



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Maria Cecilia Lim and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team





NORTHERN TRAILS


BOOK I

By

William J. Long


_WOOD FOLK SERIES BOOK VI_


1905



PREFACE

In the original preface to "Northern Trails" the author stated that,
with the solitary exception of the salmon's life in the sea after he
vanishes from human sight, every incident recorded here is founded
squarely upon personal and accurate observation of animal life and
habits. I now repeat and emphasize that statement. Even when the
observations are, for the reader's sake, put into the form of a
connected story, there is not one trait or habit mentioned which is not
true to animal life.

Such a statement ought to be enough, especially as I have repeatedly
furnished evidence from reliable eye-witnesses to support every
observation that the critics have challenged; but of late a strenuous
public attack has been made upon the wolf story in this volume by two
men claiming to speak with authority. They take radical exception to my
record of a big white wolf killing a young caribou by snapping at the
chest and heart. They declared this method of killing to be "a
mathematical impossibility" and, by inference, a gross falsehood,
utterly ruinous to true ideas of wolves and of natural history.

As no facts or proofs are given to support this charge, the first thing
which a sensible man naturally does is to examine the fitness of the
critics, in order to ascertain upon what knowledge or experience they
base their dogmatic statements. One of these critics is a man who has no
personal knowledge of wolves or caribou, who asserts that the animal has
no possibility of reason or intelligence, and who has for years publicly
denied the observations of other men which tend to disprove his ancient
theory. It seems hardly worth while to argue about either wolves or men
with such a naturalist, or to point out that Descartes' idea of animals,
as purely mechanical or automatic creatures, has long since been laid
aside and was never considered seriously by any man who had lived close
to either wild or domestic animals. The second critic's knowledge of
wolves consists almost entirely of what he has happened to see when
chasing the creatures with dogs and hunters. Judging by his own nature
books, with their barbaric records of slaughter, his experience of wild
animals was gained while killing them. Such a man will undoubtedly
discover some things about animals, how they fight and hide and escape
their human enemies; but it hardly needs any argument to show that the
man who goes into the woods with dogs and rifles and the desire to kill
can never understand any living animal.

If you examine now any of the little books which he condemns, you will
find a totally different story: no record of chasing and killing, but
only of patient watching, of creeping near to wild animals and winning
their confidence whenever it is possible, of following them day and
night with no motive but the pure love of the thing and no object but to
see exactly what each animal is doing and to understand, so far as a man
can, the mystery of its dumb life.

Naturally a man in this attitude will see many traits of animal life
which are hidden from the game-killer as well as from the scientific
collector of skins. For instance, practically all wild animals are shy
and timid and run away at man's approach. This is the general experience
not only of hunters but of casual observers in the woods. Yet my own
experience has many times shown me exactly the opposite trait: that when
these same shy animals find me unexpectedly close at hand, more than
half the time they show no fear whatever but only an eager curiosity to
know who and what the creature is that sits so quietly near them.
Sometimes, indeed, they seem almost to understand the mental attitude
which has no thought of harm but only of sympathy and friendly interest.
Once I was followed for hours by a young wolf which acted precisely like
a lost dog, too timid to approach and too curious or lonely to run away.
He even wagged his tail when I called to him softly. Had I shot him on
sight, I would probably have foolishly believed that he intended to
attack me when he came trotting along my trail. Three separate times I
have touched a wild deer with my hand; once I touched a moose, once an
eagle, once a bear; and a score of times at least I have had to frighten
these big animals or get out of their way, when their curiosity brought
them too near for perfect comfort.

So much for the personal element, for the general attitude and fitness
of the observer and his critics. But the question is not chiefly a
personal one; it is simply a matter of truth and observation, and the
only honest or scientific method is, first, to go straight to nature and
find out the facts; and then--lest your own eyesight or judgment be at
fault--to consult other observers to find if, perchance, they also have
seen the facts exemplified. This is not so easy as to dogmatize or to
write animal stories; but it is the only safe method, and one which the
nature writer as well as the scientist must follow if his work is to
endure.

Following this good method, when the critics had proclaimed that my
record of a big wolf killing a young caribou by biting into the chest
and heart was an impossibility, I went straight to the big woods and, as
soon as the law allowed, secured photographs and exact measurements of
the first full-grown deer that crossed my trail. These photographs and
measurements show beyond any possibility of honest doubt the following
facts: (1) The lower chest of a deer, between and just behind the
forelegs, is thin and wedge-shaped, exactly as I stated, and the point
of the heart is well down in this narrow wedge. The distance through the
chest and point of the heart from side to side was, in this case,
exactly four and one-half inches. A man's hand, as shown in the
photograph, can easily grasp the whole lower chest of a deer, placing
thumb and forefinger over the heart on opposite sides. (2) The heart of
a deer, and indeed of all ruminant animals, lies close against the chest
walls and is easily reached and wounded. The chest cartilage, except in
an old deer, is soft; the ribs are thin and easily crushed, and the
spaces between the ribs are wide enough to admit a man's finger, to say
nothing of a wolf's fang. In this case the point of the heart, as the
deer lay on his side, was barely five eights of an inch from the
surface. (3) Any dog or wolf, therefore, having a spread of jaws of four
and one-half inches, and fangs three quarters of an inch long, could
easily grasp the chest of this deer from beneath and reach the heart
from either side. As the jaws of the big northern wolf spread from six
to eight inches and his fangs are over an inch long, to kill a deer in
this way would require but a slight effort. The chest of a caribou is
anatomically exactly like that of other deer; only the caribou fawn and
yearling of "Northern Trails" have smaller chests than the animals I
measured.

