Читать книгу The Song of Hugh Glass - John G. Neihardt - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The year was eighteen hundred twenty three.

’Twas when the guns that blustered at the Ree

Had ceased to brag, and ten score martial clowns

Turned from the unwhipped Aricara towns,

Earning the scornful laughter of the Sioux.

A withering blast the arid South still blew,

And creeks ran thin beneath the glaring sky;

For ’twas a month ere honking geese would fly

Southward before the Great White Hunter’s face:

And many generations of their race,

As bow-flung arrows, now have fallen spent.

It happened then that Major Henry went

With eighty trappers up the dwindling Grand,

Bound through the weird, unfriending barren-land

For where the Big Horn meets the Yellowstone;

And old Hugh Glass went with them.

Large of bone,

Deep-chested, that his great heart might have play,

Gray-bearded, gray of eye and crowned with gray

Was Glass. It seemed he never had been young;

And, for the grudging habit of his tongue,

None knew the place or season of his birth.

Slowly he ‘woke to anger or to mirth;

Yet none laughed louder when the rare mood fell,

And hate in him was like a still, white hell,

A thing of doom not lightly reconciled.

What memory he kept of wife or child

Was never told; for when his comrades sat

About the evening fire with pipe and chat,

Exchanging talk of home and gentler days,

Old Hugh stared long upon the pictured blaze,

And what he saw went upward in the smoke.

But once, as with an inner lightning stroke,

The veil was rent, and briefly men discerned

What pent-up fires of selfless passion burned

Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.

There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,

Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began

The downy beard to mark him for a man.

Blue-eyed was he and femininely fair.

A maiden might have coveted his hair

That trapped the sunlight in its tangled skein:

So, tardily, outflowered the wild blond strain

That gutted Rome grown overfat in sloth.

A Ganymedes haunted by a Goth

Was Jamie. When the restive ghost was laid,

He seemed some fancy-ridden child who played

At manliness ‘mid all those bearded men.

The sternest heart was drawn to Jamie then.

But his one mood ne’er linked two hours together.

To schedule Jamie’s way, as prairie weather,

Was to get fact by wedding doubt and whim;

For very lightly slept that ghost in him.

No cloudy brooding went before his wrath

That, like a thunder-squall, recked not its path,

But raged upon what happened in its way.

Some called him brave who saw him on that day

When Ashley stormed a bluff town of the Ree,

And all save beardless Jamie turned to flee

For shelter from that steep, lead-harrowed slope.

Yet, hardly courage, but blind rage agrope

Inspired the foolish deed.

’Twas then old Hugh

Tore off the gray mask, and the heart shone through.

For, halting in a dry, flood-guttered draw,

The trappers rallied, looked aloft and saw

That travesty of war against the sky.

Out of a breathless hush, the old man’s cry

Leaped shivering, an anguished cry and wild

As of some mother fearing for her child,

And up the steep he went with mighty bounds.

Long afterward the story went the rounds,

How old Glass fought that day. With gun for club,

Grim as a grizzly fighting for a cub,

He laid about him, cleared the way, and so,

Supported by the firing from below,

Brought Jamie back. And when the deed was done,

Taking the lad upon his knee: “My Son,

Brave men are not ashamed to fear,” said Hugh,

“And I’ve a mind to make a man of you;

So here’s your first acquaintance with the law!”

Whereat he spanked the lad with vigorous paw

And, having done so, limped away to bed;

For, wounded in the hip, the old man bled.

It was a month before he hobbled out,

And Jamie, like a fond son, hung about

The old man’s tent and waited upon him.

And often would the deep gray eyes grow dim

With gazing on the boy; and there would go—

As though Spring-fire should waken out of snow—

A wistful light across that mask of gray.

And once Hugh smiled his enigmatic way,

While poring long on Jamie’s face, and said:

“So with their sons are women brought to bed,

Sore wounded!”

Thus united were the two:

And some would dub the old man ‘Mother Hugh’;

While those in whom all living waters sank

To some dull inner pool that teemed and stank

With formless evil, into that morass

Gazed, and saw darkly there, as in a glass,

The foul shape of some weakly envied sin.

