Читать книгу Wild Freedom - Max Brand - Страница 5

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When a man is lost in the woods, the first thing to do is to sit down and have a long think and not wander away in the first direction that comes into his head.

That was what John Parks had cautioned Tommy more than once. He remembered it now as he sat cross-legged under a pine, with his back against the trunk. He had spent the morning making up the pack - a weird bundle it was when he finished - and moving down lower in the valley, farther from the Turnbull, so that the sound of its roaring would not haunt him. He had descended simply because he dared not undertake, alone, that perilous journey over the mountain snows. No, wherever he went, it must be down the valley.

And he made the first stop at this open place where the lower slope of the mountain put out a fist through the shrouding forest - or, rather, it might be called a sharp, square shoulder. From the top of it Tommy looked up and down the valley across a wilderness of evergreens. The great mountains over which they had come were at his back. Beneath him, the Turnbull wound into view again, making him shudder as the sun flashed on its windings. And in the dim distance were other mountains, a cloudy rolling of blue which separated to give place to the Turnbull.

Through that pass he must go with Billy. It might take weeks to reach the gap, and during that time he might find no man to help him on the way. Yes, and what lay in blue distance and under the horizon, he could not dream. Perhaps there was a desert, burning hot, impassable except to those who knew the water holes, deadly even to those, sometimes. He had heard much of such places.

As for the trail over which he had come, if he turned back he would have first the terrible heights of the mountains to climb, and then, beyond those, there would be the long stretches which he had crossed with his father - and it had taken them three days from the nearest town. He might miss the way altogether, besides. And it would not be strange if one perished of hunger. No, the best way, he decided, was to follow the Turnbull River, even though it wandered down through an eternity of distance. For there was a great chance that it would lead him to some town.

Bravely, but not quickly, he made up his mind. That uncertain distance was terrible to poor Tommy. For hours he sat there pondering the question back and forth, and, when he eventually made up his mind and rose to start on with Billy, he suddenly noted that his feet were in shadow. The afternoon had worn late, all unawares.

He wanted to start on at once, for he was in a fever of eagerness to have the first stage of the great adventure accomplished and put behind him; but he knew that, when one finds a good camping place in the middle of the afternoon, it is better to camp at once and make an early start in the morning. And nothing could be more ideal than this level hill-shoulder.

In the dense ranks of the trees which marched up around him, there were quantities of dead branches. His keen young eye had noted them automatically while he sat there during the afternoon. There were shrubs, too, which he could easily cut with his father's sharp ax. Wood, then, which is one of the two main essentials for a camp, was there in plenty. As for water, it was furnished in equal abundance. A rivulet flowed from the mouth of a cave which had doubtless been worn by the working of the water, and the little stream wound across the level, then darted with sudden speed to the foot of the hill where it joined a large creek, and both went murmuring off to join the more distant Turnbull. Perhaps John Parks, if he had seen this place, would have decided to start his home on the very spot. With the thought, great tears welled into the eyes of Tommy.

But, according to John Parks, there is a great and universal antidote for sorrow - work. Tommy sprang up and set to making camp with a fury. He took the pack from the back of Bill - his unpracticed hands had built it so poorly that it had twisted awry on the burro's patient back - and then, with Billy at work on the grass, the boy hurried to the trees and swung the ax with a will.

It was far too large for him, but practice had taught him to shorten his grip on the handle and in that fashion he made fair play with it. Its keen edge gave him in five minutes an abundance of wood which kept him busy for half an hour longer, dragging it to the center of the opening. But he wanted an oversupply of fuel; there could not be too much to furnish him with company during the cold, solemn hours of the night.

The fire itself he made in approved fashion, grouping some big stones around it, and here he mixed the cornmeal with soda and water and salt and fried his hot cakes and set his bacon sizzling. He made coffee, too, and for a while he was so busy that he had no time to give to other worries.

It was not until he began to eat his supper that grief took him by the throat. It seemed to Tommy that John Parks was somewhere down the mountain, was coming home with great, impatient strides, and that his well-known whistle would surely soon be sounding on the farther side of the clearing. Once he found himself breathlessly listening, his eyes strained and wide. He rallied from that with a great effort, but, when his glance lowered, it struck on the side of the coffee pot, with the graniteware dented where he, on a morning, had dropped pot and coffee and all and sent the boiling stuff sizzling across his father's shoes. He chuckled softly as he remembered how John Parks had danced around on one foot and then on the other. But there had been no reproving, no sharp words.

