CHAPTER IV
THE WHITE HUNTRESS
Two months, filled with the clean breath of outdoors, had softened thememory of that stark tragedy upon which Wanda had come at the edge ofEcho Creek. Not forgotten, never to be wiped clean from the memory,still the keen horror was dulled, the harsh details blurred, the wholedreadful picture softened under the web which the spider of time weavesover an old canvas.
Again life was glad and good and golden. Again youth was eager andhopeful and merry. The death which had come and changed the world hadgone, leaving the world as it has always been.
Wanda and Gypsy and Shep saw much of one another. They were all veryhappy, perhaps because they were very busy. Full of enthusiasm thatwas at once gay and serious Wanda had thrown herself into her "Work"immediately upon returning home in the early springtime. Before thetragic event which for the time had driven her life out of its grooveshe had already won for herself the title, bestowed merrily by WayneShandon, of the "White Huntress." Her "work," to which she gave up somany hours of each day, was purposeful, steadily pursued, and broughther a vast pleasure. The game she hunted was the squirrel tossing hisgrey body through the branches of pine and cedar, the quail callingfrom the hillsides, the cottontail scampering through the underbrush,the yellowhammer, the woodpecker, the wide winged butterflies sailingthrough the orchard and across the meadow lands. The weapon with whichshe hunted was a camera which she carried in its black case slung overher shoulder or hanging from the horn of Gypsy's saddle.
Reared since babyhood in a land where men and women were few and wherethe wild things of the forests were many and unafraid, she had long agocome to look upon the little, bright eyed woodland folk as herplaymates. Many of her childhood sorrows and joys were linked withtheir fates. Her first great grief had occurred when she was ten yearsold and Jule, her brown bear cub,--named after the cook to whom he borein the child's eyes a marked resemblance, a slight and necessaryvariation in the termination of the name taking care of the matter of adifference in sex,--came to an untimely end through the instinctive andmerciless conduct of Shep's grandparents. The house was filled withchipmunks who frightened Julia, to whom they were "jest rats, drat'em," and who raided the kitchen systematically. A trained greysquirrel barked from the trees above the house, and pet rabbits werenumerous and unprofitable about the vegetable garden. At the age whenlittle girls in the cities were dressing and undressing their dolls,Wanda was taming a palpitating heart in some little fury [Transcriber'snote: furry?] breast or leaning breathlessly, like a small mother birdherself, over a nest in the grass watching eagerly for the tender billsto peck and chip their way out into the wonderful world.
It was but natural therefore that after her childhood had gone and shehad outgrown her passion for numberless pets overrunning the house justas her sisters in the cities had outgrown their pleasure in dressingand undressing dolls, she should become the "White Huntress." Sheloved more than ever the wildness of the forest lands, and the ways ofthe woodland things were wonderful and mysterious to her. And now,from a new angle, they were her study.
There were days when she rode far out from the ranch house, her lunchat her saddle strings, to be gone until dusk or after the stars cameout. She would leave Gypsy tethered where the grass was deep and rich,command Shep to lie down and see that nobody ran away with her outfit,and then tramp off alone, carrying her camera. She knew how to climbup into the tree and to screen herself behind the foliage, so that shemight watch the mother bird and her ways, and find out when she shouldexpect the joyous miracle of new life.
When the eggs were hatched Wanda was ready. Days before she had chosenthe exact spot on the particular limb where she would place her camera.She had clothed herself as the springtime clothed the forests. A softblouse of green, short skirt and stockings of green, little cap ofgreen and green moccasins. She crouched upon the broad limb of a cedaror clung more hazardously to the branch of a pine, the tone colour ofher costume making no discord with the dusky sheen of the wavingbranches, and watched and waited. So, when "hunting" was good she hada picture of the mother bird perched upon the edge of the nest in whichthe eggs lay, a picture of the nest with the little, new birds obeyingthe first command of nature, a picture of the parents feeding them thefirst worm or berry or rebellious bug, a picture of the trial flightwhen soft young bodies essayed independence on unskilful wings.