For each man builds a world and dwells therein.

Nor could these know what mocking ghost of Spring

Stirred Hugh’s gray world with dreams of blossoming

That wooed no seed to swell or bird to sing.

So might a dawn-struck digit of the moon

Dream back the rain of some old lunar June

And ache through all its craters to be green.

Little they know what life’s one love can mean,

Who shrine it in a bower of peace and bliss:

Pang dwelling in a puckered cicatrice

More truly figures this belated love.

Yet very precious was the hurt thereof,

Grievous to bear, too dear to cast away.

Now Jamie went with Hugh; but who shall say

If ’twas a warm heart or a wind of whim,

Love, or the rover’s teasing itch in him,

Moved Jamie? Howsoe’er, ’twas good to see

Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,

One age in young adventure. One who saw

Has likened to a February thaw

Hugh’s mellow mood those days; and truly so,

For when the tempering Southwest wakes to blow

A phantom April over melting snow,

Deep in the North some new white wrath is brewed.

Out of a dim-trailed inner solitude

The old man summoned many a stirring story,

Lived grimly once, but now shot through with glory

Caught from the wondering eyes of him who heard—

Tales jaggéd with the bleak unstudied word,

Stark saga-stuff. “A fellow that I knew,”

So nameless went the hero that was Hugh—

A mere pelt merchant, as it seemed to him;

Yet trailing epic thunders through the dim,

Whist world of Jamie’s awe.

And so they went,

One heart, it seemed, and that heart well content

With tale and snatch of song and careless laughter.

Never before, and surely never after,

The gray old man seemed nearer to his youth—

That myth that somehow had to be the truth,

Yet could not be convincing any more.

Now when the days of travel numbered four

And nearer drew the barrens with their need,

On Glass, the hunter, fell the task to feed

Those four score hungers when the game should fail.

For no young eye could trace so dim a trail,

Or line the rifle sights with speed so true.

Nor might the wistful Jamie go with Hugh;

“For,” so Hugh chaffed, “my trick of getting game

Might teach young eyes to put old eyes to shame.

An old dog never risks his only bone.”

‘Wolves prey in packs, the lion hunts alone’

Is somewhat nearer what he should have meant.

And so with merry jest the old man went;

And so they parted at an unseen gate

That even then some gust of moody fate

Clanged to betwixt them; each a tale to spell—

One in the nightmare scrawl of dreams from hell,

One in the blistering trail of days a-crawl,

Venomous footed. Nor might it ere befall

These two should meet in after days and be

Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,

Recounting with a bluff, heroic scorn

The haps of either tale.

’Twas early morn

When Hugh went forth, and all day Jamie rode

With Henry’s men, while more and more the goad

Of eager youth sore fretted him, and made

The dusty progress of the cavalcade

The journey of a snail flock to the moon;

Until the shadow-weaving afternoon

Turned many fingers nightward—then he fled,

Pricking his horse, nor deigned to turn his head

At any dwindling voice of reprimand;

For somewhere in the breaks along the Grand

Surely Hugh waited with a goodly kill.

Hoofbeats of ghostly steeds on every hill,

Mysterious, muffled hoofs on every bluff!

Spurred echo horses clattering up the rough

Confluent draws! These flying Jamie heard.

The lagging air droned like the drowsy word

Of one who tells weird stories late at night.

Half headlong joy and half delicious fright,

His day-dream’s pace outstripped the plunging steed’s.

Lean galloper in a wind of splendid deeds,

Like Hugh’s, he seemed unto himself, until,

Snorting, a-haunch above a breakneck hill,

The horse stopped short—then Jamie was aware

Of lonesome flatlands fading skyward there

Beneath him, and, zigzag on either hand,

A purple haze denoted how the Grand

Forked wide ’twixt sunset and the polar star.

A-tiptoe in the stirrups, gazing far,

He saw no Hugh nor any moving thing,

Save for a welter of cawing crows, a-wing

About some banquet in the further hush.

One faint star, set above the fading blush

Of sunset, saw the coming night, and grew.

