Wilderness are as gods, distributing benefits, and, from such as
have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of
all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the gods repaid
with the pure joy of creation which is the special prerogative of
gods.
But Greenhow had heard nothing of the Greeks save as a symbol of
all unintelligibility, and of the gods not at all. His stock was
out of England by way of the Tennessee mountains, drifting Pacific
coastward after the war of the Rebellion, and he was a Pot Hunter
by occasion and inclination. The occasion he owned to being born
in one of the bays of the southerly Sierras where the plentitude
of wild life reduced pot hunting to the degree of easy murder.
A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for
what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the
healthful interactions of competition. Greenhow potted quail in
the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could
bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue,
down the runways to the drinking places. He took pronghorn at
Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held
aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down
the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of
season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw
back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to
the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace
to pot hunting.
There were Indians in those parts who could have told him
better--notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with
fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before
they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the
Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man,
opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at
his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces
in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly.
Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as
your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though
Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in
the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for
their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot
hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it
off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned
the reprisal of the gods, of whom in a dozen years he had not even
become aware.
In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was
opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges
like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws
up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted
over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the
Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and
blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil
level under the nose of San Jacinto--rabbits used to play there
until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast--and a stream
bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow.
Greenhow built a shack under a live oak there and fancied himself
in the character of a proprietor. He reckoned that in the three
years before his vineyard came into bearing, he could pot-hunt in
the hills behind his clearing for the benefit of the Homesteaders.
It was altogether a lovely habitation. Camise grew flush with the
meadow and the flanks of San Jacinto shivered and sparkled with
the wind that turned the thousand leaves of the chaparral. Under
the wind one caught at times the slow deep chuckle of the water.
Greenhow should have been warned by that. In just such tones the
ancient Greeks had heard the great god Pan laughing in the woods
under Parnassus,--which was Greek indeed to the Pot Hunter.
Greenhow was thirty-four when he took out his preemption papers
and planted his first acre of vines. For reasons best known to
the gods, the deer kept well away from that side of the San Jacinto
that year. Greenhow enlarged the meadow and turned up ground for
a garden; he became acquainted with his neighbors and learned that
they had prejudices in favor of game regulations, also that one of
them had a daughter. She had white, even teeth that flashed when
she laughed; the whole effect of her was as sound and as appetizing
as a piece of ripe fruit. Greenhow told her that the prospect of
having a home of his own was an incentive such as pot-hunting held
out to no man. He looked as he said it, a very brother to Nimrod,
for as yet the Pot had not marked him.
He stood straight; his eyes had the deep, varying blueness of lake
water. Little wisps and burrs, odors of the forest clung about
his clothing; a beard covered his slack, formless mouth. When he
told the Homesteader's daughter how the stars went by on heather
planted headlands and how the bucks belled the does at the bottom
of deep canons in October, she heard in it the call of the trail
and young Adventure. Times when she would see from the level of
her father's quarter section the smoke of the Pot Hunter's cabin
rising blue against the glistening green of the live oak, she thought
that life might have a wilder, sweeter tang there about the roots
of the mountain.
In his second Spring when the camissal foamed all white with bloom
and the welter of yellow violets ran in the grass under it like
fire, Greenhow built a lean-to to his house and made the discovery
that the oak which jutted out from the barranca behind it was of
just the right height from the ground to make a swing for a child,
which caused him a strange pleasant embarrassment.
"Look kind o' nice to see a little feller playin' round," he
admitted to himself, and the same evening went down to call on the
Homesteader's daughter.
That night the watchful guardians of the Wild sent the mule-deer
to Harry the man who had been a pot-hunter. A buck of three years
came down the draw by the watercourse and nibbled the young shoots
of the vines where he could reach them across the rabbit proof
fencing that the settler had drawn about his planted acres. Not
that the wire netting would have stopped him; this was merely the
opening of the game. Three days later he spent the night in the
kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard.
After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing
season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita,
lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining
bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took
all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling
green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white
under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had
closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the
Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the
garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing in the gully behind
the house, and take up his rifle to put in the rest of the day
snaking through the breathless fifteen foot cover, only to have
a glimpse of the buck at last dashing back the late light from
glittering antlers as he bounded up inaccessible rocky stairs. This
was the more exasperating since Greenhow had promised the antlers
to the Homesteader's daughter.
When the surface of the camissal had taken on the brown tones
of weed under sea water and the young clusters of the grapes were
set--for this was the year the vineyard was expected to come into
bearing--the mule-deer disappeared altogether from that district,
and Greenhow went back hopefully to rooting the joint grass out
of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the
velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the
mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on
the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining
with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they
lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest,
wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by
day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped
between the barbs of the fine wired fence without so much as changing
a leg or altering their long, loping stride; and what they left
the quail took.
