The Iron Edge of Winter
The glory of the leaves was gone; the glory of the snow was not yet come; and the world, smitten with bitter frost, was grey like steel. The ice was black and clear and vitreous on the forest pools. The clods on the ploughed field, the broken hillocks in the pasture, the ruts of the winding backwoods road, were hard as iron and rang under the travelling hoof. The silent, naked woods, moved only by the bleak wind drawing through them from the north, seemed as if life had forgotten them.
Suddenly there came a light thud, thud, thud, with a pattering of brittle leaves; and a leisurely rabbit hopped by, apparently on no special errand. At the first of the sounds, a small, ruddy head with bulging, big, bright eyes had appeared at the mouth of a hole under the roots of an ancient maple. The bright eyes noted the rabbit at once, and peered about anxiously to see if any enemy were following. There was no danger in sight.
Within two or three feet of the hole under the maple the rabbit stopped, sat up as if begging, waved its great ears to and fro, and glanced around inquiringly with its protruding, foolish eyes. As it sat up, it felt beneath its whitey fluff of a tail something hard which was not a stone, and promptly dropped down again on all fours to investigate. Poking its nose among the leaves and scratching with its fore-paws, it uncovered a pile of beech-nuts, at which it began to sniff. The next instant, with a shrill, chattering torrent of invective, a red squirrel whisked out from the hole under the maple, and made as if to fly in the face of the big, good-natured trespasser. Startled and abashed by this noisy assault, the rabbit went bounding away over the dead leaves and disappeared among the desolate grey arches.
The silence was effectually dispelled. Shrieking and scolding hysterically, flicking his long tail in spasmodic jerks, and calling the dead solitudes to witness that the imbecile intruder had uncovered one of his treasure-heaps, the angry squirrel ran up and down the trunk for at least two minutes. Then, his feelings somewhat relieved by this violent outburst, he set himself to gathering the scattered nuts and bestowing them in new and safer hiding-places.
In this task he had little regard for convenience, and time appeared to be no object whatever. Some of the nuts he took over to a big elm fifty paces distant, and jammed them one by one, solidly and conscientiously, into the crevices of the bark. Others he carried in the opposite direction, to the edge of the open where the road ran by. These he hid under a stone, where the passing wayfarer might step over them, indeed, but would never think of looking for them. While he was thus occupied, an old countryman slouched by, his heavy boots making a noise on the frozen ruts, his nose red with the harsh, unmitigated cold. The squirrel, mounted on a fence stake, greeted him with a flood of whistling and shrieking abuse; and he, not versed in the squirrel tongue, muttered to himself half enviously: “Queer how them squur’ls can keep so cheerful in this weather.” The tireless little animal followed him along the fence rails for perhaps a hundred yards, seeing him off the premises and advising him not to return, then went back in high feather to his task. When all the nuts were once more safely hidden but two or three, these latter he carried to the top of a stump close beside the hole in the maple, and proceeded to make a meal. The stump commanded a view on all sides; and as he sat up with a nut between his little, hand-like, clever fore-paws, his shining eyes kept watch on every path by which an enemy might approach.
Having finished the nuts, and scratched his ears, and jumped twice around on the stump as if he were full of erratically acting springs, he uttered his satisfaction in a long, vibrant chir-r-r-r, and started to re-enter his hole in the maple-roots. Just at the door, however, he changed his mind. For no apparent reason he whisked about, scurried across the ground to the big elm, ran straight up the tall trunk, and disappeared within what looked like a mass of sticks perched among the topmost branches.
The mass of sticks was a deserted crow’s nest, which the squirrel, not content with one dwelling, had made over to suit his own personal needs. He had greatly improved upon the architecture of the crows, giving the nest a tight roof of twigs and moss, and lining the snug interior with fine dry grass and soft fibres of cedar-bark. In this secure and softly swaying refuge, far above the reach of prowling foxes, he curled himself up for a nap after his toil.
He slept well, but not long; for the red squirrel has always something on his mind to see to. In less than half an hour he whisked out again in great excitement, jumped from branch to branch till he was many yards from his own tree, and then burst forth into vehement chatter. He must have dreamed that some one was rifling his hoards, for he ran eagerly from one hiding-place to another and examined them all suspiciously. As he had at least two-score to inspect, it took him some time; but not till he had looked at every one did he seem satisfied. Then he grew very angry, and scolded and chirruped, as if he thought some one had made a fool of him. That he had made a fool of himself probably never entered his confident and self-sufficient little head.
While indulging this noisy volubility he was seated on the top of his dining-stump. Suddenly he caught sight of something that smote him into silence and for the space of a second turned him to stone. A few paces away was a weasel, gliding toward him like a streak of baleful light. For one second only he crouched. Then his faculties returned, and launching himself through the air he landed on the trunk of the maple and darted up among the branches.
