“Beyond the dark. I tell you, sonny, when the ghon-ya cries he ain’t bothering himself about any glass-eyed beetle-hunter who’s just hankering to label all the critturs in this yearth; he’s not thinkin’ about you nor me, but he’s jes’ wailing in that shudderous voice to the shadders that pass by in the night; whether it’s to comfort ’em, or to put ’em on the right track, or to warn ’em of danger, I can’t say. One night I had taken the short cut past the big krantz, being late from the shop where I’d been for a tin of o’ black sugar, and thinkin’ of nothin’ at all when I yeard the ghon-ya’s cry passin’ overhead. There was nothin’ more’n ordinary solemn in the wail of it, but when I came to the thick of the wood it seemed to me there was a queer whisperin’ going on among the trees. Have you ever marked a bee against the shadder? Of course you have, and you’ll know how he moves like a drop o’ light as the sun strikes on his wings against the dark of the hill behind. Well, I happened to look back over my shoulder to the other side of the valley where ’twas as black as black, and in the glance of my eyes, with the blue and red light snapping from ’em as it does sometimes when you blink, in that very moment of turning, I seed a passing of a many shadders.”
“Tree shadows?”
“Shadders of dreams, sonny, I tell you. Jes’ in a flash I seed ’em moving up, and then all was black groups of trees; but I knowed where that whisperin’ come from. Yes, a many shadders hurryin’ on up that valley with the cry of the ‘ghon-ya’ pealin’ out ahead. Well, I got outer that valley pretty quick, and were hurryin’ by the top of the krantz overlooking the big kloof when the ‘ghon-ya’ cried jes’ ahead o’ me. A locust! Lor’, sonny, right afore me there was a something shaddery—a darker patch on the blackness, standing on the brink of the krantz overlooking the deep kloof that lay below stretching towards the sea, and the ‘ghon-ya,’ loud, long, mournful as the solitary toll of the death-bell, went out on the air, an’ I jes’ went to the ground as if the bones had all been drawed out. Looking along the top, with my eyes to the light that was in the sky over the sea, I seed them shadders from the valley file down into the kloof. A many shadders, sonny, come out of the valley—passed by that dark patch, and jes’ floated down into the kloof—whispering as they went. What sort o’ shadders they were I couldn’t tell you, my lad; but they belong, sure enough, to the other world beyond the dark. Many a time I yeard them same things in the kloof, when the dead quiet has been broken by a movement in the air, and a sort o’ creepin’ sound ’sif somethin’ were peepin’ at you from behind a tree. You’ve felt it, too, of course. The dogs they know, ’cos they’re not so cock-sure as we are about knowin’ everything jes’ bekose we can make a cast-iron reaper.”
The ghon-ya from the darkness called again, as if the sorrows of the world were in the cry.
“A locust!” cried Abe scornfully; “that’s no locust. It’s calling the sperits of the woods together, and the ghostses of animiles—that’s what; and that’s why all the other noises is hushed.”