The Strength of the Pines Part 9

"Two full days' tramp at the least--barring out accidents. But if you think it is best--you can start out to-day."

Bruce was a man who made decisions quickly. He had learned the wisdom of it,--that after all the evidence is gathered on each side, a single second is all the time that is needed for any kind of decision. Beyond that point there is only vacillation. "Then I'll start--right away. Can you tell me how to find the trail?"

"I can only tell you to go straight north. Use your watch as a compa.s.s in the daytime and the North Star at night."

"I didn't suppose that it was wisdom to travel at night."

She looked at him in sudden astonishment. "And where did you learn that fact, Bruce?"

The man tried hard to remember. "I don't know. I suppose it was something I heard when I was a baby--in these mountains."

"It is one of the first things a mountaineer has to know--to make camp at nightfall. You would want to, anyway, Bruce. You've got enough real knowledge of the wilderness in you--born in you--to want a camp and a fire at night. Besides, the trails are treacherous."

"Then the thing to do is to get ready at once. And then try to bring Hudson back with me--down to the valley. After we get there we can see what can be done."

Linda smiled rather sadly. "I'm not very hopeful. But he's our last chance--and we might as well make a try. There is no hope that the secret agreement will show up in these few weeks that remain. We'll get your things together at once."

They breakfasted, and after the simple meal was finished, Bruce began to pack for the journey. He was very thankful for the months he had spent in an army camp. He took a few simple supplies of food: a piece of bacon, a little sack of dried venison--that delicious fare that has held so many men up on long journeys--and a compact little sack of prepared flour. There was no s.p.a.ce for delicacies in the little pack. Besides, a man forgets about such things on the high trails. b.u.t.ter, sugar, even that ancient friend coffee had to be left behind. He took one little utensil for cooking--a small skillet--and Linda furnished him with a camp ax and a long-bladed hunting knife. These things (with the exception of the knife and ax) he tied up in one heavy, all-wool blanket, making a compact pack for carrying on his back.

In his pocket he carried cartridges for the rifle, pipe, tobacco, and matches. Linda took the hob-nails out of her own shoes and pounded them into his. For there are certain trails in Trail's End that to the unnailed shoe are quite like the treadmills of ancient days; the foot slips back after every step.

One thing more was needed: tough leggings. The soft flannel trousers had not been tailored for wear in the brush coverts. And there is still another reason why the mountain men want their ankles covered. In portions of Trail's End there are certain rock ledges--gray, strange stone heaps blasted by the summer sun--and some of the paths that Bruce would take crossed over them. These ledges are the home of a certain breed of forest creatures that Bruce did not in the least desire to meet. Unlike many of the wild folk, they are not at all particular about getting out of the way, and they are more than likely to lash up at a traveler's instep. It isn't wise to try to jump out of the way. If a man were practiced at dodging lightning bolts he might do it, but not an ordinary mortal. For that lunging head is one of the swiftest things in the whole swift-moving animal world. And it isn't entirely safe to rely on a warning rattle. Sometimes the old king-snake forgets to give it.

These are the poison people--the gray rattlesnakes that gather in mysterious, grim companies on the rocks--and the only safety from them is thick covering to the knees that the fangs cannot penetrate.

But the old woman solved this problem with a deer hide that had been curing for some seasons on the wall behind the house. Her eyes were dimmed with age, her fingers were stiff, but in an astonis.h.i.+ngly short period of time she improvised a pair of leathern puttees, fastening with a strap, that answered the purpose beautifully. The two women walked with him, out under the pine.

Bruce shook old Elmira's scrawny hand; then she turned back at once into the house. The man felt singularly grateful. He began to credit the old woman with a great deal of intuition, or else memories from her own girlhood of long and long ago. He _did_ want a word alone with this strange girl of the pines. But when Elmira had gone in and the coast was clear, it wouldn't come to his lips.

He felt curious conjecturings and wonderment arising within him. He couldn't have shaped them into words. It was just that the girl's face intrigued him, mystified him, and perhaps moved him a little too. It was a frank, clear, girlish face, wonderfully tender of feature, and at first her eyes held him most of all. They gave an impression of astounding depth. They were quite serious now; and they had a l.u.s.ter such as can be seen on cold spring water over dark moss,--and few other places on earth.

"It seems strange," he said, "to come here only last night--and then to be leaving again."

It seemed to his astonished gaze that her lips trembled ever so slightly. "We have been waiting for each other a long time, Bwovaboo,"

she replied. She spoke rather low, not looking straight at him. "And I hate to have you go again so soon."

"But I'll be back--in a few days."

"You don't know. No one ever knows when they start out in these mountains. Promise me, Bruce--to keep watch every minute. Remember there's nothing--_nothing_--that Simon won't stoop to do. He's like a wolf. He has no rules of fighting. He'd just as soon strike from ambush.

