Edison Marshall

“ Then there came a day when Dan caught his first steelhead in the North Fork. There was no finer sport in the whole West than this,—the play of the fly, the strike, the electric jar that carries along the line and through the arm and into the soul from where it is never quite effaced, and finally the furious strife and exultant throb when the fish is hooked. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed down the ripples. ”

“ Now snow water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields, scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side, leaping faster than a deer leaps—and when you speak of the speed of a descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can scarcely follow—from cataract to cataract; and the sight is always a pleasing one to behold. ”

“ The shadows quickly lengthened—simply leaping over the snow from the fast-falling sun. Soon it dropped down behind the ridge; and the gray of twilight began to deepen among the more distant trees. It blurred the outline and dulled the sight. With the twilight came the cold, first crisp, then bitter and penetrating to the vitals. The twilight deepened, the snow turned gray, and then, in a vague way, the journey began to partake of a quality of unreality. It was not that the cold and the snow and their hunger were not entirely real, or that the wilderness was no longer naked to their eyes. ”

“ Dan could n't understand the strange light that suddenly leaped to her eyes. Perhaps she herself could n't have explained the wave of tenderness that swept over her,—with no cause except the look in Dan's earnest gray eyes and the lines that cut so deep. Since the world was new, it has been the boast of the boldest of men that they looked their Fate in the face. And this is no mean looking. For fate is a sword from the darkness, a power that reaches out of the mystery, and cannot be classed with sights of human origin. It burns out the eyes of all but the strongest men. ”

“ The wolves themselves, sensing dawn, were losing the last of their cowardice.
Once more she went to one of the saplings, but she stumbled and almost went to her face at the first blow. It was the instant that her gray watchers had been waiting for. The wolf that stood nearest leaped—a gray streak out of the shadow—and every wolf in the pack shot forward with a yell. It was a short, expectant cry; but it chopped off short. For with a half-sob, and seemingly without mental process, she aimed her pistol and fired.
A fast-leaping wolf is one of the most pistol targets that can be imagined. ”

“ A moment before the rush and whir of the grouse flock had dried the roof of his mouth with terror. The tall trees appalled him, the shadows fell upon his spirit. And when he heard this final sound, when he saw the glint that might so easily have been a gun-barrel, his nerves and muscles reacted at once. Not even a fraction of a second intervened. His gun flashed up, just as a small-game shooter hurls his weapon when a mallard glints above the decoys, and a little, angry cylinder of flame darted, as a snake's head darts, from the muzzle. ”

“ It is usually the most unmitigated folly for a cougar to chase a deer against which he has missed his stroke; and it is also quite fatal to his dignity. And whoever doubts for a minute that the larger creatures have no dignity, and that it is not very dear to them, simply knows nothing about the ways of animals. They cling to it to the death. And nothing is quite so amusing to old Woof, the bear—who, after all, has the best sense of humor in the forest—as the sight of a tawny, majestic mountain lion, rabid and foaming at the mouth, in an effort to chase a deer that he can't possibly catch. ”

“ She was making other sounds now—queer, whimpering sounds not greatly different from the bleat that the fawn utters when it dies. It was a fear-sound, and if there is one emotion with which the wild beasts are acquainted, in all its phases, it is fear. She was afraid of him then, and that meant he need no longer be in the least afraid of her. His skin began to twitch all over with that terrible madness and passion of the flesh-hunters.
This game was like the deer, and the thing to do was lie in wait. There was only one trail. ”

“ The great pines, tall and dark past belief, stood absolutely motionless, like strange pillars of ebony. The whole ridge was splotched with patches of moonlight, and the trail, dimming as the eyes followed it, wound away into the utter darkness. Bert Cranston knelt in a brush covert, his rifle loaded and ready in his lean, dark hands.
No wolf that ran the ridges, no cougar that waited on the deer trails knew a wilder passion, a more terrible blood-lust than he. ”

“ Dan held a chair for her in front of the fireplace, and she took it with entire naturalness. He was careful to put it where the firelight was at its height. He wanted to see its effect on the flushed cheeks, the soft dark hair. And then, standing in the shadows, he simply watched her. With the eye of an artist he delighted in her gestures, her rippling enthusiasm, her utter, irrepressible girlishness that all of Time had not years enough to kill.
He decided that she had gray eyes. Gray eyes seemed to be characteristic of the mountain people. ”