No less swiftly the weasel followed, hungry, bloodthirsty, relentless on the trail. Terrified into folly by the suddenness and deadliness of this peril, the squirrel ran too far up the tree and was almost cornered. Where the branches were small there was no chance to swing to another tree. Perceiving this mistake, he gave a squeak of terror, then bounded madly right over his enemy’s head, and was lucky enough to catch foothold far out on a lower branch. Recovering himself in an instant, he shot into the next tree, and thence to the next and the next. Then, breathless from panic rather than from exhaustion, he crouched trembling behind a branch and waited.
The weasel pursued more slowly, but inexorably as doom itself. He was not so clever at branch-jumping as his intended prey, but he was not to be shaken off. In less than a minute he was following the scent up the tree wherein the squirrel was hiding; and again the squirrel dashed off in his desperate flight. Twice more was this repeated, the squirrel each time more panic-stricken and with less power in nerve or muscle. Then wisdom forsook his brain utterly. He fled straight to his elm and darted into his nest in the swaying top. The weasel, running lithely up the ragged trunk, knew that the chase was at an end. From this cul de sac the squirrel had no escape.
But Fate is whimsical in dealing with the wild kindreds. She seems to delight in unlooked-for interventions. While the squirrel trembled in his dark nest, and the weasel, intent upon the first taste of warm blood in his throat, ran heedlessly up a bare stretch of the trunk, there came the chance which a foraging hawk had been waiting for. The hawk, too, had been following this breathless chase, but ever baffled by intervening branches. Now he swooped and struck. His talons had the grip of steel. The weasel, plucked irresistibly from his foothold, was carried off writhing to make the great bird’s feast. And the squirrel, realizing at last that the expected doom had been somehow turned aside, came out and chattered feebly of his triumph.
The Grip in Deep Hole
The roar of the falls, the lighter and shriller raging of the rapids, had at last died out behind the thick masses of the forest, as Barnes worked his way down the valley. The heat in the windless underbrush, alive with insects, was stifling. He decided to make once more for the bank of the stream, in the hope that its character might by this time have changed, so as to afford him an easier and more open path. Pressing aside to his left, he presently saw the green gloom lighten before him. Blue sky and golden light came low through the thinning trees, and then a gleam of unruffled water. He was nearing the edge now; and because the underbrush was so thick about him he began to go cautiously.
All at once, he felt his feet sinking; and the screen of thick bushes before him leaned away as if bowed by a heavy gust. Desperately he clutched with both hands at the undergrowth and saplings on either side; but they all gave way with him. In a smother of leafage and blinding, lashing branches he sank downwards–at first, as it seemed, slowly, for he had time to think many things while his heart was jumping in his throat. Then, shooting through the lighter bushy companions of his fall, and still clutching convulsively at those upon which he had been able to lay his grasp, he plunged feet first into a dark water.
The water was deep and cold. Barnes went down straight, and clear under, with a strangled gasp. His feet struck, with some force, upon a tangled, yielding mass, from which he rose again with a spring. His head shot up above the surface, above the swirl of foam, leafage, and débris; and splutteringly he gulped his lungs full of air. But before he could clear his eyes or his nostrils, or recover his self-possession, he was stealthily dragged down again. And with a pang of horror he realized that he was caught by the foot.
A powerful swimmer, Barnes struck out mightily with his arms and came to the surface again at once, rising beyond the shoulders. But by so much the more was he violently snatched back again, strangling and desperate, before he had time to empty his lungs and catch breath. This time the shock sobered him, flashing the full peril of the situation before his startled consciousness. With a tremendous effort of will he stopped his struggling, and contented himself with a gentle paddling to keep upright. This time he came more softly to the surface, clear beyond the chin. The foam and débris and turbulence of little waves seethed about his lips, and the sunlight danced confusingly in his streaming eyes; but he gulped a fresh lungful before he again went under.
Paddling warily now, he emerged again at once, and, with arms outspread, brought himself to a precarious equilibrium, his mouth just above the surface so long as he held his head well back. Keeping very still, he let his bewildered wits clear, and the agitated surface settle to quiet.
He was in a deep, tranquil cove, hardly stirred by an eddy. Some ten paces farther out from shore the main current swirled past sullenly, as if weary from the riot of falls and rapids. Across the current a little space of sand-beach, jutting out from the leafy shore, shone golden in the sun. Up and down the stream, as far as his extremely restricted vision would suffer him to see, nothing but thick, overhanging branches, and the sullen current. Very cautiously he turned his head–though to do so brought the water over his lips–and saw behind him just what he expected. The high, almost perpendicular bank was scarred by a gash of bright, raw, reddish earth, where the brink had slipped away beneath his weight.
