Miranda and the Furtive Folk
From the very first day of her new life at the clearing, Miranda had
found it to her taste. Her mother loved it for its peace, for its
healing; but to the elvish child it had an incomparably deeper and more
positive appeal. For her the place was not solitary. Her wide eyes saw
what Kirstie could not see; and to her the forest edges—which she was
not allowed to pass—were full of most satisfying playmates just waiting
for her to invite their confidence. Meanwhile, she had the two steers
and the black-and-white cow to talk to. Her mother noticed that when she
sat down in the grass by the head of one of the animals, and began her
low mysterious communication, it would stop its feeding and hearken
motionless. The black-and-red brindle, Star, would sometimes follow her
about like a dog, as if spelled by the child’s solemn eyes. Then the
solemn eyes on a sudden would dance with light; her lips would break
into a peal of whimsical mirth, shrill but not loud; and the steer, with
a flick of his tail and an offended snort, would turn again to his
pasturing.
In a hole in one of the logs, just under the eaves of the cabin, there
was a family of red squirrels, the four youngsters about three-fourths
grown and almost ready to shift for themselves. No sooner had the old
lumberman and his son gone away than the squirrels began to make
themselves much at home. They saw in Kirstie a huge and harmless
creature, whose presence in the cabin was useful to scare away their
enemies. But in Miranda they found a sort of puzzling kinship. The two
old squirrels would twitch up and down on the edge of the roof,
chattering shrilly to her, flirting their airy tails, and stretching
down their heads to scan her searchingly with their keen protruding
eyes; while Miranda, just below, would dance excitedly up and down in
response, nodding her head, jerking her elbows, and chattering back at
them in a quick, shrill voice. It was a very different voice to the soft
murmurs in which she talked to the cattle; but to the squirrels it
appeared satisfactory. Before she had been a week at the clearing the
whole squirrel family seemed to regard her as one of themselves,
snatching bread from her tiny brown fingers, and running up her skirt to
her shoulder whensoever the freak possessed them. Kirstie, they
ignored—the harmless, necessary Kirstie, mother to Miranda.
No sooner were they fairly settled than the child discovered an
incongruity in her gay pink calico frocks, and got her mother to bury
them out of sight in the deal chest behind the door. She was at ease now
only in the dull, blue-grey homespun, which made her feel at one with
her quiet surroundings. Nevertheless the vein of contradiction which
streaked her baby heart with bright inconsistencies bade her demand
always a bit of scarlet ribbon about her neck. This whim Kirstie
humoured with a smile, recognizing in it a perpetuation of the scarlet
kerchief about her own black hair. As for Miranda’s hair, it was black
like her mother’s when seen in shadow; but in the sunshine it showed
certain tawny lights, a pledge of her fatherhood to all who had known
Frank Craig.
So the autumn slipped by; and the silent folk of the wood, watching her
curiously and unwinkingly as she played while her mother built fences,
came to know Miranda as a creature in some way not quite alien to
themselves. They knew that she often saw them when her mother’s eyes
could not. Perceiving that her mother did not quite understand her, at
times, when she tried to point out pretty animals among the trees, the
child grew a little sensitive and reticent on the subject; and the
furtive folk, who had at first inclined to resent her inescapable
vision, presently realized her reserves and were appeased. Her grey
little sprite of a figure might have darted in among the trees, turned
to a statue, and become suddenly as invisible as any lynx, or cat, or
hare, or pine-marten amongst them, except, indeed, for that disquieting
flame of scarlet at her neck. This was a puzzle to all the folk of the
wood, continually reminding them that this quiet-flitting creature did
not really belong to the wood at all, but to the great woman with the
red about her head, whose axe made so vexing a clamour amid the trees.
As for Kroof, the bear, that bit of scarlet so interested her that one
day, being curious, she came much nearer than she intended. Miranda saw
her, of course, and gazed with wide-eyed longing for the “great big dog”
as a playmate. Just then Kirstie saw her, too—very close at hand, and
very huge.
