The wolves had not yet come, if they were coming. Buck and Lem and Penny dismounted and tied the dogs to trees. A thin strip of color like a yellow ribbon lay low across the east. The autumn mist hung above it. Figures were visible only a few feet above the ground. At first the water-hole seemed deserted. Then bodies took shape here and there about it, as though the fog itself had solidified, still gray and tenuous. The antlers of a buck deer formed in the distance. Lem lifted his gun instinctively, then lowered it. The wolves were more important for the moment.
Mill-wheel murmured, “I don’t remember no stumps around that pond.”
As he spoke, the stumps moved. Jody blinked his eyes. The stumps were young bears. There were a good dozen of them. Two larger bears ambled slowly beyond them. They had not seen or winded the buck, or chose, to ignore him. The curtain of mist lifted higher. The band of color broadened in the east. Penny pointed. There was movement in the northwest. The forms of the wolves were barely visible, slipping down in single file as the humans had done. The keen nose of old Julia caught a faint taint and she lifted it high and wailed. Penny struck at her to hush her. She dropped flat to the ground.
The Forresters Go to Town (p. 288)
Penny whispered, “We ain’t got a chancet in the world o’ gittin’ a shot this way. We cain’t git clost enough.”
Buck’s whisper was a growl.
“How about a shot at the buck and mebbe the old bears?”
“Listen to me. One of us kin slip around to the east and south and make a quick dash acrost the south marsh. The wolves’ll be too fur down to turn back. They won’t go to the marsh. They’re obliged to come out to the woods right past where we be now.”
Acceptance of the idea was immediate.
“Go ahead.”
“Jody kin do it as good as a man. And he’s no shot. We’ll need all our shots here.”
“All right.”
“Jody, you ride down jest inside the edge o’ the woods yonder. When you git opposite that tallest pine, you cut right back acrost the marsh towards us here. Jest as you turn, take a pot-shot at the pack. Ne’ mind tryin’ to hit ’em. Git goin’. Go fast but quiet.”
Jody touched Cæsar’s rump and trotted away. His heart had jumped from its normal position and was beating somewhere high in his throat. His vision blurred. He was afraid he would never see the tall pine, and cut in too soon or too late and bungle the whole business. He rode unseeing. He straightened his back and slid one hand along the barrel of his gun. A blessed stiffening and clarity came to him. He picked out the pine before he reached it. He swung Cæsar’s head sharply to the right, dug his heels into him, slapped his neck with the reins and shot into the open. The marsh water flew under him. He saw the young bears scatter. He was afraid he had not come in far enough behind the wolves. The creeping pack ahead of him hesitated, on the verge of turning back the way they had come. He lifted his gun and shot behind them. They bolted in a mass. He held his breath. He saw them stream toward the scrub. He heard the barking of guns and the sound was music. He had done his part and it was out of his hands. He galloped around the south side of the pond toward the men. The tethered dogs lifted their voices. A single gun spoke now and again. His mind was clear. He wished that he had another shot. He was sure he could take it coolly and accurately.
Penny’s ruse had worked to perfection. A dozen of the gray bodies lay about on the earth. An argument was in progress. Lem wanted the dogs turned loose after the rest of the pack. Buck and Penny were opposed.
Penny said, “Lem, you know we ain’t got a dog kin run down one o’ them streaks o’ lightnin’. They won’t tree like a cat, they won’t turn at bay like a bear. They’ll run forever.”
Buck said, “He’s right, Lem.”
Penny turned excitedly.
“Look at what them young bears has done. They’ve treed. What say we have a go at ketchin’ ’em alive? Ain’t there a good price on the east coast for live creeturs?”
“That’s what they say.”
Penny swung up in the saddle and Jody eased back behind him.
“Take it easy, men, slower you work on this, better we’ll do.”
