Read Ebook: The Voice of the Pack by Marshall Edison

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Ebook has 893 lines and 65637 words, and 18 pages

The creatures of the wild,--they were the folk he had always secretly loved and instinctively understood. His ancestors, for literally generations, had been frontiersmen and outdoor naturalists who never wrote books. Was it possible that they had bequeathed to him an understanding and love of the wild that most men did not have? But before he had time to meditate on this question, an idea seemed to pop and flame like a Roman candle in his brain. He knew where he would spend his last six months of life.

His own grandfather had been a hunter and trapper and frontiersman in a certain vast but little known Oregon forest. His son had moved to the Eastern cities, but in Dan's garret there used to be old mementoes and curios from these savage days,--a few claws and teeth, and a fragment of an old diary. The call had come to him at last. Tenderfoot though he was, Dan would go back to those forests, to spend his last six months of life among the wild creatures that made them their home.

The dinner hour found Dan Failing in the public library of Gitcheapolis, asking the girl who sat behind the desk if he might look at maps of Oregon. He got out the whole question without coughing once, but in spite of it she felt that he ought to be asking for California or Arizona maps, rather than Oregon. People did not usually go to Oregon to rid themselves of his malady. A librarian, as a rule, is a wonderfully well-informed person; but her mental picture of Oregon was simply one large rainstorm. She remembered that she used to believe that Oregon people actually grew webs between their toes, and the place was thus known as the Webfoot State. She didn't know that Oregon has almost as many climates as the whole of nature has in stock,--snow in the east, rain in the north, winds in the west, and sunshine in the south, with all the grades between. There are certain sections where in midwinter all hunters who do not particularly care to sink over their heads in the level snow walk exclusively on snowshoes. There are others, not one hundred miles distant, where any kind of snowstorm is as rare a phenomenon as the seventeen-year locusts. Distances are rather vasty in the West. For instance, the map that Dan Failing looked at did not seem much larger than the map, say, of Maryland. Figures showed, however, that at least two counties of Oregon were each as large as the whole area of the former State.

He remembered that his grandfather had lived in Southern Oregon. He looked along the bottom of his map and discovered a whole empire, ranging from gigantic sage plains to the east to dense forests along the Pacific Ocean. Those sage flats, by the way, contain not only sage hens as thick as poultry in a hen-yard and jack rabbits of a particularly long-legged and hardy breed, but also America's one species of antelope. Had Dan known that this was true, had he only been aware that these antelope are without exception the fastest-running creatures upon the face of the earth, he might have been tempted to go there instead of to the land of his fathers. But all he saw on the map was a large brown space marked at exceedingly long intervals with the name of a fort or town. He began to search for Linkville.

Time was when Linkville was one of the principal towns of Oregon. Dan remembered the place because some of the time-yellowed letters his grandfather had sent him had been mailed at a town that bore this name. But he couldn't find Linkville on the map. Later he was to know the reason,--that the town, halfway between the sage plains and the mountains, had prospered and changed its name. He remembered that it was located on one of those great fresh-water lakes of Southern Oregon; so, giving up that search, he began to look for lakes. He found them in plenty,--vast, unmeasured lakes that seemed to be distributed without reason or sense over the whole southern end of the State. Near the Klamath Lakes, seemingly the most imposing of all the fresh-water lakes that the map revealed, he found a city named Klamath Falls. He put the name down in his notebook.

The map showed a particularly high, far-spreading range of mountains due west of the city. Of course they were the Cascades; the map said so very plainly. Then Dan knew he was getting home. His grandfather had lived and trapped and died in these same wooded hills. Finally he located and recorded the name of the largest city on the main railroad line that was adjacent to the Cascades.

The preparation for his departure took many days. He read many books on flora and fauna. He bought sporting equipment. Knowing the usual ratio between the respective pleasures of anticipation and realization, he did not hurry himself at all. And one midnight he boarded a west-bound train.

There were none that he cared about bidding good-by. The sudden realization of the fact brought a moment's wonder. He had not realized that he had led such a lonely existence. There were men who were fitted for living in cities, but perhaps he was not one of them. He saw the station lights grow dim as the train pulled out. Soon he could discern just a spark, here and there, from the city's outlying homes. And not long after this, the silence and darkness of the farm lands closed down upon the train.

