THE FLITTING, AND THE FORERUNNER
"Dêh-Yān, we must be going!"
"And thy leg?"
"Ah, yes,--but, stronger or weaker, we must go, or there will be no
legs of mine, or of thine, to go upon!"
"Dreams again?--that hare?"
The man nodded sagely and swept the white waste below the cave with
apprehensive eyes. There was nothing to be seen. A delaying spring had
hardly made itself evident at their height. The lammergeiers in a cleft
high overhead, were feeding a single clamorous youngster, a fat, downy
chick, but the lammergeier lays its egg in the last days of the old
year. The ravens were hard at work upon their nest, the wool was in
(winter coat of stone-buck), the first green egg would be laid within
the week, for March was wearing according to our modern calendar.
The stream had begun to trickle, the water-ousels were at work, but
the larch was still untasselled, and not a flower had yet broken the
snow-crust, not even the fringed purple soldanella, or the small pale
crocuses at the edges of the drifts. The passes would still be piled
deep with soft new falls.
The crossing would be a desperate business as Pŭl-Yūn knew very well.
Such a feat had never been essayed so early within human memory; all
crossings (and such were rare events) had ever been made in the late
autumn when the snows were hard. Yet he was in a fever to be gone, and
the woman knew why.
"Thy Little Moons will make an early start of it--some of them at least
will be up here presently looking for their lost braves."
"I buried them deeply--many stones did I roll down over them," said
the girl gravely, thinking her own thoughts.
"But, their dogs (Good Wolves) will find them, never doubt," remarked
Pŭl-Yūn. "It was bad luck thy not killing their dogs the same night.
Nay, I do not blame thee. Thou hadst run far and fast, and fought
bravely, wonderfully; it makes my heart laugh to think of one woman
fighting three braves and bringing away their scalps. Yes, I own thou
wast tired out. All the same it was against us, and is against us
still, that those three dogs were left to gnaw through their leashes
and get away down to the tribe masterless. They will be brought up
again and laid on and followed, and if they do not own to the trails of
their dead masters, they will own to ours, which is as bad for us. No,
we cannot fight the whole of thy tribe, we must be moving, and at once."
This was final. Dêh-Yān, who had put in three whole days at
arrow-making, arose with the last and finest specimen of her art in
her hands. It was fledged with the white and black quills of ptarmigan,
and pointed with a keen splinter of bone. Holding the venomous looking
thing between her hands by point and nock, she straightened a weary
back and lifted it towards the Young Moon. "O Totem of my people, and
of me, and of my New Thing, grant that this one at the least of all my
arrows may serve me at my need!"
They began their packing, a serious affair; their outfit must be cut
down to the least, last ounce. It must consist of just food, raw meat,
their weapons, the bear-skin to sleep in, and the trophies; no more.
Double-moccasinned they set forth, clothed with deer-skin leggings to
the body, dividing the loads between them, an event significant and of
the first importance in human history.
"We must march light," said Pŭl-Yūn, and paused. Dêh-Yān frowned, set
her mouth, and tossed from the cave-sill the hoard of rock-crystals,
amethyst and cairngorm, as dear to a girl of the Magdalanian age as her
diamonds to a bride of our own.
"This I will _not_ leave," continued the man, nodding approval of
the accomplished sacrifice of vanities. The thing reserved was the
shoulder-blade of the dead bear upon which he, no mean draughtsman,
had etched the story of the fight; yet, watching the resolution of his
wife to disencumber herself, he presently cast down his achievement,
and turned his back to it where it lay.--Yet, as we know, it was not
lost: did not the drip from the roof glaze it over and preserve it? Did
not the wet floor upon which it lay enclasp and seal it down? Did not a
sheet of incrustation fall from the roof and cover it, and finally, in
the fulness of time, did not the Professor come fumbling along and find
it? And is it not to-day the especial glory and pride of a certain case
in a certain University Museum?
Pŭl-Yūn was minded to work up as high as his leg would carry him, and
then, after a heavy meal, to make a night of it, coiled up with his
wife in that thick, warm, capacious bear-skin in a hole in a drift.
