Kitabı oku: «Neighbors Unknown», sayfa 9
LITTLE BULL OF THE BARRENS
Through the thick drive of the snowflakes – small, hard, bitter flakes, borne on the long wind of the terrible Coppermine barrens – the man and the beast stood staring at each other, motionless. In the beast’s eyes was a heavy wonder, mixed with curiosity and dread. Never before had he seen any being like this erect slim shape, veiled and vague and dark in the whirling drift. He felt it to be dangerous, but he was loath to tear himself away from the scrutiny of it.
The man, on the other hand, had neither wonder, curiosity, nor dread in his gaze. He knew that the black and massive apparition before him was a musk-ox. His first impulse had been to snatch up his rifle and shoot, before the beast could fade off into the white confusion of the storm. But his practised eye had told him that the animal was an old bull. His necessity was not fierce enough to drive him to the eating of such flesh – tough and reeking to nausea with musk. He wanted a young cow whose meat would be tender and sweet as caribou. He was content to wait, knowing that the herd must be near, and would not leave these feeding-grounds unless frightened. At this season the black bull, there staring at him heavily through the drift, would not be solitary.
The man was a trapper, who was making his way down the river to the Hudson Bay Company’s post at the mouth. Through failure of the caribou to come his way according to their custom, his supplies had run short, and he was seeking the post in good time before the pinch of hunger should fix itself upon him. But he had had bad luck. The failure of the caribou had hit others besides himself. The wolves had suffered by it. Perhaps, in their shrewd and savage spirits, they had blamed the man for the absence of their accustomed quarry. Some weeks before his start they had craftily picked off his dogs – a reasonable and satisfying retaliation. And now the man was hauling the sledge himself.
In a moment’s lift of the storm, the man had noted a little valley, a depression in the vast wind-swept level of the barrens, lying but a couple of stone’s-throws aside from the banks of the river which was his guide. He knew that there he would find a dense growth of the stunted firs which spring up wherever they can find shelter from the wind. There he knew he would find dry stuff in plenty for his fire. There he would take covert till the storm should go down and suffer him to trail the musk-ox herd. After eying the black bull steadily for some minutes, he softly turned away, and without haste made for the valley of the little firs, dragging the laden sledge behind him.
The black bull snorted thickly and took several steps forward. The strange figure fading silently away through the drift evidently feared him. A fleeing foe was surely to be followed. But that long dark shape crawling at the stranger’s heels —that looked formidable and very mysterious. The beast stopped, shook his head, snorted again more loudly, and drew back those few paces which he had advanced. Perhaps it was just as well not to be too bold in interrogating the unknown. After a few moments of hesitation he wheeled aside, lifted his massive and shaggy head, sniffed the air, listened intently, and withdrew to rejoin the little herd, which was lying down and contentedly chewing the cud, all indifferent to the drive of the polar storm.
The black bull of the barrens, as he stood and eyed contemplatively the resting herd, showed small in stature but extraordinarily massive in build. A scant six feet in length from muzzle to root of tail, and not much over three feet high at the shoulder, he was modelled, nevertheless, on lines that for power a mammoth might have envied. His square frame was clothed with long blackish hair reaching almost to the fetlocks. His ponderous head, maned and shaggy, was armed with short crescent horns, keen-tipped and serviceable for battle. And he carried it swung low, muzzle in and front well forward, always ready for defence against the enemies of the herd.
The herd numbered some dozen or fifteen cows, armed and powerful like their mates, several younger bulls, and perhaps a dozen yearling or two-year-old calves. At one moment, as the fierce drift slackened, they would all be more or less visible – shrouded, dark forms with contemplative eyes, peacefully ruminating. A moment more and they would vanish, as the snow again closed down about them.
It was the old bull alone who seemed to be thoroughly on the alert. Hither and thither, with a certain slow vigilance, he moved through the herd. All at once he lifted his head sharply and questioned the air with dilating nostrils, while his eyes gleamed with anger and anxiety. The next instant he stamped his foot and gave a loud abrupt call, half bleat, half bellow.
