As an apple tossed spinning into the air, so spun the world above the
hand that tossed it into space.
And one day in early spring, Sé-só-Kah, the robin, awoke at dawn, and
saw a girl at the foot of the blossoming tree holding a babe cradled in
the silken sheets of her hair.
At its feeble cry, Kaug, the porcupine, raised his quilled head.
Wabóse, the rabbit, sat still with palpitating sides. Kay-óshk, the
gray gull, tiptoed along the beach.
Kent knelt with one bronzed arm around them both.
"Ihó! Inâh!" whispered the girl, and held the babe up in the rosy
flames of dawn.
But Kent trembled as he looked, and his eyes filled. On the pale green
moss their shadows lay--three shadows. But the shadow of the babe was
white as froth.
Because it was the firstborn son, they named it Chaské; and the girl
sang as she cradled it there in the silken vestments of her hair; all
day long in the sunshine she sang:
Wâ-wa, wâ-wa, wâ-we--yeá;
Kah-wéen, nee-zhéka Ke-diaus-âi,
Ke-gâh nau-wâi, ne-mé-go S'weén,
Ne-bâun, ne-bâun, ne-dâun-is âis.
E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we--yeá;
E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we--yeá.
Out in the calm ocean, Shinge-bis, the diver, listened, preening his
satin breast in silence. In the forest, Ta-hinca, the red deer, turned
her delicate head to the wind.
That night Kent thought of the dead, for the first time since he had
come to the Key of Grief.
"Aké-u! aké-u!" chirped Sé-só-Kah, the robin. But the dead never come
again.
"Beloved, sit close to us," whispered the girl, watching his troubled
eyes. "Ma-cânte maséca."
But he looked at the babe and its white shadow on the moss, and he only
sighed: "Ma-cânte maséca, beloved! Death sits watching us across the
sea."
Now for the first time he knew more than the fear of fear; he knew
fear. And with fear came grief.
He never before knew that grief lay hidden there in the forest. Now he
knew it. Still, that happiness, eternally reborn when two small hands
reached up around his neck, when feeble fingers clutched his hand--that
happiness that Sé-só-Kah understood, chirping to his brooding
mate--that Ta-mdóka knew, licking his dappled fawns--that happiness
gave him heart to meet grief calmly, in dreams or in the forest depths,
and it helped him to look into the hollow eyes of fear.
He often thought of the camp now; of Bates, his blanket mate; of Dyce,
whose wrist he had broken with a blow; of Tully, whose brother he had
shot. He even seemed to hear the shot, the sudden report among the
hemlocks; again he saw the haze of smoke, he caught a glimpse of a tall
form falling through the bushes.
He remembered every minute incident of the trial: Bates's hand laid
on his shoulder; Tully, red-bearded and wild-eyed, demanding his
death; while Dyce spat and spat and smoked and kicked at the blackened
log-ends projecting from the fire. He remembered, too, the verdict, and
Tully's terrible laugh; and the new jute rope that they stripped off
the market-sealed gum packs.
He thought of these things, sometimes wading out on the shoals,
shell-tipped fish spear poised: at such times he would miss his fish.
He thought of it sometimes when he knelt by the forest stream listening
for Ta-hinca's splash among the cresses: at such moments the feathered
shaft whistled far from the mark, and Ta-mdóka stamped and snorted
till even the white fisher, stretched on a rotting log, flattened his
whiskers and stole away into the forest's blackest depths.
When the child was a year old, hour for hour notched at sunset and
sunrise, it prattled with the birds, and called to Ne-Kâ, the wild
goose, who called again to the child from the sky: "Northward!
northward, beloved!"
When winter came--there is no frost on the Island of Grief--Ne-Kâ, the
wild goose, passing high in the clouds, called: "Southward! southward,
beloved!" And the child answered in a soft whisper of an unknown
tongue, till the mother shivered, and covered it with her silken hair.
"O beloved!" said the girl, "Chaské calls to all things living--to
Kaug, the porcupine, to Wabóse, to Kay-óshk, the gray gull--he calls,
and they understand."
Kent bent and looked into her eyes.
"Hush, beloved; it is not _that_ I fear."
"Then what, beloved?"
"His shadow. It is white as surf foam. And at night--I--I have seen----"
"Oh, what?"
"The air about him aglow like a pale rose."
"Ma cânté maséca. The earth alone lasts. I speak as one dying--I know,
O beloved!"
Her voice died away like a summer wind.
"Beloved!" he cried.
But there before him she was changing; the air grew misty, and her hair
wavered like shreds of fog, and her slender form swayed, and faded, and
swerved, like the mist above a pond.
In her arms the babe was a figure of mist, rosy, vague as a breath on
a mirror.
"The earth alone lasts. Inâh! It is the end, O beloved!"
The words came from the mist--a mist as formless as the ether--a mist
that drove in and crowded him, that came from the sea, from the clouds,
from the earth at his feet. Faint with terror, he staggered forward
calling, "Beloved! And thou, Chaské, O beloved! Aké u! Aké u!"
Far out at sea a rosy star glimmered an instant in the mist and went
out.
A sea bird screamed, soaring over the waste of fog-smothered waters.
Again he saw the rosy star; it came nearer; its reflection glimmered in
the water.
"Chaské!" he cried.
He heard a voice, dull in the choking mist.
"O beloved, I am here!" he called again.
There was a sound on the shoal, a flicker in the fog, the flare of a
torch, a face white, livid, terrible--the face of the dead.
He fell upon his knees; he closed his eyes and opened them. Tully stood
beside him with a coil of rope.
* * * * *
Ihó! Behold the end! The earth alone lasts. The sand, the opal wave on
the golden beach, the sea of sapphire, the dusted starlight, the wind,
and love, shall die. Death also shall die, and lie on the shores of
the skies like the bleached skull there on the Key to Grief, polished,
empty, with its teeth embedded in the sand.