The Pirate of Jasper Peak

by Cornelia Meigs

It was a longer and a steeper climb than he had bargained for. More than once he thought he was at the top and even beginning to descend on the other side, only to discover that there was another ascent to be made. He went upward for what seemed to him an endless time, and began to be very weary. At last he reached the summit, but found that the trees were so tall and thick that he could see no distance even from there, and a slight, a very slight doubt began to arise in his mind as to whether he had done the wisest thing in following a plan of his own.

He saw a great mass of rock rising among the trees not a quarter of a mile away and decided that he had better climb to the top of it and get his bearings before going any further. It was a hard scramble through the thickets and up the side of the giant red bowlder, but Hugh accomplished it in ever increasing haste. He wished to assure himself as quickly as possible that all his calculations were correct. He was panting with hurry and excitement when he came out upon the top of the rock and turned his face toward where Jasper Peak should be.

Somehow it is rather a terrible thing to look for so reliable a landmark as a mountain or a lake and not to find it.

“They must be there, they must be there,” he kept repeating half aloud; but, no, there was nothing to be seen but hills and hills, endless miles of green in every direction and all utterly unfamiliar. For a full minute Hugh stood gaping, before there came over him the sickening knowledge that he was lost.

He had thought the forest beautiful on his night journey with Shokatan, it had seemed to him mysterious, wonderful, teeming with adventure. But now it seemed only dark, threatening and cruel, as though it existed merely to shelter dangers and hidden enemies, as though the rolling hills and valleys swept up to his feet to drown him in a sea of green.

“I mustn’t get excited,” he kept telling himself, “I must keep my head.”

But even as he so thought, he knew that his brain was reeling and that his bewilderment was increasing every moment.

“I will go back just the way I came,” was his first plan, but it proved impossible to follow. He found traces here and there of where he had passed before, yet the way was so twisted and uncertain that, after an hour of struggling through the underbrush he finally came out on the same ridge again and faced the same mass of red rock. He climbed the steep bowlder once more to make sure that he had not been mistaken and, on seeing again that vast pitiless expanse of forest, all calmness suddenly left him. He slid down the rock in a wild scramble, landed on all-fours among the brambles, picked himself up and started down the opposite side of the hill at a run.

He was quite unconscious of the fact that he had dropped Oscar’s rifle and had left it behind him. He never had any idea of where he went or in what direction. He ran until he could drag his leaden feet no longer, then he lay panting upon the ground until he could get up and run again. Finally he became so exhausted that he could only walk and had to stop to rest every few minutes, but still he pressed obstinately on, determined to get somewhere, anywhere.

Once he found himself, not knowing how he got there, floundering at the edge of a wide marsh and noticed footmarks in the soft ground beside him as though some great creature of the woods had passed there not very long before. The prints were very large and clear in the wet earth, but he scarcely noticed them so far gone was he in weariness and despair. Slowly he dragged himself on, past a dense poplar thicket, over a dried-up watercourse, up a hill, through the close undergrowth at the top—and stood still with a cry that was almost a sob. Below him spread a wide valley, green and open and full of sunshine, at its foot, in exactly the opposite quarter from where it should be, lay the shining blue of the lake. Oscar’s little house, still in quite the wrong direction, stood on the ridge at his right, the door open, the curtains flying, the red roof basking in the sun. A pleasant homelike tinkle came up from the grassy slope below him where the contented Hulda was grazing peacefully.