Part 8 (2/2)

Altogether we looked upon the incident as a purple spot. But we were many miles from available bacon, and when, upon trial, the engine refused to make a revolution, we began to get exceedingly hungry for meat.

Having a dead engine and no paddles, we drifted. We drifted very slowly.

The Kid asked if he might not go ash.o.r.e and drive a stake in the bank.

For what purpose? Why, to ascertain whether we were going up or down stream! While we drifted in the now blistering sun, we talked about _meat_. With a devilish persistence we quite exhausted the subject. We discussed the best methods for making a beefsteak delicious. It made us very hungry for meat. The Kid announced that he could feel his backbone sawing at the front of his s.h.i.+rt. But perhaps that was only the hyperbole of youth. Bill confessed that he had once grumbled at his good wife for serving the steak too rare. He now stated that at the first telegraph station he would wire for forgiveness. I advised him to wire for money instead and buy meat with it. Personally I felt a sort of wistful tenderness for packing-houses.

That day pa.s.sed somehow, and the next morning we were still hungry for meat. We spent most of the morning talking about it. In the blistering windless afternoon, we drifted lazily. Now and then we took turns cranking the engine.

We were going stern foremost and I was cranking. We rounded a bend where the wall rocks sloped back, leaving a narrow arid sagebrush strip along both sides of the stream. I had straightened up to get the kink out of my back and mop the sweat out of my eyes, when I saw something that made my stomach turn a double somersault.

A good eight hundred yards down stream at the point of a gravel-bar, something that looked like and yet unlike a small cl.u.s.ter of drifting, leafless brush moved slowly into the water. Now it appeared quite distinct, and now it seemed that a film of oil all but blotted it out. I blinked my eyes and peered hard through the baffling yellow glare. Then I reached for the rifle and climbed over the gunwhale. I smelled raw meat.

Fortunately, we were drifting across a bar, and the slow water came only to my shoulders. The thing eight hundred yards away was forging across stream by this time--heading for the mouth of a coulee. I saw plainly now that the brush grew out of a head. It was a buck with antlers.

Just below the coulee's mouth, the wall rocks began again. The buck would be obliged to land above the wall rocks, and the drifting boat would keep him going. I reached sh.o.r.e and headed for that coulee. The sagebrush concealed me. At the critical moment, I intended to show myself and start him up the steep slope. Thus he would be forced to approach me while fleeing me. When I felt that enough time had pa.s.sed, I stood up. The buck, shaking himself like a dog, stood against the yellow sandstone at the mouth of the gulch. He saw me, looked back at the drifting boat, and appeared to be undecided.

I wondered what the range might be. Back home in the plowed field where I frequently plug tin cans at various long ranges, I would have called it six hundred yards--at first. Then suddenly it seemed three or four hundred. Like a thing in a dream the buck seemed to waver back and forth in the oily sunlight.

”Call it four hundred and fifty,” I said to myself, and let drive. A spurt of yellow stone-dust leaped from the cliff a foot or so above the deer's back. Only four hundred? But the deer had made up his mind. He had urgent business on the other side of that slope--he appeared to be overdue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRESH MEAT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUPPER!]

I pumped up another sh.e.l.l and drew fine at four hundred. That time his rump quivered for a second as though a great weight had been dropped on it. But he went on with increased speed. Once more I let him have it.

That time he lost an antler. He had now reached the summit, two hundred feet up at the least.

He hesitated--seemed to be s.h.i.+vering. I have hunted with a full stomach and brought down game. But there's a difference when you are empty. In that moment before you kill, you became the sort of fellow your mother wouldn't like. Perhaps the average man would feel a little ashamed to tell the truth about that savage moment. I got down on my knee and put a final soft-nosed ball where it would do the most good. The buck reared, stiffened, and came down, tumbling over and over.

That night we pitched camp under a lone scrubby tree at the mouth of an arid gulch that led back into the utterly G.o.d-forsaken Bad Lands. It was the wilderness indeed. Coyotes howled far away in the night, and diving beaver boomed out in the black stream.

We built half a dozen fires and swung above them the choice portions of our kill. And how we ate--with what glorious appet.i.tes!

It is good to sit with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful banter across very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a country table at Christmas time with turkey and pumpkin-pies and old-fas.h.i.+oned puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply happy with apples and cider before an open fireplace. I have been present when the brilliant sword-play of wit flashed across a banquet table--and it thrilled me. _But_----

There is no feast like the feast in the open--the feast in the flaring light of a night fire--the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the wild and the tang of the smoke in it!

CHAPTER VI

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

It all came back there by the smoldering fires--the wonder and the beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely--a giant feast.

There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked to the bone, only the bone was left.

Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my stars that seemed so near. _My stars!_ Soft and gentle and mystical!

Like a dark-browed Yotun woman wooing the latent giant in me, the night pressed down. I closed my eyes, and through me ran the sensuous surface fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister, like a mother she caressed me, lazy with the huge feast; and yet, a drowsy, half-voluptuous joy s.h.i.+mmered and rippled in my veins.

Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole--sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, s.h.i.+mmering, universal joy.

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