182

WHAT SHALL HE HAVE WHO KILLED THE DEER?

WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finically clean about her housekeeping, she spent days scouring, rubbing, putting to rights and rearranging that which none used, nobody came to see; but she could not cook acceptably, and their scant fare suffered in her inept hands till she nearly starved them both.

Here, with some show of reason, she blamed her mother. Having never seen the time when she could go back to the Gentry place with a gift in her hand, she had not been there at all since her marriage. And here she blamed Lance. Between her incapacity and his earlier recklessness, they were desperately pinched. The season for hauling closed even sooner than he had feared. After it was past, he got a bit of work now and again, often walking long distances to it, since he had been obliged, as he had foreseen, to leave Satan and Cindy in the Settlement; and when the black horses came no more to the log stable behind the 183 cabin, Callista accepted it as the first open confession of defeat.

Lance was one who sought a medicine for his spiritual hurts with as sure an instinct as that by which the animals medicate their bodies, creeping away like them to have the pain and wounding out alone. With the first cold weather he was afoot, his long brown rifle in the hollow of his arm, tramping the ridges for game. The wide, silent spaces spoke restfully to his spirit. Half the time he left the cabin ill provided with firewood and other necessities, but he brought back rabbits, quail, an occasional possum—which latter Callista despised and refused to cook, even when Lance had carefully prepared it, so that the dogs got it for their share. The undercurrent of the material struggle to make a living was always the pitiful duel between these two, who really loved well, and who were striving as much each for the mastery of self, as for the mastery of the other, could they but have realized it.

In late November, the days began to break with a thin, piercing sleet in the air, under an even gray sky. On the brown sedge, dry as paper, it whispered, whispered through the clinging white-oak leaves, with a sharp sibilance, as of one who draws breath at the end of a pageant; for the last flickerings of the gold and glory of Autumn were gone; the radiance and warmth and beauty of life all circled now around a hearth-stone.

"If we get much more weather like this, I'll go out and bring ye 184 in a deer," Lance told his Callista; "then we'll have fresh meat a-plenty."

"Well, see that there's firewood enough to cook your deer after you've killed it," Callista retorted, resentfully mindful of Lance's having forgotten to provide her with sufficient fuel the last time he went on an unsuccessful hunting trip.

"You don't roast a deer whole," Lance told her tolerantly. "We'll dry some of the meat, and some we'll salt."

To Callista's exacting, practical nature, this figuring on the disposal of a deer one had not yet killed was exasperating. She wanted Lance to know that she lacked many things which she should have had. She wished him plainly to admit that he ought to furnish those things, and that he was sorry he could not. She had a blind feeling that, if he did so, it would in a measure atone.

"Well, it wouldn't take much wood to cook all the deer you brought home last time," she said with a little bitter half-smile.

Taunt of taunts—to reproach the unsuccessful hunter with his empty bag! Lance was not one to give reasons for his failure, to tell of the long, hard miles he had tramped on an unsuccessful quest. He merely picked up his gun and walked out of the house without looking to right or left, leaving his young wife breathing a little short, but sure of herself.

So far as he was concerned, he could find good counsel in the 185 wild to which, he fled. This morning there was come over everything a blind fog, which was gradually thinning a little with the dawn, showing to his eyes, where it lifted, hundreds of little ripples fleeing across the pond from icy verge to verge, with a mist smoking to leeward. The forest swam about him in a milky haze; the trees stood, huge silver feathers, soft gray against the paler sky, their coating not glassy, like real sleet, but a white fringe, a narrow strip of wool, composed of the finest pointed crystals, along every twig. The yard grass, as he crossed it, was a fleece; the weeds by the garden fence, where he vaulted over, a cloud.

Dulling one sense, the obscuring fog seemed to muffle all others. Lance was shut in a little white world of his own, that moved and shifted about him as he went forward. In his heart was the beginning of self-distrust; a very small beginning, which he cried down and would none of; yet the mood sent him seeking a spot he had not seen for months. Straight as an arrow he went through the forest, guiding himself by his sense of direction alone, since he could neither see far nor recognize any familiar landmark in its changed guise.