He sat for a long time in the vestibule of the sleeping car, thinking in anticipation of this final adventure of his life. It is true that he had not experienced many adventures. He had lived most of them in imagination alone; or else, with tired eyes, he had read of the exploits of other men. He was rather tremulous and exultant as he sank down into his berth.

He usually didn't sign his name in quite this manner. The people of Gitcheapolis did not have particularly vivid memories of Dan's grandfather. But it might be that a legend of the gray, straight frontiersman who was his ancestor had still survived in these remote Oregon wilds. The use of the full name would do no harm.

Instead of hurting, it was a positive inspiration. The Chamber of Commerce of the busy little Oregon city was not usually exceptionally interested in stray hunters that wanted a boarding place for the summer. Its business was finding country homes for orchardists in the pleasant river valleys. But it happened that the recipient of the wire was one of the oldest residents, a frontiersman himself, and it was one of the traditions of the Old West that friendships were not soon forgotten. Dan Failing I had been a legend in the old trapping and shooting days when this man was young. So it came about that when Dan's train stopped at Cheyenne, he found a telegram waiting him:

"Any relation to Dan Failing of the Umpqua Divide?"

Dan had never heard of the Umpqua Divide, but he couldn't doubt but that the sender of the wire referred to his grandfather. He wired in the affirmative. The head of the Chamber of Commerce received the wire, read it, thrust it into his desk, and in the face of a really important piece of business proceeded to forget all about it. Thus it came about that, except for one thing, Dan Failing would have probably stepped off the train at his destination wholly unheralded and unmet. The one thing that changed his destiny was that at a meeting of a certain widely known fraternal order the next night, the Chamber of Commerce crossed trails with the Frontier in the person of another old resident who had his home in the farthest reaches of the Umpqua Divide. The latter asked the former to come up for a few days' shooting--the deer being fatter and more numerous than any previous season since the days of the grizzlies. For it is true that one of the most magnificent breed of bears that ever walked the face of the earth once left their footprints, as of flour-sacks in the mud, from one end of the region to another.

"Too busy, I'm afraid," the Chamber of Commerce had replied. "But Lennox--that reminds me. Do you remember old Dan Failing?"

Lennox probed back into the years for a single instant, straightened out all the kinks of his memory in less time than the wind straightens out the folds of a flag, and turned a most interested face. "Remember him!" he exclaimed. "I should say I do." The middle-aged man half-closed his piercing, gray eyes. Those piercing eyes are a characteristic peculiar to the mountain men, and whether they come from gazing over endless miles of winter snow, or from some quality of steel that life in the mountains imbues, no one is quite able to determine.

"Listen, Steele," he said. "I saw Dan Failing make a bet once. I was just a kid, but I wake up in my sleep to marvel at it. We had a full long glimpse of a black-tail bounding up a long slope. It was just a spike-buck, and Dan Failing said he could take the left-hand spike off with one shot from his old Sharpe's. Three of us bet him--the whole thing in less than two seconds. With the next shot, he'd get the deer. He won the bet, and now if I ever forget Dan Failing, I want to die."

"You're just the man I'm looking for, then. You're not going out till the day after to-morrow?"

"No."

"On the limited, hitting here to-morrow morning, there's a grandson of Dan Failing. His name is Dan Failing too, and he wants to go up to your place to hunt. Stay all summer and pay board."

Lennox's eyes said that he couldn't believe it was true. After a while his tongue spoke, too. "Good Lord," he said. "I used to foller Dan around--like old Shag, before he died, followed Snowbird. Of course he can come. But he can't pay board."

It was rather characteristic of the mountain men,--that the grandson of Dan Failing couldn't possibly pay board. But Steele knew the ways of cities and of men, and he only smiled. "He won't come, then," he explained. "Anyway, have that out with him at the end of his stay. He wants fishing, and you've got that in the North fork. He wants shooting, and if there is a place in the United States with more wild animals around the back door than at your house, I don't know where it is. Moreover, you're a thousand miles back--"

"Only one hundred, if you must know. But Steele--do you suppose he's the man his grandfather was before him--that all the Failings have been since the first days of the Oregon trail? If he is--well, my hat's off to him before he steps off the train."

