Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 4
Chapter IV
It was written, by those special jungle gods that plan entertainment for tenderfeet, that Hugh Gaylord should get some slight taste of the real mountains on his walk to the sheep camp. It was only a mile, but the trail was nothing whatever like the golf course that Hugh had been wont to walk around on Friday afternoons. It was narrow and brown, and hard-packed by the feet of the wild folk that had been passing up and down that way since the mountains were new. They hadn't been careful to keep the grade under six per cent. There was also an occasional rock and a rather frequent dead log that had to be leaped. Moreover the berry vines scratched the face and caught at his clothes when the trail twined between the heavier thickets.
Hugh had been proud of his physical condition. He had been under the tutelage of a high-paid physical director, and he could swing the Indian clubs a startling number of times without fatigue. Before that walk was done, however, the fine edge of his self-assurance had been somewhat dulled. In the first place, the pace was rather fast. Pete the guide was inordinately lazy and a wretched guide, but like most wilderness men who get their exercise in walking game trails rather than in swinging Indian clubs, he knew how to make the long miles slide under his feet. It is not an accomplishment of a day—that bent-kneed, shuffling walk, shoulders sagging and feet falling lightly—and it is far from graceful. But it clicks out four miles in every hour through the long mountain day without fatigue. It carries a man up mountains and into glens, and he feels fresh at the end. To-night Pete was in a particular hurry. The devils that dwell just under the dark skins of all his race were crying for strong drink. Besides, darkness would be upon them very soon.
The pace took Gaylord's wind. It brought queer pains low in his chest and an odd heaviness in his legs. But for all that, a physician could have prescribed no better medicine for him. The sweat leaped from his white skin and felt prickly at his neck and forehead, and the fumes of alcohol departed from his brain. The truth was that in this deepening twilight Gaylord saw more clearly than any time since his arrival at Smoky Land.
His senses became more alert, his eyes began to penetrate deeper into the thickets. He began to notice dainty mountain flowers, and he took a singular delight in the tracks of the wild things that had been left in the trail. Here a coyote had skulked, here a wolf had raced along in some chase of death, and here a cougar had crept by in some dreadful business of a few nights before. His hearing was sharper, and once the rustle of leaves above his head called his attention to a family of gray squirrels, disporting on the limbs. He found himself watching, with unexplainable interest, his guide.
For the first time he marked clearly the silent tread, the peculiar alertness of his carriage, and most of all the dark surface-lights in his eyes. As they headed deeper into the thickets a strange change seemed to come over the man. Perhaps the liquor was dying in him, too, or possibly Gaylord's imagination was playing tricks upon him. He received an odd impression that hitherto his guide had been asleep and had just now wakened. They were near the sheep camp now; they could hear the faint bleat of the bedding animals, and the Indian seemed to forget the other's presence. All at once he began to stalk in earnest. He slackened his pace: Gaylord behind him slackened his. The moccasined feet had fallen softly before; now they seemingly made no sound at all. The dark eyes brightened, the muscles rippled under the dusky skin, a new vitality seemed to come over him. The truth was that this son of a savage race had not undergone so great degeneration but that he still responded to the age-old intoxication of the falling night. It was the hunting hour, and Hugh could imagine the tawny cougar, Broken Fang, whom he had come to slay, responding in the same way.
Abruptly the Indian paused and held up his hand. Hugh crept near.
" Big animal—close," the guide whispered. "Maybe you get a shot."
Hugh stood still, listening. Far distant he heard the usual, faint mysterious sounds that the early night hours always bring to the wilderness world; but if anything, the primordial silence was more heavy and portentous than ever. The snow peaks still gleamed faintly, and he sensed their majesty and grandeur as never before. It was not alone an impression of beauty. Beauty is an external thing alone: in this moment of farseeing, he understood something of their mighty symbolism, their eternal watch over the waste places. He saw them as they were: grand, silent, unutterably aloof.
"How do you know?" he asked, in reply to his guide. "I don't hear anything."
The truth was that Pete would have found considerable difficulty in telling just how he knew. Rather it was a sixth sense, an essence in the air that blunter senses could not have perceived. "We're near flock—maybe lot of varmints hanging close. Always is—around sheep. Don't know what animal came near just now—cougar, I think."
