A Venison Steak
Throughout the succeeding winter Dave managed to visit the clearing two
or three times in the course of each month, but he could not see that he
made any progress in Miranda’s favour. As at first, she was sometimes
friendly, sometimes caustically indifferent. Only once did he perceive
in her the smallest hint of gratification at his coming. That was the
time when he came on his snow-shoes through the forest by moonlight, the
snow giving a diffused glimmer that showed him the trail even through
the densest thickets. Arriving in the morning, he surprised her at the
door of the cow stable, where she had been foddering the cattle. Her
face flushed at the sight of him; and a look came into her wide, dark
eyes which even his modesty could not quite misunderstand. But his
delight quickly crumbled: Miranda was loftily indifferent to him during
all that visit, so much so that after he had gone Kirstie reproached her
with incivility.
“I can’t help it, mother!” she explained. “I don’t want to hate him, but
what better is he than a butcher? His bread is stained with blood. Pah!
I sometimes think I smell blood, the blood of the kind wood creatures,
when he’s around.”
“But you don’t want him not to come, girl, surely,” protested her
mother.
“Well, you know, it’s a pleasure to you to have him come once in a
while,” said the girl, enigmatically.
Dave continued his visits, biding his time. He lost no chance of
familiarizing Miranda’s imagination with the needs of man as he imagined
them, and with a rational conception of life as he conceived it. This he
did not directly, but through the medium of conversation with Kirstie,
to whom his words were sweetness. He was determined to break down
Miranda’s prejudice against his calling, which to him was the only one
worth a man’s while,—wholesome, sane, full of adventure, full of
romance. He was determined, also, to overcome her deep aversion to flesh
food. He felt that not till these two points were gained would Miranda
become sufficiently human to understand human love or any truly human
emotions. In this belief he strictly withheld his wooing, and waited
till the barriers that opposed it should be undermined by his systematic
attacks. He was too little learned in woman to realize that with Miranda
his best wooing was the absence of all wooing; and so he builded better
than he knew.
During the cold months he was glad to be relieved of the presence of
Kroof, who had proved, in her taciturn way, quite irreconcilable. He had
tried in vain to purchase her favour with honey, good hive bees’ honey
in the comb, carried all the way from the Settlement. She would have
nothing to do with him at any price; and he felt that this discredited
him in Miranda’s eyes. He hoped that Kroof would sleep late that spring
in her lair under the pine root.
But while Dave was labouring so assiduously, and, as he fancied, so
subtly, to mould and fashion Miranda, she all unawares was moulding him.
Unconsciously his rifle and his traps were losing zest for him; and the
utter solitude of his camp beyond the Quah-Davic began to have manifest
disadvantages. Once he hesitated so long over a good shot at a lynx,
just because the creature looked unsuspecting, that in the end he was
too late, and his store of pelts was the poorer by one good skin.
Shooting a young cow moose in the deep snow, moreover, he felt an
unwonted qualm when the gasping and bleeding beast turned upon him a
look of anguished reproach. His hand was not quite so steady as usual
when he gave her the knife in the throat. This was a weakness which he
did not let himself examine too closely. He knew the flesh of the young
cow was tender and good, and after freezing it he hung it up in his cold
cellar. Though he would not for an instant have acknowledged it, even to
himself, he was glad that bears were not his business during the winter,
for he would almost certainly have felt a sense of guilt, of wrong to
Miranda, in shooting them. For all this undercurrent of qualm in the
hidden depths of his heart, however, his hunting was never more
prosperous than during the January and February of that winter; and fox,
lynx, wolverine, seemed not only to run upon his gun, but to seek his
traps as a haven. He killed with an emphasis, as if to rebuke the waking
germ of softness in his soul. But he had little of the old satisfaction,
as he saw his peltries accumulate. His craft was now become a business,
a mere routine necessity. For pleasure, he chose to watch Miranda as her
feathered pensioners—snowbirds, wrens, rose grosbeaks, and a glossy crow
or two—gathered about her of a morning for their meal of grain and
crumbs. They alighted on her hair, her shoulders, her arms; and the
round-headed, childlike grosbeaks would peck bread from her red lips;
and a crow, every now and then, would sidle in briskly and give a
mischievous tug at the string of her moccasin. To the girl, his heart
needed no warming,—it burned by now with a fire which all his backwood’s
stoicism could but ill disguise,—but to the birds, and through them to
all the furry folk of the wood, his heart warmed as he regarded the
beautiful sight. He noted that the birds were quite unafraid of Kirstie,
who also fed them; but he saw that toward Miranda they showed an active,
even aggressive ardour, striving jealously for the touch of her hand or
foot or skirt when no tit-bits whatever were in question. And another
sight there was, toward shut of winter’s evening, that moved him
strangely. The wild, white hares (he and Kirstie and Miranda called them
rabbits) would come leaping over the snow to the cabin door to be fed,
with never cat or weasel on their trail. They would press around the
girl, nibbling eagerly at her dole of clover, hay, and carrots; some
crouching about her feet, some erect and striking at her petticoat with
their nervous fore paws, all twinkling-eared, and all implicitly
trustful of this kind Miranda of the clover.
