Jerry knew the trail, as he knew the floor of his mine, by the feel of the ground under him, so as he heaved and guided with his shoulder, the great ram grew quieter and lent himself to the effort till they came clear of the swale, and the sweat ran down from Jerry's forehead. But the bighorn could do no more. In the soft fleece of the snow he stood cowed and trembling. The snow came on faster, and wiped out the trail of the flock; he made no motion to go after. Such a death comes to the wild sheep of the mountains often enough: to fail from old age in some sudden storm, to sink in the loose snow and await the quest of the wolf, or the colder mercy of the drift. He turned his back to the storm which began to slant a little with the rising wind, and looked not once at Jerry nor at the hills where he had been bred. But Jerry cast his eye upon the sheep, which was full heavier then than he, and then up at the steep where his cabin stood, remembering that he had nothing there that might serve a sheep for food. Then he bent down again, and by dint of pulling and pushing, and by a dim sense that began to filter through the man's brain to the beast, they made some progress on the trail. They went over broken boulders and floundered in the drifts, where Jerry half carried the sheep and was half borne up and supported by the spread of the great horns. They crossed Pine Creek, which ran dumbly under the snow, housed over by the stream tangle. The flakes hissed softly on Jerry's lantern and struck blindingly on his eyes, but ever as they went the sheep was eased of his labor, grew assured, and carried himself courageously. Finally they came where the storm thinned out, and whole hill-slopes covered with buckthorn and cherry warded off the snow by springy arches, and Jerry drew up to rest under a long-leaved pine while the sheep went on alone, nodding his great horns under the branches of the scrub. He neither lingered nor looked back, and met the new chance of life with as much quietness as the chance of death. Jerry was worn and weary, and there was a singing in his brain. The pine trees broke the wind and shed off the snow in curling wreaths. It seemed to the old man most good to rest, and he drowsed upon his feet.
"If I sleep I shall freeze," he said; and it seemed on the whole a pleasant thing to do. So it went on for a little space; then there came a shape out of the dark, a hand shook him by the shoulder, and a voice called him by name. Then he started out of dreaming as he had started at that other call an hour ago, and it seemed not strange to him, the night, nor the storm, nor the face of the blue-eyed man that shone out of the dark, but whether by the light of his lantern he could not tell. He shook the snow from his shoulders.
"I have expected you long," he said.
"And now I have come," said the stranger and smiled.
"Have you brought the luck again?"
"Come and see," said the man.
Then Jerry took his hand and leaned upon him, and together they went up the trail between the drifts.
"You bear me no ill-will for what I did?" said Jerry.
And the stranger answered, "None."
"I have wished it undone many times," said the old man. "I have tried this night to repay it."
"By what you have done this night I am repaid," said the stranger.
"It was only a sheep."
"It was one of God's creatures," said the man.
So they went on up the trail, and it seemed sometimes to Jerry that he wandered alone in the dark, that he was cold, and his lantern had gone out; and again he would hear the stranger comfort and encourage him. At last they came toward the cabin, and saw the light stream out of the window and the fire leap in the stove. Then Jerry thought of the mine, and that the stranger had brought back the luck again. It seemed that the young man had promised him this, though he could not be sure of that, nor very clear in his mind on any point except that he had come home again. But as he drew near, it seemed a brightness came out of the tunnel of the mine, a warmth and a great light. As he came into it tremblingly, he saw that the light came from the walls, and from the lode at the far end of it, and it was the brightness of pure gold. And Jerry smiled and stretched out his arms to it, making sure that the luck had come again.
After the week of the Big Snow there were people in the town who remembered Jerry, and wondered how he fared. So when the snow had a crust over it, they came up by the windy cañon and sought him in his house, where the door stood open and a charred wick flared feebly in the lamp, and in his mine, where they found him at the far end of the tunnel, and it seemed as if he slept and smiled.
"It is a worthless lode," they said, "but he loved it."
So they took powder and made a blast, and with it a great heap of stones, shutting off the end of the tunnel from the outer air, and so left him with his luck and the Golden Fortune.
