Here fell away to eastward, rising, rough
With old rain-furrows, to a lofty bluff
That faced the river with a yellow wall.
Thereto, perplexed, Hugh set about to crawl,
Nor reached the summit till the sun was low.
Far-spread, shade-dimpled in the level glow,
The still land told not whence the murmur grew;
But where the green strip melted into blue
Far down the winding valley of the stream,
Hugh saw what seemed the tempest of a dream
At mimic havoc in the timber-glooms.
As from the sweeping of gigantic brooms,
A dust cloud deepened down the dwindling river;
Upon the distant tree-tops ran a shiver
And huddled thickets writhed as in a gale.
On creeps the windless tempest up the vale,
The while the murmur deepens to a roar,
As with the wider yawning of a door.
And now the agitated green gloom gapes
To belch a flood of countless dusky shapes
That mill and wrangle in a turbid flow—
Migrating myriads of the buffalo
Bound for the winter pastures of the Platte!
Exhausted, faint with need of meat, Hugh sat
And watched the mounting of the living flood.
Down came the night, and like a blot of blood
The lopped moon weltered in the dust-bleared East.
Sleep came and gave a Barmecidal feast.
About a merry flame were simmering
Sweet haunches of the calving of the Spring,
And tender tongues that never tasted snow,
And marrow bones that yielded to a blow
Such treasure! Hugh awoke with gnashing teeth,
And heard the mooing drone of cows beneath,
The roll of hoofs, the challenge of the bull.
So sounds a freshet when the banks are full
And bursting brush-jams bellow to the croon
Of water through green leaves. The ragged moon
Now drenched the valley in an eerie rain:
Below, the semblance of a hurricane;
Above, the perfect calm of brooding frost,
Through which the wolves in doleful tenson tossed
From hill to hill the ancient hunger-song.
In broken sleep Hugh rolled the chill night long,
Half conscious of the flowing flesh below.
And now he trailed a bison in the snow
That deepened till he could not lift his feet.
Again, he battled for a chunk of meat
With some gray beast that fought with icy fang.
And when he woke, the wolves no longer sang;
White dawn athwart a white world smote the hill,
And thunder rolled along the valley still.
Morn, wiping up the frost as with a sponge,
Day on the steep and down the nightward plunge,
And Twilight saw the myriads moving on.
Dust to the westward where the van had gone,
And dust and muffled thunder in the east!
Hugh starved while gazing on a Titan feast.
The tons of beef, that eddied there and swirled,
Had stilled the crying hungers of the world,
Yet not one little morsel was for him.
The red sun, pausing on the dusty rim,
Induced a panic aspect of his plight:
The herd would pass and vanish in the night
And be another dream to cling and flout.
Now scanning all the summit round about,
Amid the rubble of the ancient drift
He saw a bowlder. ‘Twas too big to lift,
Yet he might roll it. Painfully and slow
He worked it to the edge, then let it go
And breathlessly expectant watched it fall.
It hurtled down the leaning yellow wall,
And bounding from a brushy ledge’s brow,
It barely grazed the buttocks of a cow
And made a moment’s eddy where it struck.
In peevish wrath Hugh cursed his evil luck,
And seizing rubble, gave his fury vent
By pelting bison till his strength was spent:
So might a child assail the crowding sea!
Then, sick at heart and musing bitterly,
He shambled down the steep way to the creek,
And having stayed the tearing buzzard beak
With breadroot and the waters of the rill,
Slept till the white of morning o’er the hill
Was like a whisper groping in a hush.
The stream’s low trill seemed loud. The tumbled brush
And rumpled tree-tops in the flat below,
Upon a fog that clung like spectral snow,
Lay motionless; nor any sound was there.
No frost had fallen, but the crystal air
Smacked of the autumn, and a heavy dew
Lay hoar upon the grass. There came on Hugh
A picture, vivid in the moment’s thrill,
Of martialed corn-shocks marching up a hill
And spiked fields dotted with the pumpkin’s gold.
It vanished; and, a-shiver with the cold,
He brooded on the mockeries of Chance,
The shrewd malignity of Circumstance
That either gave too little or too much.
Yet, with the fragment of a hope for crutch,
His spirit rallied, and he rose to go,
Though each stiff joint resisted as a foe
And that old hip-wound battled with his will.
So down along the channel of the rill
Unto the vale below he fought his way.
The frore fog, rifting in the risen day,
Revealed the havoc of the living flood—
The river shallows beaten into mud,
The slender saplings shattered in the crush,
All lower leafage stripped, the tousled brush
Despoiled of fruitage, winter-thin, aghast.
And where the avalanche of hoofs had passed
It seemed nor herb nor grass had ever been.
And this the hard-won paradise, wherein
A food-devouring plethora of food
Had come to make a starving solitude!
Yet hope and courage mounted with the sun.
Surely, Hugh thought, some ill-begotten one
Of all that striving mass had lost the strife
And perished in the headlong stream of life—
A feast to fill the bellies of the strong,
That still the weak might perish. All day long
He struggled down the stricken vale, nor saw
What thing he sought. But when the twilight awe
Was creeping in, beyond a bend arose
A din as though the kiotes and the crows
Fought there with shrill and raucous battle cries.
Small need had Hugh to ponder and surmise
What guerdon beak and fang contended for.
Within himself the oldest cause of war
Brought forth upon the instant fang and beak.
He too would fight! Nor had he far to seek
Amid the driftwood strewn about the sand
For weapons suited to a brawny hand
With such a purpose. Armed with club and stone
He forged ahead into the battle zone,
And from a screening thicket spied his foes.
He saw a bison carcass black with crows,
And over it a welter of black wings,
And round about, a press of tawny rings
That, like a muddy current churned to foam
Upon a snag, flashed whitely in the gloam
With naked teeth; while close about the prize
Red beaks and muzzles bloody to the eyes
Betrayed how worth a struggle was the feast.
Then came on Hugh the fury of the beast—
To eat or to be eaten! Better so
To die contending with a living foe,
Than fight the yielding distance and the lack.
Masked by the brush he opened the attack,
And ever where a stone or club fell true,
About the stricken one an uproar grew
And brute tore brute, forgetful of the prey,
Until the whole pack tumbled in the fray
With bleeding flanks and lacerated throats.
Then, as the leader of a host who notes
The cannon-wrought confusion of the foe,
Hugh seized the moment for a daring blow.
The wolf’s a coward, who, in goodly packs,
May counterfeit the courage that he lacks
And with a craven’s fury crush the bold.
But when the disunited mass that rolled
In suicidal strife, became aware
How some great beast that shambled like a bear
Bore down with roaring challenge, fell a hush
Upon the pack, some slinking to the brush
With tails a-droop; while some that whined in pain
Writhed off on reddened trails. With bristled mane
Before the flying stones a bolder few
Snarled menace at the foe as they withdrew
To fill the outer dusk with clamorings.
Aloft upon a moaning wind of wings
The crows with harsh, vituperative cries
Now saw a gray wolf of prodigious size
Devouring with the frenzy of the starved.
Thus fell to Hugh a bison killed and carved;
And so Fate’s whims mysteriously trend—
Woe in the silken meshes of the friend,
Weal in the might and menace of the foe.
But with the fading of the afterglow
The routed wolves found courage to return:
Amid the brush Hugh saw their eye-balls burn;
And well he knew how futile stick and stone
Should prove by night to keep them from their own.
Better is less with safety, than enough
With ruin. He retreated to a bluff,
And scarce had reached it when the pack swooped in
Upon the carcass.
