The Ocean's Menace

by Archibald Rutledge

  The Ocean’s Menace

  The Ocean’s Menace

  ARCHIBALD RUTLEDGE

  Introduction and Afterword by Jim Casada

  Illustrations by Stephen Chesley

  THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

  A Project of South Carolina Humanities

  © 2018 University of South Carolina

  Published by the University of South Carolina Press

  Columbia, South Carolina 29208

  www.sc.edu/uscpress

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov

  ISBN: 978-1-61117-815-9 (cloth)

  ISBN: 978-1-61117-817-3 (leather)

  ISBN: 978-1-61117-816-6 (e-book)

  Front cover illustration by Stephen Chesley

  Contents

  Introduction

  Jim Casada

  The Ocean’s Menace

  Afterword

  Jim Casada

  Introduction

  Jim Casada

  ARCHIBALD HAMILTON RUTLEDGE (1883–1973) quite possibly ranks as South Carolina’s most prolific literary figure ever. Even more impressive than the scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of poems he published is the diversity of his literary output. He was South Carolina’s first poet laureate, a post he held for upwards of three decades. Supposedly on not one but two occasions he was the runner-up for the Nobel Prize in literature. As a hunting writer “Old Flintlock,” as Rutledge was fondly known to family and friends, was incredibly prolific, with nationally recognized expertise on the quest for white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, grouse, and other species. His nature writings garnered him the prestigious John Burroughs Medal. Short inspirational books with comforting titles such as Beauty in the Heart, Life’s Extras, and Peace in the Heart lightened the days and brightened the ways of hundreds of thousands of readers. Poetry ranging from exquisitely constructed sonnets to free verse which flows with the silky smoothness of Rutledge’s beloved Santee River graced the pages of major national magazines on an almost monthly basis.

  For the man’s fans, and legions of them remain today, a full three decades-plus after his death, his efforts in all these literary genres are well known. Yet one salient aspect of Rutledge’s endeavors, the one which in many senses brought him to the attention of editors on a national level and began to put welcome funds in his bank account, has largely been forgotten. This is his production in the field which might be described as children’s literature.

  To be sure, what readers in the first third of the last century considered appropriate and engaging material for youngsters differs dramatically from that of today’s world. Most, if not all, of what Rutledge wrote for youthful audiences would now be considered “over their heads,” of little interest, or possibly inappropriate. In the latter context he regularly wrote stirring adventure tales about what he liked to describe as chimeras (a word which in all likelihood not one in a hundred contemporary adolescents would recognize). These stories involved gigantic versions of diamondback rattlesnakes, sharks, alligators, wild hogs, cottonmouth water moccasins, and other dangerous creatures of the wilds. While his chimera stories were fictional in nature, they had a solid underpinning of factual information. Without exception they involved beasts with which Rutledge was intimately familiar and which he had encountered, as a boy and a man, on his beloved Hampton Plantation near McClellanville, South Carolina.

  In terms of both quantity and quality, all of his contributions to children’s literature are impressive. It might also be noted that his work figured prominently in the readers and anthologies which were in commonplace usage in classrooms during the first half of the last century. Among the magazines to which he contributed were American Boy, Black Cat, Boys’ Magazine, Boys’ Own Magazine, Classmate, Haversack, Ideal Youth, Open Road for Boys, Target, and Youth’s Companion—a partial listing at best.

  Rutledge’s writings in this field have been largely overlooked by posterity, often dismissed as being of little interest, at least for adult audiences, simply because they were originally written for juveniles. Book publishers are also culpable in this regard. Most of Rutledge’s book-length works of prose are anthologies comprised of chapters which originally appeared in magazines. With a few notable exceptions his chimera stories are missing from these books, and to my knowledge about the only use of these tales since Rutledge’s death has been the reprinting of a couple of them in the popular outdoor magazine, Sporting Classics. Interestingly this publication is considered to be top drawer, a magazine geared specifically to the thinking, well-educated outdoorsman. One has to wonder how many of its readers, as they enjoyed tales such as “Death in the Moonlight” or “The Spectre of Tiger Creek,” realized the material was originally intended for youngsters.

