by Max Brand
Tommy cleared his dizzy eyes and crept closer. There was no hope that John Parks could have lived for a moment in that run of waters. A twig was dislodged by Tommy’s hand and fell into the stream. It was whirled wildly around, danced away from the teeth of jag-toothed rocks, and then darted off down the foaming length of the flume. A tree trunk might be ground to powder in that shoot of water.
Tommy drew back from the water. The moment the bank cut away the view of the stream, he turned and fled as though the waterfall were a living enemy ready to plunge in pursuit with mighty leaps. Breathless, he reached the clearing. He ran to the burro, he threw his arms around the neck of that scrawny little beast.
“Oh, Billy,” he cried, “Dad is gone . . . Dad is gone! Dad can never come back to me!”
Billy canted one ear back and one forward, as was his way in all emergencies calling for thought, and, swinging his head around, he looked mildly upon his young master. The next instant he was calmly reaching for more buds on the shrub off which he had been feeding.
Tommy stepped back and watched the burro calmly making a meal, stamping now and then to show his content, or flicking his long ears back in gloomy anger when he caught sight of the pack saddle nearby. It seemed to Tommy Parks that the patient munching of the burro was a symbol of the bland indifference of all the world. His father was dead, but here was the wind bustling merrily among the twinkling leaves of the aspens, and yonder were the white heights over which they had just come, and in the distance was the voice of the Turnbull, an ominous, small thunder. His father was dead, but all went on as it had gone on before. The very fire that he had lighted still sent up a straggling wisp of smoke. At sight of this, Tommy, who had remained dry-eyed, suddenly burst into tears and wept in an agony of grief and loneliness and fear.
The burro wandered over and curiously nudged his shoulder with his nose.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MARAUDER KILLS
When a man is lost in the woods, the first thing to do is to sit down and have a long think and not wander away in the first direction that comes into his head. That was what John Parks had cautioned Tommy more than once. He remembered it now as he sat cross-legged under a pine, with his head back against the trunk. He had spent the morning making up the pack—a weird bundle it was when he finished—and moving down lower in the valley, farther from the Turnbull, so that the sound of its roaring would not haunt him. He had descended simply because he dared not undertake, alone, that perilous journey over the mountain snows. No, wherever he went, it must be down the valley.
He made the first stop at this open place where the lower slope of the mountain put out a fist through the shrouding forest—or, rather, it might be called a sharp, square shoulder. From the top of
it Tommy looked up and down the valley across a wilderness of evergreens. The great mountains over which they had come were at his back. Beneath him, the Turnbull wound into view again, making him shudder as the sun flashed on its windings. In the slim distance were other mountains, a cloudy rolling of blue that separated to give place to the Turnbull.
Through that pass he must go with Billy. It might take weeks to reach the gap, and during that time he might find no man to help him on the way. Yes, and what lay in the blue distance and under the horizon, he could not dream. Perhaps there was a desert, burning hot, impassable except to those who knew the water holes, deadly even to those, sometimes. He had heard much of such places.
As for the trail over which he had come, if he turned back, he would have first the terrible heights of the mountains to climb, and then, beyond those, there would be the long stretches that he had crossed with his father—and it had taken them three days from the nearest town. He might miss the way altogether, besides. And it would not be strange if one perished of hunger. No, the best way, he decided, was to follow the Turnbull River, even though it wandered down through an eternity of distance. For there was a great chance that it would lead him to some town.
Bravely, but not quickly, he made up his mind. That uncertain distance was terrible to poor Tommy. For hours he sat there pondering the question back and forth, and, when he eventually made up his mind and rose to start on with Billy, he suddenly noted that his feet were in shadow. The afternoon had worn late, all unawares.
He wanted to start at once, for he was in a fever of eagerness to have the first stage of the great adventure accomplished and put behind him, but he knew that, when one finds a good camping place in the middle of the afternoon, it is better to camp at once and make an early start in the morning. Nothing could be more ideal than this level hill shoulder.
In the dense ranks of the trees that marched up around him, there were quantities of dead branches. His keen young eye had noted them automatically while he sat there during the afternoon. There were shrubs, too, which he could easily cut with the sharp axe of his father. Wood, then, which is one of the two main essentials for a camp, was there in plenty. As for water, it was furnished in equal abundance. A rivulet flowed from the mouth of a cave that had doubtless been worn by the working of the water, and the little stream wound across the level, then darted with sudden speed to the foot of the hill where it joined a large creek, and both went murmuring off to join the more distant Turnbull. Perhaps John Parks, if he had seen this place, would have decided to start his home on the very spot. With that thought, great tears welled into the eyes of Tommy.
But, according to John Parks, there is a great and universal antidote for sorrow—work. Tommy sprang up and set to making camp with a fury. He took the pack from the back of Billy—his unpracticed hands had built it so poorly that it had
twisted awry on the burro’s patient back—and then, with Billy at work on the grass, the boy hurried to the trees and swung the axe with a will.