All night long, the din
Of wrangling wolves assailed the starry air,
While high above them in a brushy lair
Hugh dreamed of gnawing at the bloody feast.
Along about the blanching of the east,
When sleep is weirdest and a moment’s flight,
Remembered coextensive with the night,
May teem with hapful years; as light in smoke,
Upon the jumble of Hugh’s dreaming broke
A buzz of human voices. Once again
He rode the westward trail with Henry’s men—
Hoof-smitten leagues consuming in a dust.
And now the nightmare of that broken trust
Was on him, and he lay beside the spring,
A corpse, yet heard the muffled parleying
Above him of the looters of the dead:
But when he might have riddled what they said,
The babble flattened to a blur of gray—
And lo, upon a bleak frontier of day,
The spent moon staring down! A little space
Hugh scrutinized the featureless white face,
As though ‘twould speak. But when again the sound
Grew up, and seemed to come from under ground,
He cast the drowse, and peering down the slope,
Beheld what set at grapple fear and hope—
Three Indian horsemen riding at a jog!
Their ponies, wading belly-deep in fog,
That clung along the valley, seemed to swim,
And through a thinner vapor moving dim,
The men were ghost-like.
Could they be the Sioux?
Almost the wish became belief in Hugh.
Or were they Rees? As readily the doubt
Withheld him from the hazard of a shout.
And while he followed them with baffled gaze,
Grown large and vague, dissolving in the haze,
They vanished westward.
Knowing well the wont
Of Indians moving on the bison-hunt,
Forthwith Hugh guessed the early riders were
The outflung feelers of a tribe a-stir
Like some huge cat gone mousing. So he lay
Concealed, impatient with the sleepy day
That dawdled in the dawning. Would it bring
Good luck or ill? His eager questioning,
As crawling fog, took on a golden hue
From sunrise. He was waiting for the Sioux,
Their parfleche panniers fat with sun-dried maize
And wasna! From the mint of evil days
He would coin tales and be no begging guest
About the tribal feast-fires burning west,
But kinsman of the blood of daring men.
And when the crawler stood erect again—
O Friend-Betrayer at the Big Horn’s mouth,
Beware of someone riding from the South
To do the deed that he had lived to do!
Now when the sun stood hour-high in the blue,
From where a cloud of startled blackbirds rose
Down stream, a panic tumult broke the doze
Of windless morning. What unwelcome news
Embroiled the parliament of feathered shrews?
A boiling cloud against the sun they lower,
Flackering strepent; now a sooty shower,
Big-flaked, squall-driven westward, down they flutter
To set a clump of cottonwoods a-sputter
With cold black fire! And once again, some shock
Of sight or sound flings panic in the flock—
Gray boughs exploding in a ruck of birds!
What augury in orniscopic words
Did yon swart sibyls on the morning scrawl?
Now broke abruptly through the clacking brawl
A camp-dog’s barking and a pony’s neigh;
Whereat a running nicker fled away,
Attenuating to a rearward hush;
And lo! in hailing distance ‘round the brush
That fringed a jutting bluff’s base like a beard
Upon a stubborn chin out-thrust, appeared
A band of mounted warriors! In their van
Aloof and lonely rode a gnarled old man
Upon a piebald stallion. Stooped was he
Beneath his heavy years, yet haughtily
He wore them like the purple of a king.
Keen for a goal, as from the driving string
A barbed and feathered arrow truly sped,
His face was like a flinty arrow-head,
And brooded westward in a steady stare.
There was a sift of winter in his hair,
The bleakness of brown winter in his look.
Hugh saw, and huddled closer in his nook.
Fled the bright dreams of safety, feast and rest
Before that keen, cold brooder on the West,
As gaudy leaves before the blizzard flee.
‘Twas Elk Tongue, fighting chieftain of the Ree,
With all his people at his pony’s tail—
Full two-score lodges emptied on the trail
Of hunger!
On they came in ravelled rank,
And many a haggard eye and hollow flank
Made plain how close and pitilessly pressed
The enemy that drove them to the West—
Such foeman as no warrior ever slew.
A tale of cornfields plundered by the Sioux
Their sagging panniers told. Yet rich enough
They seemed to him who watched them from the bluff;
Yea, pampered nigh the limit of desire!
No friend had filched from them the boon of fire
And hurled them shivering back upon the beast.
Erect they went, full-armed to strive, at least;
And nightly in a cozy ember-glow
Hope fed them with a dream of buffalo
Soon to be overtaken. After that,
Home with their Pawnee cousins on the Platte,
Much meat and merry-making till the Spring.
On dragged the rabble like a fraying string
Too tautly drawn. The rich-in-ponies rode,
For much is light and little is a load
Among all heathen with no Christ to save!
Gray seekers for the yet begrudging grave,
Bent with the hoeing of forgotten maize,
Wood-hewers, water-bearers all their days,
Toiled ‘neath the life-long hoarding of their packs.
And nursing squaws, their babies at their backs
Whining because the milk they got was thinned
In dugs of famine, strove as with a wind.
Invincibly equipped with their first bows
The striplings strutted, knowing, as youth knows,
How fair life is beyond the beckoning blue.
Cold-eyed the grandsires plodded, for they knew,
As frosted heads may know, how all trails merge
In what lone land. Raw maidens on the verge
Of some half-guessed-at mystery of life,
In wistful emulation of the wife
Stooped to the fancied burden of the race;
Nor read upon the withered granddam’s face
The scrawled tale of that burden and its woe.
Slant to the sagging poles of the travaux,
Numb to the squaw’s harsh railing and the goad,
The lean cayuses toiled. And children rode
A-top the household plunder, wonder-eyed
To see a world flow by on either side,
From blue air sprung to vanish in blue air,
A river of enchantments.
Here and there
The camp-curs loped upon a vexing quest
Where countless hoofs had left a palimpsest,
A taunting snarl of broken scents. And now
They sniff the clean bones of the bison cow,
Howl to the skies; and now with manes a-rough
They nose the man-smell leading to the bluff;
Pause puzzled at the base and sweep the height
With questioning yelps. Aloft, crouched low in fright,
Already Hugh can hear the braves’ guffaws
At their scorned foeman yielded to the squaws’
Inverted mercy and a slow-won grave.
Since Earth’s first mother scolded from a cave
And that dear riddle of her love began,
No man has wrought a weapon against man
To match the deadly venom brewed above
The lean, blue, blinding heart-fires of her love.
Well might the hunted hunter shrink aghast!
But thrice three seasons yet should swell the past,
So was it writ, ere Fate’s keen harriers
Should run Hugh Glass to earth.
The hungry curs
Took up again the tangled scent of food.
Still flowed the rabble through the solitude—
A thinning stream now of the halt, the weak
And all who had not very far to seek
For that weird pass whereto the fleet are slow,
And out of it keen winds and numbing blow,
Shrill with the fleeing voices of the dead.
Slowly the scattered stragglers, making head
Against their weariness as up a steep,
Fled westward; and the morning lay asleep
Upon the valley fallen wondrous still.
Hugh kept his nook, nor ventured forth, until
The high day toppled to the blue descent,
When thirst became a master, and he went
With painful scrambling down the broken scarp,
Lured by the stream, that like a smitten harp
Rippled a muted music to the sun.
Scarce had he crossed the open flat, and won
The half-way fringe of willows, when he saw,
Slow plodding up the trail, a tottering squaw
Whose years made big the little pack she bore.
Crouched in the brush Hugh watched her. More and more
The little burden tempted him. Why not?