[Illustration: She . . . stood motionless, erect and formidable]
For the first time, Kirstie Craig felt something like fear, not for
herself, but for the child. Thrusting Miranda roughly behind her, she
clutched her axe, and stood motionless, erect and formidable, awaiting
attack. Her great black eyes blazed ominously upon the intruder. But
Kroof, well filled with late berries, and sweet wild roots, and
honeycomb, was in most amiable humour, and just shambled off lazily when
she saw herself detected; whereupon Kirstie, with a short laugh of
relief, threw down her axe and snatched the child to her breast.
Miranda, however, was weeping salt tears of disappointment.
“I want it, mother,” she sobbed; “the nice big dog. You scared it away.”
Kirstie had heard more than enough about the dog.
“Hark now, Miranda,” she said severely, giving her shoulder a slight
shake to enforce attention. “You just remember what I say. That ain’t a
dog; that’s a bear; _a bear_, I say! And don’t you ever go near it, or
it’ll eat you up. Mind you now, Miranda, or I’ll just whip you well.”
Kirstie was a little fluttered and thrown off her poise at the idea of
Miranda encountering the great animal alone, and perhaps attempting to
bring it home to play with; so she forgot for a moment the wonted
stringency of her logic. As for Miranda, she consented to obey, and held
her tongue; but she clung secretly to her own opinion on the subject of
the big dog. She knew very well that the fascinating animal did not want
to eat her; and her mother’s order seemed to her just one of those bits
of maternal perversity which nobody can ever hope to understand.
The incident, however, overshadowed the child’s buoyant spirits for the
best part of two whole days. It thrust so very far off the time she
hoped for, when she might know and talk to the shy, furtive folk of the
wood, with their strange, unwinking eyes. Her mother kept her now ever
close to her skirts. She had no one to talk to about the things her
mother did not understand, except the steers and the black-and-white
cow, and the rather irrepressible squirrels.
The winter, which presently fell white and soundless and sparkling about
the lonely cabin, was to Miranda full of events. Before the snow Kirstie
had repaired the old lean-to, turning it into a fowl-house; and now they
had six prim hens to occupy it, and a splendid, flame-red cock who
crowed most loftily. Miranda felt that this proud bird despised her, so
she did not get on very well with him; but the hens were amiable, if
uninteresting, and it was a perennial joy to search out their eggs in
the loft or the corners of the stalls. Then there were the paths to be
kept clear after every snow-fall,—the path to the spring, the path to
the barn door and hen-house, the path to the woodpile. Uncle Dave had
made her a hand-sled, and she had the exhilarating duty of hauling in
the wood from the pile as fast as her mother could split it. It was a
spirited race, this, in which her mother somehow always managed to keep
just about one stick ahead.
And the fishing—this was a great event, coming about once a week, if the
weather suited. Both Kirstie and Miranda were semi-vegetarians. Frank
Craig had been a decryer of flesh-meat, one who would have chosen to
live on fruits and roots and grains and eggs, had not his body cried out
against the theory of his brain. But he had so far infected his wife
with his prejudice that neither she nor the child now touched meat in
any form. The aversion, artificial on Kirstie’s part, was instinctive on
Miranda’s. But as for fish—fish seemed to them both quite another
matter. Even Miranda of the sympathies and the perceptions had no sense
of fellowship for these cold-blooded, clammy, unpleasant things. She had
a fierce little delight in catching them; she had a contented joy in
eating them when fried to a savory brown in butter and yellow cornmeal.
For Miranda was very close to Nature, and Nature laughs at consistency.
The fishing in which Miranda so delighted took place in winter at the
lake. When the weather seemed quite settled, Kirstie would set out on
her strong snow-shoes, with Miranda, on her fairy facsimiles of them,
striding bravely beside her, and follow the long, white trail down to
the lake. Even to Miranda’s discerning eyes the trail was lonely now,
for most of the forest folk were either asleep, or abroad, or fearful
lest their tinted coats should reveal them against the snowy surface.
