The Cross Pull/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
The Shoshones who had once peopled the Land of Many Rivers had called this season the Short Blue Moon.
The lordly blacktail bucks were preparing to renew acquaintance with their wives and must beautify themselves accordingly. They had discarded the long, faded hair of last year’s coat, and the new one had not yet deepened into the dark gray of early winter.
For one brief span the short new hair was a glistening blue-gray.
Moran pointed across a gulch to where a big buck grazed placidly in a little open park.
“The deer are in the short blue,” he said. “This is the best season of all the year, Flash. It’ll soon be love making time for the antlered tribes. Wait until all the old bull elk tune up. We’ve stayed too long now but it’s worth waiting another week to hear. You’ve never heard one of those old boys blow off—but you will.”
Flash raised his head and listened to a distant call. There is no animal sound in the world so distinctive—so impossible to describe or imitate—as the clear, silvery bugle of a bull elk.
“There!” Moran exclaimed. “What do you think of that? He’s a small one, a five pointer, and he’s rushing the season some. He’ll prance around the cows now because he knows the old herd bulls will come down out of their bachelor nooks in a few days and drive him off.”
Each day the pealing bugles of the younger bulls grew more insistent. Then there sounded the fuller, rounder notes of the old herd bulls, the big six pointers. Every band of cows now had a tyrannical male who herded them jealously and bugled his defiance to the less fortunate bulls who tried to cut out a few stragglers from his harem.
The blacktail bucks, casual free lovers of the hills, made no pretense of holding their own bunch of does but kept ever on the move, philandering from one love to the next.
Rams with great, curling horns traveled with every bunch of ewes in the rough peaks above the the timberline.
One night when the running season was in full swing, Flash lay listening to the bugling of distant bulls when his nose detected the first sign of the proximity of man since the night at Two Ocean Pass, almost three months before.
Twice he trotted a short way into the wind, then came back to Moran.
“You old rascal,” said Moran. “You’re planning a midnight raid. After I’m asleep you’ll slip away and interrupt the courting of some old bull. You’re a queer mixture, Flash, but you’re more wolf than dog after all.”
Two hours later Flash stood in a little valley across a ridge from where Moran was camped. The wind was heavy with the odor of a dead camp fire and living men. He followed it up the valley until he knew that they were less than a hundred yards away.
He shifted back and forth across the wind to catch each different angle from the camp. There was something that was unlike any thing he had chanced across before, and it aroused an intense desire to investigate.
Little by little, shifting silently from tree to tree, he approached to within twenty feet of three sleeping figures. They lay in a little open park with the moonlight streaming down on them.
Flash did not know that when men slept their minds were not at work, but he did know that at such times their scent was negative. He could identify those he had met before but that was all—he could not classify them with nose and ear as when they thought and spoke.
One of these he knew was Dad Kinney whom he had often met with Moran. The other was a stranger to him, but neither of them interested him in the least.
The third was of a kind he had never seen. He knew unerringly that this was the female of the species man—the first woman he had known. She radiated bubbling vitality and health and a wholesome, friendly interest in all things—and from this Flash knew that she was not asleep.
She was lying awake, enjoying the silvery bugle chorus of challenging bulls that came from far and near—in love with the spell of the Short Blue Moon.
Flash was irresistibly drawn to her. He wanted to creep close and investigate this strange being. He knew she was watching him and he stepped from under the trees into the moonlit open space and stopped.
Then the girl spoke.
“Come here,” she said.
At the sound of her voice the two men beyond her opened their eyes instantly but made no move. Flash knew they were awake.
“Come here,” she said again, and extended her hand.
Flash took one more step and for one brief instant his big bushy tail flipped aloft, then dropped again. Inch by inch he edged up to her, keeping a wary eye on the two silent spectators beyond. His nose barely touched the tips of the extended fingers.
The girl reached out still farther and stroked his head.
“Come on up here—don’t be afraid of me—I won’t hurt you,” she coaxed.
He crept closer, thrilling to the soft touch of her hand. His nose brushed her cheek and pressed against the mass of brown hair, breathing deep of its fragrance; then he abruptly raised his head and peered across her at the two men as one of them spoke.
“That’s the first time he ever let a soul touch him but Moran,” Kinney said.
“You know him then,” said the stranger.
“It’s Flash,” Kinney answered. “He belongs to Clark Moran. Did it make you nervous to watch a wolf crawl up to her that way?”
“No,” said the other man. “A wolf wouldn’t come that close to us in a thousand years. Then I saw him swing his brush up in the air when Betty spoke to him. A wolf never cocks his tail up in the air—and I knew he was a dog.”
This stranger with the close-clipped gray beard and close-clipped accent of the east evidently knew the animals of the hills.
Their voices had a friendly ring and Flash lay flat beside the girl.
“Who is Moran?” she asked. “I’m going to buy his dog.”
Kinney chuckled and shook his head.
“You can’t,” he said.
“But I want him,” she insisted. “Surely he’ll sell him at some price.”
“Not him,” said Kinney. “Moran seems to have enough money of his own to worry along. It don’t mean as much to him as Flash. He wouldn’t consider any sum.”
Kinney gave them a brief history of the wolf.