A thin cry throttled in that lonely spot
Could bring no succor. None should ever know,
Save him, the feasted kiote and the crow,
Why one poor crone found not the midnight fire.
Nor would the vanguard, quick with young desire,
Devouring distance westward like a flame,
Regret this ash dropped rearward.
On she came,
Slow-footed, staring blankly on the sand—
So close now that it needed but a hand
Out-thrust to overthrow her; aye, to win
That priceless spoil, a little tent of skin,
A flint and steel, a kettle and a knife!
What did the dying with the means of life,
That thus the fit-to-live should suffer lack?
Poised for the lunge, what whimsy held him back?
Why did he gaze upon the passing prize,
Nor seize it? Did some gust of ghostly cries
Awaken round her—whisperings of Eld,
Wraith-voices of the babies she had held—
To plead for pity on her graveward days?
Far down a moment’s cleavage in the haze
Of backward years Hugh saw her now—nor saw
The little burden and the feeble squaw,
But someone sitting haloed like a saint
Beside a hearth long cold. The dream grew faint;
And when he looked again, the crone was gone
Beyond a clump of willow.
Crawling on,
He reached the river. Leaning to a pool
Calm in its cup of sand, he saw—a fool!
A wild, wry mask of mirth, a-grin, yet grim,
Rose there to claim identity with him
And ridicule his folly. Pity? Faugh!
Who pitied this, that it should spare a squaw
Spent in the spawning of a scorpion brood?
He drank and hastened down the solitude,
Fleeing that thing which fleered him, and was Hugh.
And as he went his self-accusing grew
And with it, anger; till it came to seem
That somehow some sly Jamie of a dream
Had plundered him again; and he was strong
With lust of vengeance and the sting of wrong,
So that he travelled faster than for days.
Now when the eve in many-shaded grays
Wove the day’s shroud, and through the lower lands
Lean fog-arms groped with chilling spirit hands,
Hugh paused perplexed. Elusive, haunting, dim,
As though some memory that stirred in him,
Invasive of the real, outgrew the dream,
There came upon the breeze that stole up stream
A whiff of woodsmoke.
‘Twixt a beat and beat
Of Hugh’s deluded heart, it seemed the sweet
Allure of home.—A brief way, and one came
Upon the clearing where the sumach flame
Ran round the forest-fringe; and just beyond
One saw the slough grass nodding in the pond
Unto the sleepy troll the bullfrogs sung.
And then one saw the place where one was young—
The log-house sitting on a stumpy rise.
Hearth-lit within, its windows were as eyes
That love much and are faded with old tears.
It seemed regretful of a life’s arrears,
Yet patient, with a self-denying poise,
Like some old mother for her bearded boys
Waiting sweet-hearted and a little sad.—
So briefly dreamed a recrudescent lad
Beneath gray hairs, and fled.
Through chill and damp
Still groped the odor, hinting at a camp,
A two-tongued herald wooing hope and fear.
Was hospitality or danger near?
A Sioux war-party hot upon the trail,
Or laggard Rees? Hugh crawled across the vale,
Toiled up along a zigzag gully’s bed
And reached a bluff’s top. In a smudge of red
The West burned low. Hill summits, yet alight,
And pools of gloom anticipating night
Mottled the landscape to the dull blue rim.
What freak of fancy had imposed on him?
Could one smell home-smoke fifty years away?
He saw no fire; no pluming spire of gray
Rose in the dimming air to woo or warn.
He lay upon the bare height, fagged, forlorn,
And old times came upon him with the creep
Of subtle drugs that put the will to sleep
And wreak doom to the soothing of a dream.
So listlessly he scanned the sombrous stream,
Scarce seeing what he scanned. The dark increased;
A chill wind wakened from the frowning east
And soughed along the vale.
Then with a start
He saw what broke the torpor of his heart
And set the wild blood free. From where he lay
An easy point-blank rifle-shot away,
Appeared a mystic germinating spark
That in some secret garden of the dark
Upreared a frail, blue, nodding stem, whereon
A ruddy lily flourished—and was gone!
What miracle was this? Again it grew,
The scarlet blossom on the stem of blue,
And withered back again into the night.
With pounding heart Hugh crawled along the height
And reached a point of vantage whence, below,
He saw capricious witch-lights dim and glow
Like far-spent embers quickened in a breeze.
‘Twas surely not a camp of laggard Rees,
Nor yet of Siouan warriors hot in chase.
Dusk and a quiet bivouacked in that place.
A doddering vagrant with numb hands, the Wind
Fumbled the dying ashes there, and whined.
It was the day-old camp-ground of the foe!
Glad-hearted now, Hugh gained the vale below,
Keen to possess once more the ancient gift.
Nearing the glow, he saw vague shadows lift
Out of the painted gloom of smouldering logs—
Distorted bulks that bristled, and were dogs
Snarling at this invasion of their lair.
Hugh charged upon them, growling like a bear,
And sent them whining.
Now again to view
The burgeoning of scarlet, gold and blue,
The immemorial miracle of fire!
From heaped-up twigs a tenuous smoky spire
Arose, and made an altar of the place.
The spark-glow, faint upon the grizzled face,
Transformed the kneeling outcast to a priest;
And, native of the light-begetting East,
The Wind became a chanting acolyte.
These two, entempled in the vaulted night,
Breathed conjuries of interwoven breath.
Then, hark!—the snapping of the chains of Death!
From dead wood, lo!—the epiphanic god!
Once more the freightage of the fennel rod
Dissolved the chilling pall of Jovian scorn.
The wonder of the resurrection morn,
The face apocalyptic and the sword,
The glory of the many-symboled Lord,
Hugh, lifting up his eyes about him, saw!
And something in him like a vernal thaw,
Voiced with the sound of many waters, ran
And quickened to the laughter of a man.
Light-heartedly he fed the singing flame
And took its blessing: till a soft sleep came
With dreaming that was like a pleasant tale.
The far white dawn was peering up the vale
When he awoke to indolent content.
A few shorn stars in pale astonishment
Were huddled westward; and the fire was low.
Three scrawny camp-curs, mustered in a row
Beyond the heap of embers, heads askew,
Ears pricked to question what the man might do,
Sat wistfully regardant. He arose;
And they, grown canny in a school of blows,
Skulked to a safer distance, there to raise
A dolorous chanting of the evil days,
Their gray breath like the body of a prayer.
Hugh nursed the sullen embers to a flare,
Then set about to view an empty camp
As once before; but now no smoky lamp
Of blear suspicion searched a gloom of fraud
Wherein a smirking Friendship, like a bawd,
Embraced a coward Safety; now no grief,
‘Twixt hideous revelation and belief,
Made womanish the man; but glad to strive,
With hope to nerve him and a will to drive,
He knew that he could finish in the race.
The staring impassivity of space
No longer mocked; the dreadful skyward climb,
Where distance seemed identical with time,
Was past now; and that mystic something, luck,
Without which worth may flounder in the ruck,
Had turned to him again.
So flamelike soared
Rekindled hope in him as he explored
Among the ash-heaps; and the lean dogs ran
And barked about him, for the love of man
Wistful, yet fearing. Surely he could find
Some trifle in the hurry left behind—
Or haply hidden in the trampled sand—
That to the cunning of a needy hand
Should prove the master-key of circumstance:
For ‘tis the little gifts of grudging Chance,
Well husbanded, make victors.
Long he sought
Without avail; and, crawling back, he thought
Of how the dogs were growing less afraid,
And how one might be skinned without a blade.
