V
JULES’S STRATAGEM
Tritou swore mighty and fearful oaths. For the third time in as many weeks, his traps had been robbed of their fur and the empty ones sprung. The first time it had happened he reset them, and let it go at that; the second time he reset them, and watched half the night, but saw nothing, and the next morning the traps were all sprung again; now, the third time, it was too much for any hard-working Indian to stand.
Tritou set and baited his line once more; then he started off at full speed for the post, forty miles away. He was on foot, and it was night when he reached the stockade; without a word to any one, he went into his tepee, brought out food, blankets, and his beloved rifle; then he picked out his dogs, eight of them, from the pack that wandered about the post yard, harnessed them to his light sledge, and went off into the darkness.
The other trappers wondered at this extraordinary behaviour on Tritou’s part; he was usually communicative, and often quarrelsome, therefore this silent streak in him astonished his fellow-Indians. “Tritou he fin’ beeg lot caribou to-day, Ah t’ink,” said old Maquette. “Mabbe,” the others answered, and that was all that was said about it.
Tritou urged on his dogs; mile after mile passed under the sledge, and still he hurried on. It was a quiet night, and at times a cloudy one. There had been no snow for several days, and the crust was very hard—so hard that the sledge often whirled sidewise on the turns, because the bone runners could get no hold on the glare surface. The dogs needed no whip; there were eight of them to the light sledge, and they made easy work of it with only one hundred and forty pounds to draw, for Tritou was not a heavy man. Four hours they travelled; then Tritou raa-a-ed softly to them, and they swung off to the right, following a snow gorge which led across a long barren. At the edge of the timber Tritou stopped his team, and fastened the leader to a tree; with rifle cocked and eyes and ears alert, he went into the sombre woods. His snow-shoes clicked a little, though he did his best to prevent it by walking wide-legged and lifting them high at every step; with a muttered curse, he knelt and took them off. The crust was too slippery to stand in moccasins alone, so he was forced to put them on again.
He went very slowly, listening intently at every little sound, and peering now high, then low, through the tree trunks. An owl, disturbed by this strange marauder, screeched over his head and flew away. Tritou started at the sound. “Hibou! Dam’!” he whispered to himself. Suddenly he stopped and looked at something that rested in a V cut in a big spruce; it was the first trap on his line, and—sprung!
“Ah-h-h!” he softly hissed through his teeth; then he felt on the crust at his feet, and found fresh scratches and little places where bits of ice had cracked under some weight. Slowly he worked his way along the line of traps, finding each one sprung as he came to it.
The spruce trees stood less thickly here, and a weird, dim gray light shone on the snow between their trunks. Tritou listened again; far away he heard the faint click-click of snow-shoes. His hold on the rifle tightened, and he looked again to be sure that it was cocked, and advanced more carefully than ever; then he stopped again; not far in front of him he heard the thud of a deadfall as it struck the threshold of a trap, and then the clicking moved on; so did he, now bending almost double. The woods grew more and more open as the edge of a barren was approached, and the moonlight trickled on to the snow freely in places.
Tritou stopped and knelt on one knee, raising the rifle to his shoulder as he did so. One hundred yards away, in an open spot, stood a tall figure; it loomed up in the moonlight clear and sharp.
“Ha!” shouted Tritou as he fired.
The figure swayed, tottered, then gathered itself and disappeared in the shadows.
“Blessé! Woun’, by gar!” said Tritou, with great satisfaction, as he hastened to the place where the figure had stood; he hurried carefully, with his rifle ready for another shot. Nothing stirred anywhere; Tritou bent over in the open space. “Du sang!” he said, as he saw the dark spots spreading over the crust here in blotches, and there, close to the woods, in a thin streak. He thought for a moment, “Ah go back for ze dog’; he no go far; Ah shoot for zat beeg hearrt Ah hear so mooch h’about!” He chuckled, and turned back for the sledge.
Jules Verbaux had had bad luck with his traps; the Company’s Indians had destroyed two lines of them entirely, so he started out on a foraging expedition against their traps. “An eye for an eye,” thought Jules. He selected Tritou’s line to plunder, because he had hated Tritou ever since that day in the woods when he heard him say that he, Tritou, was going to kill Verbaux for “dix dollaires et des fines blankeets.”
