The Collected Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood
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almost December when Lerue, a half-breed from Lac Bain, saw Baree's footprints in freshly fallen snow, and a little later caught a flash of him in the bush.
"Mon Dieu, I tell you his feet are as big as my hand, and he is as black as a raven's wing with the sun on it!" he exclaimed in the company's store at Lac Bain. "A fox? Non! He is half as big as a bear. A wolf—oui! And black as the devil, m'sieus."
McTaggart was one of those who heard. He was putting his signature in ink to a letter he had written to the company when Lerue's words came to him. His hand stopped so suddenly that a drop of ink spattered on the letter. Through him there ran a curious shiver as he looked over at the half-breed. Just then Marie came in. McTaggart had brought her back from her tribe. Her big, dark eyes had a sick look in them, and some of her wild beauty had gone since a year ago.
"He was gone like—that!" Lerue was saying, with a snap of his fingers. He saw Marie, and stopped.
"Black, you say?" McTaggart said carelessly, without lifting his eyes from his writing. "Did he not bear some dog mark?"
Lerue shrugged his shoulders.
"He was gone like the wind, m'sieu. But he was a wolf."
With scarcely a sound that the others could hear Marie had whispered into the factor's ear, and folding his letter McTaggart rose quickly and left the store. He was gone an hour. Lerue and the others were puzzled. It was not often that Marie came into the store. It was not often that they saw her at all. She remained hidden in the factor's log house, and each time that he saw her Lerue thought that her face was a little thinner than the last, and her eyes bigger and hungrier looking. In his own heart there was a great yearning.
Many a night he passed the little window beyond which he knew that she was sleeping. Often he looked to catch a glimpse of her pale face, and he lived in the one happiness of knowing that Marie understood, and that into her eyes there came for an instant a different light when their glances met. No one else knew. The secret lay between them—and patiently Lerue waited and watched. "Some day," he kept saying to himself—"Some day"—and that was all. The one word carried a world of meaning and of hope. When that day came he would take Marie straight to the missioner over at Fort Churchill, and they would be married. It was a dream—a dream that made the long days and the longer nights on the trap line patiently endured. Now they were both slaves to the environing Power. But—some day—
Lerue was thinking of this when McTaggart returned at the end of the hour. The factor came straight up to where the half dozen of them were seated about the big box stove, and with a grunt of satisfaction shook the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders.
"Pierre Eustach has accepted the Government's offer and is going to guide that map-making party up into the Barrens this winter," he announced. "You know, Lerue—he has a hundred and fifty traps and deadfalls set, and a big poison-bait country. A good line, eh? And I have leased it of him for the season. It will give me the outdoor work I need—three days on the trail, three days here. Eh, what do you say to the bargain?"
"It is good," said Lerue.
"Yes, it is good," said Roget.
"A wide fox country," said Mons Roule.
"And easy to travel," murmured Valence in a voice that was almost like a woman's.
CHAPTER XXV
The trap line of Pierre Eustach ran thirty miles straight west of Lac Bain. It was not as long a line as Pierrot's had been, but it was like a main artery running through the heart of a rich fur country. It had belonged to Pierre Eustach's father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and beyond that it reached, Pierre averred, back to the very pulse of the finest blood in France. The books at McTaggart's Post went back only as far as the great-grandfather end of it, the older evidence of ownership being at Churchill. It was the finest game country between Reindeer Lake and the Barren Lands. It was in December that Baree came to it.
Again he was traveling southward in a slow and wandering fashion, seeking food in the deep snows. The Kistisew Kestin, or Great Storm, had come earlier than usual this winter, and for a week after it scarcely a hoof or claw was moving. Baree, unlike the other creatures, did not bury himself in the snow and wait for the skies to clear and crust to form. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute's, heavy and yet muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of the Wuttooi, or blood film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His jaws were like Kazan's, perhaps even more powerful.
Through all that week of the Big Storm he traveled without food. There were four days of snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and after that three days of intense cold in which every living creature kept to its warm dugout in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed themselves in. One might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose and not have guessed it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of the storm but did not allow the snow to gather over him.
Every trapper from Hudson's Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking food, and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the biggest chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over their trap lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on the eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over Pierre Eustach's line, which was now his own for the season. It took him two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the fallen "trap houses," and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was back at Lac Bain.
It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of McTaggart's line. McTaggart's trail was fresh in the snow about the cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate itself with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute there rumbled in Baree's chest a deep and sullen growl. For many minutes after that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the cabin.
Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer, until at last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of life came from inside, but he could smell the old smell of McTaggart. Then he faced the wilderness—the direction in which the trap line ran back to Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles twitched. He whined. Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind—the fight in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm's edge—even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great yearning, almost expectation. Then it died slowly away. After all, the scent in the snow was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill, and not of anything that he had loved. For an instant nature had impressed on him the significance of associations—a brief space only, and then it was gone. The whine died away, but in its place came again that ominous growl.
Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin struck the first trap on the line. Hunger had caved in his sides until he was like a starved wolf. In the first trap house McTaggart had placed as bait the hindquarter of a snowshoe rabbit. Baree reached in cautiously. He had learned many things on Pierrot's line: he had learned what the snap of a trap meant. He had felt the cruel pain of steel jaws; he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would do when the trigger was sprung—and Nepeese herself had taught him that he was never to touch a poison bait. So he closed his teeth gently in the rabbit flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself could have done. He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five baits without springing a pan. The sixth was a deadfall. He circled about this until he had beaten a path in the snow. Then he went on into a warm balsam swamp and found himself a bed for the night.
The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow between the wits of man and beast. To Baree the encroachment of Bush McTaggart's trap line was not war; it was existence. It was to furnish