CHAPTER 1THE MAD MONTH
John Belden was still ten yards from the trap when he knew that it was sprung. The twisted wire that he had carefully buried on the bank now stretched tautly from the trunk of an aspen sapling into one of the black pools of Spatterdown Creek.
Frost-brittle grass cracked under the soles of his knee-length rubber boots as he strode forward along the creek bank. He knelt by the aspen, grasped the wire in a gloved hand, and tugged gently. The wire coiled about his knees as he brought it in. On the end of the fifteen feet of wire, a five-pound boulder with the trap chain snug against it came into view. Trailing the boulder on its twenty inches of chain was a steel trap with a drowned mink fast in it.
John pressed the spring down and took the mink from the trap. He ran his hands along the little animal to wring the water from its fur, and held it up by the neck. The mink, he saw, would grade number one medium and its fur would sell for about seven dollars and a half. He grinned. That put him seven dollars and a half closer to the Ranger School at Tankota.
John dropped the mink into a canvas gunny sack containing two muskrats he had taken from other traps, and stepped down to re-set the trap. He knew that if there was another mink in the vicinity, it would be attracted by the scent of the one he had already caught.
Wading in the water to avoid leaving any human odor on the bank, he went five feet down-stream from the aspen sapling. The roots of a fallen tree formed an interlocking maze on the edge of the creek there, and at the upper end of the roots was a small hole half buried by water—just the kind of hole a mink would be likely to explore when coursing this stream. John pressed the spring down, set the trap on his knee, and laid it squarely in front of the hole, making sure that the trap was covered by scent-destroying water.
Hanging on to the wire so that it would not jerk the trap, he tossed the boulder back out into the stream. The surplus wire, which ran from the aspen sapling to the trap, he covered with leaves.
Minks are water animals. When another stepped into the trap, its natural instinct would lead it into the water rather than out on the land. The ring on the trap chain would slide down the wire and the boulder would keep the trap submerged. Still pulling into the water, the trapped mink would quickly drown. It was a merciful way of trapping, left no crippled animals that pulled out of traps, and lost no furs.
Finally John splashed water over the buried wire to help kill such human scent as might be on the leaves, and climbed back up the bank. It had been a good day. The muskrats were worth not less than a dollar and a quarter each. If he could continue to make ten dollars a day he could enter the Ranger School next fall. But, he sighed, it was impossible to do that well consistently.
He had a hundred and sixty traps set in two circular twenty-mile lines that swung away from his cabin and back again so that the last trap on each line left him close to the cabin at night. The lines were looked at every other day. But frequently he covered an entire line without taking a single fur.
The sharp November wind was blowing down Spatterdown Creek and John kept his face turned to it as he started up through a grove of aspen trees. It was good to be here, he felt, good to be nineteen, and alive, and in the woods. He took his hat off to let the wind sting his tanned cheek and ruffle his straight black hair, and began humming.
He had started out at four o’clock that morning. But, though it lacked only two hours of the early fall darkness, he was not tired. He turned up a waterless side gulley that led over the high knoll where he had built his trapping cabin. Borne on the wings of the wind, a little storm of leaves swept before him. John laughed. Everything in the woods was good to see—even leaves blowing in the autumn wind.
An orphan, when he had graduated from High School two years ago, his teachers had advised him to give up his dream of becoming a Ranger. Life in the Alleghany Mountain back country, they said, was a lonely one and a young man had better seek his future in the cities where there was a greater possibility of making money. But John had clung stubbornly to his chosen course. He had wanted to take a four-year course in a forestry school, but lacked the money. He had determined at least to take the one-year course at the Ranger School, and had turned to the woods to earn the money to pay for it. And the more he was in them, the more he saw that they were the only place for him.
A brown grouse flushed almost under his feet, and like a feathered bomb went rocking away through the aspens. The grouse’s flight was weaving and crooked. A great shower of leaves arose as he dropped to the ground, to rise almost immediately and come flying back. John watched, and understood.
