by Max Brand
“Blue gentian — and wild asters — and here — breathe of this!”
He gave her a soft tuft of greenery which she pressed to her face and inhaled the rich fragrance of clover blossoms that the bees love. She had followed to the center of the little space, and here he dropped on one knee beside a rivulet which wandered through the center of the meadow.
“Here is the spirit of the place,” he told her gently. “It has no voice for you, at first. But if you kneel here for a moment and listen — hardly breathing”
She obeyed him. She kneeled by the edge of the water and listened, half closing her eyes, and presently she could hear it — a most delicate lacework of sound, rustling through the grasses where they advanced a step into the stream, and the easy coiling of the current as it turned the corners or swerved lazily toward the bank on either side; and now and again, when a breeze shivered across the grasses of the meadow, there was the faint lapping of small waves upon the shore.
She stayed there for a long moment, until the rivulet grew as a dream grows into a vast and winding sheet of water — a mighty river, going slow and solemn, toward the verge of the sea. The grasses became as tall and as dark as ancient forest along the banks, and the trees were hills.
Then he rose, the dream snapped, she stood beside him once more.
“Night is the time,” he told her, speaking as softly as though he feared to frighten something away from her. “But there is quite another beauty in the day. There are a thousand insects quavering here and there over the blossoms, and great butterflies with wings as bright as aspen leaves in autumn. There are birds, too, and everything with some manner of a voice; it is a great chorus to think of, but in fact it is all so small and blended that one thought or lifting of the eyes will drown it all.
“Besides that is a drowsy time; it is so brilliant and so stirring that one begins to yawn, but at night there is no life here except the things which are rooted in the soil, and that is the best of all. If you want more, you can call up the other things with a thought, and see the ghosts of them. The birds are shadows, with the songs you remember coming into your mind, and the butterflies are tilting over the tops of the grasses as pale as moths in the moonlight.”
He turned abruptly upon her, frowning. “These are some of the reasons I come here,” he told her.
She nodded. “I understand, or try to. I’ve kept the mountains in mind just as things to climb, or look at against the sky; I’ve never dreamed of making them intimates, as you’ve done.”
He sighed with what might have been relief. “I hoped you’d see” He did not go on to say what, but added with a sudden change of voice and an enthusiasm which charmed her: “There are other things to watch and to know here, of course. Do you know how this meadow was made?”
“Made?” she asked.
“Of course. There’s a reason for everything in the mountains, every valley and hollow and head of a peak, just as much as there are reasons behind the wrinkles in a man’s face. A glacier plowed a hollow out of the bedrock just here. When it melted away, the hollow became a lake with snow creeks running into it, rolling down pebbles and a little sand. That formed a margin of silt along the edges of the lake; grasses and sedges began to grow. More rock and silt were washed down. The trees sprang up around the lake, and finally the lake itself was filled to the brim with sediment; it became as level as you see it; the grasses rolled across it, and here you are with a natural lawn.”
“Have you learned all this since you came to the mountains?” she asked him.
“A person can’t learn such things in a moment; I began when I was a youngster. You see, I’m going to explain myself so thoroughly that when I’m done you’ll know me from end to end; then you can close the book and put it away, and we’ll bother each other no more. When I was a boy, I was a bit frail; it was a mile from our cottage to the village where the school was, but even that walk was too long for me. It used to seem an age from the first sight of the little white house and the blue shutters to the time when I stepped onto the brick walk and heard the gate creak behind me. The doctor took me out of school and told my mother to keep me in the open.
“I had two years of it, and it was heaven. The place I hunted was a creek which ran through the hollow, west of the house. It had a young forest along its banks. There were a hundred kinds of birds nesting in the branches; there were a hundred kinds of lizards and water dogs, to say nothing of fish. Well, I learned that creek as well as I could. I was so interested that no weather could keep me indoors. Even in winter when the fogs blew in from the bay and rolled over the top of the hill and blotted out the walnut orchard, I still went out to the creek and found what I could find; and I was never disappointed. That was the time when I began to learn. So that when I was thrown into these mountains so many years later, I had starting points to go on from. Shall I tell you more about this meadow?”
