# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 38/Number 6/Furs

From the Red Book magazine, April 1922, pp. 75–78, 138–141. Accompanying illustrations omitted.
Furs
By Edison Marshall
Illustrated by H. J. Soulen
THE Aikens' tent faced east and a little south, and there was always a time in late afternoon when the sunlight flooded through the opening in the rear. It looked as if it aimed straight for their camp—coursing down through a rift in the tall pines beyond the river, slanting down across the foaming waters, and full upon the tent—and sometimes upon the Aiken brothers, returned from their work on river-bank and hill. Except for this yellow flood, it might have been very hard to get a clear view of their faces as they played their game one day, sitting at a rude table just outside their canvas shelter.
For it is true that ordinarily the Aiken camp was not well lighted. In the first place it had been built in the shadow of the pines—those tall, dark, forbidding pines of the Oregon wilderness. And the pine-shadow never seems just an absence of light: it is like a dusky substance in itself that the eyes strain to see through, and which can get into a man's soul, after a certain number of years, and turn his thoughts dark. It is the background on which the Oregon wilderness—far and far in the Cascades—is laid. Besides, the site was the very bottom of a gloomy and steep-walled glen that never, even in the springtime, seemed to give itself to the sun with that sweet surrender that is seen by country dwellers in the plowed fields. It always seemed dark, and the sunlight always an intruder, flickering nervously in the spaces between the trees and about to flit away. Even the white foam of the river, the brink of which was just behind the tent, could not alleviate the effect of gloom about the camp. Lastly, one of the Aiken boys—the older and the stronger—was the kind of man that never seems to emerge fully into the light. It was as if a shadow—an essence from the brooding dusk of his own thoughts—was ever over him.
But the moment's burst of sunlight illumined his face quite clearly; and now and then, as his arms moved in the game, it revealed his lean, dark hand. His was the face of a hill man, and at first one would have been mystified by the eyes. They were dark eyes, in which a man's strong passions smoldered and glowed; and perhaps they had something to do with the nickname by which he was known through the Divide. Wolf Aiken, was what the people called him. The name was all over him—in the fierce eyes that could also be cunning, the stealth of his motions, the savagery that was about his lips, and most of all, the lightning strength of his muscles. They were not the kind of muscles that gather in great bunches and stand out like deformities. Rather, his legs and arms and back looked lean. The wilderness, whose child he was, had put its mark upon him.
This is a thing the wilderness is always doing. Sometimes the mark is just a glitter in the eyes, as if the pupils had been polished to steel points, and it goes with a peculiar, listening alertness that once acquired is never lost. Both things seem to be mostly habit—the result of the constant watchfulness that is soon acquired by all the dwellers of the wild places. The men who do not acquire them are merely transients, going out by such swift and certain highways as an unguarded step on a precipice, or failure to find shelter before a blizzard, or an attempt to swim the river at the rapids. These are all one-way roads, as the sign-posts say, and the transients do not come again to commit more blunders.
Wolf Aiken was a young man, scarcely thirty; but the wilderness had already destroyed the outer marks of youth. The skin looked very dark, the hair black and unkempt. The lines of his face were already graven deep. He was always alert, always swift and deadly of muscle, and the eyes of the buzzard in the sky were not more watchful than his. Usually, in his work on the river-bank, Wolf was as cold as steel, but as the sun revealed him this April afternoon, a curious heat and excitement had seemed to engross him. He tried to suppress it, setting his muscles like iron every time he played a card; yet the gaunt hand trembled ever so slightly; and a tiny glow, so faint that the eyes could not be sure of it at all, lay on the dark skin of his cheek-bones.
Perhaps Buck Aiken, his brother, did not notice it. Possibly he was also too engrossed in the game. But Wolf wondered at it himself. He had gambled before, always coldly, always with a face inscrutable as a mask, and no fire or passion had ever led him to a false play. The stakes had been large, too; and here—he tried to tell himself that the stakes were not worth the effort of the game. His eyes wandered over toward them—the glossy, dusky heap by the tent, and it seemed to him that the heart within him beat faster.
