The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 20

trap lines lay in great circles, coinciding at various points in order to reduce the number of cabins needed to work them, and ultimately swinging back to the home cabin in the thicket beside the sea. They were very simple to follow, he explained—Bess's line running up the river to the mouth of a great tributary that flowed from the south, the camp being known as the Eagle Creek cabin; thence up the tributary to its forks, known as the Forks cabin, up the left-hand forks to its mother springs, the Spring cabin, and then straight down the ridge to the home cabin, four days' journey in all. She couldn't miss any of the three huts, Doomsdorf explained, as all of them were located in the open barrens, on the banks of the creeks she was told to follow. Doomsdorf drew for her guidance a simple map that would remove all danger of going astray.

Ned's route was slightly more complicated, yet nothing that the veriest greenhorn could not follow. It took him first to what Doomsdorf called his Twelve-Mile cabin at the very head of the little stream on which the home cabin was built, thence following a well-blazed trail along an extensive though narrow strip of timber, a favorable country for marten, to the top of the ridge, around the glacier, and down to the hut that Bess occupied the third night out, known as the Forks cabin; thence up the right-hand fork to its mother spring, the Thirty-Mile cabin; over the ridge and down to the sea, the Sea cabin; and thence, trapping salt water mink and otter, to the home cabin, five days' journey in all. “If you use your head, you can't get off,” Doomsdorf explained. “If you don't, no one will ever take the trouble to look you up.”

As if smiling upon their venture, nature gave them a clear dawn in which to start forth. The squaw and Bess started up from the river mouth together, the former in the rôle of teacher; Ned and Doomsdorf followed up the little, silvery creek that rippled past the home cabin. And for the first time since his landing on Hell Island Ned had a chance really to look about him.

It was the first time he had been out of sight of the cabin and thus away from the intangible change that the mere presence of man works on the wild. All at once, as the last vestige of the white roof was concealed behind the snow-laden branches of the spruce, he found himself in the very heart of the wilderness. It was as if he had passed from one world to another.

Even the air was different. It stirred and moved and throbbed in a way he couldn't name, as if mighty, unnamable passions seemed about to be wakened. He caught a sense of a resistless power that could crush him to earth at a whim, of vast forces moving by fixed, invisible law; he felt that secret, wondering awe which to the woodsman means the nearing presence of the Red Gods. Only the mighty powers of nature were in dominion here: the lashing snows of winter, the bitter cold, the wind that wept by unheard by human ears. Ned was closer to the heart of nature, and thus to the heart of life, than he had ever been before.

He had no words to express the mood that came upon him. The wind that crept through the stunted spruce trees expressed it better than he; it was in the song that the wolf pack rings to sing on winter nights; in the weird complaint that the wild geese called down from the clouds. What little sound there was, murmuring branches and fallen aspen leaves, fresh on the snow, rustling faintly together and serving only to accentuate the depth of the silence, had this same, eerie motif,—nothing that could be put in words, nothing that ever came vividly into his consciousness, but which laid bare the very soul and spirit of life. Cold and hunger, an ancient persecution whose reason no man knew, a never-to-be-forgotten fear of a just but ruthless God!

This was the land untamed. There was not, at first, a blaze on a tree, the least sign that human beings had ever passed that way before. It was the land-that-used-to-be, unchanged seemingly since the dim beginnings of the world. Blessed by the climbing sun of spring, warm and gentle in the summer, moaning its old complaint when the fall winds swept through the branches, lashed by the storms of winter,—thus it had lain a thousand-thousand years. And now, a little way up the stream, there was more tangible sign that this was the kingdom of the wild. Instead of an unpeopled desert, it was shown to be teeming with life. They began to see the trails of the forest creatures in the snow.

Sometimes they paused before the delicate imprint of a fox, like a snow etching made by a master hand; sometimes the double track of marten and his lesser cousin, the ermine; once the great cowlike mark of a caribou, seeking the pale-green reindeer moss that hung like tresses from the trees. Seemingly every kind of northern animal of which Ned had ever heard had immediately preceded them through the glade.