At first the girl had been merely an amateur in the early, sweet senseof the word. Then one day she saw a couple of pages in an illustratedmagazine devoted to such photographs as these she was playing with.They were better than hers, since the man who had taken them was atrained artist as well as a lover of the wild; and they had been atonce a disappointment and an inspiration to her. Then, upon anotherday, her father who made little comment upon her pastime, handed her abox from the express office in which she found a camera with a lensthat would do its part if she learned to do hers. And that was whenshe threw herself so enthusiastically into her "work."
"I am going to have a page of pictures in that same magazine," was herway of thanking him. "And mine are going to be better!"
She flushed a little at his smile, but when she had gone away and wasalone with her new possession and a world of possibilities, her chinwas very firm.
She had her own studio in the attice above the dining room, developedplates and films there, and descended the ladder into the hallwayflushed with triumph or vexed with disappointment as her efforts provedto be good or bad. The mistakes had been many at first; they were fewnow.
She became a student of the "Home Life of the Wild Things." They allinterested her, they all posed for her, squirrel and bird andbutterfly. Inevitably she began to specialise, but her specialisationwas not in one species but rather in one process, in the dawning andbudding life of the young in the real "home life" before the newfledgling or tiny furred body left the nest for an independent life anda future nest of its own. The wild mates at work upon the house whichinstinct prompted was to be of use soon, the construction of a swingingpocket hung high up by an oriole, this was a part of the home life,just as essential a part of it as the covering of the eggs, the feedingof the young.
Before the year had swelled and blossomed into full mid-summer she hada pupil. It was her mother. Mother and daughter had always been moreto each other than the terms commonly imply, very nearly all that theyshould connote. They had been friends. Here where the solitudes weremighty and vast, where long miles and hard trails lay between homes andwhere women were few, they had had but themselves to turn to when needor desire came for the company of their own sex. Mrs. Leland hadremained young, in part because hers was a happy, sunny nature, in partbecause she had had the fires of youth replenished from thesuperabundant glow of girlhood in her daughter.
But now that the summer came with monotony and silence, now that ArthurShandon came no more, that Wayne seemed to have forgotten the rangecountry, that Garth Conway was busy every day with the entiremanagement of a heavily stocked cattle outfit, there were long, quietdays at the Echo Creek.
"Wanda," Mrs. Leland said one day, a little wistfully. "Can't I comewith you and take a peep first hand into the homes of your wildfriends? I'll be very still, I'll stay with Shep and Gypsy if you wantme to."
Wanda, at once contrite and happy, was filled with apologies andexplanations. She had had no thought that her mother would find aninterest in her "play." But if she would come, if she would like tocome, oh, she would show her the most wonderful discovery. . . .
So mother and daughter rode out together that day with lunch andcamera, and that night worked together in Wanda's attic studio over ahighly satisfactory film. The older woman's interest became as steady,as enthusiastic in a deeply thoughtful way, as Wanda's. She learned tolove each day's adventure as warmly as did her daughter, she came tohave the same tender joy in the unexpected discovery of some new phaseof the home life of the wild.
"In all of your hunting you are missing something, my W
hite Huntress,"she said one day. "Something which I have discovered!"
Wanda smiled brightly at her over the top of a new picture, pleasedwith her mother's interest no less than with the print in her hands.
"What is it, mamma?"
"I am not going to tell you yet. But to-morrow when we go out for theoriole's nest, I am going to take your old kodak!"
As they rode the five or six miles to the spot where they were to dothe morning's "hunting" Wanda wondered what it was she had missed thather mother had noticed. But she promptly forgot about it when sheclimbed the great pine which, for her mother's purpose, was so happilysituated close to a cliff. She noted with a bright nod of approval asshe edged far out upon a horizontal limb that her mother had made herown way up to the cliff top. Long she waited that morning, patient andhappy and still, her camera set in front of her, before she got theexposure she wanted. And she did not hear the other click of the othermachine, did not know that her mother had been as patient and ascontented waiting to get the picture she wanted of Wanda as Wanda hadbeen in snapping the bird and the nest and the young, hungry mouths atthe threshold.
