They Who Walk in the Wilds/Wild Adoption
It had been a wet spring, cold and belated, and the turbulent Wassis was still in flood, raging between its scarred banks. A couple of hundred yards lower down, it plunged over the forty-foot drop of Great Falls and went crashing, torn to flying snow, through the black and narrow deeps of the gorge. The steady, trampling thunder of its plunge throbbed on the air.
Near the edge of the high bank, but not too near, stood a lanky, long-legged, long-headed moose calf, sniffing at the green and brown leaf-buds of a poplar sapling. Its preposterously long nose was pleased with the scent of the bursting leaf-buds; but the awkward youngster had not yet learned to browse, even upon such delicate fare as poplar-buds. He was still dependent on the abundant milk of his great, dark-coated mother.
The cow moose was at the other side of the glade, forty or fifty paces back from the bank, browsing comfortably on the tender, sappy twigs of a young silver birch. She was a splendid specimen of her race, full five feet high at the tip of her massive, humped shoulders; her brown, furred hide was almost black except along the belly, where it faded to a ruddy fawn, and on the lower parts of the legs, where it was of a pepper-and-salt grey. For all her strength and her imposing appearance, however, she could lay small claim to beauty or grace; her hindquarters were much too small and meagre to balance her grand shoulders, and her huge head, with its long, overhanging muzzle and immense, donkey-like ears, would have been grotesque had it not looked so formidable.
Presently, turning her head to glance at her offspring, she decided that he was rather closer to the edge of the bluff than prudence would dictate. "M'wha!" she grunted, softly but emphatically. The calf wheeled in answer to the summons. But he did not instantly obey—for, indeed, the call had not been urgent. It had not been the usual danger signal. That cry would have brought him to her side at once. Now, however, he was inclined to be playful, and to tease his anxious mother. He shook his head, and executed an ungainly gambol on his absurdly babyish stilts of legs.
In that same instant, the slight extra impulse of his kick being just what was needed to precipitate the catastrophe, the whole brow of the bluff crumbled beneath him, undermined by the torrent. With an agonized bleat of terror, amid a sinking chaos of turf and stones and bushes, he vanished.
In a few gigantic strides the black mother reached the spot, with such a rush that she could barely check herself at the brink of the raw red steep. The bank at this point was fully thirty feet high, and practically perpendicular. Bawling piteously, her eyes almost starting from her head, she searched the flood. At first she could see nothing but the bushes and saplings as they swept along in the torrent. Then she caught glimpses of a small, dark form appearing and disappearing among them, feebly kicking, rolled over and over by the conflict of the tortured surges. A few moments more, and calf and wreckage together, with a sickening lunge, went over the abyss.
Crashing through the bushes, and bleating harshly as she went, the frantic mother raced along the bank till she reached a spot just over the falls. Here she paused, and stood staring down into the thunder and the tumult.
For a Jong time the moose cow stood there motionless and silent, her dark, uncouth form sharply outlined against the pallid sky. At last she roused herself, and moved off slowly among the pointed ranks of the fir-trees. In addition to the pain of her loss, she was tormented by the ache of her udder yearning insistently for the warm mouth which it had nursed.
Too restless to feed, she pushed her way far back from the gorge, far back from the hated thunder of the falls, and then wandered aimlessly down the wide valley, moving without a sound through the balsam-scented silence. For all her bulk and the spread of her great, cleft, knife-edged hoofs, she could go through the woods and the undergrowth, when she chose, as noiselessly as a weasel or a fox.
Ordinarily it was the habit of the big cow moose to keep strictly to her own range, a section of the valley about four miles in length and stretching back to the hardwood ridge, some three miles from the river. This was her home, and she knew every inch of it. Now, however, it had grown distasteful to her. Continuing on downstream, a mile below the gorge, she found herself in fresh territory. Crossing a sparsely wooded rise, from which the lumbermen had cleaned out all the heavier timber, she saw below her a valley more spacious than her own, with a stretch of pale green water-meadow, or "intervale," where the wild Wassis joined its current to the broader flood of the Ottanoonsis. In the angle of their junction stood a log cabin and a barn, surrounded by several patches of roughly fenced clearing.
The scene as a whole had no interest for the unhappy mother moose, except for one item in it. In a little grassy inclosure behind the barn, hidden from the cabin windows, was a red calf, standing with its long legs rather wide apart in a posture of insecure and sprawling babyhood.