The mountaineer's bronzed face was earnest and intent in the bright lights of the club. Steele thought he had known this breed. Now he began to have doubts of his own knowledge. "He won't be; don't count on it," he said humbly. "The Failings have done much for this region, and I'm glad enough to do a little to pay it back, but don't count much on this Eastern boy. He's lived in cities; besides, he's a sick man. He said so in his wire. You ought to know it before you take him in."

The bronzed face changed; possibly a shadow of disappointment came into his eyes. "A lunger, eh?" Lennox repeated. "Yes--it's true that if he'd been like the other Failings, he'd never have been that. Why, Steele, you couldn't have given that old man a cold if you'd tied him in the Rogue River overnight. Of course you couldn't count on the line keeping up forever. But I'll take him, for the memory of his grandfather."

"You're not afraid to?"

"Afraid, Hell! He can't infect those two strapping children of mine. Snowbird weighs one hundred and twenty pounds and is hard as steel. Never knew a sick day in her life. And you know Bill, of course."

Yes, Steele knew Bill. Bill weighed two hundred pounds, and he would choose the biggest of the steers he drove down to the lower levels in the winter and, twisting its horns, would make it lay over on its side. Besides, both of the men assumed that Dan must be only in the first stages of his malady.

And even as the men talked, the train that bore Dan Failing to the home of his ancestors was entering for the first time the dark forests of pine and fir that make the eternal background of the Northwest. The wind came cool and infinitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of blasting sun. And these smells all came straight home to Dan. He was wholly unable to understand the strange feeling of familiarity that he had with them, a sensation that in his dreams he had known them always, and that he must never go out of the range of them again.

Dan didn't see his host at first. For the first instant he was entirely engrossed by a surging sense of disappointment,--a feeling that he had been tricked and had only come to another city after all. He got down on to the gravel of the station yard, and out on the gray street pavement he heard the clang of a trolley car. Trolley cars didn't fit into his picture of the West at all. Many automobiles were parked just beside the station, some of them foreign cars of expensive makes, such as he supposed would be wholly unknown on the frontier. A man in golf clothes brushed his shoulder.

It wasn't a large city; but there was certainly lack of any suggestion of the frontier. But there were a number of things that Dan Failing did not know about the West. One of the most important of them was the curious way in which wildernesses and busy cities are sometimes mixed up indiscriminately together, and how one can step out of a modern country club to hear the coyotes wailing on the hills. He really had no right to feel disappointed. He had simply come to the real West--that bewildering land in which To-morrow and Yesterday sit right next to each other, with no To-day between. The cities, often built on the dreams of the future, sometimes are modern to such a point that they give many a sophisticated Eastern man a decided shock. But quite often this quality extends to the corporation limits and not a step further. Then, likely as not, they drop sheer off, as over a precipice, into the utter wildness of the Past.

Dan looked up to the hills, and he felt better. He couldn't see them plainly. The faint smoke of a distant forest fire half obscured them. Yet he saw fold on fold of ridges of a rather peculiar blue in color, and even his untrained eyes could see that they were clothed in forests of evergreen. It is a strange thing about evergreen forests that they never, even when one is close to them, appear to be really green. To a distant eye, they range all the way from lavender to a pale sort of blue for which no name has ever been invented. Just before dark, when, as all mountaineers know, the sky turns green, the forests are simply curious, dusky shadows. The pines are always dark. Perhaps, after all, they are simply the symbol of the wilderness,--eternal, silent, and in a vague way rather dark and sad. No one who really knows the mountains can completely get away from their tone of sadness. Over the heads of the green hills Dan could see a few great peaks; McLaughlin, even and regular as a painted mountain; Wagner, with queer white gashes where the snow still lay in its ravines, and to the southeast the misty range of snow-covered hills that were the Siskeyous. He felt decidedly better. And when he saw old Silas Lennox waiting patiently beside the station, he felt he had come to the right place.

