“I can’t help it, mother!” she explained. “I don’t want to hate him, but what better is he than a butcher? His bread is stained with blood. Pah! I sometimes think I smell blood, the blood of the kind wood creatures, when he’s around.”
“But you don’t want him not to come, girl, surely,” protested her mother.
“Well, you know, it’s a pleasure to you to have him come once in a while,” said the girl, enigmatically.
Dave continued his visits, biding his time. He lost no chance of familiarizing Miranda’s imagination with the needs of man as he imagined them, and with a rational conception of life as he conceived it. This he did not directly, but through the medium of conversation with Kirstie, to whom his words were sweetness. He was determined to break down Miranda’s prejudice against his calling, which to him was the only one worth a man’s while,—wholesome, sane, full of adventure, full of romance. He was determined, also, to overcome her deep aversion to flesh food. He felt that not till these two points were gained would Miranda become sufficiently human to understand human love or any truly human emotions. In this belief he strictly withheld his wooing, and waited till the barriers that opposed it should be undermined by his systematic attacks. He was too little learned in woman to realize that with Miranda his best wooing was the absence of all wooing; and so he builded better than he knew.
During the cold months he was glad to be relieved of the presence of Kroof, who had proved, in her taciturn way, quite irreconcilable. He had tried in vain to purchase her favour with honey, good hive bees’ honey in the comb, carried all the way from the Settlement. She would have nothing to do with him at any price; and he felt that this discredited him in Miranda’s eyes. He hoped that Kroof would sleep late that spring in her lair under the pine root.
But while Dave was labouring so assiduously, and, as he fancied, so subtly, to mould and fashion Miranda, she all unawares was moulding him. Unconsciously his rifle and his traps were losing zest for him; and the utter solitude of his camp beyond the Quah-Davic began to have manifest disadvantages. Once he hesitated so long over a good shot at a lynx, just because the creature looked unsuspecting, that in the end he was too late, and his store of pelts was the poorer by one good skin. Shooting a young cow moose in the deep snow, moreover, he felt an unwonted qualm when the gasping and bleeding beast turned upon him a look of anguished reproach. His hand was not quite so steady as usual when he gave her the knife in the throat. This was a weakness which he did not let himself examine too closely. He knew the flesh of the young cow was tender and good, and after freezing it he hung it up in his cold cellar. Though he would not for an instant have acknowledged it, even to himself, he was glad that bears were not his business during the winter, for he would almost certainly have felt a sense of guilt, of wrong to Miranda, in shooting them. For all this undercurrent of qualm in the hidden depths of his heart, however, his hunting was never more prosperous than during the January and February of that winter; and fox, lynx, wolverine, seemed not only to run upon his gun, but to seek his traps as a haven. He killed with an emphasis, as if to rebuke the waking germ of softness in his soul. But he had little of the old satisfaction, as he saw his peltries accumulate. His craft was now become a business, a mere routine necessity. For pleasure, he chose to watch Miranda as her feathered pensioners—snowbirds, wrens, rose grosbeaks, and a glossy crow or two—gathered about her of a morning for their meal of grain and crumbs. They alighted on her hair, her shoulders, her arms; and the round-headed, childlike grosbeaks would peck bread from her red lips; and a crow, every now and then, would sidle in briskly and give a mischievous tug at the string of her moccasin. To the girl, his heart needed no warming,—it burned by now with a fire which all his backwood’s stoicism could but ill disguise,—but to the birds, and through them to all the furry folk of the wood, his heart warmed as he regarded the beautiful sight. He noted that the birds were quite unafraid of Kirstie, who also fed them; but he saw that toward Miranda they showed an active, even aggressive ardour, striving jealously for the touch of her hand or foot or skirt when no tit-bits whatever were in question. And another sight there was, toward shut of winter’s evening, that moved him strangely. The wild, white hares (he and Kirstie and Miranda called them rabbits) would come leaping over the snow to the cabin door to be fed, with never cat or weasel on their trail. They would press around the girl, nibbling eagerly at her dole of clover, hay, and carrots; some crouching about her feet, some erect and striking at her petticoat with their nervous fore paws, all twinkling-eared, and all implicitly trustful of this kind Miranda of the clover.
Toward spring Miranda began to be troubled about Kirstie’s health. She saw that the firm lines of her mother’s face were growing unwontedly sharp, the bones of her cheek and jaw strangely conspicuous. Then her solicitous scrutiny took note of a pallor under the skin, a greyish whiteness at the corners of her eyes, a lack of vividness in the usually brilliant scarlet of the lips; for up to now Kirstie had retained all the vital colouring and tone of youth. Then, too, there was a listlessness, a desire to rest and take breath after very ordinary tasks of chopping or of throwing fodder for the cattle. This puzzled the girl much more than Kirstie’s increasing tendency to sit dreaming over the hearth fire when there was work to be done. Miranda felt equal to doing all the winter work, and she knew that her mother, like herself, was ever a dreamer when the mood was on. But even this brooding abstraction came to worry her at last, when one morning, after a drifting storm which had piled the snow halfway up the windows, her mother let her shovel out all the paths unaided, with never a comment or excuse. Miranda was not aggrieved at this, by any means; but she began to be afraid, sorely afraid. It was so unlike the alert and busy Kirstie of old days. Of necessity, Miranda turned to Dave for counsel in her alarm, when next he came to the clearing.
The conference took place in the warm twilight of the cow stable, where Dave, according to his custom, was helping Miranda at the milking, while Kirstie got supper. The young hunter looked serious, but not surprised.
“I’ve took note o’ the change this two month back, Mirandy,” he said, “an’ was a-wonderin’ some how them big eyes of yourn, that can see things us ordinary folks can’t see, could be blind to what teched ye so close.”
“I wasn’t blind to it, Dave,” protested the girl, indignantly; “but I didn’t see how you could help any. Nor I don’t see now; but there was no one else I could speak to about it,” she added, with a break in her voice that distantly presaged tears.