THE WHITE HUNTRESS
Two months, filled with the clean breath of outdoors, had softened the
memory of that stark tragedy upon which Wanda had come at the edge of
Echo Creek. Not forgotten, never to be wiped clean from the memory,
still the keen horror was dulled, the harsh details blurred, the whole
dreadful picture softened under the web which the spider of time weaves
over an old canvas.
Again life was glad and good and golden. Again youth was eager and
hopeful and merry. The death which had come and changed the world had
gone, leaving the world as it has always been.
Wanda and Gypsy and Shep saw much of one another. They were all very
happy, perhaps because they were very busy. Full of enthusiasm that
was at once gay and serious Wanda had thrown herself into her "Work"
immediately upon returning home in the early springtime. Before the
tragic event which for the time had driven her life out of its groove
she had already won for herself the title, bestowed merrily by Wayne
Shandon, of the "White Huntress." Her "work," to which she gave up so
many hours of each day, was purposeful, steadily pursued, and brought
her a vast pleasure. The game she hunted was the squirrel tossing his
grey body through the branches of pine and cedar, the quail calling
from the hillsides, the cottontail scampering through the underbrush,
the yellowhammer, the woodpecker, the wide winged butterflies sailing
through the orchard and across the meadow lands. The weapon with which
she hunted was a camera which she carried in its black case slung over
her shoulder or hanging from the horn of Gypsy's saddle.
Reared since babyhood in a land where men and women were few and where
the wild things of the forests were many and unafraid, she had long ago
come to look upon the little, bright eyed woodland folk as her
playmates. Many of her childhood sorrows and joys were linked with
their fates. Her first great grief had occurred when she was ten years
old and Jule, her brown bear cub,--named after the cook to whom he bore
in the child's eyes a marked resemblance, a slight and necessary
variation in the termination of the name taking care of the matter of a
difference in sex,--came to an untimely end through the instinctive and
merciless conduct of Shep's grandparents. The house was filled with
chipmunks who frightened Julia, to whom they were "jest rats, drat
'em," and who raided the kitchen systematically. A trained grey
squirrel barked from the trees above the house, and pet rabbits were
numerous and unprofitable about the vegetable garden. At the age when
little girls in the cities were dressing and undressing their dolls,
Wanda was taming a palpitating heart in some little fury [Transcriber's
note: furry?] breast or leaning breathlessly, like a small mother bird
herself, over a nest in the grass watching eagerly for the tender bills
to peck and chip their way out into the wonderful world.
It was but natural therefore that after her childhood had gone and she
had outgrown her passion for numberless pets overrunning the house just
as her sisters in the cities had outgrown their pleasure in dressing
and undressing dolls, she should become the "White Huntress." She
loved more than ever the wildness of the forest lands, and the ways of
the woodland things were wonderful and mysterious to her. And now,
from a new angle, they were her study.
There were days when she rode far out from the ranch house, her lunch
at her saddle strings, to be gone until dusk or after the stars came
out. She would leave Gypsy tethered where the grass was deep and rich,
command Shep to lie down and see that nobody ran away with her outfit,
and then tramp off alone, carrying her camera. She knew how to climb
up into the tree and to screen herself behind the foliage, so that she
might watch the mother bird and her ways, and find out when she should
expect the joyous miracle of new life.
When the eggs were hatched Wanda was ready. Days before she had chosen
the exact spot on the particular limb where she would place her camera.
She had clothed herself as the springtime clothed the forests. A soft
blouse of green, short skirt and stockings of green, little cap of
green and green moccasins. She crouched upon the broad limb of a cedar
or clung more hazardously to the branch of a pine, the tone colour of
her costume making no discord with the dusky sheen of the waving
branches, and watched and waited. So, when "hunting" was good she had
a picture of the mother bird perched upon the edge of the nest in which
the eggs lay, a picture of the nest with the little, new birds obeying
the first command of nature, a picture of the parents feeding them the
first worm or berry or rebellious bug, a picture of the trial flight
when soft young bodies essayed independence on unskilful wings.
At first the girl had been merely an amateur in the early, sweet sense
of the word. Then one day she saw a couple of pages in an illustrated
magazine devoted to such photographs as these she was playing with.
