Читать книгу The Great Divide - Alan Sullivan - Страница 6

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Shaped like a gigantic “S” with shallow curves, the pass lay between a tangle of mountains on whose precipitous flanks wild goats sprang from ledge to ledge: above it towered scarred peaks, first to blush under the rising sun, last to retain the dying glory: eastward, westward, the land fell away to ravines and hanging valleys and glacier-fed lakes in whose shining surface shimmered the reflection of gaunt, inaccessible summits.

Each lake, lonely in its beauty, smiled up, bordered with stretches of dark green conical spruce of which the multitudinous spires were guarded by ten thousand feet of solid rock, and swayed by no disturbing winds. Here in a season of the year stalked the gigantic elk, deliberate and unafraid: here were meadows of a lighter green, traversed by winding streams where the beaver built his heavy-roofed home of earth and sticks, damming the vagrant creeks till only a rounded crown was unsubmerged.

By rocky shores where scented cedars curled their gnarled roots over naked boulders, the otter, the mink, and fisher played and hunted, while everywhere spread a chuckle of hidden runnels, and a murmurous sound born of snowy cataracts leaping from mountain palisades into gulfs below. Baldheaded eagles with sheathed eyes and unquivering pinions floated across circumambient space, crumpled talons drawn close against the grey-white of their breasts. They alone could scale the heights and look down on the austerity of the mountain tops.

This might be seen from the pass in summer time.

In winter an alien world was revealed, a world of white, relieved only where the stony ribs of earth rose vertically, and the spruce still held their warm and verdant hue. Here and here only was there life. No cataracts transfixed the purple distance, every lake was iron-clad, wraiths of drifting snow circled diaphanously around the upper peaks, and the glaciers glinted stark in vast folds of the eternal solitudes.

In the upper regions, smitten by gales born in the Aleutians, nothing stirred, but down where the evergreen spruce gave shelter a wild population moved across the blanket of snow. Pink-eyed rabbits, white as the snow itself, frisked and made their runways, wary of marauding fox and lynx: elk thrust their gigantic antlers between young trees, pawing the snow till succulent moss lay bare: red deer passed daintily in the crumbling trough of their own making, partridge fed in the hemlocks, and the otter ploughed his sinuous overland course in search of food. The black bear drowsed in his burrow, and ivory-beaked ravens with great ragged wings winnowed over crystalline silence.

Near the middle of the pass, a spring formed a tiny pool that overflowed in opposite directions, one part of it moving hesitantly to the west, where, joined by other trickles, it began to hurry down the sunset slope. The other ran eastward towards the Columbia River.

The pass was unknown, and the range made the backbone of a continent: no crossing had been accomplished, and its fangs filled the sky, unmapped and unconquered.

It fell on a day that Apau, the Weasel, was camped on the slopes of the Selkirk Mountains, and sat with his head between his hands, saying nothing. On the other side of the teepee crouched Anatoki, She of the Pretty Head, while at her empty breast sucked her first and late-born son, Light in the Morning. Her face was thin and troubled as she looked down at the child, then at her husband.

Nodding silently, he put on his heaviest moccasins and capote, slung axe, knife and powder-horn in his belt with the little deerksin sack of bullets, and picked up his long, single-barrelled gun. There was no word of farewell when he went out.

Stooping a little as he walked, he skirted first the edge of the timber, slowly working his way higher: he knew that the greater his altitude the less the chance of finding elk, but somewhere among the naked ridges might be a mountain sheep whose flesh was good, and of whose coat Anatoki would weave a winter blanket for Light in the Morning.

Moving without sound, he came clear of the timber: the day had a quiet greyness, with a touch of snow in the air, and far below he could see his lodge, a yellowish speck in a gulf of distance.

This country was strange to him. A man of violent passions, he had not been acceptable to his tribe on the eastern foothills, so in a season of the year when Anatoki was already with child he crossed the Kicking Horse Pass and journeyed west in search of elk. For weeks he travelled: then Light in the Morning was born, and they moved on, the child packed in moss and strapped to a board carried on Anatoki’s back. Now Apau looked for a place to winter where game was plentiful, but so far with no success.

Leaning on his gun, he stared westward where, it was said, lay the Bitter Water, and there lived other Indians who ate only fish. Searching the ground he could distinguish no sign that any man had ever preceded him: north and south lifted the crests, tossing their heights into a sunless sky, lonely, austere, except at one point where, a little below his own level, their nakedness was broken by a patch of scanty timber that nestled in a cleft of this gigantic rampart: it was miles away, but guided by some instinct, he turned in that direction.

At this moment came a sudden clatter fifty yards off, and a bull elk with great branching horns galloped southward along the slope.

