by Max Brand
She herself had not moved from her place after first coming into the clearing; but the stranger suddenly bounded from his tree-stump chair as though shot upward from springs. He landed upon his feet, facing her, and at the side of a tree trunk, behind which he disappeared. In no longer a time than it takes the camera shutter to wink back and forth, this picture was rubbed out, and she found herself alone in the clearing.
There was a little touch of fear in her, then. But she shrugged her shoulders and forced that weak sensation away. Then she crossed the clearing and followed a curious impulse which made her sit upon the stump just where the stranger had sat, and raise her head. But having done so, she did not see the moon or the sky. She closed her eyes to all of that. Instead, far up the canyon she heard the noise of the racing man hunt as it thundered along at the heels of its prey.
Apparently the cliff faces on either side of the valley were so placed by a freak of nature that they reflected all the sounds from the upper valley as mirrors will repeat light, and focused them, faintly to be sure, at this particular point. But how could this long-haired stranger have known the thing? Where was he when the hunt rushed past, sweeping across this very clearing? Suddenly, she knew that the black-haired youth was standing just behind her, watching her as still as a stone!
VIII. LISTENING
THERE WAS NO doubt about her fear now; it froze her in a great cold wave; but like all people who are naturally very brave, the touch of fear simply startled her at once into action, and, jumping down from the stump, she whirled about and faced him. For her instinct had not been wrong; he had been standing just behind her, and he was still there, his arms folded, his black hair falling around a sun-darkened face, very thin, and oddly handsome. He was not a small man, but so slender of foot and hand and standing with such a strange lightness, that he gave her a singular impression of fragility. He might be in age anything from twenty-two to thirty, for he was one of those odd people upon whom time, during youth, leaves only negligible traces.
From the instant she faced him she lost all her fear; there remained in her only pity that so weak a creature should be living here in the forest like a wild Indian; for Indian dark though his skin was, he had the regular features and the great and open eye of a white man; and if there still lingered in her blood a little chill of that first strangeness in his appearance, it merely sharpened her attention.
He was dressed almost in rags. He wore tight-fitting trousers of deerskin, after a vanished Indian fashion, and even the leather had been worn almost to tatters by his rough life. Upon his feet were moccasins. He wore a shirt of which the sleeves had apparently been worn to bits, so that now they had been trimmed off nearly to the shoulders and exposed his long, narrow arms, as sun-browned as his face.
After this second and closer survey of him, what seemed wonderful to the girl was that he should have ventured to come out again and have faced her, for his whole air and manner was one of the most perfect aloofness. He had folded his arms and looked at her so quietly and steadily, that he might have been thought to be viewing a species of strange plant, an oddity in trees, rather than a human being. Rose was very distinctly uncomfortable. Her early pity died away. She found that she was forgetting the tatters in which he was dressed, and she was unconscious of anything about him saving the large, clear eyes and the thin face, so cleanly carved, so carefully made.
“What are they hunting?” he asked her. “Why are they running in the middle of the night? Have they rounded up a mountain lion? Surely they don’t run the lions without a pack of dogs!”
The clearness with which he enunciated, the ease of his speech, all told a great deal to Rose; it meant an educated mind, and that a man of education, perhaps of real and fine culture, should be existing in this guise in the woods was more wonderful than ever.
“It’s a robber who broke into my father’s house,” she told him.
He seemed to pay no attention to one part of what she said, but was the more shocked by the other half.
“Is it a man they are hunting? Are there really people who ride after others all night — as if they were beasts?”
“Don’t you understand?” she told him. “This robber broke into my father’s house and took away thousands of dollars.”
“So they are going to take his life for that. Well, if you had a million of dollars, could you make a new life? Could you buy it in a market?”
She decided that his brain was a little touched. “You’ve come up here to spend a summer close to nature?” she said, abruptly turning the subject.
He waved his hand, though she could not tell whether it was to brush away her conjecture or assent to it. But she had an ample stock of assurance. She was one of those girls who unite with the flower and loveliness of a woman the sharp eye and the steady hand of a man; and she talked to the stranger with the intellectual confidence of a cow-puncher who has an enemy covered with his Colt.
“When I saw you at first,” she told him frankly, “I thought that you were a wild Indian.”
He shrugged his shoulders as though her conjectures did not interest him, and it occurred to Rose that he acted as though he was actually becoming bored.
“I was listening to the hunt,” he said coldly. “From that stump you can hear everything in the valley, almost. All the ground noises and all the tree sounds and all the winds speak out of the valley to this place. The walls are sounding boards, you know; and they focus here. You can hear everything on the edges of the valley, too. It’s a sort of a listening post, you might say.”
He stepped to the shattered stump and rested a hand upon it, raising his head as he had done when she first saw him. His eyes closed; his face relaxed as utterly as perfect sleep.
