The Heart of the Ancient Wood

Before he could fully recover, the deer was upon him again; and Miranda, her eyes glowing, her cheeks scarlet with excitement and exultation, clutched her companion’s arm with such a grip that her slim fingers hurt him deliciously. The lynx, alarmed and furious, twisted himself over and fixed both claws and teeth in his adversary’s leg, just below the shoulder. Fierce and strong as he was, he was nevertheless getting badly punished, when his mate appeared bounding down the slope, and with a sharp snarl sprang upon the doe’s neck, bearing her to her knees.

“Shoot! shoot!” cried Miranda, springing away from Dave’s side to give him room. But his rifle was at his shoulder ere she spoke. With the word his shot rang out; and the second assailant dropped to the ground, kicking. Immediately Dave ran forward. The male lynx, disentangling himself, darted for cover; but just as he was disappearing, Dave gave him the second barrel, at short range, and the bullet caught him obliquely across the hind quarters, breaking his spine. Dave was noted as the best shot in all that region; but the marksmanship which he had just displayed was lost on Miranda. She took it for granted that to shoot was to hit, and to hit was to kill, as a matter of course. Dave’s first shot had killed. The animal was already motionless. But the writhings of the other lynx, prone in the bush, tore her heart.

“Oh, how it’s suffering! Kill it, quick!” she panted. Dave ran up, swung his rifle in a short grip, and struck the beast a settling blow at the base of the skull. The deer, meanwhile, limping and bleeding, but not seriously the worse for her dreadful encounter, hobbled back to where the body of her young lay stretched upon the moss. She sniffed at it for a moment with her delicate nose, satisfied herself that it was quite dead, then moved off slowly into the shadows.

Miranda went to each of the three slain animals in turn, and looked at them thoughtfully, while Dave waited in silence, uncertain what to do next. He felt that it behooved him to step warily while Miranda was wrestling with emotions. At last she said, with a sob in her voice, and her eyes very bright and large, – “Come, let’s get away from this horrid place!”

Dave experienced a certain mild pang at the thought of leaving two good pelts behind him to be gnawed by foxes; but he followed Miranda without a word. It would have been a fatal error to talk of furs at that moment. As soon, however, as they were out of sight of the open slope, he turned aside and headed their course toward a rocky knoll which was visible through the trees.

“What are you going that way for?” asked Miranda.

“Likely the lou’-cerfies had their den in the rocks yonder,” was the reply; “we must find it.”

“What do we want of their den?” queried the girl in surprise.

“There’ll be a couple of lou’-cerfie kittens in it, I reckon,” said Dave, “an’ we must find ’em.”

“What for?” demanded Miranda, suspiciously.

Dave looked at her.

“You’ve had me shoot the father an’ mother, Mirandy,” he said slowly, “for the sake of the deer. An’ now would ye hev the little ones starve to death?”

“I never thought of that, Dave,” answered the girl, smitten with remorse; and she looked at him with a new approval. She thought to herself that he, hunter and blood-stained as he was, showed yet a readier and more reasonable tenderness for the furry kindred than she herself.

For nearly half an hour they searched the hollows of the rocky knoll, and at last came upon a shallow cave overhung darkly by a mat of dwarf cedar. There were bones about the entrance, and inside, upon a bed of dry moss, were two small rusty brown, kitten-like objects curled softly together. Miranda’s discerning vision perceived them at once, but it took Dave’s eyes some seconds to adapt themselves to the gloom. Then the furry ball of “lou’-cerfie” kittens looked to him very pretty – something to be fondled and protected. He knew well how their helplessness would appeal to Miranda’s tender heart. Nevertheless, with a firmness of courage which, under the circumstances, few heroes would have arisen to, he stepped forward, stooped, untangled the soft ball, and with the heavy handle of his hunting-knife struck each kitten just one sharp stroke on the neck, killing it instantly and easily.

“Poor little critters!” he muttered; “it was the only thing to do with ’em,” and he turned to Miranda.

The girl had backed out of the cave and now stood, with flushed face, staring at him fiercely.

“You brute!” she exclaimed.

Dave had been prepared for some discussion of his action. But he was not prepared for just this. He drew himself up.

“I did think ye was a woman grown; an’ for all yer idees were kind of far-fetched, I’ve respected ’em a heap; an’ I won’t say but what they’ve influenced me, too. But now I see ye’re but a silly child an’ don’t reason. Did ye think, maybe, these here leetle mites o’ things could live an’ take keer o’ themselves?”

He spoke coldly, scornfully; and there was a kind of mastery in his voice that quelled her. She was astonished, too. The colour in her face deepened, but she dropped her eyes.

