assault, paused suddenly. His arm sank to his side. What exactly
stopped him he could never say. For one thing, he feared his own
anger, feared that if he let himself go he would not stop till he had
killed--committed murder. He knew his own fearful temper and stood
afraid of it. Yet it was not only that. The calm firmness of the
Redskin, his courage under pain, and something in the fixed and
burning eyes arrested him. Was it also something in the words he had
used--"Ishtot see _you_"--that stung him into a queer caution midway in
his violence?
He could not say. He only knew that a momentary sense of awe came over
him. He became unpleasantly aware of the enveloping forest, so still,
listening in a kind of impenetrable, remorseless silence. This lonely
wilderness, looking silently upon what might easily prove murder, laid a
faint, inexplicable chill upon his raging blood. The hand dropped slowly
to his side again, the fist unclenched itself, his breath came more
evenly.
"Look you here," he said, adopting without knowing it the local way of
speech. "I ain't a bad man, though your going-on do make a man damned
tired. I'll give you another chance." His voice was sullen, but a new
note in it surprised even himself. "I'll do that. You can have the night
to think it over, Tooshalli--see? Talk it over with your----"
He did not finish the sentence. Somehow the name of the Redskin God
refused to pass his lips. He turned away, flung himself into his
blankets, and in less than ten minutes, exhausted as much by his anger
as by the day's hard going, he was sound asleep.
The Indian, crouching beside the dying fire, had said nothing.
Night held the woods, the sky was thick with stars, the life of the
forest went about its business quietly, with that wondrous skill which
millions of years have perfected. The Redskin, so close to this skill
that he instinctively used and borrowed from it, was silent, alert and
wise, his outline as inconspicuous as though he merged, like his
four-footed teachers, into the mass of the surrounding bush.
He moved perhaps, yet nothing knew he moved. His wisdom, derived from
that eternal, ancient mother who from infinite experience makes no
mistakes, did not fail him. His soft tread made no sound; his breathing,
as his weight, was calculated. The stars observed him, but they did not
tell; the light air knew his whereabouts, yet without betrayal....
The chill dawn gleamed at length between the trees, lighting the pale
ashes of an extinguished fire, also of a bulky, obvious form beneath a
blanket. The form moved clumsily. The cold was penetrating.
And that bulky form now moved because a dream had come to trouble it. A
dark figure stole across its confused field of vision. The form started,
but it did not wake. The figure spoke: "Take this," it whispered,
handing a little stick, curiously carved. "It is the totem of great
Ishtot. In the valley all memory of the White Gods will leave you. Call
upon Ishtot.... Call on Him if you dare"; and the dark figure glided
away out of the dream and out of all remembrance....
2
The first thing Grimwood noticed when he woke was that Tooshalli was not
there. No fire burned, no tea was ready. He felt exceedingly annoyed. He
glared about him, then got up with a curse to make the fire. His mind
seemed confused and troubled. At first he only realized one thing
clearly--his guide had left him in the night.
It was very cold. He lit the wood with difficulty and made his tea, and
the actual world came gradually back to him. The Red Indian had gone;
perhaps the blow, perhaps the superstitious terror, perhaps both, had
driven him away. He was alone, that was the outstanding fact. For
anything beyond outstanding facts, Grimwood felt little interest.
Imaginative speculation was beyond his compass. Close to the brute
creation, it seemed, his nature lay.
It was while packing his blankets--he did it automatically, a dull,
vicious resentment in him--that his fingers struck a bit of wood that
he was about to throw away when its unusual shape caught his attention
suddenly. His odd dream came back then. But was it a dream? The bit of
wood was undoubtedly a totem stick. He examined it. He paid it more
attention than he meant to, wished to. Yes, it was unquestionably a
totem stick. The dream, then, was not a dream. Tooshalli had quit, but,
following with Redskin faithfulness some code of his own, had left him
the means of safety. He chuckled sourly, but thrust the stick inside his
belt. "One never knows," he mumbled to himself.