November was the mad month, but the madness had reason. Grouse families, born in the same nest and together all summer, would suddenly take to the air in wild flights that apparently lacked both aim and purpose. Some of these flights were distance hops that continued until the bird’s beating wings would no longer bear it aloft, some were short skips from place to place as though the grouse was unable to make up its mind where it wanted to go. But when the flights were finished, grouse families were broken up and there was new blood in each community.
Buck deer roved the November woods with swollen necks and bloodshot eyes. Hundreds of savage—and sometimes fatal—battles were fought between them on lonely ridges and in lost gulleys as they settled the all-important question of which was the better buck. A buck in November, John knew, would attack anything and was the most dangerous animal in the woods. Among all wild animals, deer were the most dangerous anyway. You never knew what they were going to do.
His hat in his hand, John continued up the gulley. He stopped at a slight motion in the aspens, and his right hand stole down to the twenty-two revolver at his belt. The motion in the aspens was not repeated, and one less experienced in the woods might have passed on with the thought that he had seen nothing. But John knew better. Presently a fine big c**k grouse, that like John had caught a flicker of motion, but unlike him had passed it up as of no consequence, walked out on the end of a fallen log. John raised the revolver slowly, took aim, and fired. Shot through the head, the grouse tumbled from the log into the leaves. John picked it up and went on. No game was better eating than grouse.
He came to a huge rock wedged in the side of the gulley, climbed to the back of the rock, and walked out to the edge to sit with his legs dangling. Below him Spatterdown Creek was a silver ribbon winding away to lose itself in the distance. Endless ranges of hills, overshadowed by November’s gray sky but with a faint suggestion of October’s blue hazes still hanging over them, stretched as far as he could see. John looked at them, and breathed deeply of the tangy air. Two years of hard work, trapping, working on road gangs, in lumber camps, and for Fred Cramer, Ranger of the Rasca district, had only whetted his desire to become a ranger. Some day, he told himself, he would have charge of a forest district such as the one he could see from here.
John left the rock and walked on up the gulley. A doe snorted and went leaping away. A little farther up, three more grouse strutted on the ground before him. He watched, but did not shoot. One grouse was all he could eat, and no good woodsman killed more than he could use.
Since he felt so fresh, he decided to walk over and see Fred Cramer that night. The Spatterdown Creek country was right on the edge of the Rasca district. Fred Cramer’s headquarters, in the little village of Pine Hill, was scarcely six miles from John’s cabin. John had borrowed a book on pine seedlings from Fred last week, and had all but committed it to memory. Tonight he would take the book back and borrow one on control of tree diseases. If he was lucky Fred might have time to talk to him for a while of the forest lore learned from a lifetime in the woods.
Maybe tonight would be a good time to ask Fred for a job on next spring and summer’s surveying and fire crews. John needed the money, and every job he got that had to do with forestry taught him a little more about it. He grinned ruefully. Fred Cramer had told him that a ranger had to be not a jack-of-all-trades but master of all. At various times rangers were called on to serve as blacksmiths, mechanics, road and bridge builders, telephone line men, fire fighters, game wardens, police, hunters, and so on, nearly endlessly. It was when John thought of it that way that he wondered if he would ever learn all there was to know.
Reaching the head of the gulley, he saw his trapping cabin, a square, tar-paper-covered shack nestling in a grove of pines beside a dirt road. Smoke, coming from the tin pipe that served as a chimney, proved the cabin occupied. But that was all right. Any wanderer in this wilderness country was welcome to make himself at home in any cabin he came across as long as he left the place clean, replaced what wood he used, and brought the food he ate back again on his next trip through.
John went around to the front of the cabin, and hung up his gunny sack containing the mink and the two muskrats. The smell of frying bacon and boiling coffee made his mouth water. It took a day in the open to teach a man how hungry he could be. He licked his lips, and hoped that the stranger had at least made enough coffee for two. Shifting his grouse to the other hand, he entered the cabin and shut the door behind him.