“More about yourself. Much, much more!”
“That’s too long a trail. This is the hunting I promised you.”
“But I thought it would be”
“A killing?”
“Yes.”
“There can be that, too, if you wish. I expect to see an old enemy of mine here this very night.”
“Without a weapon?”
“I have this,” he said, drawing out a revolver. “Since the work is to be at close hand, it will do as well as a rifle.”
He smiled down at her, though the shadows from the moonlight changed the smile into a sardonic mask.
XIX. A KILLING
SHE WAS BEGINNING to understand, now. This was no case of a lonely wanderer leading a sad life in a wilderness, for that wilderness spake as steadily and as clearly to him as did the printed page of a book to her. He could not be alone. Even a desert of sands and rocks was constantly telling him its story, speaking in a slow voice of hundreds of centuries; and here in the forest life must be passing about him in a joyous quickstep. No, it was she who felt a lonely and a barren life from the contrast.
She asked him when the hunting began.
“I am hunting now,” he told her, “by waiting for him to come.”
“Does he move by the clock?”
“Very regularly, I assure you.”
“Do you mean,” she cried with a sudden horror,” that it is a man?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “A man is not so very formidable,” he told her. “There are other things in the mountains just about as terrible. For instance, if Madame Bruin should take a spite against me, I should be very worried indeed; a man would be much less. But mankind is the hundred-headed Hydra. If you strike off one head, two new ones spring out in its place. That is why I fear them. If you should let a whisper fall about me, it would be the end of me.
“For the sake of mere curiosity, men hunt through the polar ice to discover — what? The North Pole or the South? Oh, no! But simply to go where no one has ever gone before. They’d hunt me down. Ten fools might fail to find me; but that would only start a hundred trailing. They would keep at it day and night. When they found me, I could not escape. I’d be brought in for examination. They’d arrest me for vagrancy, I suppose!”
It was true enough, she knew. If she herself had merely heard of such a wanderer through the mountains, she could not have rested until she knew more about him. Indeed, here she was acting strangely enough to get at the heart of the wanderer, and yet the nearer she came to him, the more she found that was mysterious. After that he talked of other things. He pointed out the dimmer masses of the high peaks around them, which seemed to exercise a peculiar fascination over him. He told her how they were made — how the rocks had been folded up a mile higher than they now appeared to her; how the glacial age had sheeted the world with moving masses of snow, and snow compacted into ice, incredibly thick and terrible in power.
He told her how those glaciers had, at last, sculptured the peaks around them, and how the glacial age had passed; but still a few small ones at the very fountain heads of wha
t had once been giants, continued to flow slowly forward, completing the more delicate chiseling of what the ancient glaciers had blocked out with great, rough strokes.
“But where will it all end?” she asked him.
“At sea level,” he told her, smiling again. “Then another fold of rock will be pushed up in some other place, out of the bottom of the sea, perhaps, and the head of that mountain will begin to wear away just as this one has done.”
It seemed that with the gesture of his hand, the mountains rose; with the gesture of his hand they sank again.
“The time is very close, now,” he said suddenly. “My enemy is almost here.”
So, with a quickening heart, she followed him behind a great rock.
“Lie flat,” he told her, picking away some of the small boulders which encumbered the ground. “Lie flat; put your head in the hollow of your arm.”
She obeyed him. Instantly he slipped to the ground beside her. Nothing was said for a time. She took careful heed of her surroundings. The rocks which gave them their immediate shelter must have tumbled down the side of the mountain; they were big enough to have crushed their way through the forest as though the trees were mere standing reeds, but they had rolled down here so long ago that the forest had sprung up again in the path of the flying ruin. They were on the very edge of the glacier meadow, with the trees standing tall and regular as raised lances behind them, and the moon, which shone against them, covered them with the shadows of the rocks like black paint. She could hardly make out the form of the hunter beside her.