That afternoon they developed and printed, each her own pictures. Andwhen Mrs. Leland had finished she showed Wanda what she had done.There was the picture of Wanda, far out upon the great limb, eager andwatchful, her camera ready, the oriole's nest swinging before her, themother bird just dropping down to it. And below and beyond were theground, looking immeasurably distant, the fir and pine branches, theforest of trees.
"You see, Wanda, what you have overlooked?" Mrs. Leland's eyes wereunusually bright. "You have dozens of pictures that are wonderful,pictures that you strove for for weeks, months at a time! One looks atyour picture and sees that it is wonderful, but does not understand howwonderful. You cling to a branch or a tree trunk or the side of acliff, fifty or a hundred and fifty feet of space below you, and takeyour picture. People look at the picture and do not see that thewonderful thing, the interesting thing, is how you got it!"
"But . . ." began Wanda.
"But," Mrs. Leland laughed happily, "just listen to me a moment, miss.You are going on with your pictures and I am going to follow you veryhumbly and take other pictures to show how you get them. We'll sendboth sets to your magazines and you'll see if mine aren't snapped upjust as quick as yours!"
So the relationship of mother and daughter which had grown into that ofa warm, intimate friendship now developed into closer, more intimatecompanionship. Together they found bright, brimming days thatotherwise might have been dull and empty.
Wanda came to realise that a woman who is forty may be, in allessentials, as young as a girl of twenty, and that the added score ofyears while it brings truer insight and perhaps a steadier heart doesnot quench ardour or deaden the emotions.
"Mamma," she said one day, looking up brightly from the development ofa film from her mother's kodak, "you are just a girl yourself!"
And Mrs. Leland was just girl enough to flush, and youthful enough tolaugh as musically as her daughter.
Thus, as the days went by and they were frequently alone together,Martin Leland being often away on the business upon which he and ArthurShandon had entered with Sledge Hume, the two women were not lonely.Mrs. Leland accompanied Wanda everywhere to take pictures showing thegirl climbing for a lofty bird nest, clinging to the cliffs at theupper end of the valley, crouching hidden among the bushes waiting fora rabbit to hop into the picture, even on the deer "hunt" they hadalready begun.
So the late summer slipped by more swiftly in its smooth channel thanever, the leaves in the orchard yellowed with the fall, the light greentips upon the fir branches turned dark green, the cattle were drivendown to the lower valleys along the creeks, and the first snows ofwinter dimmed the shortening days.
With the passing of the summer, Garth Conway came again to be afrequent visitor at the Echo Creek ranch house. Since the letter fromWayne Shandon in New York he had had but one communication from the manwho now owned the Bar L-M. It had been characteristically short,written in London.
"I am leaving the destiny of the cows In your competent hands," Waynewrote. "I am legally giving you a power of attorney. This authorisesyou to run the outfit as you judge best. Make what sales you want toto pay the boys and yourself. Bank the money or re-invest forimprovements and more cattle. The Lord knows when I'll come back . . .provided the Devil has told Him."
And then, in a postscript, hastily scribbled he had added,
"I have made my will . . . Imagine me making a will! . . . and if Idon't come back at all the outfit is yours. Love to the Lelands."
And then, as a second afterthought, he had scrawled at the top of thenote.
"A joke on you in case I shouldn't come back, Garth! I want you tosell some cows and send me another two thousand. But I promise not todo it again."
Garth told his news in the living room where the family had beenlistening to the music of Wanda's lilting young voice with her mother'spiano accompaniment when he came in. Mrs. Leland's smiling face grewclouded and distressed and her eyes turned involuntarily to herhusband. Martin Leland sprang to his feet in sudden wrath.
"Hell's bells!" he shouted angrily. "Two sacrifice sales in less thana year! Four thousand dollars! And what has he done with it? Gotdrunk, chucked it away across race courses and card tables . . . Wouldto God I had done what it was my duty to do, that . . ."
"Martin!" cried Mrs. Leland. "Martin, dear!"