Three of the spring cubs, motherless, perhaps, long enough to have forgotten discipline, had not even treed. They sat on their haunches, crying like babies. They made no effort to escape. Penny tied the three together and looped the end of the rope around a large pine. Some of the cubs had only climbed saplings. It was a simple matter to shake them out and tie them too. Two others were high in a larger tree. Jody, as the lightest and nimblest, climbed after them. They climbed higher above him, then scrambled out on a limb. He edged along the limb. It was ticklish work to shake it without falling off himself. The limb cracked faintly. Penny shouted to him to wait. An oak limb was cut and trimmed and handed up. Jody slid down the tree until he could reach it and climbed back. He poked it at the cubs. They clung as though they had grown to the limb. At last they dropped. He climbed down.
The old bears and the buck had vanished with the first shot. Two yearling bears showed too much fight to be taken alive. They were sleek and plump and since both houses were in need of fresh meat, they were shot down for food. The take of cubs was ten.
Buck said, “Now wouldn’t Fodder-wing of loved to of seed this? Now I wisht he was alive to see it.”
Jody said, “If I didn’t have me Flag a’ready, I shore would carry one home.”
Penny said, “And you and hit both git barred out together.”
Jody went close and talked to the cubs. They lifted their sharp snouts, scenting him, and stood up on their hind legs.
He said, “Now ain’t you-all proud you goin’ to git to live?”
He moved closer and reached out a tentative hand to touch one. It raked its sharp claws across his sleeve. He jumped back.
He said, “They ain’t grateful, Pa. They ain’t a mite grateful we saved ’em from the wolves.”
Penny said, “You didn’t look at his eyes good. You picked a mean un to pet. I’ve done told you, where there’s twin cubs, one’ll be friendly and t’other’ll be mean. Now see kin you find one has got a friendly eye.”
“I mought not pick good. I’ll leave ’em be.”
The Forresters laughed. Lem picked up a stick and began to tease one of the cubs. He poked it in the ribs to make it bite the stick. He knocked it over and it squealed in pain.
Penny said, “Now kill the thing, Lem, if you’re goin’ to torment it.”
Lem turned angrily.
“You have your say-so for your young un. I’ll do what I please.”
“You’ll not torment nothin’ long as I got breath to interfere.”
“You want the breath knocked outen you then, eh?”
Buck said, “Leave off your meanness a little while, Lem.”
“You want a fight, too?”
The Forresters took sides among themselves without rhyme or reason, but this time they all sided with Buck and Penny. They were good-natured from the kill and the catch. Lem glowered but put down his fists. It was agreed that Gabby and Mill-wheel should stay and keep an eye on the cubs in case they chewed loose from their bindings, which ranged from Penny’s rope to Buck’s deer-hide boot laces. The rest would return to Forresters’ Island for the wagon to fetch the cubs.
“Now kin we agree on where to carry ’em,” Penny said, “me and Jody jest as good to go on home. I got a leetle huntin’ business o’ my own on the way.”
“You fixin’ to go run down that buck?” Lem asked suspiciously.
“If you got to know my business, I’m fixin’ to go on to Juniper Spring and shoot me a ’gator. I need grease for my boots and I want to smoke me the tail for meat for my dogs. Now you satisfied?”
Lem did not answer. Penny turned to Buck.
“Don’t you reckon St. Augustine’s the best place to sell them cubs?”
“Well, if the price ain’t right, hit’d be wuth a try to go on to Jacksonville.”
“Jacksonville,�
� Lem said. “I got some business there myself.”
“I got a gal in Jacksonville,” Mill-wheel said, “but I got no business there.”
“If she’s the one got married,” Buck said, “you shore as the devil got no business there.”
Penny said patiently, “Hit’s Jacksonville, then. Now who’s goin’?”
The Forresters looked at one another.
Penny said, “Buck’s the only one o’ you kin trade without quarrelin’.”
Lem said, “The wagon don’t go without me.”
“That’s Buck and Lem, then. Now you want I should go? Ain’t room for but three on the seat.”
They were silent.
Mill-wheel said at last, “You got high shares in the cubs, Penny, but I shore do crave to go. Come to think on it, I got a barrel o’ somethin’ else I’d love to carry and trade.”
Penny said, “Well, I got no cravin’ a-tall to go. Buck, I’ll be beholden to you to look out for my share and do my tradin’ for me. When’ll you go? Tomorrer? All right, if you’ll stop by tomorrer, me and Ma’ll have it figgered what-all we want you to trade for.”