The loneliness, the helplessness, in the youngling's attitude went straight to the heart of the sorrowful mother. Involuntarily she gave a low, soft call, a call for which there is no name as yet in the vocabulary of either the naturalist or the woodsman. It was neither the mooing of a cow nor the bleating of a ewe, but it held something of both; and it was unmistakably a mother's cry. Faint and far off though it was, the lonely calf heard it, and lifted up his head hopefully.
The great black moose surveyed all the surroundings of that little inclosure with wary eyes, though the longing in her heart and the ache of her burdened udder strove to dull her caution. There was not a man-creature in sight. Satisfied on this point, she moved swiftly, but always noiselessly, down the slope, through the aisles of the fir woods, and halted behind a screen of bushes close to the fence. The red calf was gazing all about him, hoping to hear again that mother call. His colour, his form, his moist, blunt, naked muzzle were all very strange to the silent watcher; but her heart went out to him. Suddenly growing impatient—for he was hungry as well as lonely—he stretched his neck and uttered an appealing, babyish bawl.
To the moose this cry was irresistible. She emerged at once from her hiding, breasted down the rail fence with a crash, and over its ruins strode into the inclosure.
The calf was too young and unsophisticated to be afraid. He was startled, to be sure, by the great black form approaching him so swiftly, but there was no misunderstanding the sounds—hoarse but tender—proceeding from its shaggy throat. It was the same voice, which, heard from far off, had so aroused his hopes. Somewhat doubtfully he allowed himself to be muzzled by the tall, velvet-nosed stranger; but when, with a gesture quite unmistakable, she turned her flank to him coaxingly, his hesitation vanished on the instant, and he greedily began to nurse.
Comforted, but ever vigilant, the moose stood for some minutes, alternately eying her new baby and scanning the barn and the clearing. Then, uneasy in that perilous neighbourhood, she firmly withdrew herself from the calf's eager attentions and moved off towards the gap in the fence, muttering a gentle summons for the youngster to follow. And follow he did, at once, ambling close at her side, desperately afraid lest he should lose her. Presently the curiously assorted pair vanished into the dark green mazes of the fir woods.
It chanced that the owner of the little farm at the mouth of the Wassis was a newcomer to the backwoods. Not an experienced woodsman, not an adept in the wisdom of the wilderness, he was quite at a loss when he found that the calf had disappeared. His efforts to trail the fugitive were a failure, and he came to the conclusion that a hungry bear had broken in and carried off the tender prize. Thereafter he hunted bears with inplacable hostility, though with very scant success, and those wary beasts soon came to know far more about him than he was ever able to learn about them. They sensed his enmity, and kept him under unsuspected observation.
The cow moose, travelling slowly to allow for the weakness of her adopted young, worked her way far past her old range and took up a new one at a safer distance from the clearing. Suspecting that the man-creature might come searching for the calf, she forsook the valley of the Wassis altogether, crossed the ridge, and established herself in a region of small, shallow lakes and wooded knolls drained by one of its wildest tributaries, Burnt Brook. It was a region undisturbed by the lumbermen, because the timber was small and hard to get out, and it lay somewhat aside from the trails of hunter and fisherman.
In this invigorating environment, with abundant food, and exercise exactly fitted to his needs, the red calf throve amazingly. At first it seemed to him that he and his tall new mother were the only dwellers in the wilderness; for his strange colour and stranger scent caused all the shy, furtive creatures to avoid him. But soon they realized that he was as harmless as any ordinary moose calf. Then he saw, all at once, that the solitude was in reality full of life. The tawny deer-mice, intent on their foraging or their play, scurried freely all about him, only taking care to avoid his clumsy hoofs. The weasels glided up and snarled at him insolently with their narrow, bloodthirsty muzzles in the air. The big, bulging-eyed snowshoe rabbits gamboled about him, glad of the protection afforded them by the presence of his mighty foster mother. And once in a while a crafty red fox, prowling past in search of a quarry, would halt and sit up on his ruddy brush of a tail to stare at him in wonder and interrogation, amazed that a moose cow should give birth to so curious a calf. The calf, full of childish pugnacity, would invariably run and butt at the bushytailed stranger. And that superior and self-assured animal, recognizing his childishness, would slip away with an indulgent sniff.
