The Voice of the Pack/Book 1/Chapter 2
II
The dinner hour found Dan Failing in the public library of Gitcheapolis, asking the girl who sat behind the desk if he might look at maps of Oregon. He got out the whole question without coughing once, but in spite of it she felt that he ought to be asking for California or Arizona maps, rather than Oregon. People did not usually go to Oregon to rid themselves of his malady. A librarian, as a rule, is a wonderfully well-informed person; but her mental picture of Oregon was simply one large rainstorm. She remembered that she used to believe that Oregon people actually grew webs between their toes, and the place was thus known as the Webfoot State. She didn't know that Oregon has almost as many climates as the whole of nature has in stock,—snow in the east, rain in the north, winds in the west, and sunshine in the south, with all the grades between. There are certain sections where in midwinter all hunters who do not particularly care to sink over their heads in the level snow walk exclusively on snowshoes. There are others, not one hundred miles distant, where any kind of snowstorm is as rare a phenomenon as the seventeen-year locusts. Distances are rather vasty in the West. For instance, the map that Dan Failing looked at did not seem much larger than the map, say, of Maryland. Figures showed, however, that at least two counties of Oregon were each as large as the whole area of the former State.
He remembered that his grandfather had lived in Southern Oregon. He looked along the bottom of his map and discovered a whole empire, ranging from gigantic sage plains to the east to dense forests along the Pacific Ocean. Those sage flats, by the way, contain not only sage hens as thick as poultry in a hen-yard and jack rabbits of a particularly long-legged and hardy breed, but also America's one species of antelope. Had Dan known that this was true, had he only been aware that these antelope are without exception the fastest-running creatures upon the face of the earth, he might have been tempted to go there instead of to the land of his fathers. But all he saw on the map was a large brown space marked at exceedingly long intervals with the name of a fort or town. He began to search for Linkville.
Time was when Linkville was one of the principal towns of Oregon. Dan remembered the place because some of the time-yellowed letters his grandfather had sent him had been mailed at a town that bore this name. But he couldn't find Linkville on the map. Later he was to know the reason,—that the town, halfway between the sage plains and the mountains, had prospered and changed its name. He remembered that it was located on one of those great fresh-water lakes of Southern Oregon; so, giving up that search, he began to look for lakes. He found them in plenty,—vast, unmeasured lakes that seemed to be distributed without reason or sense over the whole southern end of the State. Near the Klamath Lakes, seemingly the most imposing of all the fresh-water lakes that the map revealed, he found a city named Klamath Falls. He put the name down in his notebook.
The map showed a particularly high, far-spreading range of mountains due west of the city. Of course they were the Cascades; the map said so very plainly. Then Dan knew he was getting home. His grandfather had lived and trapped and died in these same wooded hills. Finally he located and recorded the name of the largest city on the main railroad line that was adjacent to the Cascades.
The preparation for his departure took many days. He read many books on flora and fauna. He bought sporting equipment. Knowing the usual ratio between the respective pleasures of anticipation and realization, he did not hurry himself at all. And one midnight he boarded a west-bound train.
There were none that he cared about bidding good-by. The sudden realization of the fact brought a moment's wonder. He had not realized that he had led such a lonely existence. There were men who were fitted for living in cities, but perhaps he was not one of them. He saw the station lights grow dim as the train pulled out. Soon he could discern just a spark, here and there, from the city's outlying homes. And not long after this, the silence and darkness of the farm lands closed down upon the train.
He sat for a long time in the vestibule of the sleeping car, thinking in anticipation of this final adventure of his life. It is true that he had not experienced many adventures. He had lived most of them in imagination alone; or else, with tired eyes, he had read of the exploits of other men. He was rather tremulous and exultant as he sank down into his berth.
He saw to it that at least a measure of preparation was made for his coming. That night a long wire went out to the Chamber of Commerce of one of the larger Southern Oregon cities. In it, he told the date of his arrival and asked certain directions. He wanted to know the name of some mountain rancher where possibly he might find board and room for the remainder of the summer and the fall. He wanted shooting, and he particularly cared to be near a river where trout might be found. They never came up Gitcheapolis River, or leaped for flies in the pond back of the courthouse. The further back from the paths of men, he wrote, the greater would be his pleasure. And he signed the wire with his full name: Dan Failing with a Henry in the middle, and a "III" at the end.
He usually did n't sign his name in quite this manner. The people of Gitcheapolis did not have particularly vivid memories of Dan's grandfather. But it might be that a legend of the gray, straight frontiersman who was his ancestor had still survived in these remote Oregon wilds. The use of the full name would do no harm.
Instead of hurting, it was a positive inspiration. The Chamber of Commerce of the busy little Oregon city was not usually exceptionally interested in stray hunters that wanted a boarding place for the summer. Its business was finding country homes for orchardists in the pleasant river valleys. But it happened that the recipient of the wire was one of the oldest residents, a frontiersman himself, and it was one of the traditions of the Old West that friendships were not soon forgotten. Dan Failing I had been a legend in the old trapping and shooting days when this man was young. So it came about that when Dan's train stopped at Cheyenne, he found a telegram waiting him:
"Any relation to Dan Failing of the Umpqua Divide?"