Plainly it was a signal well understood. In a second the whole herd was on its feet. In another, with lightning precision, it had formed itself into a compact circle, using the watchful leader as the basic point of its formation. The calves, butted unceremoniously into the centre, hustled one upon the other, with uplifted muzzles over each other’s shoulders and mild eyes staring with startled fright. The outer rim of the circle became a fringe of sullen lowering foreheads, angry eyes and keen horns jutting formidably from snow-powdered manes of dark hair.
Not a member of the musk-ox herd, to the youngest calf, but knew very well against what enemy the old bull had so suddenly marshalled them into fighting phalanx. For some moments, however – long, tense, vigilant moments – nothing appeared. Then at last, through the driving flakes, they caught sight of several gaunt, leaping forms, gray and shadowy, which swept down upon them in silence out of the storm.
With terrible suddenness and speed they came, these leaping forms, as if they would hurl themselves blindly upon the massed herd. But the line of lowered horns never flinched or wavered, and with a short snarl from their leader the wolves swerved, just in time to escape a savage thrust from the old bull. They swerved, strung out into line, and went loping round the circle, their narrowed, greenish, merciless eyes glaring into the obstinate ones of the musk-oxen. Again and again they circled the rampart of horns, again and again they drew off and swept up furiously to the assault, hoping to find some weak point in the defences – some timorous young cow who would shrink and swerve at their assault and open a breach in the line. But there was no cow in that herd afflicted with any such suicidal folly. The snow-spotted, lowering line of heads waited unshaken, and presently the wolves – there were seven of them – bunched together a few paces from the circle and seemed to consider. Two of them sat down upon their haunches with their tongues hanging out, and eyed the rampart of horned fronts evilly, while the others stood with their heads together, or prowled restlessly back and forth. They might, indeed, with the vast leaping power of their long legs and muscular haunches, have sprung clear over the line of defence, and gained in two seconds the helpless calves in the centre; but they knew what that would mean. The herd would turn in upon them in a blind, uncalculating fury and trample them underfoot. For the moment, therefore, they hung wavering in irresolution, looking for a sign from the leader of the pack.
In the meantime the man had found his valley hollow and the shelter of the expected colony of dwarf firs. Here the snow lay soft and undrifted. In a recess of the fir-thicket he trod it down with his snowshoes, and made haste to build himself a little fire of dead sticks. Above his head, above the shrouded fir-tops, above the rim of the hollow, the storm drove by unabated; but the snowflakes that escaped from the tumult to filter down into this retreat were too light and fine and dry to interfere with the fire. In two or three minutes the flames were crackling up clear and free, with little spittings and fine hissings where the flakes fell at their thin edges.
Having collected a pile of dry sticks within easy reach, the man stretched a couple of stitched caribou hides on poles to form a sloping roof over his head, cooked himself a hasty stew of pemmican and biscuit, made a hearty meal, and squatted before the fire with his back against his sledge, to smoke and wait. He knew how to wait, like an Indian, when there was anything to be gained by it, and his heart, weary of pemmican, was set on fresh meat.
There was no sign of the storm breaking; there was no use hunting in the storm. There was nothing to fear, for it was now three weeks since he had seen sign of the wolves which had eaten his dogs, and he knew that they had ranged off on the trail of the vanished caribou. There was nothing to do. He was warm and filled, and free from care. Some hundred miles or so away there was a post and human companionship, to which he looked forward with unhurried content. In due time he would arrive there and find it, as always before, unchanged, like all else in that land of inevitable recurrence. Meanwhile – this afternoon, perhaps, or to-morrow – he would shoot a young musk-ox cow. He drew his furs well about him and dozed off to sleep, knowing that the moment the fire began to get dangerously low an unfailing instinct would bid him awake to tend it.
While he slept, the storm drove unrelenting over the place of his retreat, and kept heaping the thin dry snow in fringes and wreaths upon the shaggy, lowering fronts of the musk-ox phalanx. From time to time, a massive head would shake off the burden and emerge black and menacing. And always, with unwavering vigilance, the army of angry eyes and short sharp horns confronted the group of discontented wolves.