After the cold, late spring, summer came upon the wilderness world with a rush, and all the browns and rosy greys and ochre yellows and dusk purples were submerged in floods of ardent green. As the heat grew and the flies became troublesome, the calf learned from his foster mother the trick of wading out into the lake till only his head was above water. Then, plunging his head under to secure a mouthful of water-lily root, which the mother taught him to relish, he would drown his winged tormentors by the myriad.
To join them in this cool retreat one day came two big black moose bulls. At this season their new antlers—the old ones having been shed early in the preceding winter—had not yet begun to sprout, and so they looked very much like the cow, except for their greater bulk and height. At this time of year they had no thought of mating, and so there was no jealous rivalry between them; their attitude towards the comely cow was one ofgood-natured indifference. But the red calf, which seemed to belong to her, excited their keenest curiosity. They stood and eyed him intently for some moments, while he returned the formidable stare quite unabashed. Presently they strode up close to him, one on each side, and sniffed him over, with loud snortings, and harsh mumblings in their throats. Not quite liking these attentions, the red calf drew back a step or two. Apparently there was some disapproval in their mumblings; for suddenly the cow, with an angry grunt, ran at them, and shouldered the nearest bull aside without ceremony.
The two bulls, respecting the sacred rights of a mother, promptly gave way, and wandered off lazily down to the water to pull lily-roots. If a cow of their species was unfortunate enough to give birth to such a ridiculous and unmooselike offspring, well, it was her own affair and they were not disposed to worry about it. Thereafter, when any of the bulls of her kind were about, the cow always made haste to show that the red calf was hers, in order to avoid any possible unpleasantness. She was, indeed, as often happens, more devoted to this strange foster-child of hers than she had ever been to her own offspring. She never quite understood his moods or his manners, and this kept her interest keen.
It was not till late autumn, indeed, that the red calf realized it was possible for his dark mother to have any interest in life except himself. When his green world had turned to a riot of purple and russet and pale gold and flaming scarlet, and the wax-vermilion of the mountain-ash berries hung in lavish clusters over the white granite rocks, and thin frosts laced and powdered the glades at sunrise with sparkling silver and opal, he found his mother growing restless and sometimes forgetful of his presence. By this time the moose bulls, whom he occasionally caught sight of as they strode through the underbrush, had grown their mighty palmated antlers, and become so magnificent as to impress even his audacious and irreverent young spirit. He experienced his first sense of awe when he heard them bellowing their hoarse challenges across the night and thrashing the bushes fiercely with their antlers.
One still, crisp night in October, when the lakes lay glassy silver and steel beneath a low primrose-coloured moon, the tall cow wandered down the beach, stretched her head out over the water and gave voice to a long, sonorous call which was unlike anything the calf had ever before heard her utter. It was answered almost at once by a harshly eager voice from the black woods around the outlet. Puzzled and anxious, the calf trotted down and nosed at his mother to attract her attention. To his surprise she brushed him aside with a sweep of her great head, impatiently. Much offended, he drew away. There was something in the air which he did not understand, and so he too stood waiting, like his mother.
Some minutes later the thick bushes on the bank above parted noiselessly, and a trim young bull, with slender antlers only in the third year, stepped down the beach. The cow turned her head to greet him with a guttural murmur of welcome. Before responding, however, the newcomer, with a threatening squeal, lowered his antlers, and chased the indignant calf away some fifty yards up the beach. Then he strode back proudly to the waiting cow, and the two began to make friends, sniffing at and caressing each other with their long, sensitive muzzles.
These pleasant preliminaries of courtship, however, were rudely interrupted. From back in the thickets came a mighty challenging roar, followed by a heavy crashing. The young bull wheeled about and roared furiously in reply, prepared to fight for his new mate. But when, a moment later, a gigantic black head, with antlers as wide again as his own, appeared above the bushes, the young bull's heart misgave him. The new arrival came smashing down upon the beach, roaring and snorting, magnificent in his prime. Whereupon the unfortunate youngster, knowing himself hopelessly overmatched, turned tail and made off at his best speed, to hide his discomfiture in the fir woods, while the faithless cow welcomed the newcomer with enthusiasm.
A few hours later, when the pair withdrew among the trees to lie down and sleep, the lonely calf, venturing to approach his mother again, was received with quite the old affection. The great bull, perceiving this, and being too experienced to be jealous of such an infant, showed no objection to his company. In the chill grey of dawn they all rose to their feet and fell to browsing together till the sunrise broke in gold and fiery rose over the misty lake.