It would be interesting to explain why Dan at once recognized the older man for the breed he was. But unfortunately, there are certain of the many voices that speak within the minds of human beings of which scientists have never been able to take phonographic records. They simply whisper their messages, and their hearer, without knowing why, knows that he has heard the truth. Silas Lennox was not dressed in a way that would distinguish him. It was true that he wore a flannel shirt, riding trousers, and rather heavy, leathern boots. But sportsmen all over the face of the earth wear this costume at sundry times. Mountain men have a peculiar stride by which experienced persons can occasionally recognize them; but Silas Lennox was standing still when Dan got his first glimpse of him. The case resolves itself into a simple matter of the things that could be read in Lennox's face.

Dan disbelieved wholly in a book that told how to read characters at sight. Yet at the first glance of the lean, bronzed face his heart gave a curious little bound. A pair of gray eyes met his,--two fine black points in a rather hard gray iris. They didn't look past him, or at either side of him, or at his chin or his forehead. They looked right at his own eyes. The skin around the eyes was burned brown by the sun, and the flesh was so lean that the cheek bones showed plainly. The mouth was straight; but yet it was neither savage nor cruel. It was simply determined.

But the strangest part of all was that Dan felt an actual sense of familiarity with this kind of man. To his knowledge, he had never known one before; and it was extremely doubtful if, in his middle-western city, he had even seen the type. In spite of the fact that he thinks nothing of starting out thirty miles across the snow on snowshoes, the mountain man cannot be called an extensive traveler. He plans to go to some great city once in a lifetime and dreams about it of nights, but rather often the Death that is every one's next-door neighbor in the wilderness comes in and cheats him out of the trip. Few of the breed had ever come to Gitcheapolis. Yet all his life, Dan felt, he had known this straight, gray-eyed mountain breed even better than he knew the boys that went to college with him. At the time he didn't stop to wonder at the feeling. He was too busy looking about. But the time was to come when he would wonder and conclude that it was just another bit of evidence pointing to the same conclusion. And besides this unexplainable feeling of familiarity, he felt a sudden sense of peace, even a quiet sort of exultation, such as a man feels when he gets back into his own home country at last.

Lennox came up with a light, silent tread and extended his hand. "You're Dan Failing's grandson, aren't you?" he asked. "I'm Silas Lennox, who used to know him when he lived on the Divide. You are coming to spend the summer and fall on my ranch."

The immediate result of these words, besides relief, was to set Dan wondering how the old mountaineer had recognized him. He wondered if he had any physical resemblance to his grandfather. But this hope was shot to earth at once. His telegram had explained about his malady, and of course the mountaineer had picked him out simply because he had the mark of the disease on his face. As he shook hands, he tried his best to read the mountaineer's expression. It was all too plain: an undeniable look of disappointment.

The truth was that even in spite of all the Chamber of Commerce head had told him, Lennox had still hoped to find some image of the elder Dan Failing in the face and body of his grandson. But at first there seemed to be none at all. The great hunter and trapper who had tamed the wilderness about the region of the Divide--as far as mortal man could tame it--had a skin that was rather the color of old leather. The face of this young man was wholly without tinge of color. Because of the thick glasses, Lennox could not see the young man's eyes; but he didn't think it likely they were at all like the eyes with which the elder Failing saw his way through the wilderness at night. Of course he was tall, just as the famous frontiersman had been, but while the elder weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, bone and muscle, this man did not touch one hundred and thirty. Evidently the years had brought degeneracy to the Failing clan. Lennox was desolated by the thought.

He helped Dan with his bag to a little wiry automobile that waited beside the station. They got into the two front seats.

"You'll be wondering at my taking you in a car--clear to the Divide," Lennox explained. "But we mountain men can't afford to drive horses any more where a car will go. This time of year I can make it fairly easy--only about fifteen miles on low gear. But in the winter--it's either a case of coming down on snowshoes or staying there."

And a moment later they were starting up the long, curved road that led to the Divide.

During the hour that they were crossing over the foothills, on the way to the big timber, Silas Lennox talked a great deal about the frontiersman that had been Dan's grandfather. A mountain man does not use profuse adjectives. He talks very simply and very straight, and often there are long silences between his sentences. Yet he conveys his ideas with entire clearness.

