely to free itself, and often did the shaken hunter fear that he had miscalculated the strength of his ropes, but they stood the test well, and, being elastic, acted in some degree like lines of indiarubber. At the end of that time the bear fell prone from exhaustion, which, to do him justice, was more the result of semi-strangulation than exertion.
This was what Little Tim had been waiting for and expecting. Quietly but quickly he descended to the ground, but the bear saw him, partially recovered, no doubt under an impulse of rage, and began to rear and plunge again, compelling his foe to run to the fallen rocks for shelter. When Bruin had exhausted himself a second time, Tim ran forward and seized the old net with which he had failed to catch the previous bear, and threw it over his captive. The act of course revived the lively monster, but his struggles now wound him up into such a ravel with the two lines and the net that he was soon unable to get up or jump about, though still able to make the very earth around him tremble with his convulsive heaves. It was at once a fine as well as an awful display of the power of brute force and the strength of raw material!
Little Tim would have admired it with philosophic interest if he had not been too busy dancing around the writhing creature in a vain effort to fix his third rope on a hind leg. At last an opportunity offered. A leg burst one of the meshes of the net. Tim deftly slipped the noose over it, and made the line fast to the tree. “Now,” said he, wiping the perspiration from his brow, “you’re safe, so I’ll have a meal.”
And Little Tim, sitting down on a stone at a respectful distance, applied himself with zest to the cold breakfast of which he stood so very much in need.
He was thus occupied when his son with the prairie chief and his party found him.
It would take at least another chapter to describe adequately the joy, surprise, laughter, gratulation, and comment which burst from the rescue party on discovering the hunter. We therefore leave it to the reader’s imagination. One of the young braves was at once sent off to find the agent and fetch him to the spot with his cage on wheels. The feat, with much difficulty, was accomplished. Bruin was forcibly and very unwillingly thrust into the prison. The balance of the stipulated sum was honourably paid on the spot, and now that bear is—or, if it is not, ought to be—in the Zoological Gardens of New York, London, or Paris, with a printed account of his catching, and a portrait of Little Tim attached to the front of his cage!