Now, as it chanced, the trapper was wrong in his assumption as to the wolves. The truth – which would have made a great difference in his calculations had he known it – was that they had been cautiously trailing him ever since he left his hut. But they knew something of man, those wolves, and they feared him. They were not yet quite mad with hunger, so they had not yet quite plucked up courage to reveal themselves to him, still less to commit themselves to an open attack. They dreaded his eye, they dreaded his sharp, authoritative voice. They dreaded the strange, menacing smell of him. They dreaded his mysterious power of striking invisibly from very far off. Had they had any choice, they would far rather have been running down the caribou than trailing this solitary trapper. But the craving belly is a hard master, and they had no choice but to hasten wherever it scourged them on. Moreover, they knew along the trail of the man there were liable to be pickings, for man, a fastidious feeder, never eats all he kills.
When at last the trail of the man had led them into that of the musk-oxen, the pack had been glad. So much the more, therefore, their disappointed rage, when they found the herd ready for their attack, and too strong, in point of numbers and experienced leadership, to be stampeded. Seeing the prey so near, with each moment of their discomfiture their hunger and their fury grew.
Suddenly, without visible sign or warning, it seemed to boil over all at once. The whole pack sprang together, swift as the snap of a whip, into a compact mass, and hurled itself straight upon the circle of lowered horns. The charge looked irresistible. It seemed that the most dauntless must cringe and shrink before it.
But the point attacked was a strong one in the array. It was held by the wise old bull. To either side of him the shaggy black heads breathed hard or snorted loudly, but not a horn wavered. And in the face of this steadfastness the attack was not driven home. In the very last fraction of a second the leader swerved; the pack swept swiftly aside, but it was very close. As the hindmost wolf went by, the old bull lunged forward, head and shoulders beyond the circle, with a savage twist of his short, polished horns. There was a startled yelp. He had just managed to catch his foe a rending prod in the thick of the haunch. The wolf never paused – he was under the iron discipline of the pack, – but as he ran he left a scarlet trail along the snow behind him.
To the slow amazement of the herd, their enemies now, in the next instant, had vanished through the thin whirl of the drift. Heavy heads, thrust far out from the phalanx, turned to stare after them. There was nothing to be seen but the endless, sheeted procession of the snow. There was nothing to be heard but the muffled rush of the wind and their own snortings and tramplings. For a long time, however, they kept their array unbroken, fearing a trick on the part of their adversaries. Then at last the old bull, after sniffing the wind in all directions with uplifted muzzle, stepped forth from the ranks. Immediately the circle dissolved. There was a moment of whirling and grunting, of butting at stupid calves or reorganizing the array, then, at a swift walk, the whole herd moved off toward the northeast, where they knew of a region of low huddled hills which would give them the kind of shelter that they loved.
In the meantime the pack, maddened by failure and ravenous from the view of food denied, had resumed the trail of the man. They were different beings now from the wary skulkers who had been following him from afar. Silent and swift, their eyes flaming coldly and their thin lips wrinkled back from long white fangs, they swept over the brink and down into the windless hollow of the stunted firs.
The man, sleeping in his furs by the little fire, had a bad dream. With a struggle and a yell he awoke from it, to find himself half erect, upon one knee, battling frantically for his life. One great hairy form he had clutched by the throat with both hands, as its fangs snapped within an inch of his face, and its huge hot breath daunted him with a sense that the end of things had come. With a monstrous effort he hurled it off, but in the same moment he was borne down from behind. It seemed to him that a wave of furred, fighting bodies, enormous and irresistible, went over him, blotting out everything, even to the desire of life. He was but half conscious of the fangs that sank into his flesh, strangely without pain. He was but half conscious of struggling – the mere instinctive struggle of his strong muscles, and already condemned as futile by his aloof and scornful spirit. Then nothing but a knot of great gray wolves, tussling and snarling over something on the snow.
* * * * * * * *
After everything on the sledge had been torn open and investigated, and scattered over the blood-stained snow, the wolves drew off to a little distance from the fire, which they hated and dreaded. It was a victory which would make that pack for the future tenfold more dangerous. They had dared and vanquished man. But what was one man and a little bag of dry pemmican to such hunger as theirs? All at once, as if moved simultaneously by one impulse, they gathered, sped up out of the firs into the wind, and swept away through the storm on the trail of the musk-ox herd.
