Wildly the black struggled. Slowly, carefully, making no move that might alarm, Jed scratched his neck and talked to him. Finally, the frantic creature stopped his insane thrashing and held his head still. Calmly, Jed walked to the front of him. Instantly, the horse closed his jaws on the boy’s arm. Jed gritted his teeth as the strong teeth squeezed, but his free hand played soothingly around the animal’s ears.
The horse unclenched his jaws. He pressed his muzzle against Jed’s mud-caked body and smelled him over. The boy grinned happily. The black and he were acquainted. Now he could go to work.
The frenzied flight of the horse had carried him a dozen feet from the floor of the ravine, and left him facing into the swamp. Still keeping up his murmuring undertone, Jed studied the situation. He had no lifts or hoists, and no way of getting any. It was useless for him to try to pit his own strength against the sucking mud. Likewise, there was no way whatever to make this wild creature obey his commands, and first he would have to get him facing back toward the ravine.
With his knife, Jed set to work by the horse’s side. When the carpet of grass on top of the mud had been cut away, he could dig faster with his hands—but as soon as he scooped out a handful of mud, another handful seeped in to take its place. He took off his shirt and returned to the ravine, where he filled it with loose shale from the rock slide. As soon as he scooped away a handful of mud he packed the remaining wall with shale. That held. The horse edged against the wall as soon as the boy made enough room for him to move. Jed was much encouraged when dark stopped the work. After eight hours of steady labor, the black had been turned about at least six inches.
In the last faint light of day, the boy returned to the ravine and got the coil of rope. The night would be a bad time. He did not think the horse could sink any deeper, but if he became panicky again, he might easily render useless all the work done. With his knife, Jed hacked off a dozen slender saplings, and carried them back, along with the coil of rope. The black turned his head to watch when his rescuer started back to where he was; almost it seemed that he was glad of company. Jed threw the saplings down beside the horse. They were to be his bed. The rope he passed about the horse’s neck, and made a hackamore that fitted over his jaw. With his head resting on the horse’s back, he lay down on the saplings. The end of the rope was in his hand. If the black should start to sink, he would hold his head up as long as he could.
All night long, Jed talked to the mired horse, calling him endearing names, soothing him with a quiet voice whenever he became restless. A full two hours he spent caressing the animal’s head with his mud-torn hands. An hour before dawn, he went again to the bottom of the ravine. Light of day was just breaking when he scrambled over the rock slide. He picked a great armful of the wild grass that grew in patches on the other side of the slide and carried it to the horse. Half of it he threw in front of him, but when the animal had eaten that, he took the rest from the boy’s hand.
Doggedly Jed set to work with his knife. It was devastatingly slow work—take out as much mud as he could, and pack the sides with shale, over and over again. Heedless of the time, he worked on, making countless trips to the slide for more shale. Before the sun set, the black was again facing toward the ravine. Furiously, he plunged to reach the firm earth. The boy quieted him. The time had not yet come to make the test.
Jed slept again beside the horse. When morning came, he once more scaled the slide to get him grass, feeding him by hand, then he resumed his digging. He worked from a different angle this time. It was scarcely ten feet to stony footing. A yard in front of the mired animal, he set to work clearing the mud way. When he got down to the level of the horse’s feet, he filled the hole with rocks and shale, and packed the sides with shale alone. As the day wore on, he gradually worked up to the horse’s breast. Two hours before sunset, all was ready.
In front of the black, there was a ramp of shale and rocks, a foot high, a yard long and four feet wide. Jed took the rope, one end of which still formed the hackamore, and ran it into the ravine. He returned to the horse. With his knife and hands, he scraped the mud away from one of his mired front legs. As soon as the pressure eased, the animal brought the freed leg to rest on the ramp and raised his entire body two inches from the mud.