“Watch the hilltop to the west,” he told her. “But you’ll have to change your mind if you expect to see anything.”
“My mind?” she queried.
“Of course. Some thoughts are as loud as shouts. They tell people of danger that’s coming; they tell animals even more, but even men catch some of the wireless messages.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Haven’t you ever watched a hound hunting a hare. It has no sense of scent to speak of, and do you think it relies on its eyes alone? Not at all! What makes it leave one field and run for the next? Only that some frightened rabbit in that field has sighted the hound and is crouching there with its heart beating madly. Its very fear betrays it, you understand.”
“How horrible”
“Everything that’s true isn’t pretty. Still more — why does a horse halt and refuse for a time to go over a shaky bridge, even though he has never been that way before? What tells him that the bridge is weak? Why does a dog run out from under a tree in a thunderstorm just before the lightning strikes that very tree? Come still closer home — consider how much we live by guess and by taking chance. It’s as though we know that our instinct can guide us very safely and surely by avenues of knowledge which our conscious selves remain quite ignorant of.
“Have you never seen a gambler take his chance blindly? Sometimes he wins — sometimes when he is not concentrating too much on what he is trying to do! Why are the best gamblers the least excitable men? Because their carelessness enables that instinct to begin to work. I tell you, I have seen a man who now and then knew on what color the roulette wheel would stop! You will not believe at first, I suppose!”
“It bewilders me too much,” she admitted. “I know that I’ve tried to rely on chance — never with any luck.”
“Because you tried too hard. I knew a great gambler who was full of nerves. But he crushed away his nerves into nothingness by a tremendous effort of the will. He made his face immobile, and then he could win or lose with a smile or frown which had nothing to do with the true state of his emotions. No one could read his face. He kept his mind as empty as the brain of an infant, and he bet or did not bet according to what an instinct told him. When that instinct stopped speaking, he stopped playing. He played and won steadily for ten years.
“At forty he looked barely thirty. Then, in two years, he was smashed. His hair turned white; his face was filled with wrinkles, and the skin hung in pouches; and he died sitting in his chair after dinner, wrapped in a blanket for warmth, though it was a hot day. Of course it was simply the reaction of the nerves he had suppressed so long. The wave behind the boat became too great, overtook it, and swamped it.
“Now, if you look at the top of that western hill and make your mind a perfect blank, you will presently see something. But if you allow yourself to be consumed with curiosity, you may depend upon it that you will warn my enemy away!”
She obeyed him implicitly; for though she smiled at it at first, there was such an air of assured confidence about him that she could not help but do as he bade her. She made her mind a blank, thinking all thought away, making her very body limp.
“That is right!” she heard the faint murmur of her companion.
It struck her with sudden wonder; how, without turning his head, could he have known in what degree she had succeeded in obeying his instructions? Before she could resolve that question, a form appeared on the top of the western hill, just as the hunter had promised her, and paused there against the moonlit sky. It was no man, indeed, but a gigantic loafer wolf, with huge shoulders and sloping haunches — the head of a bear and the hind quarters of a jackal — a great, wise, cruel destroyer. He paused in this fashion for an instant.
Then he came down the hillside with his smooth trot, disappeared into the forest, and emerged with astonishing suddenness on the edge of the meadow. But now she could see him no more, for the rock blotted him from view. Neither could the hunter see, but suddenly he rose to his knees; there was a quick movement of feet through the grass of the meadow on the other side of the rock, and then the revolver barked, and the lone death cry of a wolf rang from mountain to mountain. Rose herself started up in time to see the monster leap high into the air. The wail and his life left him before he struck the earth, a limp weight.