Toward spring Miranda began to be troubled about Kirstie’s health. She
saw that the firm lines of her mother’s face were growing unwontedly
sharp, the bones of her cheek and jaw strangely conspicuous. Then her
solicitous scrutiny took note of a pallor under the skin, a greyish
whiteness at the corners of her eyes, a lack of vividness in the usually
brilliant scarlet of the lips; for up to now Kirstie had retained all
the vital colouring and tone of youth. Then, too, there was a
listlessness, a desire to rest and take breath after very ordinary tasks
of chopping or of throwing fodder for the cattle. This puzzled the girl
much more than Kirstie’s increasing tendency to sit dreaming over the
hearth fire when there was work to be done. Miranda felt equal to doing
all the winter work, and she knew that her mother, like herself, was
ever a dreamer when the mood was on. But even this brooding abstraction
came to worry her at last, when one morning, after a drifting storm
which had piled the snow halfway up the windows, her mother let her
shovel out all the paths unaided, with never a comment or excuse.
Miranda was not aggrieved at this, by any means; but she began to be
afraid, sorely afraid. It was so unlike the alert and busy Kirstie of
old days. Of necessity, Miranda turned to Dave for counsel in her alarm,
when next he came to the clearing.
The conference took place in the warm twilight of the cow stable, where
Dave, according to his custom, was helping Miranda at the milking, while
Kirstie got supper. The young hunter looked serious, but not surprised.
“I’ve took note o’ the change this two month back, Mirandy,” he said,
“an’ was a-wonderin’ some how them big eyes of yourn, that can see
things us ordinary folks can’t see, could be blind to what teched ye so
close.”
“I _wasn’t_ blind to it, Dave,” protested the girl, indignantly; “but I
didn’t see how you could help any. Nor I don’t see now; but there was no
one else I could speak to about it,” she added, with a break in her
voice that distantly presaged tears.
“I could help some, if you’d let me, Mirandy,” he hesitated, “for I know
right well what she’s needin’.”
“Well, what is it?” demanded the girl. There was that in his voice which
oppressed her with a vague misgiving.
“It’s good, fresh, roast meat she wants!” said Dave.
There was a pause. Miranda turned and looked out through the stable
door, across the glimmering fields.
“It’s her blood’s got thin an’ poor,” continued Dave. “Nothin’ but flesh
meat’ll build her up now, an’ she’s jest got to have it.” He was
beginning to feel it was time that Miranda experienced the touch of a
firm hand.
“I don’t believe you!” said the girl, and turned hotly to her milking.
“Well, we’ll see,” retorted Dave. In Miranda’s silence he read a tardy
triumph for his views.
That evening he took note of the fact that Kirstie came to supper with
no appetite, though every dish of it was tempting and well cooked.
Miranda observed this also. Her fresh pang of apprehension on her
mother’s account was mixed with a resentful feeling that Dave would
interpret every symptom as a confirmation of his own view. She was quite
honest in her rejection of that view, for in her eyes flesh food was a
kind of subtle poison. But she was too anxious about her mother’s health
to commit herself in open hostility to anything, however extreme, which
might be suggested in remedy. On this point she was resolved to hold
aloof, letting the decision rest between her mother and Dave.
Aroused by the young hunter’s talk, Kirstie was brighter than usual
during the meal; but, to her great disappointment, Dave got up to go
immediately after supper. He would take no persuasion, but insisted that
he had come just to see if she and Miranda were well, and declared that
affairs of supreme importance called him straight back to the camp.
Kirstie was not convinced. She turned a face of reproach on Miranda, so
frankly that the girl was compelled to take her meaning.
“Oh! it isn’t my fault, mother,” she protested, with a little vexed
laugh. “I’ve not been doing anything ugly to him. If he goes, it’s just
his own obstinacy, for he knows we’d like him to stay as he always does.
Let him go if he wants to!”
“Mirandy,” said her mother, in a voice of grave rebuke, “I wish you
would not be so hard with Dave. If you treated your dumb beasts like you
treat him, I reckon they would never come to you a second time. You seem
to forget that Dave and his father are our only friends,—and just now,
Dave’s father being in the lumber camp, we’ve nobody but Dave here to
look to.”
“Oh! I’ve nothing against Dave, mother, except the blood on his hands,”
retorted the girl, turning her face away.
The young hunter shrugged his shoulders, deprecatingly, smiled a slow
smile of understanding at Kirstie, and strode to the door.