It was far too large for him, but practice had taught him to shorten his grip on the handle, and in that fashion he made fair play with it. Its keen edge gave him in five minutes an abundance of wood that kept him busy for half an hour longer, dragging it to the center of the opening. But he wanted an oversupply of fuel; there could not be too much to furnish him with company during the cold, solemn hours of the night.
The fire itself he made in approved fashion, grouping some big stones around it, and here he mixed the cornmeal with soda and water and salt, and fried his hot cakes and set his bacon sizzling. He made coffee, too, and for a while he was so busy that he had no time to give to other worries.
It was not until he began to eat his supper that grief took him by the throat. It seemed to Tommy that John Parks was somewhere down the mountain, was coming home with great, impatient strides, and that his well-known whistle would surely soon be sounding on the farther side of the clearing. Once he found himself breathlessly listening, his eyes strained and wide. He rallied from that with a great effort, but, when his glance lowered, it struck on the side of the coffee pot, with the graniteware dented where he, on a morning, had dropped pot and coffee and all and sent the boiling stuff sizzling across his father’s shoes. He chuckled softly as he remembered how John Parks had danced around on one foot, and then on the other. But there had been no reproving, no sharp words.
Tommy buried his face in his hands and sat quivering, full of a grief that could not spend itself in tears. Afterward, he could eat no more. He could not even look at the tinware and the pots, but, turning his back on the camp, he fled uphill and down, fairly running from sorrow. In a measure, he succeeded, for he came to a panting halt at last with the thick forest around him, rapidly darkening with evening, and realized that he must work back carefully if he expected to find the camp.
So that problem filled his mind, and, when he reached the camp, it was to find the fire almost dead. He freshened it, and, as he did so, he heard, blown on the wind from lower down in the valley, a shrill, quavering, sobbing voice, melancholy as the weeping of a lost child. Tommy listened with a chill running up his spine, for well he knew it was a mountain lion hunting up the valley, hunting for the time being
, carelessly and well-nigh blindly, since he chose to come down the wind instead of against it. And hungered pumas have been known to stalk men, if not actually attack them.
Tommy, at least, could collect half a hundred memories of stories such as men tell around a campfire when supper is finished and the day’s work is done and pipes and imaginations are drawing freely. He picked up the rifle, saw that it was loaded, and practiced aiming it here and there wherever the firelight flashed on a leaf. It was a heavy gun for a child to handle, but familiarity with one’s tools is half the battle, and for two years now John Parks had taken an almost foolish pleasure in teaching his son to shoot with that very weapon.
When Tommy started to work cleaning up the supper dishes, he kept the rifle close at hand. Then he built a rousing fire, not of loose brush that would toss flames into the sky for a few wild minutes and then burn out, but of solid branches that would keep a blaze alive for hours. He even ventured into the forest for more wood, but it was only a single expedition, for, while he worked, he felt eyes watching him in the darkness.
But when he went back to the fire and lay down beside it, twisted in his blanket, only one side was sheltered by the heat of the fire and the red light that all wild beasts are said to dread. The other side lay open to the terrible dark and all the powers that prey by night.
There had been no such fear, no dream of such fear the other nights when John Parks was near. The very sound of his voice, so it seemed to the boy, would be sufficient to frighten hungered prowlers away. Night had been simple and even beautiful before. But now, as he looked up to the huge arch of the sky, filled with impersonal eyes, the mountains appearing like piled shadows on the one side, it seemed to Tommy that all the vast space in between was packed close with enmity and hatred focusing on his single head.
He got up again, dry of throat, and with his eyes burning from constant staring among the trees and the shadows. This time he split the fire into two parts, each a solid mass of wood that should burn steadily without replenishing until close to daylight, and between the two fires he lay down.
It was very hot there. He folded the blanket and lay on top of it. He even opened his shirt so that
the air might cool him. But it was better a thousand times to lie in heat than in terror.
That one cry from the mountain lion was all he heard, however; perhaps it had been hurrying across country on a trail well known to it and leading to certain prey. That was the reason it had been traveling down the wind, instead of prowling up it.
This conclusion came like a blessing and the assurance of peace to Tommy. An instant later the stars swam and mingled together in a soft, cool fire above his head. He slept.
It was no nightmare now. Utter weariness of soul and body shut out the possibility of dreams. Out of that dreamless, perfect sleep he was wakened by the horrible knife-stab of sound—the snarl of a wild beast making a kill and biting deeply. He stood erect, his heart thundering wildly, his wits astray. Then he heard a groan and a fall.
For the first time he could see. The two fires on which he had counted so certainly had burned to smoldering beds of coals, dusted over with ashes that alone kept the life from completely dying. From the beds of coals there passed an uncertain glow of light that revealed things not at a glance but by dim degrees, just as the mind works out a problem.
So, what Tommy saw first was a distant, isolated gleam on a polished leaf. Next he saw the pack, a jumbled heap without head or tail to it. Last of all he saw where Billy lay prostrate, and over the poor burro, with fangs sunk in his throat, crouched the mountain lion, a tawny splotch in the darkness— although clearly enough visible for Tommy to make out the long sweep of the tail as it was lashed from side to side.
