“You told the truth, Pete, when you said this job was almost over,” Hugh remarked from his blankets. “And I’ve been thinking of something. If you’d help me load it on, I might be able to pack that poor devil down to the settlements by myself. You could stay here, and I could hunt up the flock owner and get him to give you a steady job as herder. He’d be grateful enough to you for staying to watch his sheep so that he’ll gladly do it. How would you like that?”
The Indian grunted. “Me no sheep herder,” he said distinctly.
Hugh marked the tone with some surprise. Its inference could not well be mistaken. Evidently Pete felt himself much above such an occupation.
“I thought you might like to be,” Hugh responded pleasantly.
“No. Only dagoes and Mexicans sheep herders. I’m a guide. Other herder got shot. Maybe I get shot too.”
Hugh didn’t pursue the subject further. After all, he couldn’t blame the man. By the code of the West it was degrading work; besides, the war with the cattlemen made it as perilous an occupation as could well be imagined. The glimpse of the still form that the guide had rolled in a blanket and which now lay outside the tent door was evidence in plenty of this fact.
He lay on the buoyant, fragrant fir boughs, watching the dancing shadows. The wilderness stirred and whispered with life. The sheep slept. The moon that had looked upon many shepherds shone on his face.
This same moon meant good hunting to the wild creatures that ranged the forest about the little meadow. It was hard for them to work in the utter darkness. And one can only imagine—because no naturalist has ever yet been able to know in full the inner natures of animals—the thrill and the exultation that had passed from border to border through the wilderness world when the great white disk first rose above the mountains.
“The hunting hour” was the word that passed—in the secret ways of the forest—from mouth to mouth. The wind seemed to carry it, and the whole wilderness thrilled and pulsed with it. Wild, hot blood leaped in savage veins; strange terrible lights sprang up in fierce eyes. “It is time to start forth,” the whisper passed: and the whole wild-life kingdom seemed to go mad.
It was a rapturous, an exultant thing, and human beings—jaded with too many centuries of repression that men call civilization—find it hard to understand. Only those who have stood in a duck blind watching a flock of mallard swing down toward the decoys, only those who have lain pressed to the slide rock and seen the mountain sheep, the incomparable Bighorn, in a long file against the snow, or those who have beheld the waters break and explode as the steelhead strikes can comprehend this wilderness ecstasy at all. The smells on the winds, the little hushed noises in the thickets, the startled waverings of shadows all added their influence; and the blood-lust came upon the beasts of prey.