“Now you can hear, of course,” he said, and beckoned her to him. She, also, leaned across the stump. What she heard was the whisper of the wind among the pines, and, in the near distance, the dying scolding of a squirrel which had been awakened by the rushing of the horsemen through the night. There was the dull and melancholy voice of the little waterfall, also. But she knew that the man beside her was hearing other things. Presently he began to explain.
“That wolf you hear calling up the valley,” he said, “is the old she-devil with only three toes on her left forefoot. She was murdering calves on the Wilson ranch a week ago; they ran her up to the summits, or very nearly there; then gave up the chase. Now she is coming back!”
“Were you on the Wilson ranch a week ago?”
“I was near.”
She held her peace and thought the more. The Wilson ranch was a matter of a hundred and eighty miles away, and the intervening region was a tumbled and jagged mass of raw rocks and steep-browed mountains, all giants. To have traveled that distance upon foot, as the outfit of the stranger suggested that he had done, to have crossed those knife-edged rocks with moccasined feet, was truly marvelous. Quickly she estimated that distance. Then she turned to the subject at hand. She had not heard the cry of the wolf; and even now, though she knew from what point to expect it, and though she strained her attention, she could not hear a sound comparable with the devilish wailing of a lobo.
“There!” he said suddenly. “The noise of that hunt frightened him almost to death.” He chuckled at the thought. “He ran as fast as he could run, and you know a mountain lion can go faster than the wind for a little distance. But now he’s got his courage back; he’s coming down the valley again. Listen to the silly fellow warn every creature in the mountains that he’s coming! He’s telling them all to stay in their holes or up their trees on the thin little branches where he can’t get at ’em. How he’s booming now! Sometimes I think that that rolling thunder of his so frightens them that they are frozen. Besides, the echoes pick up his voice so fast that I suppose they hardly know from which direction he’s coming, and if they try to run, they may dash right into his jaws.”
She was growing worried. He talked as if the very air trembled with the roaring of the hunter, and yet her own k
een ears did not hear a sound. She told him so, and at this he replied by taking her wrist, not with a foolish familiarity, but with fingers as steady and as cool as a rock; there was a suggestion of strength, too, in that touch, which made her able to understand that gigantic march across the mountains.
That wonder passed quickly from her mind. It was as though this strange fellow were saying: “Listen! Listen!”
No doubt it was simply the effect of absolute quiet, rocklike stillness of body and brain, yet it seemed to her that something flowed into her from the cool fingers, and all the borders of her mind were enlarged, her senses were purged from a mist. The fragrance of the evergreens touched her with a new and stinging sweetness, the cold of the mountain night wind passed into her very blood, and then into the dim borders of her consciousness were borne new sounds, first a faint and far-off wailing which made her shudder — that was the cry of the wolf coming down the draw; then she heard the cry of the mountain lion.
Contrasted even with the feeble voice of the waterfall they were sounds as faint as the shining of a new moon compared with the blaze of noonday, and yet they were clear. He released her hand; and instantly she heard the noises no longer. She might explain that through her sudden excitement and the quickening of her heartbeat, and yet she told herself that there was something more which could not be explained. Though she was as calmly practical as any man, yet she found herself believing that here was a mystery beyond explaining.
“The wolf has heard the lion hunting,” said the stranger. “One last yell — you hear it? — and now he is silent and goes sulking off on a new trail, I suppose.”
She watched him sharply, but there was no affectation of the charlatan about him. He was as little excited as though he had simply called her attention to one of the neighboring trees.
“How long have you lived like this?” she asked him suddenly.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Four or five years, I suppose.”
“Four or five years! In these mountains?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You and the others live by day,” he said. “That’s why they never see me. Except for the fur traders, you’re the only person I’ve talked to in all the times I’ve been here.”
“You’ve grown lonely, then?”
He hesitated. “Tonight — after I saw you — but only a little. You see, I’ve had the fear always that sooner or later I’d be pulled back to my own kind. When I watched you from the trees it seemed to me that I was surer of that than ever before.”
It was only a suggested compliment, but it pleased her wonderfully; she could feel her heart softening toward him every moment they continued their talk.
“Then I saw,” he continued, “that I’d have to come out and talk with you. Otherwise you’d go home and tell them that you had seen a wild man in the woods and they’d start out to hunt me — just as they’re hunting that poor fellow far away — far away yonder in the draw. Listen! They’re shooting. Perhaps that means they’ve cornered him. Perhaps that only means that they’re giving up hope of getting him and they’re firing at random in the hope of bringing him down.”
She listened and heard nothing; but had he touched her, she had a perfect confidence that she could have made out the distant fusillade clearly enough.
VIII. NO MYSTERY
IN THAT SHORT pause she stepped back and looked at herself and this stranger in perspective, so to speak, and what she saw she wondered at. She had an almost irresistible desire to know more of him, to mine down toward the very roots of his heart and find out all the emotions which actuated him. Other men she knew were interesting enough; but here was one who offered a real problem if she would even faintly comprehend him. Something was missing, too, which should be there. She was only beginning to see what it was; another man would not have been able to stay so long with her in the dark of the forest, with the spotting of moonshine like fallen silver here and there, without making pretty speeches.
