Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 7
Chapter VII
Of the three that lay beside the sheep that night, Hugh slept lightest of all. He missed the effects of strong drink. Night after night—more of them than he liked to remember—he had gone to bed half-torpid from the after-effects of the poison in his veins; but to-night he was singularly alert and watchful. The mountain air got to him for the first time since he had come to Smoky Land, and it invigorated him. Besides, perhaps his mind was too busy with thoughts to yield quickly to slumber.
The Indian came of a race that ordinarily sleeps lightly as the wild creatures—a habit learned by uncounted generations in the wild. It is good—wilderness people know—to be able to spring out of a dream and be instantly alert and ready for any crisis. But to-night he neglected the fire. And of course the late sheep herder slept soundest of all. Loud must be the alarm to waken him.
The night hours passed, and Hugh stirred and muttered in his half-sleep. He was troubled with curious dreams; and even on wakening he didn't know quite what they were. It seemed to him that some one had been trying to tell him something to which he did not want to listen. He kept trying to shut his ears, yet the words got through. They were accusing words, damning him for shirking a great responsibility that had been put upon him. He could see the scorn in the accuser's face. He was facing some sort of a test, and he broke beneath it.
He would rouse himself, listen to the mysterious sounds of the night, then drop back to sleep. He couldn't get away from a recurring dream that some terrible Foe was lurking in the shadows just beyond his vision, ready to swoop down on one who was very weak and helpless; yet he wouldn't stay to fight it off.
Once or twice he got up to mind the fire, and at such times the night noises reached him with startling vividness. Dawn was nearing; the sheep were stirring and uneasy. Once more he went to sleep. For a little while all his dreams departed. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
"Get up," a voice said in his ear. "We got start now—make it down by night."
He opened his eyes. The forest world was still lost in darkness. True, a faint grayness had spread over the east, but the moon still rode vividly in the sky. And, yes, the sheep had got up and were feeding in the grass.
Hugh leaped to his feet. The guide had already rebuilt the fire; and the two of them went about the tasks that were necessary before departure. Pete caught the horse, Hugh himself completed the cooking of breakfast that the guide had already started. He watched with an extraordinary fascination the grim, certain motions of the Indian as he prepared the herder's body for the day's journey. The animal was saddled, the stiffening form tied on. Hugh helped put out the fire—the last act of a real woodsman when he breaks camp—and laid out food for the dog. A few moments more and they were ready to go.
"You're sure you won't stay—and take a job as sheep herder?" Hugh asked.
"Not me," the Indian replied. "Herder shot—me shot next."
"There's no reason for thinking you would be shot."
"You don't know cattlemen—Landy Fargo—José Mertos—Besides—Pete got other work to do."
Perhaps it was true. The guide had other work to do. Hugh glanced toward the flock. The animals were not bunched so closely now, and some of the lambs were feeding at the very margin of the river. Their numbers, now that they were widely spread, seemed greater than ever.
The shepherd dog came running to him, and Hugh bent to caress him for the last time. He held the head in his hands and looked into the brown eyes. The dog's gaze did not flinch as is usual when his majesty, man, looks into the eyes of one of the lower creatures. Instead, Hugh couldn't get away from a haunting idea that the dog's expression was one of pathetic appeal. It was almost as if the animal had spoken in words, and Hugh could not laugh at his own discomfort. "Aid me," the dog seemed to say. "Help me keep my trust. The odds are long against me, so give me your aid."
The dog leaped from his arms; then ran forward a little way, barking, toward the sheep. But Hugh laughed and called him back again.
"Good-by, old fellow," he said. "Mind the sheep!"
The dog whined softly, and Hugh tried not to understand.
"There'll be a herder up here in a day or two, if the owner can procure one. And I've left out food for you. Good-by again, for the last time."
But the concluding words of that farewell the animal did not seem to hear. Hugh felt him stiffen in his arms and saw that the intelligent eyes were gazing away, over the flock toward the river. Hugh followed the line of sight, but all he could see was the shadows, bleached here and there by the bodies of the sheep. Then the dog leaped frantically from his arms.
Hugh watched him till the shadows hid him, saw him encircle the wing of the flock, and race at top speed toward the river. It was as if a message had come to him to which Hugh was deaf, that the dog's eyes had discerned some occurrence on the distant river bank that Hugh himself could not see, and, obedient to a great law within himself, true to a deathless trust that had been bestowed upon him, had dashed forth to give aid.
And the miracle was no less than Hugh thought. The dog had gone to give aid, and no man may say by what avenue of sense, by what inscrutable means he knew that aid was needed. The distance seemed too far for eyesight. There was no actual voice in the air that Hugh could hear. On the green bank of the river one of the ewes raced up and down, bleating pitifully, evidently in great distress. Hundreds of sheep were bleating at the same time, and it seemed hard to believe that the dog could have distinguished a note of distress, unheard in the others, in her voice. She seemed to be gazing in frantic terror down into the wild and seething cataract.
Far across the meadow Hugh did not hear and he did not heed. He turned to the guide, waiting at the horse's head. "Lead the way," he ordered. "There's no use of our waiting any longer."
Broken Fang, the cougar, had had a discouraging night. Never in his long years could he remember a time of darkness when the hunting had been so barren of results. Now the dawn was coming out, and not even a rabbit had been caught to appease the gnawing hunger within him.
