CHAPTER XIII
THE BULL MOOSE
Gomposh's lair was in the black heart of the cedar swamp. Old though the cedars were, Gomposh had the feeling of being even older. He liked the ancientness of the place; its dankness and darkness, and, above all, its silence—the silence of green decaying things. It was so silent that he could almost hear himself thinking, and his thoughts seemed to make more noise even than his great padded feet. Under the grey twisted trunks, the ground oozed with moisture, which fed the pits of black water that never went dry even in the summer drought. Whatever life stirred in those black pits, occasionally disturbing their stagnant surfaces with oily ripples, it did not greatly affect Gomposh. He preferred not to bother about them, and to devote his mind instead to the clumps of fat fungus—white, red, pink and orange—which, glowed like dull lamps in the heart of the gloom. The taste of their flabby fatness pleased his palate. It was not exactly an exciting form of food; but it grew on your doorstep, so to speak, and saved a lot of trouble. And when you wanted to vary your diet, there were the skunk cabbages and other damp vegetables.
Another thing that recommended the place to the old bear was its comparative freedom from other animals. Goohooperay, it is true, inhabited the hollow hemlock on the farther side of the swamp, but he seldom came near Gomposh's lair, since his activities took him generally to the open slopes of the Bargloosh where the hunting was fair to medium, and sometimes even good. His voice, of course, was a thing to be regretted, and when, on first getting out of bed, he would perch at the top of his tree and send the loudest parts of himself shrilling lamentably far out into the twilight, Gomposh's little eyes would shine with disapproval, and he would make remarks to himself deep down in his throat. But a voice cannot be cuffed into silence, when it has wings that carry it out of the reach of your paw, and so Gomposh had to content himself with a little wholesome grumbling which, after all, kept him from becoming all fungus and fat, and made him change his feeding-ground from place to place. The only other bird that ever intruded upon his privacy was the nuthatch. But as this little bird, being one of the quietest of all the feathered folk, spent its time mainly in sliding up and down the cedar trunks like a shadow without feet, only now and then giving forth a tiny faint note in long silences, as if it were apologizing to itself for being there at all—Gomposh couldn't find it in his heart to lodge a complaint. He would lie in his lair for hours and hours, listening contentedly to the fat, oozy silence, and observing the solemn gloom in which the colours of the red and orange toadstools seemed loud enough to make a noise, and wish that the nuthatch needn't go on apologizing.
The lair was in a deep hollow, between the humpy roots of a large old cedar. It was dry enough, except when the rains were very heavy, as it was tunnelled out on the edge of one of the Hardwood knolls which rose up from the swamp here and there, like the last remaining hill-tops of a drowned world. To make this hole still more rainproof, and at the same time warmer, Gomposh had covered the cedar roots with boughs which he had contrived cunningly into a roof! Oh, he was a wise, wary old person, was Gomposh! and the experience of unnumbered winters had taught him that when the blizzards come swirling over the Bargloosh from the northeast, it is a grand and comforting thing to have a good roof over you, thatched thick and warm with snow. So to this deep cave in the roots of the cedar when the wind moaned in the draughty tops of the spruce woods and the frost bit with invisible teeth, Gomposh, bulging with berries and fat, would retire for the winter, and sleep, and sleep, and sleep!
Toadstools and various sorts of berries made up the principal part of his diet; but as berries did not grow in the swamp, and after a time he had eaten all the best toadstools in the neighbourhood of his den, he occasionally found it pleasant to leave the swamp and ascend to the blueberry barrens high up on the slopes of the Bargloosh.
One morning, not many days after Shasta's return to his wolf kin, Gomposh got up with the berry feeling in him very bad. It was a little early for blueberries, but there were other things he might find—perhaps an Indian pear with its sweet though tasteless fruit, ripened early in some sunny spot. And anyhow there were always confiding beetles under stones, and whole families of insects that live in rotten logs.
He left his lair, picking his way carefully between the humpy roots that made the ground lift itself into such strange shapes, and setting his great padded feet on the thick moss as delicately as a fox, so that, in case some mouse or water-rat should be out of its hole, he might catch it unawares with one of the lightning movements of his immense paw. At the edge of the swamp he pushed his way stealthily through a thicket of Indian willows and then paused to sniff the air with that old sensitive nose of his which brought him tidings of the trails as to what was abroad, with a fine certainty that could not err. But, sniff as he would, nothing came to his questing nostrils except the smell that was as old as the centuries—the raw, keen sweetness of the wet spruce and fir forests, mixed with the homely scent of the cedar swamp. Yet in spite of this, he did not move without the utmost caution, and, for all his apparent clumsiness, his vast furry bulk seemed to drift in among the spruces with the quietness of smoke.
Far away on the other side of the lake, a great bull moose was making his way angrily through the woods, looking for the cow he had heard calling to him at dawn, and thrashing the bushes with his mighty antlers as a challenge to any one who should be rash enough to dispute his title of Lord of the Wilderness. But as he was travelling up-wind, and was, moreover, too far away for the sound of his temper to carry, Gomposh's unerring nose did not receive the warning as he ascended the Bargloosh with the berry want in his inside.
He was half-way up the mountain, when, all at once, he stopped, and swung his nose into the wind. Something was abroad now—something with a warmer, thicker scent than the sharp tang of the spruces. What was it? There was a smell of wolf in it, and yet again something which was not wolf. It was a mixture of scents so finely jumbled together that only a nose like Gomposh's could have disentangled them. In spite of his immense knowledge of the thousand ways in which the wilderness kindreds spill themselves upon the air, the old bear was puzzled. So, in order to give his mind perfect leisure to attend to his nose, Gomposh sank back on his haunches, and then sat bolt upright with his paws hanging idly in the air.
The scent came more and more plainly. And as it grew, Gomposh's brain worked faster and faster. The smell was half strange and half familiar. Where had he smelt it before? And then, suddenly, he knew.