The Cross Pull/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
A man may learn to stalk and study one animal and then hopelessly bungle the matter when he tries to approach the next because he is prone to attribute the same qualities to all. Nature has endowed each species with some peculiarity of its own—some method of protection for itself and young. Both Moran and Flash had learned these things and Moran had told Betty many strange problems which Nature has worked out—things about which few men know the truth.
She lay flat on her favorite point of rocks thinking of what had transpired there the night before. She frequently rested her elbows on the ledge and swept the far hills with Moran’s glasses, examining each slope and open park for signs of game. From all those things Moran had told her she now had a keener, more intelligent interest in the animal world. Little ways and habits of each species, formerly meaningless, now carried a greater significance in the light of this new knowledge.
She saw a bunch of cow elk feeding along the edge of an opening in the spruce. She no longer wondered why there was not a single calf with so large a band of cows. She knew that the calves were lying motionless far back in the timber. This was one of the curious things Moran had told her.
For a calf elk gives off no scent. The coyote, the keenest nosed animal of all the wild, will pass a few feet downwind from a new born calf and never know; and a coyote can scent a mouse for a hundred yards downwind!
When moving, the lamb of the mountain sheep looms up whitely against the green meadows of his lofty home above timberline but when the old ewe leaves her offspring she caches him with an eye for details. Even the piercing eye of the circling eagle can not pick the motionless sleeping lamb from among the white rocks of a bowlder field.
The sun dapples down spottedly through the leaves of the trees and mingles with the spotted coat of the blacktail fawn. In later life this changes with the deer.
Bucks travel much during that season which white men have named Indian Summer and which Indians know as the season of the Short Blue Moon. A bluish haze hangs in the hills; the sage brush on the open slopes between the trees takes on a blue-gray tinge—and the new fall coat of the blacktail blends in with the color scheme.
Each animal has some one sense more highly developed than the rest and on this one supersense he mainly relies.
The antelope of the open plains has only fair nose and ears but wonderful all-seeing eyes. The white hairs on an antelope’s rump are stiff and this white patch bristles, each hair standing out, when the animal is alarmed. The sun flashes on this sparkling white field, and in a few brief moments every antelope within many miles is made aware that there is danger abroad on the plains from these signals flashed from band to band.
Elk, whose range is both in the timber and on broken slopes which seldom afford a clear field of view, find less use for their eyes. Their vision is very good but not exceptional. It is an even break whether nose or ears first warn them of approaching enemies.
The bear lives more in the down-timbered gorges and gloomy pockets of the hills. He has nearsighted eyes. If a man stands motionless it is difficult for a bear to distinguish man from stump. He may hear a sound which warns him—but if he catches one least whiff of scent he knows!
Out above the timberline the mountain sheep beds down upon some dizzy pinnacle, sweeps the hills with his telescopic eye and defies his enemies to approach unseen. Scent seems to mean little to him and sound evidently means nothing at all. Some men claim that the constant falling of storm-loosened rocks among his native peaks has rendered him careless of sound, that each noise is attributed to the clatter of a rolling stone. Others assert that the battering, smashing fights between ram and ram in the running moon shatter the ear drums and deafen them. Either may be true. The fact remains that the hearing of ewes is better than that of rams.
The girl thought of these things as she located each new kind with the glasses. She saw Flash staring steadily at the face of the cliff behind. Three rams were moving along the sheer wall. It seemed impossible that even a lizard could cling to it. Not even a wolf, lithe and active as he is, can follow the bighorn sheep and it is a question whether even the mountain lion can keep in sight of him at all times. A ram’s hind feet are sharp, his front feet larger, each forefoot fitted with two oval, non-skid pads. He can jump ten feet along the sheer face of a cliff and land safely on a projecting nose of rock no larger than a foot across. In this way he tacks fearlessly from ledge to ledge along the dizzy wail of any precipice.
Betty studied these three rams with even more interest than any other animals she had seen. Moran had told her that they were his favorites of all horned game.
Flash knew all these things; knew that those rams were safe from him, temporarily safe at least. When he stalked his meat he was well aware of the individual abilities of his prey. He would move upwind on an elk, crouching motionless when it looked his way, knowing he might escape its sight but that he could never remain undetected for one instant if the wind carried his scent to it. When he stalked a sheep he paid less heed to the wind, crossed rock slides without care for the stones his feet dislodged, but centered his attention wholly upon avoiding those never-failing eyes until he could come between his prey and some impossible cliff.
These things he knew from observation, from stern experience, not from that broad term “instinct” under which men are so prone to lump all animal knowledge and dismiss it as a settled fact. True he had instinctive knowledge of some things—not many—but in the main it was experience that had taught him. Once failing, he profited by his loss and learned each day.
Flash raised his head and peered toward the break through which the game trail topped the bench and the girl knew that he heard Moran. He soon joined her on the ledge. Each knew the longing that throbbed in the other’s heart, but neither spoke of it.