How do I know that you'll ever come back again?"

"But I will." He smiled at her, and his eyes dropped from hers to her lips. His heart seemed to miss a beat. He hadn't noticed these lips in particular before. The mouth was tender and girlish, its sensitiveness scarcely seeming fitting in a child of these wild places. He reached out and took her hand.

"Good-by, Linda," he said, smiling.

She smiled in reply, and her old cheer seemed to return to her.

"Good-by, Bwovaboo. Be careful."

"I'll be careful. And this reminds me of something."

"What?"

"That for all the time I've been away--and for all the time I'm going to be away now--I haven't done anything more--well, more intimate--than shake your hand."

Her answer was to pout out her lips in the most natural way in the world. Bruce was usually deliberate in his motions; but all at once his deliberation fell away from him. There seemed to be no interlude of time between one position and another. His arms went about her, and he kissed her gently on the lips.

But it was not at all as they expected. Both had gone into it lightly,--a boy-and-girl caress such as is usually not worth thinking about twice. He had supposed it would be just like the other kisses he had known in his growing-up days: a moment's soft pressure of the lips, a moment's delight, and nothing either to regret or rejoice in. But it was far more than this, after all. Perhaps because they had been too long in one another's thoughts; perhaps--living in a land of hated foes--because Linda had not known many kisses, this little caress beneath the pine went very straight home indeed to them both. They fell apart, both of them suddenly sobered. The girl's eyes were tender and l.u.s.trous, but startled too.

"Good-by, Linda," he told her.

"Good-by--Bwovaboo," she answered. He turned up the trail past the pine.

He did not know that she stood watching him a long time, her hands clasped over her breast.

XIII

Miles farther than Linda's cabin, clear beyond the end of the trail that Duncan took, past even the highest ridge of Trail's End and in the region where the little rivers that run into the Umpqua have their starting place, is a certain land of Used to Be. Such a name as that doesn't make very good sense to a tenderfoot on the first hearing.

Perhaps he can never see the real intelligence of it as long as he remains a tenderfoot. Such creatures cannot exist for long in the silences and the endless ridges and the unbeaten trails of this land; they either become woodsmen or have communication with the buzzards.

It isn't a land of the Present Time at all. It is a place that has never grown old. When a man pa.s.ses the last outpost of civilization, and the shadows of the unbroken woods drop over him, he is likely to forget that the year is nineteen hundred and twenty, and that the day before yesterday he had seen an aeroplane pa.s.sing over his house. It is true that in this place he sees winged creatures in the air, seeming masters of the arial tracts, but they are not aroplanes. Instead they are the buzzards, and they are keeping even a closer watch on him than he is on them. They know that many things may happen whereby they can get acquainted before the morning breaks. The world seems to have kicked off its thousand-thousand years as a warm man at night kicks off covers; and all things are just as they used to be. It is the Young World,--a world of beasts rather than men, a world where the hand of man has not yet been felt.

Of course it won't be that way forever. Sometime the forests will fall.

What will become of the beasts that live in them there is no telling; there are not many places left for them to go. But at present it is just as savage, just as primitive and untamed as those ancient forests of the Young World that a man recalls sometimes in dreams.

On this particular early-September day, the age-old drama of the wilderness was in progress. It was the same play that had been enacted day after day, year upon year, until the centuries had become too many to count, and as usual, there were no human observers. There were no hunters armed with rifles waiting on the deer trails to kill some of the players. There were no naturalists taking notes that no one will believe in the coverts. It was the usual matine performance; the long, hot day was almost at a close. The play would get better later in the evening, and really would not be at its best until the moon rose; but it was not a comedy-drama even now. Rather it was a drama of untamed pa.s.sions and bloodshed, strife and carnage and l.u.s.t and rapine; and it didn't, unfortunately, have a particularly happy ending. Mother Nature herself, sometimes kind but usually cruel, was the producer; she furnished the theater, even the spotted costume by which the fawn remained invisible in the patches of light and shadow; and she had certain great purposes of her own that no man understands. As the play was usually complicated with many fatalities, the buzzards were about the only ones to benefit.

They were the real heroes of the play after all. Everything always turned out all right for them. They always triumphed in the end.

The greatest difference between this wilderness drama and the dramas that human beings see upon a stage is that one was reality and the other is pretense. The players were beasts, not men. The only human being anywhere in the near vicinity was the old trapper, Hudson, following down his trap line on the creek margin on the way to his camp. It is true that two other men, with a rather astounding similarity of purpose, were at present coming down two of the long trails that led to the region; but as yet the drama was hidden from their eyes. One of these two was Bruce, coming from Linda's cabin. One was Dave Turner, approaching from the direction of the Ross estates. Turner was much the nearer. Curiously, both had business with the trapper Hudson.

