VIII
The rains fell unceasingly for seven days: not a downpour but a constant drizzle that made the distant ridges smoke. The parched earth seemed to smack its lips, and little rivulets began to fall and tumble over the beds of the dry streams. The Rogue and the Umpqua flooded and the great steelhead began to ascend their smaller tributaries. Whisperfoot hunted with ease, for the wet shrubbery did not crack and give him away. The air was filled with the call of the birds of passage.
All danger of forest fire was at once removed, and Snowbird was no longer needed as a lookout on old Bald Mountain. She went to her own home, her companion back to the valley; and now that his sister had taken his place as housekeeper, Bill had gone down to the lower foothills with a great part of the live stock. Dan spent these rainy days in toil on the hillsides, building himself physically so that he might pay his debts.
It was no great pleasure, these rainy days. He would have greatly liked to have lingered in the square mountain house, listening to the quiet murmur of the rain on the roof and watching Snowbird at her household tasks. She could, as her father had said, make a biscuit. She could also roll up sleeves over trim, brown arms and with entire good humor do a week's laundry for three hardworking men. He would have liked to sit with her, through the long afternoons, as she knitted beside the fireplace—to watch the play of her graceful fingers and perhaps, now and then, to touch her hands when he held the skeins. But none of these things transpired. He drove himself from daylight till dark, developing his body for the tests that were sure to come.
The first few days nearly killed him. He over-exercised in the chill rain, and one anxious night he developed all the symptoms of pneumonia. Such a sickness would have been the one thing needed to make the doctor's prophecy come true. But with Snowbird's aid, and numerous hot drinks, he fought it off.
She had made him go to bed, and no human memory could be so dull as to forget the little, whispered message that she gave him with his last spoonful of medicine. She said she'd pray for him, and she meant it too,—literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,—simple and true and wholly without affectation. But he had n't relaxed thereafter. He knew the time had come to make the test. Night after night he would go to bed half-sick from fatigue, but the mornings would find him fresh. And after two weeks, he knew he had passed the crisis and was on the direct road to complete recovery.
Sometimes he cut wood in the forest: first the felling of some tall pine, then the trimming and hewing into two-foot lengths. The blisters came on his hands, broke and bled, but finally hardened into callosities. He learned the most effective stroke to hurl a shower of chips from beneath the blade. His back and limbs hardened from the handling of heavy wood—and the cough was practically gone.
Sometimes he mended fences and did other manual labor about the ranch; but not all his exercise was taken out in work. He did n't forget his friends in the forest, creatures of talon and paw and wing. He spent long days roaming the ridges and fighting through the buckbrush, and the forest yielded up its secrets, one by one. But he knew that no mortal span of years was long enough to absorb them all. Sometimes he shot ducks over the marshes; and there was no greater sport for him in the wilds than the first sight of a fine, black-pencil line upon the distant sky, the leap through the air that it made until, in an instant's flash, it evolved into a flock of mallard passing with the wind; and then the test of eye and nerve as he saw them over the sights.
His frame filled out. His face became swarthy from constant exposure. He gained in weight. A month glided by, and he began to see the first movement of the largest forest creatures down to the foothills. For not even the animals, with the exception of the hardy wolf pack, can survive if unprotected from the winter snow and cold of the high levels. The first snow sifted from the gray sky and quickly melted on the wet pine needles. And then the migration of the deer began in earnest. Before another week was done, Whisperfoot had cause to marvel where they had all gone.
One cloudy afternoon in early November found Silas Lennox cutting wood on the ridge behind his house. It was still an open question with him whether he and his daughter would attempt to winter on the Divide. Dan of course wanted to remain, yet there were certain reasons, some very definite and others extremely vague, why the prospect of the winter in the snow fields did not appeal to the mountaineer. In the first place, all signs pointed to a hard season. Although the fall had come late, the snows were exceptionally early. The duck flight was completed two weeks before its usual time, and the rodents had dug their burrows unusually deep. Besides, too many months of snow weigh heavily upon the spirit. The wolf packs sing endlessly on the ridges, and many unpleasant things may happen. On previous years, some of the cabins on the ridges below had human occupants; this winter the whole region, for nearly seventy miles across the mountains to the foothills, would be wholly deserted by human beings. Even the ranger station, twelve miles across a steep ridge, would soon be empty. Of course a few ranchers had homes a few miles beyond the river, but the wild cataracts did not freeze in the coldest of seasons, and there were no bridges. Besides, most of the more prosperous farmers wintered in the valleys. Only a few more days would the road be passable for his car; and no time must be lost in making his decision.