Jed ran back to the ravine. Taking the rope in both hands, he pulled gently but steadily. The horse fought the rope a minute before he yielded to it. With a prodigious effort, he placed his other forefoot on the ramp, and, arching his back, he sent all the elastic strength of its muscles into his mired rear quarters. The boy heaved mightily on the rope. The black cleared the ramp with both front legs; for the first time his belly was clear of the mud. Jed gritted his teeth and pulled even harder. The horse’s hind hoofs slid on the ramp. He leaped and threw himself a yard through the mud. His front feet found a wisp of hard footing. He pawed wildly. A second later, the black scrambled to the stony floor of the ravine.
Jed fell back to the ground and, for a few seconds, yielded to the fatigue that was upon him. He had slept little and eaten nothing in almost three days. Dimly, he was aware of an immense black beast standing over him, pushing him with its muzzle and nibbling him with its lips.
The horse’s mane fell about him. Jed grasped it and pulled himself erect. He could not rest—yet. The black followed close behind him. He nickered anxiously when the boy climbed over the slide, and pranced playfully when he came back, his arms laden with wild grass.
Half the grass Jed left on top of the slide, the rest he carried into the ravine with him. He took away the hackamore as the animal ate, and fashioned a breast strap in the end of the rope. With utter freedom, he dodged under the horse’s neck and arranged the crude harness. Then he climbed to the top of the rocks for the rest of the grass.
Jed shook his head worriedly as he surveyed the slide; a good team could not move some of the boulders in it. But perhaps the black—he banished fear from his mind as he hitched the free end of the rope about one of the boulders and, with the grass in his arms, went to the head of the horse.
He patted the mud-caked muzzle as the animal pulled at the hay in his arms. Slowly, he backed away. The horse followed and the rope stretched taut. The black stopped and swung his head as he edged nervously sidewise. Jed gasped. If the horse fought the harness now, he could never get it on him again—and he could never get him out of the ravine! Jed stepped close to the troubled animal.
“This way, horse,” he murmured. “Look this way. You can do it, horse. Come this way.”
He stepped back again, the grass held out invitingly. The black trembled . . . and took a step forward. Pebbles flew from beneath his hoofs as he gave all his enormous strength to the task in hand. The tight rope hummed. The boulder moved an inch—six inches. Then, in a steady creeping that did not stop at all, it came away from the pile.
* * *
A week later, a great black horse appeared in the upper pasture where Tom Raglan was counting his colts. The horse stopped while the tiny, emaciated figure of a young boy slid from his back. Incredulously, Raglan approached them. The horse stood fearlessly behind his wasted companion.
“You got him, Jed,” Raglan said.
Raglan was no waster of words, but words were not needed. He was unable to tear his eyes away from the horse’s massive legs, his splendid head, his flawless body, all the qualities that had here combined to form the perfect living thing.
“I got him, Tom,” Jed Hale said, “and I brought him back like I said I would.”
Raglan coughed hesitantly. Above all else, he was a horseman. There was no need for the boy to tell him of the chase, or how the horse had been captured. Jed’s sunken eyes, his skeleton body, his tattered clothes, the fingers from which the nails had been torn, told the story for those who could read. There was a world of difference between himself, the successful stockman, and Jed, the crippled stable hand. But they were brothers by a common bond—the love of a good horse. Raglan coughed again. Jed had indeed brought the horse back, b
ut, by all the rules known, the black could only belong to one man, the man who had brought him back.
“Jed,” Raglan said slowly, “I never went back on my word yet, and I’ll stick by the bargain I made. But that horse is no good to me.” Jed stood without speaking.
“He’d kill anybody except you that tried to monkey ‘round him,” Raglan continued. “I can’t risk that. But I’ll go a long way to get his blood in my stock. Now there’s a house and barn in my north pasture. I’ll give both of them to you, along with fifty acres of ground, if you’ll take that horse up there and let me turn my best mares in with him. I can pay you thirty dollars a month, and you can keep every seventh colt. Do you think you’d just as soon do that as have the five hundred?”