A flake of flint might do it: he would try.
And then he saw—or did the servile eye
Trick out a mental image like the real?
He saw a glimmering of whetted steel
Beside a heap now washed with morning light!
Scarce more of marvel and the sense of might
Moved Arthur when he reached a hand to take
The fay-wrought brand emerging from the lake,
Whereby a kingdom should be lopped of strife,
Than Hugh now, pouncing on a trader’s knife
Worn hollow in the use of bounteous days!
And now behold a rich man by the blaze
Of his own hearth—a lord of steel and fire!
Not having, but the measure of desire
Determines wealth. Who gaining more, seek most,
Are ever the pursuers of a ghost
And lend their fleetness to the fugitive.
For Hugh, long goaded by the wish to live,
What gage of mastery in fire and tool!—
That twain wherewith Time put the brute to school,
Evolving Man, the maker and the seer.
‘Twixt urging hunger and restraining fear
The gaunt dogs hovered round the man; while he
Cajoled them in the language of the Ree
And simulated feeding them with sand,
Until the boldest dared to sniff his hand,
Bare-fanged and with conciliative whine.
Through bristled mane the quick blade bit the spine
Below the skull; and as a flame-struck thing
The body humped and shuddered, withering;
The lank limbs huddled, wilted.
Now to skin
The carcass, dig a hole, arrange therein
And fix the pelt with stakes, the flesh-side up.
This done, he shaped the bladder to a cup
On willow withes, and filled the rawhide pot
With water from the river—made it hot
With roasted stones, and set the meat a-boil.
Those days of famine and prodigious toil
Had wrought bulimic cravings in the man,
And scarce the cooking of the flesh outran
The eating of it. As a fed flame towers
According to the fuel it devours,
His hunger with indulgence grew, nor ceased
Until the kettle, empty of the feast,
Went dim, the sky and valley, merging, swirled
In subtle smoke that smothered out the world.
Hugh slept.
And then—as divers, mounting, sunder
A murmuring murk to blink in sudden wonder
Upon a dazzling upper deep of blue—
He rose again to consciousness, and knew
The low sun beating slantly on his face.
Now indolently gazing round the place,
He noted how the curs had revelled there—
The bones and entrails gone; some scattered hair
Alone remaining of the pot of hide.
How strange he had not heard them at his side!
And granting but one afternoon had passed,
What could have made the fire burn out so fast?
Had daylight waned, night fallen, morning crept,
Noon blazed, a new day dwindled while he slept?
And was the friendlike fire a Jamie too?
Across the twilit consciousness of Hugh
The old obsession like a wounded bird
Fluttered.
He got upon his knees and stirred
The feathery ash; but not a spark was there.
Already with the failing sun the air
Went keen, betokening a frosty night.
Hugh winced with something like the clutch of fright.
How could he bear the torture, how sustain
The sting of that antiquity of pain
Rolled back upon him—face again the foe,
That yielding victor, fleet in being slow,
That huge, impersonal malevolence?
So readily the tentacles of sense
Root in the larger standard of desire,
That Hugh fell farther in the loss of fire
Than in the finding of it he arose.
And suddenly the place grew strange, as grows
A friend’s house, when the friend is on his bier,
And all that was familiar there and dear
Puts on a blank, inhospitable look.
Hugh set his face against the east, and took
That dreariest of ways, the trail of flight.
He would outcrawl the shadow of the night
And have the day to blanket him in sleep.
But as he went to meet the gloom a-creep,
Bemused with life’s irrational rebuffs,
A yelping of the dogs among the bluffs
Rose, hunger-whetted, stabbing; rent the pall
Of evening silence; blunted to a drawl
Amid the arid waterways, and died.
And as the echo to the sound replied,
So in the troubled mind of Hugh was wrought
A reminiscent cry of thought to thought
That, groping, found an unlocked door to life:
The dogs—keen flint to skin one—then the knife
Discovered. Why, that made a flint and steel!
No further with the subtle foe at heel
He fled; for all about him in the rock,
To waken when the needy hand might knock,
A savior slept! He found a flake of flint,
Scraped from his shirt a little wad of lint,
Spilled on it from the smitten stone a shower
Of ruddy seed; and saw the mystic flower
That genders its own summer, bloom anew!
And so capricious luck came back to Hugh;
And he was happier than he had been
Since Jamie to that unforgiven sin
Had yielded, ages back upon the Grand.
Now he would turn the cunning of his hand
To carving crutches, that he might arise,
Be manlike, lift more rapidly the skies
That crouched between his purpose and the mark.
The warm glow housed him from the frosty dark,
And there he wrought in very joyous mood
And sang by fits—whereat the solitude
Set laggard singers snatching at the tune.
The gaunter for their hunt, the dogs came soon
To haunt the shaken fringes of the glow,
And, pitching voices to the timeless woe,
Outwailed the lilting. So the Chorus sings
Of terror, pity and the tears of things
When most the doomed protagonist is gay.
The stars swarmed over, and the front of day
Whitened above a white world, and the sun
Rose on a sleeper with a task well done,
Nor roused him till its burning topped the blue.
When Hugh awoke, there woke a younger Hugh,
Now half a stranger; and ‘twas good to feel
With ebbing sleep the old green vigor steal,
Thrilling, along his muscles and his veins,
As in a lull of winter-cleansing rains
The gray bough quickens to the sap a-creep.
It chanced the dogs lay near him, sound asleep,
Curled nose to buttock in the noonday glow.
He killed the larger with a well-aimed blow,
Skinned, dressed and set it roasting on a spit;
And when ‘twas cooked, ate sparingly of it,
For need might yet make little seem a feast.
Fording the river shallows, south by east
He hobbled now along a withered rill
That issued where old floods had gashed the hill—
A cyclopean portal yawning sheer.
No storm of countless hoofs had entered here:
It seemed a place where nothing ever comes
But change of season. He could hear the plums
Plash in the frosted thicket, over-lush;
While, like a spirit lisping in the hush,
The crisp leaves whispered round him as they fell.
And ever now and then the autumn spell
Was broken by an ululating cry
From where far back with muzzle to the sky
The lone dog followed, mourning. Darkness came;
And huddled up beside a cozy flame,
Hugh’s sleep was but a momentary flight
Across a little shadow into light.
So day on day he toiled: and when, afloat
Above the sunset like a stygian boat,
The new moon bore the spectre of the old,
He saw—a dwindling strip of blue outrolled—
The valley of the tortuous Cheyenne.
And ere the half moon sailed the night again,
Those far lone leagues had sloughed their garb of blue,
And dwindled, dwindled, dwindled after Hugh,
Until he saw that Titan of the plains,
The sinewy Missouri. Dearth of rains
Had made the Giant gaunt as he who saw.
This loud Chain-Smasher of a late March thaw
Seemed never to have bellowed at his banks;
And yet, with staring ribs and hollow flanks,
The urge of an indomitable will
Proclaimed him of the breed of giants still;
And where the current ran a boiling track,
‘Twas like the muscles of a mighty back
Grown Atlantean in the wrestler’s craft.
Hugh set to work and built a little raft
Of driftwood bound with grapevines. So it fell
That one with an amazing tale to tell
Came drifting to the gates of Kiowa.
IV
THE RETURN OF THE GHOST
Not long Hugh let the lust of vengeance gnaw
Upon him idling; though the tale he told
And what report proclaimed him, were as gold
To buy a winter’s comfort at the Post.
“I can not rest; for I am but the ghost
Of someone murdered by a friend,” he said,
“So long as yonder traitor thinks me dead,
Aye, buried in the bellies of the crows
And kiotes!”