Quick as thought, Apau fired. Usually he would have stalked the animal till he could get a standing shot and make sure of a kill, but to-day he was weak, with no saying how far his strength would carry him. It was a hit. The elk swerved, stumbled, came to his knees, scrambled up and dashed off. Apau, his heart pounding, reloaded, ran forward, and found a gout of blood: scraping this up, he swallowed it, took courage, and hurried on.

At this height the air tasted thin, and his breast rose with long, deep inhalations. Presently he found more blood, dark and thick. Not stopping this time, he progressed in a sort of shuffle, arms hanging loose, knees bent, his black eyes fixed always some twenty feet ahead: he missed nothing; a broken stick, an overturned stone, a scrape of moss—all were eloquent. Smiling, he thought of Light in the Morning, of Anatoki’s sigh of relief at the burden he would carry back, and the bubbling of a pot as it hung over the teepee fire.

Watching the trail, he watched also the country he traversed. Behind the patch of timber which he now neared there seemed to be a great hole in the mountains with nothing beyond but emptiness and air. That on the western side. On the east the ground fell away very quickly into a wide ravine floored with spruce much bigger and older than that higher up: it was sheltered down there, with wood and water, a likely spot for game, and a very good place to camp in. He must remember that.

The elk now came into sight, floundered across a rockslide, swerved into what seemed to be a mountain meadow, and stood for a fraction of time outlined against the sky. Beside a spring it lowered its head to drink, when Apau, steadying himself, fired again: the bullet went in behind and below the shaggy shoulder, the beast quivered, gave a choking cough, and died reaching for the water.

Apau nodded, grunted, reloaded, and moved forward. He was, he reckoned, ten miles from camp, but that did not matter, and fifteen minutes later his strong teeth were shearing into a wedge of half-scorched meat. Devouring it slowly, life began to course more buoyantly in his veins. He would take a hundred-weight back with him, leave the carcass protected in a cache of big stones, and to-morrow pack the rest of it down to camp. Where he stooped to drink at the little pond, he noted that it ran both east and west.

Perched here on the very summit of the divide, and looking westward, on right and left the slopes pitched steeply down, leaving this unexpected roadway towards the setting sun. In front the land fell away to a lower level in a series of prodigious steps, and widening valleys were visible. These must lead toward the Bitter Water. Regarding them with a mild curiosity, he wondered what the country was like farther on, and determined that some day he would find out.

It gave no promise of the plains whence his people had come, and was far too rough for buffalo, but ought to harbour elk, beaver and deer. His keen microscopic eyes could distinguish no teepees, no feather of smoke, no cutting, no faint suggestion of a trail: he saw a baldheaded eagle, and heard the distant croak of ravens, but that was all. Then, feeling sleepy and a little tired, his lids began to droop.

But Apau, the Weasel, was not alone. Eyes watched him from fifty feet away, small, bright, brown eyes in a leathery skull topped by short triangular ears; for behind a boulder, motionless save for the slow regular breathing of its enormous body, lay a two-year grizzly. The crack of a gunshot had come to him an hour previously, and since then the Lord of the Mountain, who feared nothing that walked the earth, had marked every step of the approaching hunter. Never before had he seen anything that went on two legs.

His deep tawny hide blending marvellously with the tone of his shelter, the great brute had not shifted even when the dying elk shambled up to the spring, for instinct had warned him that danger was drawing near, and like a master of strategy he waited his moment. The smell of meat was in his nostrils, but now it was lost in that other smell of humanity, than which there is no sharper signal to the wild things of the forest.

He did not stir till Apau’s head sagged forward, then with extraordinary quietness he began his attack, a soundless brown mountain, ears back, his terrible jaws bared: very softly the great paws progressed, sheathing their long, copper-coloured claws, spreading sponge-like on the hard ground while a light wind ruffled his shaggy fur. He had covered half the distance when one displaced pebble made a tiny clatter.

Instantly Apau’s full senses revived, but, snatching at the gun and whirling as he sat, his heart faltered. Little chance was there of stopping this mass of bone and muscle when it came head on. The gun leaped to his shoulder, and he fired. In the same second “He who walks like a Man” lifted on his huge haunches.

The bullet grazed his skull, ploughing through leathery skin and furrowing the lower jaw. There came an infuriated cough as Apau darted to one side. A stone turned under one foot, and he fell. He was conscious of a smothering weight, but after the first swinging blow he knew no pain.

An hour went by. The grizzly, glutted, drank deeply at the spring, and carried what remained of the elk to a cranny in the rocks. Returning, he stood for a moment over the lifeless body of Apau, sniffed, and pushed it with one great paw. Then, leaving the first discoverer of the pass to ravens that would shortly drop out of dull-grey skies, he took his lurching unhurried way to a cavern in the western slopes.