IT was merely a little arrangement for the division of the season's catch. They were trappers, the Aikens, and they had just concluded the most successful season of their lives. Furs were high; yet the mink and marten had been more plentiful than at any time they could remember. The little dark heap of prime pelts represented better than sixteen hundred dollars—a good sum in the hills. And this afternoon they were dividing the pelts between them.
As all furriers know, there is often a great difference between two pelts of the same species. Small blemishes, length of hair, color and size, all have their weight. So Buck Aiken, the younger brother, had suggested a simple way to secure a fair division. He laid out two pelts at a time, the same fur and as near the same value as he could determine. Then each man drew cards from their soiled deck—and the low card got first choice of the two pelts.
The results of the game could not possibly make more than a few dollars' difference; and Wolf could not understand his growing rancor at his brother's consistent winning. Throughout the division only twice had Wolf drawn the lowest card, and in each case the two pelts had been so nearly alike that he could hardly make a choice. But many times, it seemed, when Buck had won, he had noticed a pronounced difference in the value of the pelts. It had begun to get on his nerves.
It seemed to him, as they came up for drawing, that he had certain mental associations with every individual skin. It was not that he had known the living creatures that wore them. The Little People of forest and stream are dear to all real lovers of nature; but Wolf's only relation with them was one of death. He had no mental picture of the living mink,—the white-toothed little slayer that followed moonlit trails on the river-bank,—but he did have particularly vivid images of each animal's death.
Buck was shuffling now—the last pair of marten skins were up for the draw—and Wolf leaned forward with half-closed eyes, carried back to certain little dramas on the river-bank and upon the snow-swept hills. He remembered so well each close-range shot with the killer-gun or blow with wooden mallet—so close to the sparkling eyes—whenever their victims had been found alive in their traps. When the two brothers made the trap-line together, it had always been Wolf who dispatched them. Buck never liked to do it. Ever since a child, he had retained a peculiar squeamishness about such things that—although rightfully ridiculous—had always seemed lovable to Wolf. Always Wolf had been ready enough to do this task for him; and now he remembered these killings, vivid in every little detail. And the strangeness lay not only in the fact that Wolf remembered every blow he had dealt, but that he remembered them—and every detail of the little tragedies in which they were concerned—with a kind of passion and ecstasy. It was the wolf for which he was named, drunk with rapture over its fallen prey; and each pelt began to partake of a new and astounding valuation in his eyes.
AGAIN his gaunt hand drew a card—then flung it with a curse beside the card his brother had drawn. Buck had won again. He began to look over the two marten skins. Wolf remembered one of them particularly well. The little creature had been found alive in the trap, and Wolf could almost hear again the slight tap he had given it with the mallet. An inexplicable thrill of delight went through him when he saw that it was the inferior of the two skins. Buck, of course, would choose the other.
“You fool!” his voice suddenly rasped out. “The other was the best skin!” For Buck, through some lapse of judgment, had not chosen the one Wolf had anticipated.
Buck looked up with a question in his dark eyes. For once he did not understand his brother. Wolf was evidently sincere, and it was a queer thing that he should seem distressed, rather than pleased, at his brother's error. He chuckled a little.
“I'll keep it, anyway. You've been getting an edge the worst of it. And now what about the fisher?”
Only one hide was left; and Wolf's mind flew to it with a startling and overwhelming passion. It was a glossy, beautiful thing, the only fisher in their catch, and the most valuable pelt in the collection. For a moment the immediate surroundings faded from Wolf's consciousness—blinked out like a light and left a river-picture that filled him with a strange, quivering eagerness. It was down by the great whirlpool, beyond the fallen pine, where the waters had undermined the bank. Buck had not been with him when he found the fisher, alive and ready to fight to the death in the trap. There had been many blows that day. Life had been tenacious in the beautiful body. But he had done his work well, and had not injured the skin. And Wolf remembered that afterward there had been a little flow of blood from the animal's mouth—he had seen it on his hand
He had hardly noticed it then. The memory of it was clearer than the fact itself. His eyes leaped over the furry pelt, reveling in it; and desire was upon him. Buck seemed to be speaking from far away.
