The Forester's Daughter Part 11

"I'm eager for duty," replied Wayland.

The next morning, as he rode down to the office to meet the Supervisor, he was surprised and delighted to find Berea there. "I'm riding, too,"

she announced, delightedly. "I've never been over that new trail, and father has agreed to let me go along." Then she added, earnestly: "I think it's fine you're going in for the Service; but it's hard work, and you must be careful till you're hardened to it. It's a long way to a doctor from Settle's station."

He was annoyed as well as touched by her warning, for it proclaimed that he was still far from looking the brave forester he felt himself to be.

He replied: "I'm not going to try anything wild, but I do intend to master the trailer's craft."

"I'll teach you how to camp, if you'll let me," she continued. "I've been on lots of surveys with father, and I always take my share of the work. I threw that hitch alone." She nodded toward the pack-horse, whose neat load gave evidence of her skill. "I told father this was to be a real camping expedition, and as the grouse season is on we'll live on the country. Can you fish?"

"Just about that," he laughed. "Good thing you didn't ask me if I could _catch_ fish?" He was recovering his spirits. "It will be great fun to have you as instructor in camp science. I seem to be in for all kinds of good luck."

They both grew uneasy as time pa.s.sed, for fear something or some one would intervene to prevent this trip, which grew in interest each moment; but at last the Supervisor came out and mounted his horse, the pack-ponies fell in behind, Berrie followed, and the student of woodcraft brought up to rear.

"I hope it won't rain," the girl called back at him, "at least not till we get over the divide. It's a fine ride up the hill, and the foliage is at its best."

It seemed to him the most glorious morning of his life. A few large white clouds were drifting like snow-laden war-vessels from west to east, silent and solemn, and on the highest peaks a gray vapor was lightly clinging. The near-by hills, still transcendently beautiful with the flaming gold of the aspen, burned against the dark green of the farther forest, and far beyond the deep purple of the shadowed slopes rose to smoky blue and tawny yellow. It was a season, an hour, to create raptures in a poet, so radiant, so wide-reaching, so tumultuous was the landscape.

Nothing sad, nothing discouraging, showed itself. The wind was brisk, the air cool and clear, and jewel-like small, frost-painted vines and ripened shrubberies blazed upward from the ground. As he rode the youth silently repeated: "Beautiful! Beautiful!"

For several miles they rode upward through golden forests of aspens. On either hand rose thick walls of snow-white boles, and in the mystic glow of their gilded leaves the face of the girl shone with unearthly beauty.

It was as if the very air had become auriferous. Magic coins dangled from the branches. Filmy shadows fell over her hair and down her strong young arms like priceless lace. Gold, gold! Everywhere gold, gold and fire!

Twice she stopped to gaze into Wayland's face to say, with hushed intensity: "Isn't it wonderful! Don't you wish it would last forever?"

Her words were poor, ineffectual; but her look, her breathless voice made up for their lack of originality. Once she said: "I never saw it so lovely before; it is an enchanted land!" with no suspicion that the larger part of her ecstasy arose from the presence of her young and sympathetic companion. He, too, responded to the beauty of the day, of the golden forest as one who had taken new hold on life after long illness.

Meanwhile the Supervisor was calmly leading the way upward, vaguely conscious of the magical air and mystic landscape in which his young folk floated as if on wings, thinking busily of the improvements which were still necessary in the trail, and weighing with care the clouds which still lingered upon the tallest summits, as if debating whether to go or to stay. He had never been an imaginative soul, and now that age had somewhat dimmed his eyes and blunted his senses he was placidly content with his path. The rapture of the lover, the song of the poet, had long since abandoned his heart. And yet he was not completely oblivious. To him it was a nice day, but a "weather breeder."

"I wonder if I shall ever ride through this mountain world as unmoved as he seems to be?" Norcross asked himself, after some jarring prosaic remark from his chief. "I am glad Berrie responds to it."

At last they left these lower, wondrous forest aisles and entered the unbroken cloak of firs whose dark and silent deeps had a stern beauty all their own; but the young people looked back upon the glowing world below with wistful hearts. Back and forth across a long, down-sweeping ridge they wove their toilsome way toward the clouds, which grew each hour more formidable, awesome with their weight, ponderous as continents in their majesty of movement. The horses began to labor with roaring breath, and Wayland, dismounting to lighten his pony's burden, was dismayed to discover how thin the air had become. Even to walk unburdened gave him a smothering pain in his breast.

