The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

A sudden swirl of the wind threw a dense cloud of hot white smoke about them. They stood still with the flannel of their shirt-sleeves pressed over eyes and nostrils, waiting for it to pass.

When they could look they saw a wall of fire bearing down upon them from three sides. The wind had whirled the fire backward and sidewise so that it had surrounded the meagre little space that they had cleared and had now outflanked them. Their own manœuvre had been turned against them. There was but one way to run, straight down the hill with the fire roaring and panting after them. It was a playful, tricky 142 monster that cackled gleefully behind them, laughing at their puny efforts.

Breathless and spent, they finally ran themselves out of the path of the flames and dropped exhausted in safety as the fire went roaring by them on its way.

Their horses were gone, of course. The fire in its side leap had caught them and they had fled shrieking down the hill, following their instinct to hunt water.

The men now began to understand the work that was theirs. They were five already weary men. All day and all night, perhaps, they must follow the fire that travelled almost as fast as they could run at their best. And they must hang upon its edge and fight every inch of the way to fold that edge back upon itself, to keep that edge from spreading out upon them. A hundred men who could have flanked the fire shoulder to shoulder for a long space might have accomplished what these five were trying to do. For them it was impossible. But they hung on in desperation.

Three times more they made a stand and pushed the edge of the fire back a little, each time daring to hope that they had done something. And three times more the treacherous wind whirled the fire back behind and around them so that they had to race for life.

Now they were down off the straight slope of the mountain and among the broken hills. Here 143 their work was entirely hopeless and they knew it. They knew also that they were in almost momentary danger of being cut off and completely surrounded. Here the fire did not keep any steady edge that they could follow and attack. The wind eddied and whirled about among the broken peaks of the hills in every direction and with it the fire ran apparently at will.

When they tried to hold it to one side of a hill and were just beginning to think that they had won, a sudden sweep of the wind would send a ring of fire around to the other side so that they saw themselves again and again surrounded and almost cut off.

Ahead of them now there was one hope: to hold the fire to the north side of the Chain. The Chain is a string of small lakes running nearly east and west. It divides the hill country into fairly even portions. If they could keep the fire north of the lakes they would save the southern half of the country. Their own homes all lay to the north of the lakes and they were now doomed. But that was a matter that did not enter here. What was gone was gone. Their loved ones would have had plenty of warning and would be out of the way by now. The men were fighting the enemy merely to save what could be saved. And as is the way of men in fight they began to make it a personal quarrel with the fire.

They began to grow blindly angry at their opponent. 144 It was no longer an impersonal, natural creature of the elements, that fire. It was a cunning, a vicious, a mocking enemy. It hated them. They hated it. Its eyes were red with gloating over them. Their eyes were red and bloodshot with the fury of their battle. Its voice was hoarse with the roar of its laughing at them. Their voices were thick and their lips were cracking with the hot curses they hurled back at it.