“Take that thing outside an’ hang it until this time tomorrow,” a deep voice ordered. “How many times do I have to tell you that game ain’t fit to eat ‘less’n it’s hung a day? Two days is better.”
A tall, spare man with graying hair was bending over the stove. John dropped the grouse on the table.
“Fred!” he shouted. “Fred Cramer! How did you get here?”
“Reckon I drove,” the old Ranger said dryly. “I haven’t sprouted my first pair of wings yet, an’ there’s even them as say I’ll have horns first. I left my car up the road a piece. How’d you make out today, Johnny?”
“I got a mink and two muskrats.”
“Huh. We could spare a few minks. They kill a lot of rabbits an’ birds, an’ whatever else they get hol’t of that they think they can lick. They’re bloody little devils, for all their use.”
“Use? They’re just killers.”
The old Ranger waved his hand.
“Wa’al, Johnny, most everything in the woods is useful. Minks eat birds an’ rabbits, but there’s some birds an’ rabbits ought to be et. Take a sick rabbit, for instance, or maybe one that ain’t really sick but has got a leetle somethin’ wrong with it. If we leave a few minks on our cricks, the chances is nine out of ten that they’ll catch an’ eat such rabbits. If there ain’t no minks, the rabbit hops right along, mixes with others, an’ they get sick too. In that way there’s more rabbits kil’t in a week than a mink’ll take in a year. The same with deer. Somebody finds where a bobcat kil’t a deer. ‘Ha!’ they say, ‘we must exterminate them fearful critters an’ save our beautiful deer!’ So they put enough of a bounty on cats so’s trappers’ll go after ‘em. By’n by the cats are caught up, an’ the deer has a epidemic an’ dies off by the thousands on account there wasn’t nothin’ to catch the sick ones.
“But get along an’ wash up, Johnny. I didn’t come here to preachify at you. Hang that bird like I told you, an’ come line your stomach with some beans an’ sow belly. I thought you’d be home ‘bout now.”
John hung the grouse outside, and came back into the cabin to wash while the old Ranger set steaming hot food on the table. The boy was greatly thrilled, and proud. He had visited Fred often, but this was the first time the old Ranger had ever come to see him. He burned with curiosity as to the reason for his visit, but asked no questions. Fred would tell him in due time, if he thought best. A man’s business was his own unless he cared to reveal it.
They ate in silence, John mindful of one of the old Ranger’s sayings—“Don’t talk to a hungry man until he’s got his vittles in him.” The meal finished and the last plate licked clean, Fred pushed his chair back from the table, took a blackened pipe from his pocket, lit it, and began blowing blue smoke rings into the air.
“I was coming over to see you tonight,” John ventured at last. “I’ve studied the last book you gave me, and wondered if you would loan me another? I’d like to learn as much as I can about forestry work before I go to school.”
The old Ranger took his pipe from his mouth and held it between two fingers.
“Johnny,” he said gravely, “I’m afraid that I ain’t goin’ to loan you any more books or teach you no more rangerin’.”
John frowned. “What have I done now?”
“Son,” Fred Cramer said with a grin, “when you’re ten years older you’ll know better than to make remarks like that. If you’d done somethin’ wrong, I’d ‘a tol’ you straight out. Nope. I come to say goodbye, Johnny. I’m leavin’ the Rasca.”
“Oh—oh.” John’s heart sank. About to lose his friend, the boy realized how much the old Ranger had taught him, and what he had meant to him. “Where are you going?” he asked dully.
“Over to the Bandley district. They got fifteen thousand acres of barren land over there that they want me to make into a pine plantation. The Bandley’s four hundred miles from the Rasca, Johnny. I’ll be away a year, an’ I won’t get home often. But it’s a nice promotion with good pay.”
“I suppose it is.” John tried to force cheer into his voice. “Congratulations, Fred, and good luck.”