THE WHITE-BARKED PINE
THE WHITE-BARKED PINE
The white-barked pine grew on the slope of Kearsarge highest up of all the pines, so high that nothing grew above it but brown tufts of grass and the rosy Sierra primroses that shelter under the edges of broken boulders. The white-barked pines are squat and short, trunks creeping along the rocks, and foliage all matted in a close green thatch by the winter's weight. Snow lies on the slope of Kearsarge eight months in the year, deep and smooth over the pines and the jagged rocks; other months there are great storms of rain, and always a strong wind roaring through the Pass, so that, try as it might, no tree could stand erect on those heights. The white-barked pine stretched its body along the ground, and though it was four hundred years old, it was no thicker than a man's leg, and its young branches of seventy-five or a hundred years were still so supple that one could tie knots in them. It grew near the trail, which here crossed through a gap in the crest of the range and straggled on down the other side of the mountain.
Along this trail went many strange things in their season. Early in the year, before the snow had melted at all on the high places, went a great lumbering bear that had a lair above Big Meadows, going down to the calf-pens and pig-sties of the town at the foot of Kearsarge. He ranged back and forth on these little excursions of fifteen or twenty miles in the hungry season of the year, and sometimes there were hunters on his trail with dogs and guns, but nothing ever came of it. When the trail began to run a rivulet from the drip of melting snow banks, the forest ranger went up the Pass, singing as he went and beating his arms to keep himself warm. Afterwards when the snow water was all drained off, he came back and mended the trail. All through the summer there would be parties of miners and hunters with long strings of pack mules, going over Kearsarge to camp in Big Meadows or on the fork of King's River. Sometimes there were parties of Indians with women and children, making very merry with berries, fish, and deer meat. Nearly always, whatever went over the mountain came back again, and the white pine noticed that the same people came again another season. In four hundred years one has space for observation and reflection. Gradually the pine tree grew into the conviction that the other side of the mountain must be much finer than this.
"Else why," said he, "should so many people go there every year?"
It was very fine, you may be sure, on the white pine's side, but the tree had known it all for so many years, it no longer pleased him. From where he grew he looked down between the ridges on a great winding cañon full of singing trees, with blue lakes like eyes winking between them. He could watch in the open places the white feet of the water on its way to the valley, and from the falls long rainbows of spray blown out as if they were blowing kisses to the white-barked pine. Below all this lay the valley, hollow like a cup, full of fawn-colored and violet mist, and the farms and orchards lay like dregs at the bottom of the cup. Beyond the valley rose other noble ranges with cloud shadows playing all along their slopes.
"It is very tiresome to look at the same things for four hundred years," said the white-barked pine. "If I could only get to the top, now. Do tell me, what is it like on the other side?" he said to the wind.
"Oh!" said the wind, "it rains and snows. There are trees and bushes and blue lakes. It is not at all different from this side."
A deer said the same thing when it slept one night under the thatch of the highest pine. "It is all meadows and hills, only sometimes the grass is not so good there, and again sometimes it is better. It is very much like this."
"I do not believe them," said the pine to himself. "They are simply trying to console me for not realizing my ambition. But I am not a sapling any longer, let me tell you that."
"At least," said a young tree that grew a little farther down, "you are higher up than any of us."
"Of what use is that if I do not get to the top?" said the unhappy pine. "There is a bunch of blue flowers there, I can see it quite plainly just where the trail dips over the ridge. Surely I am as capable of climbing as any blue weed."
"But," said the young pine, "weeds do not have to grow cones."
"Oh, as for cones," cried the tree quite crossly, "the seasons are so short I hardly ever ripen any, and if I do the squirrels get them. I do believe I have not started a seedling these two hundred years. It is no use to talk to me, I shall be happy only when I have seen the other side of the mountain."
It seems what one desires with all one's heart for a long time finally comes to pass in some fashion or other. That very season the white-barked pine went up over Kearsarge to the other side. Early in the summer, when the rosy primroses had just begun to blow beside the drifts that hugged the shade of the boulders, a party of miners went up the trail with a long string of pack mules burdened with picks and shovels, flour and potatoes, and other things that miners use. The last pull up the Kearsarge trail is the hardest, over a steep waste of loose stones that want very little encouragement to go roaring down as an avalanche into the ravine below. The miners shouted, the mules scrambled and panted on the steep, but just as they came by the last of the white-barked pines, one slipped and went rolling over and over on the jagged stones. As happens very frequently when a pack animal falls, the mule was not very much hurt, but the pack saddle was quite ruined.
"We must do the best we can," said one of the men, and he cut down the white-barked pine. He chopped off the boughs, and split the trunk in four pieces to mend the pack. It was a very small tree though it was so old.