“I saw him kill a yearling colt in a pasture one early summer dawn,” he told her, “and I’ve trailed him since. A beast that kills a horse is a mortal enemy of mine. I’ve worked for two years to get him; and the wise old devil has known it all the time. I’ve found his trail at the edge of my camp fire in the morning, where he’s stood and peered into my sleeping face, hungry to sink his teeth into my throat, but held back by something — Heaven knows what. Finally I stopped chasing him; I studied him.
“A man’s mind is a lot more terrible than a gun to a beast. I learned his ways, the old fox. He killed on both sides of the range, you see, colts or calves, he hardly cared which. In crossing this part of the range I always found that his trail cut across this glacier meadow; perhaps he liked the taste of some of the grasses here. At any rate, there’s one murderer less in the world!”
XX. JEREMY SAYLOR
HE BROUGHT HER back to the ranch house when the moon, in turn, was beginning to grow wan and fade to the dimness of a bit of silver cloud in the sky. In the shadow of the house he said goodby.
“I shouldn’t have seen you again,” he told her. “I knew it after that very first meeting; there was something fatal in you, and now I’m afraid — I’m very much afraid that all the forest and the mountains are dead things to me!”
She did not understand until she reached her room and her bed; but then the truth stole upon her with one delicious stride. All sufficient though he seemed, there was a flaw in the armor of the man of the forest; he was beginning to fear her strength; and that was only a way of saying that he could not let her out of his thoughts — in one word, he was beginning to love her!
Rose Kenworthy sat up in her bed and clasped herself in her arms and laughed into the darkness as silently as the man of the forest himself. She did not even know his name; she could not tell how much of his story was a lie, or whether there was a grain of truth in it. That made her lie down again and draw the covers close about her, grown suddenly cold with the suggestion. She lay in the bed, turning quickly this way and that as she remembered bits of that strange night. She would never forget a word or a step which they had taken
together. Then a shadow blotted her window. She looked up, and she saw that it was the man of the forest balanced there on the sill. But his face was pinched and haggard, and his eyes were deep behind a shadow.
Outside, the morning was brightening instantly. Suppose he should be seen? That thought drew her upright in the bed again, staring wildly at him.
“The moment I left you,” he said gloomily, “I knew the truth. I’ve come back to tell you my name. I am Jeremy Saylor. I’ve come to tell you that Jeremy Saylor loves you. Why I should tell you, God knows! It isn’t out of hope that you can care for a penniless vagabond of the mountains; but I’ve made a clean breast of it, and now, if you’ll tell me plainly and bluntly that I’ve made myself ridiculous, perhaps it will give me strength enough to stay away from you.”
He waited. But Rose could not speak. There was such a lightness of fear and of happiness in her mind that it seemed to her that the yellow sun of the midmorning was already pouring through the window — that a garden fragrance of roses was blowing through the room, and that the rattle of bird talk from the trees was the sweetest music playing over still waters.
“Or if you keep silent, Rose, I’ll think that I may dare to take a great hope into my heart; and if I do that, I must have you or die for you.”
Something stirred in the house; it struck a thrill of terror through her. “Go, go!” she cried to him. “They’ll see you — they’ll find you here and”
“I don’t care what ten thousand find or see. I only care what you”
“Come back today”
“Today?”
“Yes, yes — my father”
“My God, Rose, does it mean”
“I don’t know what it means”
“Before noon!” he called softly to her, and vanished from the window as though the dizzy height from the ground was no more to him than a mere step. Yet it so frightened her that she slipped from the bed and ran to look. He was not on the ground beneath the window; but now she heard a faint, shrill whistle from the nearest of the encircling trees which swung around that side of the house, and there she saw him among the shadows, waving to her. She pressed both her hands against her lips and threw them out to him, and then, realizing what she had done, she sank into a chair and looked almost stupidly around her for help and comfort. She had a strange feeling that she was besieged with a hundred dangers, and yet that danger was a more delightful happiness than any she had ever dreamed of.