The Heart of the Ancient Wood :: Chapter XI Miranda and Young Dave

Chapter XI Miranda and Young Dave

After this the cabin in the clearing ran small risk of marauders. To the most sceptical homespun philosopher in the Settlement it seemed obvious that Kirstie and Miranda had something mysterious about them, and had forsaken their kind for the fellowship of the furtive kin. No one but Old Dave had any relish for a neighbourhood where bears kept guard, and lynxes slily frequented, and caribou bulls of a haughty temper made themselves free of the barnyard. As for Young Dave, unwilling to fall foul of the folk who were so friendly to Kirstie and Miranda, he carried his traps, his woodcraft, and his cunning rifle to a tract more remote from the clearing.

Thus it came that Miranda grew to womanhood with no human companion but her mother. To her mother she stood so close that the two assimilated each other, as it were. Such education as Kirstie possessed, and such culture, narrow but significant, were Miranda’s by absorption. For the rest, the quiet folk of the wood insensibly moulded her, and the great silences, and the wide wonder of the skies at night, and the solemnity of the wind. At seventeen she was a woman, mature beyond her years, but strange, with an elfish or a faun-like strangeness: as if a soul not all human dwelt in her human shape. Silent, wild, unsmiling, her sympathies were not with her own kind, but with the wild and silent folk who know not the sweetness of laughter. Yet she was given to moods of singing mirth, at long intervals; and her tenderness toward all pain, her horror of blood, were things equally alien to the wilderness creatures, her associates. It was doubtless this unbridgable divergence, combining with her sympathy and subtle comprehension, which secured her mysterious ascendency in the forest; for by this time it would never have occurred to her to step aside even for a panther or a bull moose in his fury. Something, somehow, in the air about her, told all the creatures that she was supreme.

In appearance, Miranda was a contrast to her mother, though her colouring was almost the same. Miranda was a little less than middle height, slender, graceful, fine-boned, small of hand and foot, delicate-featured, her skin toned with the clear browns of health and the open air and the matchless cosmetic of the sun. Her abundance of bronze-black hair, shot with flame-glints wheresoever the sunlight struck it, came down low over a broad, low forehead. Her eyes, in which, as we have seen, lay very much of her power over the folk of the wood, were very large and dark. They possessed a singular transparency, akin to the magical charm of the forest shadows. There was something unreal and haunting in this inexplicable clarity of her gaze, something of that mystery which dwells in the reflections of a perfect mirror of water. Her nose, straight and well modelled, was rather large than small, with nostrils alertly sensitive to discern all the wilding savours, the clean, personal scents of the clean-living creatures of the wood, and even those inexpressibly elusive perfume-heralds which, on certain days, come upon the air, forerunning the changes of the seasons. Her mouth was large, but not too large for beauty, neither thin nor full, of a vivid scarlet, mobile and mutable, yet firm, and with the edges of the lips exactly defined. Habitually reposeful and self-controlled in movement, like her mother, her repose suggested that of a bird poised upon the wing, liable at any instant to incalculable celerities; while that of Kirstie was like the calm of a hill with the eternal disrupting fire at its heart. The scarlet ribbon which Miranda the woman, like Miranda the child, wore always about her neck, seemed in her the symbol of an ineradicable strangeness of spirit, while Kirstie’s scarlet kerchief expressed but the passion which burned perennial beneath its wearer’s quietude.

Being in all respects natural and unselfconscious, it is not to be wondered at that Miranda was inconsistent. The truce which she had created about her—the pax MirandÆ—had so long kept her eyes from the hated sight of blood that she had forgotten death, and did not more than half believe in pain. Nevertheless she was still a shaft of doom to the trout in the lake and river. Fishing was a delight to her. It satisfied some fierce instinct inherited from her forefathers, which she never thought to analyze. The musical rushing of the stream; the foam and clamour of the shallow falls; the deep, black, gleaming pools with the roots of larch and hemlock overhanging; the sullen purple and amber of the eddies with their slowly swirling patches of froth,—all these allured her, though with a threat. And then the stealthy casting of the small, baited hook or glittering fly, the tense expectancy, the electrifying tug upon the line, the thrill, the exultation of the landing, and the beauty of the spotted prey, silver and vermilion, on the olive carpet of the moss! It hardly occurred to her that they were breathing, sentient creatures, these fish of the pools. She would doubtless have resented the idea of any kinship between herself and these cold inhabiters of a hostile element. In fact, Miranda was very close to nature, and she could not escape her part in nature’s never ceasing war of opposites.