With hand for trumpet, Jamie gave halloo;

And once again. For answer, the horse neighed.

Some vague mistrust now made him half afraid—

Some formless dread that stirred beneath the will

As far as sleep from waking.

Down the hill,

Close-footed in the skitter of the shale,

The spurred horse floundered to the solid vale

And galloped to the northwest, whinnying.

The outstripped air moaned like a wounded thing;

But Jamie gave the lie unto his dread.

“The old man’s camping out to-night,” he said,

“Somewhere about the forks, as like as not;

And there’ll be hunks of fresh meat steaming hot,

And fighting stories by a dying fire!”

The sunset reared a luminous phantom spire

That, crumbling, sifted ashes down the sky.

Now, pausing, Jamie sent a searching cry

Into the twilit river-skirting brush,

And in the vast denial of the hush

The champing of the snaffled horse seemed loud.

Then, startling as a voice beneath a shroud,

A muffled boom woke somewhere up the stream

And, like vague thunder hearkened in a dream,

Drawled back to silence. Now, with heart abound,

Keen for the quarter of the perished sound,

The lad spurred gaily; for he doubted not

His cry had brought Hugh’s answering rifle shot.

The laggard air was like a voice that sang,

And Jamie half believed he sniffed the tang

Of woodsmoke and the smell of flesh a-roast;

When presently before him, like a ghost,

Upstanding, huge in twilight, arms flung wide,

A gray form loomed. The wise horse reared and shied,

Snorting his inborn terror of the bear!

And in the whirlwind of a moment there,

Betwixt the brute’s hoarse challenge and the charge,

The lad beheld, upon the grassy marge

Of a small spring that bullberries stooped to scan,

A ragged heap that should have been a man,

A huddled, broken thing—and it was Hugh!

There was no need for any closer view.

As, on the instant of a lightning flash

Ere yet the split gloom closes with a crash,

A landscape stares with every circumstance

Of rock and shrub—just so the fatal chance

Of Hugh’s one shot, made futile with surprise,

Was clear to Jamie. Then before his eyes

The light whirled in a giddy dance of red;

And, doubting not the crumpled thing was dead

That was a friend, with but a skinning knife

He would have striven for the hated life

That triumphed there: but with a shriek of fright

The mad horse bolted through the falling night,

And Jamie, fumbling at his rifle boot,

Heard the brush crash behind him where the brute

Came headlong, close upon the straining flanks.

But when at length low-lying river banks—

White rubble in the gloaming—glimmered near,

A swift thought swept the mind of Jamie clear

Of anger and of anguish for the dead.

Scarce seemed the raging beast a thing to dread,

But some foul-playing braggart to outwit.

Now hurling all his strength upon the bit,

He sank the spurs, and with a groan of pain

The plunging horse, obedient to the rein,

Swerved sharply streamward. Sliddering in the sand,

The bear shot past. And suddenly the Grand

Loomed up beneath and rose to meet the pair

That rode a moment upon empty air,

Then smote the water in a shower of spray.

And when again the slowly ebbing day

Came back to them, a-drip from nose to flank,

The steed was scrambling up the further bank,

And Jamie saw across the narrow stream,

Like some vague shape of fury in a dream,

The checked beast ramping at the water’s rim.

Doubt struggled with a victor’s thrill in him.

As, hand to buckle of the rifle-sheath,

He thought of dampened powder; but beneath

The rawhide flap the gun lay snug and dry.

Then as the horse wheeled and the mark went by—

A patch of shadow dancing upon gray—

He fired. A sluggish thunder trailed away;

The spreading smoke-rack lifted slow, and there,

Floundering in a seethe of foam, the bear

Hugged yielding water for the foe that slew!

Triumphant, Jamie wondered what old Hugh

Would think of such a “trick of getting game”!

“Young eyes” indeed!—And then that memory came,

Like a dull blade thrust back into a wound.

One moment ’twas as though the lad had swooned

Into a dream-adventure, waking there

To sicken at the ghastly land, a-stare

Like some familiar face gone strange at last.