Whereupon said one of those
Who heard him, noting how the old man shook
As with a chill: “God fend that one should look
With such a blizzard of a face for me!”
For he went grayer like a poplar tree
That shivers, ruffling to the first faint breath
Of storm, while yet the world is still as death
Save where, far off, the kenneled thunders bay.
So brooding, he grew stronger day by day,
Until at last he laid the crutches by.
And then one evening came a rousing cry
From where the year’s last keelboat hove in view
Around the bend, its swarthy, sweating crew
Slant to the shouldered line.
Men sang that night
In Kiowa, and by the ruddy light
Of leaping fires amid the wooden walls
The cups went round; and there were merry brawls
Of bearded lads no older for the beard;
And laughing stories vied with tales of weird
By stream and prairie trail and mountain pass,
Until the tipsy Bourgeois bawled for Glass
To ‘shame these with a man’s tale fit to hear.’
The graybeard, sitting where the light was blear,
With little heart for revelry, began
His story, told as of another man
Who, loving late, loved much and was betrayed.
He spoke unwitting how his passion played
Upon them, how their eyes grew soft or hard
With what he told; yet something of the bard
He seemed, and his the purpose that is art’s,
Whereby men make a vintage of their hearts
And with the wine of beauty deaden pain.
Low-toned, insistent as October rain,
His voice beat on; and now and then would flit
Across the melancholy gray of it
A glimmer of cold fire that, like the flare
Of soundless lightning, showed a world made bare,
Green Summer slain and all its leafage stripped.
And bronze jaws tightened, brawny hands were gripped,
As though each hearer had a fickle friend.
But when the old man might have made an end,
Rounding the story to a peaceful close
At Kiowa, songlike his voice arose,
The grinning gray mask lifted and the eyes
Burned as a bard’s who sees and prophesies,
Conning the future as a time long gone.
Swaying to rhythm the dizzy tale plunged on
Even to the cutting of the traitor’s throat,
And ceased—as though a bloody strangling smote
The voice of that gray chanter, drunk with doom.
And there was shuddering in the blue-smeared gloom
Of fallen fires. It seemed the deed was done
Before their eyes who heard.
The morrow’s sun,
Low over leagues of frost-enchanted plain,
Saw Glass upon his pilgrimage again,
Northbound as hunter for the keelboat’s crew.
And many times the wide autumnal blue
Burned out and darkened to a deep of stars;
And still they toiled among the snags and bars—
Those lean up-stream men, straining at the rope,
Lashed by the doubt and strengthened by the hope
Of backward winter—engines wrought of bone
And muscle, panting for the Yellowstone,
Bend after bend and yet more bends away.
Now was the river like a sandy bay
At ebb-tide, and the far-off cutbank’s boom
Mocked them in shallows; now ‘twas like a flume
With which the toilers, barely creeping, strove.
And bend by bend the selfsame poplar grove,
Set on the selfsame headland, so it seemed,
Confronted them, as though they merely dreamed
Of passing one drear point.
So on and up
Past where the tawny Titan gulps the cup
Of Cheyenne waters, past the Moreau’s mouth;
And still wry league and stubborn league fell south,
Becoming haze and weary memory.
Then past the empty lodges of the Ree
That gaped at cornfields plundered by the Sioux;
And there old times came mightily on Hugh,
For much of him was born and buried there.
Some troubled glory of that wind-tossed hair
Was on the trampled corn; the lonely skies,
So haunted with the blue of Jamie’s eyes,
Seemed taunting him; and through the frosted wood
Along the flat, where once their tent had stood,
A chill wind sorrowed, and the blackbirds’ brawl
Amid the funeral torches of the Fall
Ran raucously, a desecrating din.
Past where the Cannon Ball and Heart come in
They labored. Now the Northwest ‘woke at last.
The gaunt bluffs bellowed back the trumpet blast
Of charging winds that made the sandbars smoke.
To breathe now was to gulp fine sand, and choke:
The stinging air was sibilant with whips.
Leaning the more and with the firmer grips,
Still northward the embattled toilers pressed
To where the river yaws into the west.
There stood the Mandan village.
Now began
The chaining of the Titan. Drift-ice ran.
The wingéd hounds of Winter ceased to bay.
The stupor of a doom completed lay
Upon the world. The biting darkness fell.
Out in the night, resounding as a well,
They heard the deck-planks popping in a vise
Of frost; all night the smithies of the ice
Reëchoed with the griding jar and clink
Of ghostly hammers welding link to link:
And morning found the world without a sound.
There lay the stubborn Prairie Titan bound,
To wait the far-off Heraclean thaw,
Though still in silent rage he strove to gnaw
The ragged shackles knitting at his breast.
And so the boatman won a winter’s rest
Among the Mandan traders: but for Hugh
There yet remained a weary work to do.
Across the naked country west by south
His purpose called him at the Big Horn’s mouth—
Three hundred miles of winging for the crow;
But by the river trail that he must go
‘Twas seven hundred winding miles at least.
So now he turned his back upon the feast,
Snug ease, the pleasant tale, the merry mood,
And took the bare, foot-sounding solitude
Northwestward. Long they watched him from the Post,
Skied on a bluff-rim, fading like a ghost
At gray cock-crow; and hooded in his breath,
He seemed indeed a fugitive from Death
On whom some tatter of the shroud still clung.
Blank space engulfed him.
Now the moon was young
When he set forth; and day by day he strode,
His scarce healed wounds upon him like a load;
And dusk by dusk his fire out-flared the moon
That waxed until it wrought a spectral noon
At nightfall. Then he came to where, awhirl
With Spring’s wild rage, the snow-born Titan girl,
A skyey wonder on her virgin face,
Receives the virile Yellowstone’s embrace
And bears the lusty Seeker for the Sea.
A bleak, horizon-wide serenity
Clung round the valley where the twain lay dead.
A winding sheet was on the marriage bed.
‘Twas warmer now; the sky grew overcast;
And as Hugh strode southwestward, all the vast
Gray void seemed suddenly astir with wings
And multitudinary whisperings—
The muffled sibilance of tumbling snow.
It seemed no more might living waters flow,
Moon gleam, star glint, dawn smoulder through, bird sing,
Or ever any fair familiar thing
Be so again. The outworn winds were furled.
Weird weavers of the twilight of a world
Wrought, thread on kissing thread, the web of doom.
Grown insubstantial in the knitted gloom,
The bluffs loomed eerie, and the scanty trees
Were dwindled to remote dream-traceries
That never might be green or shield a nest.
All day with swinging stride Hugh forged southwest
Along the Yellowstone’s smooth-paven stream,
A dream-shape moving in a troubled dream;
And all day long the whispering weavers wove.
And close on dark he came to where a grove
Of cottonwoods rose tall and shadow-thin
Against the northern bluffs. He camped therein
And with cut boughs made shelter as he might.
Close pressed the blackness of the snow-choked night
About him, and his fire of plum wood purred.
Athwart a soft penumbral drowse he heard
The tumbling snowflakes sighing all around,
Till sleep transformed it to a Summer sound
Of boyish memory—susurrant bees,
The Southwind in the tousled apple trees
And slumber flowing from their leafy gloom.
He wakened to the cottonwoods’ deep boom.
Black fury was the world. The northwest’s roar,
As of a surf upon a shipwreck shore,
Plunged high above him from the sheer bluff’s verge;
And, like the backward sucking of the surge,
Far fled the sobbing of the wild snow-spray.