"Walk whilst the light lasts and you can see your marks," was his rede.
"Who knows what the weather upon the pass may be to-morrow?" It might
well be that a "firn" from the south would be blowing on the col, and
then they must just lie snug and sleep it out, yes, to the last strip
of their meat, if needs were, for to face it would be--death!
Up they trudged, and up, and still up, bowed double beneath their
burdens, occasionally stopping to straighten weary backs, always
choosing the outcrops of bare rock where such trended upward, but
for an hour on end sinking mid-thigh-deep at every toilsome step in
soft, new snow. The last of the trees was far below them, even the
trailing pine and juniper had given out. They were working up into
their first cloud; below the ragged coldness of its moving edge Dêh-Yān
turned and took her last look upon the country of her childhood and
her folk. There was no regret in her heart; nor any love for any human
creature whom she was leaving. Her father she had never known, he had
perished young. (Most savages die young--hard is the life and heavy
the mortality; the hunter-tribes barely keep up their stocks despite
early marriage). Her mother, whom she could just remember, was also
dead. Her child-life had been made bitter to her by blows and grinding
service rendered to gruff masters and shrewish mistresses. The small
girl-child had struggled up; other children died, she survived, being
one of the indestructibles, sharpened, hardened, toughened exceedingly
by her environment. Such an upbringing, whatsoever else it may do, does
not cultivate the affections. How jealous she had been of the boys!
How she had despised the girls, her inferiors in speed and daring!
When promoted to the post of Governess, how she had bullied her small
charges!
No, she gazed with unshaken bosom and clear eye upon the valleys of her
home. The last peep! And there, miles and miles away, and, oh, so far
beneath, was a something strung out across a snow-field, a something
which would have escaped the best eye in a regiment of modern Alpini--a
something which moved slowly, and was withal so faint and so far, that
a strand of cobweb seen across a pane at the breadth of a wide room
would be cable-broad compared with it. "Wah, we started none too soon,"
was Pŭl-Yūn's comment, and, leg-weary as he found himself, he kept at
it, butting away upward into cloud and falling snow so long as he was
sure of his line, then, confident that the advance-party of the Little
Moons, supposing that they had got upon the spoor, and meant sticking
to it, would not have daylight to make it good, he bored into the
leeside of a big drift, throwing out the loose snow behind him like a
dog, and invited Dêh-Yān to accept it as a camp.
Dêh-Yān disliked the idea of camping in the presence of pursuit, but
she saw that her man had marched as far as he was able. Moreover,
he was now in his element; a brave who had been a member of four
war-parties had a right to his opinion as to what other braves would or
would not do. "They will follow on to the edge of the cloud," said he.
"Above that the new fall will cover our sign, not wholly, but enough to
make them call off the dogs when the sun sets. And we--we will be up
and off before She rises to-morrow. And I say, Dêh-Yān, I do not like
those Good Wolves of thy people."
"Nor I--And if they follow on?"
"They won't. They are wholly out of their country, and I am nearing
mine, and have travelled this road before, which none of them have, as
I think--at least none that returned."
"That is so," assented Dêh-Yān. "When I was quite little, two of our
young men tried this pass. They never came back. Tell me," she went on,
snuggling down into the bear-skin, and feeling the blood begin to move
again in her toes. "What brought thee over this awful road?"
"I was out for a wife."
"But were there no girls in the tribes south of you that thou took this
high white path?"
"Oh, yes, there are girls everywhere, but the tribes to the south of
the Sun-Men, the Hawks and the White Wolf people, are so much stronger
than we that we have had to give up going to them for wives. It was our
braves who never came back from those journeys."
"Oho! those tribes would not be braver, I think? then, how?"
"They have an all-year-round camp close to the best quarry of
weapon-stone. They have many slaves at work doing nothing else but
axe-making, and so are better armed than we. Also they stockade their
camps. There is no getting in or getting out of their villages. I think
our bows will surprise them." He added, "And now, if thou hast eaten
all thou canst, go to sleep. I shall watch, or rather lie awake and
listen."