  Rutledge must also shoulder some of the blame for the ephemeral nature of his writings for juveniles. With one noteworthy exception, there is little indication he made much effort to incorporate them in his books. That exception focuses on one of his earliest books, Old Plantation Days. Or, to be more precise, on two books bearing that same title.

  Although no date of publication is given, it seems almost certain that the first rendition of Old Plantation Days was from the Eddy Press Corporation of Cumberland, Maryland, about fifty miles south of the boarding school where Rutledge taught English for many years. It comprises one hundred and sixty pages and eighteen stories, and I have been able to locate thirteen of them as they appeared in magazines. All of these were published between 1908 and 1911, and all but one in magazines for adolescents. This suggests that the Eddy Press version was likely published in 1912 or 1913, and it probably involved the same basic approach Rutledge used for some of his earlier books such as Under the Pines and Other Poems (1906), Plantation Song (1908), and The Banners of the Coast (1908). It is worth noting that Under the Pines also bears the Eddy Press imprint, a fact which pretty well puts paid to the suggestion, made by some Rutledge students, that Old Plantation Days was pirated by that printer. Another circumstance arguing against the book having been published without the author’s knowledge or permission is the fact that there are copies of the Eddy edition bearing Rutledge’s signature, dated Christmas 1913.

  My personal view is that Rutledge underwrote its publication as a privately printed item or what was in those days sometimes known as a vanity publication. Whatever the precise nature of the Eddy edition’s origins, it differs appreciably from the more common 1921 edition published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, an edition still available to this day. The two books share thirteen stories in common. The Eddy Press edition has five stories which are unique to it. Similarly the Stokes edition has fourteen new stories. The Eddy Press version is extremely rare and was likely printed in an edition of no more than 200 to 250 copies. I personally have seen only three copies of the Eddy edition in a lifetime of reading and collecting Rutledgeiana, and the paucity of listings in the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, not to mention on Internet sources, is suggestive. A check of listings on the latter found a single copy—at a whopping $5,000 plus—on offer. That may be a bit higher than the work’s retail value, but unquestionably the book is extremely rare.

  As a result, the five tales found in it which do not appear in the 1921 edition—“The Egret’s Plumes,” “Claws,” “The Ocean’s Menace,” “The Heart of Regal,” and “The Doom of Ravenswood”—are unfamiliar to virtually all lovers of Rutledge’s writings. Therein lies the genesis of this project, published in partnership between South Carolina Humanities and the University of South Carolina Press. Bringing these tales back into print provides today’s r
eaders with a chance to enjoy forgotten tales from Old Flintlock, to sample and savor his work as an author of juvenile literature, and to garner eye-opening exposure to how much material aimed at an adolescent audience has changed over the passage of a century.

  Changes in the nature of reading tastes notwithstanding, there is a timelessness in Rutledge’s writing, a quality of literary appeal, which makes these stories enduring and endearing. They are as interesting and intriguing as they were when originally published. The pieces reveal a young author in the making, and in them we see ample evidence of the characteristics which would be salient ones throughout Rutledge’s career—a comfortable intimacy with his subject, a rare understanding of the natural world, an enviable mastery of words, and the unerring feel of a masterful storyteller. Like virtually everything Rutledge wrote, these tales of forgotten days and vanished ways belong to the ages.