The action of the play was calm at first. Mostly the forest creatures were still in their afternoon sleep. Brother Bill, the great stag elk, had a bed in the very center of a thick wall of buckbush, and human observers at first could not have explained how his great body, with his vast spread of antlers, had been able to push through. But in reality his antlers aided rather than hindered. Streaming almost straight back they act something like a snow-plow, parting the heavy coverts.

The bull elk is in some ways the master of the forest, and one would wonder why he had gone to such an out-of-the-way place to sleep. Unless he is attacked from ambush, he has little to fear even from the Tawny One, the great cougar, and ordinarily the cougar waits until night to do his hunting. The lynx is just a source of scorn to the great bull, and even the timber wolf--except when he is combined with his relatives in winter--is scarcely to be feared. Yet he had been careful to surround himself with burglar alarms,--in other words, to go into the deep thicket that no beast of prey could penetrate without warning him--by the sound of breaking brush--of its approach. It would indicate that there was at least one living creature in this region--a place where men ordinarily did not come--that the bull elk feared.

The does and their little spotted fawns were sleeping too; the blacktail deer had not yet sought the feeding grounds on the ridges. The cougar yawned in his lair, the wolf dozed in his covert, even the poison-people lay like long shadows on the hot rocks. But these latter couldn't be relied upon to sleep soundly. One of the many things they can do is to jump straight out of a dream like a flicking whiplash, coil and hit a mark that many a good pistol shot would miss.

Yet there was no chance of the buzzards, at present spectators in the clouds and waiting for the final act, to become bored. Particularly the lesser animals of the forest--the Little People--were busy at their occupations. A little brown-coated pine marten--who is really nothing but an overgrown weasel famous for his particularly handsome coat--went stealing through the branches of a pine as if he had rather questionable business. Some one had told him, and he couldn't remember who, that a magpie had her nest in that same tree, and Red Eye was going to look and see. Of course he merely wanted to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps he would try to arrange to get a little sip of the mother's blood, just as it pa.s.sed through the big vein of the throat,--but of course that was only incidental. He felt some curiosity about the magpie's eggs too, the last brood of the year. It might be that there were some little magpies all coiled up inside of them, that would be worth investigation by one of his scientific turn of mind. Perhaps even the male bird, coming frantically to look for his wife, might fly straight into the nest without noticing his brown body curled about the limb. It offered all kinds of pleasing prospects, this hunt through the branches.

Of course it is doubtful if the buzzards could detect his serpent-like form; yet it is a brave man who will say what a buzzard can and cannot see. Anything that can remain in the air as they do, seemingly without the flutter of a wing, has powers not to speak of lightly. But if they could have seen him they would have been particularly interested. A marten isn't a glutton in his feeding, and often is content with just a sip of blood from the throat. That leaves something warm and still for the buzzard's beak.

A long, spotted gopher snake slipped through the dead gra.s.s on the ground beneath. He didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. He was just moseying--if there is such a word--along. Not a blade of gra.s.s rustled. Of course there was a chipmunk, sitting at the door of his house in the uplifted roots of a tree; but the snake--although he was approaching in his general direction--didn't seem at all interested in him. Were it not for two things, the serpent would have seemed to be utterly bored and indifferent to life in general. One of these things was its cold, glittering, reptile eyes. The other was its darting, forked tongue.

It may be, after all, that this little tongue was of really great importance in the serpent's hunting. Many naturalists think that quite often the little, rattle-brained birds and rodents that it hunts are so interested in this darting tongue that they quite fail to see the slow approach of the mottled body of the snake behind it. At least it was perfectly evident that the chipmunk did not see Limber-spine at present.

Otherwise he wouldn't have been enjoying the scenery with quite the same complacency. If all went well, there might be a considerable lump in the snake's throat yet this afternoon. But it would be a quite different kind of lump from the one the chipmunk's little mate, waiting in vain for her lord to come to supper, would have in _her_ throat.

An old racc.o.o.n wakened from his place on a high limb, stretched himself, scratched at his fur, then began to steal down the limb. He had a long way to go before dark. Hunting was getting poor in this part of the woods. He believed he would wander down toward Hudson's camp and look for crayfish in the water. A coyote is usually listed among the larger forest creatures, but early though the hour was--early, that is, for hunters to be out--he was stalking a fawn in a covert. The coyote has not an especially high place among the forest creatures, and he has to do his hunting early and late and any time that offers. Most of the larger creatures pick on him, all the time detesting him for his cunning. The timber wolf, a rather close relation whom he cordially hates, is apt to take bites out of him if he meets him on the trail. The old bull elk would like nothing better than to cut his hide into rag patches with the sharp-edged front hoofs. Even the magpies in the tree tops made up ribald verses about him. But nevertheless the spotted fawn had cause to fear him. The coyote is an infamous coward; but even the little cotton tail rabbit does not have to fear a fawn.