He cried out in an agony of horror and fear, but the small, choked voice had the power to make the puma leap, growling, from its kill and face suddenly around. There it saw a man from the ground, risen out of the very body of detested fires, so it seemed. The mountain lion spat in fear and rage, then turned and with uncanny speed slunk away. A single stride, and it seemed to melt into nothingness.
But Tommy dared not move. It was not fear of the lion that kept him frozen and still. A danger once confronted and seen nakedly with the eye becomes only a tithe as terrible as when it existed only behind a wall of darkness. It was not dread of the lion, but consciousness of what the death of Billy meant—that he was chained to this place in the valley of the Turnbull River. He could not venture farther away than a single day’s march from his source of supplies, and, in this wilderness, how long would it be before men came that way?
CHAPTER FOUR
TOOLS FOR THE BATTLE
Large meanings sometimes burst upon the brain with one flash that shows all the corners of their significance. So it was with Tommy. In the horror of that great knowledge, he forgot fear of the monster that had only now crouched in the clearing scarcely more than leaping distance away from him. He forgot the death of the poor burro, although the old ways and the patient soul of Billy had made him an old and dear friend. Only one soul-crushing thought remained—that he was marooned here in the wilderness as completely as though he were his favorite Robinson Crusoe on the island. Rifle, ammunition, the bundle of traps, clothing, food—all of these were things that he needed to sustain life, and he could not take them with him a single step now that Billy was dead.
But was Billy, indeed, dead? In an agony of haste, forgetful entirely of all danger of the mountain lion that might still be lurking near the edge of the clearing, he raced to Billy and dropped to his knees. But Billy was dead. His lolling tongue, his torn throat, told plainly that he would never rise again. Tommy sank back on the ground. He looked up and saw the cold beginnings of the dawn make the stars fade slowly. Still his brain struggled with the future. He was only twelve. If he had a rest for a rifle, he could shoot and shoot well; his three years among the mountains had taught him much about them. But, after the ammunition was gone, how could he live? And in this wilderness, would the lonely life be endurable?
No tears came. He had been snatched into the heart of a tragedy so swiftly that he could not weep. After all, tears came more quickly when there is a comforter nearby. There in the cold grass he lay, his fists clenched tightly, struggling against the problem. It would be easier and less painful to go back to that fatal place on the brink of the river and cast himself in. But now the light of morning increased rapidly, and to the east he saw the first sunlight glisten on the top of a snowy mountain.
Tommy rose slowly to his feet, and he was no sooner risen than he was touched by that spur that drives men on to most of their accomplishments—a stab of hunger. An instant later, he was busy kindling the fire. He had begun to slice bacon, but a moment of reflection made him drop the knife. This was food that would keep, and there might well come a time when he would need it bitterly. In the meantime, that spring morning held other life that must feed him. A tree squirrel chattered overhead and told him that he need not hunt far. So he took up the ever-loaded rifle, dropped upon one knee, with his elbow resting on the other, and took careful aim. The squirrel promptly ducked around to the farther side of the tree trunk. But Tommy knew squirrel nature. The little creatures are invincibly curious, and, instead of moving around to the farther side of the tree to get in a shot, he watched the same opening among the branches. Presently, as he had expected, the tiny head slipped into view, and in that instant his finger closed on the trigger.
He did not miss. When one has a limited supply of ammunition, one dare not miss. The ring of the shot was still in his ears when he heard the little body come rustling through the foliage and drop with a light thud to the ground. He took it up quickly with a strangely savage thrill of satisfaction. Was not all the world now banded against him? John Parks had stood between him and the outside, but now he was stripped naked of help. Every tooth and claw hidden among those tree-clad valleys and lowlands were against him. And he had struck his first blow in self-defense.
The squirrel he cleaned and broiled for his breakfast. It was a big, fat fellow and made enough of a meal, even eaten without bread—for the corn-meal was something that he must scrupulously cherish against a time of need. When the meal was ended, his spirits had risen greatly. John Parks, after breakfast, had always sat quietly and smoked a pipe while he arranged all his plans for the day’s work. Tommy imitated that good example by sitting up, hugging his knees while he surveyed the situation.
There was one advantage, at least. So long as misfortune had to overtake him, it was the greatest blessing that he had been struck here, where the cumbrous pack was left in such an ideal camping place. Water, wood, and, best of all, for a year-around home, a permanent shelter made to his hand, for such the cave, from which the little stream ran, seemed to offer. He went instantly to explore it.
It was far better than he had dared to hope. It opened as a roughly rectangular gap six or seven feet across and about half that height. But almost immediately it expanded to better proportions. It swelled up a dozen feet high and twice that broad, and in the dim light Tommy could see the glimmer of the stream trailing off into indistinguishable darkness.
He went back to the embers of his breakfast fire, picked out a length of resinous pinewood for a torch, lighted it, and with that yellow sputter of flame he advanced again in the cave. Now he could make out every detail. It drove back into the heart of the mountain nearly a hundred feet, with an arched roof of rock and rough rock walls that seemed to promise that there could never be a cave-in. Toward the rear, the dimensions of the cave steadily shrank until it ended in a little crevice of a hand’s-breadth, out of which the water poured.