Black blindness grew white blindness—and ‘twas day.
All being now seemed narrowed to a span
That held a sputtering wood fire and a man;
Beyond was tumult and a whirling maze.
The trees were but a roaring in a haze;
The sheer bluff-wall that took the blizzard’s charge
Was thunder flung along the hidden marge
Of chaos, stridden by the ghost of light.
White blindness grew black blindness—and ‘twas night
Wherethrough nor moon nor any star might grope.
Two days since, Hugh had killed an antelope
And what remained sufficed the time of storm.
The snow banked round his shelter kept him warm
And there was wood to burn for many a day.
The third dawn, oozing through a smudge of gray,
Awoke him. It was growing colder fast.
Still from the bluff high over boomed the blast,
But now it took the void with numbing wings.
By noon the woven mystery of things
Frayed raggedly, and through a sudden rift
At length Hugh saw the beetling bluff-wall lift
A sturdy shoulder to the flying rack.
Slowly the sense of distances came back
As with the waning day the great wind fell.
The pale sun set upon a frozen hell.
The wolves howled.
Hugh had left the Mandan town
When, heifer-horned, the maiden moon lies down
Beside the sea of evening. Now she rose
Scar-faced and staring blankly on the snows
While yet the twilight tarried in the west;
And more and more she came a tardy guest
As Hugh pushed onward through the frozen waste
Until she stole on midnight shadow-faced,
A haggard spectre; then no more appeared.
‘Twas on that time the man of hoary beard
Paused in the early twilight, looming lone
Upon a bluff-rim of the Yellowstone,
And peered across the white stream to the south
Where in the flatland at the Big Horn’s mouth
The new fort stood that Henry’s men had built.
What perfect peace for such a nest of guilt!
What satisfied immunity from woe!
Yon sprawling shadow, pied with candle-glow
And plumed with sparkling woodsmoke, might have been
A homestead with the children gathered in
To share its bounty through the holidays.
Hugh saw their faces round the gay hearth-blaze:
The hale old father in a mood for yarns
Or boastful of the plenty of his barns,
Fruitage of honest toil and grateful lands;
And, half a stranger to her folded hands,
The mother with October in her hair
And August in her face. One moment there
Hugh saw it. Then the monstrous brutal fact
Wiped out the dream and goaded him to act,
Though now to act seemed strangely like a dream.
Descending from the bluff, he crossed the stream,
The dry snow fifing to his eager stride.
Reaching the fort stockade, he paused to bide
The passing of a whimsy. Was it true?
Or was this but the fretted wraith of Hugh
Whose flesh had fed the kiotes long ago?
Still through a chink he saw the candle-glow,
So like an eye that brazened out a wrong.
And now there came a flight of muffled song,
The rhythmic thudding of a booted heel
That timed a squeaking fiddle to a reel!
How swiftly men forget! The spawning Earth
Is fat with graves; and what is one man worth
That fiddles should be muted at his fall?
He should have died and did not—that was all.
Well, let the living jig it! He would turn
Back to the night, the spacious unconcern
Of wilderness that never played the friend.
Now came the song and fiddling to an end,
And someone laughed within. The old man winced,
Listened with bated breath, and was convinced
‘Twas Jamie laughing! Once again he heard.
Joy filled a hush ‘twixt heart-beats like a bird;
Then like a famished cat his lurking hate
Pounced crushingly.
He found the outer gate,
Beat on it with his shoulder, raised a cry.
No doubt ‘twas deemed a fitful wind went by;
None stirred. But when he did not cease to shout,
A door creaked open and a man came out
Amid the spilling candle-glimmer, raised
The wicket in the outer gate and gazed
One moment on a face as white as death,
Because the beard was thick with frosted breath
Made mystic by the stars. Then came a gasp,
The clatter of the falling wicket’s hasp,
The crunch of panic feet along the snow;
And someone stammered huskily and low:
“My God! I saw the Old Man’s ghost out there!”
‘Twas spoken as one speaks who feels his hair
Prickle the scalp. And then another said—
It seemed like Henry’s voice—“The dead are dead:
What talk is this, Le Bon? You saw him die!
Who’s there?”
Hugh strove to shout, to give the lie
To those within; but could not fetch a sound.
Just so he dreamed of lying under ground
Beside the Grand and hearing overhead
The talk of men. Or was he really dead,
And all this but a maggot in the brain?
Then suddenly the clatter of a chain
Aroused him, and he saw the portal yawn
And saw a bright rectangled patch of dawn
As through a grave’s mouth—no, ‘twas candlelight
Poured through the open doorway on the night;
And those were men before him, bulking black
Against the glow.
Reality flashed back;
He strode ahead and entered at the door.
A falling fiddle jangled on the floor
And left a deathly silence. On his bench
The fiddler shrank. A row of eyes, a-blench
With terror, ran about the naked hall.
And there was one who huddled by the wall
And hid his face and shivered.
For a spell
That silence clung; and then the old man: “Well,
Is this the sort of welcome that I get?
‘Twas not my time to feed the kiotes yet!
Put on the pot and stew a chunk of meat
And you shall see how much a ghost can eat!
I’ve journeyed far if what I hear be true!”
Now in that none might doubt the voice of Hugh,
Nor yet the face, however it might seem
A blurred reflection in a flowing stream,
A buzz of wonder broke the trance of dread.
“Good God!” the Major gasped; “We thought you dead!
Two men have testified they saw you die!”
“If they speak truth,” Hugh answered, “then I lie
Both here and by the Grand. If I be right,
Then two lie here and shall lie from this night.
Which are they?”
Henry answered: “Yon is one.”
The old man set the trigger of his gun
And gazed on Jules who cowered by the wall.
Eyes blinked, expectant of the hammer’s fall;
Ears strained, anticipative of the roar.
But Hugh walked leisurely across the floor
And kicked the croucher, saying: “Come, get up
And wag your tail! I couldn’t kill a pup!”
Then turning round: “I had a faithful friend;
No doubt he too was with me to the end!
Where’s Jamie?”
“Started out before the snows
For Atkinson.”
V
JAMIE
The Country of the Crows,
Through which the Big Horn and the Rosebud run,
Sees over mountain peaks the setting sun;
And southward from the Yellowstone flung wide,
It broadens ever to the morning side
And has the Powder on its vague frontier.
About the subtle changing of the year,
Ere even favored valleys felt the stir
Of Spring, and yet expectancy of her
Was like a pleasant rumor all repeat
Yet none may prove, the sound of horses’ feet
Went eastward through the silence of that land.
For then it was there rode a little band
Of trappers out of Henry’s Post, to bear
Dispatches down to Atkinson, and there
To furnish out a keelboat for the Horn.
And four went lightly, but the fifth seemed worn
As with a heavy heart; for that was he
Who should have died but did not.
Silently
He heard the careless parley of his men,
And thought of how the Spring should come again,
That garish strumpet with her world-old lure,
To waken hope where nothing may endure,
To quicken love where loving is betrayed.
Yet now and then some dream of Jamie made
Slow music in him for a little while;
And they who rode beside him saw a smile
Glimmer upon that ruined face of gray,
As on a winter fog the groping day
Pours glory through a momentary rift.
Yet never did the gloom that bound him, lift;
He seemed as one who feeds upon his heart
And finds, despite the bitter and the smart,
A little sweetness and is glad for that.
Now up the Powder, striking for the Platte
Across the bleak divide the horsemen went;
Attained that river where its course is bent
From north to east: and spurring on apace
Along the wintry valley, reached the place
Where from the west flows in the Laramie.
