He was a man of the open, attuned to Nature’s varying moods; he had felt the different spells exerted by mountain, lake and plain and thought that he knew them all; yet here was something new. There was a hush in the dim aisles of this mightiest of all forests, a reverent silence rarely broken. It was so completely roofed over by the tufted tops as to almost exclude the light. Even the night sounds were subdued as if the wild things hesitated to raise their voices above the softest croon and cheep necessary for communication among themselves. Woodson some way disliked to shatter the silence with his voice and when he spoke to his horses it was in the modulated tones one uses in some ancient cathedral freighted with reverent memories.
After a year the call of the Yellowstone drew him on the back trail. As he traveled he sometimes pondered about that mark he would make for himself in the world. Yet there was no hurry. There was undreamed plenty of everything in this land of his. One had but to choose his course, dip in and help himself from the storehouse that was inexhaustible,—Nature’s storehouse that replenished itself without help. He reflected that ever since history began, this natural reservoir had been refilled more rapidly than it could possibly be depleted by man. A world of plenty; leather for all the world from the buffalo of the plains; hardwood timber without end to the eastward; free grass for fifty million cows; meat for the nation from the antelope of the plains and the elk and mule deer of the hills; wealth untold for those who would seek for it and burrow in the ground for gold; and in this great untouched forest of the northwest coast was enough lumber to roof the earth. He smiled and slapped the brown mare on the neck as a whimsical thought crossed his mind.
“She didn’t forget a thing,” he said. “She didn’t leave one thing out. There’s enough of everything to go round and a lot to spare. Back in the Yellowstone, where we’re headed for, there’s enough natural and unnatural wonders to entertain the people of the world. She didn’t even leave that out—plenty of everything for us all.”
As he traveled eastward his desire to look again upon this best land of all increased and he made longer packs. Soon it was rumored that the lone wanderer, for so long a part of the Park, had returned to roam once more in the hills of the Yellowstone. He knew the valleys of warm springs where his horses might winter while others were forced to drive their stock to the lower country. He prospected far and wide in summer but always he came back to winter within the limits of his own estate.
After a lapse of perhaps fifteen years since Woodson and Old Tom had quit the plains, a little pack train was seen winding down the east slope of the hills. The man rode a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. In the rear of the string still another bay mare, ancient and decrepit, pensioned for long service and unburdened by a pack, trailed stiffly after the rest. The man told those he met along the trails that he was headed for the lower country to join a hide outfit for one last buffalo-hunt on the plains. Men smiled at the naïve plans of this Rip Van Winkle who had been asleep in the hills; for the buffalo was gone.
Woodson knew that the men from his old outfit—Hanson, Cleve, McCann and all the rest—would be wherever the most of the shaggy beasts had congregated for the southward drift of fall. But when he made inquiry he found that their names were unknown to the present-day dwellers of the foothills. Men told him that the buffalo was no more. That the last of them had been killed off to make room for the settler’s cows. As he traveled east he experienced a series of surprises. Stockmen’s cabins showed at every water hole where, but a few years past, there had been no human habitation within two hundred miles. All this was as it should be, he reflected; a wild country tamed and made habitable for man. It was clear that the buffalo had to go to make room for the cows. But the job had certainly been sweeping and thorough. He crossed vast stretches where domestic stock had not yet arrived but the way had been paved for them years in advance of their coming, for not a single buffalo track could he find. Little towns had sprung up with amazing rapidity. Out in the long desolate stretch between Lander and Rawlins he covered forty-two miles unmarked by a water hole, an arid region where domestic stock could not live but where the buffalo might have ranged in thousands; but here too they had been wiped out to the last hoof. It came to him that he knew of enough waste areas, as yet untouched by cows, to support a half-million head of buffalo. They would have constituted a source of revenue for many years to come. Men spoke vaguely of the “lost herd” that lived in some unknown spot and would one day repopulate these waste stretches with buffalo. Woodson could see that all this development was for the best; there were now homes where no homes stood before. But a vague uneasiness assailed him, a sense of something gone amiss with a popular idol. Some way it seemed that he had been warned of this. Some forgotten prophecy welled up out of the past to clamor for expression at the threshold of his consciousness. It troubled him that he should not quite place the thing and he attempted to shake it off.
He left his horses with a cowman and held on to the east. The old trails where once the prairie schooners and the oxbows had wound interminably to the far horizon were no longer traveled. Steel rails stretched away in their stead; and the creak of wheels and leather and the bawls of plodding oxen,—all these were replaced by the rattle and roar of freight cars and the screech of the locomotives’ whistles; city streets wound where there had been naught but dog towns on blistering flats.
Truly development was wonderful and he rejoiced with the rest over this sweeping transformation, the swiftest and most complete reclamation in the history of the world. But again the still small voice assailed him from within and whispered that a good and worthy job had been just a trifle too well done.
A cold fall storm was driving down from the north and overtook him in the salt-marsh country of Western Kansas. The water-fowl scurried ahead of it. Every pond and slough, each broad prairie lake and marshy bottom was covered with members of the feathered horde en route to the winter quarters on the Gulf. Flock followed flock in an endless procession, streaking the sky. The prairies were covered with feeding geese. Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats, traveling in bands of hundreds, and at night the wild whoops of overhead squadrons almost drowned the clamor of oncoming hordes of geese. This evidence of abundance cheered him. He estimated that he saw over a million birds a day; and he reflected that everywhere east and west of him this great migration was going on; the east coast and the west, the Mississippi flyway and the course of every inland river; all were experiencing this same deluge of birds headed into the south. Nowhere had he seen so much bird life except during the pigeon flights in the hardwood country of his boyhood home. There he had seen the skies blackened with wild pigeons, had seen limbs broken from the trees by the sheer weight of thousands of roosting birds. The shock of finding the buffalo gone from the plains in a few short years was counteracted by this fresh evidence of plenty.
It was in Dodge that his trail crossed that of Hanson, a man from his old outfit. Hanson, with a younger man named Rice, was hunting antelope for the hides. The two spoke of old friends. Cleve had gone to the lumber camps of the northwest coast, Hanson informed, and McCann to the hardwood belt to the east. They had quit the hunting. Antelope were fleet and it was difficult to stalk them in the flats. Hanson had known the time when all hands might kill and skin an average of twenty buffalo to the man each day. He now lamented the necessity of hunting the wary pronghorn for less than a dollar a hide. A man was doing well to average four a day.