Pŭl-Yūn had out-marched his pursuers, but he had over-marched himself.
The pride of manhood kept him going, the same pride forbade him to
acknowledge his terrible weariness, but his wife was not deceived.
"I will watch first," she had said, and had insisted upon taking a last
look round their hiding-place before turning in. Upon her return she
found, as she had anticipated, that her man was sunk in the deepest
sleep that nature knows. The Master-Girl nodded, built herself a line
of marks, slight, but sufficient, and glided off into the snow-lit
night silent as an owl.
At midnight Pŭl-Yūn turned himself and woke with a sense of something
lost. He was alone. For some moments his locality, and his very
individuality escaped him, so deeply had he plunged, then both returned.
"Dêh-Yān, come in here, it is my watch," he whispered, but there was
no reply. The man peered forth into the darkness, and got to his feet
armed. His wife was gone. He listened. The night was thick and still,
what wind was blowing came up the pass from the glen which they had
left. It was bitter cold. Suddenly, from down the pass came one small
sound, slight and keen as the squeak of a bat, but it was not the
squeak of a bat, and Pŭl-Yūn felt the hairs creep upon his neck, for it
was the shrieking yelp of a wolf. Now a wolf is an animal which hunts
and lives in a society of its own, a society which has common needs
and cooperates in its enterprises. Hence wolves have a multiplicity
of cries with which to express their wants and intentions, and many
of these were known to Pŭl-Yūn from childhood. But a wolf, though a
villain, is no coward, and rarely, most rarely expresses pain. As a
rule, when trapped he dies mute. What meant that single piercing yelp?
To the ear and trained imagination of the woodlander it signified a
spasm of surprise, despair, disappointment and grief. It was a call to
the pack, "_To me, my comrades! Haro! I am betrayed!_"
That his wife's hand was in it Pŭl-Yūn never doubted, but how deep was
her hand in it? and could she withdraw that hand? To have left him
asleep and gone off upon a lone hunting at midnight was--it was--_like
her_! But, it was hard upon him, very hard.
He took his weapons, axe and knife, for of what service are arrows
in a midnight?--and moved in the direction of the cry. Within a few
strides he stumbled upon the first of her marks, then upon a second,
later upon a third. This, then, was no unpremeditated escapade; no,
like everything else which she did, this foray towards the camp of the
pursuing enemy was a thought-out business.
The snow creaked, something was coming. A quick light breathing, a
swift foot, Dêh-Yān was upon him, had caught him silently by the arm,
had turned him and was urging him to his top speed. He raced beside her
obediently in blind faith, she smelt of wolf and of blood. There was a
cry of wolves behind them as they ran, but Dêh-Yān was laughing. The
cry, mingled with the shouts of hunters, rose to a crash.
"That is the last of it--they have come upon my kill, and are baying
upon the blood. They can carry the line no farther."
She was right, the fierce, wild clamour rose and fell and rose again,
but was stationary.
"But, we must be upon the trail. There is no room here for thee and for
me." The Master-Girl was speaking with quick decision; her husband
listened, guessing wildly--they had picked up the marks, had found the
snow-camp, she was refolding the bear-skin; he gathered his own affairs
and followed her.
"Whither?--thou hast never been this way before, and even I am unsure
of our road in this thickness and mirk."
"_Anywhere_ is good--it is sheer death to loiter. We must risk
everything upon speed and the chance of a farther snowfall. Run thy
best now, I will tell thee more to-morrow."
Hours later in the first grey of a wintry dawn they had halted and dug
themselves a second cave. This time they both snuggled within it, and
sat panting and weak, listening for sounds of pursuit, and hearing only
the ghost-like cackle of the mountain choughs at play amid cloud and
falling snow overhead. They had got to their farthest; if followed up
and found now they must die. Rest and sleep and food were imperative
claims which would take no denials. Snow was falling, they had still a
chance. They ate and slept and were not interrupted.
They awoke in an unknown world, small flakes fell steadily and
straight, no wind breathed, there was no sun or sign of sun, it was
one whiteness of diffused light in which the sense of direction was
defeated.