Jed Hale gasped and put a hand against the horse’s withers to steady himself. The black laid his muzzle against the boy’s shoulder. Jed encircled it with an arm. The black horse, the horse that could do anything, was his now. It was a little too much to stand all at once. . . . Suddenly, Jed remembered that he was now a hard-boiled stock owner.
“Why, yes,” he said finally. “If that’s the way you’d rather have it, Tom, yes. I guess I’d just as soon.”
The Lake and the Lonely Exiles
The new day and a gentle wind arrived together. For a time, the breeze practiced caution, plucking tentatively at this or that, as though teaching itself what to do with a strength as yet unfamiliar and untried. Then, as the dim gray light in the early morning sky flexed its own sinews and found force within them, the wind rushed at the tules and set them dancing.
A shimmering girdle that started at the water’s edge and ended where the shallows flirted with the green depths, the belt of bulrushes kept the lake’s middle tight and slender. The tules’ width varied from as much as fifteen to as few as three feet, and the shallows varied accordingly. The rushes could not plant their roots where the water was too deep. The tules, the lake, the softly rising slopes around them, and the sky-probing peaks that walled everything in, disdained any pattern and flouted all conformity, but the effect was rhythmic and all the more pleasing.
A half mile wide by a mile and a half long, the mirror-smooth face that the lake had worn all night became a succession of ripples as the little wind found the daring to stray over it. A flock of coots that had spent the night on open water began darting swiftly and erratically about. The tiny ripples revived in each anxious memories of calm water churned to sudden anger, and brought the thought that it would be wise to do all that needed doing before the ripples became surging waves that would drive them to shelter.
Here and there, lazily-rising trout broke water, lured by the hope of finding food, since there would be no insects until the sun rose high enough to warm the haunts in which they had shivered since sundown and gave them back their wings. Near the tules, nesting mallards were almost frantically scurrying about while time worked against them. They must hurry. If the eggs in hidden nests became cold, the young within them would die without ever cracking the shells.
Occasionally, the ripples on the surface were shattered or crossed by a curling V-wake that marked the watery trail of a swimming muskrat. At the far north end of the lake, a lithe doe, who had left her dappled fawn hidden in a thicket, sipped, raised a nervous head to look, and lowered it to sip again. As though his last dark deed, the murder of a nesting mallard, could not abide the light, a snake-thin mink looked for a den in which he might lie up and found one in a hollow stump. Two crows, busily trying to pick up a dead fish that floated with white belly upward, cawed their disappointment or rising excitement as their fortunes waned or rose. Saucy, red-winged blackbirds tilted on bending rushes and whistled defiance to the rest of the world.
Deep in the thick rushes, where he had hidden himself at sunset, the great white-throated gander had come awake with the first pale hint of dawn but, as yet, he had not moved. Then the wind set the tules to quivering and the water to rippling. With wisdom his birthright and experience his teacher, the wild goose conformed.
While all else was still, he had held still. Now that there was motion, he bobbed back and forth, precisely as the anchored nest of grebe, which the gander realized he resembled, would bob. When he knew he could do so safely, he would go out to feed. Until he was sure, he would stay exactly as he was. It was the ultimate in caution, even for a wild goose, but there were sound reasons why all risks must be avoided.
For the past four seasons, the gander had winged south with his flock, making the long journey from summer nesting to winter feeding grounds and learning firsthand of the many perils along the way. Times without number, he had seen geese in mid-flight fold suddenly-limp wings and tumble, end over end, when a shotgun blasted from some hidden blind or camouflaged pit. He knew the poacher’s nets and snares, and, from this knowledge, he had taught himself how to find places in which danger did not lurk. The centers of wooded swamps whose snarled thickets and treacherous sink holes were shunned by even the hardiest hunter, and isolated little potholes where food was available but which were almost never considered as a place to hunt geese, were safest.
This would have been the gander’s fourth season in the nesting grounds, if he had not made an error that was not justly his fault. There was a pothole south of the lake, one he knew and always visited, where he had never run into trouble. Nor would there have been any this time if, just as the gander was settling to come into it, flying at treetop level, a poacher with a ready shotgun, a one-in-a-million coincidence, had not happened to be walking in the forest at that time.