"Ah! Ah!" said the tree, "it hurts, but one does not mind that when one is realizing an ambition. Now I shall go to the top." So he went over Kearsarge on mule-back quite like an old traveler.
"Well, we are rid of his complaining," said the pine who stood next to him, "and now I am the highest up of all the pines. I wonder if it is really so much finer on the other side."
His old companion, in four pieces, was swinging down the other side of the mountain, and as he went, he saw high peaks and soddy meadows, long winding cañons with white glancing waters; and heard the chorus of the falls. When it was night the miners lit a fire and loosened up the packs, and after dark, when the wind began to move among the trees and the fire burned low, one of the men threw a piece of the white-barked pine on it.
"Oh! Oh!" cried the pine as the flames caught hold of it, "and is this really the end of all my travels?"
"How that green wood sputters!" said the man; "it is not fit even for firewood."
The next day the wind took up the ash and carried it back over the pass, and dropped it where the chopped boughs lay fainting on the ground.
"Ah, is that you?" they said; "now you can tell us what it is like on the other side."
"How ignorant you are," said the ash of the white-barked pine, "one would know you have never traveled. It is exactly like this side." But he could not hear what they had to say to that, for the wind whirled him away.
NA'ŸANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT
DRIVE
NA'ŸANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT DRIVE
The Basket Woman was walking over the mesa with the great carrier at her back. Behind her straggled the children and the other women of the campoodie, each with a cone-shaped basket slung between her shoulders. Alan clapped his hands when he saw them coming, and ran out along the path.
"You come see rabbit drive," she said, twinkling her shrewd black eyes under the border of her basket cap. Alan took hold of a fold of her dress as he walked beside her, for he was still a little afraid of the other Indians, but since the time of his going out to see the buzzards making a merry-go-round, he knew he should never be afraid of the Basket Woman again. The other women laughed a great deal as they looked at him, showing their white teeth and putting back the black coarse hair out of their eyes, and Alan felt that the things they said to each other were about him, though they could hardly have been unpleasant with so much smiling. Now he could see the men swarm out of the huts under the hill, all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies at a tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs. They passed up the mesa in a blur of golden dust; westward they dwindled to a speck, something ran between them from man to man, now thick like a cord, then shaken out and vanishing in air. Then the riders dropped from their horses and fumbled on the ground. Alan plucked at the Basket Woman's dress.
"Tell me what it is they do," he said.
"It is the net which they set with forked stakes of willow," answered the Basket Woman. Now the young men and the middle-aged began to form a line across the mesa, standing three man's lengths apart in the sage. Some of them were armed with guns and others had only clubs; all were merry, laughing and calling to one another. They began to move forward evenly with a marching movement, beating the brush as they went. Presently up popped a rabbit from the sage and ran before them in long flying leaps; far down the line another bounded from a stony wash, his lean flanks turned broadside to the sun.
Then the hunters broke into shouts of laughter and clapping, then one began to sing and the song passed from man to man along the line; then the men crouched a little as Indians do in singing, then their bodies swayed and they stamped with each staccato note as they moved forward. Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries and laughter grew and the singing rose louder. The wind blew it back to the women and children straggling far behind, who took it up, and the burden of it was this, —
E – ya – ha hi, E – ya, E – ya – hi!
But every man sang it for himself, beginning when he liked and leaving off, and when a rabbit started up under foot or one over-leaped himself and went sprawling to the sand the refrain broke out again, but the words, when there were any, seemed not to have anything to do with the hunt, and sounded to Alan like a game.
"He-yah-hi, hi! he has it; he has it, he has the white, he has it!"
"Na'ÿang-wit'e!" chuckled the Basket Woman. "Na'ÿang-wit'e, na'ÿang-wit'e! It is as it was of old time, look now and you shall see."
Alan looked at the hunters again, and whether it was because of the blown dust of the mesa, or the quiver of heat that rose up from the sand, or because the Basket Woman had laid her hand upon him, he saw that they were not as they had been a moment since. Now they wore no hats and were naked from the waist up, clothed below with deerskin garments. Quivers of the skin of cougars with the tails hanging down were slung between their shoulders, and the arrows in them were pointed with tips of obsidian and winged with eagle feathers. Every man carried his bow or his spear in his hand. Bright beads and bits of many-colored shell hung and glittered in their hair. Rabbits went before them like grasshoppers for number, and the song and the shouting were fierce and wild. "But what is it all about?" asked Alan.