Tommy buried his face in his hands and sat quivering, full of a grief which could not spend itself in tears. Afterward, he could eat no more. He could not even look at the tinware and the pots, but, turning his back on the camp, he fled uphill and down, fairly running from sorrow. And, in a measure, he succeeded, for he came to a panting halt at last with the thick forest around him, rapidly darkening with evening, and realized that he must work back carefully if he expected to find the camp.

So that problem filled his mind, and when he reached the camp it was to find the fire almost dead. He freshened it, and as he did so he heard, blown on the wind from lower down, the valley, a shrill quavering, sobbing voice, melancholy as the weeping of a lost child. Tommy listened with a chill running up his spine, for well he knew it was a mountain lion hunting up the valley, hunting, for the time being, carelessly and well-nigh blindly, since he chose to come down the wind instead of against it. And hungered pumas have been known to stalk men, if not actually to attack them.

Tommy, at least, could collect half a hundred memories of stories such as men tell around a camp fire when supper is finished and the day's work is done and pipes and imaginations are drawing freely. He picked up the rifle, saw that it was loaded, and practiced aiming it here and there wherever the firelight flashed on a leaf. It was a heavy gun for a child to handle, but familiarity with one's tools is half the battle, and for two years now John Parks had taken an almost foolish pleasure in teaching his son to shoot with that very weapon.

When Tommy started to work cleaning up the supper dishes, he kept the rifle close at hand. Then he built a rousing fire, not of loose brush which would toss flames into the sky for a few wild minutes and then burn out, but of solid branches which would keep a blaze alive for hours. He even ventured into the forest for more wood, but it was only a single expedition, for while he worked he felt eyes watching him in the darkness.

But when he went back to the fire and lay down beside it, twisted in his blanket only one side was sheltered by the heat of the fire and the red light which all wild beasts are said to dread. The other side lay open to the terrible dark and all the powers that prey by night.

There had been no such fear, no dream of such fear the other nights when John Parks was near. The very sound of his voice, so it seemed to the boy, would be sufficient to frighten hungered prowlers away. Night had been simple and even beautiful before. But now, as he looked up to the huge arch of the sky, filled with impersonal eyes, the mountains appearing like piled shadows on the one side, it seemed to Tommy that all the vast space in between was packed close with enmity and hatred focusing on his single head.

He got up again, dry of throat, and with his eyes burning from constant staring among the trees and the shadows. This time he split the fire into two parts, each a solid mass of wood which should burn steadily without replenishing until close to daylight, and between the two fires he lay down.

It was very hot there. He folded the blanket and lay on top of it. He even opened his shirt so that the air might cool him. But it was better a thousand times to lie in heat than in terror.

That one cry from the mountain lion was all he heard, however, and perhaps it had been hurrying across country on a trail well known to it and leading to certain prey. That was the reason it had been traveling down the wind instead of prowling up it.

This conclusion came like a blessing and the assurance of peace to Tommy. An instant later the stars swam and mingled together in a soft, cool fire above his head. He slept.

It was no nightmare now. Utter weariness of soul and body shut out the possibility of dreams. And out of that dreamless, perfect sleep he was wakened by a horrible knife-stab of sound - the snarl of a wild beast making a kill and biting deep. He stood erect, his heart thundering wildly, his wits astray. Then he heard a groan and a fall.

For the first time he could see. The two fires on which he had counted so certainly had burned to smoldering beds of coals, dusted over with ashes which alone kept the life from completely dying. And from the beds of coals were passed an uncertain glow of light which revealed things not at a glance but by dim degrees, just as the mind works out a problem.

So, what Tommy saw first was a distant, isolated gleam on a polished leaf. Next he saw the pack, a jumbled heap without head or tail to it. And last of all he saw where Billy lay prostrate, and over the poor burro, with fangs sunk in his throat, crouched the mountain lion, a tawny splotch in the darkness - though clearly enough visible for Tommy to make out the long sweep of the tail as it was lashed from side to side.

He cried out in an agony of horror and fear, but the small, choked voice had the power to make the puma leap growling from its kill and face suddenly around. There it saw a man risen from the ground, risen out of the very body of detested fires, so it seemed. The mountain lion spat in fear and rage, then turned and with uncanny speed slunk away. A single stride, and it seemed to melt into nothingness.

But Tommy dared not move. It was not fear of the lion which kept him frozen and still. A danger once confronted and seen naked with the eye becomes only a tithe as terrible as when it existed only behind a wall of darkness. It was not dread of the lion but consciousness of what the death of Billy meant - that he was chained to this place in the valley of the Turnbull River. He could not venture farther away than a single day's march from his source of supplies, and in this wilderness, how long would it be before men came that way?