They were better than hers, since the man who had taken them was a
trained artist as well as a lover of the wild; and they had been at
once a disappointment and an inspiration to her. Then, upon another
day, her father who made little comment upon her pastime, handed her a
box from the express office in which she found a camera with a lens
that would do its part if she learned to do hers. And that was when
she threw herself so enthusiastically into her "work."
"I am going to have a page of pictures in that same magazine," was her
way of thanking him. "And mine are going to be better!"
She flushed a little at his smile, but when she had gone away and was
alone with her new possession and a world of possibilities, her chin
was very firm.
She had her own studio in the attice above the dining room, developed
plates and films there, and descended the ladder into the hallway
flushed with triumph or vexed with disappointment as her efforts proved
to be good or bad. The mistakes had been many at first; they were few
now.
She became a student of the "Home Life of the Wild Things." They all
interested her, they all posed for her, squirrel and bird and
butterfly. Inevitably she began to specialise, but her specialisation
was not in one species but rather in one process, in the dawning and
budding life of the young in the real "home life" before the new
fledgling or tiny furred body left the nest for an independent life and
a future nest of its own. The wild mates at work upon the house which
instinct prompted was to be of use soon, the construction of a swinging
pocket hung high up by an oriole, this was a part of the home life,
just as essential a part of it as the covering of the eggs, the feeding
of the young.
Before the year had swelled and blossomed into full mid-summer she had
a pupil. It was her mother. Mother and daughter had always been more
to each other than the terms commonly imply, very nearly all that they
should connote. They had been friends. Here where the solitudes were
mighty and vast, where long miles and hard trails lay between homes and
where women were few, they had had but themselves to turn to when need
or desire came for the company of their own sex. Mrs. Leland had
remained young, in part because hers was a happy, sunny nature, in part
because she had had the fires of youth replenished from the
superabundant glow of girlhood in her daughter.
But now that the summer came with monotony and silence, now that Arthur
Shandon came no more, that Wayne seemed to have forgotten the range
country, that Garth Conway was busy every day with the entire
management of a heavily stocked cattle outfit, there were long, quiet
days at the Echo Creek.
"Wanda," Mrs. Leland said one day, a little wistfully. "Can't I come
with you and take a peep first hand into the homes of your wild
friends? I'll be very still, I'll stay with Shep and Gypsy if you want
me to."
Wanda, at once contrite and happy, was filled with apologies and
explanations. She had had no thought that her mother would find an
interest in her "play." But if she would come, if she would like to
come, oh, she would show her the most wonderful discovery. . . .
So mother and daughter rode out together that day with lunch and
camera, and that night worked together in Wanda's attic studio over a
highly satisfactory film. The older woman's interest became as steady,
as enthusiastic in a deeply thoughtful way, as Wanda's. She learned to
love each day's adventure as warmly as did her daughter, she came to
have the same tender joy in the unexpected discovery of some new phase
of the home life of the wild.
"In all of your hunting you are missing something, my White Huntress,"
she said one day. "Something which I have discovered!"
Wanda smiled brightly at her over the top of a new picture, pleased
with her mother's interest no less than with the print in her hands.
"What is it, mamma?"
"I am not going to tell you yet. But to-morrow when we go out for the
oriole's nest, I am going to take your old kodak!"
As they rode the five or six miles to the spot where they were to do
the morning's "hunting" Wanda wondered what it was she had missed that
her mother had noticed. But she promptly forgot about it when she
climbed the great pine which, for her mother's purpose, was so happily
situated close to a cliff. She noted with a bright nod of approval as
she edged far out upon a horizontal limb that her mother had made her
own way up to the cliff top. Long she waited that morning, patient and
happy and still, her camera set in front of her, before she got the
exposure she wanted. And she did not hear the other click of the other
machine, did not know that her mother had been as patient and as
contented waiting to get the picture she wanted of Wanda as Wanda had
been in snapping the bird and the nest and the young, hungry mouths at
the threshold.
That afternoon they developed and printed, each her own pictures. And
when Mrs. Leland had finished she showed Wanda what she had done.