“Why not draw for it—fair way as any,” the man was saying. “It's a prime pelt.”
“Yes, shuffle 'em quick,” Wolf responded. “Low card wins, the same as before.”
Once more Buck looked up, questioning. Wolf was speaking in an unfamiliar voice, as if his attention were riveted elsewhere Buck followed down the line of his hungry eyes until they rested upon the pelt.
“What you lookin' at?” he demanded.
Wolf seemed to recoil. “Nothin'.” He reached out his lean hand, with suddenly narrowing eyes. “Let me deal, this time,” he demanded.
Buck smiled at him. “Sure.” He passed over the sticky deck, and the cards worked through Wolf's fingers. It seemed to his glowing eyes that the last card to leave his fingers on one side was a three-spot, coming up as the card nearest the top. He wasn't sure—but his heart leaped at the possibility.
He held the deck out in his soiled hand. “Cut?” he asked breathlessly.
“Let 'em ride!” Buck answered with a smile.
Without waiting for Buck to draw first, Wolf broke the pack—lifting two cards from the deck. It was a chance, anyway; and the dark face was alive with delight and passion when he looked. He had drawn a three.
“Good Lord, what luck!” Buck gasped. There was no hint of suspicion in his face. “But I'll never say die—”
He cut carelessly from the deck. Then he shouted with boyish joy.
He had drawn the deuce; and he threw the fisher pelt upon his pile. But Wolf had no answering shout of blasphemy. His emotion went too deep for that, and he only stared with red eyes at the river—intrigued by the fury and tumult with which the wild stream swept by their camp.
THE night fell crisp and chill—the kind of night that usually made the Aiken brothers think at once of the comfort of their blankets. The wind was an icy breath off the snowfields, whispering strangely in the trees, and blowing, like lips, at the fire. Yet neither of the brothers went at once to his bed.
Buck Aiken lighted his pipe, and supposed of course that his brother was joining him in this little ritual of friendship. It was true that Wolf held his pipe between his teeth, and in the growing shadows and the smoke from the dying fire, Buck failed to observe that it was not lighted. It was wholly possible that Wolf himself was not aware of the fact.
He wondered why his brother did not turn in. Usually the boy, loving sleep, went quickly to his bunk. Often when Wolf wished to sit and enjoy his pipe before a high fire, he was scarcely able to keep the younger man awake. But tonight Buck still lingered—and Wolf felt a growing impatience. He wished that his brother would go.
He didn't know why. The impulse went too deep for him to see. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts, wanted this with a curious, passionate eagerness. Again and again he looked at his watch, pretending to yawn sleepily himself. There was no conscious cunning behind the little actions. They all seemed to spring from some dark part of him, an evil genius that was in the ascendency. “If you're goin' to set up, we'd better build up the fire,” Buck said suddenly.
Wolf reached out his lean hand, with suddenly narrowing eyes. “Let me deal, this time,” he demanded.
Wolf was cold himself, but he shook his head. “We'll be turnin' in in a minute. Go ahead and get the bunk warm.”
All men who have been in the wilderness have learned the solace and comfort of a high, bright fire at night. As the flames leap, the memory-cords of a thousand-thousand years begin to hum, and a man crawls out of his civilization as a butterfly from its chrysalis; and the fire suddenly becomes a haven and protection from all the age-old terrors of the darkness. The fire was man's first friend, and even when the darkness no longer holds things to fear, when the eves of the last beast of prey no longer blink and glow in the shadows, the memory of its cheer remains. It is hard for a man to break away from. Wolf had lied when he said he would soon turn in. He simply knew that Buck would not go to bed as long as the fire was bright, and he would rather sit cold than have him remain. Besides, the coldness was only at his fingertips and skin and feet, not in his heart or his brain. It was as if he had a fire within himself.