Thence, fearing to encounter with the Ree,
They headed eastward through the barren land
To where, fleet-footed down a track of sand,
The Niobrara races for the morn—
A gaunt-loined runner.
Here at length was born
Upon the southern slopes the baby Spring,
A timid, fretful, ill-begotten thing,
A-suckle at the Winter’s withered paps:
Not such as when announced by thunder-claps
And ringed with swords of lightning, she would ride,
The haughty victrix and the mystic bride,
Clad splendidly as never Sheba’s Queen,
Before her marching multitudes of green
In many-bannered triumph! Grudging, slow,
Amid the fraying fringes of the snow
The bunch-grass sprouted; and the air was chill.
Along the northern slopes ‘twas winter still,
And no root dreamed what Triumph-over-Death
Was nurtured now in some bleak Nazareth
Beyond the crest to sunward.
On they spurred
Through vacancies that waited for the bird,
And everywhere the Odic Presence dwelt.
The Southwest blew, the snow began to melt;
And when they reached the valley of the Snake,
The Niobrara’s ice began to break,
And all night long and all day long it made
A sound as of a random cannonade
With rifles snarling down a skirmish line.
The geese went over. Every tree and vine
Was dotted thick with leaf-buds when they saw
The little river of Keyapaha
Grown mighty for the moment. Then they came,
One evening when all thickets were aflame
With pale green witch-fires and the windflowers blew,
To where the headlong Niobrara threw
His speed against the swoln Missouri’s flank
And hurled him roaring to the further bank—
A giant staggered by a pigmy’s sling.
Thence, plunging ever deeper into Spring,
Across the greening prairie east by south
They rode, and, just above the Platte’s wide mouth,
Came, weary with the trail, to Atkinson.
There all the vernal wonder-work was done:
No care-free heart might find aught lacking there.
The dove’s call wandered in the drowsy air;
A love-dream brooded in the lucent haze.
Priapic revellers, the shrieking jays
Held mystic worship in the secret shade.
Woodpeckers briskly plied their noisy trade
Along the tree-boles, and their scarlet hoods
Flashed flamelike in the smoky cottonwoods.
What lacked? Not sweetness in the sun-lulled breeze;
The plum bloom murmurous with bumblebees
Was drifted deep in every draw and slough.
Not color; witcheries of gold and blue
The dandelion and the violet
Wove in the green. Might not the sad forget,
The happy here have nothing more to seek?
Lo, yonder by that pleasant little creek,
How one might loll upon the grass and fish
And build the temple of one’s wildest wish
‘Twixt nibbles! Surely there was quite enough
Of wizard-timber and of wonder-stuff
To rear it nobly to the blue-domed roof!
Yet there was one whose spirit stood aloof
From all this joyousness—a gray old man,
No nearer now than when the quest began
To what he sought on that long winter trail.
Aye, Jamie had been there; but when the tale
That roving trappers brought from Kiowa
Was told to him, he seemed as one who saw
A ghost, and could but stare on it, they said:
Until one day he mounted horse and fled
Into the North, a devil-ridden man.
“I’ve got to go and find him if I can,”
Was all he said for days before he left.
And what of Hugh? So long of love bereft,
So long sustained and driven by his hate,
A touch of ruth now made him desolate.
No longer eager to avenge the wrong,
With not enough of pity to be strong
And just enough of love to choke and sting,
A gray old hulk amid the surge of Spring
He floundered on a lee-shore of the heart.
But when the boat was ready for the start
Up the long watery stairway to the Horn,
Hugh joined the party. And the year was shorn
Of blooming girlhood as they forged amain
Into the North; the late green-mantled plain
Grew sallow; and the ruthless golden shower
Of Summer wrought in lust upon the flower
That withered in the endless martyrdom
To seed. The scarlet quickened on the plum
About the Heart’s mouth when they came thereto;
Among the Mandans grapes were turning blue,
And they were purple at the Yellowstone.
A frosted scrub-oak, standing out alone
Upon a barren bluff top, gazing far
Above the crossing at the Powder’s bar,
Was spattered with the blood of Summer slain.
So it was Autumn in the world again,
And all those months of toil had yielded nought
To Hugh. (How often is the seeker sought
By what he seeks—a blind, heart-breaking game!)
For always had the answer been the same
From roving trapper and at trading post:
Aye, one who seemed to stare upon a ghost
And followed willy-nilly where it led,
Had gone that way in search of Hugh, they said—
A haggard, blue-eyed, yellow-headed chap.
And often had the old man thought, ‘Mayhap
He’ll be at Henry’s Post and we shall meet;
And to forgive and to forget were sweet:
‘Tis for its nurse that Vengeance whets the tooth!
And oh the golden time of Jamie’s youth,
That it should darken for a graybeard’s whim!’
So Hugh had brooded, till there came on him
The pity of a slow rain after drouth.
But at the crossing of the Rosebud’s mouth
A shadow fell upon his growing dream.
A band of Henry’s traders, bound down stream,
Who paused to traffic in the latest word—
Down-river news for matters seen and heard
In higher waters—had not met the lad,
Not yet encountered anyone who had.
Alas, the journey back to yesterwhiles!
How tangled are the trails! The stubborn miles,
How wearily they stretch! And if one win
The long way back in search of what has been,
Shall he find aught that is not strange and new?
Thus wrought the melancholy news in Hugh,
As he turned back with those who brought the news;
For more and more he dreaded now to lose
What doubtful seeking rendered doubly dear.
And in the time when keen winds stripped the year
He came with those to where the Poplar joins
The greater river. There Assinoboines,
Rich from the Summer’s hunting, had come down
And flung along the flat their ragged town,
That traders might bring goods and winter there.
So leave the heartsick graybeard. Otherwhere
The final curtain rises on the play.
‘Tis dead of Winter now. For day on day
The blizzard wind has thundered, sweeping wide
From Mississippi to the Great Divide
Out of the North beyond Saskatchewan.
Brief evening glimmers like an inverse dawn
After a long white night. The tempest dies;
The snow-haze lifts. Now let the curtain rise
Upon Milk River valley, and reveal
The stars like broken glass on frosted steel
Above the Piegan lodges, huddled deep
In snowdrifts, like a freezing flock of sheep.
A crystal weight the dread cold crushes down
And no one moves about the little town
That seems to grovel as a thing that fears.
But see! a lodge-flap swings; a squaw appears,
Hunched with the sudden cold. Her footsteps creak
Shrill in the hush. She stares upon the bleak,
White skyline for a moment, then goes in.
We follow her, push back the flap of skin,
Enter the lodge, inhale the smoke-tanged air
And blink upon the little faggot-flare
That blossoms in the center of the room.
Unsteady shadows haunt the outer gloom
Wherein the walls are guessed at. Upward, far,
The smoke-vent now and then reveals a star
As in a well. The ancient squaw, a-stoop,
Her face light-stricken, stirs a pot of soup
That simmers with a pleasant smell and sound.
A gnarled old man, cross-legged upon the ground,
Sits brooding near. He feeds the flame with sticks;
It brightens. Lo, a leaden crucifix
Upon the wall! These heathen eyes, though dim,
Have seen the white man’s God and cling to Him,
Lest on the sunset trail slow feet should err.
But look again. From yonder bed of fur
Beside the wall a white man strives to rise.
He lifts his head, with yearning sightless eyes
Gropes for the light. A mass of golden hair
Falls round the face that sickness and despair
Somehow make old, albeit he is young.
