“You can have your horse now,” Hugh had said, when at last he gained the man’s attention. He spoke quite clearly and distinctly, and all matters returned to Fargo’s consciousness with a rush. “And, of course, you can have your dogs, too. There’s quite a little heap of them for you back there in the forest.”
It seemed to Fargo, when he went to look, that only a laugh followed him out of the firelight. It was to haunt him for months, that laugh. There was quite a heap of them,—an impotent heap that Fargo stood by clear into the dawn, strange fumes of rage and hatred in his brain. The buzzards dropped down one by one to see what had interested him.
CHAPTER XVIII
The summer days dragged by, one by one, until they were all gone. Moons waxed and waned, annual plants budded, flowered, and died, the glossy green of the pine needles changed to a dusky blue; and all of these things were as they should be. There was, however, one important and disastrous omission. No rain had fallen since April.
It was bad for all the forest in general and very bad for certain people in particular. Of course, the little underground folk, such as the digger squirrels and gophers, didn’t particularly care. Their small stomachs seemed to be lined with fur; and the dryer the brushwood the easier they could gnaw it. Old Urson, the porcupine, might have found this arid season quite to his liking. But it was more than possible that he didn’t even know it hadn’t rained. For Urson is ever lost in a strange apathy, a mental stupor, and life must be to him an inscrutable mystery without head or tail. He is guileless and stupid and so slow that even a cub-bear can overtake him (although clumsy little Woof, because of certain removable decorations on Urson’s back, would not care to do it a second time) and one of his only two advantages is an utter indifference to the water supply. He can get along very well on the moisture in the tree limbs on which he browses. His other advantage is, of course, a convertible-armor arrangement that he uses for a back. One minute, and Urson looks sleek and almost as handsome as, say, a dromedary seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The next, and he becomes a formidable bundle of bristling spines, a veritable burr that is most painful to touch.
Of course the poison people did not care. They could swim on demand, of course, but they were not fond of water. If rain came any time during the following winter it would be soon enough for them. They lay in heavy sleep on the rock ledges where the heat waves danced. It isn’t wise, however, to put one’s trust in that slumber and go climbing over those sun-blasted rocks with unprotected ankles. A rattlesnake may look dead as last year’s leaves, he may lie so still that even the buzzard—in the sky—is deceived, and yet he can spring straight out of his dark, wicked dreams and bury his hypodermic needles, filled with as deadly a poison as a scientist can concoct in his laboratory, in the exact spot of man’s flesh he chooses. The heat waves danced and spiraled in the air, the rocks grew too hot to touch, and still the serpents lay in their heat trance, wholly content. And lastly, the buzzards had no complaint with the drought.
For disaster to the forest creatures always means triumph to the buzzards. They are the undertakers, the followers of the dead. If all the streams and all the springs should dry up, the buzzards would be in their glory. There is a legend, passed down from mother to fledgling among them, that long ago such a drought did happen, and that is what the ancient birds think about when they soar so endlessly in the sky. And there is a prophecy that some time such an hour of glory will come again.
But the deer found poor feeding. The grass was dry as dust, the leaves crinkly and crisp, their favorite saltlicks were hard, dry mud. Most of the springs were dried up, the lesser tributaries of Silver Creek were only successions of stagnant pools in which the silver people were already dying and turning white bellies to the sun. The grubs that the old black bear loved were dried to little flakes, like grease spots, on the dead logs; and the berries withered and dropped off before they ever ripened. The wolves ran their game, and since in the hot, stifling days exhaustion came quickly to their prey, perhaps they benefited, rather than suffered, from the drought. But these gray hunters can always be expected to benefit. “Mercy from Cold-Eye is the season that betrays the wolf,” is one of those strange maxims among the forest people, and it needs, like most of the forest sayings, a certain amount of interpretation. Cold-Eye is the forest name for the rattlesnake, and no man who has seen the evil diamonds in his head can doubt that it is a good one. And mercy is the one thing that can never be expected from the rattler. It is the same as saying that it will be a snowy day in July when the wolf cannot turn the most far-spread disaster to his own account. Everything always turns out all right for the gray rangers. And maybe that is the reason why, in spite of endless centuries of warfare with men, they still fill the autumn woods with their songs.
But Broken Fang, the great tawny king of the pumas, and all his lithe and deadly younger brethren almost starved to death. Their whole hunting success depended on a noiseless stalk upon a breed of creatures with ears sharp enough to hear the predatory beetles utter their kill screams in the air, and even the feline cushioned feet could not step with silence in the dry brush. At first there was only gnawing hunger and distemper, then frantic ferocity, and finally almost a madness wherein blue lights dwelt ever in their eyes and agonized convulsions came to the muscles of their throats. Even the porcupines heard them come in time to climb out to the end of the tree limbs, and by the middle of September Broken Fang was ready and willing to lie in ambush a whole night for the sake of a chipmunk that might venture forth from its nest.
The instinct of all the creatures was to climb ever higher,—into the far, lovely grass slopes of the high peaks. In these places the melting snow, the colder nights and days, the moisture-laden winds that swept across them removed, in some degree, the effect of drought. The rains would certainly come in October, but it began to look as if, unless better hunting were found in these high realms, the starving felines could not survive the few weeks that remained. But there were good prospects in these high trails. Dwelling in the wastes of sliderock and snow field, feeding on the grass slopes and scaling the loftiest cliffs, lived the very monarchs of the mountains, creatures that weighed up to two hundred and fifty pounds, and who even in these starving times were tender and fat.