Jenny stopped, refusing to advance another step, eyes rolling whitely and mouthing her bit at the stench. It overpowered the stink of the rotting carrion McAvoy had used as bait and was almost tangible.
He stepped down and made the reins fast round a sapling some distance away. Pulling the Winchester from its saddle scabbard, he looked about at the signs of the creature’s struggles to escape.
In every direction, up to the radius of the chain, the snow was ploughed and banked, spattered crimson here and there, where the unrelenting grip of the trap had brought the wolverine up short.
He’d set the anchor stake himself, so he knew it would not budge, and he had no reason to doubt the chain or the trap. It was a Baine and Summers, the best he could afford, its cost offset against the toll in calves. Their torn and pathetic carcases had steeled him against his personal dislike of gin-trapping and after a fruitless month of hunting this wraith, he’d reached for the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
There was no triumph in him now at his success. Simply a sense of necessity - of a chore that had had to be done.
The wolverine had voided its scent glands at some time during its long struggle and musk hung thick in the frigid air; a defiant, yet hopeless final attempt to gain its freedom. McAvoy breathed shallowly and advanced slowly and cautiously..
At the trap, he leaned forward and studied the motionless, snow-shrouded form, marvelling at the extent of its courageous fight against the inevitable. He’d never seen one before – simply heard tales and legends of this almost mythical predator.
It was a stocky, heavily built creature, thick winter coat adding to its bulk. Exhaustion and pain had contributed to its end at his hand, and there was a sense of guilt that his ineptitude at tracking it down had bought them to this sad epitaph.
From the entrapped rear paw, the chain snaked back, loosely, to the stout stake that McAvoy had driven into the frozen earth a week ago. It seemed that the animal had collapsed for the last time in the middle of one of its rushes to the end of the chain.
It lay on one side, as though asleep, finally at rest and released from the agony and the fear. Although, from what he’d heard about this creature of legend, McAvoy doubted that fear had entered its broad, blunt head. More likely rage and frustration had fuelled its last desperate attempts. He squatted closer and studied it.
Strange that the single eye visible had not clouded over with the film of death. It seemed bright. McAvoy scratched his stubble and fancied he saw a tiny flicker of reflected movement in that dark, glistening hemisphere. He waved his hand and a tiny image mimicked the gesture. Then he registered the little pool of snow-melt around the black snout at the same time that a sudden, chilling realisation struck him.
He started to rise as the wolverine rolled onto its belly in a spray of snow crystals and with an ugly running snarl, lunged at him, jaws agape.
Half erect, caught off balance, panicked and clumsy in his snow-boots, McAvoy scrambled back and fell, in that millisecond comparing the slack in the chain with the distance the wolverine had to cover to reach him. And found it adequate.
He doubled his backward, crablike efforts to get as far away as possible, hands and heels churning the snow, the rifle abandoned. A muted clang preceded by a moment a paralysing pain in his right wrist and right ankle as he triggered the second gin trap.
Numbed by shock and his own suffering, he hardly registered that the animal’s charge had been brought up short by the chain, its savagely armed jaws mere inches from his cringing left boot. He was rigid with the agony in his right wrist and ankle, clamped in the most awkward position possible, the stout leather of boot and glove punctured and held by the sharp, interlocking teeth of the trap so that his flesh was not deeply lacerated, but inescapably held, nonetheless.
Stretched out at his feet, the wolverine regarded him malevolently, growling and hissing, great, curved fore-claws kneading at the snow as though to extend its tortured body - just far enough to reach his foot.
McAvoy had been nervous setting the traps, fearful of an accident, having not used a gin before, and he knew how much force it had taken to force the jaws agape, standing on them with all his weight so that the trigger pan could be set. Force that it was impossible to exert, contorted as he was now.
A number of feeble, but agonising efforts and he subsided into comparative stillness to try to think, one eye on his fellow captive.
The wolverine was motionless, watching him, wanting him, its eyes slightly protuberant, hot and smoky with hate. He felt certain that it knew he was the cause of its inability to melt away as it always had; that somehow he stood between it and escape. It lapped a little snow and he was shocked to see the damage it had inflicted to its mouth through repeated, hopeless attacks on the trap itself.
With the blood supply cut, McAvoy’s trapped hand and foot soon lost all feeling and with it much of the pain, although his extremities felt heavy and icy cold. He thought that would be what had enabled the wolverine to continue - attempt after futile attempt – all sensation departed from its imprisoned hind leg.
A thought occurred to McAvoy… Jenny could be relied on to come when called. If he could get to the lariat on his saddle, there was a chance of getting a loop over the Winchester in the saddle scabbard, difficult throw as it would be, but he was right-handed and Jenny stood quite some way off, head down, hind hoof cocked, securely tied by McAvoy himself. There would be no help from that quarter.
The wolverine stirred suddenly, and with many a warning, backward glance, it dragged its trap back to where the chunk of rotting carrion bait lay untouched, and began to feed. Even in his predicament, McAvoy was amazed. Until he reasoned that with its energy stores exhausted by suffering, cold and rage, the creature was keeping its strength up – for some sort of supreme effort. It wolfed down the putrid beef, gagging and choking on the sizeable mouthfuls it tore from the lump grasped between its foreclaws, occasionally stopping to challenge McAvoy with a hiss that sprayed the snow with fragments of its vile repast.
It had been afternoon when McAvoy rode up to the trap, the sun somewhere directly overhead behind thick cloud that signalled more snow in the night. The trees cast no shadow, their trunks reaching bare and silvery for fifty feet, to a sparse canopy of motionless branches.
Now, some hours afterwards, a weak afternoon sun had found a way through the cloud cover and cast long. grey images across the forest floor. There was no birdsong at this altitude, no other signs of life, the silence broken only by gluttonous feeding sounds and an occasional creak of saddlery as Jenny changed her position.
Half frozen, McAvoy had retreated to a place in his mind where this was not happening, clinging to consciousness. There was no reason at this stage for anyone to follow his plainly visible tracks in the snow to find him. They would be getting on with their lives and the evening fires. Expecting Jenny to plod out of the evening gloom on her way to the barn, McAvoy trudging at her head. Nobody could imagine this.
The wolverine gulped more snow, watching him fixedly from where it had consumed its huge meal. McAvoy fancied it looked stronger already. Half his bodyweight, but built for its purpose. To survive anything Nature could throw at it and equipped to make mockery of Man’s clumsy attempts to foil it. He knew that it was utterly fearless and determined - that even bears gave it a wide berth - that it preyed on anything that moved but would eat most things that didn’t.
Darkness came suddenly with hardly a twilight phase. In the last light, the wolverine rose and retraced its dragging, clanking way back to lie at his feet. McAvoy’s lower body had lost all feeling, both from a lack of circulation and from prolonged contact with the snow that body-heat had melted. It had penetrated his clothing and with his lowered temperature, had started to crystallise again. He was beginning to enter the dangerous world of resignation – and the acceptance of death.
The wolverine was simply a darker shadow when he heard an unmistakeable sound. It had started gnawing through its trapped limb. The final resort he had heard about…
Pinelands Writers Circle