“I wanted to take them home, and tame them,” she explained, quite humbly.

Dave’s stern face softened.

“Ye’d never ’a’ been able to raise ’em. They’re too young, a sight too young. See, their eyes ain’t open. They’d have jest died on yer hands, Mirandy, sure an’ sartain!”

“But – how could you!” she protested, with no more anger left, but a sob of pity in her throat.

“It was jest what you do to the fish ye ketch, Mirandy, to stop their sufferin’.”

Miranda looked up quickly, and her eyes grew large.

“Do you know, I never thought of that before, Dave,” she replied. “I’ll never catch a fish again, long as I live! Let’s get away from here.”

“Ye see,” began Dave, making up his mind to sow a few seeds of doubt in Miranda’s mind as to the correctness of her theories, “ye see, Mirandy, ’tain’t possible to be consistent right through in this life; but what ye’ll find, life’ll make a fool o’ ye at one point or another. I ain’t a-goin’ to say I think ye’re all wrong, not by no means. Sence I’ve seen the way ye understand the live critters of the woods, an’ how they understand you, I’ve come to feel some different about killin’ ’em myself. But, Mirandy, Nature’s nature, an’ ye can’t do much by buckin’ up agin her. Look now, ye told me to shoot the lou’-cerfie coz he killed the deer kid. But he didn’t go to kill it for ugliness, nor jest for himself to make a dinner off of – you know that. He killed it for his mate, too. Lou’-cerfie ain’t built so’s they can eat grass. If the she lou’-cerfie didn’t git the meat she needed, her kittens’d starve. She’s jest got to kill. Nature’s put that law onto her, an’ onto the painters, an’ the foxes an’ wolves, the ’coons an’ the weasels. An’ she’s put the same law, only not so heavy, onto the bears, an’ also onto humans, what’s all built to live on all kinds of food, meat among the rest. An’ to live right, and be their proper selves, they’ve all got to eat meat sometimes, for Nature don’t stand much foolin’ with her laws!”

“I’m well,” interrupted Miranda, eagerly, with the obvious retort.

“Maybe ye won’t be always!” suggested Dave.

“Then I’ll be sick – then I’ll die before I’ll eat meat!” she protested passionately. “What’s the good of living, anyway, if it’s nothing but kill, kill, kill, and for one that lives a lot have got to die!”

Dave shook his head soberly.

“That’s what nobody, fur’s I can see, Mirandy, has ever been able to make out yet. I’ve thought about it a heap, an’ read about it a heap, alone in camp, an’ I can’t noways see through it. Oftentimes it’s seemed to me all life was jest like a few butterflies flitterin’ over a graveyard. But all the same, if we don’t go to too much foolish worryin’ ’bout what we can’t understand, we do feel it’s good to be alive; an’ I do think, Mirandy, this life might be somethin’ finer than the finest kind of a dream.”

Something in his voice, at these last words, thrilled Miranda, and at the same time put her on her guard.

“Well,” she exclaimed positively, if not relevantly, “I’m never going to catch another fish.”

The answer not being just what Dave needed for the support of his advance, he lost courage, and let the conversation drop.

Chapter XVII

In the Roar of the Rapids

A little before noon, when the midsummer heat of the outside world came filtering faintly down even into the cool vistas of the forest, and here and there a pale-blue butterfly danced with his mate across the clear shadow, and the aromatic wood smells came out more abundantly than was their wont, at the lure of the persuasive warmth, the travellers halted for noonmeat. Sitting on a fallen hemlock trunk beside a small but noisy brook, it was a frugal meal they made on the cheese and dark bread which Kirstie had put in Dave’s satchel. Their halt was brief; and as they set out again, Dave said: —

“’Tain’t a mile from here to the Big Fork. Gabe’s canoe’s hid in the bushes just where this here brook falls in. Noisy, ain’t it?”

“I love the sound,” exclaimed Miranda, stepping quickly and gaily, as if the light, musical clamour of the stream had got into her blood.

“Well, the Big Fork’s a sight noisier,” continued Dave. “It’s heavy water, an’ just rapids on rapids all the ways down to Gabe’s clearing. Ye won’t be skeered, Mirandy?”

The girl gave one of her rare laughs, very high-pitched, but brief, musical, and curiously elusive. She was excited at the prospect.

“I reckon you know how to handle a canoe, Dave,” was all she said. The trust in her voice made Dave feel measurably nearer his purpose. He durst not speak, lest his elation should betray itself.

In a little while there came another sound, not drowning or even obscuring the clear prattle of the brook, but serving as a heavy background to its brightness. It was a large, yet soft, pulsating thunder, and seemed to come from all sides at once; as if far-off herds, at march over hollow lands, were closing in upon them. Dave looked at Miranda. She gave him a shining glance of comprehension.