"Better stay on," called the girl. "My rule is to ride the hill going up and walk it going down. Down hill is harder on a horse than going up."

Nevertheless he persisted in clambering up some of the steepest parts of the trail, and was increasingly dismayed by the endless upward reaches of the foot-hills. A dozen times he thought, "We must be nearly at the top,"

and then other and far higher ridges suddenly developed. Occasionally the Supervisor was forced to unsling an ax and chop his way through a fallen tree, and each time the student hurried to the spot, ready to aid, but was quite useless. He admired the ease and skill with which the older man put his shining blade through the largest bole, and wondered if he could ever learn to do as well.

"One of the first essentials of a ranger's training is to learn to swing an ax," remarked McFarlane, "and you never want to be without a real tool. _I_ won't stand for a hatchet ranger."

Berrie called attention to the marks on the trees. "This is the government sign--a long blaze with two notches above it. You can trust these trails; they lead somewhere."

"As you ride a trail study how to improve it," added the Supervisor, sheathing his ax. "They can all be improved."

Wayland was sure of this a few steps farther on, when the Supervisor's horse went down in a small bog-hole, and Berrie's pony escaped only by the most desperate plunging. The girl laughed, but Wayland was appalled and stood transfixed watching McFarlane as he calmly extricated himself from the saddle of the fallen horse and chirped for him to rise.

"You act as if this were a regular part of the journey," Wayland said to Berrie.

"It's all in the day's work," she replied; "but I despise a bog worse than anything else on the trail. I'll show you how to go round this one."

Thereupon she slid from her horse and came tiptoeing back along the edge of the mud-hole.

McFarlane cut a stake and plunged it vertically in the mud. "That means 'no bottom,'" he explained. "We must cut a new trail."

Wayland was dismounting when Berrie said: "Stay on. Now put your horse right through where those rocks are. It's hard bottom there."

He felt like a child; but he did as she bid, and so came safely through, while McFarlane set to work to blaze a new route which should avoid the slough which was already a bottomless horror to the city man.

This mishap delayed them nearly half an hour, and the air grew dark and chill as they stood there, and the amateur ranger began to understand how serious a lone night journey might sometimes be. "What would I do if when riding in the dark my horse should go down like that and pin me in the mud?" he asked himself. "Eternal watchfulness is certainly one of the forester's first principles."

The sky was overshadowed now, and a thin drizzle of rain filled the air.

The novice hastened to throw his raincoat over his shoulders; but McFarlane rode steadily on, clad only in his shirtsleeves, unmindful of the wet. Berrie, however, approved Wayland's caution. "That's right; keep dry," she called back. "Don't pay attention to father, he'd rather get soaked any day than unroll his slicker. You mustn't take him for model yet awhile."

He no longer resented her sweet solicitude, although he considered himself unent.i.tled to it, and he rejoiced under the shelter of his fine new coat. He began to perceive that one could be defended against a storm.

After pa.s.sing two depressing marshes, they came to a hillside so steep, so slippery, so dark, so forbidding, that one of the pack-horses balked, shook his head, and reared furiously, as if to say "I can't do it, and I won't try." And Wayland sympathized with him. The forest was gloomy and cold, and apparently endless.

After coaxing him for a time with admirable gentleness, the Supervisor, at Berrie's suggestion, shifted part of the load to her own saddle-horse, and they went on.

Wayland, though incapable of comment--so great was the demand upon his lungs--was not too tired to admire the power and resolution of the girl, who seemed not to suffer any special inconvenience from the rarefied air.

The dryness of his open mouth, the throbbing of his troubled pulse, the roaring of his breath, brought to him with increasing dismay the fact that he had overlooked another phase of the ranger's job. "I couldn't chop a hole through one of these windfalls in a week," he admitted, as McFarlane's blade again liberated them from a fallen tree. "To do office work at six thousand feet is quite different from swinging an ax up here at timber-line," he said to the girl. "I guess my chest is too narrow for high alt.i.tudes."