They sate close as snow-bound hares and munched bear-meat, Dêh-Yān
telling her story between the mouthfuls.
"After I mounted guard it came to me that my people--I mean the Little
Moons--would never have come up so high so early in the season for
game. It is no winter-hunting that we saw below us at the edge of the
cloud, it is a war-party, and they mean scalps. Also, it seemed to me,
even at that distance, I could make out Good Wolf with them."
"Good eyes thou must have!--but, go on."
"Now it came to me that with Good Wolf they could not very well lose
our trail, and being on the war-path, all braves too, and marching
light, we should not be able to outmarch them, burdened as we are,
and--and--"
"And--and--" mimicked the husband, "my wife did not wish to leave her
skin behind, eh?"
"We find it useful, thou and I; warm too," murmured the wife, drawing
the deep-piled pelt around her lover, and burying her own nose in the
soft fur. "But it was not for this skin only, but for two others for
which I was taking thought--"
"They are not so furry, those two," chuckled Pŭl-Yūn, pinching her.
"It seemed to me," resumed the Master-Girl sedately, "that if it were a
war-party of braves, with Good Wolf, too, our chance was bad, unless--"
"Unless someone somehow foiled our line?" whispered the man
ponderingly. "But how?"
"That was the question. I went down to their camp and made friends with
the first Good Wolf that came up to me. There were others, but they
were curled up each with his master, this one was the only watch they
had set. I listened, I saw. Then I was for coming away, for ten braves
and as many Good Wolf are bad company for one girl. But the getting
away again was not easy. Gow-Loo's Good Wolf (I knew him, and he me)
was suspicious. He walked around my knees so closely I could hardly
move my feet. I could not speak to him for fear of rousing the camp.
At last, when he had licked my hands, I got him to let me out and to
follow. When I had led him a good way, and he was upon my hatchet-hand,
and a little in front of me, I killed him. I had not meant him to have
spoken, but the light was bad and he was very quick. It cost me two
strokes. The rest thou knows."
Pŭl-Yūn did know that his wife had run a frightful risk, and that once
again her foresight and cool courage had brought her through. What
he did not know was that she owed her life to the fact that her dead
enemy's wolf, or wolf-dog, was still ignorant of the art of barking,
and had met the night-comer to his masters' camp in the silent fashion
of his wild parents. But, the wonder of it! His inmost heart told him
that this adventure would have been beyond him: he would not have
risked the certainty of being pulled down by wolves, good or bad, and
taken from them by their masters to dree a crueller ending at the stake.
Meanwhile snow fell steadily for a day and a night. The fugitives sate
close and contrived to keep themselves warm, but their stock of food,
howsoever well husbanded, was running out. Their position was already
critical, presently it might be desperate, but they were spared the
pangs of indecision or of divided counsels. Both recognised that their
very lives depended upon doing nothing. To exhaust their bodily heat by
struggling in deep new drift would be madness. And whither?--Their last
mark was lost, they knew not north from south whilst the snow continued
falling. No, they must sit it out, even if they starved where they sat.
By the evening of the third day the last of the meat was gone. They
were huddling in silence, having discussed the question of eating their
leggings and moccasins on the morrow, and agreed to refrain.
"For," said Pŭl-Yūn, "we could never get away from this snow-camp
without our leg-gear, so we may as well starve clothed and with a hope
in our hearts, as starve two days later half-naked with none." And to
this the Master-Girl had agreed.
But the situation was far from cheerful and did not conduce to much
conversation.
"Hark!--what is that?"
"Hush, on thy life, hush!--we are well hidden."
During their headlong flight from their first halt, and in the course
of the various doublings and subterfuges by which the fugitives had
hoped to break the continuity of their trail and baffle their pursuers,
these youngsters had most effectually lost their bearings. This, their
second, and which threatened to prove itself their final camp, was
excavated in the side of one among many round-topped drifts which
studded a level plain, or what seemed such, for its limits were hidden,
it was probably the frozen surface of some small lake, or such another
expanse as the Andermatt valley, a green and pleasant place in the
summer months, upon which several lateral glens converged, a haunt of
the mountain bison and the tall, wide-antlered stag, but in winter a
dreary waste avoided by man and beast.