When the shotgun blasted, the gander’s flight mates rose on strong wings, while he himself beat fumblingly into the air. The two or three pellets in his body were painful, but the erratic charge that had found his right wing was crippling. By some miracle, the single sliver of bone that had not broken on impact did not snap until just after he landed on the lake.
Now he was robbed of flight, his only positive assurance that he need fear nothing if he saw it first. Until he could fly again, he was a prisoner on the lake and he did not like it. Although the tules offered a good hiding place, they were no barrier at all to a man in a boat, or even a man on foot, if he cared to undergo a soaking.
To risk being seen was to risk death, therefore the wild goose must not be seen. Only when there was no longer even a faint doubt that the lake was not under observation of human eyes did the gander swim out to feed.
He was wholly unaware that one pair of eyes singled him out the second he appeared and remained fixed upon him until he went back into the tules.
They belonged to a dog, a woolly creature of many breeds that had obviously run to size but had been bequeathed no special mark of identification. This haphazard animal had the muzzle, stature, ears, tail and pelt of a wolf and resembled a wolf far more than any known dog. Only his troubled eyes, his way of looking about and a pace that no wolf could possibly imitate, were present to refute the villainous form and to say that a true dog lived in the wolf’s body.
With his huge frame, the dog would have been a full twenty pounds heavier if properly fed. Starved, his belly was pinched and gaunt and even his soft fur did not hide slatted ribs. Nevertheless, the look he turned on the gander was wholly wistful, with no taint of the lustful. The dog’s story was just another tragedy among innumerable similar cases that are seldom brought to light because the principals involved cannot tell their own stories.
Now three years old, since puppy days the dog had been the trusted friend and companion of an understanding farmer who never failed to grin when someone pointed out a wolfish look. It was always amusing to meet anyone so blind that he could not see the sham or discover the dog. Suddenly prosperous by reason of inherited wealth, the farmer promptly decided to give himself the vacation that had always haunted his dreams.
Leaving his farm in care of a hired manager who knew all he should about farming but nothing about dogs, the farmer went his way. Neither attracted nor repelled by the dog, the manager was satisfied to co
nsider him as just another farm animal until hysteria erupted. A sheep-killing dog appeared among neighboring flocks. The inevitable eyewitness who hadn’t seen anything in true perspective positively identified the wolflike dog as the culprit. Thereafter, the manager was bombarded by threats, which included everything from legal to vigilante action, unless he disposed of the “killer.”
Terrified to keep the dog, but equally afraid to kill him and explain his death to his employer, the manager chose the only alternative he saw open. Taking the trusting animal in his pickup truck, he drove as far as a wheeled vehicle could be driven into the wilderness and kicked him out. Thus his conscience would be clear when he said he had not killed the dog and there would be no feelings of guilt when he declared that he had not seen him around the place for some time. Let the farmer decide for himself that the creature must have run away.
Although he knew nothing of dogs, the manager was dedicated to a job well done and he intended to do this one well. To keep the dog from ever finding his way home, he abandoned him deep in hunting country so remote that nobody visited it in summer and only the hardy and venturesome dared pit themselves against such a place even during the hunting season. It was thirty-three miles to a paved road by the route they had followed, thirty-eight to a town. The next nearest paved road in any direction lay through wilderness as primitive as it had been before Columbus set sail. A few wandering shepherds grazed their flocks in it, but the only human habitation in an area whose size compared favorably with some smaller states was a lodge that catered to hunters in the fall and fishermen and campers in the spring and summer. Except for Johnny Warner, the crippled caretaker, this lodge was closed all winter.
Bewildered and frightened, sure only that there had been a terrible mistake, the dog ran after the departing truck. But even though desperation loaned wings to his feet as he galloped down the two ruts and grassy crown that served for a road, he was outdistanced in the first three-quarters of a mile.
Two Dogs and a Horse Page 3
