Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 6
Chapter VI
In the hour before Pete, the guide, returned with camp supplies to the sheep camp, Hugh had a chance to observe various things about this mountain land of which he had never been aware before. He sensed, for really the first time, the mystery of the forest in the darkness. The domain of man, it seemed to him, extended just to the limits of the little meadow where the sheep were bedded: beyond that lay the Kingdom of the Wild. He saw, with an inner gladness and stir, the long outline of the high range against the pale western sky,—the one part of the firmament the darkness had not yet completely overspread. The peaks seemed to rise to the upper reaches of the heavens; between them he could see the sweeping concave line, rough-edged, of the pine forests. He learned certain things concerning the way the firelight leaps into the shadow and the darkness comes racing back. He heard the various overtones, known only to a woodsman, in the crackle of the fire. At the end of the hour he beheld an even greater mystery.
At first it was just a smear of silver, suddenly catching his eye, in the darkness of the east. It grew, it extended; clouds were ensilvered by it and broken apart; it gleamed with indescribable beauty, and in a moment it evolved into the moon. The orb rose higher, the beams slanted down.
But the enchantment of the forest only seemed to deepen beneath it. Only at intervals could the beams penetrate between the trees, and the silver patches that came, now and then, between the trunks only mystified the eyes. And it soon became an indisputable fact that these patches were not motionless and unvarying in outline as Hugh might have expected. Sometimes they blended and moved; and once or twice a swift shadow flicked across them. There was only one explanation. Living creatures—beasts of prey such as always linger about the sheep flocks—hovered at the border of darkness ready to swoop forth.
Pete returned soon after and began upon the simple tasks of the night. He went to the edge of the forest, returning with a bundle of fir boughs for Hugh's bed. He chopped more fuel, and once he mystified the Eastern man by some hurried business in the dead herder's tent. He seemed to be making a frenzied search for something that he needed very badly.
He found it at last, and a moment of drama resulted when he came forth into the firelight. A dark bottle was clutched in each of his hands. Hugh glanced at them, then looked with even greater interest at the deep lines in the guide's face.
"I've found 'em," the Indian told him eagerly. "Knew sure he had 'em somewhere. Fire water."
The blood leaped once in Hugh's veins, and a great desire seemed to set fire to his brain. For a moment it seemed to cost him all power of thought. His hand started to reach forward. Then, almost as if the gesture had been inadvertent, he drew it slowly back.
He smiled; and his eyes gave no sign of the vision that was before them. The Indian's sight was keen, but he had no realization of the grim and terrible battle that was being waged in the man's own soul. There was no outward indication of the convulsive wrench that had been necessary to draw his hand back to his side. Even in that mountain silence, voiceless as the interstellar spaces, the Indian could not hear the voice of demons, shrieking within the man.
The truth was that Hugh had just been given a glimpse into his own soul: a sight that he had never really had before. He did not know from whence such power of vision came. It was something the wilderness had taught him in the hour that he had watched the sheep. He had always been ready to deny that strong drink had any hold upon him whatsoever. He believed that he had always drunk heavily because there had been no reason for doing otherwise. That such a hold could exist upon any one of the self-reliant, aristocratic circle in which he moved was simply one admission that would never be made, but had rather been linked with the offensive sentimentality that has constituted so much of the hue and cry of over-officious prohibitionists. Yet in one single vivid second of introspection he knew the truth. In this hour when all his best instincts warned him to abstain, the craving was almost too terrible to resist.
But he won that fight at last. He would have been ashamed to admit it, but little, icy sweatdrops had come out upon his forehead. And the victory left him curiously sobered. For the first time in his life, it seemed to him, he knew Hugh Gaylord as he really was.
The guide still stood waiting. Hugh's eyes swept to the flock. The two of them were on guard to-night, and this was no time to blur the senses with heady liquor. A hard task awaited them on the morrow. Besides—it was dead man's drink.