He had no definite plans to carry out after his brother was asleep. He only knew that he wanted to be alone, and he had some vague idea of examining again the two piles of pelts. He wanted to count them over, to feel the soft fur, and perhaps—in his brother's unconsciousness—he would be able to imagine a sense of possession not only for his own portion but his brother's as well. A sleeping man cannot own furs, he thought. They would be his, all his—for the moment at least. No one that lies still, with closed eyes, could ever stretch a hand to the treasure. His mind seemed to linger over the thought as if it loved it.
HE glanced furtively at Buck; the younger man was busy at some cheery plans of his own. His thoughts were not on the furs, unless he was thinking of the money that his share of them would bring. There would be gay times with that wealth—eight hundred dollars for each of them. His eyes seemed to be quite bright, not dark and brooding like his brother's. Wolf scorned him in his thoughts, yet at the same time he envied him. For did he not own half—the better half—of the pelts? At least, he owned them now—until the night's sleep claimed him, and shut his bright, boyish eyes.
“Them are sure fine furs!” Buck suddenly exulted.
For the first time the hot light went out of Wolf's eyes, and left them icy and glittering. If Buck had seen the look, he would have known no sleep that night. Only the black hatred of jealousy and covetousness brings that look to the eyes of men. But Buck rose and shuffled to his cot; and Wolf was left alone by the fire.
He waited until he thought the younger man was asleep. Then he piled wood on the fire. In its bright light he was able to make a close scrutiny of the deck with which they had played that afternoon. He hoped that he would find some indication of cheating on his brother's part, not wholly understanding why he hoped so. Yet there were no marks on the cards, no rough edges made by thumb-nails, nothing to which he could attach the least vestige of suspicion.
He got up then, and stole into the tent. For a moment he listened to Buck's heavy breathing. The man was asleep—the dark face in repose, a smile about the lips. They could smile, then, those lips—even in sleep, as if he were remembering his possession of the dark heap of pelts beside the cot.
For a moment it seemed to Wolf that he could not leave the bedside. He stood motionless, trance-like, scarcely breathing, a strange cloud and murk over his thoughts. Through the front opening of the tent he could see the glow that the fire made, dimming and brightening as if by a pulse. It was red, too. It was almost as red as the blood he had shed to take the furs. Blood was always red and warm—like fire. Beyond, he saw the stars through the rifts in the trees.
Buck had kicked off his heavy trousers before climbing in between the blankets, and with them the belt on which he carried his hunting knife. The trousers lay beside the tree-bough pallet, and Wolf slowly bent toward them. As his hands moved over the cloth, with a curious nervousness, his knuckles touched the handle of the knife. He couldn't keep them from it.
The steel rib of the knife-hilt was cold; yet a flame climbed up Wolf's arm through his veins. He stood erect again, a long time, listening and watching. Again he bent, and drew the blade half out. His fingers seemed to lock about it. He touched its edge; Buck always kept his knife sharp as a razor. Then Wolf's eyes wandered to a little exposed patch of bare flesh just under the curve of his brother's jowl. But he pushed the blade back into its case, and stepped forth to the door of the tent.
The fire was almost in embers again, and its red glow went out over the water. Wolf bent and lifted both heaps of furs into his arms.
He carried them out and laid them beside the fire. They were his, all his—until Buck wakened. They were beautiful and soft and glossy; they would bring much money in the fur-market He began to wonder if any amount of money would be great enough to equal their value—to pay for their softness and luster and to make up for the blood he had spilled to get them. They were his own, all his; for had he not always administered the blow that had killed the wounded? He had won his right t them by killing; why should Buck carry away half of them?