“Where there's timber, there's marten,” Doomsdorf explained. “Marten, I suppose you know, are the most valuable furs we take, outside of silver and blue fox—and one of the easiest taken. The marten's such a ruthless hunter that he doesn't look what he's running into. You won't find them far on the open barrens, but they are in hundreds in the long, narrow timber belt between Twelve-Mile cabin, to-night's stop, and Forks cabin that you'll hit to-morrow night. And we'll make our first set right here.”

He took one of the traps from Ned's shoulder and showed him how to make the set. The bait was placed a few feet above the trap, in this case, on the trunk of the tree, so that to reach it the marten would almost certainly spring the trap.

“Put 'em fairly thick through here,” Doomsdorf advised. “Lay more emphasis on fox and lynx in the open barrens.” He stepped back from the set. “Do you think you can find this place again?”

Ned looked it over with minute care, marking it in relation to certain dead trees that lay across the creek. “I think I can.”

“That's the very essential of trapping, naturally. It will come to be second nature after a while—without marking it by trees or anything. You'll have better than a hundred traps; and it isn't as easy as it looks. Remember, I won't be with you the next time you pass this way.”

They tramped on, and Doomsdorf pointed out where a wolverine had come down the glade and crossed the creek. “You'll curse at the very name of wolverine before the season's done,” Doomsdorf told him, as Ned paused to study the imprint. “He's the demon of the snow so far as the trapper is concerned. Nevertheless, you'll want to take a skin for your own use. It's the one fur for the hood of a parka—you can wear it over your mouth in fifty below and it doesn't get covered with ice from your breath. But you'll have to be a smarter man than I think you are to catch him.”

A few minutes later the timber became to be more noticeably stunted, the trees farther and farther apart, and soon they were in the open. These were the barren lands, deep moss or rich marsh grass already heavy with snow; and the only trees remaining were a few willow, quivering aspen, and birch along the bank of the creek. From time to time the two men stopped to place their traps, Doomsdorf explaining the various “sets”, how to conceal the cold steel of which most all creatures have such an instinctive fear, and how to eliminate the human smell that might otherwise keep the more cunning of the fur-bearers from the bait. Once they paused before a great, cruel instrument of iron, seemingly much too large to be a trap, that had been left at the set from the previous trapping season.

“Lift it,” Doomsdorf advised. Ned bent, finding the iron itself heavy in his arms.

“No creature's going to walk away with that on his leg, is he?”

“No? That's all you know about it. I'll admit that you wouldn't care to walk with it very far. You would see why I didn't take it into shelter at the close of the season—although of course it's easy enough to haul on a sled. You notice it's attached to a chain, and that chain to a toggle.”

“Toggle” was a word that Ned had never heard before, but which plainly represented a great log, or drag, to which the trap chain was attached. Ned gazed, and another foolish question came to his lips. “You use that because there isn't a tree handy?” he asked.

“If there was a tree handy, I'd use it just the same,” Doomsdorf explained. “There's no holding the animal I catch in that trap by chaining him fast. No matter how big the tree or how stout the chain, he'd break loose—or else he'd pull out his foot. You've got to give him play. That's why we use a toggle.”

“You don't mean he drags that great thing”

“No, only about halfway across the island before I can possibly overtake him and shoot him, bellowing like a devil every step of the way. Moreover, the toggle has to be chained near the end, rather than in the middle—otherwise he'll catch the ends back of a couple of tree trunks and break loose. Now set the trap.”

It took nearly all of Ned's strength to push down the powerful springs and set the great jaws. The fact that he didn't know just how to go about it impeded him too. And when he stood erect again, he found Doomsdorf watching him with keenest interest.

“I didn't think you were man enough to do it,” he commented. “You'll say that's quite a trap, won't you?”

“It's quite a trap,” Ned agreed shortly. “What kind of an elephant do you take in it?”

“No kind of an elephant, but one of the grandest mammals that ever lived, at that. I don't trap them much, because I hardly get enough for their skins to pay for handling them—you can guess they're immensely bulky. There's a fair price for their skulls, too, but the skull alone is a fair load for a weak back. Last year I needed a few hides for the cabin. Did you ever hear of the Kodiac bear?”

“Good Lord! One bear can't move all that.”