He stopped abruptly and sank back into his chair. For a little whilethere was silence, heavy and painful. Wanda's eyes grew misty. Notonce since that day in the spring had she been disloyal to RedReckless, whom she had known in his boyhood, who had fought her earlybattles for her, who had been the plumed knight of her early girlhood.She told herself now that he had not come back because he could notbear to return yet to the place where he and his brother had spent somany happy days together, that if he was living wildly now, scurryingup and down the world and flinging away his inheritance, it was becausehe had felt his brother's loss far more than he had let them know, thathe was going his pace swiftly to forget what lay behind. And againthere rose in her heart the mute prayer that he might come back and bea man and show them all that they had not judged him fairly.
Garth glanced swiftly at the faces of these three people who had heardhis news with such varied emotions, and went on to break the silencenone of them had noticed.
"Matters are going rather well on the range," he said quietly. "I solda hundred head at an average of ninety-seven dollars last week and wasable to bank the entire nine thousand, seven hundred. Maybe," with aquick smile, "it will be just as well if he doesn't come back in ahurry."
"Oh," cried Wanda impulsively. "That is ungenerous of you! AfterWayne says that he is leaving everything to you in his will, too!"
"I don't mean to be ungenerous or yet ungrateful," replied Garth a bitstiffly, flushing under the girl's reproachful eyes. "I onlymeant . . ."
"Wanda," said her father sharply, "you should be ashamed of yourself!Garth has not been ungenerous and you have. And he is right. It wouldbe the best thing for Wayne himself as well as for the range if hedoesn't come back for a long time. Garth is working hard for theinterests of both. And if any one should be grateful to the man who isrunning his range for him it is that young spendthrift. You are notthinking, Wanda."
The girl bit her lip and turned away. And she did not make the apologyher father expected. Dimly it seemed to her that they were all overready, over eager to condemn the man whose one crime had been mereheedlessness, who was surely hurting no one but himself, but whooffended their ideas in refusing to take life seriously and bear thecommon burden of responsibility.
"After all," said Mrs. Leland a little hurriedly, "Wayne is only a boy.Oh, he's a man in years, of course, but then some people are fortunateenough to carry their youth with them a long time before it drops off.And," with a smile, "he says he won't do it again!"
Martin Leland smoked his two pipefuls of strong tobacco and thendeparted to attend to some correspondence. Mrs. Leland soon slippedaway to her book and easy chair and cushions in a corner. Until teno'clock Wanda and Garth bent together over a big scrap book containingthe latest additions to the home life of the wild.
Soon afterward even Garth Conway's visits to the Leland home stopped.November came with many dark days and an occasional flurry of snow.The ground might at any time now be covered, the passes choked with thesoft drifts, the valleys hidden. The cattle must be moved down themountains to the foothills where each year they wintered. The Bar L-Mbuildings were closed, the heavy wooden shutters put up, the corralsdeserted until thaw time. Conway with his men and cattle would notcome again until springtime came with them.
And over the Echo Creek ranch the silence of the summer passed into thedeeper silence of winter. Leland's cattle and men had gone already tohis winter range; there was no one at home excepting Mrs. Leland,Wanda, Julia, and Jim who remained to do what little work there was tobe done during the term of "hibernating." Martin's interests were toobig for him to stay here had he desired to do so; his family would notsee him again for the two months or so during which he remained outside.
It was not the first year that the Echo Creek house was not shutteredand closed for the winter. Mrs. Leland had sometimes gone with herhusband to spend the storm swept months of the year either at one ofhis other ranches or in the city, and sometimes she had stayed here.This winter she had no particular desire to leave her comfortable homefor the makeshift of a San Francisco hotel and Wanda was eager to stay.
"You'll be cooped up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," MartinLeland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch inDecember. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if Icouldn't get in again or you get out before well on into February orMarch."
He had made a flying trip between storms, hastening from El Toyon toWhite Rock over the mail route, coming in from White Rock through thestill open pass through the mountains. His one object in coming hadbeen to try to induce his women folk to leave Echo Creek. And the sameday, seeing the threat of bad weather, he went out again, on skis andalone.