He faced the situation squarely. He was alone in the wilderness. His
capable, experienced woodsman had deserted him. The situation was
serious. What should he do? A weakling would certainly retrace his
steps, following the track they had made, afraid to be left alone in
this vast hinterland of pathless forest. But Grimwood was of another
build. Alarmed he might be, but he would not give in. He had the defects
of his own qualities. The brutality of his nature argued force. He was
determined and a sportsman. He would go on. And ten minutes after
breakfast, having first made a _cache_ of what provisions were left
over, he was on his way--down across the ridge and into the mysterious
valley, the Valley of the Beasts.
It looked, in the morning sunlight, entrancing. The trees closed in
behind him, but he did not notice. It led him on....
He followed the track of the gigantic moose he meant to kill, and the
sweet, delicious sunshine helped him. The air was like wine, the
seductive spoor of the great beast, with here and there a faint splash
of blood on leaves or ground, lay forever just before his eyes. He found
the valley, though the actual word did not occur to him, enticing; more
and more he noticed the beauty, the desolate grandeur of the mighty
spruce and hemlock, the splendour of the granite bluffs which in places
rose above the forest and caught the sun.... The valley was deeper,
vaster than he had imagined. He felt safe, at home in it, though, again
these actual terms did not occur to him.... Here he could hide for
ever and find peace.... He became aware of a new quality in the deep
loneliness. The scenery for the first time in his life appealed to him,
and the form of the appeal was curious--he felt the comfort of it.
For a man of his habit, this was odd, yet the new sensations stole over
him so gently, their approach so gradual, that they were first
recognized by his consciousness indirectly. They had already established
themselves in him before he noticed them; and the indirectness took this
form--that the passion of the chase gave place to an interest in the
valley itself. The lust of the hunt, the fierce desire to find and kill,
the keen wish, in a word, to see his quarry within range, to aim, to
fire, to witness the natural consummation of the long expedition--these
had all become measurably less, while the effect of the valley upon him
had increased in strength. There was a welcome about it that he did not
understand.
The change was singular, yet, oddly enough, it did not occur to him as
singular; it was unnatural, yet it did not strike him so. To a dull mind
of his unobservant, unanalytical type, a change had to be marked and
dramatic before he noticed it; something in the nature of a shock must
accompany it for him to recognize it had happened. And there had been no
shock. The spoor of the great moose was much cleaner, now that he caught
up with the animal that made it; the blood more frequent; he had noticed
the spot where it had rested, its huge body leaving a marked imprint on
the soft ground; where it had reached up to eat the leaves of saplings
here and there was also visible; he had come undoubtedly very near to
it, and any minute now might see its great bulk within range of an easy
shot. Yet his ardour had somehow lessened.
He first realized this change in himself when it suddenly occurred to
him that the animal itself had grown less cautious. It must scent him
easily now, since a moose, its sight being indifferent, depends chiefly
for its safety upon its unusually keen sense of smell, and the wind
came from behind him. This now struck him as decidedly uncommon: the
moose itself was obviously careless of his close approach. It felt no
fear.
It was this inexplicable alteration in the animal's behaviour that made
him recognize, at last, the alteration in his own. He had followed it
now for a couple of hours and had descended some eight hundred to a
thousand feet; the trees were thinner and more sparsely placed; there
were open, park-like places where silver birch, sumach and maple
splashed their blazing colours; and a crystal stream, broken by many
waterfalls, foamed past towards the bed of the great valley, yet another
thousand feet below. By a quiet pool against some over-arching rocks,
the moose had evidently paused to drink, paused at its leisure,
moreover. Grimwood, rising from a close examination of the direction the
creature had taken after drinking--the hoof-marks were fresh and very
distinct in the marshy ground about the pool--looked suddenly straight
into the great creature's eyes. It was not twenty yards from where he
stood, yet he had been standing on that spot for at least ten minutes,
caught by the wonder and loneliness of the scene. The moose, therefore,
had been close beside him all this time. It had been calmly drinking,
undisturbed by his presence, unafraid.
The shock came now, the shock that woke his heavy nature into
realization. For some seconds, probably for minutes, he stood rooted to
the ground, motionless, hardly breathing. He stared as though he saw a
vision. The animal's head was lowered, but turned obliquely somewhat,
so that the eyes, placed sideways in its great head, could see him
properly; its immense proboscis hung as though stuffed upon an English
wall; he saw the fore-feet planted wide apart, the slope of the enormous
shoulders dropping back towards the fine hind-quarters and lean flanks.