“Johnny,” Fred Cramer said solemnly, “I spent the last ten years of my life workin’ hard in the Rasca. I guess it’s sort of part of me. I know every inch of her, an’ can just about tell you where to find every tree in her. There’s a hunnert an’ fifty thousand acres of forest over there, includin’ the best ten-thousand-acre white pine plantation in the state. The wild things that live in the woods are countless.
“I don’t think I’m any great shakes, but I know what it takes to run the Rasca. An’ the Ranger who takes over where I leave off has got to be somethin’ besides a pink tea drinker. He’s goin’ to have complete charge of all them woods. Everythin’ wild in ‘em is goin’ to be his personal responsibility. There’s five hunnert people in the Rasca, an’ the Ranger has to see that they mind the forest laws an’ has to work with the game warden in enforcin’ game laws. He’s got to know when to stop an’ when to go. He can never lead a personal life, but will have to give everythin’ he’s got to the Rasca. Such a man will have a big job, but he’ll also have a chanst to do somethin’ wonderful. Do you follow me, Son?”
“Sure,” John said enviously, wondering if the new Ranger would be anybody he knew.
The old man was watching him keenly.
“I think you do follow me, Johnny,” he said finally. “I think you really know what I’m talkin’ about. Now, as I said before, I expect to be gone about a year. How would you like to take charge of the Rasca until I get back?”
“Me?” John was thunderstruck. “Me?”
“Yes, you, Johnny. I know you ain’t graduated from a forestry school or anythin’ like that. I ain’t either; such things was after my time. But I talked to the head forester, an’ he said that it will be all right to put you in there if you can pass the test. I warn you that it’s tough, Johnny. Bein’ Ranger of the Rasca don’t come under the headin’ of easy jobs. It will take every last ounce of sweat you got in you, an’ it’ll come close to breakin’ your heart. It will put you in danger, demand things that no other job will, an’ as a beginner it will pay you only ninety dollars a month for everythin’ it asks. Now, do you want to take the test?”
“I’d give anything for the chance!” John’s eyes were shining. “Is it hard?”
“Many a college man couldn’t pass it.”
“I don’t know how to thank you for giving me the chance,” John said huskily. “But I promise you one thing. If I pass the test and get to take your place, I’ll do everything in my power to run the Rasca as it should be run.”
“Nobody could do more than that,” the old Ranger said gently. “Come on. We’ll wash these dishes an’ go drill you a little for the test. We’ll prob’ly be gone three or four days. If you pass, you won’t have to come back here at all.”
“But I can’t go now,” John said, in sudden panic.
“Why?”
“I’ve got traps out. There might be animals in some of them. If something goes wrong… Well, I just have to pull in my traps.”
“Johnny, do you put a mink or mushrat hide ahead of your own future? Ahead of the Rasca? Forget your traps an’ come on.”
John shook his head miserably, his gaze fixed on the hunting license pinned to Fred’s suspenders.
“I can’t. It’s not—well, it’s not right, I guess.”
“Supposin’ somebody else gets the job fust?”
“Then—then I guess they’ll just have to go ahead and get it.”
John’s head dropped. He stared miserably at the floor, scarcely conscious of Fred Cramer’s eyes upon him. His great chance—and he had to miss it!
The old Ranger smiled to himself.
“Johnny, how long will it take you to pick up your traps?”
“Two or three days,” John said dully.
“Come see me in Pine Hill when you get the last one in. Everythin’ will be all right.”
John raised his head eagerly.
“Do you think I might take the test later?”
“Johnny,” Fred Cramer said, “you just took the test. This ain’t a reg’lar appointment, just a substitute. The chief names the man who takes charge until I get back, but he said he’d put in anybody I recommend. I can get a hunnert men who know all about silviculture, an’ dendrology, an’ plain an’ fancy surveyin’. But what I wanted was somebody who knew a little about all them things an’ had somethin’ more besides; somebody who put himself last. Anybody who can be considerin’ of trapped animals, can be expected to be considerin’ of other things. Come over to the house when you get your last trap picked up, an’ I’ll turn the keys over to the new Ranger!”
Aksara