Читать книгу Ulysses and His Woodland Zoo - Jim Kjelgaard - Страница 6

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The next morning, for several minutes after he woke up, Ulysses remained quite sure that he was still asleep and dreaming. Rather than the dingy roof of a boxcar or a sweep of open sky, his eyes beheld massive beams that supported a ceiling. His bed was luxuriously soft. The fact that he was neither too hot nor too cold, plus the fact that he awakened with only a normal appetite, completed the illusion that he must be enjoying a pleasant dream.

Then he knew, and for a short interval he lay and pondered the astonishing sequence of events that had brought him here. Though he was not lacking in outdoor experience, which included extensive fishing trips with his uncle and aunt, a fair amount of camping—and even a little hunting that had been singularly unproductive because, though on occasion he had fired a vast number of shots at something or other, he had never been able to hit anything—by no means had he ever considered himself a modern day Daniel Boone. It was as plausible to suppose that he was visiting the North Pole as it was to imagine himself as caretaker of a wilderness lodge.

Suddenly it occurred to him that, for all practical purposes, he might as well be at the North Pole. As far as he'd observed, there was not a single human habitation between Conifer and himself. Though Conifer was only twenty-one miles away, when the heavy snows came, according to Mr. Corson, it might as well be twenty-one million. It looked remarkably as though he would be very accustomed to talking with himself before the winter ended.

Still, the situation was not without its advantages. In spite of reams of lyrical prose that have been penned about the open road and the vagabond's life—Ulysses suspected that those who penned it must have endured untold mental anguish as they sat in their comfortable chairs near their groaning tables and tried to think of something to write—the fact remained that an innerspring mattress was softer than the ground. Also, there was much to be said for a full stomach and more for a secure job, even though the job must be secure largely because there was nobody around to fire him.

Finally, it would be impossible to find a place more ideally suited to having it out with his personal jinx and determining, once and for all, which was to emerge victorious. That much decided, Ulysses wondered where he went from here.

Pete Corson had escorted him all through the lodge, with its apparently numberless bedrooms, bathrooms and storage rooms. There was a whole closet full of assorted clothing, footwear and headwear, all suited to the country, from which Ulysses was free to choose at will. The gun cabinet contained every imaginable firearm, from compressed air pistols to rifles capable of dropping a bull elk in its tracks, and ample ammunition for all of it. Huge pantries were stocked with everything from common table salt to canned caviar and quail eggs. In the sheds at the rear were snowshoes, steel traps, skis, axes, toboggans and a bewildering assortment of other gear. Though the horses had already been moved to lower country, where snow did not lie so deep, there was even a shed full of baled hay.

After showing him about, and after satisfying himself that Ulysses knew how to build a fire, open cans, heat water, and was otherwise equipped for life in the wilds, Pete Corson made the sensible suggestion that he should not even try to live in the entire lodge. Of course he must use the kitchen. Other than that, why not move a bed in front of the living-room fireplace and do his sleeping there?

It was in this bed, near a room-sized fireplace wherein dying embers still snapped, that Ulysses awoke, at first to fears and doubts and then to a steadily-mounting sense of contentment. For the first time in his life he was entirely alone. Thus, for the first time in his life, he was free to cope with Ulysses Grant Jones with no advice or interference from the bleachers.

The day was not warm, as he discovered when he hopped out of bed and shrugged into long-handled underwear, wool pants, wool shirt, heavy wool socks and leather-topped rubber-bottomed pacs that, with Pete Corson's help, he had already taken from the closet. Neither was it cold. The windows were clear, rather than frost-glazed, and the thermometer that hung outside read just seven degrees below freezing. Ulysses entered the kitchen, a large room equipped with everything he'd ever heard of and much that he hadn't. However, Pete Corson had also simplified that.

The great electric stove over which a white-aproned chef presided when the lodge was filled with summer guests, was cold and shrouded in a covering of transparent plastic. So were the huge refrigerators and everything else designed for mass production meals. But there was a small wood-burning range that kept the kitchen warm enough and the pantries were filled to overflowing.

Ulysses built a fire, and such was his newfound sense of well-being that it never even occurred to him to be astonished because the stovepipe didn't fall down on his head or the flames leap out at him. In fact, everything remained as normal as it might have been for anyone who wasn't jinxed. The fire going, Ulysses filled a teakettle, set it over a hot lid and went about preparing his breakfast.