“It’s the rapids!” she cried. “Do we go through those?”

Dave laughed.

“Not those! Not by a long chalk! That’s the ‘Big Soo’ ye hear, an’ it’s more a fall than a rapid. Ther’s an eddy an’ a still water jest below, an’ that’s where we take to the canoe.”

As they went on, the great swelling noise seemed to Miranda to fill her soul, and worked a deep yet still excitement within her. Nevertheless, rapidly as its volume increased, the light chatter of the brook was upborne distinctly upon the flood of it. Then, suddenly, as the forest thinned ahead, and the white daylight confronted them, the voice of the brook was in an instant overwhelmed, utterly effaced. The softly pervasive thunder burst all at once into a trembling roar, vehement, conflicting, explosive; and they came out full in face of a long, distorted slope of cataract. White, yellow, tawny green, the waves bounded and wallowed down the loud steep; and here and there the black bulks of rock shouldered upward, opposing them eternally.

Spellbound at the sight, Miranda stood gazing, while Dave fetched from the bushes a ruddy-yellow canoe of birch bark, and launched it in a quiet but foam-flecked back-water at their feet. In the bow he placed a compact bundle of bracken for Miranda to sit upon, with another flat bundle at her back, that the cross-bar might not gall her.

“Best fer ye to sit low, Mirandy, ’stead o’ kneelin’,” he explained, “coz I’ll be standin’ up, with the pole, goin’ through some o’ the rips, an’ ye’ll be steadier sittin’ than kneelin’.”

“But I paddle better kneeling,” protested Miranda.

“Ye won’t need to paddle,” said Dave, a little grimly. “Ye’ll jest maybe fend a rock now an’ agin, that’s all. The current an’ me’ll do the rest.”

The fall of the “Big Soo” ended in a basin very wide and deep, whose spacious caverns absorbed the fury of the waters and allowed them to flow off sullenly. Dave knelt in the stern, paddle in hand, and the long pole of white spruce sticking out behind the canoe, where he could lay his grasp upon it in an instant. A couple of strokes sent the little craft out into the smooth, purplish-amber swirls of the deep current, whereon the froth clusters wheeled slowly. A few minutes more and a green fringed overhang of rock was rounded, the last energy of the current spent itself in a deep and roomy channel, the uproar of the cataract mellowed suddenly to that pulsating thunder which they had heard at first, and the canoe, under Dave’s noiseless propulsion, shot forward over a surface as of dark brown glass. There was a mile of this still water, along which Miranda insisted upon paddling. The rocks rose straight from the channel, and the trees hung down from their rim, and the June sun, warmly flooding the trough of rock and water, made its grimness greatly beautiful. Then the rocks diminished, and the steep, richly green slopes of the hillsides came down to the water’s edge, and a rushing clamour began to swell in the distance. The currents awakened under the canoe, which darted forward more swiftly. The shouting of the “rips” seemed to rush up stream to meet them. The surface of the river began to slant away before them, not breaking yet, but furrowing into long, thready streaks. Then, far down the slant, a tossing white line of short breakers, drawn right across the channel, clambered toward them ravenously.

“Ye’d better not paddle now, Mirandy,” said Dave, in a quiet voice, standing up for a moment to survey the channel, while the canoe slipped swiftly down toward the turmoil. “There’s rapids now all the way down to Gabe’s clearing. An’ we won’t be long goin’, neither.”

A moment more, and to Miranda it seemed that the leafy shores ran by her, that the gnashing phalanx of the waves sprang up at her. She had never run a rapid before. Her experience of canoeing had all been gained on the lake. She caught her breath, but did not flinch as the tumbling waters seethed and yammered around her. Then her blood ran hot with the excitement of it; her nerves tingled. She wanted to cry out, to paddle wildly and fiercely. But she held herself under curb. She never moved. Only the grip of her hands on the paddle, which lay idle before her, tightened till the knuckles went white. There was no word from Dave; no sign of his presence save that the canoe shot straight as an arrow, and bit firmly upon the big surges, so that she knew his wrist of steel was in control. Suddenly, just ahead, sprang a square black rock, against which the mad rush of water upreared and fell back broken to either side. The canoe leaped straight at it, and Miranda held her breath.

“Stroke on the right!” came Dave’s sharp order. She dipped her paddle strenuously, twice – thrice – and, swerving at the last moment, while the currents seethed up along her bulwarks, the canoe darted safely past.

