The Heart of the Ancient Wood

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

After this the cabin in the clearing ran small risk of marauders. To the most sceptical homespun philosopher in the Settlement it seemed obvious that Kirstie and Miranda had something mysterious about them, and had forsaken their kind for the fellowship of the furtive kin. No one but Old Dave had any relish for a neighbourhood where bears kept guard, and lynxes slily frequented, and caribou bulls of a haughty temper made themselves free of the barnyard. As for Young Dave, unwilling to fall foul of the folk who were so friendly to Kirstie and Miranda, he carried his traps, his woodcraft, and his cunning rifle to a tract more remote from the clearing.

Thus it came that Miranda grew to womanhood with no human companion but her mother. To her mother she stood so close that the two assimilated each other, as it were. Such education as Kirstie possessed, and such culture, narrow but significant, were Miranda’s by absorption. For the rest, the quiet folk of the wood insensibly moulded her, and the great silences, and the wide wonder of the skies at night, and the solemnity of the wind. At seventeen she was a woman, mature beyond her years, but strange, with an elfish or a faun-like strangeness: as if a soul not all human dwelt in her human shape. Silent, wild, unsmiling, her sympathies were not with her own kind, but with the wild and silent folk who know not the sweetness of laughter. Yet she was given to moods of singing mirth, at long intervals; and her tenderness toward all pain, her horror of blood, were things equally alien to the wilderness creatures, her associates. It was doubtless this unbridgable divergence, combining with her sympathy and subtle comprehension, which secured her mysterious ascendency in the forest; for by this time it would never have occurred to her to step aside even for a panther or a bull moose in his fury. Something, somehow, in the air about her, told all the creatures that she was supreme.

In appearance, Miranda was a contrast to her mother, though her colouring was almost the same. Miranda was a little less than middle height, slender, graceful, fine-boned, small of hand and foot, delicate-featured, her skin toned with the clear browns of health and the open air and the matchless cosmetic of the sun. Her abundance of bronze-black hair, shot with flame-glints wheresoever the sunlight struck it, came down low over a broad, low forehead. Her eyes, in which, as we have seen, lay very much of her power over the folk of the wood, were very large and dark. They possessed a singular transparency, akin to the magical charm of the forest shadows. There was something unreal and haunting in this inexplicable clarity of her gaze, something of that mystery which dwells in the reflections of a perfect mirror of water. Her nose, straight and well modelled, was rather large than small, with nostrils alertly sensitive to discern all the wilding savours, the clean, personal scents of the clean-living creatures of the wood, and even those inexpressibly elusive perfume-heralds which, on certain days, come upon the air, forerunning the changes of the seasons. Her mouth was large, but not too large for beauty, neither thin nor full, of a vivid scarlet, mobile and mutable, yet firm, and with the edges of the lips exactly defined. Habitually reposeful and self-controlled in movement, like her mother, her repose suggested that of a bird poised upon the wing, liable at any instant to incalculable celerities; while that of Kirstie was like the calm of a hill with the eternal disrupting fire at its heart. The scarlet ribbon which Miranda the woman, like Miranda the child, wore always about her neck, seemed in her the symbol of an ineradicable strangeness of spirit, while Kirstie’s scarlet kerchief expressed but the passion which burned perennial beneath its wearer’s quietude.

Being in all respects natural and unselfconscious, it is not to be wondered at that Miranda was inconsistent. The truce which she had created about her—the pax Mirandæ—had so long kept her eyes from the hated sight of blood that she had forgotten death, and did not more than half believe in pain. Nevertheless she was still a shaft of doom to the trout in the lake and river. Fishing was a delight to her. It satisfied some fierce instinct inherited from her forefathers, which she never thought to analyze. The musical rushing of the stream; the foam and clamour of the shallow falls; the deep, black, gleaming pools with the roots of larch and hemlock overhanging; the sullen purple and amber of the eddies with their slowly swirling patches of froth,—all these allured her, though with a threat. And then the stealthy casting of the small, baited hook or glittering fly, the tense expectancy, the electrifying tug upon the line, the thrill, the exultation of the landing, and the beauty of the spotted prey, silver and vermilion, on the olive carpet of the moss! It hardly occurred to her that they were breathing, sentient creatures, these fish of the pools. She would doubtless have resented the idea of any kinship between herself and these cold inhabiters of a hostile element. In fact, Miranda was very close to nature, and she could not escape her part in nature’s never ceasing war of opposites.

Late one afternoon in summer Miranda was loitering homeward from the stream with a goodly string of trout. It was a warm day and windless, and the time of year not that which favours the fisherman. But in those cold waters the fish will rise even in July and August, and Miranda’s bait, or Miranda’s home-tied fly, was always a killing lure to them. She carried her catch—one gaping-jawed two-pounder, and a half dozen smaller victims—strung through the crimson gills on a forked branch of alder. Her dark face was flushed; her hair (she never wore a hat) was dishevelled; her eyes were very wide and abstracted, taking in the varied shadows,—the boulders, the markings on the bark of the tree trunks, the occasional flickering moths, and the solemn little brown owl that sat in the cleft of the pine tree, yet seeming to see not these but something within or beyond them.

Suddenly, however, they were arrested by a sight which scattered their abstraction. Their focus seemed to shorten, their expression concentrated to a strained intensity, then lightened to a greyness with anger as she took a hasty step forward, and paused, uncertain for a moment what to do.

Before her was a little open glade, full of sun, secure and inviting. At its farther edge a thick-branched, low beech tree, reaching out from the confusion of trunks and vistas, cast a pleasant differentiated shade. Here in this shade a young man lay sleeping, sprawled carelessly, his head on one arm. He was tall, gaunt, clad in grey homespuns and a well-worn buckskin jacket. His red-brown hair was cut somewhat short, his light yellow moustache, long and silky, looked the lighter by contrast with the ruddy tan of his face. His rifle leaned against the tree near by, while he slept the luxurious sleep of an idle summer afternoon.

But not five paces away crouched an immense panther, flattened to the ground, watching him.

The beast was ready, at the first movement or sign of life, to spring upon the sleeper’s throat. Its tail rigidly outstretched, twitched slightly at the tip. Its great, luminous eyes were so intently fixed upon the anticipated prey that it did not see Miranda’s quiet approach.

To the girl the sleeper seemed something very beautiful, in the impersonal way that a splendid flower, or a tall young tree in the open, or the scarlet-and-pearl of sunrise is beautiful—not a thing as near to herself as the beasts of the wood, whom she knew. But she was filled with strange, protective fury at the thought of peril to this interesting creature. Her hesitation was but for a moment. She knew the ferocity of the panther very well, and trembled lest the sleeper should move, or twitch a muscle. She stepped up close to his side, and fixed the animal’s eyes with her disconcerting gaze.