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THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”
Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.
There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill; there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there; but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the grandfather himself,—as they took the fact that the ground was under their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.
In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood—well, it had rested there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.
Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark, still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from the crack in the floor that had let it in.
That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious in the sleeping house,—a sound as of a small stream of water falling from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.
Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could never have forgotten the cost and value of water.
If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,” you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.”
Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far West known as the “arid belt.”
Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the “tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”—yellow with silt, which is not injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock, nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it; but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.
In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,—letting only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and steadily decreasing quantity.
One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,—hills that had been faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.
They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson; for these hills are noble in form and of great size,—a family of giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,—and the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.
The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known so well.
From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was a happy boy.
He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old, winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes, squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor from over the sun-baked hills.
“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”
There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,—one isn’t so foolish as that at seven years old,—but was ready for the joys of the present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being “sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!
Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist on the way.
The “band” was pouring over the hill slopes in all directions, making at full speed for the river. The hills themselves seemed to be dizzily moving. The masses of distant small gray objects swarmed, they drifted, they swam, with a curious motionless motion. They looked like nothing more animated than a crop of gray stones, nearly of a size, spreading broadly over the hills and descending toward the river with an impulse which seemed scarcely more than the force of gravitation.
The dogs were barking, the shepherds were racing and shouting to head off the sheep and check their speed, lest the hundreds behind should press upon the hundreds in front and force them out into deep water. The hot air throbbed with the tumult.
When the thirst of every panting throat had been slaked and the band began to scatter along the hill slopes, the boys went forward to speak with the sheepmen.
A few moments afterward both lads were returning to the camp on a run, to ask permission to accept from the shepherds the gift of a lamb that couldn’t “keep up” with the band. It had run beside its mother as far as its strength would carry it, and then it had fallen and been trampled; and there it must lie unless help could revive it. A night on the hills, with the coyotes about, would finish it.
Permission was given, and breakfast was a perfunctory meal for the children by reason of the lamb lying on the strip of shade outside. After breakfast they sopped its mouth with warm milk, they sponged it with cold water, they tried to force a spoonful of mild stimulant between its teeth. They hovered and watched for signs of returning life. The lamb lay with its eyes closed; its sides, that were beginning to swell, rose and sank in long, heavy gasps. Once it moved an ear, and the children thought it must be “coming to.” Upon this hopeful sign they began at once to make plans for the lamb’s future life and joys with them in the cañon.
It should be led down to the river, night and morning, to drink; it should have bran soaked in milk; it should nibble the grass on the green strip; they would build it a house, for fear the coyotes should come prowling about at night; it should follow them up the gulch and over the hills, and race with them in the evenings on the river beach, as “Daisy,” the pet fawn, had done—until something happened to her (the children never knew what), and the lovely creature disappeared from the cañon and out of their lives forever.