“Moran’s a queer one—and a good one too,” he said. “He puts in his time visiting around after first one animal and the next—studying how they act and all. He even claims they talk among themselves in sounds and smells.”
“A naturalist,” said the girl.
“That’s him. He’s a naturalist sure enough. He came in through Sunlight Gap and hit this country near three months ago. No one’s seen him since. He’s camped around here close. But you can’t buy Flash, Betty. Moran keeps him for company when he’s out alone.”
“Then I won’t try to buy him,” the girl generously decided.
Kinney chuckled as he rolled over and prepared to resume his interrupted slumbers.
The two men slept but Flash lay motionless beside the girl. Her hand rested on his head and held him. Her regular breathing soon announced that she too was asleep.
Flash heard their horses moving around farther up the valley. He slipped away and went up to look them over. One horse was picketed and the rest were grazing near. He went back to the girl.
Twice during the night she half woke.
“Flash,” she said sleepily each time. “Flash, old fellow, are you still here?” And stretched out her hand to touch him.
There was something in her voice when she spoke his name that brought a thrill which was only second to his love for Moran. He waited until almost dawn, hoping that she would wake again.
Then he grew nervous—Moran would soon be awake and waiting for him to bring the horses into camp.
Half an hour before the first streak of light showed in the east, he slipped away under the trees, stopped and looked back, then started for Moran. There was a crisp cool in the air. As he crossed the open places the tail grass was coated white with frost and bent stiffly under his feet.
He had never been away from Moran for so long a time and once free of the spell of the girl his desire to get back to him and see that all was well amounted to almost a panic and he covered the miles with all his speed.
He found Moran already up and lighting a fire.
“Where are the horses, Flash?” Moran greeted. “Go get ’em, boy. Go bring ’em in.” He waved his arm toward a meadow below. “We’re going to make an early start to-day. It’s back to the flats for us, Flash. Do you want to go back?”
Late in the afternoon they stopped on the crest of a mighty divide, and Moran turned for one last look at the country over which they had wandered alone for the last three months.
In a narrow valley below, a file of moving specks caught his eye and he focused his glasses on the spot. Two men were wrangling a string of a dozen packhorses along a game trail.
Two cream colored buckskins and a calico pinto in the outfit identified the string as Brent’s.
Moran knew that the other man would be the same one Brent guided to this seed for a hunting trip each fall.
There’s Brent, Flash,” he said. “They’re just coming in so it’s just as well we’re going out. You’d stumble across their camp some night and hell would be to pay. I wouldn’t give two cents for Brent’s chance to go on living if you found him curled up some place asleep.”
“That man with him is a New York lawyer—Luther Nash. I’d like to have you sniff him over and hear his voice. I’m curious to know what your verdict would be on Nash.”
Every fall Nash came for a two weeks’ trip into the hills with Brent, and Moran had met him several years before. On one of Moran’s trips to the east Nash had looked him up—and as far as Moran was concerned that once had been enough.
Moran’s healthy outdoor sense of the fitness of things had revolted at this man’s mode of life. Human weakness he could understand but not the ugly, perverted pleasures which Nash had reveled in. Even his oaths were not mere profanity but putrid slime.
“He showed me around one time, Flash,” said Moran. “He’s one hell of a fellow—that Nash. I like him the same way you like stale meat.”
He swept his glasses over the country, searching the grassy slopes of the peaks in search of a bunch of mountain sheep. Another file of horses showed way off to the right above the timberline, heading for the Rampart Pass. Three people walked behind the pack animals, leading their horses up the steep divide.
Moran rested his elbows on a rock to steady them for a better view. He looked long before he finally swung to his horse and headed down the opposite slope.
“One of that outfit was a woman, Flash—a girl,” he said after a while. “Now whatever do you suppose she was doing away off up in here?”
Far below them they could see tiny green spots that broke the solid brown of the foothills; little cultivated fields of the squatters that were beginning to settle the range.
They made camp in a little side hill meadow.
“I wonder if she was young and pretty,” Moran said as he sat smoking one last pipeful before going to sleep.
“The spell of the Short Blue Moon is working on me too, Flash,” he went on. “After all, a man can live too much alone.
“All this we’ve been listening to—that’s what it means. The bucks polishing their horns on the trees, and all those bugling bulls. That note you listen for every night and don’t know what it is. The wolf season doesn’t start for a few months yet—when it does come you’ll know what all that means. It’s the same way with us all, even men. Every living creature needs one thing to round out his life—a mate.”
Moran slept, and Flash climbed back to the crest of the divide.
A light gleamed from a ridge above the valley where Brent’s pack outfit had halted late in the afternoon. It swayed back and forth as if suspended in the air. Far off among the bald ridges near Two Ocean Pass Flash could see a tiny point of fire twinkling through the clear air. This too, made sweeps to the right and left.
Flash could not read the message, but he watched until the lights disappeared. From below him on one side sounded the wild, pealing bugle of an old bull elk, and the whistling snort of a blacktail buck; from the other came the occasional stroke of a horse bell. This reminded him of his trust.
He turned his back on the Land of Many Rivers and trotted down the opposite slope to Moran and the world of men.