The rains fell unceasingly for seven days: not a downpour but a constant
drizzle that made the distant ridges smoke. The parched earth seemed to
smack its lips, and little rivulets began to fall and tumble over the
beds of the dry streams. The Rogue and the Umpqua flooded and the great
steelhead began to ascend their smaller tributaries. Whisperfoot hunted
with ease, for the wet shrubbery did not crack and give him away. The
air was filled with the call of the birds of passage.
All danger of forest fire was at once removed, and Snowbird was no
longer needed as a lookout on old Bald Mountain. She went to her own
home, her companion back to the valley; and now that his sister had
taken his place as housekeeper, Bill had gone down to the lower
foothills with a great part of the live stock. Dan spent these rainy
days in toil on the hillsides, building himself physically so that he
might pay his debts.
It was no great pleasure, these rainy days. He would have greatly liked
to have lingered in the square mountain house, listening to the quiet
murmur of the rain on the roof and watching Snowbird at her household
tasks. She could, as her father had said, make a biscuit. She could also
roll up sleeves over trim, brown arms and with entire good humor do a
week's laundry for three hardworking men. He would have liked to sit
with her, through the long afternoons, as she knitted beside the
fireplace--to watch the play of her graceful fingers and perhaps, now
and then, to touch her hands when he held the skeins. But none of these
things transpired. He drove himself from daylight till dark, developing
his body for the tests that were sure to come.
The first few days nearly killed him. He over-exercised in the chill
rain, and one anxious night he developed all the symptoms of pneumonia.
Such a sickness would have been the one thing needed to make the
doctor's prophecy come true. But with Snowbird's aid, and numerous hot
drinks, he fought it off.
She had made him go to bed, and no human memory could be so dull as to
forget the little, whispered message that she gave him with his last
spoonful of medicine. She said she'd pray for him, and she meant it
too,--literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a
mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,--simple and
true and wholly without affectation. But he hadn't relaxed thereafter.
He knew the time had come to make the test. Night after night he would
go to bed half-sick from fatigue, but the mornings would find him fresh.
And after two weeks, he knew he had passed the crisis and was on the
direct road to complete recovery.
Sometimes he cut wood in the forest: first the felling of some tall
pine, then the trimming and hewing into two-foot lengths. The blisters
came on his hands, broke and bled, but finally hardened into
callosities. He learned the most effective stroke to hurl a shower of
chips from beneath the blade. His back and limbs hardened from the
handling of heavy wood--and the cough was practically gone.
Sometimes he mended fences and did other manual labor about the ranch;
but not all his exercise was taken out in work. He didn't forget his
friends in the forest, creatures of talon and paw and wing. He spent
long days roaming the ridges and fighting through the buckbrush, and the
forest yielded up its secrets, one by one. But he knew that no mortal
span of years was long enough to absorb them all. Sometimes he shot
ducks over the marshes; and there was no greater sport for him in the
wilds than the first sight of a fine, black-pencil line upon the
distant sky, the leap through the air that it made until, in an
instant's flash, it evolved into a flock of mallard passing with the
wind; and then the test of eye and nerve as he saw them over the sights.
His frame filled out. His face became swarthy from constant exposure. He
gained in weight. A month glided by, and he began to see the first
movement of the largest forest creatures down to the foothills. For not
even the animals, with the exception of the hardy wolf pack, can survive
if unprotected from the winter snow and cold of the high levels. The
first snow sifted from the gray sky and quickly melted on the wet pine
needles. And then the migration of the deer began in earnest. Before
another week was done, Whisperfoot had cause to marvel where they had
all gone.
One cloudy afternoon in early November found Silas Lennox cutting wood
on the ridge behind his house. It was still an open question with him
whether he and his daughter would attempt to winter on the Divide. Dan
of course wanted to remain, yet there were certain reasons, some very
definite and others extremely vague, why the prospect of the winter in
the snow fields did not appeal to the mountaineer. In the first place,
all signs pointed to a hard season. Although the fall had come late,
the snows were exceptionally early. The duck flight was completed two
weeks before its usual time, and the rodents had dug their burrows
unusually deep. Besides, too many months of snow weigh heavily upon the
spirit. The wolf packs sing endlessly on the ridges, and many unpleasant
things may happen. On previous years, some of the cabins on the ridges
below had human occupants; this winter the whole region, for nearly
seventy miles across the mountains to the foothills, would be wholly
deserted by human beings. Even the ranger station, twelve miles across a
steep ridge, would soon be empty. Of course a few ranchers had homes a
few miles beyond the river, but the wild cataracts did not freeze in the
coldest of seasons, and there were no bridges. Besides, most of the more
prosperous farmers wintered in the valleys. Only a few more days would
the road be passable for his car; and no time must be lost in making his
decision.
Once the snows came in reality, there was nothing to do but stay.