An hour after he and Callista had parted in the kitchen of his own home, he was before that outside cabin of the Gentry place, at whose casement he had first held her in his arms, looking up 186 at the blank square of closed panes. It was so early that none of the household was yet astir. The dogs knew him, and made no clamorous outcry. Shut in by the wavering walls of mist which clung and chilled, he stood long beneath her window, staring fixedly up at it. Something ominous and symbolic in the change which had come upon the spot since he last stood there, checked the beating of his heart, strive as he might to reject its message. The yard grass, green and lush on that September night, stood stark, dry, white wool; the bullace vine, whose trunk had borne his eager love up to her kiss, gleamed steel-like along its twisted stems; the sill itself was a bar of humid ice. All looked bleak, inhospitable, forbidding; the place was winter-smitten, like—like—

Some blind rage at the power which makes us other than we would be, which gives us stones for bread, stirred within him. He shivered. She was not there now—she was at home in his house—his wife. What had he come here for? This was a gun in the hollow of his arm—not a banjo; he was out trying to find some wild meat to keep them alive. She was waiting at home to—no, not in the gropings of his own mind, would he complain too bitterly of his bride. Heaven knows what the disillusioning was when Lance found for the first time that he and Callista could seriously quarrel—their old days of what might be termed histrionic bickerings for the amusement of an audience, he had 187 put aside, as of no portent. When he discovered that Callista could look at him with actually alien eyes, and say stinging things in an even tone, the boundaries of his island drew in till there was barely room for his own feet amid the wash of estranging waters. But he turned resolutely from the thought. His concern should be all with his own conduct, his own failings. Callista must do what she would do—and he would play up to the situation as best he might.

Somebody moved in the house and called one of the hounds. He laughed at himself a bit drearily, and struck off across the hill, assured in his own mind that he had merely taken this as a short cut to the glen at the head of the gulch, where he hoped to find his deer. The clean winds of Heaven soothed the pain that throbbed under his careless bearing. He had not been five hours afoot, he was but just preparing to make his noon halt and eat the bit of cold pone in his pocket, when he was ready to smile whimsically at the ill-made, ill-flavored thing and decide that it would be "just as fillin'," even though Callista had not yet learned the bread-maker's art.

He must needs consider it rare good luck that he found a deer at all; but it was five miles from home, in the breaks of Chestnut Creek, that he finally made his kill. He had no horse to carry the bulk of wild meat; and, in his pride refusing to leave a 188 part swung up out of harm's way, he undertook to pack the whole deer home on his shoulder—a piece of exhausting, heart-breaking toil, though the buck was but a half-grown one. He was not willing to risk the loss of a pound. There were no antlers; but he would make Callista a pair of moccasins out of the soft-tanned skin. Sunday he was due at old man Fuson's for a couple of days, to repair a chimney; but, come Tuesday or Wednesday, he would return and be ready to look after the venison. It ought to keep so long in this cold.

Callista, pent indoors all day, chained to distasteful tasks for which she was incompetent, had not won to as serene a temper as her mate. She saw him approaching, laden, through the grove, and hurried into the cold, closed far room to be busy about some task so that she need not meet him as he entered. When she emerged, he had skinned the deer and hung up the meat safely between two trees, and was already washed and sitting in the chimney-corner. His clear eyes went swiftly to her face with its coldly down-dropped lids. The man who can bring home a deer and not boast of it has self-control; but when Lance noted the line of his wife's lips, he reached for his banjo without a word, and began to hold his communications with it.

She knelt at the hearth to continue her supper preparations. For the first time since they had quarreled, she wished that she 189 could make some advance toward a reconciliation. Yet there was Lance; look at him! Head thrown back a little, chin atilt, his eyes almost closed, showing a bright line under the shadowing lash, the firelight played on her husband's face and painted the ghost of a flickering smile about his mouth as he strummed lightly on the strings. Was that a countenance asking sympathy, begging for quarter? And listen to the banjo; it was no wistful, questing melody of "How many miles, how many years?" now; a light, jigging dance-tune rippled under his finger ends. Callista wondered angrily if he wished he were at Derf's. No doubt they would be dancing there to-night, as commonly on Saturday.