"Maybe old Broken Fang himself?"
"I don't know. Heap maybe not. Country's big."
Pete was given to telling lies, on occasion, but he had told the truth for once. Hugh's eyes leaped from peak to peak, and he began to realize something of the vast, tremendous distances of the region. They pushed on, over the ridge and through the last of a heavy wall of brush.
They came out on the edge of a small meadow,—one of those grassy, treeless stretches that are so often encountered in the high ranges. Silver Creek ran through it: a stream that was a "creek" only in the Western sense. In reality it carried more water than many a famous river. It was narrow, however, lined with thickets, and evidently deep and swift. Five hundred yards beyond the great forest encroached again, and the meadow was even more narrow, parallel to the creek. And at the first glance Hugh might have thought that the meadow was covered with deep snow.
It was the sheep. They were bedding down for the night,—a flock that could not contain less than three thousand ewes and lambs. They had crowded so close together that they occupied, in all, a space hardly more than a hundred yards square, and the only break in the white drift was an occasional spot of inky black. These, in a moment's inspection, revealed themselves as black sheep,—animals that occur in every western flock and are generally used by the herdsmen as markers.
Their numbers staggered Hugh. He wondered how any one herder could care for them. And he was suddenly amazed at the strange thoughts that flooded him.
The truth was that Hugh was an exceedingly sensitive man, finely tuned to all manner of external impressions. Something about that snowy band touched a side of his nature of which he had never been aware before. He couldn't quite identify the thoughts that stirred him. They dwelt in an unknown realm of his being; he grasped for them but always they flitted away. He held hard on himself and tried to understand. The sheep bleated, the shadows grew over the distant mountains. He began to think that the plaintive bleat of the sheep was playing tricks upon his imagination. It sounded to him almost as a direct appeal for help and protection. He realized at once the truth of a fact he had heard long ago,—that sheep, above all other domestic animals, are dependent upon men for their very lives. A horse may run freely in the waste places, fighting off with slashing fore feet and terrible teeth such wild enemies as molest it. The cattle can range far in comparative safety: for even the great grizzly has been known to avoid the horned steer. Even the hogs, half-wild in the underbrush, have some means of self-protection. These sheep had none.
But the thoughts he had went deeper than that. He was dimly aware of a vague symbolism, a realization that in this mountain scene could be read some of the great, essential truths of life. He had a curious impression of being face to face, for the first time in his life, with realities,—in spite of the paradoxical fact that a vagueness, seemingly a bewilderment, was upon him.
All his life Hugh Gaylord had dwelt in cities. He had traveled far: sometimes in motors, usually in luxurious sleeping cars, occasionally in steamships. Yet he had never really been outside of cities. He knew the hurrying throngs, the great buildings, the busy streets. The shops, the theaters, the gaiety had been acquaintances as long as he could remember. He had never dreamed of a world without these things. Yet, in an instant, all of them seemed infinitely distant. Strangest of all, they suddenly didn't seem to matter.
It was an impression that all his life there had been a cloud before his vision, and all at once he could see clear. Here, not in those swarming cities, was reality. The cities had been built in a day; the other factors that had been so necessary in his life—his clubs, his motor cars, his amusements, even much of the great world of business—were merely mushroom growths of a little handful of centuries that men called the age of civilization. Strangely, they no longer seemed to him the basic things of existence. Rather now, for the first time in his days, he was face to face with life,—life in its simplest phases, with all its unrealities and superficialities swept away. This was no vista of the present: this scene of the white sheep bedding down for the night in the dim light of the herder's fire. Rather it was an image of the uncounted ages. All the basic elements of life were here: the flocks, the herder's little shelter, the fire glowing in the falling darkness, the watchful shepherd dog guarding the lambs, the beasts of prey lurking in the growing shadows.