Once in a while she detected the hare squatting under a spruce bush,
looking like a figure of snow in his winter coat; and once or twice,
too, she saw the weasel, white now, with but a black tip to his tail as
a warning to all who had cause to dread his cruelty. Miranda knew
nothing about him, but she did not quite like the weasel, which was just
as well, seeing that the weasel hated Miranda and all the world besides.
As for the lynx and the brown cat, they kept warily aloof in their
winter shyness. The wood-mice were asleep,—warm, furry balls buried in
their dry nests far from sight; and Kroof, too, was dreaming away the
frozen months in a hollow under a pine root, with five or six feet of
snow drifted over her door to keep her sleep unjarred.
Arrived at the lake, Kirstie would cut two holes through the ice with
her nimble axe, bait two hooks with bits of fat pork, and put a line
into Miranda’s little mittened hands. The trout in the lake were
numerous and hungry; and somehow Miranda’s hook had ever the more deadly
fascination for them, and Miranda’s catch would outnumber Kirstie’s by
often three to one. Though her whole small being seemed absorbed in the
fierce game, Miranda was all the time vividly aware of the white
immensity enfolding her. The lifeless white level of the lake; the
encircling shores all white; the higher fringe of trees, black beneath,
but deeply garmented with white; the steep mountain-side, at the foot of
the lake, all white; and over-brooding, glimmering, opalescent,
fathomless, the flat white arch of sky. Across the whiteness of the
mountain-side, one day, Miranda saw a dark beast moving, a beast that
looked to her like a great cat. She saw it halt, gazing down at them;
and even at that distance she could see it stretch wide its formidable
jaws. A second more and she heard the cry which came from those
formidable jaws,—a high, harsh, screeching wail, which amused her so
that she forgot to land a fish. But her mother seemed troubled at the
sound. She gazed very steadily for some seconds at the far-off shape,
and then said: “Panthers, Miranda! I don’t mind bears; but with panthers
we’ve got to keep our eyes open. I reckon we’ll get home before sundown
to-day; and mind you keep right close by me every step.”
All this solicitude seemed to Miranda a lamentable mistake. She had no
doubt in her own mind that the panther would be nice to play with.
As I have said, the winter was for Miranda full of events. Twice, as she
was carrying out the morning dish of hot potatoes and meal to the hens,
she saw Ten-Tine, the bull caribou, cross the clearing with measured
stately tread, his curious, patchy antlers held high, his muzzle
stretched straight ahead of him, his demure cows at his heels. This was
before the snow lay deep in the forest. Later on in the winter she would
look out with eager interest every morning to see what visitors had been
about the cabin during the night. Sometimes there was a fox track, very
dainty, cleanly indented, and regular, showing that the animal who made
it knew where he was going and had something definite in view. Hare
tracks there were sure to be—she soon came to recognize those
three-toed, triplicate clusters of impressions, stamped deeply upon the
snow by the long, elastic jump. Whenever there was a weasel
track,—narrow, finely pointed, treacherously innocent,—it was sure to be
closely parallel to that of a leaping hare; and Miranda soon
apprehended, by that instinct of hers, that the companionship was not
like to be well for the hare. Once, to her horror, she found that a hare
track ended suddenly, right under the cabin window, in a blood-stained
patch, bestrewn with fur and bones. All about it the snow was swept as
if by wings, and two strange footprints told the story. They were long,
these two footprints—forked, with deep hooks for toes, and an obscure
sort of brush mark behind them. This was where the owl had sat up on the
snow for a few minutes after dining, to ponder on the merits of the
general order of things, and of a good meal in particular. Miranda’s
imagination painted a picture of the big bird sitting there in the
moonlight beside the bloody bones, his round, horned head turning slowly
from one side to the other, his hooked beak snapping now and again in
reminiscence, his sharp eyes wide open and flaming. There was also the
track of a fox, which had come up from the direction of the barn,
investigated the scene of action, and gone off at a sharp, decisive
angle toward the woods. Miranda had no clew to tell her how stealthily
that fox had come, or how nearly he had succeeded in catching an owl for
his breakfast; but from that morning she bore a grudge against owls, and
never could hear without a flash of wrath their hollow
_two-hoo-hoo-whoo-oo_ echoing solemnly from the heart of the pinewood.