Miranda stopped paddling. There was a steeper slope in front, but a clear channel, the waves not high but wallowing inward toward the centre. Straight down this centre rushed the canoe, the surges clutching at her on both sides, yellow green, with white foam-streaks veining their very hearts. At the foot of the slope, singing sharply and shining in the sun, curved a succession of three great “ripples,” stationary in mid-channel, their back-curled crests thin and prismatic. Straight through these Dave steered. The three thin crests, thus swiftly divided, one after another, slapped Miranda coldly in the face, drenching her, and leaving a good bucketful of water in the canoe.

“Oh!” gasped Miranda, at the shock, and shook her hair, laughing excitedly.

There was gentler water now for a hundred yards or so, and Dave steered cautiously for shore.

“We’ll hev to land an’ empty her out,” said he. “Ther’s no more big ‘ripples’ like them there on the whole river; an’ we won’t take in water agin ’twixt here an’ Gabe’s.”

“I don’t care if we do!” exclaimed Miranda, fervently. “It was splendid, Dave! And you did it just fine!”

This commendation took him aback somewhat, and he was unable to show his appreciation of it except by a foolish grin, which remained on his face while he turned the canoe over and while he launched it again. It was still there when Miranda resumed her place in the bow; and, strangely enough, she felt no disposition to criticise him for it.

The rest of the journey, lasting nearly an hour longer, was a ceaseless succession of rapids, with scant and few spaces of quiet water between. None were quite so long and violent as the first; but by the time the canoe slowed up in the reach of still water that ran through the interval meadow of Gabe’s clearing, Miranda felt fagged from the long-sustained excitement. She felt as if it had been she, not Dave, whose unerring eye and unfailing wrist had brought the canoe in triumph through the menace of the roaring races.

They landed on the blossoming meadow strip, and Dave turned the canoe over among the grasses, under the shade of an elm that would serve to keep the afternoon sun from melting the rosin off the seams. Gabe’s cabin stood a stone’s throw back from the meadow, high enough up the slope to be clear of the spring freshets. It was a bare, uncared-for place, with black stumps still dotting all the fields of buckwheat and potatoes, a dishevelled-looking barn, and no vine or bush about the house. It gave Miranda a pang of pity to look at it. Her own cabin was lonely enough, but with a high, austere, clear loneliness that seemed to hold communion with the stars. The loneliness of this place was a shut-in, valley loneliness, without horizons and without hope. She felt sorry almost to tears for the white and sad-eyed woman who appeared in the cabin door to welcome them.

“Sary Ann, this is Mirandy I spoke to ye about.”

The two women shook hands somewhat shyly, and, after the silent fashion of their race, said nothing.

“How’s Jimmy?” asked Dave.

“’Baout the same, thank ye, Dave,” replied the woman, wearily, leading the way into the cabin.

In a low chair near the window, playing listlessly with a dingy red-and-yellow rag doll, sat a thin-faced, pallid little boy with long, pale curls down on his shoulders. He lifted sorrowful blue eyes to Miranda’s face, as she, with a swift impulse of tenderness and compassion, rushed forward and knelt down to embrace him. Her vitality and the loving brightness of her look won the child at once. His wan little face lightened. He lifted the baby mouth to be kissed. Miranda pressed his fair head to her bosom gently, and had much ado to keep her eyes from running over, so worked the love and pity and the mothering hunger in her heart.

“He takes to ye, Mirandy,” said the woman, smiling upon her. And Dave, his passion almost mastering him, blurted out proudly, —

“An’ who wouldn’t take to her, I’d like to know?”

He felt at this moment that Miranda was now all human, and could never quite go back to her mystic and uncanny wildness, her preference for the speechless, furry kin over her own warm, human kind. He produced the medicine from his satchel; and from Miranda’s attentive hand Jimmy took the stuff as if it had been nectar. Jimmy’s mother looked on with undisguised approval of the girl. Had she thought Miranda was going to stay any length of time, her mother-jealousy would have been aroused; but as it was she was only exquisitely relieved at the thought of Jimmy’s being in some one else’s care for a few hours. She whispered audibly – a mere chaffing pretence of a whisper it was – to Dave: —

“It’s a right purty an’ a right smart little wife she’ll make fer ye, Dave Titus, an’ she’ll know how to mind yer babies. Ye’re a lucky man, an’ I hope ye understand how lucky ye air!”

Poor Dave! She might as well have thrown a bucket of cold water in his face. For an instant he could have strangled the kindly, coarse-grained, well-meaning, silly woman, who stood beaming her pale goodwill upon them both. He cursed himself for not having warned her that Miranda could not be chaffed like a common Settlement girl. He saw Miranda’s face go scarlet to the ears, though she bent over Jimmy and pretended to have heard nothing; and he knew that in that moment his good work was all undone. For a few seconds he could say nothing, and the silence grew trying. Then he stammered out: —

“I’m afeard ther’s no sich luck fer me, Sary Ann, though God knows I want her. But Mirandy don’t like me very well.”