Doomsdorf stood erect, and his eyes gleamed. Evidently the great, savage monarch of the islands of which he spoke was some way close to his own savage heart. “He can move your heart into your throat just to look at him!” he said. “One of the grandest mammals that ever lived—the great, brown bear of the islands. Of course, you ought to know he's by all odds the biggest bear on earth, he and the polar bear just north of here—and the biggest carnivorous animal on earth, for that matter. Your lions, your tigers wouldn't last a minute under those great hooks of his. He'd tear your whole chest out in one swipe. This seems to be about the northern limit of his range—the big brownies go all the way from Admiralty Islands, in the south, clear up to here, with very little variation as to size and color. There are not many on the Skopins—but going around with just an axe and a hunting knife for weapons, you'll be glad there aren't any more. At this point their range begins to coincide, to some slight degree, with the polar bear—but of course just a stray gets down below the Arctic circle. You've got to have a whole caribou carcass to interest the old devil in the way of bait. And now I'll show you how to outfox him.”

He cut a slender whip, about half an inch in diameter, from a near-by willow, and thrusting both ends into the ground in front of the trap, made an arch. “When the old boy comes along, he'll lift his front foot right over that arch, to avoid stepping on anything that looks so unstable, and then straight down into the trap,” Doomsdorf explained. “If it was heavy wood, he'd rest his foot on it and miss the trap.”

A few minutes later they came to what seemed to Ned a new and interesting geological formation. It seemed to be a noisy waterfall of three or four feet, behind which the creek was dammed to the proportions of a small, narrow lake. Yet the dam itself didn't appear to be a natural formation of rock. It looked more like driftwood, but it was inconceivable that mere drift could be piled in this ordered way.

Keenly interested, he bent to examine it. Farther up the creek some heavy body struck the water with a mighty splash. It was too swift, however, for him to see what it was. There were no power plants or mill wheels here, and thus it was difficult to believe that human hands had gone to the great labor of building such a dam. Only one explanation remained.

“It must be a beaver dam,” he said.

“You're right for once,” Doomsdorf agreed. “Did you ever see better engineering? Even the dam is built in an arch—the strongest formation known to man—to withstand the waters. Sometime I'll tell you how they do it—there isn't as much premeditated cunning in it as you think. Do you know what a beaver looks like?”

“Got big teeth”

“Correct. It has to have 'em to cut all this wood. Likely enough the little devils go considerable distances up and down this creek to get their materials. Sometimes they'll dig great canals for floating the sticks they use in their dams.

“A big beaver weighs about fifty pounds—and he's about the handiest boy to trap there is. You'll wonder what the purpose of these dams is. As far as I can make out, simply to keep the water at one level. You know these little streams rise and fall like the tides. They've learned, in a few hundred thousand years of their development, that it doesn't pay to build a nice house and then have the creek come up and wash it away and drown them out. When they put down their winter food, they want to be sure it's going to be there when they want it—neither washed away nor high and dry out of water. The solution was—to build a dam. Now I'll show you how to catch a beaver.”

It seemed to Ned that the logical place to lay the trap was on the beaver house itself—a great pile of sticks and mud. But Doomsdorf explained that a trap set on the house itself so alarmed the animals that the entire colony was likely to desert the dam. Instead, the trap was set just below the surface of the water at a landing,—a place where the beaver went in and out of the water in the course of their daily work.

No bait was used this time. The trap was covered with fine mud with the idea that the beaver would blunder into it either on leaving or entering the water. A heavy sack of little stones from the creek bed was attached to the chain, and a long wire, leading from this, was fastened securely to a tree on the creek bank. The arrangement was really a merciful one to the beaver. The instant the trap was sprung, the animal's instinct was to dive into deep water. Of course he dragged the heavy sack with him and was unable to rise again. The beaver, contrary to expectations, cannot live in water indefinitely. An air-breathing mammal, he drowns almost as quickly as a human being would under the same circumstances.

They placed a second trap on the dam itself, then encircling the meadow, continued on up the stream. From time to time they made their sets, as this was a favorable region for mink and otter, two of the most beautiful and valuable furs.