In pattering droves of hundreds they trekked in from the camise
before there was light enough to shoot by, and nipped once and
with precision at the ripest in every bunch. Afterward they dusted
themselves in the chaparral and twitted the proprietor with soft
contented noises. At the end of the October rut the deer came
back plentifully to the Tonkawanda District, and Greenhow gave up
the greater part of the rainy season to auditing his account with
them. He spent whole days scanning the winter colored slope for
the flicker and slide of light on a hairy flank that betrayed his
enemy, or, rifle in hand, stalking a patch of choke cherry and
manzanita within which the mule-deer could snake and crawl for
hours by intricacies of doubling and back tracking that yielded
not a square inch of target and no more than the dust of his final
disappearance. Wood gatherers heard at times above their heads
the discontented whine of deflected bullets. Windy mornings the
quarry would signal from the high barrens by slow stiff legged
bounds that seemed to invite the Pot Hunter's fire, and at the end
of a day's tracking among the punishing stubs of the burnt district,
Greenhow returning would hear the whistling cough of the mule-deer
in the ravine not a rifle shot from the house.
In the meantime rabbits burrowed under the wire netting to bark
his young trees, and an orchardist who held the job of ditch tender
along the Tonkawanda, began to take an interest in the Homesteader's
daughter. Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the
Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up
on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto where the buck, bedded
in the low brush between the bosses of the hills, kept a look out
across the gullies from which Greenhow attempted to ambuscade him.
Day by day the man would vary the method of approach until almost
within rifle range, and then the wind would change or there would
be the click of gravel underfoot, or the scrape of a twig on stiff
overalls, and suddenly the long oval ears would slope forward, the
angular lines flow into grace and motion and the game would begin
again.
Greenhow killed many deer that season and got himself under suspicion
of the game warden, but never THE deer; and a very subtle change
came over him, such a change as marks the point at which a man
leaves off being hunter to become the hunted. He began to sense,
with vague reactions of resentment, the personality of Power.
It was about the end of the rains that the DITCH TENDER who was
also an orchardist, took the Homesteader's daughter to ride on his
unoccupied Sunday afternoon. He had something to say to her which
demanded the wide, uninterrupted space of day. They went up toward
the roots of the mountain between the green dikes of the chaparral,
and he was so occupied with watching the pomegranate color of her
cheeks and the nape of her neck where the sun touched it, that
he failed to observe that it was she who turned the horses into
the trail that led off the main road toward the shack of the Pot
Hunter. The same change that had come over the man had fallen on
his habitation. through the uncurtained window they saw heaps of
unwashed dishes and the rusty stove, and along the eaves of the
lean-to, a row of antlers bleaching.
"There's really no hope for a man," said the ditch tender, "once
he gets THAT habit. It's worse than drink."
"Perhaps," said the Homesteader's daughter, "if he had any one at
home who cared..." She was looking down at the bindweed that had
crept about the roots of a banksia rose she had once given the Pot
Hunter out of her own garden, and she sighed, but the ditch tender
did not notice that either. He was thinking this was so good an
opportunity for what he had to say that he drew the horses toward
the end of the meadow where the stream came in, and explained to
her particularly just what it meant to a man to have somebody at
home who cared.
The Homesteader's daughter leaned against the oak as she listened,
and lifted up her clear eyes with a light in them that was like a
flash out of the deep, luminous eye of day, which caused the ditch
tender the greatest possible satisfaction. He did not think it
strange, immediately he had her answer, to hear the titter of the
leaves of the lilac and the sudden throaty chuckle of the water.
"I am so happy," laughed the ditch tender, "that I fancy the whole
world is laughing with me."
All this was not so long as you would imagine to look at the Pot
Hunter. As time went on the marking of the pot came out on him
very plainly. He acquired the shifty, sidelong gait of the meaner
sort of predatory creatures. His clothes, his beard, his very
features have much the appearance that his house has, as if the
owner of it were distant on another occupation, and the camise has
regained a considerable portion of his clearing. Owing to the
vigilance of the game warden his is not a profitable business;
also he is in disfavor with the homesteaders along the Tonkawanda
who credit him with the disappearance of the mule-deer, once
plentiful in that district. A solitary specimen is occasionally
met by sportsmen along the back of San Jacinto, exceedingly gun
wary. But if Greenhow had known a little more about the Greeks it
might all have turned out quite differently.
[signed] Mary Austin
Men of the Sea
The afternoon sun etched our shadows on the whitewashed wall behind
us. Acres of grain and gorse turned the moorland golden under a
windy blue sky. In front of us the Bay of Biscay burned sapphire
to the horizon.