Dan had never heard of the Umpqua Divide, but he could n't doubt but that the sender of the wire referred to his grandfather. He wired in the affirmative. The head of the Chamber of Commerce received the wire, read it, thrust it into his desk, and in the face of a really important piece of business proceeded to forget all about it. Thus it came about that, except for one thing, Dan Failing would have probably stepped off the train at his destination wholly unheralded and unmet. The one thing that changed his destiny was that at a meeting of a certain widely known fraternal order the next night, the Chamber of Commerce crossed trails with the Frontier in the person of another old resident who had his home in the farthest reaches of the Umpqua Divide. The latter asked the former to come up for a few days' shooting—the deer being fatter and more numerous than any previous season since the days of the grizzlies. For it is true that one of the most magnificent breed of bears that ever walked the face of the earth once left their footprints, as of flour-sacks in the mud, from one end of the region to another.
"Too busy, I'm afraid," the Chamber of Commerce had replied. "But Lennox—that reminds me. Do you remember old Dan Failing?"
Lennox probed back into the years for a single instant, straightened out all the kinks of his memory in less time than the wind straightens out the folds of a flag, and turned a most interested face. "Remember him!" he exclaimed. "I should say I do." The middle-aged man half-closed his piercing, gray eyes. Those piercing eyes are a characteristic peculiar to the mountain men, and whether they come from gazing over endless miles of winter snow, or from some quality of steel that life in the mountains imbues, no one is quite able to determine.
"Listen, Steele," he said. "I saw Dan Failing make a bet once. I was just a kid, but I wake up in my sleep to marvel at it. We had a full long glimpse of a black-tail bounding up a long slope. It was just a spike-buck, and Dan Failing said he could take the left-hand spike off with one shot from his old Sharpe's. Three of us bet him—the whole thing in less than two seconds. With the next shot, he'd get the deer. He won the bet, and now if I ever forget Dan Failing, I want to die."
"You 're just the man I'm looking for, then. You 're not going out till the day after to-morrow?"
"No."
"On the limited, hitting here to-morrow morning, there's a grandson of Dan Failing. His name is Dan Failing too, and he wants to go up to your place to hunt. Stay all summer and pay board."
Lennox's eyes said that he could n't believe it was true. After a while his tongue spoke, too. "Good Lord," he said. "I used to foller Dan around—like old Shag, before he died, followed Snowbird. Of course he can come. But he can't pay board."
It was rather characteristic of the mountain men,—that the grandson of Dan Failing couldn't possibly pay board. But Steele knew the ways of cities and of men, and he only smiled. "He won't come, then," he explained. "Anyway, have that out with him at the end of his stay. He wants fishing, and you 've got that in the North fork. He wants shooting, and if there is a place in the United States with more wild animals around the back door than at your house, I don't know where it is. Moreover, you 're a thousand miles back—"
"Only one hundred, if you must know. But Steele—do you suppose he's the man his grandfather was before him—that all the Failings have been since the first days of the Oregon trail? If he is—well, my hat's off to him before he steps off the train."
The mountaineer's bronzed face was earnest and intent in the bright lights of the club. Steele thought he had known this breed. Now he began to have doubts of his own knowledge. "He won't be; don't count on it," he said humbly. "The Failings have done much for this region, and I'm glad enough to do a little to pay it back, but don't count much on this Eastern boy. He's lived in cities; besides, he's a sick man. He said so in his wire. You ought to know it before you take him in."
The bronzed face changed; possibly a shadow of disappointment came into his eyes. "A lunger, eh?" Lennox repeated. "Yes—it's true that if he'd been like the other Failings, he'd never have been that. Why, Steele, you could n't have given that old man a cold if you'd tied him in the Rogue River overnight. Of course you could n't count on the line keeping up forever. But I 'll take him, for the memory of his grandfather."
"You 're not afraid to?"
"Afraid, Hell! He can't infect those two strapping children of mine. Snowbird weighs one hundred and twenty pounds and is hard as steel. Never knew a sick day in her life. And you know Bill, of course."
Yes, Steele knew Bill. Bill weighed two hundred pounds, and he would choose the biggest of the steers he drove down to the lower levels in the winter and, twisting its horns, would make it lay over on its side. Besides, both of the men assumed that Dan must be only in the first stages of his malady.
And even as the men talked, the train that bore Dan Failing to the home of his ancestors was entering for the first time the dark forests of pine and fir that make the eternal background of the Northwest. The wind came cool and infinitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of blasting sun. And these smells all came straight home to Dan. He was wholly unable to understand the strange feeling of familiarity that he had with them, a sensation that in his dreams he had known them always, and that he must never go out of the range of them again.