I
September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,--that far
wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for
his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It
wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice
formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in
length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings
in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there
hadn't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between
the two seasons,--the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.
It was true that the leaves were shedding from the underbrush. They came
yellow and they came red, and the north wind, always the first breath of
winter, blew them in all directions. They made a perfect background for
the tawny tints of Whisperfoot, and quite often the near-sighted deer
would walk right up to him without detecting him. But the cougar always
saw to it they didn't do it a second time. It had been a particularly
bad season for Whisperfoot, and he was glad that his luck had changed.
The woods were so dry from the long drought that even he--and as all men
know, he is one of the most silent creatures in the wilderness when he
wants to be, which are the times that he doesn't want to make as much
noise as a steam engine--found it hard to crawl down a deer trail
without being heard. The twigs would sometimes crack beneath his feet,
and this is a disgrace with any cougar. Their first lessons are to learn
to walk with silence.
Woof the bear loved this month above all others. It wasn't that he
needed protective coloring. He was not a hunter at all, except of grubs
and berries and such small fry. He had a black coat and a clumsy stride;
and he couldn't have caught a deer if his life had depended upon it. But
he did like to shuffle through the fallen leaves and make beds of them
in the warm afternoons; and besides, the berries were always biggest and
ripest in September. The bee trees were almost full of honey. Even the
fat beetles under the stumps were many and lazy.
Everywhere the forest people were preparing for the winter that would
fall so quickly when these golden September days were done. The Under
Plane of the forest--those smaller peoples that live in the dust and
have beautiful, tropical forests in the ferns--found themselves digging
holes and filling them with stores of food. Of course they had no idea
on earth why they were doing it, except that a quiver at the end of
their tails told them to do so; but the result was entirely the same.
They would have a shelter for the winter. Certain of the birds were
beginning to wonder what the land was like to the south, and now and
then waking up in the crisp dawns with decided longings for travel. The
young mallards on the lakes were particularly restless, and occasionally
a long flock of them would rise in the morning from the blue waters with
a glint of wings,--and quite fail to come back. And one night all the
forest listened to the wail of the first flock of south-going geese. But
the main army of waterfowl would of course not pass until fall came in
reality.
But the most noticeable change of all, in these last days of summer, was
a distinct tone of sadness that sounded throughout the forest. Of course
the wilderness note is always somewhat sad; but now, as the leaves fell
and the grasses died, it seemed particularly pronounced. All the forest
voices added to it,--the wail of the geese, the sad fluttering of
fallen leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed
darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed
without dropping their burdens on the parched hillsides. Of course all
the tones and voices of the wilderness sound clearest at night--for that
is the time that the forest really comes to life--and Dan Failing,
sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon
rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.
It was true that in the two months he had spent in the mountains he had
learned to be very receptive to the voices of the wilderness. Lennox had
not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination
and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of wood lore
from his frontiersmen ancestors. Two months before he had been a
resident of cities. Now the wilderness had claimed him, body and soul.
These had been rare days. At first he had to limit his expeditions to a
few miles each day, and even then he would come in at night staggering
from weariness. He climbed hills that seemed to tear his diseased lungs
to shreds. Lennox wouldn't have been afraid, in a crisis, to trust his
marksmanship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one
twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of
a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a
mountaineer's weapon--except a sawed-off specimen for family
contingencies--yet Dan acquired a certain measure of skill at small game
hunting, too. He got so he could shatter a grouse out of the air in the
half of a second or so in which its bronze wings glinted in the
shrubbery; and when a man may do this a fair number of times out of ten,
he is on the straight road toward greatness.
Then there came a day when Dan caught his first steelhead in the North
Fork. There was no finer sport in the whole West than this,--the play of
the fly, the strike, the electric jar that carries along the line and
through the arm and into the soul from where it is never quite effaced,
and finally the furious strife and exultant throb when the fish is
hooked. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a
steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of
the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed
down the ripples. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now
and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with
main strength, and are still somewhat dazed by the result. It might be
done with a steel cable, but an ordinary line or leader breaks like a
cobweb. When his majesty the steelhead takes the fly and decides to run,
it can be learned after a time that the one thing that may be done is to
let out all the line and with prayer and humbleness try to keep up with
him.