Once the snows came in reality, there was nothing to do but stay. Seventy miles across the uncharted ridges on snowshoes is an undertaking for which even a mountaineer has no fondness. It might be the wisest thing, after all, to load Snowbird and Dan into his car and drive down to the valleys. The fall round-up would soon be completed, Bill would return for a few days from the valleys with new equipment to replace the broken lighting system on the car, and they could avoid the bitter cold and snow that Lennox had known so long. Of course he would miss it somewhat. He had a strong man's love for the endless drifts, the crackling dawns and the hushed, winter forest wherein not even Woof or Whisperfoot dares to go abroad. He chopped at a great log and wondered what would suit him better,—the comfort and safety of the valleys or the rugged glory of the ridges.
But at that instant, the question of whether or not he would winter on the Divide was decided for him. And an instant was all that was needed. For the period of one breath he forgot to be watchful,—and a certain dread Spirit that abides much in the forest saw its chance. Perhaps he had lived too long in the mountains and grown careless of them: an attitude that is usually punished with death. He had just felled a tree, and the trunk was still attached to the stump by a stripe of bark to which a little of the wood adhered. He struck a furious blow at it with his ax.
He had n't considered that the tree lay on a steep slope. As the blade fell, the great trunk simply seemed to leap. Lennox leaped too, in a frenzied effort to save his life; but already the leafy bows, like the tendrils of some great amphibian, had whipped around his legs. He fell, struggling; and then a curious darkness, streaked with flame, dropped down upon him.
An hour later he found himself lying on the still hillside, knowing only a great wonderment. At first his only impulse was to go back to sleep. He did n'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.
He remembered now: the last blow and the rolling log. He tried to turn his head to look up to the hill.
He found himself wholly unable to do it. Something wracked him in his neck when he tried to move. But he did glance down. And yes, he could turn in this direction. And he saw the great tree trunk lying twenty feet below him, wedged in between the young pines.
He was surrounded by broken fragments of limbs, and it was evident that the tree had not struck him a full blow. The limbs had protected him to some extent. No man is of such mold as to be crushed under the solid weight of the trunk and live to remember it. He wondered if this were the frontier of death,—the grayness that lingered over him. He seemed to be soaring.
He brought himself back to earth and tried again to remember. Of course, the twilight had fallen. It had been late afternoon when he had cut the tree. His hand stole along his body; and then, for the first time, a hideous sickness came upon him. His hand was warm and wet when he brought it up. The other hand he could n't stretch at all.
The forest was silent around him, except a bird calling somewhere near the house—a full voice, rich and clear, and it seemed to him that it had a quality of distress. Then he recognized it. It was the voice of his own daughter, Snowbird, calling for him. He tried to answer her.
It was only a whisper, at first. Yet she was coming nearer; and her own voice sounded louder. "Here, Snowbird," he called again. She heard him then: he could tell by the startled tone of her reply. The next instant she was at his side, her tears dropping on his face.
With a tremendous effort of will, he recalled his speeding faculties. "I don't think I'm badly hurt," he told her very quietly. "A few ribs broken—and a leg. But we 'll have to winter here on the Divide, Snowbird mine."
"What does it matter, if you live," she cried. She crawled along the pine needles beside him, and tore his shirt from his breast. He was rapidly sinking into unconsciousness. The thing she dreaded most—that his back might be broken—was evidently not true. There were, as he said, broken ribs and evidently one severe fracture of the leg bone. Whether he had sustained internal injuries that would end his life before the morning, she had no way of knowing.
At that point, the problem of saving her father's life fell wholly into her hands. It was perfectly plain that he could not aid himself in the slightest way. It was evident, also, he could not be moved, except possibly for the distance to the house. She banished all impulse toward hysteria and at once began to consider all phases of the case.
His broken body could not be carried over the mountain road to physicians in the valleys. They must be transported to the ranch. It would take them a full day to make the trip, even if she could get word to them at once; and twenty-four hours without medical attention would probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.
It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive, by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about the valley.
Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give. The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the house.
He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.
One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human form,—a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman. She knew at once that this problem was solved.
The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the limp body still across her shoulders.
It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed, on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of the interior doors.
She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots—needed sorely for the steep climb—and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the dark trees when she started out.
Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and complained because he could find no deer.