THE trapper ran his fingers through the fur, and the motion yielded a curious excitement. Then he pressed the great lovely fisher skin against his cheek.
It carried him back to the day and the place of the catch—far up the river, where the waters had undermined the bank. There was a whirlpool there in which no living creature—except the Little People of the river themselves—might live. It was a cataract, a wild, tumultuous place, where the waters roared and broke against great rocks, and even the salmon were dashed back and forth in their upward climb to spawn. He remembered now that black whirlpool; and very slowly and carefully he recalled every occasion Buck and he had passed that way.
He remembered that only on his last visit, when he had caught the fisher, did he notice that the supporting earth of the bank had all been washed away. It was just a green shelf, extending out over the whirlpool, and possibly it had already fallen in. He was curiously sickened at the thought. But if it hadn't, the slightest weight would break it down.
There was even a wilder riffle than this, just back of the tent. He looked a long time into the wild waters, fascinated by the faint glow that the fire flung over them. They would clutch a man, those waters; they would hurl him against the great boulders of the river-bed; they would carry him away as sleep had carried Buck,—only from such a sleep he could never awaken.
Wolf's creed was the creed of the beast for which he was named, but it was also the creed of the river: to slay all that could not conquer it. Wolf Aiken rose slowly, and went to the pile of steel traps that the two of them had but recently taken up.
He moved among them very cautiously, so that the chains would not rattle. He did not permit the passion that was upon him to affect the iron control that his nerves had over his muscles. Then he tiptoed to the door of the tent for a last look at the sleeper.
Buck always slept soundly, never wakening until the first light of day. Wolf left him and headed up the river-bank, a steel trap in his hand.
It was a long walk that Wolf made that night, but he was tireless as the river beside him. It was as if the laws in obedience to which the river flowed to the sea were no more commanding, no more inexorable, than those that drove him up the bank that night.
He reached at last the outstretching bank over the whirlpool where the fisher had been caught. No, it had not yet fallen in; and a careless eye, unless the observer climbed down the bank to the water's edge below or above the place, would never see that its supporting earth had been undermined.
Wolf picked up a long, dry piece of driftwood—a slender dead limb of a pine, and looped the chain of the trap over its end. Then he crept as near as he dared to the overhanging bank, and carefully lifted the trap clear to its edge.
As he lay there, crouched and trembling, the old buck that fed on the hillsides might have mistaken him for the gray wolf itself, that remorseless slayer for which he was named, crouched in ambush on the deer-trail.
NEVER had Wolf cooked the breakfast better. His hands were steady and sure. No telltale flush was on his face. And he waited until an hour after breakfast before he began the morning's business.
He sauntered over to the pile of traps and began to look them over. He tested the springs of some; he jerked the chains of others in his hands. Then he looked up questioningly.
“Buck, where's that old Number 215 that caught the fisher?”
The younger Aiken looked up. “It's right there. Aint gone blind, have you, Wolf?”
One little line about the older man's mouth quivered—ever so slightly. “Well, it aint. I guess I left it up the river.”
Wolf began to keep constant watch of the river for a figure that might come floating by.
Buck strolled over. “But I thought I saw the old brute just yesterday.” He kicked the pile of traps. “But it aint here. I must have seen another. I guess you left it.”
For a moment Wolf seemed to be trying to recollect. “Of course! You know the big pine across the river—where we caught that last mink?”
“Yes.”
“There's a green bank just above. Aint more than a mile from here. It must be lying on the bank where I dropped it, when I stopped to loop up the others. There's a little brush between the tree and the spot, but you can circle the brush and me right out to it. If you aint got nothin' better to do, you might go and get it—and maybe pick off a deer on the way.” Buck started to get up, and for the first time a quiver passed over Wolf's frame. But his eyes drifted to the two piles of pelts, and at once he was steady. Buck headed up the river.