“I’ll not fail you, you know that.”
“I know.”
The party separated. The Forresters went north and the Baxters south.
Penny said, “Love nor money wouldn’t git me to the east coast with them jay-birds. There’ll be broke jugs and broke heads all the way along their track.”
“You reckon Buck’ll do us right?”
“He’ll do right. Buck’s the only one o’ the litter was wuth raisin’. Him and pore Fodder-wing.”
Jody said, “Pa, I feel peculiar.”
Penny halted Cæsar and looked around. Jody was white.
“Why, boy, you jest had too much excitement. Now it’s over, you’ve give out.”
He got down and lifted Jody in his arms. He was limp. Penny propped him against a sapling.
“You’ve done a growed man’s work today. Now set easy and I’ll fetch you a bite to eat.”
He fumbled in the saddle-bags and brought out a cold baked sweet potato and peeled it.
“This’ll freshen you up. When we git to the spring, you take a good drink o’ water.”
At first Jody could not swallow. Then the taste of the sweet potato touched his palate. He sat up and ate it in small mouthfuls. He felt better immediately.
“You’re jest like I was when I were a boy,” Penny said. “You take ever’thing hard and hit leaves you faintified.”
Jody grinned. With any one but his father, he would have been ashamed. He clambered to his feet. Penny laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t keer to praise you in front o’ the men, but you done noble.”
The words were as strengthening as the sweet potato.
“I’m all right now, Pa.”
They mounted and rode on. The morning haze had thinned and vanished. The November air was crisp. The sun was a warm arm across their shoulders. The black-jacks flamed, the scrub oaks glistened. The fragrance of the purple deer-tongue filled the road. Scrub jays flew across the road. Their solid blue feathered coats, Jody thought, were prettier than the bluebirds’, because there was more of it. The strong smell of the yearling bear over old Cæsar’s rump behind him blended not unpleasantly with the sweat of the horse, the rich smell of the saddle, the deer-tongue and the lingering odor of the sweet potato. He would have a great deal, he thought, to tell Flag when he got home. The finest part about talking to Flag was that he could think most of the talk and not have to try to say it. He preferred talking to his father, but he could never find the words in which to make things clear. When he tried to say a thing that he had thought, the idea vanished while he was still floundering. It was like his efforts to shoot doves in a tree. He saw them, he cocked his gun, he crept close. Then they were gone before he could pull the trigger.
With Flag, he could say, “There come the wolves, slippin’ in to the pond,” and he could sit and see the whole thing, and feel the feelings again, the fears and the sharp ecstasies. Flag would nuzzle him and look at him with his soft liquid eyes, and he could feel that he was understood.
He came to himself with a start. They had picked up the old Spanish trail through the hammock to Juniper Spring. The spring was at its normal level. Debris from the flood was thick about its banks. The spring itself bubbled clear and blue from a bottomless cavern. A fallen tree lay across it. They hitched Cæsar to a magnolia and skirted the spring for ’gator sign. There was none. An old female alligator who was almost tame inhabited the spring. She raised a swarm of young every second year, and she would swim to the bank when called and take meat thrown to her. She was perhaps down in her cave with the year’s young. Because she was so tame and had been there so long, no one ever disturbed her. Penny was afraid that some day a stranger would come and kill her, finding her easy prey. They worked down the bank of the run. A shipoke flew.
Penny put out a hand behind him to halt Jody. On the opposite bank was a fresh ’gator wallow. The mud had been packed smooth where they turned and rolled their hard bodies. Penny dropped to his haunches behind a buttonwood bush. Jody dropped behind him. Penny had reloaded his gun. There was shortly a commotion in the waters of the swift-running creek. What seemed a log lifted not quite to the surface. There were two bumps at one end. The log was an eight-foot alligator. The bumps were its heavy-lidded eyes. It submerged again, then raised clear and lifted its fore-quarters to the bank. It crawled slowly to the wallow, heaved its bulk up and down on its short legs, flipped its tail and lay quietly. Penny drew a bead more carefully than Jody had ever seen him do on bear or deer. He fired. The long tail thrashed wildly, but the body sank instantly to the mud. Penny ran up-stream, around the head of the spring with Jody at his heels, and down-stream on the other side of the wallow. The broad flat jaws were opening and closing automatically. Penny held them shut with one hand and gripped a fore-leg with the other. The dogs barked excitedly. Jody took hold and they dragged the body to firm ground. Penny stood up and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“That’s light totin’ for a leetle bit,” he said.
