As the dawn broke over Smoky Land, the sheep fed farther and farther out
from the camp,—a long, white column like a moving snow field against
the deep dusk of the forest. The light grew, the last stars faded, the
gloom of the underbrush evolved into distinct browns and greens; most of
the beasts of prey returned to their lairs. Unlike Hugh they had no love
for these daylight hours. Dawn meant the end of their reign.
For the night has always been the time of triumph to the hunting
creatures. It is the hour of glory when fang and talon and strength and
stealth come into their own. Now the deer had left their feeding ground
and had gone into the heavy brush through which even a cougar could not
creep without being heard. The birds had left their perches, the little
underground people had retired to their burrows. In the nighttime the
dim, sinuous movements of the hunters’ bodies could hardly be
distinguished from the wavering shadows, but the deer made no such
mistake in the hours of daylight. Many of the flesh-eaters had not yet
killed, and those that had been successful found no pleasure in leaving
their warm, dripping feasts to the buzzards in the sky. Only the coyotes
and such low-caste people remained to hunt; and they didn’t stay from
choice. With them it was a simple matter of hunting all the time, of
seeking tirelessly with never a rest, that kept them fed at all.
The reason went back to a curse that Manitou put upon the coyotes in the
young days of the earth. No one knows just what their offense
was—whether they were once dogs who betrayed men, or the fathers of
dogs that betrayed the wild by selling their sons into the bondage of
men—but not even a tenderfoot can doubt the severity of their
punishment and the depths of their remorse. Many of the voices of the
forest are dim and small, many of them are inaudible except to those who
give their lives and their souls to the wild, but the curse upon Running
Feet the coyote is usually made clear in one night at the twilight hour.
For the coyotes do not keep their afflictions to themselves. Their voice
suddenly shudders out of the half-darkness, a long wail broken by
half-sobs,—infinitely despairing and sad.
Very few of the wilderness voices are joyful. Even the whistling of the
birds—close observers find out at last—have a plaintive note that
seems never entirely absent. No man can doubt the sadness in the wailing
cries of the passing geese,—telling of the bleak, glooming marshes
where they live and die. The winter song of the pack, the little
shrieking of pikas on the sliderock, even the murmur of the pines are
filled with the ancient sadness of existence, the old complaint of the
pain of living with only Fear and Death at the end. But none of these
voices contain the utter despair, the incomprehensible sadness of the
twilight cries of the coyotes. Thus wise men know that they—because of
some offense of long ago—have been accursed among beasts.
They have been exiled to the rocky hills, they are afflicted with
madness in Indian summer, their pride has been taken from them, and all
of the greater forest creatures treat them with contempt. They are
driven from the game trails, and thus they have to do their hunting at
any time that offers, early or late. All of the larger beasts of prey
had now gone to their lairs and to sleep, but these gray skulkers still
lingered about the flock.
Once Hugh caught a glimpse of a gray figure in a distant thicket; but it
was too far to shoot. An expert marksman would have felled him in an
instant; and Hugh began to regret that he had not—by taking to the
hunting trails in some of his wasted days—learned this art. Try as he
might he couldn’t see that he was in the least equipped for taking care
of the flocks until another herder could be secured. And for the first
hour he was deeply troubled as to the success of his undertaking.
No man, he considered—not even the Innuits of the Arctic—knew less
concerning the white grazers than he himself. He had read no books about
them, and except for the fact that he had bought various all-wool
fabrics for his clothes and had eaten many a lamb chop, he had had no
dealings with them whatsoever. He hadn’t the least idea how to control
or care for the vast flock, when to water them and when to feed them
salt, at what hours they should bed down and what orders to give his one
faithful assistant, the dog. This animal, he concluded, knew worlds more
about the business than he himself. In his new humbleness he seriously
regretted that the barrier of speech prevented him from taking orders
from the dog.
Fortunately Hugh was blessed with a sense of humor, and soon it came to
his aid. After the first doleful hour he found considerable amusement in
his own predicament,—a clubman with three thousand sheep suddenly
thrust upon his hands. He had read stories of men who had been given the
care of one or more babies,—and he laughed when he thought how his own
experiences had put them out of the running. Fifteen hundred babies, and
as many helpless mothers, all of them wholly in his care. He was tickled
all over, and after that he had no place in his mind for worry and doubt
about the outcome.
And the fact that he regained his poise was the best thing that ever
happened for the sheep. Realizing his own ignorance he made no attempt
to herd or guide them. He was not in the least nervous or excited
himself, and thus there was no contagion of alarm to carry to the flock.
“After all,” he thought, “these brutes know what’s best for ’em better
than I know myself. Let nature take its course. Let ’em do what they
want and I’ll follow along and keep off the cougars; and of course, get
’em back to the camp at night.”
The wisest herdsman on earth could not have given him better advice. He
didn’t hurry the sheep. But it was not because he had heard that old
Hebrew maxim,—that a lame herder takes the best care of sheep. The idea
is, of course, that a lame man does not walk fast and hurry his animals.
By letting them follow their own ways, he avoided the usual mistake of
an inexperienced herder in trying to keep his flock too close together.