It was a magnificent bull. The horns and head justified his wildest
expectations, they were superb, a record specimen, and a phrase--where
had he heard it?--ran vaguely, as from far distance, through his mind:
"the biggest moose in the world."
There was the extraordinary fact, however, that he did not shoot; nor
feel the wish to shoot. The familiar instinct, so strong hitherto in his
blood, made no sign; the desire to kill apparently had left him. To
raise his rifle, aim and fire had become suddenly an absolute
impossibility.
He did not move. The animal and the human stared into each other's eyes
for a length of time whose interval he could not measure. Then came a
soft noise close beside him: the rifle had slipped from his grasp and
fallen with a thud into the mossy earth at his feet. And the moose, for
the first time now, was moving. With slow, easy stride, its great weight
causing a squelching sound as the feet drew out of the moist ground, it
came towards him, the bulk of the shoulders giving it an appearance of
swaying like a ship at sea. It reached his side, it almost touched him,
the magnificent head bent low, the spread of the gigantic horns lay
beneath his very eyes. He could have patted, stroked it. He saw, with a
touch of pity, that blood trickled from a sore in its left shoulder,
matting the thick hair. It sniffed the fallen rifle.
Then, lifting its head and shoulders again, it sniffed the air, this
time with an audible sound that shook from Grimwood's mind the last
possibility that he witnessed a vision or dreamed a dream. One moment
it gazed into his face, its big brown eyes shining and unafraid, then
turned abruptly, and swung away at a speed ever rapidly increasing
across the park-like spaces till it was lost finally among the dark
tangle of undergrowth beyond. And the Englishman's muscles turned to
paper, his paralysis passed, his legs refused to support his weight, and
he sank heavily to the ground....
3
It seems he slept, slept long and heavily; he sat up, stretched himself,
yawned and rubbed his eyes. The sun had moved across the sky, for the
shadows, he saw, now ran from west to east, and they were long shadows.
He had slept evidently for hours, and evening was drawing in. He was
aware that he felt hungry. In his pouchlike pockets, he had dried meat,
sugar, matches, tea, and the little billy that never left him. He would
make a fire, boil some tea and eat.
But he took no steps to carry out his purpose, he felt disinclined to
move, he sat thinking, thinking.... What was he thinking about? He did
not know, he could not say exactly; it was more like fugitive pictures
that passed across his mind. Who, and where, was he? This was the Valley
of the Beasts, that he knew; he felt sure of nothing else. How long had
he been here, and where had he come from, and why? The questions did not
linger for their answers, almost as though his interest in them was
merely automatic. He felt happy, peaceful, unafraid.
He looked about him, and the spell of this virgin forest came upon
him like a charm; only the sound of falling water, the murmur of wind
sighing among innumerable branches, broke the enveloping silence.
Overhead, beyond the crests of the towering trees, a cloudless evening
sky was paling into transparent orange, opal, mother of pearl. He saw
buzzards soaring lazily. A scarlet tanager flashed by. Soon would the
owls begin to call and the darkness fall like a sweet black veil
and hide all detail, while the stars sparkled in their countless
thousands....
A glint of something that shone upon the ground caught his eye--a
smooth, polished strip of rounded metal: his rifle. And he started to
his feet impulsively, yet not knowing exactly what he meant to do. At
the sight of the weapon, something had leaped to life in him, then faded
out, died down, and was gone again.
"I'm--I'm----" he began muttering to himself, but could not finish what
he was about to say. His name had disappeared completely. "I'm in the
Valley of the Beasts," he repeated in place of what he sought but could
not find.
This fact, that he was in the Valley of the Beasts, seemed the only
positive item of knowledge that he had. About the name something known
and familiar clung, though the sequence that led up to it he could not
trace. Presently, nevertheless, he rose to his feet, advanced a few
steps, stooped and picked up the shining metal thing, his rifle. He
examined it a moment, a feeling of dread and loathing rising in him,
a sensation of almost horror that made him tremble, then, with a
convulsive movement that betrayed an intense reaction of some sort he
could not comprehend, he flung the thing far from him into the foaming
torrent. He saw the splash it made, he also saw that same instant a
large grizzly bear swing heavily along the bank not a dozen yards from
where he stood. It, too, heard the splash, for it started, turned,
paused a second, then changed its direction and came towards him. It
came up close. Its fur brushed his body. It examined him leisurely, as
the moose had done, sniffed, half rose upon its terrible hind legs,
opened its mouth so that red tongue and gleaming teeth were plainly
visible, then flopped back upon all fours again with a deep growling
that yet had no anger in it, and swung off at a quick trot back to the
bank of the torrent. He had felt its hot breath upon his face, but he
had felt no fear. The monster was puzzled but not hostile. It
disappeared.