Yet, something was approaching, for the snow, frozen crisply by the
evening's chill, crunched beneath heavy feet. There was the deep,
rhythmical panting of a huge body labouring hugely. What on earth might
this be? Four thoroughly frightened human eyes peered forth from the
spy-hole left at the mouth of the snow-cave, and beheld--What think ye?
A great, bald, black block of a head, maned at the temples and nape
and hung with a pair of shield-shaped hairy ears, was butting through
the drifts. A coil of bristly trunk was stowed away between a pair
of prodigious tusks which showed yellow amid the whiter snows around
them. They were as stout as young beeches and curled upon themselves in
such wise that their points were useless to the monster who bore them.
This had probably been his down-fall; some younger rival with shorter
weapons, shorter and lighter, but with points which could be brought
to bear, had ousted this patriarch from the herd. Here was a rogue
mammoth upon his travels, setting the height and width of a mountain
range between himself and the scene of his disgrace, a Napoleon on his
way to St Helena, diswived, discrowned, a tragedy of brute existence.
The great heart was hot within him, he was boiling to avenge his wrongs
upon the first creature that he might meet, and meantime was working
off his fury in tempestuous exertions. What was a fifty or sixty-mile
march to the enormous sinews of limbs seasoned by migrations and
combats of a hundred and fifty years? His breath smoked around him as
he forged his way along, now pawing the snow under him, now wallowing
over it, using his huge belly as a raft.
[Illustration: THE FORERUNNER]
Evidently he had fought his fight to a finish, had bellowed, butted and
thrust at some more adroit or better-armed youngster (some youth of
seventy or eighty summers, maybe), who had worn him down and worsted
him, and now, with such holes and rents in his shaggy sides as would
have been death to any smaller beast, and were gruesome to see, he had
relinquished the partners and pastures of his lusty prime, and was a
wanderer upon the face of the earth until death--death which would from
henceforth ambush his path and his lying down, for no keenly-interested
wives would henceforth watch over his safety. No, with yearly waning
powers he must stave off doom as he might, but come it would at length,
a grisly onslaught of a horde of lions, a staked pitfall, a snow-hidden
morass.
Dêh-Yān shuddered at the sight of his small, red, wicked eye.
"If he gets our wind?" she whispered, in the ghost of a pixie's
whisper, and was well pinched for the indiscretion. The giant did not
get their wind, he had something else to think of. When he paused for
breath close to their cave, they could see the great wall of hairy side
twitching with the smart of the raw gashes with which it was scored,
the records of that desperate and final conflict, for it is the law
of the elephant herd that a dethroned master-bull shall never retry
the issue: once down he is an outcast for the rest of his life, and a
terror to the twentieth-century jungle, as his collateral ancestor, the
rogue mammoth, was to the bleak tundras and mountain forests which were
his home in the age of ice.
It was their first sight of a mammoth, the great beasts were already a
dwindling race in the times we tell of, the days of the Magdalanian men.
Presently the silent watchers beheld the great panting hero get his
breath and resume his travels. Ploughing, heaving, wading through the
snow, he faded from sight and silence returned.
"This may be just the luckiest thing in the world for us," said
Pŭl-Yūn, "or on the other hand, the unluckiest."
"Um, yes," assented the Master-Girl, thoughtfully, peering forth upon
the trail which the passing monster had left. "If he is marching by
himself we can take the same line, there is no losing _that_ spoor. He
knows the way, be sure of that, and where he can go we can follow--but,
he leaves a blood-sign behind him, see!--If a party of tigers, or of
grizzlies, strike that trail they will follow it up on the chance of
finding the bull in some drift. Or, those Little Moon braves might
happen upon it, eh?"
"In any case we must lie close for to-night, no more dark marches for
me! and if the morning shows that the bull is travelling unattended, we
will use his trail."
"I begin to think we shall do it after all," smiled Dêh-Yān, a little
grimly, perhaps, for though she had kept a stiff mouth all day, the
prospect was not encouraging, and she, at least, had no local knowledge
to fall back upon even if the weather should take up and let them
through.