There was the picture of Wanda, far out upon the great limb, eager and
watchful, her camera ready, the oriole's nest swinging before her, the
mother bird just dropping down to it. And below and beyond were the
ground, looking immeasurably distant, the fir and pine branches, the
forest of trees.
"You see, Wanda, what you have overlooked?" Mrs. Leland's eyes were
unusually bright. "You have dozens of pictures that are wonderful,
pictures that you strove for for weeks, months at a time! One looks at
your picture and sees that it is wonderful, but does not understand how
wonderful. You cling to a branch or a tree trunk or the side of a
cliff, fifty or a hundred and fifty feet of space below you, and take
your picture. People look at the picture and do not see that the
wonderful thing, the interesting thing, is how you got it!"
"But . . ." began Wanda.
"But," Mrs. Leland laughed happily, "just listen to me a moment, miss.
You are going on with your pictures and I am going to follow you very
humbly and take other pictures to show how you get them. We'll send
both sets to your magazines and you'll see if mine aren't snapped up
just as quick as yours!"
So the relationship of mother and daughter which had grown into that of
a warm, intimate friendship now developed into closer, more intimate
companionship. Together they found bright, brimming days that
otherwise might have been dull and empty.
Wanda came to realise that a woman who is forty may be, in all
essentials, as young as a girl of twenty, and that the added score of
years while it brings truer insight and perhaps a steadier heart does
not quench ardour or deaden the emotions.
"Mamma," she said one day, looking up brightly from the development of
a film from her mother's kodak, "you are just a girl yourself!"
And Mrs. Leland was just girl enough to flush, and youthful enough to
laugh as musically as her daughter.
Thus, as the days went by and they were frequently alone together,
Martin Leland being often away on the business upon which he and Arthur
Shandon had entered with Sledge Hume, the two women were not lonely.
Mrs. Leland accompanied Wanda everywhere to take pictures showing the
girl climbing for a lofty bird nest, clinging to the cliffs at the
upper end of the valley, crouching hidden among the bushes waiting for
a rabbit to hop into the picture, even on the deer "hunt" they had
already begun.
So the late summer slipped by more swiftly in its smooth channel than
ever, the leaves in the orchard yellowed with the fall, the light green
tips upon the fir branches turned dark green, the cattle were driven
down to the lower valleys along the creeks, and the first snows of
winter dimmed the shortening days.
With the passing of the summer, Garth Conway came again to be a
frequent visitor at the Echo Creek ranch house. Since the letter from
Wayne Shandon in New York he had had but one communication from the man
who now owned the Bar L-M. It had been characteristically short,
written in London.
"I am leaving the destiny of the cows In your competent hands," Wayne
wrote. "I am legally giving you a power of attorney. This authorises
you to run the outfit as you judge best. Make what sales you want to
to pay the boys and yourself. Bank the money or re-invest for
improvements and more cattle. The Lord knows when I'll come back . . .
provided the Devil has told Him."
And then, in a postscript, hastily scribbled he had added,
"I have made my will . . . Imagine me making a will! . . . and if I
don't come back at all the outfit is yours. Love to the Lelands."
And then, as a second afterthought, he had scrawled at the top of the
note.
"A joke on you in case I shouldn't come back, Garth! I want you to
sell some cows and send me another two thousand. But I promise not to
do it again."
Garth told his news in the living room where the family had been
listening to the music of Wanda's lilting young voice with her mother's
piano accompaniment when he came in. Mrs. Leland's smiling face grew
clouded and distressed and her eyes turned involuntarily to her
husband. Martin Leland sprang to his feet in sudden wrath.
"Hell's bells!" he shouted angrily. "Two sacrifice sales in less than
a year! Four thousand dollars! And what has he done with it? Got
drunk, chucked it away across race courses and card tables . . . Would
to God I had done what it was my duty to do, that . . ."
"Martin!" cried Mrs. Leland. "Martin, dear!"
He stopped abruptly and sank back into his chair. For a little while
there was silence, heavy and painful. Wanda's eyes grew misty. Not
once since that day in the spring had she been disloyal to Red
Reckless, whom she had known in his boyhood, who had fought her early
battles for her, who had been the plumed knight of her early girlhood.