Dan fished for lake trout in the lakes of the plateau; he shot waterfowl
in the tule marshes; he hunted all manner of living things with his
camera. But most of all he simply studied, as his frontiersmen ancestors
had done before him. He found unceasing delight in the sagacity of the
bear, the grace of the felines, the beauty of the deer. He knew the
chipmunks and the gray squirrels and the snowshoe rabbits. And every day
his muscles had hardened and his gaunt frame had filled out.
He no longer wore his glasses. Every day his eyes had strengthened. He
could see more clearly now, with his unaided eyes, than he had ever seen
before with the help of the lens. And the moonlight came down through a
rift in the trees and showed that his face had changed too. It was no
longer so white. The eyes were more intent. The lips were straighter.
"It's been two months," Silas Lennox told him, "half the four that you
gave yourself after you arrived here. And you're twice as good now as
when you came."
Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day
I climbed halfway up Baldy--within a half mile of Snowbird's
cabin--without stopping to rest."
Lennox looked thoughtful. More than once, of late, Dan had climbed up
toward Snowbird's cabin. It was true that his guest and his daughter had
become the best of companions in the two months; but on second thought,
Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the
mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets
her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held
good. The mountain women rarely mistook a maternal tenderness for an
appealing man for love. It wasn't that Dan was weak except from the
ravages of his disease; but he was still a long way from Snowbird's
ideal.
And the explanation was simply that life in the mountains gets down to a
primitive basis, and its laws are the laws of the cave. Emotions are
simple and direct, dangers are real, and the family relations have
remained unchanged since the first days of the race. Men do not woo one
another's wives in the mountains. There is no softness, no compromise:
the male of the species provides, and the female keeps the hut. It is
good, the mountain women know, when the snows come, to have a strong arm
to lean upon. The man of strong muscles, of quick aim, of cool nerve in
a crisis is the man that can be safely counted on not to leave a
youthful widow to a lone battle for existence. Although Dan had courage
and that same rigid self-control that was an old quality in his breed,
he was still a long way from a physically strong man. It was still an
even break whether he would ever wholly recover from his malady.
But Dan was not thinking about this now. All his perceptions had
sharpened down to the finest focal point, and he was trying to catch the
spirit of the endless forest that stretched in front of the house. The
moon was above the pines at last, and its light was a magic. He sat
breathless, his eyes intent on the silvery patches between the trees.
Now and then he saw a shadow waver.
His pipe had gone out, and for a long time Lennox hadn't spoken. He
seemed to be straining too, with ineffective senses, trying to recognize
and name the faint sounds that came so tingling and tremulous out of the
darkness. As always, they heard the stir and rustle of the gnawing
people: the chipmunks in the shrubbery, the gophers who, like blind
misers, had ventured forth from their dark burrows; and perhaps even the
scaly glide of those most-dreaded poison people that had lairs in the
rock piles.
Then, more distinct still, they heard the far-off yowl of a cougar. Yet
it wasn't quite like the cougar utterances that Dan had heard on
previous nights. It was not so high, so piercing and triumphant; but had
rather an angry, snarling tone made up of _ows_ and broad, nasal _yahs_.
It came tingling up through hundreds of yards of still forest; and both
of them leaned forward.
"Another deer killed," Dan suggested softly.
"No. Not this time. He missed, and he's mad about it. They often snarl
that way when they miss their stroke, just like an angry cat. But
listen--"
Again they heard a sound, and from some far-lying ridge, they heard a
curious echo. So far it had come that only a tremor of it remained; yet
every accent and intonation was perfect, and Dan was dimly reminded of
some work of art cunningly wrought in miniature. In one quality alone it
resembled the cougar's cry. It was unquestionably a wilderness
voice,--no sound made by men or the instruments of men; and like the
cougar's cry, it was simply imbued with the barbaric spirit of the wild.
But while the cougar had simply yowled in disappointment, a sound wholly
without rhythm or harmony, this sound was after the manner of a song,
rising and falling unutterably wild and strange.