“ An instant later, they heard Cranston's laughter as he vanished around the turn of the trail.
For long minutes the two of them were still. The girl still held the man's head upon her breast. The pistol had fallen in the pine needles, and her nervous hand plucked strangely at the leaves of a mountain flower. To Dan's eyes, there was something trancelike, a hint of paralysis and insensibility about her posture. He had never seen her eyes like this. The light that he had always beheld in them had vanished. ”

“ It is better to dine on nightshade, says a forest law, than to eat a porcupine; for the former innocent-looking little berry is almost as fast a death as a rifle bullet, and the flesh of the latter animal will torture with a hundred red-hot fires in the vitals before its eater is driven to its eternal lair. But it is n't that the porcupine's flesh is poison. It is just that an incautious bite on its armored body will fill the throat and mouth with spines, needle points that work ever deeper until they result in death. ”

“ He had not forgotten the wild rapture of that moment he had inadvertently sprung on Landy Hildreth,—or how, after his terror had died, he had come creeping back. He hunted his own way, waiting on the trail; and his madness was at its height. He was not just Whisperfoot; the coward, that runs at the shadow of a tall form in the thickets. The consummation was complete, and that single experience of a month before had made of him a hunter of men. His muscles set for the leap. ”

“ Perhaps there is a feeling of insignificance, a sensation that is particularly insistent in the winter snows. No man can feel like talking very loudly when he is the only living creature within endless miles. The trees, towering and old, seem to ignore him as a being too unimportant to notice. And besides, the silence of the forest itself seems to get into the spirit, and the great, quiet spaces that lie between tree and tree simply dry up the springs of conversation. Dan did not feel oppressed at all. ”

“ Every mile was an added delight to Dan. Not even wine could have brought a brighter sparkle to his eyes. He had begun to experience a vague sort of excitement, an emotion that was almost kin to exultation, over the constant stir and movement of the forest life. He didn't know that a bird dog feels the same when it gets to the uplands where the quail are hiding. He had no acquaintance with bird dogs whatever. He hadn't remembered that he had qualities in common with them,—a long line of ancestors who had lived by hunting. ”

“ X Even in the darkest night, there is one light that never brings hope or cannot lead. It is not a twinkling, joyous light like that mysterious will-o'-the-wisp that now and again has lured travelers into the marshes to their death. Nor can any one ever mistake it, or be soothed and cheered by it. It always appears the same way,—two green circles, close together, in the darkness.
When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she halted bravely and held her lantern high. ”

“ There is always a quality of unreality about a moonlit scene. Just what causes it isn't easy to explain, unless the soft blend of light and shadow entirely destroys the perspective. Old ruins will sometimes seem like great, misty ghosts of long-dead cities; trees will turn to silver; phantoms will gather in family groups under the cliffs; plain hills and valleys will become, in an instant, the misty vales of Fairyland. The scene on that distant ridge of the Divide partook of this quality to an astounding degree ”

“ Incidentally, these same snow streams are quite often simply swarming with trout,—brook and cutthroat, steelhead and even those speckled fellows that fishermen call Dolly Vardens for some reason that no one has ever quite been able to make out. They are to be found in every ripple, and they bite at a fly as if they were going to crush the steel hook into dust between their teeth, and the cold water gives them spirit to fight until the last breath of strength is gone from their beautiful bodies. ”

“ And tell me—can you smell anything—"
"Good Lord, Lennox! I can smell all kinds of things."
"I'm glad. Some men can't. No one can enjoy the woods if he can't smell. Part of the smells are of flowers, and part of balsam, and God only knows what the others are. They are just the wilderness—"
Dan could not only perceive the smells and sounds, but he felt that they were leaving an imprint on the very fiber of his soul. He knew one thing. He knew he could never forget this first introduction to the mountain night. ”

“ In the song were centered and made clear all the many lesser voices with which the forest had spoken to him these two months and which he had but dimly understood,—the passion, the exultation, the blood-lust, the strength, the cruelty, the remorseless, unceasing struggle for existence that makes the wilderness an eternal battle ground. But over it all was sadness. He could n't doubt that. He heard it all too plainly. The wild was revealed to him as it never had been before.
"It's the wolf pack," Lennox told him softly. "As long as I have been in the mountains, it always hits me the same. ”

“ Was there no balm for hatred even in the moment of death? Were men unable to forget the themes and motives of their lives, even when the shadows closed down upon them? Hildreth had known what hand had struck him down. And even on the frontier of death, his first thought was to hide his evidence where Cranston could not find it when he searched the body, but where later it might be found by the detectives that were sure to come. ”

