In the hour before Pete, the guide, returned with camp supplies to the
sheep camp, Hugh had a chance to observe various things about this
mountain land of which he had never been aware before. He sensed, for
really the first time, the mystery of the forest in the darkness. The
domain of man, it seemed to him, extended just to the limits of the
little meadow where the sheep were bedded: beyond that lay the Kingdom
of the Wild. He saw, with an inner gladness and stir, the long outline
of the high range against the pale western sky,—the one part of the
firmament the darkness had not yet completely over-spread. The peaks
seemed to rise to the upper reaches of the heavens; between them he
could see the sweeping concave line, rough-edged, of the pine forests.
He learned certain things concerning the way the firelight leaps into
the shadow and the darkness comes racing back. He heard the various
overtones, known only to a woodsman, in the crackle of the fire. At the
end of the hour he beheld an even greater mystery.
At first it was just a smear of silver, suddenly catching his eye, in
the darkness of the east. It grew, it extended; clouds were ensilvered
by it and broken apart; it gleamed with indescribable beauty, and in a
moment it evolved into the moon. The orb rose higher, the beams slanted
down.
But the enchantment of the forest only seemed to deepen beneath it. Only
at intervals could the beams penetrate between the trees, and the silver
patches that came, now and then, between the trunks only mystified the
eyes. And it soon became an indisputable fact that these patches were
not motionless and unvarying in outline as Hugh might have expected.
Sometimes they blended and moved; and once or twice a swift shadow
flicked across them. There was only one explanation. Living
creatures—beasts of prey such as always linger about the sheep
flocks—hovered at the border of darkness ready to swoop forth.
Pete returned soon after and began upon the simple tasks of the night.
He went to the edge of the forest, returning with a bundle of fir boughs
for Hugh’s bed. He chopped more fuel, and once he mystified the Eastern
man by some hurried business in the dead herder’s tent. He seemed to be
making a frenzied search for something that he needed very badly.
He found it at last, and a moment of drama resulted when he came forth
into the firelight. A dark bottle was clutched in each of his hands.
Hugh glanced at them, then looked with even greater interest at the deep
lines in the guide’s face.
“I’ve found ’em,” the Indian told him eagerly. “Knew sure he had ’em
somewhere. Fire water.”
The blood leaped once in Hugh’s veins, and a great desire seemed to set
fire to his brain. For a moment it seemed to cost him all power of
thought. His hand started to reach forward. Then, almost as if the
gesture had been inadvertent, he drew it slowly back.
He smiled; and his eyes gave no sign of the vision that was before them.
The Indian’s sight was keen, but he had no realization of the grim and
terrible battle that was being waged in the man’s own soul. There was no
outward indication of the convulsive wrench that had been necessary to
draw his hand back to his side. Even in that mountain silence, voiceless
as the interstellar spaces, the Indian could not hear the voice of
demons, shrieking within the man.
The truth was that Hugh had just been given a glimpse into his own soul:
a sight that he had never really had before. He did not know from whence
such power of vision came. It was something the wilderness had taught
him in the hour that he had watched the sheep. He had always been ready
to deny that strong drink had any hold upon him whatsoever. He believed
that he had always drunk heavily because there had been no reason for
doing otherwise. That such a hold could exist upon any one of the
self-reliant, aristocratic circle in which he moved was simply one
admission that would never be made, but had rather been linked with the
offensive sentimentality that has constituted so much of the hue and cry
of over-officious prohibitionists. Yet in one single vivid second of
introspection he knew the truth. In this hour when all his best
instincts warned him to abstain, the craving was almost too terrible to
resist.
But he won that fight at last. He would have been ashamed to admit it,
but little, icy sweat-drops had come out upon his forehead. And the
victory left him curiously sobered. For the first time in his life, it
seemed to him, he knew Hugh Gaylord as he really was.
The guide still stood waiting. Hugh’s eyes swept to the flock. The two
of them were on guard to-night, and this was no time to blur the senses
with heady liquor. A hard task awaited them on the morrow. Besides—it
was dead man’s drink.
“Put it back,” Hugh directed quietly.