"Put it back," Hugh directed quietly.
The Indian stiffened, and his dark face grew sullen. Hugh watched him coldly. It looked like mutiny, and Hugh might have wondered at his own composure, his confidence in his own ability to win this battle, too.
"I don't put 'em back," the guide retorted. "He—won't need 'em now. Why put 'em back?"
"The reason why," Hugh explained in a passionless voice, " is because I said so. I remember—I'd forgotten it until now—that there's a national law against giving whisky to Indians. Besides—you've got work to do to-morrow, and I want you to be fresh."
It was the first time since his arrival in Smoky Land that he had mentioned the man's race. He knew that he ran the risk of wakening savage anger in the Indian's breast. Yet he was willing to take that risk.
"What you got to say about it?" the Indian responded insolently. "We go back to-morrow. Job's over. You ain't given it to me, I found it. Come on—maybe take a little drink together."
At that instant Hugh remembered that he was of a dominant race, and the familiarity of the remark grated somewhat unpleasantly upon him. He got up rather leisurely. He felt that in case of emergencies he preferred to be upon his feet. "Put the bottles back," he said again. "I happen to be in command of this expedition. If you don't obey, I'll fire you right here—and you know what that would mean as far as ever getting a job as guide again. Put 'em back and put 'em back quick."
The Indian's expression changed. The sullenness gave way to surprise; then—to some measure, at least—to respect. He turned and walked back to the tent. Then Hugh heard his powerful strokes as he cut more fuel for the fire.
Hugh went to bed soon after this, and the night hours began their stealthy march, one after one, across the spaces of the wilderness. The two men had only a few more sentences of conversation. The silence and the mystery had seemingly taken out of Hugh all desire to talk.
"You told the truth, Pete, when you said this job was almost over," Hugh remarked from his blankets. "And I've been thinking of something. If you'd help me load it on, I might be able to pack that poor devil down to the settlements by myself. You could stay here, and I could hunt up the flock owner and get him to give you a steady job as herder. He'd be grateful enough to you for staying to watch his sheep so that he'll gladly do it. How would you like that?"
The Indian grunted. "Me no sheep herder," he said distinctly.
Hugh marked the tone with some surprise. Its inference could not well be mistaken. Evidently Pete felt himself much above such an occupation.
"I thought you might like to be," Hugh responded pleasantly.
"No. Only dagoes and Mexicans sheep herders. I'm a guide. Other herder got shot. Maybe I get shot too."
Hugh didn't pursue the subject further. After all, he couldn't blame the man. By the code of the West it was degrading work; besides, the war with the cattlemen made it as perilous an occupation as could well be imagined. The glimpse of the still form that the guide had rolled in a blanket and which now lay outside the tent door was evidence in plenty of this fact.
He lay on the buoyant, fragrant fir boughs, watching the dancing shadows. The wilderness stirred and whispered with life. The sheep slept. The moon that had looked upon many shepherds shone on his face.
This same moon meant good hunting to the wild creatures that ranged the forest about the little meadow. It was hard for them to work in the utter darkness. And one can only imagine—because no naturalist has ever yet been able to know in full the inner natures of animals—the thrill and the exultation that had passed from border to border through the wilderness world when the great white disk first rose above the mountains.
"The hunting hour" was the word that passed—in the secret ways of the forest—from mouth to mouth. The wind seemed to carry it, and the whole wilderness thrilled and pulsed with it. Wild, hot blood leaped in savage veins; strange terrible lights sprang up in fierce eyes. "It is time to start forth," the whisper passed: and the whole wild-life kingdom seemed to go mad.
It was a rapturous, an exultant thing, and human beings—jaded with too many centuries of repression that men call civilization—find it hard to understand. Only those who have stood in a duck blind watching a flock of mallard swing down toward the decoys, only those who have lain pressed to the slide rock and seen the mountain sheep, the incomparable Bighorn, in a long file against the snow, or those who have beheld the waters break and explode as the steelhead strikes can comprehend this wilderness ecstasy at all. The smells on the winds, the little hushed noises in the thickets, the startled waverings of shadows all added their influence; and the bloodlust came upon the beasts of prey.