His weak voice, stumbling to the mongrel tongue
Of traders, flings a question to the squaw:
“You saw no Black Robe? Tell me what you saw!”
And she, brief-spoken as her race, replies:
“Heaped snow—sharp stars—a kiote on the rise.”
The blind youth huddles moaning in the furs.
The firewood spits and pops, the boiled pot purrs
And sputters. On this little isle of sound
The sea of winter silence presses round—
One feels it like a menace.
Now the crone
Dips out a cup of soup, and having blown
Upon it, takes it to the sick man there
And bids him eat. With wild, unseeing stare
He turns upon her: “Why are they so long?
I can not eat! I’ve done a mighty wrong;
It chokes me! Oh no, no, I must not die
Until the Black Robe comes!” His feeble cry
Sinks to a whisper. “Tell me, did they go—
Your kinsmen?”
“They went south before the snow.”
“And will they tell the Black Robe?”
“They will tell.”
The crackling of the faggots for a spell
Seems very loud. Again the sick man moans
And, struggling with the weakness in his bones,
Would gain his feet, but can not. “Go again,
And tell me that you see the bulks of men
Dim in the distance there.”
The squaw obeys;
Returns anon to crouch beside the blaze,
Numb-fingered and a-shudder from the night.
The vacant eyes that hunger for the light
Are turned upon her: “Tell me what you saw!
Or maybe snowshoes sounded up the draw.
Quick, tell me what you saw and heard out there!”
“Heaped snow—sharp stars—big stillness everywhere.”
One clutching at thin ice with numbing grip
Cries while he hopes; but when his fingers slip,
He takes the final plunge without a sound.
So sinks the youth now, hopeless. All around
The winter silence presses in; the walls
Grow vague and vanish in the gloom that crawls
Close to the failing fire.
The Piegans sleep.
Night hovers midway down the morning steep.
The sick man drowses. Nervously he starts
And listens; hears no sound except his heart’s
And that weird murmur brooding stillness makes.
But stealthily upon the quiet breaks—
Vague as the coursing of the hearer’s blood—
A muffled, rhythmic beating, thud on thud,
That, growing nearer, deepens to a crunch.
So, hungry for the distance, snowshoes munch
The crusted leagues of Winter, stride by stride.
A camp-dog barks; the hollow world outside
Brims with the running howl of many curs.
Now wide-awake, half risen in the furs,
The youth can hear low voices and the creak
Of snowshoes near the lodge. His thin, wild shriek
Startles the old folk from their slumberings:
“He comes! The Black Robe!”
Now the door-flap swings,
And briefly one who splutters Piegan, bars
The way, then enters. Now the patch of stars
Is darkened with a greater bulk that bends
Beneath the lintel. “Peace be with you, friends!
And peace with him herein who suffers pain!”
So speaks the second comer of the twain—
A white man by his voice. And he who lies
Beside the wall, with empty, groping eyes
Turned to the speaker: “There can be no peace
For me, good Father, till this gnawing cease—
The gnawing of a great wrong I have done.”
The big man leans above the youth: “My son—”
(Grown husky with the word, the deep voice breaks,
And for a little spell the whole man shakes
As with the clinging cold) “—have faith and hope!
‘Tis often nearest dawn when most we grope.
Does not the Good Book say, Who seek shall find?”
“But, Father, I am broken now and blind,
And I have sought, and I have lost the way.”
To which the stranger: “What would Jesus say?
Hark! In the silence of the heart ‘tis said—
By their own weakness are the feeble sped;
The humblest feet are surest for the goal;
The blind shall see the City of the Soul.
Lay down your burden at His feet to-night.”
Now while the fire, replenished, bathes in light
The young face scrawled with suffering and care,
Flinging ironic glories on the hair
And glinting on dull eyes that once flashed blue,
The sick one tells the story of old Hugh
To him whose face, averted from the glow,
Still lurks in gloom. The winds of battle blow
Once more along the steep. Again one sees
The rescue from the fury of the Rees,
The graybeard’s fondness for the gay lad; then
The westward march with Major Henry’s men
With all that happened there upon the Grand.
“And so we hit the trail of Henry’s band,”
The youth continues; “for we feared to die:
And dread of shame was ready with the lie
We carried to our comrades. Hugh was dead
And buried there beside the Grand, we said.
Could any doubt that what we said was true?
They even praised our courage! But I knew!
The nights were hell because I heard his cries
And saw the crows a-pecking at his eyes,
The kiotes tearing at him. O my God!
I tried and tried to think him under sod;
But every time I slept it was the same.
And then one night—I lay awake—he came!
I say he came—I know I hadn’t slept!
Amid a light like rainy dawn, he crept
Out of the dark upon his hands and knees.
The wound he got that day among the Rees
Was like red fire. A snarl of bloody hair
Hung round the eyes that had a pleading stare,
And down the ruined face and gory beard
Big tear-drops rolled. He went as he appeared,
Trailing a fog of light that died away.
And I grew old before I saw the day.
O Father, I had paid too much for breath!
The Devil traffics in the fear of death,
And may God pity anyone who buys
What I have bought with treachery and lies—
This rat-like gnawing in my breast!
“I knew
I couldn’t rest until I buried Hugh;
And so I told the Major I would go
To Atkinson with letters, ere the snow
Had choked the trails. Jules wouldn’t come along;
He didn’t seem to realize the wrong;
He called me foolish, couldn’t understand.
I rode alone—not south, but to the Grand.
Daylong my horse beat thunder from the sod,
Accusing me; and all my prayers to God
Seemed flung in vain at bolted gates of brass.
And in the night the wind among the grass
Hissed endlessly the story of my shame.
“I do not know how long I rode: I came
Upon the Grand at last, and found the place,
And it was empty. Not a sign or trace
Was left to show what end had come to Hugh.
And oh that grave! It gaped upon the blue,
A death-wound pleading dumbly for the slain.
I filled it up and fled across the plain,
And somehow came to Atkinson at last.
And there I heard the living Hugh had passed
Along the river northward in the Fall!
O Father, he had found the strength to crawl
That long, heart-breaking distance back to life,
Though Jules had taken blanket, steel and knife,
And I, his trusted comrade, had his gun!
“They said I’d better stay at Atkinson,
Because old Hugh was surely hunting me,
White-hot to kill. I did not want to flee
Or hide from him. I even wished to die,
If so this aching cancer of a lie
Might be torn out forever. So I went,
As eager as the homesick homeward bent,
In search of him and peace.
But I was cursed.
For even when his stolen rifle burst
And spewed upon me this eternal night,
I might not die as any other might;
But God so willed that friendly Piegans came
To spare me yet a little unto shame.
O Father, is there any hope for me?”
“Great hope indeed, my son!” so huskily
The other answers. “I recall a case
Like yours—no matter what the time and place—
‘Twas somewhat like the story that you tell;
Each seeking and each sought, and both in hell;
But in the tale I mind, they met at last.”
The youth sits up, white-faced and breathing fast:
“They met, you say? What happened? Quick! Oh quick!”
“The old man found the dear lad blind and sick
And both forgave—‘twas easy to forgive—
For oh we have so short a time to live—”
Whereat the youth: “Who’s here? The Black Robe’s gone!
Whose voice is this?”
The gray of winter dawn
Now creeping round the door-flap, lights the place
And shows thin fingers groping for a face
Deep-scarred and hoary with the frost of years
Whereover runs a new springtide of tears.
“O Jamie, Jamie, Jamie—I am Hugh!
There was no Black Robe yonder—Will I do?”