She told herself now that he had not come back because he could not
bear to return yet to the place where he and his brother had spent so
many happy days together, that if he was living wildly now, scurrying
up and down the world and flinging away his inheritance, it was because
he had felt his brother's loss far more than he had let them know, that
he was going his pace swiftly to forget what lay behind. And again
there rose in her heart the mute prayer that he might come back and be
a man and show them all that they had not judged him fairly.
Garth glanced swiftly at the faces of these three people who had heard
his news with such varied emotions, and went on to break the silence
none of them had noticed.
"Matters are going rather well on the range," he said quietly. "I sold
a hundred head at an average of ninety-seven dollars last week and was
able to bank the entire nine thousand, seven hundred. Maybe," with a
quick smile, "it will be just as well if he doesn't come back in a
hurry."
"Oh," cried Wanda impulsively. "That is ungenerous of you! After
Wayne says that he is leaving everything to you in his will, too!"
"I don't mean to be ungenerous or yet ungrateful," replied Garth a bit
stiffly, flushing under the girl's reproachful eyes. "I only
meant . . ."
"Wanda," said her father sharply, "you should be ashamed of yourself!
Garth has not been ungenerous and you have. And he is right. It would
be the best thing for Wayne himself as well as for the range if he
doesn't come back for a long time. Garth is working hard for the
interests of both. And if any one should be grateful to the man who is
running his range for him it is that young spendthrift. You are not
thinking, Wanda."
The girl bit her lip and turned away. And she did not make the apology
her father expected. Dimly it seemed to her that they were all over
ready, over eager to condemn the man whose one crime had been mere
heedlessness, who was surely hurting no one but himself, but who
offended their ideas in refusing to take life seriously and bear the
common burden of responsibility.
"After all," said Mrs. Leland a little hurriedly, "Wayne is only a boy.
Oh, he's a man in years, of course, but then some people are fortunate
enough to carry their youth with them a long time before it drops off.
And," with a smile, "he says he won't do it again!"
Martin Leland smoked his two pipefuls of strong tobacco and then
departed to attend to some correspondence. Mrs. Leland soon slipped
away to her book and easy chair and cushions in a corner. Until ten
o'clock Wanda and Garth bent together over a big scrap book containing
the latest additions to the home life of the wild.
Soon afterward even Garth Conway's visits to the Leland home stopped.
November came with many dark days and an occasional flurry of snow.
The ground might at any time now be covered, the passes choked with the
soft drifts, the valleys hidden. The cattle must be moved down the
mountains to the foothills where each year they wintered. The Bar L-M
buildings were closed, the heavy wooden shutters put up, the corrals
deserted until thaw time. Conway with his men and cattle would not
come again until springtime came with them.
And over the Echo Creek ranch the silence of the summer passed into the
deeper silence of winter. Leland's cattle and men had gone already to
his winter range; there was no one at home excepting Mrs. Leland,
Wanda, Julia, and Jim who remained to do what little work there was to
be done during the term of "hibernating." Martin's interests were too
big for him to stay here had he desired to do so; his family would not
see him again for the two months or so during which he remained outside.
It was not the first year that the Echo Creek house was not shuttered
and closed for the winter. Mrs. Leland had sometimes gone with her
husband to spend the storm swept months of the year either at one of
his other ranches or in the city, and sometimes she had stayed here.
This winter she had no particular desire to leave her comfortable home
for the makeshift of a San Francisco hotel and Wanda was eager to stay.
"You'll be cooped up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," Martin
Leland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch in
December. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if I
couldn't get in again or you get out before well on into February or
March."
He had made a flying trip between storms, hastening from El Toyon to
White Rock over the mail route, coming in from White Rock through the
still open pass through the mountains. His one object in coming had
been to try to induce his women folk to leave Echo Creek. And the same
day, seeing the threat of bad weather, he went out again, on skis and
alone.