He smacked his lips in anticipation of the repast he had planned, but since his previous culinary experience had been restricted to making toast, boiling water and using a pointed stick to hold various edibles over an open fire until they were sufficiently incinerated, he dumped a pound of coffee in the coffeepot and added three pints of water. The flapjacks that he set hopefully out to mix would have made an ideal substitute for glue. By the time he conceded that he had a bit to learn about making flapjacks, the bacon that he had laid in a skillet was burned to a crisp and the coffeepot had come to a merry boil.

Nothing daunted, Ulysses opened a whole canned chicken, dumped it among the blackened embers of his bacon and wondered how he could be sure when it was done. He was not even slightly discouraged. There was a whole winter during which he might teach himself how to cook and who in their right mind turned up a scornful nose at fried chicken? When the chicken appeared to be reasonably crisp in all quarters, Ulysses lifted it onto a plate and poured a cup of coffee so thick that he all but had to scoop it out of the pot with a spoon. He was happily devoting himself to this pleasing repast when there came a knock at the door.

Ulysses' first thought was that Pete Corson had returned for something or other. He dropped the drumstick he was chewing, wiped his hands on a napkin and hurried to admit his employer. The man who stood before him—and almost at first glance Ulysses knew it was a man—was most certainly not Pete Corson. Although he was dressed in hunting clothes and needed a shave, nothing whatever indicated that Ulysses' visitor was a successful businessman or a successful anything else, unless a decided talent for holding his coat together with twisted wire and his pants up with neither belt nor gallus might be considered success. He was tall, seemed taller because he was almost too thin to cast a shadow, sported sideburns that met beneath his chin and blinked watery blue eyes.

"Haowdy?" he said.

"Hello," Ulysses greeted the stranger cordially. "Won't you come in?"

"Wal naow," said the visitor, who had already started to come in as soon as the door opened, "I jest mought do that. I'm Sime Hanley an' I live over thataway." He waved a hand that took in approximately fourteen million acres.

"Oh," said Ulysses, who had thought he'd be alone but was pleased to learn he had a neighbor. "I'm Ulysses Grant Jones, the caretaker."

"Be ya naow?"

As though he was overwhelmed by such news, or was trying to dazzle Ulysses, or had something wrong with his eyes, Sime Hanley devoted himself to a forty-second spasm of rapid fire blinking.

"Have some breakfast?" Ulysses invited.

"I jest mought do that."

So saying, he took up the three-quarters of a chicken that remained on Ulysses' plate, began to tear it apart with his teeth and swallowed without visibly chewing first. Ulysses studied him curiously, but at the same time respectfully.

Steeped in the finest traditions of The Lone Ranger, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok and other immortals, nobody had to tell Ulysses that, before anything else, the West was a place of true hospitality. The stranger at your door automatically becomes your brother, your son and your responsibility. What's yours must be his, and shame to you for even thinking otherwise. However, somebody should have told Ulysses that not every western character—or eastern, southern, or northern—must necessarily have the strength of ten because his heart is pure.

The great open spaces are productive of various character types, and Sime Hanley was scarcely the ideal. Horrified by little except work of any description, the youthful Sime had left his native soil hereabouts and gone out in the world fired with ambition to let almost anybody else earn his living. Thereafter he pursued a varied career, including time served in various jails throughout the Southwest. Now in his early forties, he'd finally decided that an unfeeling world would have to get along without him in the best way it could and returned to his native mountains.

His visit to the lodge was not, as Ulysses assumed, inspired by a craving for the society of his fellow men. Sime knew perfectly well that the hunting season was over. He was also completely aware of the difficulties involved in hiring a caretaker. He'd come over this morning in hopes that the lodge would be deserted and he'd be able to steal something.

Like all mortals who see their fond hopes dashed, Sime had learned to weather cruel adversity. Unlike most, he had not learned to do so with any measure of grace. He threw the polished chicken bones—only the larger ones for, evidently, he'd swallowed the smaller—on his host's plate and stared moodily out the window. Ulysses sought to make conversation.

"Do you own a ranch?" he asked.

"Nah."

"A farm?"

"Nah."

"Do you work for the Forest Service?"

"Nah."

"Are you a trapper or guide?"

"Nah."

"What do you do?"

"Ah, shet ep!"

Delivering himself of this, and without another word or backward glance, Sime rose and stamped out the door. Ulysses, who didn't know that his guest was really in high dudgeon because he hadn't been able to steal anything, was properly abashed. He'd suddenly remembered that it is no part of the code of the great untrammelled West to ask personal questions, and he was appalled by his own effrontery. Determining never to repeat such an awful mistake, he hoped he'd meet Sime again.