She detested compliments, perhaps because they had always fallen to her share in such abundance, and more than once she had found herself wishing that her face were plain; then she would be taken for her real worth, and beauty, surely, is a matter of flesh only. However, there was no question of pretty speeches in the stranger. He talked to her as though she were a man, and in spite of herself she could not say that such a conversation was exactly to her liking. As for the hunt of the robber, she had not the slightest interest in him.
“But do you think,” she said, “that having seen you and talked to you, you are any less strange? Do you think you are like other men?”
“No difference in the world,” he assured her, almost with irritation. “There’s not a shadow of mystery about me.”
He broke off to say in a whisper: “There’s a little bright-eyed rascal of a Douglas squirrel peering at us from that branch yonder. I’ll make him talk!”
He whistled a bar or two of a song which was vaguely familiar to her, as though something she might have heard her grandfather sing in her infancy. The moment his whistling ended, from a great branch near by, a squirrel began to bark furiously; then fell as suddenly silent.
“No one can be lonely with such talkers around, eh?” murmured the man of the forest, and she wondered at him more than ever.
He went on calmly: “That’s why I came out to talk to you,” he said; “to show you that I’m just like other people, except that I have a few different habits. Then I thought that you might be willing not to talk about me. I thought you might promise that, if I were willing to answer any question you cared to ask. Because I know that it’s only things we’re half familiar with that seem worth gossiping about.”
“I have no right to ask you questions; I have no right to inquire into your life,” she said, flushing.
“And I have no right,” said he, “to ask you not to tell other people that you saw a queer man living like an Indian and acting like an idiot. I’ve no right to keep you from sending twenty riders and a pack of dogs on my trail — for my own good, to bring me in where I can be taken care of.”
He made a grimace.
“Well,” she said, tormented by curiosity more terrible than the hunger for forbidden fruit, “suppose we strike the bargain, then. I’ll give you my hand that I’ll never mention your existence; and in exchange you’ll tell me who you are and why you are here.”
“It’s so simple you may be tempted not to believe. But you see, I promised that I’d show you that I’m no mystery. It’s all as straight as a string, and a very short string at that!”
At this, he rolled himself a cigarette, slowly, shaking his head a little, as though he found it hard to believe that the former self upon which he was now staring could really have been his flesh and his blood and his brain. He lighted his smoke, and then told his story.
“I was living in a big Eastern city,” he told her at last. “I was fighting two enemies, a failing business and consumption. They beat me together. On the same day I failed for a small sum, but just enough to bankrupt me, and then I went to a sanitarium where the doctor made me strong enough to sit up at the end of six months. He told me that what I really needed was a year or two of clear, mountain air. ‘But I suppose,’ said he, ‘that your business will not let you.’
“As he said it, he struck a weight from my shoulders. All through my sickness, as a matter of fact, I had been tormenting myself with the problem of how on earth I could go back into the harness and pull out the wagon of my affairs which was stuck so deep in the mud. Suddenly, while he talked, I took a new view of the whole affair. What was business to me except ruin? Why should I not go where I could live freely? He advised me to keep away from the excitement of men. Why not a life in the wilderness?
“So I tried it. I raised enough money to pay a passage West, and at this end of the line I bought a rifle, a revolver, ammunition, a few simple traps, some coffee and some bread, and I started out to make my living. It
wasn’t easy at first. I didn’t know how to fish, or how to shoot, or how to trap. I was so ignorant that I had to find a new way of learning. What I did was to start studying the animals I had to live on by hunting.
“Because, if I wanted to have meat, I had to get almost close enough to it to touch it, before I could be sure that my shot would bring it down. The result was that I studied them day and night — but chiefly by night. After all, I was a meat eater, a beast of prey. And when do the other beasts of prey go out to hunt? They go by night, of course. So I used to say to myself in those days — they were wonderfully hungry and wonderfully happy days, too — I said to myself: ‘I am a mountain lion; and I must do exactly as it does, except that I shall not be so foolish as to make a noise while I hunt, and that I shall use a leaden bullet instead of teeth and claws for bringing down my prey. Aside from that, I must learn how a mountain lion hunts.”
“How terrible!” murmured the girl, and, she added: “And wonderful, also!”
“But it was not from the lions that I learned the most,” said he. “My chief tutor was an old grizzly with more wisdom packed away in her old head than any dozen men I have ever known. I follow her every year. When I come across her trail it’s like meeting an old friend. As long as I have followed her and studied her, I never come near that clever old veteran without learning something new.
“She’s a rascal, of course. I suppose most very clever people are. She’s a cattle killer, you know. But she’s not like most of that sort of bear. She kills cattle, but only now and then when other provisions run low. It’s exactly as if she understood that it’s a dangerous business to venture onto the fenced-off lands of men. After she’s made a killing, and eaten the animal, she heads for the highest mountains with her cubs and lives on insects and roots and rabbits above timber line for a while, keeping a lookout all the time.