"You men of the sea," I said, "attain a greater growth of soul than
do we whose roots are in the land. You are men of wider spiritual
vision, of deeper capacity than are we."
The coastguard's weather-beaten visage altered subtly.
"How can that be, Monsieur? Our sins stalk us like vast red shadows.
We live violently, we men of the sea."
"But you really LIVE--spiritually and physically. You attain a
spiritual growth, a vision, an understanding, a depth seldom reached
by us:--a wide kindness, a charity, a noble humanity outside the
circumference of our experience."
He said, looking seaward out of vague, sea-gray eyes: "We drink
too deeply. We love too often. We men of the sea have great need
of intercession and of prayer."
"Not YOU."
"There was a girl at Rosporden.... And one at Bannalec.... And
others...from the ends of the earth to the ends of it...We Icelanders
drank deep. And afterwards...in the China seas...."
His gray Breton eyes brooded on the flowing sapphire of the sea;
the low sun painted his furrowed face red.
"Not one among you but lays down his life for others as quietly
and simply as he fills his pipe. From the rocking mizzen you look
down calmly upon the world of men tossing with petty and complex
passions--look down with the calm, kindly comprehension of a mature
soul which has learned something of Immortal toleration. The
scheme of things is clearer to you than to us; your pity, wiser;
our faith more logical."
"We are children," he muttered, "we men of the sea."
I have tried to say so--in too many words," said I.
My dog looked up at me, then with a slight sigh settled himself
again beside the game bag and tucked his nose under his flank. On
the whitewashed walls of the ancient, ruined fort behind us our
shadows towered in the red sunset.
I turned and looked at the roofless, crumbling walls, then at the
coast where jeweled surf tumbled, stained with crimson.
These shores had been washed with a redder stain in years gone
by: these people were forever stamped with the eradicable scar
of suffering borne by generations dead. The centuries had never
spared them.
And, as I brooded there, watching two peasants, father and son,
grubbing out the gorse below us to make a place for future wheat,
the rose surf beyond seemed full of little rosy children and showy
women, species of the endless massacres that this sad land had
endlessly endured.
"They struck you hard and deep," I said, thinking of the past.
"Deep, Monsieur," he replied, understanding me. "Deep as your
people's hatred."
"Oh, poor ça"--he made a vague gesture. "The dead are dead," he
said, leaning over and opening my game bag to look into it and sort
and count the few braces of partridge, snipe and widgeon.
Presently, from below, the peasants at work in the gorse, shouted
up to us something that I did not understand.
They were standing close together, leaning on mattock and spade,
grouped around something in the gorse.
"What do they say?" I asked.
"They have found a soldier's body."
"A body?"
"Long dead, Monsieur. The skeleton of one of these who scourged
this coast in the old days."
He rose and started leisurely down through the flowering gorse. I
followed, and my dog followed me.
In the shallow excavation there lay a few bones and shreds and bits
of tarnished metal.
I stooped and picked up a button and a belt buckle. The royal arms
and the Regimental number were decipherable on the brasses. One
of the peasants said:
"In Quimper lives a rich man who pays for relics. God, in his
compassion, sends us poor men these bones."
The coastguard said: "God sends them to you for decent internment.
Not to sell."
"But," retorted the peasant, "these bones and bits of brass belonged
to one of those who came here with fire and sword. Need we respect
our enemies who slew without pity young and old? And these bones
are very ancient."
"The living must respect the dead, Jean Le Locard."
"I am poor," muttered Le Locard. "We Bretons are born to misery
and sorrow. Life is very hard. Is it any harm if I sell these
bones and brasses to a rich man, and buy a little bread for my wife
and little ones?"
The coastguard shook his head gravely: "We Bretons may go hungry
and naked, but we cannot traffic in death. Here lies a soldier,
a hundred years hidden under the gorse. Nevertheless--"
He touched his cap in salute. Slowly the peasants lifted their
caps and stood staring down at the bones, uncovered.
"Make a grave," said the coastguard simply. He pointed up at the
old graveyard on the cliff above us. Then, touching my elbow, he
turned away with me toward the little hamlet across the moors.
"Let us find the Curé," he murmured. "We men of the sea should
salute the death God sends with the respect we owe to all His gifts
to man."
Our three gigantic shadows led us back across the moor,--my dog,
myself, and the gray-eyed silent man who knew the sea,--and something
perhaps, of the sea's Creator:--and much of his fellow men.
[signed] Robert W. Chambers
Jim--A Soldier of the King
We were machine gunners of the British Army stationed "Somewhere
in France" and had just arrived at our rest billets, after a weary
march from the front line sector.