So much for the facts and the possibilities. As for specific instances,
years ago I found a deer just killed in the snow and beside him the
fresh tracks of a big wolf, which had probably been frightened away at
my approach. The deer was bitten just behind and beneath the left
shoulder, and one long fang had entered the heart. There was not another
scratch on the body, so far as I could discover. I thought this very
exceptional at the time; but years afterwards my Indian guide in the
interior of Newfoundland assured me that it was a common habit of
killing caribou among the big white wolves with which he was familiar.
To show that the peculiar habit is not confined to any one section, I
quote here from the sworn statements of three other eyewitnesses. The
first is superintendent of the Algonquin National Park, a man who has
spent a lifetime in the North Woods and who has at present an excellent
opportunity for observing wild-animal habits; the second is an educated
Sioux Indian; the third is a geologist and mining engineer, now
practicing his profession in Philadelphia.


ALGONQUIN PARK, ONTARIO, August 31, 1907.

This certifies that during the past thirty years spent in our Canadian
wilds, I have seen several animals killed by our large timber wolves. In
the winter of 1903 I saw two deer thus killed on Smoke Lake, Nipissing,
Ontario. One deer was bitten through the front chest, the other just
behind the foreleg. In each case there was no other wound on the body.

[Signed] G.W. BARTLETT, _Superintendent_.


I certify that I lived for twenty years in northern Nebraska and Dakota,
in a region where timber wolves were abundant.... I saw one horse that
had just been killed by a wolf. The front of his chest was torn open to
the heart. There was no other wound on the body. I once watched a wolf
kill a stray horse on the open prairie. He kept nipping at the hind
legs, making the horse turn rapidly till he grew dizzy and fell down.
Then the wolf snapped or bit into his chest.... The horse died in a few
moments.

[Signed] STEPHEN JONES (HEPIDAN).


I certify that in November, 1900, while surveying in Wyoming, my party
saw two wolves chase a two-year-old colt over a cliff some fifteen or
sixteen feet high. I was on the spot with two others immediately after
the incident occurred. The only injuries to the colt, aside from a
broken leg, were deep lacerations made by wolf fangs in the chest behind
the foreshoulder. In addition to this personal observation I have
frequently heard from hunters, herders, and cowboys that big wolves
frequently kill deer and other animals by snapping at the chest.

[Signed] F.S. PUSEY.


I have more evidence of the same kind from the region which I described
in "Northern Trails"; but I give these three simply to show that what
one man discovers as a surprising trait of some individual wolf or deer
may be common enough when we open our eyes to see. The fact that wolves
do not always or often kill in this way has nothing to do with the
question. I know one small region where old wolves generally hunt in
pairs and, so far as I can discover, one wolf always trips or throws the
game, while the other invariably does the killing at the throat. In
another region, including a part of Algonquin Park, in Ontario, I have
the records of several deer killed by wolves in a single winter; and in
every case the wolf slipped up behind his game and cut the femoral
artery, or the inner side of the hind leg, and then drew back quietly,
allowing the deer to bleed to death.

The point is, that because a thing is unusual or interesting it is not
necessarily false, as my dogmatic critics would have you believe. I have
studied animals, not as species but as individuals, and have recorded
some things which other and better naturalists have overlooked; but I
have sought for facts, first of all, as zealously as any biologist, and
have recorded only what I have every reason to believe is true. That
these facts are unusual means simply that we have at last found natural
history to be interesting, just as the discovery of unusual men and
incidents gives charm and meaning to the records of our humanity. There
may be honest errors or mistakes in these books--and no one tries half
so hard as the author to find and correct them--but meanwhile the fact
remains that, though six volumes of the Wood Folk books have already
been published, only three slight errors have thus far been pointed out,
and these were promptly and gratefully acknowledged.

