Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 15
Chapter XV
Like a song soaring over the camp fire, clear and wonderfully sweet in the hushed and tremulous darkness, Alice's laugh had been her only good-by to Hugh. He hadn't approved of this night journey after the lost sheep. He was new to the mountains, yet he had sensed a vague and whispered menace in the dark forest into which the trail would lead her. He had protested to the last instant; he wanted to go himself, and he had felt a weight of apprehension and concern that she could not explain away. The very breathlessness in the air was in some way sinister; the light patches of moonlight in the big timber only accentuated its mystery, only darkened—by light of contrast—the gloom of the thickets. Yet her only answer had been a laugh.
It was true that the laugh was not really one of mirth. She felt no fear, but she was not amused at his. Rather she had laughed in simple and undeniable joy, and she didn't quite know its source. It was a little gratifying that this bronzed, well-bred man should be anxious about her. It touched her more than she was ready to admit, even to herself. Yet she really thought that his concern was unjustified.
She knew these mountains. She felt that in some measure at least she had mastered them. She could shoot straight with her pistol: if indeed Broken Fang—the great cougar that had begun to display a rather disquieting arrogance in the presence of men—should find and follow her trail, she had full confidence that the fire from her six pistol cartridges would frighten him away. She had lived long enough in the mountains to know that rare and few are the wild animals that will even menace human beings. The coyotes were abject cowards, the ordinary run of cougars—although sometimes given to trailing a night wanderer for long and unpleasant hours on the mountain trails—always seemed to lack courage to attack, and the wolves would not have their pack strength until the winter. The wolf pack in the snow, she knew perfectly, was not a thing to trifle with. But the gray creatures were living singly now, or in pairs, and starvation had not yet come upon them. In these days of full feeding they were scarcely braver than the coyotes. It seems to be true that any animal that hunts in packs or groups acquires a ferocity, a wild and frenzied courage not possessed by the lone hunter. Partly it is a matter of mob psychology, partly a sense of resistless strength,—but its reality naturalists are unable to deny. It can be seen even in the swarms of miniature ants that—with appalling ferocity—will attack the greatest creatures of the wild. But there were no packs here. The moonlit aisles were safe.
Yet she did not want to go. It was as if the voice of reason within her—the voice that urged her forth—were obscured by the incorporeal voices that spoke in her inner being. One was that of the forest, and it spoke in warning. "Come not on to my darkened trails," it might have said. "They are thine in the daylight hours, but at night they belong to the beasts. This is the time of talon and fang, and thy flesh is tender. I am old and wise, but also I am new, with the newness of the young world. And my spirit is Death." And the other voice was that of the ruddy camp fire behind her. "Stay, stay, stay," it crackled. "Here is thy hearth and thy heart. Stay, tender one."
As the shadows encroached and the firelight grew ever more dim, she found herself looking back—again and again—to the bright blaze. To-night it was home, and these forest trails were dark and silent. She entered the forest, but ever she saw its cheering gleam between the trees,—a bright haven of refuge where Danger could not come. She didn't entirely understand. She had ventured forth into the forests at night before, but never with such regret.
She could still see the form of Hugh seated beside the fire; and the sight moved her strangely. But she would not admit—even to herself—that part of the appeal of that bright circle of light was due to his presence. It had never seemed so dear, so much like home before, but it could not be because of the straight, manly form that abode there. Was he not just a lowly sheep herder, a weakling whose metal had been proven false in the crucible of life? What did he mean to her: just an employee that would soon pass on to other occupations. Yet she had felt wholly secure and comforted beside his fire. She remembered the play of his shoulders as he had hewed the fir log; and she found herself longing for his protection now. Yet what right had she to think that this weakened city man would be a fort in time of stress? She was of the mountain strain, and unlike many of her city cousins she did not accept the fact of his masculinity alone as being a tower of strength. Such dangers as did abide in the Smoky Land forest were no respecters of the males of the species: strength and courage alone must be tried and proven. Hugh had failed in life, she thought; why should he not also fail in courage and strength? The mountain women do not love weak men. They are down to realities, life is a constant battle for existence, and they want a warrior—whether gentleman or not—beside them through the long, dangerous hours of night. Hers were the mountain standards. And what could she expect from Hugh?
