As the doctor was about to leave the island he heard a distant bark, and
saw Agricola emerge from the cedars and come tearing down to the
boat-house. The dog caught sight of him and plunged into the water. He
gained the harbor, dashed up the rocks, and shook himself into rainbows.
He panted and whined, and finally seized his master by the sleeve.
“Calm yourself, boy. If you had a few sweat-glands, you wouldn’t pant so
hard.”
He rowed the dog across in Marvin’s skiff, and followed him into the
woods. Having mounted the hill and descended past the garden, Agricola
sprang across the fire-ditch and continued into the balsams.
When at last they reached the creek, the man was panting as hard as the
dog. The creek was wide at that point, and Agricola looked back
inquiringly.
The scholar hesitated, but since he thought that some child might be in
trouble, he answered the look.
“Go on.”
And on they went. The man had to take a stroke or two before they made
the other side. The woods now were almost impenetrable, but Agricola
wedged his way under. The doctor’s wet clothes scraped the leaves from
the mold, and moss from the logs. Repeatedly his gray shirt was torn by
stilettos of balsam. At last he could go no farther.
“Wait a minute.”
The dog stopped but continued to whine.
“Keep still.”
Agricola closed his red mouth again and again, trying to swallow his
noise, and in the intervals the doctor listened. He heard bits of cone
falling from the lips of red squirrels. He heard the feet of nuthatches
against the bark. He heard the borers in the balsams, grinding slowly.
He heard a far-off elfin whistle of the government boat coming down to
supply the buoy with new tanks of gas.
And then he heard a moan.
He noted the direction and crawled forward. Stumps of pine slowly
crumbling. Fallen trunks slowly flattening into earth as a dead body
flattens. Thick humus, with black pine needles like crystals of
stibnite. Great trees, snapped off and piled above him.
Now a deer run. A spring was ahead, and presently there would be a clump
of alders. Then, close to the ground, he caught a glimpse of fallow.
With great effort he rose to his feet and looked.
His own Sempronia! She was only three years old, and stone dead. The
bullet had taken her just behind the slender haunch that Marvin had
noted.
Across the body lay the form of the Little Pine, with his arms around
her neck. He had ceased to stroke her, had abandoned the effort to call
her back. Only there came at intervals the moan, tearless and hopeless.
“Shinguakonse!”
As the lad lifted his arms from the dead body his whole frame shook with
a shudder of terror.
“Good shot, my boy! I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Then the old man knelt and gathered the Little Pine to his heart.
“My dear chap, I understand. You were not content to bring groceries—you
wanted to bring her a deer too.”
The boy moaned something in his own tongue.
“Of course not. Mother wouldn’t understand. She never killed a deer in
her life. I’m the chap that understands.”
The Little Pine lifted his face from the doctor’s shoulder, but the look
of despair was not gone.
“I kill your only cow.”
“You mean, sir, that you have killed only a cow. You have killed one
cow, but I have killed forty boys. The first one I killed was up in a
tree. He fell exactly as a squirrel falls, hanging on to the last, and I
laughed. Then I got to thinking about it, and laughed no more. I lay on
the ground, sick as a dog, and made up my mind I would never have a
son.”
The boy laid a hand of sympathy on the old man’s arm.
“Little Pine, do you remember that your grandmother always called
Horatio the Gray Squirrel? And do you remember how he held you by the
hands and let you walk up him? And do you remember how your Noko laughed
and said that the pine was climbing the squirrel, whereas the squirrel
should be climbing the pine?”
The boy smiled sadly.
“Well, I want you to do something in memory of Horatio.”
“Yes, my father.”
“Then we will carry Sempronia down to your canoe, and you shall paddle
round and meet the Aspen, which is just now coming down to fill the
black buoy. I will give you a note to the captain, and he will sell the
carcass, and you shall save the money to go to school with.”
Tears at last burst from the stoical young eyes. This was his
punishment, this gift from the man he had ruined.
“I take her to Sault myself,” he sobbed.
“There, there, Horatio, stop crying. You seem to have forgotten all your
Greek. When Plato said that a boy is the most unmanageable of animals,
his best pupil retorted that a boy is more likely to do what is right
than what is politic.”
“I not Horatio.”
The old man brushed his hand across his eyes. “So you aren’t, but it’s
all the same. Horatio must have sent you. Comfort comes by comforting,
as I told Mahan last night.”
“My father, I know Mahan. My brother sent him to me.”
“What’s that?”
“I was fasting. My Noko told me to fast. A fasting boy may see his
guide. I prayed. I heard a noise like the noise of Mugwuh, the Bear. I
looked and saw Mahan.”
Dr. Rich received this primitive stuff in respectful silence.
“My father, I not think medicine man can sit in lodge and make Penaycee
well by talking to the lightning. I not think what Pere La Hogue told my
father, that antimoine he cure all. But my brother sent the Bear.”