The simple truth is that these observations of mine, though they are all
true, do not tell more than a small fraction of the interesting things
that wild animals do continually in their native state, when they are
not frightened by dogs and hunters, or when we are not blinded by our
preconceived notions in watching them. I have no doubt that romancing is
rife just now on the part of men who study animals in a library; but
personally, with my note-books full of incidents which I have never yet
recorded, I find the truth more interesting, and I cannot understand why
a man should deliberately choose romance when he can have the greater
joy of going into the wilderness to see with his own eyes and to
understand with his own heart just how the animals live. One thing seems
to me to be more and more certain: that we are only just beginning to
understand wild animals, and it is chiefly our own barbarism, our lust
of killing, our stupid stuffed specimens, and especially our prejudices
which stand in the way of greater knowledge. Meanwhile the critic who
asserts dogmatically what a wild animal will or will not do under
certain conditions only proves how carelessly he has watched them and
how little he has learned of Nature's infinite variety.

WILLIAM J. LONG

STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT



CONTENTS

WAYEESES THE STRONG ONE

THE OLD WOLF'S CHALLENGE

WHERE THE TRAIL BEGINS

NOEL AND MOOKA

THE WAY OF THE WOLF

THE WHITE WOLF'S HUNTING

TRAILS THAT CROSS IN THE SNOW


GLOSSARY OF INDIAN NAMES



FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS


"A QUICK SNAP WHERE THE HEART LAY"

"THE TERRIBLE HOWL OF A GREAT WHITE WOLF"

"WATCHING HER GROWING YOUNGSTERS"

"AS THE MOTHER'S LONG JAWS CLOSED OVER THE SMALL OF THE BACK"

"THE SILENT, APPALLING DEATH-WATCH BEGAN"



WAYEESES THE STRONG ONE



_The Old Wolf's Challenge_

We were beating up the Straits to the Labrador when a great gale swooped
down on us and drove us like a scared wild duck into a cleft in the
mountains, where the breakers roared and the seals barked on the black
rocks and the reefs bared their teeth on either side, like the long jaws
of a wolf, to snap at us as we passed.

In our flight we had picked up a fisherman--snatched him out of his
helpless punt as we luffed in a smother of spray, and dragged him
aboard, like an enormous frog, at the end of the jib sheet--and it was
he who now stood at the wheel of our little schooner and took her
careening in through the tickle of Harbor Woe. There, in a desolate,
rock-bound refuge on the Newfoundland coast, the _Wild Duck_ swung to
her anchor, veering nervously in the tide rip, tugging impatiently and
clanking her chains as if eager to be out again in the turmoil. At
sunset the gale blew itself out, and presently the moon wheeled full and
clear over the dark mountains.

Noel, my big Indian, was curled up asleep in a caribou skin by the
foremast; and the crew were all below asleep, every man glad in his
heart to be once more safe in a snug harbor. All about us stretched the
desolate wastes of sea and mountains, over which silence and darkness
brooded, as over the first great chaos. Near at hand were the black
rocks, eternally wet and smoking with the fog and gale; beyond towered
the icebergs, pale, cold, glittering like spires of silver in the
moonlight; far away, like a vague shadow, a handful of little gray
houses clung like barnacles to the base of a great bare hill whose foot
was in the sea and whose head wavered among the clouds of heaven. Not a
light shone, not a sound or a sign of life came from these little
houses, whose shells close daily at twilight over the life within, weary
with the day's work. Only the dogs were restless--those strange
creatures that shelter in our houses and share our bread, yet live in
another world, a dumb, silent, lonely world shut out from ours by
impassable barriers.

For hours these uncanny dogs had puzzled me, a score of vicious, hungry
brutes that drew the sledges in winter and that picked up a vagabond
living in the idle summer by hunting rabbits and raiding the fishermen's
flakes and pig-pens and by catching flounders in the sea as the tide
ebbed. Venture among them with fear in your heart and they would fly at
your legs and throat like wild beasts; but twirl a big stick jauntily,
or better still go quietly on your way without concern, and they would
skulk aside and watch you hungrily out of the corners of their surly
eyes, whose lids were red and bloodshot as a mastiff's. When the moon
rose I noticed them flitting about like witches on the lonely shore,
miles away from the hamlet; now sitting on their tails in a solemn
circle; now howling all together as if demented, and anon listening
intently in the vast silence, as if they heard or smelled or perhaps
just felt the presence of some unknown thing that was hidden from human
senses. And when I paddled ashore to watch them one ran swiftly past
without heeding me, his nose outstretched, his eyes green as foxfire in
the moonlight, while the others vanished like shadows among the black
rocks, each intent on his unknown quest.

That is why I had come up from my warm bunk at midnight to sit alone on
the taffrail, listening in the keen air to the howling that made me
shiver, spite of myself, and watching in the vague moonlight to
understand if possible what the brutes felt amid the primal silence and
desolation.

A long interval of profound stillness had passed, and I could just make
out the circle of dogs sitting on their tails on the open shore, when
suddenly, faint and far away, an unearthly howl came rolling down the
mountains, _ooooooo-ow-wow-wow!_ a long wailing crescendo beginning
softly, like a sound in a dream, and swelling into a roar that waked the
sleeping echoes and set them jumping like startled goats from crag to
crag. Instantly the huskies answered, every clog breaking out into
indescribable frenzied wailings, as a coll