The stable we had to sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair,
absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used
to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over
out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents;
in fact, they seemed to thrive on it.
The floor space would comfortably accommodate about twenty men lying
down, but when thirty-three, including equipment, were crowded into
it, it was nearly unbearable.
The roof and walls were full of shell holes. When it rained, a
constant drip, drip, drip was in order. We were so crowded that if
a fellow was unlucky enough (and nearly all of us in this instance
were unlucky) to sleep under a hole, he had to grin and bear it.
It was like sleeping beneath a shower bath.
At one end of the billet, with a ladder leading up to it, was a sort
of grain bin, with a door in it. This place was the headquarters
of our guests, the rats. Many a stormy cabinet meeting was held
there by them. Many a boot was thrown at it during the night
to let them know that Tommy Atkins objected to the matter under
discussion. Sometimes one of these missiles would ricochet, and
land on the upturned countenance of a snoring Tommy, and for about
half an hour even the rats would pause in admiration of his flow
of language.
On the night in question we flopped down in our wet clothes, and
were soon asleep. As was usual, No. 2 gun's crew were together.
The last time we had rested in this particular village, it was
inhabited by civilians, but now it was deserted. An order had
been issued, two days previous to our arrival, that all civilians
should move farther back of the line.
I had been asleep about two hours when I was awakened by Sailor
Bill shaking me by the shoulder. He was trembling like a leaf,
and whispered to me:
"Wake up, Yank, this ship's haunted. There's some one aloft who's
been moaning for the last hour. Sounds like the wind in the rigging.
I ain't scared of humans or Germans, but when it comes to messin'
in with spirits it's time for me to go below. Lend your ear and
cast your deadlights on that grain locker, and listen."
I listened sleepily for a minute or so, but could hear nothing.
Coming to the conclusion that Sailor Bill was dreaming things, I
was again soon asleep.
Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed when I was rudely awakened.
"Yank, for God's sake, come aboard and listen!" I listened and
sure enough, right out of that grain bin overhead came a moaning
and whimpering, and then a scratching against the door. My hair
stood on end. Blended with the drip, drip of the rain, and the
occasional scurrying of a rat overhead, that noise had a super-natural
sound. I was really frightened; perhaps my nerves were a trifle
unstrung from our recent tour in the trenches.
I awakened "Ikey" Honney, while Sailor Bill roused "Happy" Houghton
and "Hungry" Foxcroft.
Hungry's first words were, "What's the matter, breakfast ready?"
In as few words as possible, we told them what had happened. By
the light of the candle I had lighted, their faces appeared as
white as chalk. Just then the whimpering started again, and we
were frozen with terror. The tension was relieved by Ikey's voice:
"I admint I'm afraid of ghosts, but that sounds like a dog to me.
Who's going up the ladder to investigate?"
No one volunteered.
I had an old deck of cards in my pocket. Taking them out, I
suggested cutting, the low man to go up the ladder. They agreed.
I was the last to cut. I got the ace of clubs. Sailor Bill was
stuck with the five of diamonds. Upon this, he insisted that it
should be the best two out of three cuts, but we overruled him,
and he was unanimously elected for the job.
With a "So long, mates, I'm going aloft," he started toward the
ladder, with the candle in his hand, stumbling over the sleeping
forms of many. Sundry grunts, moans, and curses followed in his
wake.
As soon as he started to ascend the ladder, a "tap-tap-tap" could
be heard from the grain bin. We waited in fear and trembling the
result of his mission. Hungry was encouraging him with "Cheero,
mate, the worst is yet to come."
After many pauses, Bill reached the top of the ladder and opened
the door. We listened with bated breath. Then he shouted:
"Blast my deadlights, if it ain't a poor dog! Come alongside mate,
you're on a lee shore, and in a sorry plight."
Oh, what a relief those words were to us.
With the candle in one hand and a dark object under his arm, Bill
returned and deposited in our midst the sorriest-looking specimen
of a cur dog you ever set eyes on. It was so weak it couldn't
stand. But that look in its eyes--just gratitude, plain gratitude.
Its stump of a tail was pounding against my mess tin and sounded
just like a message in the Morse code. Happy swore that it was
sending S O S.
We were a lot of school children, every one wanting to help and
making suggestions at the same time. Hungry suggested giving it
something to eat, while Ikey wanted to play on his infernal jew's
harp, claiming it was a musical dog. Hungry's suggestion met our
approval, and there was a general scramble for haversacks. All we
could muster was some hard bread and a big piece of cheese.
His nibs wouldn't eat bread, and also refused the cheese, but not
before sniffling it for a couple of minutes. I was going to throw
the cheese away, but Hungry said he would take it. I gave it to
him.