After two or three rebuffs the calf learned to keep his distance at times, but for the greater part of the time he had no reason to resent the stranger's presence. A day or two later, moreover, he found that the great bull, though so scornfully indifferent to him, was not indifferent to his duties as temporary father-by-adoption. It was towards midnight, and the cow and bull were down by the water in the flooding moonlight, while the calf, driven away and for the time forgotten, stood dejected behind a clump of osiers some fifty or sixty yards along the beach. A hungry bear, seizing the opportunity, launched himself down the bank and rushed upon the desolate figure, expecting an easy prey. Just in time to evade that fatal rush the calf saw the danger. Bawling shrilly with terror he dashed down the beach, the bear in hot pursuit and swiftly overhauling him.
But the calf's wild appeal did not fall on deaf ears. The stiff black manes lifting along their necks with wrath, both the bull and the cow came charging up the beach to his rescue. The bear, rounding the osier thicket, was just gathering himself for the final spring, when he caught sight of the rescuers. He was a big bear, old and of ugly temper, and the cow alone he would not have hesitated to tackle. But when he saw the stature of the great bull he was seized with sudden discretion. He stopped short, hesitated for a second, and then withdrew, grumbling but dignified, behind the osiers. The cow halted beside the calf, to nuzzle him and inquire if he was hurt. But the bull, beside himself with rage, charged on and came crashing straight through the osiers. Whereupon the bear, appalled at his fury, threw dignity to the winds and fled at full gallop, like a frightened cat, leaving the triumphant bull to thrash the bushes and roar his defiance.
The great bull stayed with the red calf and his mother for five or six days, and then wandered off in search of other mates. But these, as it appeared, failed to hold his fancy; for towards the end of November, after the first heavy snowfall, he returned, and took charge of the family for the winter. Moving back from the lake to a sheltered and thick-wooded valley where such forage as moose love—especially birch and poplar and maple—was abundant, he established their winter quarters. There they trampled down deep paths in the ever-increasing snow, and lay snugly housed from storm beneath the dense branches of an overhanging hemlock. The calf, fortunately for him-! self, had learned from his mother to browse on twigs and not to depend on grass for his nourishment, and so he got through the winter without starving.
The intense cold was a searching trial to the calf, but by sleeping huddled between his mother and the bull—who had lost his antlers soon after Christmas—he managed to keep from freezing, while his red coat grew so long and shaggy that his late owner, back at the clearing on the Ottanoonsis, would never have recognized him. The return of spring found him emaciated but vigorous, and with a fierce appetite for the long, brown, withered grass of open swales and for the succulent roots of the sweet-flag and bulrush along the edges of the lake. He was heartily sick of birch-twigs. When the trees began to film with green beneath the sun and showers of May, the big bull wandered off; and the Red Calf and his mother (she had failed through some mischance, to produce a new calf that season) found themselves once more alone together beside their lonely lake.
The summer passed rather uneventfully, and by autumn Red Calf was a sturdy and agile young bull, armed with a pair of horns which were short but exceedingly sharp. Pugnacious of disposition, but with no foe to vent his pugnacity upon, he was forever butting at dead stumps and testing those new horns of his by goring and tossing the tangled bush. His mother, still devoted as ever, would watch with mild amazement these exuberant antics, so unlike what those of her own calf would have been.
When the mating moon of October began again to stir new fire in the cow's veins, Red Calf got his first chance to put his untried prowess to the test. One evening just after moonrise, before the restless cow had begun to call, a young moose bull came striding down the beach to her side. He was very young, and the cow regarded him dubiously. Glancing past her, he caught sight of Red Calf, a stocky figure, much shorter but much heavier than himself. Aflame with jealousy, but at the same time rather contemptuous of such an unantlered rival, he lowered his own slim antlers, and charged. Red Calf, with a wrathful grunt, flung up his tail stiffly and lunged forwards to meet this unprovoked attack. With a heavy thud the two armed heads crashed together. The result was disastrous to the challenger; for instead of receiving the shock, as he expected, upon his tough, elastic antlers, he got it full upon his forehead, his brow-spikes being too wide-set to engage his opponent's stumpy horns. Half stunned, he was borne backwards, almost to his haunches. Pressing the advantage, Red Calf flung him aside, staggering, and prodded him sayagely in the flank before he could recover his balance. Utterly daunted by this method of fighting—which was not according to his rules—the young bull tore himself free and fled in panic, with an ugly scarlet gash in his sleek hide. The victor chased him as far as the bushes, and then, swelling with triumph, returned to his mother for applause. To his amazement, however, she seemed very far from pleased at his achievement. Her mane on end, she ran at him with a vicious squeal. Much offended, he retired up the bank, and lay down sulkily among the willows.