They were Rambouillets—a breed in which the gregarious instinct is
highly developed—and they hung close enough together for general
purposes. They grazed slowly: Hugh had time to see the sky and the pines
and all the miracle and magic of the wonderland about him.
Never, he thought, had there been a more sudden change in human
fortunes. Two little weeks before his own sphere of life had been
restricted by a few blocks of an eastern metropolis; he had been a
clubman, possibly—and he thought upon the phrase with a strange
derision—a social favorite. He had been what men call—without greatly
bothering to discriminate—a gentleman. He had lived the life that men
of his class were expected to live, drinking rather more than was good
for him, wasting time, and being frightfully and immeasurably bored.
Now—by the exigencies of the hour, by a single prank of fate—he was
simply a herder of sheep. He was giving all he possessed of time and
skill to a job that as a rule only Mexicans and uneducated foreigners
deigned to accept. He suddenly laughed when he remembered that—although
the flock owner and himself had not yet agreed on terms—he would
probably secure wages for the time spent. Two dollars a day,
perhaps,—such a sum as he ordinarily spent for cigarettes. Thinking of
cigarettes he delved into his pocket, searching for a new pipe that on
the advice of the Old Colonel at his club he had brought with him to
Smoky Land and which had not yet been tried.
It had cost, he remembered, something less than a dollar. The Old
Colonel himself had passed upon it, explaining certain virtues in regard
to it that Hugh had since forgotten. “You’ll like a pipe,” the old
gentleman had said, “if you ever get into a real outdoor-man’s mood.
Cigarettes are all right, of course—probably don’t give you the
nicotine kick that a pipe does—but a pipe has been the woodsman’s smoke
from Sir Walter Raleigh and the Indians down.”
He found the pipe and meditatively filled it with fragrant tobacco. It
was new, the taste of burning varnish was not wholly absent, yet he
couldn’t remember that his expensive cigarettes had ever given him the
same delight. It was a herdsman’s smoke, he thought, and for the time
being at least he was a herdsman. And the thought of refusing the meager
wage that the flock owner would be willing to pay for his inexperienced
services didn’t even occur to him. He wasn’t, he remembered, devoting
his time for nothing. And he was somewhat startled by the thought that
for the first time in his life his—Hugh Gaylord’s—time was actually
worth somebody’s good money.
There would be a satisfaction in that little wage that he had never
received from the handsome checks that he got monthly from his trust
company. The clinking dollars would be worth showing to the boys at his
club,—trophies greater than the cups he had occasionally won at golf
and tennis. A herder of sheep,—that was the title and degree of Hugh
Gaylord, late of the Greenwood Club. The whole idea amused him more than
he could tell.
The best of it was that no one would mistake his calling. He looked the
part. He hadn’t shaved—he remembered by the sudden feel of scratchy
whiskers on his chin—for three days, and he had the disreputable look
that usually results from such an omission. His outing clothes were
torn, drenched, soiled, and dust-covered. At first he had felt somewhat
uncomfortable in his unsightly togs; he had regretted the departure of
his usual well-groomed appearance, but now he actually rejoiced in his
disreputability. He wouldn’t have any trouble convincing the
camp-tender—when that mysterious gentleman should reveal himself—that
sheep-herding was his fitting station in life. He would make, he thought
with a laugh, a fairly plausible tramp.
He had been greatly fatigued by his hard swim in Silver Creek, but now
he felt refreshed. And he found himself wondering at the ease with which
laughter came to his lips. It wasn’t the usual thing with Hugh Gaylord
at all. He found to his surprise that life was full of things to laugh
at: the incongruity of his position, the awkward antics of the lambs,
the grandmotherly concern of the ewes, the whole irresistible joke of
existence. Before, Hugh had laughed in really but two ways—one at wit
(usually the forced wit of a professional comedian) and the other in
scorn. One of these two ways, it seemed to him, had wholly left him now.
The ability to be really scornful of anything in the wide world had
seemingly passed away. The vision of himself watching the flocks had
brought a new tolerance, a new breadth of view toward all the world.
Never in his life, so far as he could remember, had he laughed from the
simple joy of life, the laugh of sheer delight. Somehow, he had never
learned to know delight in its true sense.
Then Hugh came to a curious conclusion. He denied it a long time, but
slowly the facts to support it became too many to resist. It was simply
that in his past life—the life between which mighty mountains now
raised a formidable barrier—he had grown old before his time. Nor was
it kindly and wholesome old age that had come to him: the ripened wisdom
of venerable years. It was a false age, and it had given him a wholly
false outlook on life. Two weeks ago he had felt infinitely old and
tired, and now he had been born again.
His vision hadn’t been quite straight. He had taken his own little
sphere of life to represent the whole magnificent sphere in which the
continents rise above the sea. Unlike all truly great people, unlike the
most worthy even among his own set, he had adopted an attitude of what
he flattered himself was sophistication. But he had not been a true
Sophist, one who could immutably separate the gold from the dross, one
who knew the infinite good humor as well as the remorseless travail of
life. He had thought that everything was dross. He had lost faith in the
world, conceiving virtue as the exception rather than the rule, doubting
the compensation of clean living, the sanctity of homes, the solace of
religion, the pride of good work, the purity of womanhood, the
immortality of ideals. And most of all he doubted happiness. He didn’t
believe that it existed.
