CHAPTER I
The mouth of the canyon was darkened with shadows when the bull elk came stealing down the brown trail through the dusky thicket. In all this mountain realm, a land where the wild things of the forest still held sway, there was no creature of more majestic bearing or noble beauty. He was full-grown; his great antlers swept back over his powerful shoulders; and it was evident from his carriage that he had no fear of such enemies as might be lurking in the gloomy canyon. For it was known far through the forest that even the great puma or the terrible grizzly, unless they had the advantage of ambush, treated Spread Horn with considerable respect.
Signs of July were everywhere: signs that were large print and clear to the eyes of the wild creatures, but which would have been mostly unintelligible to men. The huckleberries were just beginning to ripen in the thickets as always, in the seventh month. The fledglings, the little weasel noticed as he climbed here and there through the branches, were just the July size,—still soft with the fat of squabhood but yet big enough to make a pleasing lump in the stomach. The pines are a wonderful calendar in themselves; and only to the eyes of human beings, badly in need of spectacles, do they seem never to change. They go from a deep, rich green to a strange dusky blue, and now they were just about halfway between. This fact, as well as the size and developments of their cones, indicated as clearly as a printed calendar that the month was July. Besides, old Spread Horn had a sure index to the month in his own antlers.
Time was, and not many months back at that, when he had no more sign of antlers than his own cows. The time would come, just before they fell off completely, when they would be suitably hard and sharp for the edification of any rival stags that should attempt to disrupt his family life. Just at present they were full-grown but still in the “velvet,”—covered with a sort of tawny fuzz that was soft to the touch. It indicated July without the least chance for doubt.
He came slipping easily down the canyon; and there was no reason whatever for expecting him. He walked into the wind: his scent was blown behind. Otherwise certain coyotes and lynx and such hunters, too ineffective ever to get farther than hungry thoughts and speculations, would have been somewhat excited by his approach. Spread Horn made it his business to walk into the face of the wind just as much as possible, and in that way he was aware of all living creatures in the foreground before they were aware of him. To walk down the wind, all creatures know, is to announce one’s self as clearly as to wear a bell around the neck.
Neither did the great elk make any sounds in particular. If indeed a twig cracked from time to time beneath his foot it was not enough to arouse any interest. He was not especially hungry, but now and then he lowered his head to crop a tender shoot from the shrubbery. At such times he kept watch, out of the corner of his eyes, for any enemies that might be waiting in ambush beside the trail. He would stake his horns and hoofs against any wild creature that inhabited Smoky Land, in a fair fight; but the puma—and sometimes even the grizzly—didn’t always play fair. They knew how to leap like the blast of doom from a heavy thicket.
A coyote—most despised of hunters—saw Spread Horn’s tall form in the shrubbery and glided away. There was a legend in the coyote’s family of how once a particularly bold forefather had seized a cow elk by the leg, and of the subsequent tragedy that had befallen. The only result, it had seemed, was a careful and patient dissection of the gray body beneath the front hoofs of the bull—arriving just the wrong moment—and Gray Thief had no desire to start a new legend on his own account.
Spread Horn showed no surprise at his appearance. His only neighbors were the wild folk,—the only people that he knew. For the wild creatures were still, as far as facts went, the real owners and habitants of Smoky Land. It is true that in various heavy and dusty books in legal offices it could be learned that this particular part of Idaho was public domain, but as yet few frontiersmen had come to clear away the forest and till the meadows. The place was really startlingly large—distances are always rather generous in the West—but few were the maps that named it. Those that had gone to fish in its waters and hunt its mountains thought of it always as beyond,—beyond the last outposts of civilization, beyond the end of the trails, and clear where the little rivers rose in great springs. The cattlemen had named it, and at the end of the dry summer, when forest fires ranged here and there through the high ridges on each side, the name was particularly appropriate. Because of the structure of the passes the winds were likely to fill the region with pale, blue smoke.
In reality Smoky Land lay on the great shoulders of the Rockies,—a high plateau, studded here and there by grim and lofty snow peaks. It was not a land for gentlefolk. It was a hard, grim place, a forbidding land where the sun was a curse in summer and the winds a stinging lash in winter, where great glaciers gleamed in the morning light and snow fields lay unchanging above the line where the timber became stunted and died. There were rugged crags and impassable cliffs, deep gorges and dark, still canyons; miles of gray sliderock and glossy grass slope; and through it all, dwelling like a spirit, there was a beauty that could not be denied. It manifested itself to every sweep of the eyes.