Dan realized at once that if he could be, in Lennox's eyes, one fifth of the man his grandfather had been, he would never have to fear again the look of disappointment with which his host had greeted him at the station. But instead of reaching that high place, he had only--death. He was never to be one of this strong breed from which his people sprang. Always they would accept him for the memories that they held of his ancestors, pity him for his weakness, and possibly be kind enough to deplore his death. He never need fear any actual expressions of scorn. Lennox had a natural refinement that forbade it. Dan never knew a more intense desire than that to make good in the eyes of these mountain men. Far back, they had been his own people; and all men know that the upholding of a family's name and honor has been one of the greatest impulses for good conduct and great deeds since the beginnings of civilization. But Dan pushed the hope out of his mind at once. He knew what his destiny was in these quiet hills. And it was true that he began to have secret regrets that he had come. But it wasn't that he was disappointed in the land that was opening up before him. It fulfilled every promise. His sole reason for regrets lay in the fact that now the whole mountain world would know of the decay that had come upon his people. Perhaps it would have been better to have left them to their traditions.

He had never dreamed that the fame of his grandfather had spread so far. For the first ten miles, Dan listened to stories,--legends of a cold nerve that simply could not be shaken; of a powerful, tireless physique; of moral and physical strength that was seemingly without limit. Then, as the foothills began to give way to the higher ridges, and the shadow of the deeper forests fell upon the narrow, brown road, there began to be long gaps in the talk. And soon they rode in utter silence, evidently both of them absorbed in their own thoughts.

Dan did not wonder at it at all. Perhaps he began to faintly understand the reason for the silence and the reticence that is such a predominant trait in the forest men. There is a quality in the big timber that doesn't make for conversation, and no one has ever been completely successful in explaining what it is. Perhaps there is a feeling of insignificance, a sensation that is particularly insistent in the winter snows. No man can feel like talking very loudly when he is the only living creature within endless miles. The trees, towering and old, seem to ignore him as a being too unimportant to notice. And besides, the silence of the forest itself seems to get into the spirit, and the great, quiet spaces that lie between tree and tree simply dry up the springs of conversation. Dan did not feel oppressed at all. He merely seemed to fall into the spirit of the woods, and no words came to his lips. He began to watch the ever-changing vista that the curving road revealed.

First there had been brown hills, and here and there great heaps of stone. The brush had been rather scrubby, and the trees somewhat sickly and brown. But now, as the men mounted higher, they were coming into open forest. The trees stood one and one, perfect, dark-limbed, and only the carpet of their needles lay between. The change was evidenced in the streams, too. They seemingly had not suffered from the drought that had sucked up the valley streams. They were faster, whiter with foam, and the noise of their falling waters carried farther through the still woods. The road followed the long shoulder of a ridge, an easy grade of perhaps six per cent, but Dan counted ridges sloping off until he was tired.

Every tree trunk seemed to have its chipmunks, and they all appeared to be suffering from the same delusion. They all were afflicted with the idea that the car was trying to cut off their retreat, and only by crossing the road in front of it could they save themselves. This idea is a particularly prevalent one with wild animals; and it is the same instinct that makes a domestic cow almost invariably cross the road in front of a motorist. And it also explains why certain cowardly animals, such as the wolf or cougar, will sometimes seemingly without a cause on earth, make a desperate charge on a hunter. They think their retreat is cut off, and they have to fight. Again and again the chipmunks crossed at the risk of their lives. Sometimes the two men saw those big, flat-footed rabbits that are especially constructed for moving about in the winter snows, and more than once the grouse rose with a whir and beat of wings.

Every mile was an added delight to Dan. Not even wine could have brought a brighter sparkle to his eyes. He had begun to experience a vague sort of excitement, an emotion that was almost kin to exultation, over the constant stir and movement of the forest life. He didn't know that a bird dog feels the same when it gets to the uplands where the quail are hiding. He had no acquaintance with bird dogs whatever. He hadn't remembered that he had qualities in common with them,--a long line of ancestors who had lived by hunting.

Once, as they stopped the car to refill the radiator from a mountain stream, Lennox looked at him with sudden curiosity. "You are getting a thrill out of this, aren't you?" he asked wonderingly.

It was a curious tone. Perhaps it was a hopeful tone, too. He spoke as if he hardly understood.

"A thrill!" Dan echoed. He spoke as a man speaks in the presence of some great wonder. "Good Heavens, I never saw anything like it in my life."

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