Fortune smiled upon the youngsters. Morning-light showed them the
mammoth-track skinned over with a film of new snow unprinted by the
spoor of beast or man. The fall had ceased, the drifts ploughed through
and pressed down by the bulk and weight of their forerunner, gave easy
passage; something in the contours of the ground seemed familiar to
Pŭl-Yūn, who silently took the lead, striding ahead with confidence,
and presently, suddenly, the change came, the slope eased off, and the
glory of the prospect before her rushed to the eyes of the girl who
had been toiling up the last ascent bent beneath her load. She had
never been so high before, nor overlooked such an extent of country. It
caught her breath.
"Oh, what wide place is this!--And all the hunting-grounds of our
people?"
"Not the twentieth part of it!" growled Pŭl-Yūn with a frown. "Have I
not told thee how narrow our ground is, and that it grows narrower?"
The Master-Girl sucked in her lips and re-shouldered her pack. "Let
us be getting down to them," she said shortly; then, half to herself,
"Narrow or broad there shall be room enough for one Little Moon
woman--and her bow! But, O Pŭl-Yūn, when thou hast found thy folk, do
not quite forget poor Dêh-Yān."
The man fell back a stride and went beside his wife for a while in
silence, albeit the going was so good that speech had been easy whilst
in Indian file. It came home to him how bitter is the lot of the
newly-caught slave-wife among the older women of the tribe, to whom her
ignorance, youth and foreignness are subjects for ill-natured merriment
and opportunities for spite.
"There shall be no breaking-in for my wife," he said.
"Listen!--To-morrow night thou shalt sit upon that bear-skin in my
chief's presence. I have said it!"
And all this fuss about crossing one of the lower cols!
Wait, my friend. These young people had neither guides nor porters,
nor maps, compass, nor rope, nor ice-axes nor well-nailed, water-tight
boots; appointments which make a fairly simple thing of what were
otherwise a perilous feat. Moreover this was very early in the season,
a time of year when every week makes a difference. The writer of this
veracious history of the Old Time has himself seen the farm folk in a
Pyrenean glen leave their hay to run shouting at the first tourist of
the season who had news of their friends on the other side of the pass.
And that was in May.
Nor were the Alps of that Old Time just as we see them to-day. I
grant you they had come down in the world since their first glorious
Himalayan youth; they no longer towered thirty, thirty-five thousand
feet above the sub-tropical _terai_ interspersed with its chain of
salt lakes which we now know as the Mediterranean. The worst of the
Great Ice Age was over, that grievous time when half the waters of the
oceans were piled in a solid cap around the northern pole, a cap which
extended southward in such sort that in Britain everything north of
the Thames, and upon the mainland all that is now Germany and Austria,
was sealed down beneath a solid sheet which was not melted for twenty
thousand years on end. During this time, and for long after the worst
of it was over, the Alps and the Tirol were in process of being ground
down to something approaching what we see to-day. Their soaring peaks
had arrested the cloud-systems of central Europe, and turned France
into an arid steppe, the grazing-ground of countless herds of wild
horse and gazelle, the clouds had deposited themselves in snow, the
hoarded snows had ground down the sides of the giants, pared away their
summits and crawled out half across Lombardy in glaciers, which, when
they finally receded, left trails of rubbish thirty miles long, spoils
filched from the heights behind them.
The worst of this was over. The Rhone glacier had dwindled somewhat,
but still blocked the Wallis. For many generations the shores of the
Mediterranean had been peopled in winter by tribes which had each its
summer hunting quarters in this or that glen of the hinterland; tribes
which had but little knowledge of, and no intercourse with, the people
upon the other side of the chain in the glens which feed the headwaters
of the Po.
How should they have had?--I am telling a tale of the long ago; much
water has run under the bridges since, both those of Avignon and those
of Padua, and every gallon of it brought down something from the
southern Alps, hence, as nothing rolls uphill, century by century the
passes have been growing lower than they were when our two youngsters
essayed their adventure.