Once he reaped the harvest of fur from the line marked “T,” and he, unseen, had watched Tritou as Tritou watched for him on the second and third reapings. Yesterday morning he had laughed when Tritou struck out for the post, and had followed him for five miles; but as Tritou kept steadily on, he came back, ate his supper, and went down the line of traps for the fourth time. He was going along slowly, springing the deadfalls and taking the fur he found in them, when suddenly he thought he heard something; he stopped and listened. A sharp, burning pain seized him under the left arm, and the shock sent his wits flying for an instant; then he heard snow-shoes coming, and gathering his great strength, he sped into the forest. His side pained him cruelly, and his breath came and went in gasps for a few minutes; he opened his heavy jacket as he travelled and put his hand under the two shirts, and felt a little warm hole near the armpit; he felt further, and found another hole higher up on the front of his shoulder. “Dat notting, dat!” he chuckled, with great relief, and moved his arm up and down. “Ah t’ink Ah’m feenesh dat taime certainlee. Tak’ care, Tritou!” he said to himself as he tore off two pieces of his shirt and stuffed them in the little holes, effectually stopping the flow of blood. The old sign of the pannikin came back to him. “Dey goin’ try, dey goin’ comme near, mais dey not goin’ have success.” He repeated his own words of four months ago.
Daylight was just coming as he reached the big open barren; he went across it at wonderful speed, and on the edge of the next woods he took off his snow-shoes and ran on and on; he did not slip on the crust, because the moccasins he wore had caribou-hair soles. He passed through the timber and crossed to another barren; in the middle of it he put on the snow-shoes again and sped on fast.
Behind him, Tritou with his team came to the blood again, and followed it, expecting every instant to see Verbaux dead or dying. When the blood-trail ended, Tritou cursed horribly. “Ah go h’aftaire you, Verbaux, de res’ h’of ma life, but Ah fin’ you!” and he called on le bon Dieu to witness his vow. It was full light now, and he followed the snow-shoe marks easily enough to the timber edge; there they stopped, and not a sign of any kind could Tritou find. “Sacré-é! he no owl or ange!” he muttered. “He do dees trick las’ taime; Ah goin’ fin’ h’out!”
He fastened the dogs, and began working in circles, each one larger and larger as he covered the ground. It was slow work in the woods, but at last he found the lost trail out on the next barren, where Jules had put on the telltale snow-shoes. Tritou rushed back to the team, and lashing them, tore on, following the open tracks. These worked farther and farther to the southward, until Tritou was travelling at right angles to his original course. Every time the tracks ended he would swing the dogs in a big circle, and invariably find them again and hurry on.
Jules was crossing a high snow hill; from it he could see a long way; he looked back, and saw Tritou in the act of circling. “Ah-ha, Tritou! you fin’ ma leetle trick, hein? Bon! Jules goin’ show to you ’nodder vone!” He unfastened his snow-shoes, and stepping carefully in the middle of his tracks, worked backward over his own trail till he came to a depression in the barren; he ran down this, and crouched low behind a drift. In a little while Tritou came tearing down the tracks, and stopped on the hill. He looked all round: Jules could see him perfectly, standing there shading his eyes from the glare; then he began to circle again, swinging out wide, and of course moving ahead all the time; he disappeared beyond a rise, and Jules glided off on the back trail.
Tritou circled and circled in vain; he covered and recovered the whole barren in front of him, big as it was, but he could not find the least trace of Verbaux. He was furious, and beat the dogs unmercifully as he twisted and turned and traced over the white country. Then he took a tremendous circle, nearly ten miles in diameter, but returned to the hill unsuccessful. He cursed le bon Dieu for not helping him; he spat on his enemy’s tracks that came to the top of the hill and ended there. “Chien! Diable! Pig! Beas’!” he screamed, shaking his fist in the air. “Ah goin’ keel you somme taime, Verbaux! Dam’ you to l’enfer!”
He climbed on the sledge and headed the dogs back. “Ah go to la ligne, an’ set de trap,” he said to himself. When he reached the lower end of the line he fastened the team to a tree again, and worked up, rebaiting and setting. “He no comme back non plus, an’ Ah’m please’!” he muttered consolingly.
When half-way up the line, he heard a voice calling behind him, “Tritou! Tritou! Ah leave de dog h’at Rivière Noire to-mor’! Rememb’ Jules Verbaux. Au r’voir!” then a laugh, and all was still. Tritou rushed back, falling down twice in his frantic speed, and came to the tree to which he had tied the dogs; they were gone! Sledge, dogs, everything was gone! Forty yards away his rifle stuck up, butt first, in the snow, and the cartridges were scattered about on the crust at his feet. Far off he heard a faint crackling, but it died away instantly, and all was quiet.
He cried and screamed with rage for a time; then, picking up the shells and gun, he started on his forty-mile tramp to the post.