Game trails wound and crisscrossed through the thickets, and the dung was not dried to dust and the tracks half obliterated and stale as in many of the game trails of the West. One only had to wait, to lie still as a shadow in the coverts to see such sights as the forest gods usually reserved for the chosen few. Sometimes it was a doe, stealing with mincing steps and incredible grace from thicket to thicket; sometimes a puma, glaring of eye and hushed of foot and curiously interested in all the doings of the deer; sometimes an old black bear grunted and mumbled and soliloquized as he blundered along; and there is a tale, one that only the swans that come to the high lakes lived long enough to remember, that years ago, in a particularly cold winter, Old Argali, the great mountain ram, led his flock down from the high peaks to feed on the green banks of the streams.
Spread Horn knew them all. They were his neighbors. Also he knew the people that lived in the cataract at the bottom of the gorge. Sometimes, when he paused to drink, the salmon rushed past him in their mysterious journeyings,—their fourth-year migration to the waters in which they were born. They come to spawn in the waters where they were themselves spawned before they go down to the sea, and after they spawn they die. To the naturalist there are strange significances in this repatriation of the salmon. There is a sense of curious relationships,—for strong men, too, always try to return to their homeland for their last days. After four years, almost to the day, the salmon come fighting their way back through the riffles, into dreadful gorges, up cataracts, and high is the waterfall that holds them back.
The salmon were not the only water people that Spread Horn knew. He had seen the trout, too (of course the salmon himself is just an overgrown trout that has taken up a seafaring life) and some of them, like the salmon themselves, took an occasional thousand-mile jaunt to the ocean. These were the great steelheads and such seagoing people, and sportsmen say that a five-pounder at the end of a silk line will permit, for ten tearing, fighting, breathless moments, a glimpse into the Promised Land. But you can imagine the mighty salmon, who have spent four years in the sea and who have swum about the reefs of Kamchatka, regarding them with some patronage. Then there were the little trout: quivering, timid, sparkling creatures that, although great stay-at-homes and never going to sea, still look very beautiful in a creel.
It seems to be one of Nature’s aims to make life interesting and exciting for all her creatures, so she had provided certain other river-folk to entertain these finned people. Their method of entertainment was to take a sudden leap into a riffle or trout pool with glittering, gleaming razor-edged teeth all set and ready. One little instant’s delay in darting to safety, one little clasping of those wicked teeth into the beautiful silver shoulder,—and the trout leaped no more for flies in the cool of the evening. These were the otter and mink and such fur-bearing people, and they existed in plentiful numbers because in this region the trapper had not yet made himself particularly manifest. Then there were plenty of mergansers and other feathered fishermen to take care of the fingerlings.
The cattle herds fed through the region, and sometimes sportsmen penetrated its fastnesses, but mostly Smoky Land was simply the wilderness, primeval and unchanged. The venerable grizzly still dug for marmots on the high ranges,—the great killer that shared the mountain monarchy with the bull elk. The Rocky Mountain goat, white-whiskered as a patriarch, had a range just adjoining that of the bighorn. The wolf pack sang of death and hunger when the ridges were swept with snow.
The late afternoon sunlight, shot and dappled by the shadows of the leaves, fell over the bull elk’s body; and the animal sensed the approach of night. It was the drinking hour. A spring flowed at the foot of the glen, Spread Horn knew, and he turned toward it, stealing softly. And all at once he seemed to freeze in his tracks.
The wind had brought him a message, unmistakably as wireless telephones bring messages of approaching foes across a battle field. His nervous reaction was instantaneous: danger, go slow! Yet it was not a familiar smell, and scientists would have a hard time explaining why the stag had at once recognized its menace. For the creature from whom it came was almost a stranger to these mountains, and it was wholly possible that Spread Horn had never perceived the breed before.
He stood still, gazing, and he looked a long time through the shrubbery branches down to a little green glade beside the spring. He raised one foot and lifted his long muzzle. Then he gave the warning cry,—the sound with which, in the fall, he would warn his herd of danger.
There was no more distinctive cry in the whole wilderness world than this,—a strange, whistling snort, beginning high on the scale and descending to a deep bawl. It traveled far through the stillness. He waited a breathless instant while the echo came back to him. Then he sprang and darted at full speed away into the heavier thickets.
Far below, at the spring, an unfamiliar figure in these wilds leaped to his feet with a guttural cry. It was also a distinctive sound: and no wonder the little chipmunk paused in his scurried occupations to listen to it. Even to the addled brain of the squirrel it suggested annoyance and anger,—a quality possessed by the snarl of the puma when it had missed its stroke. No wonder Spread Horn had fled. The figure was none other than that tall harbinger of death and peril, man.
“It was an elk,” the man cried. “You’ve missed your chance.”
Some one stretched on the grass at his feet answered with a half-snarl. “To hell with the elk,” he replied. “You’ve tipped over the last quart.”