There were busy days for all four who remained at the ranch house in
making preparations for idle, comfortable days to follow. Jim brought
vast quantities of wood from the basement, piling it high in the corner
of the living room where it would be convenient for feeding the deep
throated fireplace whose rocks would stay warm all night, hot all day,
for many weeks. From the yard he brought more wood, piling it in the
basement until there were only narrow passageways between the slabs and
logs and the finer split stove wood. Julia superintended the placing
of her kitchen supplies, secreted those little delicacies which she
would require at Christmas time, arranged her canned goods and
perpetually fussed and rearranged in her storeroom. Meanwhile Mrs.
Leland and Wanda were everywhere at once, overseeing the moving of
beds, the shifting of furniture, the making cosy of the home against
the siege. And then, howling and shrieking, with deep voice shouting
across the pine forests, the winter came in earnest.
Martin Leland had read the signs aright; it was to be a hard winter.
There came a wind storm that lasted without cessation for three days;
the branches of the cedars about the house tossed like long arms
grappling with an unseen foe; here and there a dead limb was wrenched
from a tree trunk and hurled far out to be buried in the snow which
began to fall in small, hard flakes almost congealed to hail. Then,
the three days gone, the wind died down suddenly, the flakes grew
larger, softer, the snow clung tenaciously to the trees and fences and
eaves of house and stable. Jim in arctic shoes and mittens, his ears
lost under the flaps of his cap, having sighed and bestirred himself
from his snug comfort by Julia's stove, got his shovel and went up on
the housetop.
While the bleak, chill days rushed by Wanda prepared happily for the
fine weather which would come, when the sun reflected back from many
feet of fluffy snow would warm the air, when in the high, dry altitudes
the sparkling, Christmassy world would become a rarely beautiful thing,
when she could leave the house and penetrate deep into a solitude which
was as different from the solitude of the summer forestland as day is
from night. She brought down from the attic her own favourite pair of
skis and saw that they were fit. The long slender bits of pine, light
and graceful with their running grooves glistening, their turned up
ends like Turks' slippers, she stood on end in the living room while
she gave them a new coat of white shellac. Her snowshoe pole she
tested, making sure that it had sustained no injury during its long
banishment to the dark places of the attic, and that it could be
trusted in the work she would call upon it to do. She gathered the
winter out-door things which she had not used for two years, the white
sweater that clung close to her slim, pliant body; the white tasseled
hat, mitts, leggins, white bloomers. And then, when a blue and white,
laughing day came, and the air was clear and warm, the branches of the
trees sagging under their diamond pricked festoons of snow, she left
the house, now in truth the White Huntress.
Camera and field glasses went with her; for lunch a bit of jerked beef
and a piece of hard chocolate. For to-day she began her winter work.
Again she was hunting. The forests as she slipped through them were
very still and seemed void of all the life that had swarmed here until
the snows came. But she would see snow birds, she might find a coyote
or a big snow-shoe rabbit. She would take pictures, too, such wintry
pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of
winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into
strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the
sweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling white
background.
And she thrilled to the crunch of thin crust underfoot which
yesterday's thaw and last night's freeze had formed, the whip of the
dry air in her face, the exhilaration of the long, swift dash as she
glided from the crest of some ridge, a silent, graceful creature, into
the hollow beyond. Her body bent a little forward, her snow-shoe pole
horizontal as a tight rope walker holds his balancing rod, the white
world slid away beneath her, little sinks or humps in the apparent
smoothness of the snow demanding the sudden leap which shot the blood
tingling through the eager body. For the light skis with their three
coats of shellac carried her down the steeper slopes with the wild
speed of a bird skimming the winter whitened earth.
This first day she took an old favourite way which led her up a gradual
slope straight southward until at last she paused, breathing deeply,
upon the crest. Far behind her she could see the smoke of the ranch
house rising from a clump of cedars; straight ahead the black line of
the river. And now, balancing a moment, gripping her pole firmly,
settling her feet securely in the ski-straps, she shot downward, taking
the steep dip which would lead after a little into a long curve and so
bring her flashing through the trees down to the river three miles away.
Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her body warm with the
sun's heat and the leaping blood within her, when she straightened up
and touching the end of her pole lightly against the snow came to a
stop near the river. It was swollen and black, a mighty, shouting
thing, the only thing about her whose voice had not been stilled by the
snow.