The Indian stiffened, and his dark face grew sullen. Hugh watched him
coldly. It looked like mutiny, and Hugh might have wondered at his own
composure, his confidence in his own ability to win this battle, too.
“I don’t put ’em back,” the guide retorted. “He—won’t need ’em now. Why
put ’em back?”
“The reason why,” Hugh explained in a passionless voice, “is because I
said so. I remember—I’d forgotten it until now—that there’s a national
law against giving whisky to Indians. Besides—you’ve got work to do
to-morrow, and I want you to be fresh.”
It was the first time since his arrival in Smoky Land that he had
mentioned the man’s race. He knew that he ran the risk of wakening
savage anger in the Indian’s breast. Yet he was willing to take that
risk.
“What you got to say about it?” the Indian responded insolently. “We go
back to-morrow. Job’s over. You ain’t given it to me. I found it. Come
on—maybe take a little drink together.”
At that instant Hugh remembered that he was of a dominant race, and the
familiarity of the remark grated somewhat unpleasantly upon him. He got
up rather leisurely. He felt that in case of emergencies he preferred to
be upon his feet. “Put the bottles back,” he said again. “I happen to be
in command of this expedition. If you don’t obey, I’ll fire you right
here—and you know what that would mean as far as ever getting a job as
guide again. Put ’em back and put ’em back quick.”
The Indian’s expression changed. The sullenness gave way to surprise;
then—to some measure, at least—to respect. He turned and walked back
to the tent. Then Hugh heard his powerful strokes as he cut more fuel
for the fire.
Hugh went to bed soon after this, and the night hours began their
stealthy march, one after one, across the spaces of the wilderness. The
two men had only a few more sentences of conversation. The silence and
the mystery had seemingly taken out of Hugh all desire to talk.
“You told the truth, Pete, when you said this job was almost over,” Hugh
remarked from his blankets. “And I’ve been thinking of something. If
you’d help me load it on, I might be able to pack that poor devil down
to the settlements by myself. You could stay here, and I could hunt up
the flock owner and get him to give you a steady job as herder. He’d be
grateful enough to you for staying to watch his sheep so that he’ll
gladly do it. How would you like that?”
The Indian grunted. “Me no sheep herder,” he said distinctly.
Hugh marked the tone with some surprise. Its inference could not well be
mistaken. Evidently Pete felt himself much above such an occupation.
“I thought you might like to be,” Hugh responded pleasantly.
“No. Only dagoes and Mexicans sheep herders. I’m a guide. Other herder
got shot. Maybe I get shot too.”
Hugh didn’t pursue the subject further. After all, he couldn’t blame the
man. By the code of the West it was degrading work; besides, the war
with the cattlemen made it as perilous an occupation as could well be
imagined. The glimpse of the still form that the guide had rolled in a
blanket and which now lay outside the tent door was evidence in plenty
of this fact.
He lay on the buoyant, fragrant fir boughs, watching the dancing
shadows. The wilderness stirred and whispered with life. The sheep
slept. The moon that had looked upon many shepherds shone on his face.
This same moon meant good hunting to the wild creatures that ranged the
forest about the little meadow. It was hard for them to work in the
utter darkness. And one can only imagine—because no naturalist has ever
yet been able to know in full the inner natures of animals—the thrill
and the exultation that had passed from border to border through the
wilderness world when the great white disk first rose above the
mountains.
“The hunting hour” was the word that passed—in the secret ways of the
forest—from mouth to mouth. The wind seemed to carry it, and the whole
wilderness thrilled and pulsed with it. Wild, hot blood leaped in savage
veins; strange terrible lights sprang up in fierce eyes. “It is time to
start forth,” the whisper passed: and the whole wild-life kingdom seemed
to go mad.
It was a rapturous, an exultant thing, and human beings—jaded with too
many centuries of repression that men call civilization—find it hard to
understand. Only those who have stood in a duck blind watching a flock
of mallard swing down toward the decoys, only those who have lain
pressed to the slide rock and seen the mountain sheep, the incomparable
Bighorn, in a long file against the snow, or those who have beheld the
waters break and explode as the steelhead strikes can comprehend this
wilderness ecstasy at all. The smells on the winds, the little hushed
noises in the thickets, the startled waverings of shadows all added
their influence; and the blood-lust came upon the beasts of prey.
