On another occasion, when I showed him four gross of mousetraps with which I intended to collect small mammals to be used in determining the identification of animal remains found in wolf stomachs, and then explained the method of boiling a mouse skeleton in order to prepare it as a museum specimen, he departed the cabin without a word and refused to take his meals with me from that time forward.
I was not unduly alarmed by his behavior, for I had some knowledge of psychology and I recognized the symptoms of an ingrown personality. Nevertheless I determined to try to draw Mike out of himself. One evening I inveigled him over to the corner where I had set up my portable laboratory and proudly showed him my collection of glittering scalpels, bone shears, brain spoons and other intricate instruments which I would use in conducting autopsies on wolves, caribou and other beasts. I experienced some difficulty in explaining to Mike what was meant by an autopsy, so I opened a pathology textbook at a two-page color diagram of a human abdomen under dissection, and with this visual aid was well into my explanation when I realized I had lost my audience. Mike was backing slowly toward the door, his black eyes fixed on me with an expression of growing horror, and I realized at once that he had misconstrued what I had been saying. I sprang up in an attempt to reassure him, but at my movement he turned and fled through the door at a dead run.
I did not see him again until the following afternoon, when, returning from setting out a trapline for mice, I found him in the cabin packing his equipment as if for an extended journey. In a voice so low and rapid that I had difficulty understanding him, he explained that he had been urgently called away to visit his sick mother at the camp of the Eskimos, and would probably be gone for some time. With that he rushed out to where his team stood ready harnessed and, without another word, departed at a furious pace into the north.
I was sorry to see him go, for the knowledge that I was now entirely alone with the local wolves, while satisfying from a scientific point of view, seemed to intensify the Hound of the Baskervilles atmosphere of the desolate and stormswept lands around me. Then too, I had not yet clearly decided upon the best method of approaching the wolves, and I would have been happy to have had Mike perform the initial introductions. However, a sick mother took precedence even over my scientific needs—though I am still at a loss to understand how Mike knew his mother was ill.
The weighty problem of how best to make contact with the wolves hung fire while I began drawing up my study schedules. These were detailed in the extreme. Under “Sexual Behavior” alone I was able to list fifty-one subtopics, all requiring investigation. By the end of the week I was running short of paper. It was time to get out and about.
As I was a newcomer to the Barrens, it behooved me to familiarize myself with the country in a cautious manner. Hence, on my first expedition afield I contented myself with making a circular tour on a radius of about three hundred yards from the cabin.
This expedition revealed little except the presence of four or five hundred caribou skeletons; indeed, the entire area surrounding the cabin seemed to be carpeted in caribou bones. Since I knew from my researches in Churchill that trappers never shot caribou, I could only assume that these animals had been killed by wolves. This was a sobering conclusion. Assuming that the density of the caribou kill was uniform over the whole country, the sample I had seen indicated that wolves must kill, on the average, about twenty million caribou a year in Keewatin alone.
After this dismaying tour of the boneyard it was three days before I found time for another trip afield. Carrying a rifle and wearing my revolver, I went a quarter-mile on this second expedition—but saw no wolves. However, to my surprise I observed that the density of caribou remains decreased in an almost geometric ratio to the distance from the cabin. Sorely puzzled by the fact that the wolves seemed to have chosen to commit their worst slaughter so close to a human habitation, I resolved to question Mike about it if or when I saw him again.
Meantime spring had come to the Barrens with volcanic violence. The snows melted so fast that the frozen rivers could not carry the melted water, which flowed six feet deep on top of the ice. Finally the ice let go, with a thunderous explosion; then it promptly jammed, and in short order the river beside which I was living had entered into the cabin, bringing with it the accumulated refuse left by fourteen Huskies during a long winter.
Eventually the jam broke and the waters subsided; but the cabin had lost its charm, for the debris on the floor was a foot thick and somewhat repellent. I decided to pitch my tent on a gravel ridge above the cabin, and here I was vainly trying to go to sleep that evening when I became aware of unfamiliar sounds. Sitting bolt upright, I listened intently.
The sounds were coming from just across the river, to the north, and they were a weird medley of whines, whimpers and small howls. My grip on the rifle slowly relaxed. If there is one thing at which scientists are adept, it is learning from experience; I was not to be fooled twice. The cries were obviously those of a Husky, probably a young one, and I deduced that it must be one of Mike’s dogs (he owned three half-grown pups not yet trained to harness which ran loose after the team) that had got lost, retraced its way to the cabin, and was now begging for someone to come and be nice to it.
I was delighted. If that pup needed a friend, a chum, I was its man! I climbed hastily into my clothes, ran down to the riverbank, launched the canoe, and paddled lustily for the far bank.
The pup had never ceased its mournful plaint, and I was about to call out reassuringly when it occurred to me that an unfamiliar human voice might frighten it. I decided to stalk it instead, and to betray my presence only when I was close enough for soothing murmurs.
From the nature of the sounds I had assumed the dog was only a few yards away from the far bank, but as I made my way in the dim half-light, over broken boulders and across gravel ridges, the sounds seemed to remain at the same volume while I appeared to be getting no closer. I assumed the pup was retreating, perhaps out of shyness. In my anxiety not to startle it away entirely, I still kept quiet, even when the whimpering wail stopped, leaving me uncertain about the right direction to pursue. However, I saw a steep ridge looming ahead of me and I suspected that, once I gained its summit, I would have a clear enough view to enable me to locate the lost animal. As I neared the crest of the ridge I got down on my stomach (practicing the fieldcraft I had learned in the Boy Scouts) and cautiously inched my way the last few feet.
My head came slowly over the crest—and there was my quarry. He was lying down, evidently resting after his mournful singsong, and his nose was about six feet from mine. We stared at one another in silence. I do not know what went on in his massive skull, but my head was full of the most disturbing thoughts. I was peering straight into the amber gaze of a fully grown arctic wolf, who probably weighed more than I did, and who was certainly a lot better versed in close-combat techniques than I would ever be.
For some seconds neither of us moved but continued to stare hypnotically into one another’s eyes. The wolf was the first to break the spell. With a spring which would have done justice to a Russian dancer, he leaped about a yard straight into the air and came down running. The textbooks say a wolf can run twenty-five miles an hour, but this one did not appear to be running, so much as flying low. Within seconds he had vanished from my sight.