The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Now their way was quieter, for they had left the main travelled roads at Remsen and were faring straight into the heart of the hills. "You can follow the M. & M. from Remsen," Mary Donahue had told Augusta. "We never go that way, for there's no people much and the roads are rough. But that's where the sick people all go. And you'll be all right. Just keep somewhere not too far from the railroad. There's always some kind of a road, and you can't get lost when you're not going anywhere in particular anyway."

Augusta had as yet no definite plans. She had not indeed thought of the need of any plans. Never had two birds set forth on flight into the northland with less thought of the end of the summer than Augusta and Jimmie had taken of where they might be when the nip of chilly nights should come to warn them that the summer was over. Augusta had thought only of a long, long summer of happy drifting before the end of which Jimmie would somehow be wonderfully cured. And beyond that point her thought had not gone.

With the sight of the solid hills before her, into which they had been slowly climbing for some days, it seemed that the future was suddenly drawing up to them with a sharpened, stiffened outline. The hills looked so definite and decided that it seemed almost an impertinence to go wandering at will among them without object or settled purpose. Their very stillness and the steady, ordered lines of them as they tiered up, hill behind hill, to meet the rising sun, reminded Augusta that even here the rule of order of the world held good. People must not go on too long trusting to the future just because the future is a vague thing and far away.

The days along the road had taught her many things, and here where they were almost in the big woods her eyes and ears were being sharpened in the silences to learn and to understand the life of the little wild things that rustled and scuttled through the grass and twittered in the tree-tops and called sleepily to each other in the twilight.

Last night at dusk she had walked out on a bridge over a swampy creek and had seen a muskrat jump from the tall grass of the bank into the water and swim in a straight line, only the tip of his nose showing above the water, right to his house. Then she had thought only of how swiftly and quietly he had slipped away. Now she remembered that the largest part of his wild wisdom was that he had a home to get into and that he knew just where it was.

And yesterday she had seen a dog chasing another dog—Jimmie said it was a woodchuck, but she had no great faith in Jimmie's wood lore. It was too universal, too impromptu and, alas! too agreeable and accomodating. The woodchuck—if Jimmie was right—had vanished suddenly in the middle of a bare, open field. He had a place to go to and he knew just where it was.

Even the melancholy owls who spread pessimism through the night were probably hooting each on his own doorstep.

She and Jimmie were not fitted with the instincts of these little wild things, to have a refuge always at hand against the storm that was sure to come.

And she had noticed that the smaller these wild things were the better they were equipped, in their apparent helplessness, to escape danger. The little meadow bird building her nest in the open field was the very color of the grass that stood up above her. And the busy woodpecker was invisible against the bark of the tree where he worked for his living.

Looking up at the suggestive strength of the hills Augusta thought how little and how unready people were in this great world that knew so well its own laws and how to take care of itself. And of all people she was sure that she and Jimmie were the least equipped, the least ready for the test of life in the swift sweeping changes that nature's order brings.