Pilgrims of the Wild. Grey Evil Owl

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СКАЧАТЬ avail. The train we were to have taken passed on without us, and it would very soon be dark. The place was swarming with huskies, hunting dogs, and stray dogs, most of them half-starved, and the kitten would have made no more than a mouthful for any of them. The chances were poor. I had never realized until now how much the little fellows had gotten in under my skin. The lost waif was my own particular chum, and I was going to miss him. Yet I could not believe but what he had somehow made the grade and got to the lake, distant though it was. They had blundered complacently through a number of tough situations from the time of their birth on, and — there — sure enough, across a narrow bay I saw a dark brown object on the shoreline, dimly seen in the rapidly falling dusk — just in time! I gave several loud calls and instantly, not from the direction of this brown object at all, but from a spot not a stone’s throw ahead of me, came an answer, a most dolorous wailing. The willows were very thick and I could see nothing, but I advanced, calling every few steps and getting an answer each time, until with eyes bulging and hair erect, the wanderer burst through the leaves and threw himself at my feet. I picked up the little furry body and held him close to my shirt, while he uttered barely audible whimpering sounds and burrowed his nose into my neck. He was bone dry, so that although he must have been on the point of entering the water, he had allowed himself to be called away from it by the sound of a voice that he knew. Never before, and only once since, have I had the same feeling of relief at the recovery of anything lost.

      Anahareo of course was overjoyed. And now the so-big box had its small quota of inhabitants, and from it there arose sounds of strife as the reunited couple quarrelled lustily over some sweet biscuits we had bought to celebrate the occasion. And as I watched them disporting themselves in happy unconsciousness of any danger past, present, or future, I found it strange and a little disquieting that these animals, that had seemed heretofore to have only one use, and that I had destroyed by hundreds, should turn out to be so likeable, should so arouse the protective instinct of a man who was their natural enemy.

      From a purely economic viewpoint, I had long been opposed to the wholesale slaughter now going forward, which was indeed almost at an end for want of victims. But this was different. These beasts had feelings and could express them very well; they could talk, they had affection, they knew what it was to be happy, to be lonely — why, they were little people! And they must be all like that. All this tallied with the incredible stories I had heard in younger days, and perhaps accounted for the veneration that our people, when savage, had held them in, calling them “Beaver People,” “Little Indians,” and “Talking Mothers.” Indian mothers, bereaved of an infant, had suckled baby beavers at their breasts and thus gained some solace. I had seen them myself cared for tenderly by those whose hands they had fallen into. And I would have left them to die with never a thought, an intention that seemed now to have been something nearly barbarous. Well, we had to live, and anyway they were all right. To make sure I looked inside the box, and carefully securing the lid, went to bed.

      That night they gnawed their way out of their new domicile and, weary with this, and that, and one thing and another, were found the next morning fast asleep along side of it.

      Having again missed our train, with the freakish irresponsibility common to our kind when not seriously employed we decided to miss a few more and stay for the weekend. The news concerning our menagerie had spread, and we were approached by a fur dealer who wanted to see what we had. There was, he said, a pair of other young beaver that an Indian had turned in to a storekeeper in part payment of his debt, and he himself had intended to buy them. They were not, he said, in good shape and might die, and he would not touch them unless shipped to him at the present owner’s risk. He was much taken with ours, as they were in first class condition, and he made us a good offer. This of course we did not accept; although we were getting short of money we had no notion of parting with them.

      But we did go to see the other kittens, first putting our own under a heavily weighted galvanized wash tub, and setting a guard over them with orders to show them to nobody. The place we were going to was a combined general store and hotel, but its principal source of revenue was the sale of contraband liquor.

      This bootlegger was not a bad fellow at heart, and he gave away as much whiskey as he ever sold. He was a very devout man too, and had in his private chamber a kind of altar with a candle burning continuously before it. Here he was in the habit of holding family worship, and it was no uncommon thing for him to rise from his knees and repair behind his grocery counter, sell a bottle of liquor to a customer, and return to his devotions, being careful to bless himself before entering the sacred chamber. These people, who had bought the new kittens, had no idea of how to look after them, and the little creatures were in utter misery. They were plainly in a dying condition, crying weakly without ceasing. When we reached inside the box they clutched our fingers in their tiny hands with pitiful cries of distress, as though begging the best they knew how for somebody, anybody, to take away this great trouble that had fallen upon them, to keep them from the black abyss into which they were sinking.

      I could pity, but not condemn. I had not the right; at the old beaver house I had nearly done this very thing myself.

      “If only they would let us have them,” whispered Anahareo, “Just to die in the box with ours beside them, so they wouldn’t be lonely.”

      “We’ll buy them.” I turned to the storekeeper, “How much do you want for them?”

      “Plenty,” he countered. “How much you got?”

      I told him. “Not enough,” he said. He had to live too.

      Anahareo offered to care for them, suggesting shrewdly that they would be worth more if they recovered. This overture also was refused. The merchant had sent for a license to enable him to ship them to the dealer we had met, and would, he stated, be satisfied if the beavers lived until the deal was settled, and they safely on their way. If they then succumbed it would be, he considered, a good joke on the buyer. This, I might add, was a fair example of the ethics of more than a few of the bucket-shop fur buyers that the late boom in prices had produced.

      But the kittens did not live, fortunately perhaps, and without water, proper food, or care of any kind, one little prisoner was found on the Sunday morning lifeless in his cell, and the other lay dead beside a water pail that he had crawled to for the life-giving fluid that he could not reach.

      And it seemed to me like very close to desecration, when the two little wasted forms that belonged in the clean sweet freedom of the Silent Places were thrown, dead and despised, into a dirty bucket of slops.

      And later, as I looked in on the two small creatures that were so dependent on me, I knew that never would I sell them into bondage, and that living or dead they should be forever free. I thought too, of that other brown body lying squandered and lifeless on the bottom of their home-pond with its paw, so much like a hand, clamped in one of my traps. My gesture of atonement, made half in earnest at the time, now began to have a deeper meaning. And let times be never so hard in days to come, rather than be a party to such a scene as I had just witnessed in that sordid bootleg joint, I would myself go hungry.

      I think it was at that moment that I finally decided to quit the beaver hunt for good.

* The very young of most animals, as a protection against predatory beasts, are odourless.

3 HOW THE PILGRIMAGE COMMENCED

      This decision of mine to give up beaver trapping was not a hasty one. Beaver was an animal on which I depended almost entirely for my living. They had been so identified with my own destiny as to be something in the light of a patron beast, far more so than an owl, a detestable bird whose name had been imposed on me only on account of my nocturnal habits. Although I had ably assisted at the destruction of this СКАЧАТЬ