  The Ocean’s Menace

  ALL THE HAUNTED PLACES have their spectres; and the Ocean was haunted. What was its spectre? No one knew. But that there was a spectre everyone believed. The negroes thought that there might be many; the white people felt sure that there was at least one. Woodsmen told tales of its strange silence; turpentine hands, ranging as deeply into the heart of the woods as any men alive, feared it without shame and spoke of it with awe. There was a tradition that two brothers, years before the War, had followed a wounded deer into the Ocean and had never returned. There were vague stories coming to the plantations from time to time of a spectre that had been seen at twilight on the borders of that mysterious domain; and weird cries that no man could interpret had been heard sounding out of the great silence that those inclined to superstition held to be the pitiful laments of the victims of the Ocean’s silent spectre.

  In the language of the Santee country, the Ocean means that vast, lonely, and unsearchable swamp lying between Islington Place and Montgomery Plantation. It is thought to be seven miles long by six miles wide. Its edges are fringed with lush growths of bays, festooned with smilax; with quaking blankets of gay-colored sphagnum moss; with a statelier height of pines and black-gums; and with long reaches of green and ambered-colored broomgrass retiring mistily into the deeper and darker confines of the swamp. Far back in the Ocean, and faintly visible to the eye of one standing on its borders, the giant yellow pines uprise; beyond them are dim figures of lordly tupelos; and farthest of all are discernible, gray and remote, the moss-shrouded cypresses, like druid priests, at guard over some mystery that lies beyond them.

  No one had ever penetrated the Ocean—at least, no one who had ever returned. When deer took refuge there, the chase was abandoned; when hounds entered it, they might be days in getting home, and Major Biddecomb had once lost a pair of fox-hounds by sending them after a “red” into that terrible swamp; when men attempted to ride into it, they were called fools for their pains, and came out of the quagmiry, gruesome place with feelings toward themselves in accord with their friends’ opinions. The Ocean was a place of refuge for every hunted creature. Wherever a deer might be jumped, and however long the pursuit might last, the wily animal would at length head for the Ocean; and if he could not then be cut off, he would be lost.

  Wary old gobblers, that could out-trot a Kentucky mare and that seemed unapproachable by men, were often glimpsed along the borders of the Ocean; but a quick run, a lightening-swift dodge into the thicket margins—and they were engulfed. On two occasions negroes, ranging the woods for blueberries, had come upon bear-tracks near the great swamp and had not tarried on the scene for further investigations.

  So the Ocean remained inviolate and primeval; the virgin timber, the tall grasses, the exotic flowers, the strange silences, and the stranger noises. To man its doors were closed, and seemed to be closed forever.

  Sidney West, the young rice-planter who was trying to make a living working Fanny Mead Plantation, had never purposely intended to investigate the Ocean and its mysteries. But when the three-prong buck that he had jumped on the edge of the swamp had headed into the forbidden land, he made up his mind to follow. And his determination was strengthened by the fact that he believed the deer to be badly wounded.

  He knew the place well enough to know that he could not ride a horse into it; so he tethered the animal in a little thicket of scrub pines where the gauze-winged flies were not apt to be troublesome. Then he struck out after his one hound that was rejoicing over the hot scent that led into the Ocean. West came to where the fresh trail of the buck crossed the damp sand of an old abandoned turpentine road; he stooped exultantly over the clean-cut, incisive hoofmarks and the tiny splashes of red that were beside them.

  “He’s mine,” the hunter muttered, “if that fool dog keeps his head and his nose.”

  And so in earnest the pursuit began.

  A wounded deer, when not pressed by dogs, will not go far. It will stop warily, conserving its strength. Breathless in some scented bay-thicket or lying down in the open woods, it will wait until the first snapped twig or the first glimpse of a follower sends it bounding away again. But Sidney’s deer apparently had no intention of stopping. It kept on running straight into the heart of the Ocean. The hound, it is true, was trailing it, but the hound was very slow. Still, he was fast enough to keep well ahead of his master, who struggled panting after him, always some hundred yards in the rear, which was as much as half a mile in thickets like those in the Ocean.