Just within reach of his hand lay, half submerged, the thick, leafy top of a fallen poplar sapling, its roots apparently still clinging to the bank. Gently he laid hold of it, testing it, in the hope that it might prove solid enough to enable him to haul himself out. But it came away instantly in his grasp. And once more, in this slight disturbance of his equilibrium, his head went under.
Barnes was disappointed, but he was now absolutely master of his self-possession. In a moment he had regained the only position in which he could breathe comfortably. Then, because the sun was beating down too fiercely on the top of his head, he carefully drew the bushy top of the poplar sapling into such a position that it gave him shade. As its roots were still aground, it showed no tendency to float off and forsake him in his plight.
A very little consideration, accompanied by a cautious investigation with his free foot, speedily convinced Barnes, who was a practical woodsman, that the trap in which he found himself caught could be nothing else than a couple of interlaced, twisted branches, or roots, of some tree which had fallen into the pool in a former caving-in of the bank. In that dark deep wherein his foot was held fast, his mind’s eye could see it all well enough–the water-soaked, brown-green, slimy, inexorable coil, which had yielded to admit the unlucky member, then closed upon the ankle like the jaws of an otter trap. He could feel that grip–not severe, but uncompromisingly firm, clutching the joint. As he considered, he began to draw comfort, however, from the fact that his invisible captor had displayed a certain amount of give and take. This elasticity meant either that it was a couple of branches slight enough to be flexible that held him, or that the submerged tree itself was a small one, not too steadfastly anchored down. He would free himself easily enough, he thought, as soon as he should set himself about it coolly and systematically.
Taking a long breath he sank his head under the surface, and peered downward through the amber-brown but transparent gloom. Little gleams of brighter light came twisting and quivering in from the swirls of the outer current. Barnes could not discern the bottom of the pool, which was evidently very deep; but he could see quite clearly the portion of the sunken tree in whose interwoven branches he was held. A shimmering golden ray fell just on the spot where his foot vanished to the ankle between two stout curves of what looked like slimy brown cable or sections of a tense snake body.
It was, beyond question, a nasty-looking trap; and Barnes could not blink the fact that he was in a tight place. He lifted his face above the surface, steadied himself carefully, and breathed deeply and quietly for a couple of minutes, gathering strength for a swift and vigorous effort. Then, filling his lungs very moderately, the better to endure a strain, he stooped suddenly downward, deep into the yellow gloom, and began wrenching with all his force at those oozy curves, striving to drag them apart. They gave a little, but not enough to release the imprisoned foot. Another moment, and he had to lift his head again for breath.
After some minutes of rest, he repeated the choking struggle, but, as before, in vain. He could move the jaws of the trap just enough to encourage him a little, but not enough to gain his release. Again and again he tried it, again and again to fail just as he imagined himself on the verge of success; till at last he was forced, for the moment, to acknowledge defeat, finding himself so exhausted that he could hardly keep his mouth above water. Drawing down a stiffish branch of the sapling, he gripped it between his teeth and so held himself upright while he rested his arms. This was a relief to nerves as well as muscles, because it made his balance, on which he depended for the chance to breathe, so much the less precarious.
As he hung there pondering, held but a bare half-inch above drowning, the desperateness of the situation presented itself to him in appalling clearness. How sunny and warm and safe, to his woods-familiar eyes, looked the green forest world about him. No sound broke the mild tranquillity of the solitude, except, now and then, an elfish gurgle of the slow current, or the sweetly cheerful tsic-a-dee-dee of an unseen chicadee, or, from the intense blue overhead, the abrupt, thin whistle of a soaring fish-hawk. To Barnes it all seemed such a safe, friendly world, his well-understood intimate since small boyhood. Yet here it was, apparently, turned smooth traitor at last, and about to destroy him as pitilessly as might the most scorching desert or blizzard-scourged ice-field. A silent rage burned suddenly through all his veins–which was well, since the cold of that spring-fed river had already begun to finger stealthily about his heart. A delicate little pale-blue butterfly, like a periwinkle-petal come to life, fluttered over Barnes’s grim, upturned face, and went dancing gaily out across the shining water, joyous in the sun. In its dancing it chanced to dip a hair’s-breadth too low. The treacherous, bright surface caught it, held it; and away it swept, struggling in helpless consternation against this unexpected doom. Before it passed out of Barnes’s vision a great trout rose and gulped it down. Its swift fate, to Barnes’s haggard eyes, seemed an analogue in little to his own.
But it was not in the woodsman’s fibre to acknowledge himself actually beaten, either by man or fate, so long as there remained a spark in his brain to keep his will alive. He presently began searching with his eyes among the branches of the poplar sapling for one stout enough to serve him as a lever. With the right kind of a stick in his hand, he told himself, he might manage to pry apart the jaws of the trap and get his foot free. At last his choice settled upon a branch that he thought would serve his turn. He was just about to reach up and break it off, when a slight crackling in the underbrush across the stream caught his ear.