It was their long-awaited hour. It was their time of triumph: stealth and strength, fang and claw, the stalk in the shadows, the leap, the blow, the feasting in the moonlight. The she-wolf came creeping from her lair, her cubs behind her, and all of their eyes were just so many twin circles of green light in the darkness. Were not the deer feeding on the ridges? The coyotes skulked in the shadows about the sheep camp; the lynx went stealing toward the perches of the mountain grouse. The hunting fever spares none of the flesh-eaters, and from the smallest to the great—from the little, deadly, white-fanged mink following a rabbit's trail beside the river to the mighty grizzly, stalking a cow-elk in the thicket—they felt in their veins the age-old stir that is ever new.
But there was one resident of Smoky Land that felt it more than any of his neighbors. In the first place he was a feline,—and that means that he was just a bundle of singing, vibrant, hair-trigger nerves. For sheer sensuality there are no creatures on earth to equal the cats,—and he was king and monarch of all the breed. The animal that catches his prey by an exhausting run, a simple test of wind and limb, cannot from the nature of things feel the wild rapture and suppressed excitement of one that stalks and leaps from ambush; and the cats are the foremost exponents of this latter method of hunting.
There were certain private reasons, too. Part of the hunting fever is due to pride, a sense of power and might. A lowly skunk, trotting along looking for fledglings, must have a hard time persuading himself he is very great and powerful, but this oversized monarch of the cat family had no difficulty whatever. In his time—and his years were rather more than is best in the wilderness—he had seen the bull-elk turn from his path, and that is a sight to pass down to one's cubs. Even the old black bear, the honey-grubber who is, after all, the most lovable spirit in the forest, had been known to speak politely when the two of them met on the trail. Those who know Growl-in-the-throat can appreciate what a triumph this was,—because he rarely goes to any particular trouble to be polite to any one. This didn't mean, however, that even in his best days the great cat cared to engage him in a fair fight. Growl-in-the-throat was a honey-robber and an eater of fat grubs; he was forgetful and awkward and given to long weeks of sleeping; but he was living, forked, chain lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. No, it was rather a good thing to keep at peace with Woof.
But the coyotes, the lesser felines, even the wolves—making perfectly good meals off one another when they got the chance—were all fair prey to this tawny forest monarch. It made hunting pleasant. He didn't always have to be careful to see that he was not being hunted himself. It gave him a certain complacency and arrogance, and he expressed it from time to time in a long, wild, triumphant scream that lesser members of his family were ordinarily afraid to utter, lest it should call their enemies down upon them.
Just as the dark came down he had uttered the cry, and he had tingled with savage ecstasy as it echoed back to him. He had seen the first glint of the moon, and the green glare played in his terrible eyes as he started out upon his hunting. The moonlight showed him vaguely, huge and sinuous and graceful past all words, as he stole through the forest on the way to the game trails of the ridge.
He flattered himself that not even the wild creatures, dreading or waiting for just this moment, had ears keen enough to hear him. A perfect stalk had been his pride, in his younger days, and he still assumed that he possessed it. Time was when his stealing feet—in which his terrible talons were even now encased ready to thrust forth—fell soft as pine needles on the trail. If indeed he were past his prime, at this hour at least—just as the moon rose—he would not admit it.
He opened his savage mouth, and for an instant the moonlight gleamed on the white teeth. The forest people could not have mistaken his identity thereafter. One of the great dog-fangs had been broken sharply off in some stress of years before.
He was the great Broken Fang, the monarch of the cougars. Was not the trail cleared, for long distances ahead, of all the lesser hunters? And yet this triumph brought no pleasure, for it led to the undeniable inference that his feet had spoken loudly, rather than whispered, on the narrow path.