Her eyes turning found close at hand the first tracks she had seen this
morning, fresh tracks of a big rabbit.
"I must have frightened him," she thought. "He's gone on upstream."
She turned upstream as the rabbit had done, noiselessly following his
trail. And, turned eastward by a rabbit's track, she followed
unconsciously, unsuspectingly, the imperious bidding of her fate. Her
own life, the lives of two men would have been widely different had
Wanda Leland turned westward instead of eastward this morning.
Already she was a mile above the bridge across which the road ran to
the Bar L-M. From where she was a stranger might not suppose that man
or horse could find a place to cross in many times that distance; for
here the river banks were steep cliffs, never lower than ten feet,
rising often abruptly to thirty. Between them the water raged,
thundering over falls, leaping into deep pools where the sucking eddies
were never still.
And as she moved on upstream, further yet from the bridge, the rocky
banks grew steeper, drew nearer to each other, until suddenly the
plunging river was lost to her, its thunder muffled. Wanda could see a
thick mat of snow from a great, flat topped rock on the far side
curving downward, inward, as if from the eaves of a house, the long
icicles like sharp teeth set in a monster's gaping jaw.
Close along the edge of the cliffs the course of the fleeing rabbit
led, while Wanda's skis left their parallel smooth tracks in a straight
line a score of feet back from the steep bank. She slipped silently
through a clump of firs, peered around the branches bent down by the
heavy snow, and saw the snow-shoe rabbit where he had stopped for a
moment. He was a big fellow, the biggest she had ever seen, crouching
low, his round eyes bright and suspicious, as he trusted to his colour
to protect him. She brought her camera swiftly out of its case.
"There's a chance to get him, after all," she thought eagerly. "It
won't be much of a picture perhaps . . . just a white blur against a
white background . . ."
The camera clicked just as the rabbit leaped forward; she thought she
had caught him against the dark background of a fir from which much of
the snow had fallen. Then, just in front of the frightened animal a
little branch of a small pine, suddenly released of its weight of snow,
whipped up; a new terror came into the creature's panic stricken
breast; he stopped sharply, swerved, lost his head as one of his rattle
brained species is likely to do, ran directly toward the girl, swerved
again and running straight toward the river, essayed the impossible and
met destruction. He leaped far out across the water, attempting a jump
that none of his kind could have made safely, and fell short. The
furry body described a great valiant arc, shot upward for one flashing
second, dropped out of sight.
"Oh, I am so sorry," cried the girl contritely. "You poor little
thing."
The woodland tragedy moved her strangely, for she felt that, innocently
enough, she had caused it. She moved closer to see if by a happy
chance the rabbit had landed upon a rocky shelf far down, hoping that
after all she might in some way set him free.
Moving slowly, her camera again in its case, her pole touching the
snow, she approached until she could look down. Only the steep wall on
the far side, sinking straight and black into the swollen torrent, only
a little speck of white far down which might have been a struggling
body or a fleck of foam.
"The poor little thing," she said again. "He saw that the far bank is
lower than this one, and he was too frightened to guess the distance."
Musing, she thought that her skis were merely settling a little deeper
through the crust when she felt a slight sinking underneath. Then,
suddenly, she was aware that her skis were dipping downward, that she
was slipping. She tried hastily to draw back, she felt that she was
still slipping, that the polished surfaces of the skis were answering
the call of gravity, that she was being drawn closer, closer in spite
of her efforts . . .
She made a wild, frantic attempt to draw back, a quick terror gripping
her. The shouting river was calling to her, something was pulling at
her body steadily as a magnet pulls at a steel, the world was slipping
away under her, she was going the way the rabbit had gone . . .
Then she threw her body backward, twisting as best she could with the
skis clinging to her feet, clutching with her hands at anything her
fingers might touch. She heard a splash, knew that the overhang of
snow had dropped into the river, knew that one ski was hanging over the
brink. And then the hand that had gripped at the smooth snow sank down
and clutched the top of a small, hidden pine, she drew herself up and
back and in a moment, white, shaking she lay still, not daring to look
down.