"They know not----" he sought for the word "man," but could not find it.
"They have never been hunted."
The words ran through his mind, if perhaps he was not entirely certain
of their meaning; they rose, as it were, automatically; a familiar sound
lay in them somewhere. At the same time there rose feelings in him
that were equally, though in another way, familiar and quite natural,
feelings he had once known intimately but long since laid aside.
What were they? What was their origin? They seemed distant as the stars,
yet were actually in his body, in his blood and nerves, part and parcel
of his flesh. Long, long ago.... Oh, how long, how long?
Thinking was difficult; feeling was what he most easily and naturally
managed. He could not think for long; feeling rose up and drowned the
effort quickly.
That huge and awful bear--not a nerve, not a muscle quivered in him as
its acrid smell rose to his nostrils, its fur brushed down his legs. Yet
he was aware that somewhere there was danger, though not here. Somewhere
there was attack, hostility, wicked and calculated plans against him--as
against that splendid, roaming animal that had sniffed, examined, then
gone its own way, satisfied. Yes, active attack, hostility and careful,
cruel plans against his safety, but--not here. Here he was safe, secure,
at peace; here he was happy; here he could roam at will, no eye cast
sideways into forest depths, no ear pricked high to catch sounds not
explained, no nostrils quivering to scent alarm. He felt this, but he
did not think it. He felt hungry, thirsty too.
Something prompted him now at last to act. His billy lay at his feet,
and he picked it up; the matches--he carried them in a metal case whose
screw top kept out all moisture--were in his hand. Gathering a few dry
twigs, he stooped to light them, then suddenly drew back with the first
touch of fear he had yet known.
Fire! What _was_ fire? The idea was repugnant to him, it was impossible,
he was afraid of fire. He flung the metal case after the rifle and saw
it gleam in the last rays of sunset, then sink with a little splash
beneath the water. Glancing down at his billy, he realized next that he
could not make use of it either, nor of the dark dry dusty stuff he had
meant to boil in water. He felt no repugnance, certainly no fear, in
connexion with these things, only he could not handle them, he did not
need them, he had forgotten, yes, "forgotten," what they meant exactly.
This strange forgetfulness was increasing in him rapidly, becoming more
and more complete with every minute. Yet his thirst must be quenched.
The next moment he found himself at the water's edge; he stooped to fill
his billy; paused, hesitated, examined the rushing water, then abruptly
moved a few feet higher up the stream, leaving the metal can behind him.
His handling of it had been oddly clumsy, his gestures awkward, even
unnatural. He now flung himself down with an easy, simple motion of his
entire body, lowered his face to a quiet pool he had found, and drank
his fill of the cool, refreshing liquid. But, though unaware of the
fact, he did not drink. He lapped.
Then, crouching where he was, he ate the meat and sugar from his
pockets, lapped more water, moved back a short distance again into the
dry ground beneath the trees, but moved this time without rising to his
feet, curled his body into a comfortable position and closed his eyes
again to sleep.... No single question now raised its head in him. He
felt contentment, satisfaction only....
He stirred, shook himself, opened half an eye and saw, as he had felt
already in slumber, that he was not alone. In the park-like spaces in
front of him, as in the shadowed fringe of the trees at his back, there
was sound and movement, the sound of stealthy feet, the movement of
innumerable dark bodies. There was the pad and tread of animals, the
stir of backs, of smooth and shaggy beasts, in countless numbers. Upon
this host fell the light of a half moon sailing high in a cloudless sky;
the gleam of stars, sparkling in the clear night air like diamonds,
shone reflected in hundreds of ever-shifting eyes, most of them but a
few feet above the ground. The whole valley was alive.