There were busy days for all four who remained at the ranch house inmaking preparations for idle, comfortable days to follow. Jim broughtvast quantities of wood from the basement, piling it high in the cornerof the living room where it would be convenient for feeding the deepthroated fireplace whose rocks would stay warm all night, hot all day,for many weeks. From the yard he brought more wood, piling it in thebasement until there were only narrow passageways between the slabs andlogs and the finer split stove wood. Julia superintended the placingof her kitchen supplies, secreted those little delicacies which shewould require at Christmas time, arranged her canned goods andperpetually fussed and rearranged in her storeroom. Meanwhile Mrs.Leland and Wanda were everywhere at once, overseeing the moving ofbeds, the shifting of furniture, the making cosy of the home againstthe siege. And then, howling and shrieking, with deep voice shoutingacross the pine forests, the winter came in earnest.
Martin Leland had read the signs aright; it was to be a hard winter.There came a wind storm that lasted without cessation for three days;the branches of the cedars about the house tossed like long armsgrappling with an unseen foe; here and there a dead limb was wrenchedfrom a tree trunk and hurled far out to be buried in the snow whichbegan to fall in small, hard flakes almost congealed to hail. Then,the three days gone, the wind died down suddenly, the flakes grewlarger, softer, the snow clung tenaciously to the trees and fences andeaves of house and stable. Jim in arctic shoes and mittens, his earslost under the flaps of his cap, having sighed and bestirred himselffrom his snug comfort by Julia's stove, got his shovel and went up onthe housetop.
While the bleak, chill days rushed by Wanda prepared happily for thefine weather which would come, when the sun reflected back from manyfeet of fluffy snow would warm the air, when in the high, dry altitudesthe sparkling, Christmassy world would become a rarely beautiful thing,when she could leave the house and penetrate deep into a solitude whichwas as different from the solitude of the summer forestland as day isfrom night. She brought down from the attic her own favourite pair ofskis and saw that they were fit. The long slender bits of pine, lightand graceful with their running grooves glistening, their turned upends like Turks' slippers, she stood on end in the living room whileshe gave them a new coat of white shellac. Her snowshoe pole shetested, making sure that it had sustained no injury during its longbanishment to the dark places of the attic, and that it could betrusted in the work she would call upon it to do. She gathered thewinter out-door things which she had not used for two years, the whitesweater that clung close to her slim, pliant body; the white tasseledhat, mitts, leggins, white bloomers. And then, when a blue and white,laughing day came, and the air was clear and warm, the branches of thetrees sagging under their diamond pricked festoons of snow, she leftthe house, now in truth the White Huntress.
Camera and field glasses went with her; for lunch a bit of jerked beefand a piece of hard chocolate. For to-day she began her winter work.Again she was hunting. The forests as she slipped through them werevery still and seemed void of all the life that had swarmed here untilthe snows came. But she would see snow birds, she might find a coyoteor a big snow-shoe rabbit. She would take pictures, too, such wintrypictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace ofwinter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown intostrange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps thesweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling whitebackground.
And she thrilled to the crunch of thin crust underfoot whichyesterday's thaw and last night's freeze had formed, the whip of thedry air in her face, the exhilaration of the long, swift dash as sheglided from the crest of some ridge, a silent, graceful creature, intothe hollow beyond. Her body bent a little forward, her snow-shoe polehorizontal as a tight rope walker holds his balancing rod, the whiteworld slid away beneath her, little sinks or humps in the apparentsmoothness of the snow demanding the sudden leap which shot the bloodtingling through the eager body. For the light skis with their threecoats of shellac carried her down the steeper slopes with the wildspeed of a bird skimming the winter whitened earth.
This first day she took an old favourite way which led her up a gradualslope straight southward until at last she paused, breathing deeply,upon the crest. Far behind her she could see the smoke of the ranchhouse rising from a clump of cedars; straight ahead the black line ofthe river. And now, balancing a moment, gripping her pole firmly,settling her feet securely in the ski-straps, she shot downward, takingthe steep dip which would lead after a little into a long curve and sobring her flashing through the trees down to the river three miles away.
Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her body warm with thesun's heat and the leaping blood within her, when she straightened upand touching the end of her pole lightly against the snow came to astop near the river. It was swollen and black, a mighty, shoutingthing, the only thing about her whose voice had not been stilled by thesnow.