He would, but it was just as well that there was no available crystal ball wherein he might examine the future and visualize the circumstances of their next meeting! Ulysses was sure only that his own unintentional rudeness had spoiled his appetite. He gathered up the dishes and pensively washed them in hot water from the teakettle. Then his inspiring heritage came to his aid.

His great-grandfather, as Ulysses had been told several dozen times, had singlehandedly stormed a hill bristling with Confederate soldiers and saved the great General Grant himself from annihilation. There was another version, one usually told by other than blood relatives of the Jones family, that Great-grandfather had never stormed anything except a hen house in Georgia and had been driven from that by a wrathful fourteen-year-old girl, but Ulysses had never heard that one. All he knew was that he must carry on, rise above everything, including his own mistakes, and never show the white feather.

Fired with this noble resolution, he donned a wool jacket, pulled a wool cap over his ears and fared forth. It never once occurred to him that nobody expected him to do anything except live at the lodge and cope with any emergencies that might arise. Ulysses, hired as caretaker, considered that his responsibilities began at the lodge and extended for one mile in any direction from it. Pete Corson himself had said that the club owned that much land.

He hadn't the least idea of where to start. Indeed, for the first few minutes after he went outside, he hadn't much idea of anything except that this was wholly delightful. The brisk air had a tang and depth such as he had never before known; now he understood what poets meant when they spoke of air like wine. But there was a lot of air blowing over a lot of land, and a glance told Ulysses that it was impossible to inspect all of it at the same time. He'd have to take it little by little, and since he'd been brought in from the south, he decided to go straight north.

There was no difficulty in choosing the proper direction. On top of the lodge was a weather vane with the four points of the compass supported upon it in ten-inch-high metal letters. His heart light and his spirit of adventure soaring, Ulysses plunged into the forest primeval.

Presently he saw a fowl, then another, then six more, and halted to wonder why anyone in their right mind would even think of starting a poultry farm in this isolated spot. The creatures were turkeys, and of this Ulysses had no doubt because every Thanksgiving he and his uncle had driven to a nearby turkey farm to choose a proper fowl for the festive board. Then, becoming aware of his presence, the turkeys melted into the adjacent forest and Ulysses' heart gave a mighty leap as he realized the significance of what he'd just seen.

These were wild turkeys, lineal descendants, or so Ulysses hoped, of the birds Pocahontas had shot with her bow and arrow and carried over her shoulder to Captain John Smith. Anyhow, Ulysses thought that was the way it had been; history had never been his strong point. It didn't really matter, though. If he needed it, he now had proof positive that he was indeed in the wilderness.

Next he saw three deer, then five more, and tracks were everywhere. Ulysses couldn't be sure about any except the deer and turkey tracks, but he tried to identify the rest. There was one that resembled a cat's track, although it was a bigger cat than he had ever seen. Others were like the tracks of a small dog, while still others might have been left by big dogs. There were faint tracings where mice had scampered over the snow and huge pawprints that proved jack rabbits had passed by here.

Ulysses wandered happily onward, feeling as though he had accidentally stumbled into a huge, fascinating and unfenced zoo. He hadn't even thought of bringing a gun. Although Pete Corson had assured him that he might legally hunt varmints, the boy was not certain as to the difference between a varmint and anything else. Even if he had been sure, he wouldn't have wanted to kill. He was a caretaker. Interpreting that term in its broadest aspects, which was the only way Ulysses knew how to translate it, his new job meant taking care of everything, from the least to the most.

Ten minutes later, he took one of the least beneath his sheltering wing. He saw it from a distance, a flutter of feathers trailing some bittersweet, and advanced to find a little bird with one foot entangled in the vine. Actually, it was a fox sparrow that, having summered in these cool heights and started on its way to wintering grounds, had come to grief when it alighted on the vine. Ulysses, who for lack of a better name called it a dickey bird, knew only that it needed help. He closed his left hand gently about it, loosened the imprisoned foot with his right and debated.

The dickey bird, whose heart pounded a trip-hammer beat at first, presently calmed and quieted. Obviously, it was not seriously or permanently injured, but it should rest before being liberated to go on its way. Should Ulysses interrupt his exploration and return at once to the lodge? Or might he go on?

Since the dickey bird seemed to be resting as comfortably in his hand as it would anywhere else, he decided to go on. An hour later, he mounted a knoll and, from its crest, looked down on a clearing and across at mountains that rose in the distance. Both caught his interested attention, the mountains because they were there and the clearing because there were wild animals in it. Ulysses chose to study the mountains first.