  The sun was two hours high; but among the great trees, and under the shade and the dense canopy of the foliage, pendant moss, and rioting festoons of muscadine and smilax vines, there was already a gently grey twilight, shot through with fiery lances of the sun. August was at its height of fruit and bloom; and the air in the swamp was heavy with the rich fragrance of bull-grapes and huckleberries; while the strange brilliant flowers that grew up out of the morasses gave forth odors as luring and as enchanting as those of the Orient.

  But this was no time for a study of beauty; and Sidney pressed on as best he might after the fleet-footed buck that he feared was distancing him. He was trying to follow the hound, and at the same time to keep his sense of direction. He must not only be able to get into the Ocean, but he must be able to make an exit from its fastness. He thought of the two brothers who had been lost, and wondered on their fate. Yet the swamp did not seem to him at this time so terrible as its sinister reputation had led him to expect it would be. He had often been in similar places; true, the briars were bigger, and their thorns stung like wasps; the scenery was wilder and grander than that of other swamps; but he saw nothing that he did not understand, nothing that he could not explain.

  “Spectre!” he growled to himself, pausing on a sandy ridge to get his breath after a tussle with a thicket, “pshaw! I wonder what fool started all those stories. There may be a bear or two in this place; and I’d like the best in the world to get a shot at one. But as for anything else—!”

  He snapped out the words contemptuously; and yet, as he continued on his way down the ridge, his heart misgave him. Because, try as he might, and say what he would, he could not help feeling and knowing that he had never been in such a place before. There was a spirit in the air that haunted him with nameless fears, and that recalled to him the tales that had so impressed him as a child, of disaster and misfortune. Why should he keep repeating to himself with exasperating monotony, “the undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns”? What was it that oppressed him and made him want to give up the chase? Was it fancy? Was it fear? He called himself a fool, and kicked the gallberry bushes viciously as he strode, but with apparently no relief to his feelings. He had a most uncomfortable feeling that something was scrutinizing him, that he was being gazed upon by something that he could not see. But this he believed to be due to his growing exhaustion, to his strange surroundings, and to the ancient mystery of the place.

  Plein-air charcoal drawing, Congaree National Park, 2:20 P.M., Friday, December 28, 2016.

  Along the ridge, where half-bare spaces made it possib
le to follow the deer tracks easily, Sidney found himself beginning to doubt whether he would overtake his quarry. There were no further visible traces of blood, neither could he see that the buck’s “blind” hoofs were sagging to the sand—the surest sign of mortal weakening. At that he grew disheartened, took off his hat, baring his head to the sunset wind, and heaved a long sigh.

  “Don’t believe I crippled him, after all,” was his comment. “That blood may have been from a scratch wound. But he isn’t hit hard, I know that.”

  He was about to communicate his opinion to his hound, that had now trailed far ahead, when that optimistic creature suddenly changed his half-whining following note to one of great excitement; he opened full cry, and Sidney heard a tremendous bound in the bay-thicket ahead. He rushed forward, broke through the tangle, and came abruptly on a strange scene. For, forty yards away, in a green cup-like hollow of the swamp, the great buck that he had pursued was struggling as if with a mortal wound. The hunter marked the towering antlers in velvet, saw the heave of the flanks, glimpsed the pleading light of the wide soft eyes. He threw up his gun; but on second thought he lowered it, laid it on the ground, and ran toward the deer, drawing his hunting-knife as he ran. He was so excited and so filled with delight with the prospect of gaining the coveted prize that he paid no attention to his footing, nor to the strange growths about his ankles, nor indeed to the odd situation of the deer. His first intimation of danger was sudden: the earth under his feet gave sickeningly, engulfingly. He was now within a few feet of the buck that he saw was laboring, not with a wound, but in the fell clutches of quicksands. The hunter’s right hand, still gripping the open knife, was on the deer’s haunches when the bottom of the sinister pit seemed to sink beneath him, and he clutched the animal and clung to him. With that touch Sidney felt a change in their relations. They were no longer pursuer and pursued, but equally in danger, and equally apparently doomed.