Shepherds of the Wild

by Edison Marshall

She headed into the forest, and she saw the light of the camp fire wink out behind her. It left her singularly alone. A vague depression came upon her, an uneasiness that she could not name or place. There was a sense of utter isolation never felt before. The feel of her pistol butt in her pocket—her belt had been packed among the supplies—reassured her. Then she hastened on, down the moonlit trail.

The forest was never so mysterious. The moonlight had struck away all sense of familiarity. The silver patches between the trees were of fairyland, the dusk of the shadowed thicket was incredibly black; even the changeless pines, majestic and inscrutable emblems of the wilderness, were like great, nebulous ghosts of giants. The woodland was full of ghosts: fleet-footed phantoms that sped along the trail before her, ghostly shadows that leaped behind; little, feeble ghosts of noises that couldn’t be real, and ghostly messages in the wind that whimpered and cried in the distant thickets. Yet she could not feel the wind’s breath on her face. Rather the forest was breathless, tense, vaguely sinister as never before.

Steep was the trail she took, and ever the silence seemed to deepen. She kept watch ahead for the flock, pale white in the moonlight. She found herself listening closely for any sound that might indicate their position, either the faint bleat of the ewes or the triumph cries of such beasts of prey that had killed from their numbers. But while she did not hear these things, the silence was full of other, lesser sounds. All the creatures of the forest were stirring in their night occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her.

She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew,—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then she found the white band, bedded down for the night.

There had been casualties earlier in the evening, but mostly the beasts of prey had not yet found them. She started to drive them the long three miles back to camp.

Still the moonlight worked its conjurations in the forest; and she felt a growing discomfiture. At first she laid it to nerves. She had been tired after the day’s ride, and perhaps the long walk after the sheep had overtaxed her already exhausted body. The sense of oppression, of distant and unfamiliar peril in the forests about her grew ever more pronounced. She tried in vain to hurry the sheep. Never, it seemed to her, had they moved so slowly. The first mile took interminable ages, the second was too long for belief. No luxury, no achievement by which women usually gauge happiness could mean so much to her to-night as that little bright circle in the distant camp over which Hugh stood guard.

She was on the last mile by now, and she kept straining to see the first gleam of the camp fire through the trees. Perhaps all her apprehension had been but fancy, after all. It was only a little way farther—scarcely a mile—and the adventure would soon be over. The forest was oddly hushed and breathless.

And at that instant a strange cry came tingling up to her through the unfathomable depths of forest. It was such a sound as does not catch the consciousness immediately, beginning too dim and faint even to recognize as sound, and at first she found herself doubting its reality. The least rustle of the thickets beside her, the faintest stir of the distant wind drowned it out. Yet with such gradual encroachments as the hour hand makes on the face of the watch, it swelled and grew until all disbelief was dead, and all other sensation transcended.

The deep silence of the primeval forest alone had enabled her to detect it at first, but its quality of obscurity slowly passed away. Soon she had begun to have some idea of the quality of its tones. It was slowly, steadily gaining, and the only inference could be that whatsoever made the sound was coming toward her at an incredible pace,—something that ran behind her and cried out in beastial savagery.

A frantic flood of thoughts swept over her: blind hopes that the cool depths of her subconsciousness refused to accept. Perhaps the cries were of some wilderness hunter on the trail of deer,—a trail that closely coincided with her own. In a moment it would be just a thing to laugh at and forget. But even her own prayers, her own unquenchable spirit of optimism could not make the truth untrue. The grim fact slowly grew and strengthened that whatever ran behind her was on her own trail, that she was being remorselessly hunted through the still aisles of the forest.