“ He tried to curse his adversary as a weakling and a degenerate, but the obscene words he sought for would not come to his lips. Here was his fate, and because the darkness always fades before the light, and the courage of wickedness always breaks before the courage of righteousness, Cranston was afraid to look it in the face. The fear of defeat, of death, of Heaven knows what remorselessness with which this grave giant would administer justice was upon him, and his heart seemed to freeze in his breast. ”

“ For a long instant they stood straining, seemingly motionless. Cranston's powerful body had stood up well under the shock of Dan's leap. It was a hand-to-hand battle now. The rifle had slid on down the hillside, to be caught in a clump of brush twenty feet below. Dan called on every ounce of his strength, because he knew what mercy he might expect if Cranston mastered him. The battles of the mountains were battles to the death.
They flung back and forth, wrenching shoulders, lashing fists, teeth and feet and fingers. ”

“ The pack forgets all its knowledge of the deadliness of men in the starving times.
The grouse heard the sound, and, silly creatures that they are, even they raised their heads for a single instant from their food. The felines—the great, tawny mountain lions and their smaller cousins, the lynx—all devoted at least an instant of concentrated attention to it. A raccoon, sleeping in a pine, opened its eyes, and a lone bull elk, such as some people think is beyond all other things the monarch of the forest, rubbed his neck against a tree trunk and wondered. ”

“ Far away on the ridge top, a pair of wolves sat together with no more evidence of life than two shadows. One of the most effective accomplishments a wolf possesses is its ability to freeze into a motionless thing, so the sharpest eye can scarcely detect him in the thickets. It is an advantage in hunting, and it is an even greater advantage when being hunted. Yet at the same second they sprang up, simply seemed to spin in the dead pine needles, and brought up with sharp noses pointed and ears erect, facing the valley. ”

“ He didn't understand the grayness that had come upon the mountain world, his own strange feeling of numbness, of endless soaring through infinite spaces. But he was a mountain man, and that meant he was schooled, beyond all things, to keep his self-control. He made himself remember. It was the cruelest work he had ever done, and it seemed to him that his brain would shiver to pieces from the effort. Yes—he had been cutting wood on the hillside, and the shadows had been long. He had been wondering whether or not they should go down to the valleys. ”

“ And even as the men talked, the train that bore Dan Failing to the home of his ancestors was entering for the first time the dark forests of pine and fir that make the eternal background of the Northwest. The wind came cool and infinitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of blasting sun. ”

“ When his majesty the steelhead takes the fly and decides to run, it can be learned after a time that the one thing that may be done is to let out all the line and with prayer and humbleness try to keep up with him.
Dan fished for lake trout in the lakes of the plateau; he shot waterfowl in the tule marshes; he hunted all manner of living things with his camera. But most of all he simply studied, as his frontiersmen ancestors had done before him. He found unceasing delight in the sagacity of the bear, the grace of the felines, the beauty of the deer. ”

“ It isn't easy to advance through such thickets without ever a misstep, without the rustle of a branch or the crack of a twig. Certain of the wild creatures find it easy; but men have forgotten how in too many centuries of cities and farms. It is hardly a human quality; and a spectator would have found a rather ghastly fascination in watching the lithe motions, the passionless face, the hands that didn't shake at all. But there were no spectators—unless the little band of wolves, stragglers from the pack that had gathered on the hills behind—watched with lighted eyes. ”

“ Whisperfoot's stroke had gone home so true there had not even been a fight. The darkness began to lift around him, and a strange exultation, a rapture unknown before in all his hunting, began to creep into his wild blood. Then, as a shadow steals, he went creeping back to his dead.
V
Dan Failing had been studying nature on the high ridges; and he went home by a back trail that led to old Bald Mountain. Many a man of longer residence in the mountains wouldn't have cared to strike off through the thickets with no guide except his own sense of direction. ”

“ He wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the forest rangers,—those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and keepers of its keys.
For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted to the yearning of his arms. ”

“ But it was true that Dan had always been partial to the winter season. When the snow lay all over the farmlands and bowed down the limbs of the trees, it had always wakened a curious flood of feelings in the wasted man. It seemed to him that he could remember other winters, wherein the snow lay for endless miles over an endless wilderness, and here and there were strange, many-toed tracks that could be followed in the icy dawns. ”