Time was passing swiftly for Ned. There was even a quality of enjoyment in his reaction to the day's toil. Now as they mounted to the higher levels, he was ever more impressed by the very magnitude of the wilderness about—stretching for miles in every direction to the shores of the sea. The weary wastes got to him and stirred his imagination as never before. He found, when he paused to make the sets, that a certain measure of excitement was upon him. Evidently there was a tang and flavor in this snow-swept wilderness through which he moved to make the blood flow swiftly in the veins.

Partly it lay in the constant happening of the unexpected. Every few rods brought its little adventure: perhaps a far-off glimpse of a fox; perhaps a flock of hardy waterfowl, tardy in starting south, flushing up with a thunderous beat of wings from the water; perhaps the swift dive of that dreadful little killer, the mink; possibly the track of a venerable old bear, already drowsy and contemplating hibernation, who had but recently passed that way. But perhaps the greater impulse for excitement lay in the expectation of what the next turn in the trail might bring forth. There were only tracks here, but the old bear himself might launch forth into a deadly charge from the next thicket of birch trees. The fox was only a fleet shadow far away, but any moment they might run into him face to face, in the act of devouring his prey. Ned found that his senses had miraculously sharpened, that many little nerves of which hitherto he had been unaware had wakened into life and were tingling just under the skin. Until fatigue came heavily upon him—only the first hint of it had yet come to his thighs and back—this particular part of his daily duties need never oppress him.

But this dim, faltering hope was forgotten in the travail of the next few hours. The load of heavy traps on his back; the labor of tramping through the snow; most of all the loss of bodily heat through his flimsy, snow-wet clothes soon rewarded him for daring to seek happiness on this desert of despair. As the gray afternoon advanced, his quickened spirit fell again: once more his senses were dulled, and the crooked, boyish half-smile that had begun to manifest itself faded quickly from his lips. Doomsdorf still marched in his easy, swinging gait; and ever it was a harder fight to keep pace. Yet he dared not lag behind. His master's temper was ever uncertain in these long, tired hours of afternoon.

Tired out, weakened, aching in every muscle and not far from the absolute limit of exhaustion, Ned staggered to the cabin door at last. He had put out all the traps he had brought from the home cabin: thence his course lay along a blazed trail that skirted the edge of the narrow timber belt, over the ridge to the Forks cabin. Doomsdorf entered, then in the half-light stood regarding the younger man who had followed him in.

Ned tried to stand erect. He must not yield yet to the almost irresistible impulse to throw himself down on the floor and rest. He dared not risk Doomsdorf's anger; how did he know what instruments of torture the latter's satanic ingenuity might contrive in this lonely cabin! Nor was his mood to be trusted to-night. His gray eyes shone with suppressed excitement; and likely enough he would be glad of an excuse for some diversion to pass the hours pleasantly. It was very lonely and strange out here, in the open, in the full sweep of the wind over the barren lands.

But Ned wasn't aware of Doomsdorf's plans. The great blond man stretched his arms, yawning, buttoned his coat tighter about him, and turned to go. “I'll see you in about five days,” he remarked laconically.

Ned wakened abruptly from his revery. “You mean—you aren't going to show me anything more?”

“There's nothing more you can't learn by yourself—by hard experience. I've given you your map and your directions for the trap line. A baby couldn't miss it. There's traps on the wall—scatter 'em along between here and the Forks cabin. There you will find another bunch to put between there and Thirty-Mile cabin. So on clear around. Over your head you see the stretchers.”

Ned looked up, and over the rafters, among other supplies, were laid a large number of small boards, planed smooth and of different sizes.

“I've shown you how to set your traps, for every kind of an animal,” Doomsdorf went on. “You ought to be able to do the rest. By the time you come around, we'll likely have freezing weather—that means you'll have to thaw out your animals before you skin them. If it's a big animal, dead in the trap, too heavy to carry into camp, you'll have to make a fire in the snow and thaw him out there. Otherwise bring 'em in. You saw me skin that otter I shot—skin all the smaller animals the same way. Simply split 'em under the legs and peel 'em out toward the head, as you would a banana. Of course you'll spoil plenty of skins at first, so far as market value is concerned, but they'll be all right for your own use. The closer you can skin them, the less fat you leave on the pelts, the less you'll have to flesh them when you get to your cabin. When you can't strip off any more fat, turn 'em wrong side out on one of those boards—stretching them tight. Use the biggest board you can put in. Then hang 'em up in the cabin to dry. A skin like a beaver, that you slit up the belly and which comes off almost round, nail on the wall. All the little tricks of the trade will come in time.