He turned just once when the brush had obscured his body. Only the face suddenly showed through the thickets, and it seemed to Wolf's eyes that it gleamed quite white. It was only an effect of the sunlight—rare indeed in this somber glen,—but tor an instant the face seemed to have the pallor of death. Wolf stood still a long time, then went back to the piles of pelts.
Wolf gave him thirty minutes to walk to the river, and thirty more, in case of a failure of plans, to return. The long morning passed, and at noon Wolf cooked himself his usual midday meal. It was not that he felt hungry. But the cunning of the damned was already upon him: in case something did go wrong with his plans, and Buck returned, it would seem more natural to be cooking over the campfire. It might be that the younger man had misunderstood the direction and was spending the morning in fruitless search. It would not do to arouse his suspicions now; otherwise Buck would be careful not to give him another opportunity.
The afternoon was long and still, with hardly a breath of air in the pine-tops. As the hours passed, Wolf's exultation increased. Again and again his hands worked through the piles of pelts, gloating over them, drunk with the knowledge of possession. They were his, all his—for Buck had not returned.
Twilight is always a mystery in the mountains, and just at the drop of it, Wolf started up the river. It was well to pretend to make a search, he thought: he would be able to tell the curious in the valley below how he had hunted over all the hills, and be able to prove it if he wished. He hastened through the heavy brush.
At the edge of the fallen pine, he drew up with a sudden jerk. He knew here his first moment of terror. What if Buck had discovered the deadfall in time, and was waiting with ready rifle for Wolf to come? It would be exactly what Buck would do: for justice, in the mountains, is a thing to deal swiftly. Buck would know that Wolf would come to view his work, ostentatiously to make a search. His sight would be true and keen along the rifle-barrel.
WOLF waited a long time, while the shadows grew and deepened around him. Already it was almost too dark to see. Then he crept on.
He made a great circle, coming out on the other side of the deadfall. And in a moment more he was at the brink of the river.
The whole contour of the bank seemed changed. The trap was no longer in sight; the long stick that he had used slanted down from the bank, and the end of it, resting in the water, vibrated like a living thing. It startled him for a moment. It was as if a finger were pointing out of the whirlpool.
Fully six feet of earth had crumbled away. The trap, of course, had fallen with the man who had stepped upon the treacherous place to get it. Wolf cursed, a savage sound in the gathering darkness.
He walked rather swiftly on the way back to his camp. He wanted to be with his furs again—to realize that they were all, all his, with none now to claim even a part of them. He had killed the creatures that wore them; who else had a right to them? Besides, the deepening darkness and silence of the forest oppressed him.
He had a strange fancy that the river, by whose side he walked, was racing with him. It was as if it were carrying something that it wished to bring to the camp before he himself arrived there. It was so white in the darkness; its song was so prolonged and strange; it was so wild and indomitable. And for the first time Wolf began to wonder how soon his brother's body would be found.
He had not considered this phase of the issue before. Perhaps even now it was caught in one of the dim under-passages beneath the fallen logs, from which it would never emerge. Possibly it would continue down the river's wild course clear to the settlements in the valleys. It would be only a mystery there: no human mind could conceive of the sequence of events that had led to the tragedy.
He reached the camp, and at once built a roaring fire. He told himself it was a signal fire—to guide his lost brother into camp. He would be able to tell, in the settlements, that he had taken every precaution to find his lost brother. He did not know there was any other reason. He wouldn't have admitted any other. But the same deep-buried instinct that is the basis for the love that all men have for the open fire had its effect here: it was a haven from such dangers as might be waiting in the darkness. He wanted its company tonight.
FOR three nights Wolf Aiken built high fires on the river-bank. During the days between, he made excursions into the forest, always with the intention of traveling wide and far, but always returning soon. Somehow, the forest got on his nerves as it never had before. It seemed to him that there were vast forces moving in it that he could not see. There was a great purpose and theme in its silence, its ineffable aloofness, but it was always obscured in a patch of distant shadow. Besides, he wanted to be with his furs.