She headed into the forest, and she saw the light of the camp fire wink out behind her. It left her singularly alone. A vague depression came upon her, an uneasiness that she could not name or place. There was a sense of utter isolation never felt before. The feel of her pistol butt in her pocket—her belt had been packed among the supplies—reassured her. Then she hastened on, down the moonlit trail.
The forest was never so mysterious. The moonlight had struck away all sense of familiarity. The silver patches between the trees were of fairyland, the dusk of the shadowed thicket was incredibly black; even the changeless pines, majestic and inscrutable emblems of the wilderness, were like great, nebulous ghosts of giants. The woodland was full of ghosts: fleet-footed phantoms that sped along the trail before her, ghostly shadows that leaped behind; little, feeble ghosts of noises that couldn't be real, and ghostly messages in the wind that whimpered and cried in the distant thickets. Yet she could not feel the wind's breath on her face. Rather the forest was breathless, tense, vaguely sinister as never before.
Steep was the trail she took, and ever the silence seemed to deepen. She kept watch ahead for the flock, pale white in the moonlight. She found herself listening closely for any sound that might indicate their position, either the faint bleat of the ewes or the triumph cries of such beasts of prey that had killed from their numbers. But while she did not hear these things, the silence was full of other, lesser sounds. All the creatures of the forest were stirring in their night occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her.
She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew,—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then she found the white band, bedded down for the night.
There had been casualties earlier in the evening, but mostly the beasts of prey had not yet found them. She started to drive them the long three miles back to camp.
Still the moonlight worked its conjurations in the forest; and she felt a growing discomfiture. At first she laid it to nerves. She had been tired after the day's ride, and perhaps the long walk after the sheep had overtaxed her already exhausted body. The sense of oppression, of distant and unfamiliar peril in the forests about her grew ever more pronounced. She tried in vain to hurry the sheep. Never, it seemed to her, had they moved so slowly. The first mile took interminable ages, the second was too long for belief. No luxury, no achievement by which women usually gauge happiness could mean so much to her to-night as that little bright circle in the distant camp over which Hugh stood guard.
She was on the last mile by now, and she kept straining to see the first gleam of the camp fire through the trees. Perhaps all her apprehension had been but fancy, after all. It was only a little way farther—scarcely a mile—and the adventure would soon be over. The forest was oddly hushed and breathless.
And at that instant a strange cry came tingling up to her through the unfathomable depths of forest. It was such a sound as does not catch the consciousness immediately, beginning too dim and faint even to recognize as sound, and at first she found herself doubting its reality. The least rustle of the thickets beside her, the faintest stir of the distant wind drowned it out. Yet with such gradual encroachments as the hour hand makes on the face of the watch, it swelled and grew until all disbelief was dead, and all other sensation transcended.
The deep silence of the primeval forest alone had enabled her to detect it at first, but its quality of obscurity slowly passed away. Soon she had begun to have some idea of the quality of its tones. It was slowly, steadily gaining, and the only inference could be that whatsoever made the sound was coming toward her at an incredible pace,—something that ran behind her and cried out in beastial savagery.
A frantic flood of thoughts swept over her: blind hopes that the cool depths of her subconsciousness refused to accept. Perhaps the cries were of some wilderness hunter on the trail of deer,—a trail that closely coincided with her own. In a moment it would be just a thing to laugh at and forget. But even her own prayers, her own unquenchable spirit of optimism could not make the truth untrue. The grim fact slowly grew and strengthened that whatever ran behind her was on her own trail, that she was being remorselessly hunted through the still aisles of the forest.
The wild cries were louder now, evolving from vague and distant rumblings to prolonged and savage bays, ferocious as any wilderness cry she had ever heard. It sounded like a pack,—that terrible organization that knows no fear and against which not even the stately elk can stand. The cries had a strange exultant quality, a sense of power, and at the same time the hunting lust that can be discerned in the yell of the wolf pack in their first strength of autumn. Yet this was no autumn. The leaves were yet unfallen. The wolves were still mated, or else ran in pairs. And a great fear began to creep like a poison through her veins.
And ever the chorus grew louder, swelling into a veritable thunder that seemed to shudder, with long, undulating waves of sound, through the hushed air. It seemed to her that she heard the distant pound of running feet on the trail. And now she no longer gave thought to what these hunters might be. It no longer mattered. She only knew that some new and terrible peril was leaping forth upon her, a ferocious enemy that would contest her effort to reach the safety of the fire. The sheep broke into a run, and sobbing she sped after them.