Seventy miles across the uncharted ridges on snowshoes is an undertaking
for which even a mountaineer has no fondness. It might be the wisest
thing, after all, to load Snowbird and Dan into his car and drive down
to the valleys. The fall round-up would soon be completed, Bill would
return for a few days from the valleys with new equipment to replace the
broken lighting system on the car, and they could avoid the bitter cold
and snow that Lennox had known so long. Of course he would miss it
somewhat. He had a strong man's love for the endless drifts, the
crackling dawns and the hushed, winter forest wherein not even Woof or
Whisperfoot dares to go abroad. He chopped at a great log and wondered
what would suit him better,--the comfort and safety of the valleys or
the rugged glory of the ridges.
But at that instant, the question of whether or not he would winter on
the Divide was decided for him. And an instant was all that was needed.
For the period of one breath he forgot to be watchful,--and a certain
dread Spirit that abides much in the forest saw its chance. Perhaps he
had lived too long in the mountains and grown careless of them: an
attitude that is usually punished with death. He had just felled a tree,
and the trunk was still attached to the stump by a stripe of bark to
which a little of the wood adhered. He struck a furious blow at it with
his ax.
He hadn't considered that the tree lay on a steep slope. As the blade
fell, the great trunk simply seemed to leap. Lennox leaped too, in a
frenzied effort to save his life; but already the leafy bows, like the
tendrils of some great amphibian, had whipped around his legs. He fell,
struggling; and then a curious darkness, streaked with flame, dropped
down upon him.
An hour later he found himself lying on the still hillside, knowing only
a great wonderment. At first his only impulse was to go back to sleep.
He didn't understand the grayness that had come upon the mountain world,
his own strange feeling of numbness, of endless soaring through infinite
spaces. But he was a mountain man, and that meant he was schooled,
beyond all things, to keep his self-control. He made himself remember.
It was the cruelest work he had ever done, and it seemed to him that his
brain would shiver to pieces from the effort. Yes--he had been cutting
wood on the hillside, and the shadows had been long. He had been
wondering whether or not they should go down to the valleys.
He remembered now: the last blow and the rolling log. He tried to turn
his head to look up to the hill.
He found himself wholly unable to do it. Something wracked him in his
neck when he tried to move. But he did glance down. And yes, he could
turn in this direction. And he saw the great tree trunk lying twenty
feet below him, wedged in between the young pines.
He was surrounded by broken fragments of limbs, and it was evident that
the tree had not struck him a full blow. The limbs had protected him to
some extent. No man is of such mold as to be crushed under the solid
weight of the trunk and live to remember it. He wondered if this were
the frontier of death,--the grayness that lingered over him. He seemed
to be soaring.
He brought himself back to earth and tried again to remember. Of course,
the twilight had fallen. It had been late afternoon when he had cut the
tree. His hand stole along his body; and then, for the first time, a
hideous sickness came upon him. His hand was warm and wet when he
brought it up. The other hand he couldn't stretch at all.
The forest was silent around him, except a bird calling somewhere near
the house--a full voice, rich and clear, and it seemed to him that it
had a quality of distress. Then he recognized it. It was the voice of
his own daughter, Snowbird, calling for him. He tried to answer her.
It was only a whisper, at first. Yet she was coming nearer; and her own
voice sounded louder. "Here, Snowbird," he called again. She heard him
then: he could tell by the startled tone of her reply. The next instant
she was at his side, her tears dropping on his face.
With a tremendous effort of will, he recalled his speeding faculties. "I
don't think I'm badly hurt," he told her very quietly. "A few ribs
broken--and a leg. But we'll have to winter here on the Divide, Snowbird
mine."
"What does it matter, if you live," she cried. She crawled along the
pine needles beside him, and tore his shirt from his breast. He was
rapidly sinking into unconsciousness. The thing she dreaded most--that
his back might be broken--was evidently not true. There were, as he
said, broken ribs and evidently one severe fracture of the leg bone.
Whether he had sustained internal injuries that would end his life
before the morning, she had no way of knowing.
At that point, the problem of saving her father's life fell wholly into
her hands. It was perfectly plain that he could not aid himself in the
slightest way. It was evident, also, he could not be moved, except
possibly for the distance to the house. She banished all impulse toward
hysteria and at once began to consider all phases of the case.
His broken body could not be carried over the mountain road to
physicians in the valleys. They must be transported to the ranch. It
would take them a full day to make the trip, even if she could get word
to them at once; and twenty-four hours without medical attention would
probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the
ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The
telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected
when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.
It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and
he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one
exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant
marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not
return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger
station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking
heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new
lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that
mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the
thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the
mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive,
by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about
the valley.
Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of
the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a
position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross
the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would
return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give.
The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the
house.
He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to
him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid
that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had
come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her
fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.
One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human
form,--a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a
heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in
No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the
fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a
particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman.
She knew at once that this problem was solved.
The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon
her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she
able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him
down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the
limp body still across her shoulders.
It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those
trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the
mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed,
on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She
covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky
beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of
the interior doors.
She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly
at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on
the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father
down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots--needed sorely for
the steep climb--and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked
venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest
night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the
dark trees when she started out.
Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and
complained because he could find no deer.