But as the hot tears came, the moment passed.

Song snatches, broken tales—a troop forlorn,

Like merry friends of eld come back to mourn—

O’erwhelmed him there. And when the black bulk churned

The star-flecked stream no longer, Jamie turned,

Recrossed the river and rode back to Hugh.

A burning twist of valley grasses threw

Blear light about the region of the spring.

Then Jamie, torch aloft and shuddering,

Knelt there beside his friend, and moaned: “O Hugh,

If I had been with you—just been with you!

We might be laughing now—and you are dead.”

With gentle hand he turned the hoary head

That he might see the good gray face again.

The torch burned out, the dark swooped back, and then

His grief was frozen with an icy plunge

In horror. ’Twas as though a bloody sponge

Had wiped the pictured features from a slate!

So, pillaged by an army drunk with hate,

Home stares upon the homing refugee.

A red gout clung where either brow should be;

The haughty nose lay crushed amid the beard,

Thick with slow ooze, whence like a devil leered

The battered mouth convulsed into a grin.

Nor did the darkness cover, for therein

Some torch, unsnuffed, with blear funereal flare,

Still painted upon black that alien stare

To make the lad more terribly alone.

Then in the gloom there rose a broken moan,

Quick stifled; and it seemed that something stirred

About the body. Doubting that he heard,

The lad felt, with a panic catch of breath,

Pale vagrants from the legendry of death

Potential in the shadows there. But when

The motion and the moaning came again,

Hope, like a shower at daybreak, cleansed the dark,

And in the lad’s heart something like a lark

Sang morning. Bending low, he crooned: “Hugh, Hugh,

It’s Jamie—don’t you know?—I’m here with you.”

As one who in a nightmare strives to tell—

Shouting across the gap of some dim hell—

What things assail him; so it seemed Hugh heard,

And flung some unintelligible word

Athwart the muffling distance of his swoon.

Now kindled by the yet unrisen moon,

The East went pale; and like a naked thing

A little wind ran vexed and shivering

Along the dusk, till Jamie shivered too

And worried lest ’twere bitter cold where Hugh

Hung clutching at the bleak, raw edge of life.

So Jamie rose, and with his hunting-knife

Split wood and built a fire. Nor did he fear

The staring face now, for he found it dear

With the warm presence of a friend returned.

The fire made cozy chatter as it burned,

And reared a tent of light in that lone place.

Then Jamie set about to bathe the face

With water from the spring, oft crooning low,

“It’s Jamie here beside you—don’t you know?”

Yet came no answer save the labored breath

Of one who wrestled mightily with Death

Where watched no referee to call the foul.

The moon now cleared the world’s end, and the owl

Gave voice unto the wizardry of light;

While in some dim-lit chancel of the night,

Snouts to the goddess, wolfish corybants

Intoned their wild antiphonary chants—

The oldest, saddest worship in the world.

And Jamie watched until the firelight swirled

Softly about him. Sound and glimmer merged

To make an eerie void, through which he urged

With frantic spur some whirlwind of a steed

That made the way as glass beneath his speed,

Yet scarce kept pace with something dear that fled

On, ever on—just half a dream ahead:

Until it seemed, by some vague shape dismayed,

He cried aloud for Hugh, and the steed neighed—

A neigh that was a burst of light, not sound.

And Jamie, sprawling on the dewy ground,

Knew that his horse was sniffing at his hair,

While, mumbling through the early morning air,

There came a roll of many hoofs—and then

He saw the swinging troop of Henry’s men

A-canter up the valley with the sun.

Of all Hugh’s comrades crowding round, not one

But would have given heavy odds on Death;

For, though the graybeard fought with sobbing breath,

No man, it seemed, might break upon the hip

So stern a wrestler with the strangling grip

That made the neck veins like a purple thong

Tangled with knots. Nor might Hugh tarry long

There where the trail forked outward far and dim;

Or so it seemed. And when they lifted him,

His moan went treble like a song of pain,

He was so tortured. Surely it were vain

To hope he might endure the toilsome ride

Across the barrens. Better let him bide

There on the grassy couch beside the spring.