"Oh, you'll get used to it," she replied, cheerily. "I always feel it a little at first; but I really think it's good for a body, kind o'

stretches the lungs." Nevertheless, she eyed him with furtive anxiety.

He was beginning to be hungry also--he had eaten a very early breakfast--and he fell to wondering just where and when they were to camp; but he endured in silence. "So long as Berrie makes no complaint my mouth is shut," he told himself. "Surely I can stand it if she can." And so struggled on.

Up and up the pathway looped, crossing minute little boggy meadows, on whose bottomless ooze the gra.s.s shook like a blanket, descending steep ravines and climbing back to dark and muddy slopes. The forest was dripping, green, and silent now, a mysterious menacing jungle. All the warmth and magic of the golden forest below was lost as though it belonged to another and sunnier world. Nothing could be seen of the high, snow-flecked peaks which had allured them from the valley. All about them drifted the clouds, and yet through the mist the flushed face of the girl glowed like a dew-wet rose, and the imperturbable Supervisor jogged his remorseless, unhesitating way toward the dense, ascending night.

"I'm glad I'm not riding this pa.s.s alone," Wayland said, as they paused again for breath.

"So am I," she answered; but her thought was not his. She was happy at the prospect of teaching him how to camp.

At last they reached the ragged edge of timber-line, and there, rolling away under the mist, lay the bare, gra.s.sy, upward-climbing, naked neck of the great peak. The wind had grown keener moment by moment, and when they left the storm-twisted pines below, its breath had a wintry nip. The rain had ceased to fall, but the clouds still hung densely to the loftiest summits. It was a sinister yet beautiful world--a world as silent as a dream, and through the short, thick gra.s.s the slender trail ran like a timid serpent. The hour seemed to have neither daytime nor season. All was obscure, mysterious, engulfing, and hostile. Had he been alone the youth would have been appalled by the prospect.

"Now we're on the divide," called Berea; and as she spoke they seemed to enter upon a boundless Alpine plain of velvet-russet gra.s.s. "This is the Bear Tooth plateau." Low monuments of loose rock stood on small ledges, as though to mark the course, and in the hollows dark ponds of icy water lay, half surrounded by ma.s.ses of compact snow.

"This is a stormy place in winter," McFarlane explained. "These piles of stone are mighty valuable in a blizzard. I've crossed this divide in August in snow so thick I could not see a rod."

Half an hour later they began to descend. Wind-twisted, storm-bleached dwarf pines were first to show, then the firs, then the blue-green spruces, and then the sheltering deeps of the undespoiled forest opened, and the roar of a splendid stream was heard; but still the Supervisor kept his resolute way, making no promises as to dinner, though his daughter called: "We'd better go into camp at Beaver Lake. I hope you're not starved," she called to Wayland.

"But I am," he replied, so frankly that she never knew how faint he really was. His knees were trembling with weakness, and he stumbled dangerously as he trod the loose rocks in the path.

They were all afoot now descending swiftly, and the horses ramped down the trail with expectant haste, so that in less than an hour from timber-line they were back into the sunshine of the lower valley, and at three o'clock or thereabouts they came out upon the bank of an exquisite lake, and with a cheery shout McFarlane called out: "Here we are, out of the wilderness!" Then to Wayland: "Well, boy, how did you stand it?"

"Just middling," replied Wayland, reticent from weariness and with joy of their camping-place. The lake, dark as topaz and smooth as steel, lay in a frame of golden willows--as a jewel is filigreed with gold--and above it the cliffs rose three thousand feet in sheer majesty, their upper slopes glowing with autumnal gra.s.ses. A swift stream roared down a low ledge and fell into the pond near their feet. Gra.s.sy, pine-shadowed knolls afforded pasture for the horses, and two giant firs, at the edge of a little glade, made a natural shelter for their tent.

With businesslike cert.i.tude Berrie unsaddled her horse, turned him loose, and lent a skilful hand at removing the panniers from the pack-animals, while Wayland, willing but a little uncertain, stood awkwardly about.

Under her instruction he collected dead branches of a standing fir, and from these and a few cones kindled a blaze, while the Supervisor hobbled the horses and set the tent.

"If the work of a forester were all like this it wouldn't be so bad," he remarked, wanly. "I think I know several fellows who would be glad to do it without a cent of pay."