Some hours later, in response to the cow's repeated calls, another wooer appeared. But this time it was the same gigantic bull who had spent the winter with them. He was more lordly and more superbly antlered than ever; and his authority Red Calf never dreamed of questioning. The great bull, for his part, did not regard the youngster as a rival, and showed him no hostility. The mother, delighted to have her old magnificent mate back, forgot her fit of ill-temper. And the reunited group, harmonious and contented, hung together through the ensuing winter.
In April, as soon as the snow was gone from the open spaces, the great bull went away. For several weeks more the cow and her foster son roamed and pastured together as of old, in affectionate intimacy. And then, when the woods once more were greening in the May sunshine, the cow's mood changed. She grew impatient of her sturdy young companion's presence, and was continually trying to slip away from him. Much puzzled, he so far humoured her as to keep his distance, but he took care never to let her actually out of his sight.
Red Calf was now no longer a calf in any sense. He was a particularly fine and powerful two-year-old bull. Expert in forest lore as any moose, he was nevertheless an alien to the wilderness, driven by needs and instincts which he could not understand. The wilderness had no companionship to offer him save that of his foster mother, and this seemed now to be failing him. He was unhappy. Vague, ancestral half-memories haunted and eluded him. The life of the wilds, the only life he could conceive of, grew distasteful to him. Though he could not be aware of it, the wilderness was, indeed, his foe, hostile at heart to him because his race for ten thousand generations had belonged to Man and been stamped with Man's impress. It was even now beginning to show its enmity. In the end it would have crushed him, but only, perhaps, after years of bitter, unmated solitude, and savage hates and the torment of vain cravings. But the Unseen Powers relented, and offered him a noble exit from the ill-suited stage.
And this was the manner of it. There came a day when the moose cow, about to become a mother again, took refuge determinedly in the heart of a dense and dark clump of young fir trees. Red Bull knew exactly where she was, and having got it into his head at last that she wanted to be alone, he reluctantly endured her absence from his sight. There in her hiding-place she gave birth to two dark brown moose calves, long-legged, long-headed and ungainly like herself. While she was licking them and murmuring soft mother sounds to them, a huge black bear, still gaunt and hungry from his winter hardships, came prowling past the thicket. He heard those mother sounds and understood them. Pausing for a second or two to locate them accurately, he crept up close to the fringing branches, gathered his mighty muscles for the spring, and crashed in, counting on instant kill. But a massive drooping bough which he had not marked in the gloom, diverted slightly that deadly rush, and the blow of his pile-driving paw, which should have broken the mother's back, merely slashed her lean rump as she wheeled nimbly to face the attack and fell on the uplifted head of one of the calves, crushing out its hardly started life.
In the next fraction of a moment there was another crash, and Red Bull, with a grunt of rage, came charging into the battle. His armed front struck the bear full in the ribs, jarring the breath from his lungs with a gasping cough, and almost bowling him over.
But Red Bull did not understand his dreadful adversary's method of fighting. Instead of springing back, and fencing for a chance to repeat that mighty buffet, he kept at close quarters, pushing and goring in blind fury. The bear, twisting about, caught him a sweeping stroke on the side of the head which raked half his face away, and then, lunging clear, brought down the other huge forepaw on the back of his neck. It was as irresistible, that blow, as the fall of a boulder. Red Bull sank upon his knees and slowly rolled over, the vertebræ of his neck not only dislocated but smashed to splinters.
But his sharp horns had done their work, piercing to the bear's vitals and ripping his ribs open. The desperate mother, meanwhile, had been slashing his haunches to ribbons with mad blows of her knife-edged hoofs. The bear was in a bad way. Whining and choking, he dragged himself off, making all haste to escape the punishment of those pounding and rending hoofs. The frantic cow followed him clear of the thicket, and then rushed back to the remaining calf. Quivering with anxiety, she stood over it, licking it and nosing it to assure herself it was unhurt. And in her mother solicitude she had not even a glance to spare for the mangled body of her protector, who had so splendidly repaid the debt of her long adoption.