“Here and here and here”—he paused, to put in Ned's hands a clasp hunting knife, razor sharp, a small pocket hone to whet his tools, and a light axe that had been hanging back of the stove—“are some things you'll need. The time will come when you'll need snowshoes, too. I ought to make you make them yourself, but you'd never get it done and I'd never get any furs. There's a pair on the rafters. Now I'm going to tramp back to the cabin to spend the night—in more agreeable company.”

For a moment the two men stood regarding each other in absolute silence. Then Doomsdorf's keen ears, eager for such sounds, caught the whisper of Ned's troubled breathing. Presently a leering smile flashed through the blond beard.

It was as he thought. Ned's mind was no longer on furs. His face had been drawn and dark with fatigue, but now a darker cloud spread across it, like a storm through open skies, as some bloodcurdling thought made ghastly progress through his brain. At first it was only startled amazement, then swift disbelief—the manifestation of that strange quirk in human consciousness that ever tries to shield the spirit from the truth—and finally terror, stark and without end. It showed in the tragic loosening of every facial muscle; in the cold drops that came out at the edge of the brown, waving hair; in the slow, fixed light in his eyes.

This was what Doomsdorf loved. He had seen the same look in the faces of prisoners—newly come to a stockade amid the snow and still hopeful that the worst they had heard had been overdrawn—on seeing certain implements of initiation; and it had been a source of considerable amusement to him. This was the thing that his diseased soul craved. As the young man reached imploring hands to his own great forearms, he hurled him away with a ringing laugh.

“You mean—you and Lenore will be alone” Ned asked.

“You saw the squaw start out with Bess?” was the triumphant answer. “But why should you care? It was Lenore's own wish to stay. She'd take me and comfort any time, sooner than endure the cold with you. Of such stuff, my boy, are women made.”

The hands reached out again, clasping tight upon Doomsdorf's forearms. Ned's face, lifeless and white as a stone, was no longer loose with terror. A desperate fury had brought him to the verge of madness.

“That's a foul lie!” he shouted, reckless of Doomsdorf's retaliation. “She didn't dream that you would do that”

Doomsdorf struck him off, hurling him against the wall; but it was not with the idea of inflicting punishment. Amused at his impotent rage, his blow was not the driving shoulder blow which, before now, had broken a human jaw to fragments. Nor did he carry through, hammering his victim into insensibility at his leisure.

“That gets you a little, doesn't it?” he taunted. Ned straightened, staring at him as if he were a ghost. “Your sweetheart—that you'd sworn was yours to the last ditch! I don't mean that she'd give herself willingly to me—yet. She's just the kind of girl I'd expect a weakling like yourself to pick out—the type that would sooner go wrong than endure hardship. And that's why she's more or less safe, for the time being at least, from me. Even if Sindy wasn't coming back home to-night—probably already there—you wouldn't have to fear.”

Ned could not speak, but Doomsdorf looked at him with the fire of a zealot in his eyes.

“I don't want anything that's that easy,” he said with infinite contempt. “Sometimes the game is harder. I take back something I inferred a moment ago—that all women would do the same. The best of them, the most of them, still will go through hell for an idea; and that's the kind whose spirit is worth while to break. Do you know any one who right now, likely enough, is trudging along through this hellish snow with forty pounds of traps over her back?”

Ned shuddered, hurling off his doubt, believing yet in the fidelity of his star. “I don't know, and I don't care,” he answered.

“That's what Bess Gilbert is doing, and you know it. There, young man, is a woman worthy of my steel!”

He turned and strode out the door. Ned was left to his thoughts and the still, small voices of the waste places, alone with the wilderness night whose word was the master word of life, and with the wind that sobbed unhappy secrets as it swept his cabin roof. He couldn't help but listen, there in the twilight. Thus the work of training Ned Cornet's soul went on, strengthening him to stand erect when that stern officer, the Truth, looked into his eyes; teaching him the mastery of that bright sword of fortitude and steadfastness whereby he could parry the most pitiless blows of fate.