The herd, though travelling fast, had not gone far. On a sudden, as if at a premonition of peril, the old bull halted with a loud snort. Neither smell nor sound of his enemies had reached him, but he took alarm, and gave the signal to form phalanx for defence, at the same time galloping around the flank of the herd to close up and strengthen the rear. The evolution was prompt and swift. But before it was quite accomplished, up from the white obscurity of the storm, in silence, came the leaping wolves.
Straight into the gap in the rear of the herd they hurled themselves, slashing on every side with the aim of spreading a panic. A young bull, just in the act of whirling furiously to confront the attack, was caught full on the flank, and went down coughing, his throat torn clean out. A young cow, with one wolf snapping at her side, but failing to gain a vital spot, and another on her back, biting for her neck through the matted mane, went mad with terror, and charged straight in among the calves at the centre of the herd, making a way for the whole pack.
In a second several of the calves, bawling frantically, were pulled down. The wolves, mad with blood and their late triumph over the man, were in a riot of slaughter. The herd was cleft and rent asunder to the heart. The victory seemed overwhelming.
But there was one thing which the pack had not reckoned with – the indomitable pluck and generalship of the old bull. Blindly confident in their leader, the herd hung together stolidly, instead of disintegrating. The front ranks turned inward upon the bloody convulsion of the centre. At the same time the old bull, followed by a couple of raging cows in quest of their young calves, came plunging in behind the pack and fell upon its rear like battering rams. In a moment the flanks closed in behind them, and the completed circle, instead of flying to pieces, began ponderously to constrict.
As the wolves realized what was happening, the two hindermost whirled about, just in time to leap savagely at the old bull’s neck, one on each side. But they had no room to act effectively, no chance to choose their hold. As he charged with head down and the full impetus of his bulk, their fangs gashed him to the shoulder, but slantingly, so that the wounds were not deep. In his rage he never felt them. The next moment his two assailants were borne down, gored and trampled, by the frantic cows, while he lurched onward into the hideous mêlée at the centre. A second more, and the churning, snorting mass became wedged almost solid. Snapping silently at whatever was in reach, the wolves were overborne, trodden down with the dead or dying calves. The leader of the pack, with two of the more astute of his followers, succeeded in dragging himself forth upon the packed shoulders of his adversaries, ran over the heaving sea of backs, and raced away through the storm, gored and streaming. Soon there was no sign of a wolf anywhere to be seen. But still the packed herd went on with its trampling and churning, sullenly resolute to make an end of the matter, till even the sturdy unwounded calves were in danger of being downed, and the weaker ones perished miserably. At last, in some way, the old bull managed to make his orders understood. The milling slackened, the pressure relaxed. Ponderously he shouldered his way out, and started off once more toward the northeast. Instantly the herd followed, lumbering at his heels. A few, badly wounded, limped and staggered in the rear, and three cows, their eyes rolling wildly, remained standing over certain shapeless masses that lay trodden into the red snow. For some minutes they stood there, mooing disconsolately; then, one after the other, they shook their shaggy heads and galloped away in pursuit of the herd, appalled at the solitude and the sight of so much death.
THE TIGER OF THE SEA
Through the broad, indolent, green-purple swells, ruffled and crisped along their tops by a mild breeze, the cow-orca went wallowing contentedly, her calf swimming close at her side. From time to time it rubbed against her, as if apprehensive in face of the vast and perilous spaces of the ocean, and seeking covert behind her short powerful flipper. And from time to time, being one of the most devoted and assiduous of all the mothers of the wild, she would gather it caressingly to her side with that great flipper, or, whirling half around, touch it inquiringly with her enormous rounded snout.
She was a good nineteen or twenty feet in length, the great orca – or “killer whale,” as she would have been dubbed by any sailor or fisherman who might have chanced to cast eyes upon her. She would have been recognized at once, from all the other members of her whale-and-porpoise tribe, by the immense dorsal fin, not far from five feet high, rising erect from the broad and massive black curve of her back, by the two conspicuous white streaks on her black flank, and by the sharply defined line of her cream-white belly as she rolled lazily on the slope of a swell. All these were danger signals, which the knowing would have taken care to heed.
