Wood-folk comedies

by William J. Long

The lone wolf ceased his cry, and presently in a different direction a pack of wolves set up a hair-raising ululation. These were the brutes that had called me out; after locating them for the morrow I went back to camp and to sleep.

Before sunrise I was ready for the trail. Daylight is brave stuff. The tingle in my skin was now one of joy at being alive on a hunting morning, a joy that laughs aloud at oldwives’ fables. A few winter birds, brave little northern birds, were greeting the new day cheerily; the soundless woods were beautiful beyond words; the keen air was like old wine in its effect, with this added virtue, that one could take as much exhilaration as he pleased and still remain gloriously sober. So, until night should again fall and catch me in the forest, my ancient spine and modern brain agreed that the loup-garou was a myth, but that out yonder was a wolf to challenge any man’s wind or woodcraft. Ordinarily I let wild animals alone, preferring the work of God to that of the taxidermist; but to-day some hunter was stalking in my moccasins and, to say truth, rejoicing from toe to finger tip. “Not that I love wolves less, but deer more. If I find that big brute, I will make an end of his howling and deer killing.” Thus I promised myself, slipping a heavy revolver on one side of my belt to balance an ax on the other. Then, with a touch on various pockets to be sure that compass, knife, matches and emergency ration were in place, I was off for a day in the big woods alone. There was a vague “feel” of coming change in the air; later I noticed that deer or birds were foretelling a storm; but the sun rose on as sweet a tracking morning as heart could wish.

On the day before this hunt I had been fishing through the ice; and the first leg of my present course took me northward along my incoming snowshoe trail as far as a certain lake, halfway to my fishing ground. From the lake I would follow a wolf runway till I came near the ridge where, as I judged, the loup-garou had been howling. I was resolved to pay no heed to any other trail than his; but hardly had I entered the woods when I noticed the fresh track of a wolf beside my own of yesterday. “Too small for the loup-garou,” I said at a glance; “but what is he doing here, so near my camp?”

Only the trail could answer that question; but all the trail said was that a young wolf had cat-footed through the woods till he came within sight of my camp, half buried in snow. There he stood behind a bush, evidently watching, and then loped away to the northwest.

Here was a pretty puzzle at the outset. A wolf does not approach a camp of men unless he has an extraordinary reason; I must find out what caused a wary brute to change his lifelong habit. Among wolves, as among other gregarious creatures, there are occasional hermits or outcasts whose ways are not the ways of their kind; they are less wild, more daring or more trustful than their fellows, and perhaps this cub was one of them. Luckily he had come from northward, the direction in which I was heading; I could run his back trail and pick up information without losing precious time.

My first discovery, a surprising one, was that the wolf had been following me when I came home after dark, dragging a moose sled on which were a catch of trout, a coat, a bundle of tilts, and a duffle bag of such odds and ends as fishermen carry, all snugly lashed because of the rough going. My first notion, that the hungry brute was attracted by the trout, was promptly discarded. A timber wolf might eat a fish that he found on the shore; but nothing could induce him to go near food that lay amid human belongings. A second notion, that the cub was following me with ferocious intent, was more nearly preposterous. Not even when running in a hungry pack will these northern wolves approach a man; on the contrary, they avoid him so carefully that he is lucky to catch a fleeting glimpse of them. Occasionally, when a wolf finds you in the woods at dusk, he may follow at a distance to learn who you are or what you are doing. He is like a farm dog in that he must have a look at every stranger who crosses his range; but he differs from the dog in that he gives no challenge, and is very quiet in his investigations. It was this last motive of curiosity, I thought, which had brought the wolf sniffing along the trail behind me.

The story became more fascinating as I unrolled it from the snow. For miles the cub had followed me closely, rarely coming into the trail, where I might have seen him had I turned, but keeping to one side in thick cover. When I entered camp he had hidden and watched till the smoky smells or terrifying sounds of a hungry man getting supper sent him off on the jump. Instead of retracing his course, he had headed away to the northwest, probably to rejoin his pack at a distance from where he left it.

As I ran his trail across the first lake, another little comedy came to light. The first intimation I had of it was when I saw that the cub had been digging under a bank, and went over and found—But let me tell the tale as it happened to the wolf, not as I learned it from the snow, where the end puzzled me before I had seen the beginning.

On the farther side of the lake, where yesterday I came out on the ice at nightfall, my old moose sled had threatened to go to pieces, and I had stopped to tinker it for the last stage of the journey. It was dark when I made an end of the lashing; as I went forward once more, a bit of rope that I had not used lay unnoticed beside the trail. From the nearby woods the wolf had watched me at my work, keeping hidden till I was well across the lake. Then he ventured shyly into the open, and the first thing he ran against was this queer piece of rope.

Here was a new thing, a rare thing, a thing no wolf had ever before seen; and the cub must find out about it. He studied it gingerly, thrusting out his nose, circling to the other side, till he nerved himself to give it a pull. The end squirmed like a snake, making him hop away; but in a moment he came creeping back. This time he gave the rope a shake, and a free end whipped over his head or flicked an ear, to judge by the tremendous side jump he took to escape the thing. With a sudden access of courage he pounced on his find, tussled it, whirled it up in the air, scampered hither and yon like a playing kitten. Remembering suddenly what he was following, he started after me; but after a dozen steps he went back, and came trotting along the trail with the rope in his mouth. All the way across the lake he played with it at intervals, dropping it whenever some rumor of me came to his nose or ears, but always going back to fetch it again. When I entered the woods he ran quickly to one side and buried his plaything, and then followed me to camp, growing more wary till the wood-splitting, door-slamming, pan-rattling sound of a hasty supper frightened him away.