He sat upon his haunches, staring, staring, but staring in wonder, not
in fear, though the foremost of the great host were so near that he
could have stretched an arm and touched them. It was an ever-moving,
ever-shifting throng he gazed at, spell-bound, in the pale light of moon
and stars, now fading slowly towards the approaching dawn. And the smell
of the forest itself was not sweeter to him in that moment than the
mingled perfume, raw, pungent, acrid, of this furry host of beautiful
wild animals that moved like a sea, with a strange murmuring, too, like
sea, as the myriad feet and bodies passed to and fro together. Nor was
the gleam of the starry, phosphorescent eyes less pleasantly friendly
than those happy lamps that light home-lost wanderers to cosy rooms and
safety. Through the wild army, in a word, poured to him the deep comfort
of the entire valley, a comfort which held both the sweetness of
invitation and the welcome of some magical home-coming.
No thoughts came to him, but feeling rose in a tide of wonder and
acceptance. He was in his rightful place. His nature had come home.
There was this dim, vague consciousness in him that after long, futile
straying in another place where uncongenial conditions had forced him to
be unnatural and therefore terrible, he had returned at last where he
belonged. Here, in the Valley of the Beasts, he had found peace,
security and happiness. He would be--he was at last--himself.
It was a marvellous, even a magical, scene he watched, his nerves at
highest tension yet quite steady, his senses exquisitely alert, yet no
uneasiness in the full, accurate reports they furnished. Strong as some
deep flood-tide, yet dim, as with untold time and distance, rose over
him the spell of long-forgotten memory of a state where he was content
and happy, where he was natural. The outlines, as it were, of mighty,
primitive pictures, flashed before him, yet were gone again before the
detail was filled in.
He watched the great army of the animals, they were all about him now;
he crouched upon his haunches in the centre of an ever-moving circle of
wild forest life. Great timber wolves he saw pass to and fro, loping
past him with long stride and graceful swing; their red tongues lolling
out; they swarmed in hundreds. Behind, yet mingling freely with them,
rolled the huge grizzlies, not clumsy as their uncouth bodies promised,
but swiftly, lightly, easily, their half tumbling gait masking agility
and speed. They gambolled, sometimes they rose and stood half upright,
they were comely in their mass and power, they rolled past him so close
that he could touch them. And the black bear and the brown went with
them, bears beyond counting, monsters and little ones, a splendid
multitude. Beyond them, yet only a little further back, where the
park-like spaces made free movement easier, rose a sea of horns and
antlers like a miniature forest in the silvery moonlight. The immense
tribe of deer gathered in vast throngs beneath the starlit sky. Moose
and caribou, he saw, the mighty wapiti, and the smaller deer in their
crowding thousands. He heard the sound of meeting horns, the tread of
innumerable hoofs, the occasional pawing of the ground as the bigger
creatures manoeuvred for more space about them. A wolf, he saw, was
licking gently at the shoulder of a great bull-moose that had been
injured. And the tide receded, advanced again, once more receded, rising
and falling like a living sea whose waves were animal shapes, the
inhabitants of the Valley of the Beasts.
Beneath the quiet moonlight they swayed to and fro before him. They
watched him, knew him, recognized him. They made him welcome.
He was aware, moreover, of a world of smaller life that formed an
under-sea, as it were, numerous under-currents rather, running in and
out between the great upright legs of the larger creatures. These,
though he could not see them clearly, covered the earth, he was aware,
in enormous numbers, darting hither and thither, now hiding, now
reappearing, too intent upon their busy purposes to pay him attention
like their huger comrades, yet ever and anon tumbling against his back,
cannoning from his sides, scampering across his legs even, then gone
again with a scuttering sound of rapid little feet, and rushing back
into the general host beyond. And with this smaller world also he felt
at home.
How long he sat gazing, happy in himself, secure, satisfied, contented,
natural, he could not say, but it was long enough for the desire to
mingle with what he saw, to know closer contact, to become one with them
all--long enough for this deep blind desire to assert itself, so that at
length he began to move from his mossy seat towards them, to move,
moreover, as they moved, and not upright on two feet.
The moon was lower now, just sinking behind a towering cedar whose
ragged crest broke its light into silvery spray. The stars were a little
paler too. A line of faint red was visible beyond the heights at the
valley's eastern end.