They rested, then bent to the work of slicing out the tail meat, which, smoked, would make convenient hunting rations for the dogs. Penny turned back the hide and sliced out the layers of fat.
“The ’gators is one thing got fat on the flood,” he said.
Jody sat back on his heels with his knife in his hand.
“And likely the moccasins and the turtles,” he said.
“And the birds now,” Penny said. “All excusin’ the turkeys, the birds ain’t suffered pertickler.”
Jody pondered the strangeness of it. The creatures of the water and the creatures of the air had survived. Only the things whose home was the solid land itself had perished, trapped between the alien elements of wind and water. The thought was one of those that stirred him, and that he could never bring to earth to share with his father. It moved now across his mind like a remnant of the morning’s haze. He returned to the fat of the alligator.
The dogs were not tempted by the ’gator flesh, just as frogs were not to their taste, or coots, or ducks that fed on fishy matters. But when the tail meat, pink as veal, was smoked, the foreign taste and odor would disappear and they would eat it when no better meat was at hand. Penny emptied the lunch from the saddle-bags and filled them with the strips of meat and of fat. He looked at the package of food.
“Kin you eat now, boy?”
“I kin near about eat ary time.”
“Then we’ll eat it jest to be done with it.”
They washed their hands in the running creek and went to the head of the spring for drinking water. They lat flat on their bellies and drank deeply. They opened the lunch and divided it evenly into two portions. Penny left a biscuit filled with mayhaw jelly and a square of cassava pudding. Jody accepted them gratefully. Penny looked at the small protruding belly.
“Where you put it all, I cain’t see. But I�
�m proud I got it to give to you. There was times when I were a boy, they was sich a passel of us, my own belly lay mighty flat.”
They lay comfortably on their backs. Jody stared up into the magnolia tree over him. The under-sides of the thick leaves were like the copper of the pot that had belonged to his mother’s grandmother. The red cones of the magnolia were beginning to spill their seeds. Jody gathered a handful and dropped them idly on his chest. Penny rose lazily and fed the dogs the scraps. He led Cæsar to the spring to drink. They mounted and turned north toward Baxter’s Island.
West of Sweetwater Spring, Julia began to work a trail. Penny leaned down to look at it.
“Now that’s a mighty fresh buck track she’s got there,” he said. “I’ve a notion to leave her foller it.”
Her tail was in constant motion. Her nose was glued to the ground. She moved ahead rapidly. She lifted her nose high and began to trot with a gaited motion, scenting only by the wind.
“He must o’ cut in right ahead of us here,” Penny said.
The trail kept to the road for several hundred yards, then turned to the right. Julia gave a high thin cry.
Penny said, “Now he’s clost. I’ll bet he’s layin’ up right in the thick.”
He rode into the thicket after the dog. She bayed and a buck swayed to its knees and leaped to its feet. The buck was in full antlers. Instead of rushing away in flight, he charged headlong at the dog. The reason was instantly plain. A doe lifted her smooth unhorned head beyond him. Because of the interruption of the flood, the deer were late with their mating. The buck was courting and ready for fight. Penny held his fire, as he did often when a thing was strange. Old Julia and Rip were as amazed as he. They were fearless with bear and panther and wild-cat, but here, they had expected the game to run. They retreated. The buck pawed the earth like a bull and shook his antlers. Julia gathered her wits and jumped for his throat. He caught her on his horns and tossed her into the bushes. Jody saw the doe wheel and bolt away. Julia was unhurt and came back for action. Rip was at the buck’s heels. The buck charged again, then stood at bay with lowered antlers.
The Yearling Page 28