Shepherds of the Wild

by Edison Marshall

He had no sense of self-sacrifice as he made his decision to stay with the sheep. The joy of strong deeds does not lie in self-pity. Rather it was an inner knowledge that he had found happiness—at least the beginnings of it—and only a fool would throw it away. He had no wish to forego the first pleasure that life had ever given him.

He started away into the forest with his sheep.

CHAPTER IX

As the dawn broke over Smoky Land, the sheep fed farther and farther out from the camp,—a long, white column like a moving snow field against the deep dusk of the forest. The light grew, the last stars faded, the gloom of the underbrush evolved into distinct browns and greens; most of the beasts of prey returned to their lairs. Unlike Hugh they had no love for these daylight hours. Dawn meant the end of their reign.

For the night has always been the time of triumph to the hunting creatures. It is the hour of glory when fang and talon and strength and stealth come into their own. Now the deer had left their feeding ground and had gone into the heavy brush through which even a cougar could not creep without being heard. The birds had left their perches, the little underground people had retired to their burrows. In the nighttime the dim, sinuous movements of the hunters’ bodies could hardly be distinguished from the wavering shadows, but the deer made no such mistake in the hours of daylight. Many of the flesh-eaters had not yet killed, and those that had been successful found no pleasure in leaving their warm, dripping feasts to the buzzards in the sky. Only the coyotes and such low-caste people remained to hunt; and they didn’t stay from choice. With them it was a simple matter of hunting all the time, of seeking tirelessly with never a rest, that kept them fed at all.

The reason went back to a curse that Manitou put upon the coyotes in the young days of the earth. No one knows just what their offense was—whether they were once dogs who betrayed men, or the fathers of dogs that betrayed the wild by selling their sons into the bondage of men—but not even a tenderfoot can doubt the severity of their punishment and the depths of their remorse. Many of the voices of the forest are dim and small, many of them are inaudible except to those who give their lives and their souls to the wild, but the curse upon Running Feet the coyote is usually made clear in one night at the twilight hour. For the coyotes do not keep their afflictions to themselves. Their voice suddenly shudders out of the half-darkness, a long wail broken by half-sobs,—infinitely despairing and sad.

Very few of the wilderness voices are joyful. Even the whistling of the birds—close observers find out at last—have a plaintive note that seems never entirely absent. No man can doubt the sadness in the wailing cries of the passing geese,—telling of the bleak, glooming marshes where they live and die. The winter song of the pack, the little shrieking of pikas on the sliderock, even the murmur of the pines are filled with the ancient sadness of existence, the old complaint of the pain of living with only Fear and Death at the end. But none of these voices contain the utter despair, the incomprehensible sadness of the twilight cries of the coyotes. Thus wise men know that they—because of some offense of long ago—have been accursed among beasts.

They have been exiled to the rocky hills, they are afflicted with madness in Indian summer, their pride has been taken from them, and all of the greater forest creatures treat them with contempt. They are driven from the game trails, and thus they have to do their hunting at any time that offers, early or late. All of the larger beasts of prey had now gone to their lairs and to sleep, but these gray skulkers still lingered about the flock.

Once Hugh caught a glimpse of a gray figure in a distant thicket; but it was too far to shoot. An expert marksman would have felled him in an instant; and Hugh began to regret that he had not—by taking to the hunting trails in some of his wasted days—learned this art. Try as he might he couldn’t see that he was in the least equipped for taking care of the flocks until another herder could be secured. And for the first hour he was deeply troubled as to the success of his undertaking.

No man, he considered—not even the Innuits of the Arctic—knew less concerning the white grazers than he himself. He had read no books about them, and except for the fact that he had bought various all-wool fabrics for his clothes and had eaten many a lamb chop, he had had no dealings with them whatsoever. He hadn’t the least idea how to control or care for the vast flock, when to water them and when to feed them salt, at what hours they should bed down and what orders to give his one faithful assistant, the dog. This animal, he concluded, knew worlds more about the business than he himself. In his new humbleness he seriously regretted that the barrier of speech prevented him from taking orders from the dog.