Yet all at once he had found it: a quiet, healthy happiness that was
constant as his own breathing. It lay, not in stimulation or in
pleasures between which the mood drops down, but in a clear, sweet level
of contentment, of personal worth, of time well spent, of existence
justified and destiny fulfilled. There behind that flock, tired of
muscle but still on duty, guarding with watchful eye and ready weapon,
Hugh Gaylord felt content for the first time in his life.
If there was one blessing in particular that his false sophistication
had cost him it was that of simple faith,—the faith of children, faith
in the redemption of the race and the high constancy of the stars. It
meant, clearest of all perhaps, that he had lost faith in miracles. Yet
he now found a miraculous quality in this very happiness that had come
upon him. He had self-wonder no less amazing at the curious familiarity
and boundless peace with which he fell into the spirit of the sheep.
He felt at peace. There was no other word. Could it be that he had come
into his own at last? All his life, it had seemed to him, he had carried
in the deepest realms of his spirit a vision that had now come true:
just the feeding flocks in the deep shade of the forest. He had the
strange feelings of one who—exiled in babyhood—catches the far gleam
of his homeland at last.
It seemed wholly natural that he should be walking here—behind the
flocks—in silent vigil as the sun climbed up over the far, white peaks.
He had a sense of having returned, after long and futile wanderings, to
his own home. Always there had been blind, little-understood gropings in
his own soul, a reaching outward; and had he found his destiny at last?
Up Silver Creek came the salmon, returning to their home waters for
their last days. Four years had they dwelt in the dark bewilderment of
the sea, but they came back to their own places in the end. Did they,
all through those four years of their exile, carry in the deepest
recesses of their beings a vision of their Lost Land to which they would
return to die? Did they know a vague bewilderment, blind gropings in
their fishy souls, an unfamiliarity with the gray wastes and the
incessant waves that was not to end until they could know again the
shallows and cataracts and waterfalls of their native river? Did peace
come to them then? It was repatriation,—and Hugh felt that he had
repatriated too. Only the exile had not been confined to his own little
life. Instead of four years it was—more likely—four generations, even
four centuries. He had been an alien in those far, tumultuous cities,
but he had come home to the open places at last.
“You are an Anglo-Saxon,” the Old Colonel had said, and that had meant
that for as many years as could be counted in a day his people had been
tillers of the soil. The Anglo-Saxon was never one to gather into
cities. He knew the meadows, the forests, the feel of the earth through
the handles of his plow, the sheep feeding on the hillside. When his
land became too heavy with people—so that he could no longer see the
sun breaking forth in glory to the east because of city spires that rose
between—he was likely to set sail for the far places of the earth,
still to watch the sheep as they fed at the edge of the forest. His was
a people of the soil: before they learned to plow, their flocks fed in
the downs. The love of the soil had been bred into his race, warp and
woof, and the little generations of exile in cities could not take his
heritage away from him.
The flock fed for about two hours, then bedded down to chew their cud.
Hugh was perplexed at first. He was somewhat fearful that a sudden
illness had come upon the entire flock. The dog, however, seemed to
understand. He came back to his master’s side and the two of them had a
little chat as the morning advanced. After a short rest the sheep got up
and started to feed again.
There was really not much work for Hugh to do. Occasionally he would see
a small band of the sheep browsing off in a different direction from the
course of the main flock, but at such times the dog knew the exact
course of action. He would circle around the straying animals, cut off
their escape, and they were always glad to head back into the main
flock. It became increasingly evident, however, how difficult it was to
keep track of the entire band. Only the gregarious instinct of the
animals maintained their formation at all: in the dense woods he could
see only a small part of the flock at one time. He had no way of knowing
if various detachments had not already wandered away from the main band.
Of course he didn’t know the methods by which most herders guard against
this danger: by an approximate count achieved by keeping track of the
black sheep, or markers. It seemed to him also that the wolves and other
predatory animals had every opportunity in the world to lurk about the
flanks of the flock and steal the lambs. The truth was that losses were
sustained in this manner every day, and his presence alone prevented a
wholesale slaughter.
About ten he decided it was time to turn the sheep. They had been moving
since before dawn: he wanted to give them time in plenty to get back to
the camp before night. He didn’t know how many rests they would wish to
take in the afternoon.
He made a big circle about the flock, turning back at its head. He
supposed that he could make the animals wheel straight about in a
to-the-rear march, permitting those at the rear of the main band to get
first chance at the feed on the way home. The way of sheep, however, is
different. They executed what was more nearly a squads right, keeping
the same leaders. The great advantage of the scheme lay in the fact that
circling, they made the return trip on fresh feeding grounds.
He felt increasingly thankful for the aid of his dog. He seemed to
interpret Hugh’s every wish. And when at the head of the main band, the
man got his first glimpse of Spot.