“Good night, both of ye,” he said cheerfully. “Ye’ll see me back,
liker’n not, by this time to-morrow.”
As he went, Miranda noticed with astonishment and a flush of warmth that
for once in his career he was without his inseparable rifle. Kirstie, in
the vacant silence that followed his going, had it on her tongue to say,
“I do wish you could take to Dave, Miranda.” But the woman’s heart
within her gave her warning in time, and she held her peace. Thanks to
this prudence, Miranda went to bed that night with something of a glow
at her heart. Dave’s coming without the rifle was a direct tribute to
her influence, and to some extent outweighed his horrible suggestion
that her mother should defile her mouth with meat.
The next evening the chores were all done up; the “rabbits” had come and
gone with their clover and carrots; and Kirstie and Miranda were sitting
down to their supper, when in walked Dave. He carried a package of
something done up in brown sacking. This time, too, he carried his
rifle. Kirstie’s welcome was frankly eager, but Miranda saw the rifle,
and froze. He caught her look, and with a flash of intuition understood
it.
“_Had_ to bring it along, Mirandy,” he explained, with a flush of
embarrassment. “Couldn’t ha’ got here without it. The wolves have come
back again, six of ’em. They set on to me at my own camp door.”
“Oh, wolves!” exclaimed Miranda, in a tone of aversion. “They’re
vermin.”
Since that far-off day when, with her childish face flattened against
the pane, her childish heart swelling with wrath and tears, she had
watched the wolves attack Ten-Tine’s little herd, she had hated the
ravening beasts with a whole-souled hate.
“I hope to goodness you killed them all!” said Kirstie, with pious
fervour.
“Two got off; got the pelts of the others,” answered Dave.
“Not too bad, that,” commented Kirstie, with approval; “now come and
have some supper.”
“Not jest yet, Kirstie,” he replied, undoing his package. “I’ve noticed
lately ye was looking mighty peaked, an’ hadn’t much appetite, like. Now
when folks has anything the matter with ’em I know as much about it as
lots of the doctors, and I know what’s goin’ to set ye right up. If
ye’ll lend me the loan of yer fire, an’ a frying-pan, I’ll have
something for yer supper that’ll do ye more good than a bucketful of
doctor’s medicine.”
Miranda knew what was coming. She knew Dave had been all the way back to
the camp, beyond the Quah-Davic, for meat, that he might run no risk of
killing any of the beasts that were under her protection. She knew, too,
that to make such a journey in the twenty-four hours he could scarce
have had one hour’s sleep. None the less, she hardened her heart against
him. She kept her eyes on her plate and listened with strained intensity
for her mother’s word upon this vital subject.
Kirstie’s interest was now very much awake. “There’s the fire, Dave,”
she said, “and there’s the frying-pan hanging on the side of the
dresser. But what have you got? I’ve felt this long while I’d like a bit
of a change—not but what the food we’re used to, Miranda and me, is real
good food and wholesome.”
“Well, Kirstie,” he answered, taking a deep breath before the plunge,
and at the same time throwing back the wrapping from a rosy cut of
venison steak, “it’s jest nothin’ more nor less than fresh meat. It’s
venison, clean an’ wholesome; and I’ll fry ye right now this tender
slice I’m cuttin’ for ye.”
Kirstie was startled quite out of her self-possession. The rule of the
cabin against flesh meat was so long established, so well known at the
Settlement, so fenced about with every sanction of principle and
prejudice, that Dave’s words were of the nature of a challenge. She felt
that she ought to be angry; but, as a matter of fact, she was only
uneasy as to how Miranda would take so daring a proposal. At the same
time she was suddenly conscious of an unholy craving for the forbidden
thing. She glanced anxiously at Miranda, but the girl appeared to be
wrapped up in her own thoughts.
“But you know, Dave,” she protested rebukingly, “we neither of us ever
touch meat of any kind. You know our opinions on this point.”
The words themselves would have satisfied Miranda had she not detected a
certain irresolution in the tone. They did not affect Dave in the least.
For a moment he made no reply, for he was busy cutting thin slices off
the steak. He spread them carefully in the hot butter, now spluttering
in the pan over the coals; and then, straightening himself up from the
task, knife in hand, he answered cheerfully: “That’s all right. But, ye
see, Kirstie, all the folks reckon me somethin’ of a doctor, an’ this
here meat I’m cookin’ for ye ain’t rightly food at all. It’s medicine;
’tain’t right ye should hold off now, when ye need it as medicine.
’Tain’t fair to Mirandy. I can see ye’ve jest been pinin’ away like, all
winter. It’s new blood, with iron in it, ye need. It’s flesh meat, an’
flesh meat only, that’ll give ye iron an’ new blood. When ye’re well,
an’ yer old strong self agin, ye can quit meat if ye like,—an’ kick me
out o’ the cabin for interferin’; but now—”
He paused dramatically. He had talked right on, contrary to his silent
habit, for a purpose. He knew the power of natural cravings. He was
waiting for Kirstie’s elemental bodily needs to speak out in support of
his argument. He waited just time for the savoury smell of the steak to
fill the cabin and work its miracle. Now the spell was abroad. He looked
to Kirstie for an answer.