Not that he handled them much, after the first day. The sense of possession was enough. He arranged them in one heap, and tied them into a glossy, beautiful bundle. With a thong of buckskin he tied the bundle to the ridgepole, at the very rear of the tent and almost at the brink of the river. But every day the thought of their possession was dearer to him. Soon he could leave the dreadful forest, and take them with him down into the valleys. Men would admire them there, and many would try to buy them. He wondered if any of these admiring men would try to kill him for them.
But his self-control was not so perfect that he could shut out certain haunting memories. And all at once Wolf remembered that his brother had been a particularly able swimmer.
The thought startled him a little. What if Buck had been able to brave the current, to swim out of that terrible whirlpool, and would sometime return to pay his debts? What if Buck should be waiting now, in the thickets across the river, for the moment in which he might make amends. He cursed himself for not killing Buck that first night while he slept.
He began to wish that he could find the body, and the wish grew until it was the greatest desire of his life. Bodies usually rose after a few hours, he knew. Wolf began to keep constant watch of the river for a figure that might come floating by. He was almost afraid to go to sleep at night for fear that it would pass when he did not see it. And that would mean a whole life of tormenting doubt, a whole life of waiting for Buck to return.
FORTUNATELY he was able to watch the river perfectly when he sat up in his bunk. It was a grim and eerie watch! Far into the night he would sit, wholly motionless, with eyes straining into the silvered foam. He would hear its eternal chant—a song of hunger that could never be quite satisfied. Ever the river seemed less and less a lifeless phenomenon of nature, and more and more a living thing, a thing that ever hungered and was never full fed. He couldn't keep up with it. He couldn't watch it all the time. It seemed to him that it was cheating him, trying to get ahead of him—running ever and ever, even in the moment or two he slept.
He did have more rational moments. In these he was usually able to convince himself that Buck's body had been caught in some dim passage of the river-bed, perhaps wedged in between boulders or entrapped, like a fishnet, in driftwood. Besides, it might have floated far past his camp the first night—still beneath the surface. But always the old dread and uncertainty returned.
Buck had been an able swimmer: Wolf could remember just how he had looked when he struck off across the swimming-hole that they had played in as children. His body had always gleamed; and Wolf could picture the same gleaming body fighting through the torrents. He had used to dive for long, breathtaking seconds, until it seemed to the watching boys that surely some disaster had happened to him in the ooze of the bottom; but always, laughing, he had risen again. Wolf could still see his streaming hair and eyes as he came out. What river-bottom could hold him now?
In a moment of vivid self-consciousness he knew what he must do. One more night would he lie in his camp, but only one. In the morning he would go down to the settlements and carry his precious furs with him. The river could be forgotten then. The silence would no longer follow him, and his dreadful watch would be over. After all, it was just his dark thoughts. He would be all right once he got out of the wilderness.
WOLF AIKEN did not even remove his heavy logging-boots before going to his bunk. He wished to leave quickly in the morning. He had packed his few belongings; the pelts still swung from the ridgepole and could be easily strapped on his back. The prospect of deliverance from the dark woods gave him back, in a measure, his self-control.
He would not watch the river this night, he thought. It had all been a fancy, anyway, the beginning of madness, and nothing that floated on its water could keep him awake tonight. He was desperate for sleep.
Yet he was not entirely sure of himself: there had been nights before when he had resolved to sleep but had lain awake to watch instead. Tonight he reversed his usual position in the bed, lying with head toward the rear of the tent and the river, rather than the front. To see the stream at all, he had to sit up and turn his head completely about.
THE wilderness at night is almost always still; but tonight the hush that followed was so deep and strange that it had a quality of unreality. The river still sang under it, but did not in the least affect its absolute depth. Wolf, still at the fag-end of his dream, heard his own blood booming in his eardrums, and that was all.