Late one afternoon in summer Miranda was loitering homeward from the stream with a goodly string of trout. It was a warm day and windless, and the time of year not that which favours the fisherman. But in those cold waters the fish will rise even in July and August, and Miranda’s bait, or Miranda’s home-tied fly, was always a killing lure to them. She carried her catch—one gaping-jawed two-pounder, and a half dozen smaller victims—strung through the crimson gills on a forked branch of alder. Her dark face was flushed; her hair (she never wore a hat) was dishevelled; her eyes were very wide and abstracted, taking in the varied shadows,—the boulders, the markings on the bark of the tree trunks, the occasional flickering moths, and the solemn little brown owl that sat in the cleft of the pine tree, yet seeming to see not these but something within or beyond them.

Suddenly, however, they were arrested by a sight which scattered their abstraction. Their focus seemed to shorten, their expression concentrated to a strained intensity, then lightened to a greyness with anger as she took a hasty step forward, and paused, uncertain for a moment what to do.

Before her was a little open glade, full of sun, secure and inviting. At its farther edge a thick-branched, low beech tree, reaching out from the confusion of trunks and vistas, cast a pleasant differentiated shade. Here in this shade a young man lay sleeping, sprawled carelessly, his head on one arm. He was tall, gaunt, clad in grey homespuns and a well-worn buckskin jacket. His red-brown hair was cut somewhat short, his light yellow moustache, long and silky, looked the lighter by contrast with the ruddy tan of his face. His rifle leaned against the tree near by, while he slept the luxurious sleep of an idle summer afternoon.

But not five paces away crouched an immense panther, flattened to the ground, watching him.

The beast was ready, at the first movement or sign of life, to spring upon the sleeper’s throat. Its tail rigidly outstretched, twitched slightly at the tip. Its great, luminous eyes were so intently fixed upon the anticipated prey that it did not see Miranda’s quiet approach.

To the girl the sleeper seemed something very beautiful, in the impersonal way that a splendid flower, or a tall young tree in the open, or the scarlet-and-pearl of sunrise is beautiful—not a thing as near to herself as the beasts of the wood, whom she knew. But she was filled with strange, protective fury at the thought of peril to this interesting creature. Her hesitation was but for a moment. She knew the ferocity of the panther very well, and trembled lest the sleeper should move, or twitch a muscle. She stepped up close to his side, and fixed the animal’s eyes with her disconcerting gaze.

“Get off!” she ordered sharply, with a gesture of command.

The beast had doubtless a very plentiful ignorance of the English language, but gesture is a universal speech. He understood it quite clearly. He faced her eye, and endured it for some seconds, being minded to dispute its authority. Then his glance shifted, his whole attitude changed. He rose from his crouching posture, his tail drooped, his tension relaxed, he looked back over his shoulder, then turned and padded furtively away. Just as he was leaving, the man awoke with a start, sat up, gave one wondering look at Miranda, caught sight of the panther’s retreating form, and reached for his rifle.

Quick as light, Miranda intervened. Stepping between his hand and its purpose, she flamed out against him with sudden anger.

“How dare you—go to shoot him!” she cried, her voice trembling.

He had sprung to his feet, and was staring at her flushed face with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment.

“But he was goin’ to jump onto me!” he protested.

“Well,” rejoined Miranda, curtly, “he didn’t! And you’ve got no call to shoot him!”

“Why didn’t he?” asked the young man.

“I drove him off. If I’d thought you’d shoot him, I’d have let him jump onto you,” was the cool reply.

“Why didn’t he jump onto you?” asked the stranger, his keen grey eyes lighting up as if he began to understand the situation.

“Because he durs’n’t,—and he wouldn’t want to, neither!”

“I calculate,” said the stranger, holding out his hand, while a smile softened the thoughtful severity of his face, “that you must be little Mirandy.”

“My name is Miranda,” she answered, ignoring the outstretched hand; “but I’m sure I don’t know who you are, coming here into my woods to kill my friends.”

“I wouldn’t hurt a hair of ’em!” he asserted, with a mingling of fervour and amusement. “But ain’t I one o’ your friends, too, Mirandy? I used to be, anyway.”

He took a step nearer, still holding out a pleading hand. Miranda drew back, and put her hands behind her. “I don’t know you,” she persisted, but now with something of an air of wilfulness rather than of hostility. Old memories had begun to stir in forgotten chambers of her brain.

“You used to be friends with Young Dave,” he said, in an eager half whisper. Miranda’s beauty and the strangeness of it were getting into his long-untroubled blood.

The girl at once put out her hand with a frank kindness. “Oh, I remember!” she said. “You’ve been a long time forgetting us, haven’t you? But never mind. