The Voice of the Pack Part 3

It's too late for that."

"Of course--but sit down now, anyway. I'm sorry that s...o...b..rd isn't here."

"s...o...b..rd is--"

"My daughter. My boy, she can make a biscuit! That's not her name, of course, but we've always called her that. She got tired of keeping house and is working this summer. Poor Bill has to keep house for her, and no wonder he's eager to take the stock down to the lower levels. I only wish he hadn't brought 'em up this spring at all; I've lost dozens from the coyotes."

"But a coyote can't kill cattle--"

"It can if it has hydrophobia, a common thing in the varmints this time of year. But as I say, Bill will take the stock down next season, and then s...o...b..rd's work will be through, and she'll come back here."

"Then she's down in the valley?"

"Far from it. She's a mountain girl if one ever lived. Perhaps you don't know the recent policy of the forest service to hire women when they can be obtained. It was a policy started in wartimes and kept up now because it is economical and efficient. She and a girl from college have a cabin not five miles from here on old Bald Mountain, and they're doing lookout duty."

Dan wondered intensely what lookout duty might be. His thoughts went back to his early study of forestry. "You see, Dan," Lennox said in explanation, "the government loses thousands of dollars every year by forest fire. A fire can be stopped easily if it is seen soon after it starts. But let it burn awhile, in this dry season, and it's a terror--a wall of flame that races through the forests and can hardly be stopped.

And maybe you don't realize how enormous this region is--literally hundreds of miles across. We're the last outpost--there are four cabins, if you can find them, in the first seventy miles back to town. So they have to put lookouts on the high points, and now they're coming to the use of aeroplanes so they can keep even a better watch. All summer and until the rains come in the fall, they have to guard every minute, and even then sometimes the fires get away from them. And one of the first things a forester learns, Dan, is to be careful with fire."

"Is that the way they are started--from the carelessness of campers?"

"Partly. There's an old rule in the hills: put out every fire before you leave it. Be careful with the cigar b.u.t.ts, too--even the coals of a pipe. But of course the lightning starts many fires, and, I regret to say, hundreds of them are started with matches."

"But why on earth--"

"It doesn't make very good sense, does it? Well, one reason is that certain stockmen think that a burned forest makes good range--that the undervegetation that springs up when the trees are burned makes good feed for stock. And you must know, too, that there are two kinds of men in the mountains. One kind--the real mountain man, such as your grandfather was--lives just as well, just as clean as the ranchers in the valley. Some of this kind are trappers or herders. But there's another cla.s.s too--the most unbelievably s.h.i.+ftless, ignorant people in America. They have a few acres to raise crops, and they kill deer for their hides, and most of all they make their living fighting forest fires. A fire means work for every hill-billy in the region--often five or six dollars a day and better food than they're used to. Moreover, they can loaf on the job, put in claims for extra hours, and make what to them is a fortune.

"You'll likely see a few of the breed before--before your visit here is ended. There's a family of 'em not three miles away--and that's real neighborly in the mountains--by the name of Cranston. Bert Cranston traps a little and makes moons.h.i.+ne; you'll probably see plenty of him before the trip is over. Sometime I'll tell you of a little difficulty that I had with him once. You needn't worry about him coming to this house; he's already received his instructions in that matter.

"But I see I'm getting all tangled up in my traces. s...o...b..rd and a girl friend from college got jobs this summer as lookouts--all through the forest service they are hiring women for the work. They are more vigilant than men, less inclined to take chances, and work cheaper.

These two girls have a cabin near a spring, and they cook their own food, and are making what is big wages in the mountains. I'm rather hoping she'll drop over for a few minutes to-night."

"Good Lord--does she travel over these hills in the darkness?"

The mountaineer laughed--a delighted sound that came somewhat curiously from the bearded lips of the stern, dark man. "Dan, I'll swear she's afraid of nothing that walks the face of the earth--and it isn't because she hasn't had experiences either. She's a dead shot with a pistol, for one thing. She's physically strong, and every muscle is hard as nails.

She used to have s.h.a.g, too--the best dog in all these mountains. She's a mountain girl, I tell you; whoever wins her has got to be able to tame her!" The mountaineer laughed again. "I sent her to school, of course, but there was only one boy she'd look at--the athletic coach! And it wasn't his fault that he didn't follow her back to the mountains."

The call to supper came then, and Dan got his first sight of mountain food. There were potatoes, newly dug, mountain vegetables that were crisp and cold, a steak of peculiar shape, and a great bowl of purple berries to be eaten with sugar and cream. Dan's appet.i.te was not as a rule particularly good. But evidently the long ride had affected him. He simply didn't have the moral courage to refuse when the elder Lennox heaped his plate.

"Good Heavens, I can't eat all that," he said, as it was pa.s.sed to him.

But the others laughed and told him to take heart.

He took heart. It was a singular thing, but at that first bite his sudden confidence in his gustatory ability almost overwhelmed him. All his life he had avoided meat. His mother had always been convinced that such a delicate child as he had been could not properly digest it. But all at once he decided to forego his mother's philosophies for good and all. There was certainly nothing to be gained by following them any longer. So he cut himself a bite of the tender steak--fully half as generous as the bites that Bill was consuming across the table. And its first flavor simply filled him with delight.

"What is this meat?" he asked. "I've certainly tasted it before."

"I'll bet a few dollars that you haven't, if you've lived all your life in the Middle West," Lennox answered. "Maybe you've got what the scientists call an inherited memory of it. It's the kind of meat your grandfather used to live on--venison."

Both of them had seemed pleased that he liked the venison. And both seemed boyishly eager to test his reaction to the great, wild huckleberries that were the dessert of the simple meal. He tried them with much ceremony.

Their flavor really surprised him. They had a tang, a fragrance that was quite unlike anything he had ever tasted, yet which brought a curious flood of dim, half-understood memories. It seemed to him that always he had stood on the hillsides, picking these berries as they grew, and staining his lips with them. But at once he pushed the thoughts out of his mind, thinking that his imagination was playing tricks upon him. And soon after this, Lennox led him out of the house for his first glimpse of the hills in the darkness.

They walked together out to the gate, across the first of the wide pastures where, at certain seasons, Lennox kept his cattle; and at last they came out upon the tree-covered ridge. The moon was just rising.

They could see it casting a curious glint over the very tips of the pines. But it couldn't get down between them. They stood too close, too tall and thick for that. And for a moment, Dan's only sensation was one of silence.

"You have to stand still a moment, to really know anything," Lennox told him.

They both stood still. Dan was as motionless as that day in the park, long weeks before, when the squirrel had climbed on his shoulder. The first effect was a sensation that the silence was deepening around them.

It wasn't really true. It was simply that he had become aware of the little continuous sounds of which usually he was unconscious, and they tended to accentuate the hush of the night. He heard his watch ticking in his pocket, the whispered stir of his own breathing, and he was quite certain that he could hear the fevered beat of his own heart in his breast. But then slowly he began to become aware of other sounds, so faint and indistinct that he really could not be sure that he heard them. There was a faint rustle and stir, as of the tops of the pine trees far away. Possibly he heard the wind too, the faintest whisper in the world through the underbrush. And finally, most wonderful of all, he began to hear one by one, over the ridge on which he stood, little whispered sounds of living creatures stirring in the thickets. He knew, just as all mountaineers know, that the wilderness about him was stirring and pulsing with life. Some of the sounds were quite clear--an occasional stir of a pebble or the crack of a twig, and some, like the faintest twitching of leaves in the brush not ten feet distant, could only be guessed at.

"What is making the sounds?" he asked.

He didn't know it, at the time, but Lennox turned quickly toward him. It wasn't that the question had surprised the mountaineer. Rather it was the tone in which Dan had spoken. It was perfectly cool, perfectly self-contained.

"The one right close is a chipmunk. I don't know what the others are; no one ever does know. Perhaps ground squirrels, or rabbits, or birds, and maybe even one of those harmless old black bears who is curious about the house. The bears have more curiosity than they can well carry around, and they say they'll sometimes come up and put their front feet on a window sill of a house, and peer through the window. They must think men are the craziest things! And of course it might be a coyote--and a mad one at that. I guess I told you that they're subject to rabies at this time of year. I'll confess I'd rather have it be anything else. And tell me--can you _smell_ anything--"

"Good Lord, Lennox! I can smell all kinds of things."

"I'm glad. Some men can't. No one can enjoy the woods if he can't smell.

Part of the smells are of flowers, and part of balsam, and G.o.d only knows what the others are. They are just the wilderness--"

Dan could not only perceive the smells and sounds, but he felt that they were leaving an imprint on the very fiber of his soul. He knew one thing. He knew he could never forget this first introduction to the mountain night. The whole scene moved him in strange, deep ways in which he had never been stirred before; it left him exultant and, in deep wells of his nature far below the usual currents of excitement, a little excited too. And all the time he had that indefinable sense of familiarity, a knowledge that this was his own land, and after a long, long time of wandering in far places, he had come back to it.

Then both of them were startled out of their reflections by the clear, unmistakable sound of footsteps on the ridge. Both of them turned, and Lennox laughed softly in the darkness. "My daughter," he said. "I knew she wouldn't be afraid to come."

V

Dan could see only s...o...b..rd's outline at first, just her shadow against the moonlit hillside. His gla.s.ses were none too good at long range. And possibly, when she came within range, the first thing that he noticed about her was her stride. The girls he knew didn't walk in quite that free, strong way. She took almost a man-size step; and yet it was curious that she did not seem ungraceful. Dan had a distinct impression that she was floating down to him on the moonlight. She seemed to come with such unutterable smoothness. And then he heard her call lightly through the darkness.

The sound gave him a distinct sense of surprise. Some way, he hadn't a.s.sociated a voice like this with a mountain girl; he had supposed that there would be so many harshening influences in this wild place. Yet the tone was as clear and full as a trained singer's. It was not a high voice; and yet it seemed simply br.i.m.m.i.n.g, as a cup brims with wine, with the rapture of life. It was a self-confident voice too, wholly unaffected and sincere, and wholly without embarra.s.sment.

Then she came close, and Dan saw the moonlight on her face. And so it came about, whether in dreams or wakefulness, he could see nothing else for many hours to come.

Beauty, after all, is wholly a matter of the nearest possible approach to the physical perfection that many centuries of human faces have established as a standard. Thus perfection in this case does not mean some ideal that has been imaged by a poet, but just the nearest approach to the perfect physical body that nature intended, and which is the flawless example of the type that composes the race. Thus a typical feature is the most beautiful, and by this reasoning a composite picture of all the young girl faces in the Anglo-Saxon nations would be the most beautiful face that any painter could conceive. It follows that health is above all the most essential quality to beauty, because disease, from the nature of things, means thwarted growth that could not possibly reach the typical of the race.

The girl who stood in the moonlight had health. She was simply vibrant with health. It brought a light to her eyes, and a color to her cheeks, and life and s.h.i.+mmer to her moonlit hair. It brought curves to her body, and strength and firmness to her limbs, and the grace of a deer to her carriage. Whether she had regular features or not Dan would have been unable to state. He didn't even notice. They weren't important when health was present. Yet there was nothing of the coa.r.s.e or bold or voluptuous about her. She was just a slender girl, perhaps twenty years of age, and weighing even less than the figure occasionally to be read in the health magazines for girls of her height. And she was fresh and cool beyond all words to tell.

And Dan had no delusions about her att.i.tude toward him. For a long instant she turned her keen, young eyes to his white, thin face; and at once it became abundantly evident that beyond a few girlish speculations she felt no interest in him. After a single moment of rather strained, polite conversation with Dan--just enough to satisfy her idea of the conventions--she began a thrilling girlhood tale to her father. And she was still telling it when they reached the house.

Dan held a chair for her in front of the fireplace, and she took it with entire naturalness. He was careful to put it where the firelight was at its height. He wanted to see its effect on the flushed cheeks, the soft dark hair. And then, standing in the shadows, he simply watched her.

With the eye of an artist he delighted in her gestures, her rippling enthusiasm, her utter, irrepressible girlishness that all of Time had not years enough to kill.

He decided that she had gray eyes. Gray eyes seemed to be characteristic of the mountain people. Sometimes, when the shadows fell across them, they looked very dark, as if the pines had been reflected in them all day and the image had not yet faded out. But in an instant the shadow flicked away and left only light,--light that danced and light that laughed and light that went into him and did all manner of things to his spirit.

Bill stood watching her, his hands deep in his pockets, evidently a companion of the best. Her father gazed at her with amused tolerance.

And Dan,--he didn't know in just what way he did look at her. And he didn't have time to decide. In less than fifteen minutes, and wholly without warning, she sprang up from her chair and started toward the door.