As soon as the deer feels this foreign weight on his back the cruel teeth cutting into him, he at once runs into and through the thickest part of the forest trying to rub the incubus off his back. But the carcajo has the tenacity of the bulldog, and his own skin would be ripped and lacerated before he would let go his hold.
The deer, realizing this mad rush through the bush is useless, makes for the nearest water in the hope that this will rid him of his enemy. But vain hope, the wolverine is there to stop, and only opens his jaws when the deer is dead, or, as in my instance, through fear for his personal safety.
Our beaver hunt was spoilt for that night, so we moved back on the trail and camped. There we passed our time drying the deer's meat and skinning the Indian devil.
The amount of destructiveness contained in a full grown wolverine, or, as he is sometimes called, carcajo and Indian devil, is something past belief to any one who has not lived in the country in which they resort. The tales told by hunters and lumbermen of the doings of this strong and able beast would fill pages. Some of these, like fish stories, may be seasoned by a pinch of salt, therefore I will only jot down a few that I experienced personally in my trapping days.
Hunger cannot always be adduced as a reason for their thieving propensities, inasmuch as they will steal martens, rabbits and partridges out of traps and snares when they are full to repletion just out of pure cussedness, as it were, to make the owner of the traps and snares to use unseeming language.
When once a wolverine gets on a line of deadfalls the trapper has either to abandon his traps and seek new fields, or kill the mischievous animal, for even should the line be ten miles long the Indian Devil will destroy or put out of order each trap to the very end. Their favorite plan is to tear out the back of the trap. If they find a marten caught and they are not hungry, they will carry it off at right angles to the trail and bury it in the snow, or climb a tree and deposit it on a cross branch. I have found no fewer than three martens when visiting my trap road a day after the wolverine had passed.
Once when chum and I were off for a couple of nights from our main camp, on our return we missed a toboggan from in front of the shanty door. This was passing strange as no Indians were in the vicinity, nor had passed our way. Hunt as we did in every conceivable place did not produce the missing sled. It was only two years after when camping in the same place and felling a dry spruce for firewood that the toboggan and tree came to earth together. The mystery was solved, a wolverine had drawn it up in the top branches of the tree and left it.
I remember a laughable occurrence that took place once. Chum and I had a small log shanty on the edge of a big lake. This was our headquarters. Radiating from the shanty we had lines of traps to the four points of the compass and we often slept out a night, visiting and cleaning out the traps. Each used to take a line end, each slept for that night solitary in the wilds.
On our return from one of our trips we met on the edge of the clearing and when we got to our shanty we noticed things looked strange and yet we could not tell for a moment what it was. On opening the door things looked stranger still, for on the floor was a mixture of mostly all our belongings, flour, matches, moccasins, tobacco, soap and numerous other things and sifted over all was ashes.