He wouldn't have liked to admit the true explanation: that he had seen his best days. The cougar shares with all living things a resistless propensity to grow old, and already his years were many. He had had his day. The deer that had died in his talons, even the elk that he had laid low with one lightning, terrible bite to the throat would make a number not pleasing to contemplate by lovers of the wild game. It is to be remembered that an ordinary cougar will kill two deer a week, year on year, until the buzzards come to feed upon him. Broken Fang was no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. He had felled the horned cattle; in one starving winter he had fought Cry-in-the-night, the wolf, and had mastered him; he had taken the old tusked boar gone wild in the underbrush. He knew the hunting craft to the last wile, and time had been when a cat-tail plume, falling on the reeds, made more noise than his own step. But he was old: his unusual size proved that fact. By the same token was revealed his past prowess: only an animal that had surpassed in all the wiles of hunting and self-preservation could live to attain such a growth. But to-night—the deer had fled from him before he ever got within leaping range.
The wind had been right, the thickets had hidden his advance, the magic and the thrill of the hunting hour had been upon him. No human ear could have discerned his approach on the winding trail. But the difficulty lay in the fact that the deer have not human ears, but rather marvelous receivers as sensitive as the antennae of a wireless outfit. Broken Fang was growing old; some of his marvelous muscle-control was breaking; and no longer could he accomplish a successful stalk.
The triumph that he had felt the first hour of the hunt was quite dead in him now. He would have welcomed any kind of prey. Just before dawn he had come upon a porcupine; but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn't make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine.
"When Quill-back escapes the Hunter," the saying goes, "the buzzards will be full-fed to-morrow."
The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards. There is no more awkward, stupid, guileless creature in the woods than Quill-back, and the only reason why the beasts of prey haven't wiped out his breed centuries ago is because he is so fiendishly awkward to kill and eat. One spine in the nose means days of agony, a few in the mouth is apt to bring on slow starvation. And when one hunts pines, and they escape him, it means simply that the hunter is getting so old and so stiff that the scavengers may dine upon him very soon. In this case Quill-back crept up a tree and crawled out to the end of a limb where Broken Fang couldn't get him.
There was no more magnificent slayer in the whole woods than this huge puma, yet he had gone for a full day without food. And it was not to be wondered at that—just before dawn—the blood leaped in his veins anew when he caught the smell of the sheep flock on the wind.
He had killed sheep in plenty in his time, only on the far eastern border of his range. He hadn't known that any were to be found in this part of Smoky Land. They were an easy game to kill, dying at one little touch to the head or shoulder, and offering no sport at all to a bold hunter of deer. Yet to-night he was in no mood to be discriminating. And it was wholly possible that the smell of that flock seemed to grant a new lease of life.
To linger at the outskirts of the band, to kill when he chose, perhaps even to know that most terrible of all wilderness lusts,—the feast of death. All forest creatures know this feast: they have an inborn passion for it that simply must almost tear them in twain. In all the world of carnage and wickedness there is no debauch that is half so terrible, and the first laws of the forest have decreed against it. For the death-feast is not the rational, honest killing of the hunt. Rather it is the thing that sheepmen dread above all things else: a perfect orgy of slaying, not for food but from desire, the tearing-out of a hundred throats in so many seconds. Yet was not Broken Fang the monarch of the forest? What laws were there to restrain him?
His long tail began to lash back and forth; his fangs caught the dim light of the encroaching dawn as he crept like a serpent through the thickets. The smell became even more plain, the fierce blood leaped even more wildly in his veins. There was nothing here to fear: no leaping camp fire to fill him with the age-old awe, no tall form of the herder on constant guard. He could kill, kill, kill—as much as he wanted—until the savagery in his heart was satiated. It was true that human beings had recently been on guard, but their smell was dim, and even now they were starting away, into the forest.
He paused, taking full stock of the situation. Usually at camps such as this there were, besides the herder with his death-stick, two dogs that would die before they would permit him to touch the sheep. He knew something about the fighting spirit of the shepherd dogs. He knew their blind courage, their terrible ferocity, and he knew only one fighting spirit to compare with theirs,—that with which the she-wolf guards her whelps. Such dogs always seemed to partake of man's own unconquerable spirit and they were terrible to face. But to-night only one of the dogs was on guard, and he could find killing in plenty before they should come to grips.
Then he drew up short, scarcely able to restrain a yowl of disappointment. He was on the wrong side of the river. A veritable torrent, deep and swift, flowed between. He came of a breed that has no love for water. Of course he could cross in time, he could wander up and down the bank until he found a dead tree stretching the full way over, but he was in no mood for delays. There was a log here, true, slanting down from his own shore, but it thrust down into water but a few feet from the bank and offered no crossing. And his passion almost consumed him at the sight of a ewe and lamb, just out of leaping range,—feeding at the very margin of the river on the opposite bank.
He shivered all over with excitement. He knew already the taste of the red ecstasy in their veins. He knew—in his dark beast-fancy—the feel of their soft flesh beneath his own terrible talons. He lay still, watching greedily.
But the forest gods were good to him, after all. He couldn't see just what happened. The whole tragedy had occupied but a miniature fraction of a second. Perhaps the bank gave way, possibly the sure little feet missed their hold, or a rock rolled and struck from behind. No matter the cause, the result was the same: the ewe stood alone on the margin. The lamb—a white, dainty creature whose flesh was soft and warm as a bird's—had fallen into that raging torrent, had been swept down the stream, and as if by a miracle had been hurled into a thatch of dead sticks and driftwood that had been wedged between some of the great bowlders of the river bed.
The glaring eyes beheld its struggles and his own triumph. It was as if the forest gods had planned the whole disaster for his especial benefit. The barrier of the river was an advantage now: such guardians as kept watch over the flock could not cross those frightful waters to fight him off. He had only to steal down the log that slanted into the water, stretch out a paw to the white struggling figure half-submerged in the raft of driftwood, and snatch it up to his own remorseless fangs.