I
September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,—that far wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It was n't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there had n't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between the two seasons,—the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.
It was true that the leaves were shedding from the underbrush. They came yellow and they came red, and the north wind, always the first breath of winter, blew them in all directions. They made a perfect background for the tawny tints of Whisperfoot, and quite often the near-sighted deer would walk right up to him without detecting him. But the cougar always saw to it they did n't do it a second time. It had been a particularly bad season for Whisperfoot, and he was glad that his luck had changed. The woods were so dry from the long drought that even he—and as all men know, he is one of the most silent creatures in the wilderness when he wants to be, which are the times that he does n't want to make as much noise as a steam engine—found it hard to crawl down a deer trail without being heard. The twigs would sometimes crack beneath his feet, and this is a disgrace with any cougar. Their first lessons are to learn to walk with silence.
Woof the bear loved this month above all others. It was n't that he needed protective coloring. He was not a hunter at all, except of grubs and berries and such small fry. He had a black coat and a clumsy stride; and he could n't have caught a deer if his life had depended upon it. But he did like to shuffle through the fallen leaves and make beds of them in the warm afternoons; and besides, the berries were always biggest and ripest in September. The bee trees were almost full of honey. Even the fat beetles under the stumps were many and lazy.
Everywhere the forest people were preparing for the winter that would fall so quickly when these golden September days were done. The Under Plane of the forest—those smaller peoples that live in the dust and have beautiful, tropical forests in the ferns—found themselves digging holes and filling them with stores of food. Of course they had no idea on earth why they were doing it, except that a quiver at the end of their tails told them to do so; but the result was entirely the same. They would have a shelter for the winter. Certain of the birds were beginning to wonder what the land was like to the south, and now and then waking up in the crisp dawns with decided longings for travel. The young mallards on the lakes were particularly restless, and occasionally a long flock of them would rise in the morning from the blue waters with a glint of wings,—and quite fail to come back. And one night all the forest listened to the wail of the first flock of south-going geese. But the main army of waterfowl would of course not pass until fall came in reality.
But the most noticeable change of all, in these last days of summer, was a distinct tone of sadness that sounded throughout the forest. Of course the wilderness note is always somewhat sad; but now, as the leaves fell and the grasses died, it seemed particularly pronounced. All the forest voices added to it,—the wail of the geese, the sad fluttering of fallen leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed without dropping their burdens on the parched hillsides. Of course all the tones and voices of the wilderness sound clearest at night—for that is the time that the forest really comes to life—and Dan Failing, sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.
It was true that in the two months he had spent in the mountains he had learned to be very receptive to the voices of the wilderness. Lennox had not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of wood lore from his frontiersmen ancestors. Two months before he had been a resident of cities. Now the wilderness had claimed him, body and soul.
These had been rare days. At first he had to limit his expeditions to a few miles each day, and even then he would come in at night staggering from weariness. He climbed hills that seemed to tear his diseased lungs to shreds. Lennox would n't have been afraid, in a crisis, to trust his marksmanship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a mountaineer's weapon—except a sawed-off specimen for family contingencies—yet Dan acquired a certain measure of skill at small game hunting, too. He got so he could shatter a grouse out of the air in the half of a second or so in which its bronze wings glinted in the shrubbery; and when a man may do this a fair number of times out of ten, he is on the straight road toward greatness.
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. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with main strength, and are still somewhat dazed by the result. It might be done with a steel cable, but an ordinary line or leader breaks like a cobweb. 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. He knew the chipmunks and the gray squirrels and the snowshoe rabbits. And every day his muscles had hardened and his gaunt frame had filled out.
He no longer wore his glasses. Every day his eyes had strengthened. He could see more clearly now, with his unaided eyes, than he had ever seen before with the help of the lens. And the moonlight came down through a rift in the trees and showed that his face had changed too. It was no longer so white. The eyes were more intent. The lips were straighter.
"It's been two months," Silas Lennox told him, "half the four that you gave yourself after you arrived here. And you 're twice as good now as when you came."
Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day I climbed halfway up Baldy—within a half mile of Snowbird's cabin—without stopping to rest."
Lennox looked thoughtful. More than once, of late, Dan had climbed up toward Snowbird's cabin. It was true that his guest and his daughter had become the best of companions in the two months; but on second thought, Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held good. The mountain women rarely mistook a maternal tenderness for an appealing man for love. It was n't that Dan was weak except from the ravages of his disease; but he was still a long way from Snowbird's ideal.
And the explanation was simply that life in the mountains gets down to a primitive basis, and its laws are the laws of the cave. Emotions are simple and direct, dangers are real, and the family relations have remained unchanged since the first days of the race. Men do not woo one another's wives in the mountains. There is no softness, no compromise: the male of the species provides, and the female keeps the hut. It is good, the mountain women know, when the snows come, to have a strong arm to lean upon. The man of strong muscles, of quick aim, of cool nerve in a crisis is the man that can be safely counted on not to leave a youthful widow to a lone battle for existence. Although Dan had courage and that same rigid self-control that was an old quality in his breed, he was still a long way from a physically strong man. It was still an even break whether he would ever wholly recover from his malady.
But Dan was not thinking about this now. All his perceptions had sharpened down to the finest focal point, and he was trying to catch the spirit of the endless forest that stretched in front of the house. The moon was above the pines at last, and its light was a magic. He sat breathless, his eyes intent on the silvery patches between the trees. Now and then he saw a shadow waver.
His pipe had gone out, and for a long time Lennox had n't spoken. He seemed to be straining too, with ineffective senses, trying to recognize and name the faint sounds that came so tingling and tremulous out of the darkness. As always, they heard the stir and rustle of the gnawing people: the chipmunks in the shrub shrubbery, the gophers who, like blind misers, had ventured forth from their dark burrows; and perhaps even the scaly glide of those most-dreaded poison people that had lairs in the rock piles.
Then, more distinct still, they heard the far-off yowl of a cougar. Yet it was n't quite like the cougar utterances that Dan had heard on previous nights. It was not so high, so piercing and triumphant; but had rather an angry, snarling tone made up of ows and broad, nasal yahs. It came tingling up through hundreds of yards of still forest; and both of them leaned forward.
"Another deer killed," Dan suggested softly.
"No. Not this time. He missed, and he's mad about it. They often snarl that way when they miss their stroke, just like an angry cat. But listen—"
Again they heard a sound, and from some far-lying ridge, they heard a curious echo. So far it had come that only a tremor of it remained; yet every accent and intonation was perfect, and Dan was dimly reminded of some work of art cunningly wrought in miniature. In one quality alone it resembled the cougar's cry. It was unquestionably a wilderness voice,—no sound made by men or the instruments of men; and like the cougar's cry, it was simply imbued with the barbaric spirit of the wild. But while the cougar had simply yowled in disappointment, a sound wholly without rhythm or harmony, this sound was after the manner of a song, rising and falling unutterably wild and strange.