Moran had pondered long over what this trouble could be—this reason why she could not freely give herself to him. He knew that it had to do with the gray, moss-covered cabin, built secretly so long ago. Something had sprung up out of the past to lay its skeleton hands on her, snatched her up out of her smoothly polished little groove in life, and sent her traveling across the seamy cross currents of new viewpoints which were hard to face.
Kinney must know. Dad Kinney was a very old man and had lived a long life in the hills. He could unravel the past history of this cabin, and its meaning in her life. He recalled vague tales that Kinney had long ago ridden with the wild bunch; that when law and order claimed the west and divided its citizens by approving some lines of occupation while others were frowned upon, Kinney had been one of those who remained outside.
Flash rose and stretched, yawned widely, and trotted off along the rim, turning where the game trail dipped down into the canyon.
“He’s off again,” Moran observed. “He’ll turn wolf again for the next hour or two.”
“Would he ever turn all wolf?” she asked. “Leave us and never come back?”
“Not unless he lost us,” said Moran. “Then he would. The hold most men have on him is small. He might even leave us for a while in midwinter, the mating time of wolves. It’s hard to say.”
She turned the glasses on the lower country to search for Flash. Through an opening of the trees she could see the sheen of water, a beaver pond where a colony of them had dammed a stream until the water backed up and flooded a thicket of willows and birch. She saw the ripple as one moved across the pond and watched him climb out upon the dam. A porcupine waddled across an open park. Then Flash came into the field of her glasses, creeping stealthily across a meadow, his belly close to the grass. He made a sudden mighty leap, then clawed frantically at the ground. Several times he repeated this strange maneuver.
“Look! Can you see him?” she asked. “What in the world is he doing now?”
“Trying to catch a picket-pin for you,” said Moran.
“Picket-pin?” she inquired. “And who is he—this pin?”
“You’ve seen them,” Moran explained. “Those slender little ground squirrels. They balance on their hind feet, standing motionless until they look like a stake an inch through and six inches long. It’s hard to distinguish them from the stakes men drive to picket their night horses, then move on and leave them behind, sticking up out of the grass. They’re called picket-pin gophers out here from the fact that each newcomer finds it hard to relinquish the notion that he can walk up and tie his horse to one.”
“You tell me so many strange things that I sometimes wonder,” she accused.
“It’s Gospel,” he assured her. “There are so many queer truths in Nature that I couldn’t begin to think up fabrications to compete with them. Besides I want you to know things as they really are.”
Flash came back without his prey. These little squirrels were hard to catch; had an exasperating way of vanishing in their holes at the very instant his jaws were but a foot from them, then chattering and scolding from beneath his very nose. He sprawled contentedly on the rock and dozed. Even in his sleep the significance of each sound penetrated his consciousness. The hum of their conversation did not disturb him. A red squirrel broke into a voluble chatter in a tree below the rim. One eye flickered open for an instant; closed again. A wheeling hawk screamed harshly overhead and drew only a twitching of one ear. Then he was suddenly alert, standing erect on the edge of the canyon wall, his hair bristling and a low snarl in his throat as he looked off across the hills.
From far away there had sounded the faint report of a rifle. He knew that this meant the presence of men. His thoughts were whirled back to these who lived at Two Ocean Pass; those who had only once appeared near here and that once had tried to harm the girl.
“I wonder who that could have been,” said Moran. “Evidently some one killing meat. I hardly think Kinney could cross through Rampart Pass with horses for a few more days. Besides that was too far down the country for him. He’d have camped almost even with us. Harmon expected to come in from the other way. They have delegated him to pick the most feasible route for a Forest Service pack trail from the gap straight through to the lake and blaze a string of game trails that link up clear through. Sunlight Gap should be nearly free of snow by now; so perhaps he has come in. To-morrow I’ll go down that way and see.”
“You mustn’t go,” she said. “What do we care who it is?’ She had not told him of the men she had stumbled across that night, the men who would have taken her but for Flash. She had feared that if Moran knew of this he would insist on taking her out of these hills at once. She had thought of what awaited her back there—and decided to stay in the hills. She had thought that those men had gone, unable to find her hiding place, and that they were probably hundreds of miles away. This shot indicated that they might still be in the hills. She could not risk a meeting between them and Moran.
“Don’t try to find out who it was,” she urged. “It might turn out to be some stranger, not Harmon or Kinney at all.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” he said. “Any man in the hills would be glad to give me a part of his food supply. A little variety wouldn’t be a bad thing for us.”
“I have a perfectly good reason to think thar shot came from some one I don’t want you to meet,” she insisted. “Let’s go back to the cabin and I’ll tell you what it is.”
Flash did not follow them down the trail. He stayed on the rim, trotting from one point of vantage to the next, peering across the hills for some sign of the man that had fired the shot.