"Na'ÿang-wit'e, na'ÿang-wit'e," laughed the Basket Woman. "Wait and I will tell you the story of that song, for it is so that every song has its story, without which no one may understand it. It is not well to go too near the guns; sit you here and I will tell."
So Alan bent down the sagebrush to make him a springy seat and the Basket Woman sat upon the ground with her hands clasped about her knees.
"Long and long ago," said the Basket Woman, "when men and beasts talked together, there were none so friendly and none so much about the wickiups as the rabbit people, and some of our fathers have told that it was they who taught my people the game of na'ÿang-wit'e. I know not if that be true, but there were none so cunning as they to play it. And this is the manner of the game: there should be two sticks, or better, two bits of bone of the fore leg of a deer, made smooth and small to fit the palm. One of them is all white and the other has sinew of deer stained black and wound about it. These the players pass from hand to hand, and another will guess where is the place of the white, and he who guesses best shall win all the other's goods. It is good sport playing, and between man and man it comes even in the end, for sometimes one has the goods and sometimes another, but when my people played with the rabbit people it was not good, for the rabbits won every time. Then my people drew together, all the Indians of every sort, and made a great game against the rabbit people. There were two long rows across the mesa, and between them were all the goods piled high, all the beads and ornaments of shell, all the feather work and fine dressed deerskin, all the worked moccasins, the quivers, the bows, all the blankets, the baskets, and the woven mats. So they played at sunrise, so at noon, so when it was night and the fires were lit. So on into the night, and when it was morning the game was done, for the Indians had no more goods. Ay-aiy!" said the Basket Woman, "long will the rabbit people sorrow for that day, for it was then that the Indians first contrived together how they might be rid of them. Then they gathered up the milkweed," and she reached out and plucked a tall stem of it growing beside her, white flowered and slender, with fine leaves like grass. "Then they broke it so," and she laid it across a stone and beat it lightly with a stick, "then they drew out the threads soft and white, and so they rolled it into string."
She stretched the fibre with one hand and rolled it on her knee with the other, twisting and twining it. "Thus was the string made and afterward woven into nets. The mesh of the net was just enough to let a rabbit's head through, but not his body, and the net was a little wider than a rabbit's jump when he goes fast and fleeing, and long enough to stretch half across the world. So on a day the net was set and the drive was begun as you have seen it, and as the Indians went they remembered their anger and taunted the rabbit people. So the song of Na'ÿang-wit'e was made. Now let us go and see how it fares with the rabbit people, for as it was of old so will it be to-day."
All this time the line of men moved steadily across the mesa toward the net. Now and then a rabbit turned, made bold by fright, and passed between the men as they marched. Then the nearest turned to shoot him as he ran, but it was left to the women to pick up the game. Already the foremost rabbits were at the net, turned back by it, leaping toward the hunters and fleeing again to the net. The old men closed in the ends of the lane where the rabbits ran about distractedly with shrill squeals of anguished fear. Some got their heads through the mesh but never their bodies, and as it is not the nature of rabbits to go backward they struggled and cried, getting themselves the more entangled; some blind with their haste came against it in mid-leap, and were thrown back stunned upon the sand. The men sang no more, for they had work to do, serious work, for on the dried flesh of the rabbits and the blankets made of their skins the campoodie must largely count for food and warmth in the winter season. They closed in to the killing and made short work of it with clubs and the butt ends of their guns. Then the women came up with the children and heaped up the great carriers with the game while the men wrung the sweat from their foreheads and counted up the kill. Most of the rabbits were the kind Alan had learned to call jack rabbits, but the Basket Woman picked up a fat little cotton-tail.
"This is little Tavwots," said she, "and you shall have him for your supper." Alan's mind still ran on the story of the first drive. "But is it true?" he asked her, before he had given thanks for the gift.
"Now this is the sign I shall give you that the tale is true," said the Basket Woman. "Ever since that day if one of the rabbit people meets an Indian in the trail he flees before him as you saw them flee to-day, and that is because of na'ÿang-wit'e and the first rabbit drive." Then she laughed, but Alan took his share of the kill on his shoulder and went back across the mesa slowly, wondering.
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