Lance, the man who wouldn't take a dare from the Lord A'mighty Himself, answered her silence with silence, and her unconcern with a forgetfulness so vast as to make her attitude seem actually resentful.

By and by she called him to supper, and when he came she refused to eat, dwelling angrily on the thought that he should have regarded her bidding as an overture to peace, and have made some answering movement himself.

In short, she was not yet done interrogating this nature, fascinating, complex, inscrutable, to know what was the ultimate point, the place where he would cry "Enough!"

The next morning saw him leaving early for Fuson's, and he went 190 before Callista was out of bed. When she rose, she looked remorsefully at the tidy, small preparations for breakfast which he had made. It suddenly came home to her that, for a man in Lance's situation, the marrying of a wholly inept wife was daily tragedy. She decided that she would learn, that she would try to do better; and, as a first peace-offering, she hurried out to the grove and possessed herself of Lance's venison, that she might cure and prepare it.

After she had dragged the big, raw, bloody thing into her immaculate kitchen, she felt a little sense of repulsion at it, yet her good intentions held while she hacked and hewed and salted and pickled, on some vague remembrance of what she had heard her grandfather say concerning the curing of wild meat. It was noon when she went into the other room, leaving the outer door open so that the hound carried away the only portion of the meat which she had left fresh for immediate use. Tired, ready to cry, she consoled herself with the reflection that there was plenty remaining; she could freshen a piece of that which she had salted, for Lance's supper when he should return. For herself, she felt that she should never want to taste venison again.

Under her handling the meat deteriorated rapidly, and was in danger of becoming an uneatable mess. At last she turned a weary and disgusted back upon it, and left it soaking in weak brine. 191 Ever since Saturday night the weather had been softening; it was almost warm when Lance came hurrying home Tuesday evening, meaning to take care of his prize at once. He arrived at supper time, ate some of Callista's bread and drank his coffee eagerly, turning in mute distaste from the hunk of ill-prepared meat upon the table. Supper over he hastened out to where he had hung the deer. His wife had a wild impulse to stop him; he might have guessed from the venison she had cooked that the meat was attended to. She resented the dismay in his face when he came back asking:

"Do you know what's come of that deer? I got Jasper Fuson to let me off sooner, so's I could make haste and tend to it."

The sense of failure closed in on Callista intolerably.

"I fixed it," she returned without looking up.

"All of it?" inquired Lance sharply. "Fixed it like that, do you mean?" indicating the untouched piece on the platter.

"Yes," returned Callista with secret despair; "all but what the dogs got."

"The dogs!" echoed Lance.

"Yes," repeated Callista with a sort of stubborn composure. "I left about a third of it fresh whilst I was putting the rest in the brine, and that old hound of yours came in and stole the fresh piece." She looked at his face and then at the meat. "I 192 reckon you think that even a dog wouldn't eat this—the way I've got it."

The two young people confronted each other across the ruined food which his skill and labor had provided, her bungling destroyed. The subject for quarrel was a very real one, terrifyingly concrete and pressing. They were afraid of it; nor did they at that moment fail to realize the mighty bond of love which still was strong between them. Both would have been glad to make some advance toward peace, some movement of reconciliation; neither knew how to do it. In Lance, the torture of the thing expressed itself only in a fiery glance turned upon his wife's handiwork. To Callista, this was so intolerable that she laid about her for an adequate retort.

"Well," she said, affecting a judicial coolness, "it's true I don't know much about taking care of wild meat. We never had such in my home. There was always plenty of chickens and turkeys; and if we put up meat, it was our own shoats and beef."

Deer are growing scarce in the Cumberlands; not in half a dozen cabins throughout the Turkey Tracks would venison be eaten that season. But Lance adduced nothing of this.

"I think you might as well let the dogs have the rest of it," he said finally, with a singular gentleness in his tone. Then he added with a sudden upswelling of resentment, "Give it to 'em if they'll eat it—which I misdoubt they'll never do."