The instant she smelled that savour Kirstie knew that he was right.
Steak, venison steak fried in butter, _was_ what she required. For weeks
she had had no appetite; now she was ravenous. Moreover, a thousand
lesser forces, set in motion by Dave’s long talks, were impelling her to
just such a change as the eating of flesh would symbolize to her.
But—Miranda? Kirstie stared at her in nervous apprehension, expecting an
outburst of scorn. But Miranda was seemingly oblivious of all that went
on in the cabin. Her unfathomed eyes, abstractedly wide open, were
staring out through the white square of the window. She was trying hard
to think about the mysterious blue-white wash of radiance that seemed to
pour in palpable floods from the full moon;—about the furred and furtive
creatures passing and repassing noiselessly, as she knew, across the lit
patches of the glades;—about the herd of moose down in the firwoods,
sleeping securely between walls of deep snow in the “yard,” which they
had trodden for themselves a fortnight back;—of Kroof, coiled in her
warm den under the pine root, with five feet of drift piled over her.
But in reality she was steeling herself, with fierce desperation,
against a strange appetite which was rising within her at the call of
that insidious fragrance. With a kind of horror she realized that she
was at war with herself—that one half her nature was really more than
ready to partake of the forbidden food.
Dave noticed the look of question which Kirstie had turned upon Miranda.
“Oh, ye needn’t look to her, Kirstie, to back ye up in no foolishness,”
he went on. “I spoke to her last night about it, an’ she hadn’t a word
to say agin my medicine.”
Still there was no comment from Miranda. If Miranda, to whom abstinence
from flesh was a religion, could tolerate a compromise, why she herself,
to whom it was merely a prejudice and a preference, might well break an
ancient rule for an instant’s good. She had been inwardly anxious for
months about her condition. After a second or two of doubt, her mind was
made up; and when Kirstie made up her mind, it was in no halfway
fashion.
“I’ll try your doctoring, Dave,” she said slowly. “I’ll give it a fair
trial. But while you’re about it, why don’t you cook enough for
yourself, too? Have you put salt in the pan? And here’s a dash of
pepper.”
“No,” answered the young hunter, concealing his elation as he sprinkled
the steak temperately with the proffered salt and pepper, “I don’t want
none myself, I need meat onct in a while, er I git weak an’ no good. But
there’s nothin’ suits my taste like the feeds I git here,—the pipin’ hot
riz buckwheat cakes, with lots o’ butter an’ molasses, an’ the
johnny-cake, an’ the potater pie, an’ the tasty ways ye cook eggs. I
often think when I’m here that I wouldn’t care if I never seen a slice
o’ fresh meat, er even bacon, agin. But our bodies is built a certain
way, an’ there’s no gittin’ over Nature’s intention. We’ve got the teeth
to prove it, an’ the insides, too,—I’ve read all about it in doctors’
books. I read a heap in camp. Fact is, Kirstie, we’re built like the
bear,—to live on all kinds of food, includin’ flesh,—an’ if we don’t git
all kinds onct in a while, somethin’s bound to go wrong.”
Never had Dave talked so much before; but now he was feverishly eager to
have no opening for discussion. While he talked the venison was cooked
and served. Kirstie ate it with a relish, which convinced him of the
wisdom of his course. She ate all that he had fried; and he wisely
refrained from cooking more, that her appetite might be kept on edge for
it in the morning. Then she ate other things, with an unwonted zest.
Miranda returned to the table, talking pleasantly of everything but
health, and food, and hunting. Against herself she was angry; but on
Dave, to his surprise, she smiled with a rare graciousness. She was
mollified by his tact in characterizing the steak as medicine; and,
moreover, by his statement of a preference for their ordinary bloodless
table, he seemed in some way to range himself on her side, even while
challenging her principles. But—oh, that savoury smell! It still
enriched the air of the cabin; it still stirred riotous cravings in her
astonished appetite. She trembled with a fear and hatred of herself.
When Kirstie, with a face to which the old glow was already venturing
back, laid down her knife and fork, and explained to her guest, “You’re
a good doctor, and no mistake, Dave Titus; I declare I feel better
already,” Miranda got up and went silently out into the moonlight to
breathe new air and take counsel with herself.
Dave would have followed her, but Kirstie stopped him. “Best let her
be,” she said meaningly, in a low voice. “She’s got a heap to think over
in the last half hour.”
“But she took it a sight better’n I thought she would,” responded Dave.
And all on account of a venison steak, his hopes soared higher than they
had ever dared before.