Remembering that the sign on the depot declared that the town of Conifer was 7150 feet above sea level, Ulysses was pretty sure that the lodge was at least as far up in the air. But the mountains, that were forested all the way to the summit and upon which there seemed to be a considerable depth of snow, rose at least another 4000 feet. Earmarking them for future investigation, Ulysses turned his attention to the animals and the clearing in which they fed.

The rectangular clearing, or park, would have been a good-sized farm in some areas but it was little more than a speck in the forest here. There were nine of the tan and white animals, and, although they were obviously all the same species, they varied from the size of a big dog to that of a big goat. The smaller ones, of which there were five, were evidently the young. The biggest carried impressive antlers that rose from his forehead and ended in a Y, and clearly he was accustomed to throwing his weight about. When he wanted a bit of browsing space that was already occupied by two of his smaller companions, he merely butted them aside and took it.

Ulysses decided immediately that the big whatever-it-might-be was a potential antagonist. He had a feeling that, sooner or later, he would either have to meet it in battle or bring it into his camp—and that either course would be difficult. The spirit of the valiant ancestor whose deeds lived among his blood descendants surged powerfully within him.

"I'll call you Robert E. Lee," he declared to himself.

The dickey bird in his warm hand adjusted itself to a more comfortable position and chirped plaintively. Robert E. Lee launched a vicious attack on the smallest of his companions, and Ulysses turned thoughtfully homeward. Due entirely to the fact that his own tracks were plain in the snow, and all he had to do was follow them, instead of getting hopelessly lost, he went straight to the lodge.

The now happy dickey bird demanded his primary attention. Ulysses quartered the rescued traveler in a wicker waste basket, supplied him with a saucer of water and some crumbled cracker crumbs, kept him from flying out by covering the waste basket with a newspaper and turned his attention to the well-filled bookshelves in the living room. Selecting a ponderous volume entitled Big Game Animals of North America, he sat down, began to turn the pages . . . and presently came to a picture of Robert E. Lee.

"Antelope," the caption read. "Antilocapra americana. Prongbuck, pronghorn, antelope." Ulysses learned further that it is the only hoofed animal with hollow horns that are branched or bifurcated, that it has no dew claws, etc. Finally, he discovered that it prefers barren, rolling country or naked plains and that it avoids forests and mountains.

When he closed the book, he was both puzzled and a bit more amiable toward Robert E. Lee and his pals, all of whom were obviously in a spot. Whoever wrote the book seemed to know what he was talking about, but by no stretch of Ulysses' imagination was the little clearing either barren, rolling country or a naked plain. What foul stroke of fortune had brought Robert E. Lee and friends to such a place?

Ulysses could not know that he had just met an antelope, or a herd of them, that had cast tradition to the winds and chose to live in an unorthodox fashion. Born in the grass country through which Ulysses had passed on his way to Conifer, Robert E. Lee had started life as a proper antelope should. But he had swiftly learned that his speed was no match for a bullet's. Grazed by a shot from a trigger-happy game hog who was also hunting out of season, Robert E. Lee was two years old when he forsook the grasslands for the forest. At the proper time, he had sneaked back into the grass country and sweet-talked a beautiful young bride into sharing his exile. Now the little herd summered in the mountains that Ulysses had seen and wintered as far down as the snow drove them.

Throughout the years, Robert E. Lee had grown magnificent antlers, indeed, a record rack. He had also acquired experience and deepened his own wisdom. So adept had he become at hiding his family and himself that not even the poachers suspected their presence. Ulysses' were the first human eyes to behold Robert E. Lee since the poacher's bullet had convinced the big buck that he'd better go to the mountains for his health.

Unaware that he had just made a revolutionary discovery, Ulysses closed and replaced the book. He went about his personal chores, that seemed to grow less complex the more he did them. Even his supper was not a complete mess. Finally, Ulysses turned in to sleep the sleep of the just.

He did not know what time it was when he awakened, but only that it was the blackest part of the blackest night he could remember. A little wind moaned disconsolately about the eaves, as though looking for a place where it might enter. Ulysses waited tensely for a repetition of the noise that had disturbed his slumber.

It came, a ferocious snarl, followed by a vigorous scratching at the door. The boy, suddenly very cold rather than comfortably warm, shivered in his bed. Pete Corson had not said that there were man-eaters around, but neither had he expressly stated that there were not. Obviously, there was something at the door, and, considering the manner in which it snarled and scratched, it was there with the sole intention of converting Ulysses Grant Jones into a nine-course dinner. Well, it must be faced.

The young caretaker slipped out of bed and made ready to sell his life as dearly as possible.