Little cause for apprehension had the calf of the orca, as long as it kept near its mother. For this most swift and savage of all the cetaceans feared nothing that swam, except her giant cousin, the cachalot or sperm-whale. Though but twenty feet long, she would attack and kill, through the sheer ferocity of her fury, the great whalebone or “right” whale, of fully four times her length and many times her bulk. Man she might have feared, had she ever learned his power; but, being poor in blubber, her tribe had never tempted man to so difficult and perilous a hunting. There were sharks, to be sure, that might equal or surpass her in size, but none to even approach her in savagery, speed, or cunning. It was in care-free content, therefore, that she lazed onward through the bland, untroubled sea, heedless alike of the surf on the yellow cliffs to her right, and of the empty spaces of ocean to her left. Such attention as she could spare from the baby charms of her calf was given to searching the transparent deeps below her, where lurked the big squid and sluggish, bottom-feeding fish on which she habitually preyed.
Suddenly, with no sound but a vast sucking gurgle as the waters closed above her, she dived. Far down in the obscurity she had caught sight of a pallid, sprawling form. It was an octopus, which had been so ill-advised as to leave its customary home among the rocks of the bottom and seek new feeding-grounds. Before it had time even to attempt escape, the great jaws of the “killer” engulfed it. For one moment its eight long tentacles writhed desperately, clutching at its captor’s lips. Then they vanished, sucked in and swallowed at a gulp. Thereupon the orca sailed leisurely back to the sunlit surface, met on her way up by her anxious calf, which had not been quite quick enough to follow its mother’s lightning descent. She had not been two minutes absent, and never for an instant out of sight, but the youngster’s instinct warned it well that the mild blue element in which it dwelt was full of dangers.
The octopus, though a large one, had been but a mouthful for the great killer, a stimulus, merely, to her vast appetite. She journeyed now with a keener eye upon the depths. Presently the deep blue-green of the water began to change to a lighter, beryl hue, where a line of making reef came up to within some thirty feet of the surface, and caught the sun. Here, basking, lay a broad, flat, bat-like creature, with wing-fins a dozen feet across, and a long whip-like tail. Its cold moveless eyes, staring upward, caught sight of the killer’s body, slowly cleaving the surface. With an almost imperceptible movement of the black wings, it slid from the reef and plunged for refuge in the depths.
But the giant ray had not been quick or stealthy enough to evade its enemy’s eye. Again the orca dived, this time without heed of silence, and so swiftly that her broad flukes, rising straight into the air, came down upon the water with a report that resounded all the way in to shore. Her descent was straight as a plummet. The ray, seeing it, was seized with panic. It darted to one side, and shot upward again, at a terrific pace, on a magnificent sweeping curve. With the force of that uprush it hurled its whole black, shuddering bulk clear into the air, where it turned, and for one instant hung flapping darkly, as if the very madness of its terror had driven it to the conquest of a new element. To the nervous calf it was a prodigy of horror, blotting out the sun. But this violent excursion into the air was of only a second or two’s duration, and futile as it was brief. As the flat black wings came down again, with an enormous splash, the pursuing orca arose almost beneath them, seized them, and dragged them under. There was no fight, the ray being powerless against its mighty adversary – only a moment’s blind, frantic struggle in the foaming swirls, and then a spreading stain of red on the green sea.
This, now, was a fully sufficing meal, even for such an appetite as the orca’s; and many neglected fragments of it went spreading and sinking away to feed the innumerable scavenging crabs that lurked in the weeds and hollows of the sunken reef. The orca, for the next half hour or so, remained where she was, rolling contentedly in the bright water above the reef, nursing and caressing her calf, and digesting her meal. Then she slowly continued her journey, but slanting in toward shore till she was not more than half a mile from the chain of precipitous islets and broken promontories which fringed this dangerous coast.