Her eyes turning found close at hand the first tracks she had seen thismorning, fresh tracks of a big rabbit.
"I must have frightened him," she thought. "He's gone on upstream."
She turned upstream as the rabbit had done, noiselessly following histrail. And, turned eastward by a rabbit's track, she followedunconsciously, unsuspectingly, the imperious bidding of her fate. Herown life, the lives of two men would have been widely different hadWanda Leland turned westward instead of eastward this morning.
Already she was a mile above the bridge across which the road ran tothe Bar L-M. From where she was a stranger might not suppose that manor horse could find a place to cross in many times that distance; forhere the river banks were steep cliffs, never lower than ten feet,rising often abruptly to thirty. Between them the water raged,thundering over falls, leaping into dee
p pools where the sucking eddieswere never still.
And as she moved on upstream, further yet from the bridge, the rockybanks grew steeper, drew nearer to each other, until suddenly theplunging river was lost to her, its thunder muffled. Wanda could see athick mat of snow from a great, flat topped rock on the far sidecurving downward, inward, as if from the eaves of a house, the longicicles like sharp teeth set in a monster's gaping jaw.
Close along the edge of the cliffs the course of the fleeing rabbitled, while Wanda's skis left their parallel smooth tracks in a straightline a score of feet back from the steep bank. She slipped silentlythrough a clump of firs, peered around the branches bent down by theheavy snow, and saw the snow-shoe rabbit where he had stopped for amoment. He was a big fellow, the biggest she had ever seen, crouchinglow, his round eyes bright and suspicious, as he trusted to his colourto protect him. She brought her camera swiftly out of its case.
"There's a chance to get him, after all," she thought eagerly. "Itwon't be much of a picture perhaps . . . just a white blur against awhite background . . ."
The camera clicked just as the rabbit leaped forward; she thought shehad caught him against the dark background of a fir from which much ofthe snow had fallen. Then, just in front of the frightened animal alittle branch of a small pine, suddenly released of its weight of snow,whipped up; a new terror came into the creature's panic strickenbreast; he stopped sharply, swerved, lost his head as one of his rattlebrained species is likely to do, ran directly toward the girl, swervedagain and running straight toward the river, essayed the impossible andmet destruction. He leaped far out across the water, attempting a jumpthat none of his kind could have made safely, and fell short. Thefurry body described a great valiant arc, shot upward for one flashingsecond, dropped out of sight.
"Oh, I am so sorry," cried the girl contritely. "You poor littlething."
The woodland tragedy moved her strangely, for she felt that, innocentlyenough, she had caused it. She moved closer to see if by a happychance the rabbit had landed upon a rocky shelf far down, hoping thatafter all she might in some way set him free.
Moving slowly, her camera again in its case, her pole touching thesnow, she approached until she could look down. Only the steep wall onthe far side, sinking straight and black into the swollen torrent, onlya little speck of white far down which might have been a strugglingbody or a fleck of foam.
"The poor little thing," she said again. "He saw that the far bank islower than this one, and he was too frightened to guess the distance."
Musing, she thought that her skis were merely settling a little deeperthrough the crust when she felt a slight sinking underneath. Then,suddenly, she was aware that her skis were dipping downward, that shewas slipping. She tried hastily to draw back, she felt that she wasstill slipping, that the polished surfaces of the skis were answeringthe call of gravity, that she was being drawn closer, closer in spiteof her efforts . . .
She made a wild, frantic attempt to draw back, a quick terror grippingher. The shouting river was calling to her, something was pulling ather body steadily as a magnet pulls at a steel, the world was slippingaway under her, she was going the way the rabbit had gone . . .
Then she threw her body backward, twisting as best she could with theskis clinging to her feet, clutching with her hands at anything herfingers might touch. She heard a splash, knew that the overhang ofsnow had dropped into the river, knew that one ski was hanging over thebrink. And then the hand that had gripped at the smooth snow sank downand clutched the top of a small, hidden pine, she drew herself up andback and in a moment, white, shaking she lay still, not daring to lookdown.