And, furthermore, it seemed a foolish thing

That eighty men should wait the issue there;

For dying is a game of solitaire

And all men play the losing hand alone.

But when at noon he had not ceased to moan,

And fought still like the strong man he had been,

There grew a vague mistrust that he might win,

And all this be a tale for wondering ears.

So Major Henry called for volunteers,

Two men among the eighty who would stay

To wait on Glass and keep the wolves away

Until he did whatever he should do.

All quite agreed ’twas bitter bread for Hugh,

Yet none, save Jamie, felt in duty bound

To run the risk—until the hat went round,

And pity wakened, at the silver’s clink,

In Jules Le Bon.

‘He would not have them think

That mercenary motives prompted him.

But somehow just the grief of Little Jim

Was quite sufficient—not to mention Hugh.

He weighed the risk. As everybody knew,

The Rickarees were scattered to the West:

The late campaign had stirred a hornet’s nest

To fill the land with stingers (which was so),

And yet—’

Three days a southwest wind may blow

False April with no drop of dew at heart.

So Jules ran on, while, ready for the start,

The pawing horses nickered and the men,

Impatient in their saddles, yawned. And then,

With brief advice, a round of bluff good-byes

And some few reassuring backward cries,

The troop rode up the valley with the day.

Intent upon his friend, with naught to say,

Sat Jamie; while Le Bon discussed at length

The reasonable limits of man’s strength—

A self-conducted dialectic strife

That made absurd all argument for life

And granted but a fresh-dug hole for Hugh.

’Twas half like murder. Yet it seemed Jules knew

Unnumbered tales accordant with the case,

Each circumstantial as to time and place

And furnished with a death’s head colophon.

Vivaciously despondent, Jules ran on.

‘Did he not share his judgment with the rest?

You see, ’twas some contusion of the chest

That did the trick—heart, lungs and all that, mixed

In such a way they never could be fixed.

A bear’s hug—ugh!’

And often Jamie winced

At some knife-thrust of reason that convinced

Yet left him sick with unrelinquished hope.

As one who in a darkened room might grope

For some belovéd face, with shuddering

Anticipation of a clammy thing;

So in the lad’s heart sorrow fumbled round

For some old joy to lean upon, and found

The stark, cold something Jamie knew was there.

Yet, womanlike, he stroked the hoary hair

Or bathed the face; while Jules found tales to tell—

Lugubriously garrulous.

Night fell.

At sundown, day-long winds are like to veer;

So, summoning a mood of relished fear,

Le Bon remembered dire alarms by night—

The swoop of savage hordes, the desperate fight

Of men outnumbered: and, like him of old,

In all that made Jules shudder as he told,

His the great part—a man by field and flood

Fate-tossed. Upon the gloom he limned in blood

Their situation’s possibilities:

Two men against the fury of the Rees—

A game in which two hundred men had failed!

He pointed out how little it availed

To run the risk for one as good as dead;

Yet, Jules Le Bon meant every word he said,

And had a scalp to lose, if need should be.

That night through Jamie’s dreaming swarmed the Ree.

Gray-souled, he wakened to a dawn of gray,

And felt that something strong had gone away,

Nor knew what thing. Some whisper of the will

Bade him rejoice that Hugh was living still;

But Hugh, the real, seemed somehow otherwhere.

Jules, snug and snoring in his blanket there,

Was half a life the nearer. Just so, pain

Is nearer than the peace we seek in vain,

And by its very sting compels belief.

Jules woke, and with a fine restraint of grief

Saw early dissolution. ‘One more night,

And then the poor old man would lose the fight—

Ah, such a man!’

A day and night crept by,

And yet the stubborn fighter would not die,

But grappled with the angel. All the while,

With some conviction, but with more of guile,

Jules colonized the vacancy with Rees;

Till Jamie felt that looseness of the knees

That comes of oozing courage. Many men

May tower for a white-hot moment, when

The wild blood surges at a sudden shock;

But when, insistent as a ticking clock,

Blind peril haunts and whispers, fewer dare.