There was nothing here to perish or change. It had been the same for uncounted centuries,—since the first dim days when the nomads drove their flocks over the plains of Asia. Cities are born, grow great, are cursed with wickedness, and perish. The flocks still wander on the hills. Men catch new fancies, follow new teachings, build new orders, and pursue new ways. The firelight of the herder still glows in the twilight. Civilization rises and falls like the tide. The beasts of prey still lurk in the thickets to slay the sheep. Fashions, hobbies, pleasures, habits and modes of life, faiths and doctrines, even kingdoms and palaces start up, flourish, change and die,—and still the shepherd dog keeps his watch.
He was suddenly called from his reverie by the voice of the guide beside him. "Fire's about out," the man said. "Time herder put on more fuel."
It was a commonplace remark, yet it compelled Hugh's attention. His startled eyes turned to the Indian's impassive face. "It's not cold to-night," he replied. "What's the need of the fire?"
The Indian made no immediate reply. He did, however, hold up his hand. Hugh listened. Somewhere back of them in the thicket a twig broke with miniature explosion. Then two leaves rustled together.
"That's why," the Indian said. "Keep off varmints."
At that instant the dog discerned them and came barking toward them. He was a beautiful shepherd—from his unusual size evidently a crossed breed—and the light was still good enough for them to see his lustrous coat, his powerful form, his intelligent head, his fine brush that he carried high. The dog slowed to a walk, and Hugh spoke to him. A moment more the animal was at his knees.
Hugh had always been a dog-lover—giving his regard to an ill-mannered, savage German police dog that lived a parasitical life at his city house—and he knelt quickly to caress the shepherd's head. And for the second time that night he had a series of impressions that he could not trace or name.
They arose from the behavior of the dog. The animal seemed oddly nervous and shaken, and the great, brown, lustrous eyes were full of singular appeal. He ran from them a little way, barking, then returned as if he desired them to follow him. "What's the matter, old boy?" Gaylord asked. "What's up?"
The dog barked again, coming to his arms for more petting. Then the Indian dropped to his knees with a curious little cry.
Pete the guide had an exceedingly good command of English for a half-breed. But in that moment of astonishment the use of the language fell away from him, and his only utterance was an exclamation in his own almost-forgotten tongue. He rubbed his hand over the animal's shoulder.
"What is it, Pete?" Hugh asked quietly.
"He's creased. Dog's been shot—bullet took away a little skin."
"The shot we heard?"
"No. That rifle shot. The dog shot with pistol."
"And how in the world did you find that out?"
"Not know sure—looks heap like a scratch by small-caliber bullet. Couldn't hear pistol shot so far."
"I've heard," Hugh said thoughtfully, "that it isn't good form—for a herder to shoot at his own dog."
"Maybe not that," the Indian went on. His tone was so strange and flat that Hugh whirled to stare at him. "Fire's burning out too—sheep getting restless. Maybe better see where herder is."
"Don't you suppose he's in his shelter tent?"
"We'll look and see."
They started out into the clearing, the dog running in front of them. The sheep, after the manner of their kind, paid no attention to them. They walked swiftly toward the little tent beside the stream.
The dog stopped, sniffing at something that lay in a little clump of thicket. When still a few paces distant, Hugh thought it was one of the black sheep, separated from the flock. The Indian, however, made no such mistake. And he hardly turned to glance at it.
"The herder's other dog," he explained. "Knew there ought to be two. Better shooting this time."
Hugh felt a little stir of excitement. The black dog had been slain by a small-calibered bullet, and his body was still warm. The Indian increased his pace.
A second more, and they were at the door of the tent. It was hard for them to see clearly at first. The shadows were quite deep inside. And at first they were only aware of a heavy, strange silence that seemed to grow and deepen as they stood looking.
The herder was not standing up to greet them. Neither was he busy at any of his late-evening tasks. They made out his figure dimly, sprawled on his blankets in one corner of the tent.
"By Jove!" Hugh exclaimed. "I believe the beggar's asleep."
But he didn't speak quite the truth. In reality, he believed something far different. It is the way of a certain type of man to avoid at all costs any appearance or semblance of hysterics or sensationalism. Hugh was of that type, and he unconsciously shrank from the utterance of his true beliefs.
"Not asleep," the Indian replied bluntly. He stopped, walked into the tent, and turned the man's body in his hands. No wonder the camp fire was dying. Its tender—the sheep herder—had been shot and killed a few moments before.