But the owl was not the only bird that Miranda knew that winter. Well
along in January, when the haws were all gone, and most of the withered
rowan-berries had been eaten, and famine threatened such of the
bird-folk as had not journeyed south, there came to the cabin brisk
foraging flocks of the ivory-billed snow-bird. For these Miranda had
crumbs ready always, and as word of her bounty went abroad in the
forest, her feathered pensioners increased. Even a hungry crow would
come now and then, glossy and sideling, watchful and audacious, to share
the hospitality of this kind Miranda of the crumbs. She liked the crows,
and would hear no ill of them from her mother; but most of all she liked
those big, rosy-headed, trustful children, the pine-grosbeaks, who would
almost let her take them in her hands. Whenever their wandering flocks
came down to her, she held winter carnival for them.
During those days when it was not fine enough to go out,—when the snow
drove in great swirls and phantom armies across the open, and a dull
roar came from the straining forest, and the fowls went to roost at
midday, and the cattle munched contentedly in their stanchions, glad to
be shut in,—then the cabin seemed very pleasant to Miranda. On such days
the drifts were sometimes piled halfway up the windows. On such days the
dry logs on the hearth blazed more brightly than their wont, and the
flames sang more merrily up the chimney. On such days the piles of hot
buckwheat cakes, drenched in butter and brown molasses, tasted more
richly toothsome than at any time else, and on such days she learned to
knit. This was very interesting. At first she knit gay black-and-red
garters for her mother; and then, speedily mastering this rudimentary
process, she was fairly launched on a stocking, with four needles. The
stocking, of course, was for her mother, who would not find fault if it
were knitted too tightly here and too loosely there. As for Kirstie
herself, her nimble needles would click all day, turning out socks and
mittens of wonderful thickness to supply the steady market of the lumber
camps.
One night, after just such a cosey, shut-in day, Miranda was awakened by
a scratching sound on the roof. Throughout the cold weather Miranda
slept with her mother in the main room, in a broad new bunk which had
been substituted for the narrow one wherein Old Dave had slept on his
first visit to the clearing. Miranda caught her mother’s arm, and shook
it gently. But Kirstie was already awake, lying with wide eyes,
listening.
“What’s that, mother, trying to get in?” asked the child in a whisper.
“Hush-sh-sh,” replied Kirstie, laying her fingers on the child’s mouth.
The scratching came louder now, as the light snow was swept clear and
the inquisitive claws reached the bark. Then it stopped. After a second
or two of silence there was a loud, blowing sound, as if the visitor
were clearing his nostrils from the snow and cold. This was followed by
two or three long, penetrating sniffs, so curiously hungry in their
suggestion that even Miranda’s dauntless little heart beat very fast. As
for Kirstie, she was decidedly nervous. Springing out of bed she ran to
the hearth, raked the coals from the ashes, fanned them, heaped on birch
bark and dry wood, and in a moment had a great blaze roaring up the
chimney-throat. The glow from the windows streamed far out across the
snow. To the visitor it proved disconcerting. There was one more sharp
rattle of claws upon the roof, then a fluffy thump below the eaves. The
snow had stopped falling hours before; and when, at daylight, Kirstie
opened the door, there was the deep hollow where the panther had jumped
down, and there was the floundering trail where he had fled.
This incident made Miranda amend, in some degree, her first opinion of
panthers.