It beat ever louder and faster, until it seemed to deafen him. There was a strange quality in the darkness, too—a breath-taking, groping horror that seemed to paralyze him in his blankets. Some danger was waiting just without his tent, even now crouching—and Wolf's long body jerked in the blankets as he started out of his sleep.
He opened his eyes, blind at first to everything except the great silvery patches that lay just outside the tent-opening. He did not know what they were. He didn't realize that the moon had come up while he dozed. And terror swept through him, through every nerve and into the last fiber of every muscle, as a twig cracked just outside his tent.
The sound must have occurred the instant that he opened his eyes, only an instant after the gust of wind. In his mind, it was just at the river-bank. He didn't know that he had lost his sense of direction. He had forgotten that he had lain down in his bunk in the opposite direction from usual, and the rear of the tent was to him the front.
It is always hard to locate the exact source of any of the little night-sounds in the mountains. The sound might have been any place within forty feet of the tent, but to him it sounded as if it were immediately behind him, in what was to him the front of the tent. The fact that the river sang there instead of in front as usual did not clear matters up in his mind. He gave no thought to the river, except in the sense of what might rise out of it. He was listening too intently to the other sounds.
But it came about that in one little instant more, all the sounds that the wild might utter could no longer draw his attention. His eyes dropped down, just for an instant, and for the first time he saw a long, strange shadow on the tent floor. He gazed at it with growing horror. For the shadow wavered—in all that world of silence and immobility, it wavered to and fro.
There was only one thing could cast a shadow like that. Some form in the doorway, straight and tall, had intercepted the flood of moonlight through the tent opening. A sound is only a vibration in the air, a thing in which any man might be deceived, but this was reality. He seemed to know that some figure had come and was standing in the front opening of the tent, its eyes upon him.
“It's Buck, come back,” his hoarse whisper spoke.
Whether Buck had returned—risen like the swimmer he was—out of the cataract, or whether he had never fallen into the trap, did not make any difference. He would have the same debts to pay, the same remorseless punishment to inflict. Whether life was in him didn't matter in the least. He had come to get his furs. With a wild, half-strangled cry, Wolf leaped to his feet.
The sharp blade caught the moonlight and glittered in his hand. It made a streak of light as Wolf leaped the length of the tent. There was a great dark shape, just as he knew there would be, between him and the moonlit opening of the tent. It was the thing that had cast the shadow, and Wolf did not take time to notice anything except its outline. He simply beheld it as he lunged from the bed, and in blind terror he hurled himself against it with descending knife.
It gave before him, swinging out beneath his body, and wood cracked sharply beneath him. Then there was a sense of vast and immeasurable disaster, a great falling and rocking and hovering at the edge of nothingness. And in the little fraction of a second before the end, Wolf knew the truth.
The wilderness vengeance would not have been complete, if he had not known. The gust of wind, when it had shaken the pine-tops, had also swung back and forth the bundle of furs that hung from Wolf's ridgepole. Startled out of his dream, he had seen the wavering of the shadow that the furs cast on the tent floor; he had seen their dark outline as he leaped, and he had hurled his weight against them.
IT was the rear of tent,—at the brink of the river,—not the front, as he had thought. His arms went about the bundle of furs, but they could not check the force of his leap. They swung out; the pressure on the ridgepole pulled the tent from its supporting poles, and canvas and all plunged with him into the river.
There was no swimming in that current. The canvas clung about him, swept over him and held him fast, and the arms of the river seized him with resistless power. They hurled him here and there like a straw.
So he did not try. The moon still shone, its soft light enchanting the wilderness; and the river—the deathless spirit of the wild itself—sang on.
Here and there the little water-people—the mink and the great trout—scurried away in fright as a dark something was swept down past their dim haunts. The canvas of the tent still enveloped his body, locking fast the embrace in which Wolf Aiken's arms encircled his bundle of furs.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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