It was now full noon, and the unclouded sunlight, striking almost straight downward upon the surface of the sea, revealed the bottom at an amazing depth. Poised about half-way down the glimmering transparency, a large squid, or cuttle-fish, was swimming at leisure. His narrow, tapering body was about six feet in length, and perhaps twelve or fourteen inches in diameter at the broadest part, which was the head. From this formless head, seeming to sprout from it as leaf-stalks from a carrot, grew a bunch of tentacles, ten in number, and of about the same length as the body. Body and tentacles alike were of a pallid, dirty yellow-gray, with brownish spots – a color that made its wearer almost invisible in that sun-penetrated sea. The progress of the squid was backward; and he achieved it, not by moving his tentacles, but by sucking a volume of water into a great muscular sac beneath the tentacles and forcibly expelling it again. It looked as if he were breathing water and using it to blow himself along.
The orca was by no means hungry so soon after the feast which she had made on the giant ray, but the succulent morsel of the squid was a temptation not to be resisted. Tipping smoothly, her huge but finely modelled black-and-white form shot straight downward through the shimmering flood. But before she could reach him, the squid looked up and saw her. On the instant his ten loose tentacles tightened to a rigid bundle which offered no obstruction to his progress; his pale sides contracted with a mighty convulsion, expelling a volume of water which shot him along with the speed of a torpedo from its tube; and at the same time, from a gland within the propulsion sac, he squirted forth a jet of inky fluid which spread at once into a great cloud of black, veiling his flight. Behind that concealment he changed his direction, and fled downward toward a deep crevice in the rocky bottom, where he knew that the jaws of his enemy would not be able to reach him.
The orca, undeterred, plunged straight onward into the inky cloud. But once well within that gloom she lost all track of her intended prey. She also, for the moment, lost herself. This way and that she darted, snapping her vast jaws ravenously, but in vain. They closed on nothing but the empty and tainted water. At last, and quite unexpectedly, she emerged from the blackness into the transparent green, and, glancing upward, saw a sight which caused her to hurl herself madly to the surface with a Titanic sweep of her great flanks. That furious stroke made the depths boil like the thrust of a liner’s propellers.
The calf, having started to follow its mother into the depths, had been frightened by that inky cloud into which it had seen her vanish. Returning in a flurry to the surface, it was swimming around aimlessly and anxiously, when it caught the eye of a wandering shark.
The shark, knowing very well what it was, looked around for the mother. He had no desire to be uncivil to a mother orca; but there was no mother in sight. He did not understand it; but he was ragingly hungry, and such an opportunity was quite irresistible. He rose at the calf with a rush, and turned over on his side, exposing his livid-white belly, to seize the prize. The calf, appalled at the black, triangular, many-toothed cavern which gaped so suddenly before it, writhed away just in time, and began swimming in a big circle around the spot where its mother had dived.
Again the shark rushed; but he had to turn on his side to bring his curious underset jaws into play, and the calf of the orca had already the nimbleness of its tribe. Again the attack failed. Before he could repeat it, he caught sight of the mother shooting up from the green depths. Though he was some twenty-five feet in length – a good five feet longer than the orca – he turned and fled for his life.
One glance assured the mother that her little one was unhurt. Then she darted after the aggressor at a pace which made his flight quite futile. He had not gone fifty yards when she was upon him, open-jawed. Hurling himself convulsively aside, he just succeeded in evading that first resistless charge. With the courage of desperation he twisted himself about, turned half over, glided beneath his adversary’s belly, and caught at her with his triangular jaws. But she had already swerved, and he failed to get a fair hold. He did, indeed, rend out a mass of hide and blubber, but he reached no vital point, and the raging killer hardly felt the wound. Whirling with a violence that sent the foam and spray spurting into the air, she caught the base of the shark’s tail between her immense jaws.
As far as anything like a fight was concerned, this was the end of it. For several minutes the gigantic struggle went on, dashing the discolored water yards high; but it was all on one side, as the orca shook and crushed and tore the life out of her beaten opponent. At last she drew off, leaving a mangled mass to sink slowly into the depths. Then, having snuggled the excited calf under her fin, and given him to nurse, she swam slowly inland toward the deep channel which here ran between the islands and the shore, where she thought she might find some more of those succulent squid to compensate her for the one which had so inconsiderately evaded her approaches.