The woman stared at him incredulously.

“Lord sakes, Dave Titus, then what’s she doin’ here alone with you?” she exclaimed, the weariness coming back into her voice at the last of the phrase. “Oh, you go ’long! You don’t know nothin’ about women!”

This was quite too much for Dave, whose instincts, fined by long months in the companionship of only the great trees, the great winds, and the grave stars, had grown unerringly delicate. His own face flushed up now for Miranda’s sake.

“I’d take it kindly of ye, Sary Ann, if ye’d quit the subject right there,” he said quietly. But there was a firmness in his voice which the woman understood.

“The both of ye must be nigh dead for somethin’ to eat,” she said. “I must git ye supper right off.” And she turned to the fireplace and filled the kettle.

Thereafter, through supper, and through the short evening, Miranda had never a word for Dave. She talked a little, kindly and without showing her resentment, to Mrs. White; but her attentions were entirely absorbed in little Jimmy. Indeed, she had Jimmy very much to herself, for Mrs. White got Dave to help with the chores and the milking. Afterward, about the hearth-fire, – maintained for its cheer and not for warmth, – Mrs. White confined her conversation largely to Dave. She was not angry at him on account of his rebuke – but vaguely aggrieved at Miranda as the cause of it. She began to feel that Miranda was different from other girls, from what she herself had been as a girl. Miranda’s fineness and sensitiveness were something of an offence to her, though she could not define them at all. She characterized them vaguely by the phrase “stuck up”; and became presently inclined to think that a fine fellow like Dave was too good for her. Still, she was a fair-minded woman in her worn, colourless way; and she could not but allow there must be a lot in Miranda if little Jimmy took to her so – “For a child knows a good heart,” she said to herself.

Next morning, soon after dawn, the travellers were off, Miranda tearing herself with difficulty from little Jimmy’s embrace, and leaving him in a desolation of tears. She was quite civil and ordinary with Dave now, so much so that good, obtuse, weary Mrs. White concluded that all was at rights again. But Dave felt the icy difference; and he was too proud, if not for the time too hopeless, to try to thaw it. During all the long, laborious journey upward through the rapids, by poling, he did wonders of skill and strength, but in utter silence. His feats were not lost upon Miranda, but she hardened her heart resolutely; for now a shame, which she had never known before, gave tenacity to her anger. Through it all, however, she couldn’t help thrilling to the strife with the loud rapids, and exulting in the slow, inexorable conquest of them. The return march through the woods was in the main a silent one, as before; but how different a silence! Not electric with meaning, but cold, the silence of a walled chamber. And, as if the spirits of the wood maliciously enjoyed Dave’s discomfiture, they permitted no incident, no diversion. They kept the wood-folk all away, they emptied of all life and significance the forest spaces. And Dave grew sullen.

Arriving back at the clearing just before sundown, they paused at the cabin door. Dave looked into Miranda’s eyes with something of reproach, something of appeal. Kirstie’s voice, talking cheerfully to Kroof, came from the raspberry brambles behind the house. Miranda stretched out her hand with a cool frankness, and returned his look blankly.

“I’ve had a real good time, thank you, Dave,” she said. “You’ll find mother yonder, picking raspberries.”

Chapter XVIII

The Forfeit of the Alien

All through the summer and early autumn Dave continued his fortnightly visits to the cabin in the clearing, and always Miranda treated him with the same cold, casual civility. She felt, or pretended to herself that she felt, grateful now to the blunt-fingered, wan woman over at Gabe White’s, who had rudely jostled her back to her senses when she was on the very edge of giving up her freedom and her personality to a man – a strong man, who would have absorbed her. She flung herself passionately once more into the fellowship of the furtive folk, the secrecy and wonder of the wood. As it was a human love which she was crushing out, and as she felt the need of humanity cravingly, though not understandingly, at her heart, she lavished upon Kirstie a demonstrativeness of affection such as she had never shown before. It pleased Kirstie, and she met it heartily in her calm, strong way; but she saw through it, and smiled at the back of her brain, scarcely daring to think her thought frankly, lest the girl’s intuition should discern it. She made much of Dave, but never before Miranda; and she kept encouraging the rather despondent man with the continual assertion: “It’ll be all right, Dave. Don’t fret, but bide your time.” To which Dave responded by biding his time with a quiet, unaggressive persistence; and if he fretted, he took pains not to show it.