His woodsman’s instinct kept him motionless as he turned his eyes to the spot. In the thick leafage there was a swaying, which moved down along the bank, but he could not see what was causing it. Softly he drew over a leafy branch of the sapling till it made him a perfect screen, then he peered up the channel to find out what the unseen wayfarer was following.
A huge salmon, battered and gashed from a vain struggle to leap the falls, was floating, belly-upward, down the current, close to Barnes’s side of the stream. A gentle eddy caught it, and drew it into the pool. Sluggishly it came drifting down toward Barnes’s hidden face. In the twigs of the poplar sapling it came to a halt, its great scarlet gills barely moving as the last of life flickered out of it.
Barnes now understood quite well that unseen commotion which had followed, along shore, the course of the dying salmon. It was no surprise to him whatever when he saw a huge black bear emerge upon the yellow sandspit and stand staring across the current. Apparently, it was staring straight at Barnes’s face, upturned upon the surface of the water. But Barnes knew it was staring at the dead salmon. His heart jumped sickeningly with sudden hope, as an extravagant notion flashed into his brain. Here was his rescuer–a perilous one, to be sure–vouchsafed to him by some whim of the inscrutable forest-fates.
He drew down another branchy twig before his face, fearful lest his concealment should not be adequate. But in his excitement he disturbed his balance, and with the effort of his recovery the water swirled noticeably all about him. His heart sank. Assuredly, the bear would take alarm at this and be afraid to come for the fish.
But to his surprise the great beast, which had seemed to hesitate, plunged impetuously into the stream. Nothing, according to a bear’s knowledge of life, could have made that sudden disturbance in the pool but some fish-loving otter or mink, intent upon seizing the booty. Indignant at the prospect of being forestalled by any such furtive marauder, the bear hurled himself forward with such force that the spray flew high into the branches, and the noise of his splashing was a clear notification that trespassers and meddlers had better keep off. That salmon was his, by right of discovery; and he was going to have it.
The bear, for all the seeming clumsiness of his bulk, was a redoubtable swimmer; and almost before Barnes had decided clearly on his proper course of action those heavy, grunting snorts and vast expulsions of breath were at his ear. Enormously loud they sounded, shot thus close along the surface of the water. Perforce, Barnes made up his mind on the instant.
The bunch of twigs which had arrested the progress of the floating salmon lay just about an arm’s length from Barnes’s face. Swimming high, his mighty shoulders thrusting up a wave before him which buried Barnes’s head safely from view, the bear reached the salmon. Grabbing it triumphantly in his jaws, he turned to make for shore again.
This was Barnes’s moment. Both arms shot out before him. Through the suffocating confusion his clutching fingers encountered the bear’s haunches. Sinking into the long fur, they closed upon it with a grip of steel. Then, instinctively, Barnes shut his eyes and clenched his teeth, and waited for the shock, while his lungs felt as if they would burst in another moment.
But it was no long time he had to wait–perhaps two seconds, while amazement in the bear’s brain translated itself through panic into action. Utterly horrified by this inexplicable attack, from the rear and from the depths, the bear threw himself shoulder high from the water, and hurled himself forward with all his strength. Barnes felt those tremendous haunches heaving irresistibly beneath his clutching fingers. He felt himself drawn out straight, and dragged ahead till he thought his ankle would snap. Almost he came to letting go, to save the ankle. But he held, on, as much with his will as with his grip. Then, the slimy thing in the depths gave way. He felt himself being jerked through the water–free. His fingers relaxed their clutch on the bear’s fur–and he came to the surface, gasping, blinking, and coughing.
For a moment or two he paddled softly, recovering his breath and shaking the water from nostrils and eyes. He had an instant of apprehensiveness, lest the bear should turn upon him and attack him at a disadvantage; and by way of precaution he gave forth the most savage and piercing yell that his labouring lungs were capable of. But he saw at once that on this score he had nothing to fear. It was a well-frightened bear, there swimming frantically for the sandspit; while the dead salmon, quite forgotten, was drifting slowly away on the sullen current.
Barnes’s foot was hurting fiercely, but his heart was light. Swimming at leisure, so as to just keep head against the stream, he watched the bear scuttle out upon the sand. Once safe on dry land, the great beast turned and glanced back with a timid air to see what manner of being it was that had so astoundingly assailed him. Man he had seen before–but never man swimming like an otter; and the sight was nothing to reassure him. One longing look he cast upon the salmon, now floating some distance away; but that, to his startled mind, was just a lure of this same terrifying and perfidious creature whose bright grey eyes were staring at him so steadily from the surface of the water. He turned quickly and made off into the woods, followed by a loud, daunting laugh which spurred his pace to a panicky gallop.
When he was gone, Barnes swam to the sandspit. There he wrung out his dripping clothes, and lay down in the hot sand to let the sun soak deep into his chilled veins.