Dread hovered in the hushed and moony air

The long night through; nor might a fire be lit,

Lest some far-seeing foe take note of it.

And day-long Jamie scanned the blank sky rim

For hoof-flung dust clouds; till there woke in him

A childish anger—dumb for ruth and shame—

That Hugh so dallied.

But the fourth dawn came

And with it lulled the fight, as on a field

Where broken armies sleep but will not yield.

Or had one conquered? Was it Hugh or Death?

The old man breathed with faintly fluttering breath,

Nor did his body shudder as before.

Jules triumphed sadly. ‘It would soon be o’er;

So men grew quiet when they lost their grip

And did not care. At sundown he would slip

Into the deeper silence.’

Jamie wept,

Unwitting how a furtive gladness crept

Into his heart that gained a stronger beat.

So cities, long beleaguered, take defeat—

Unto themselves half traitors.

Jules began

To dig a hole that might conceal a man;

And, as his sheath knife broke the stubborn sod,

He spoke in kindly vein of Life and God

And Mutability and Rectitude.

The immemorial funerary mood

Brought tears, mute tribute to the mother-dust;

And Jamie, seeing, felt each cutting thrust

Less like a stab into the flesh of Hugh.

The sun crept up and down the arc of blue

And through the air a chill of evening ran;

But, though the grave yawned, waiting for the man,

The man seemed scarce yet ready for the grave.

Now prompted by a coward or a knave

That lurked in him, Le Bon began to hear

Faint sounds that to the lad’s less cunning ear

Were silence; more like tremors of the ground

They were, Jules said, than any proper sound—

Thus one detected horsemen miles away.

For many moments big with fate, he lay,

Ear pressed to earth; then rose and shook his head

As one perplexed. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

And—as at daybreak whiten winter skies,

Agape and staring with a wild surmise—

The lad’s face whitened at the other’s word.

Jules could not quite interpret what he heard;

A hundred horse might noise their whereabouts

In just that fashion; yet he had his doubts.

It could be bison moving, quite as well.

But if ’twere Rees—there’d be a tale to tell

That two men he might name should never hear.

He reckoned scalps that Fall were selling dear,

In keeping with the limited supply.

Men, fit to live, were not afraid to die!

Then, in that caution suits not courage ill,

Jules saddled up and cantered to the hill,

A white dam set against the twilight stream;

And as a horseman riding in a dream

The lad beheld him; watched him clamber up

To where the dusk, as from a brimming cup,

Ran over; saw him pause against the gloom,

Portentous, huge—a brooder upon doom.

What did he look upon?

Some moments passed;

Then suddenly it seemed as though a blast

Of wind, keen-cutting with the whips of sleet,

Smote horse and rider. Haunched on huddled feet,

The steed shrank from the ridge, then, rearing, wheeled

And took the rubbly incline fury-heeled.

Those days and nights, like seasons creeping slow,

Had told on Jamie. Better blow on blow

Of evil hap, with doom seen clear ahead,

Than that monotonous, abrasive dread,

Blind gnawer at the soul-thews of the blind.

Thin-worn, the last heart-string that held him kind;

Strung taut, the final tie that kept him true

Now snapped in Jamie, as he saw the two

So goaded by some terrifying sight.

Death riding with the vanguard of the Night,

Life dwindling yonder with the rear of Day!

What choice for one whom panic swept away

From moorings in the sanity of will?

Jules came and summed the vision of the hill

In one hoarse cry that left no word to say:

“Rees! Saddle up! We’ve got to get away!”

Small wit had Jamie left to ferret guile,

But fumblingly obeyed Le Bon; the while

Jules knelt beside the man who could not flee:

For big hearts lack not time for charity

However thick the blows of fate may fall.

Yet, in that Jules Le Bon was practical,

He could not quite ignore a hunting knife,

A flint, a gun, a blanket—gear of life

Scarce suited to the customs of the dead!

And Hugh slept soundly in his ample bed,

Star-canopied and blanketed with night,

Unwitting how Venality and Fright

Made hot the westward trail of Henry’s men.