It was their long-awaited hour. It was their time of triumph: stealth
and strength, fang and claw, the stalk in the shadows, the leap, the
blow, the feasting in the moonlight. The she-wolf came creeping from her
lair, her cubs behind her, and all of their eyes were just so many twin
circles of green light in the darkness. Were not the deer feeding on the
ridges? The coyotes skulked in the shadows about the sheep camp; the
lynx went stealing toward the perches of the mountain grouse. The
hunting fever spares none of the flesh-eaters, and from the smallest to
the great—from the little, deadly, white-fanged mink following a
rabbit’s trail beside the river to the mighty grizzly, stalking a cow
elk in the thicket—they felt in their veins the age-old stir that is
ever new.
But there was one resident of Smoky Land that felt it more than any of
his neighbors. In the first place he was a feline,—and that means that
he was just a bundle of singing, vibrant, hair-trigger nerves. For sheer
sensuality there are no creatures on earth to equal the cats,—and he
was king and monarch of all the breed. The animal that catches his prey
by an exhausting run, a simple test of wind and limb, cannot from the
nature of things feel the wild rapture and suppressed excitement of one
that stalks and leaps from ambush; and the cats are the foremost
exponents of this latter method of hunting.
There were certain private reasons, too. Part of the hunting fever is
due to pride, a sense of power and might. A lowly skunk, trotting along
looking for fledglings, must have a hard time persuading himself he is
very great and powerful, but this oversized monarch of the cat family
had no difficulty whatever. In his time—and his years were rather more
than is best in the wilderness—he had seen the bull elk turn from his
path, and _that_ is a sight to pass down to one’s cubs. Even the old
black bear, the honey-grubber who is, after all, the most lovable spirit
in the forest, had been known to speak politely when the two of them met
on the trail. Those who know Growl-in-the-throat can appreciate what a
triumph this was,—because he rarely goes to any particular trouble to
be polite to any one. This didn’t mean, however, that even in his best
days the great cat cared to engage him in a fair fight.
Growl-in-the-throat was a honey-robber and an eater of fat grubs; he was
forgetful and awkward and given to long weeks of sleeping; but he was
living, forked, chain lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. No, it was
rather a good thing to keep at peace with Woof.
But the coyotes, the lesser felines, even the wolves—making perfectly
good meals off one another when they got the chance—were all fair prey
to this tawny forest monarch. It made hunting pleasant. He didn’t always
have to be careful to see that he was not being hunted himself. It gave
him a certain complacency and arrogance, and he expressed it from time
to time in a long, wild, triumphant scream that lesser members of his
family were ordinarily afraid to utter, lest it should call their
enemies down upon them.
Just as the dark came down he had uttered the cry, and he had tingled
with savage ecstasy as it echoed back to him. He had seen the first
glint of the moon, and the green glare played in his terrible eyes as he
started out upon his hunting. The moonlight showed him vaguely, huge and
sinuous and graceful past all words, as he stole through the forest on
the way to the game trails of the ridge.
He flattered himself that not even the wild creatures, dreading or
waiting for just this moment, had ears keen enough to hear him. A
perfect stalk had been his pride, in his younger days, and he still
assumed that he possessed it. Time was when his stealing feet—in which
his terrible talons were even now encased ready to thrust forth—fell
soft as pine needles on the trail. If indeed he were past his prime, at
this hour at least—just as the moon rose—he would not admit it.
He opened his savage mouth, and for an instant the moonlight gleamed on
the white teeth. The forest people could not have mistaken his identity
thereafter. One of the great dog-fangs had been broken sharply off in
some stress of years before.
He was the great Broken Fang, the monarch of the cougars. Was not the
trail cleared, for long distances ahead, of all the lesser hunters? And
yet this triumph brought no pleasure, for it led to the undeniable
inference that his feet had spoken loudly, rather than whispered, on the
narrow path.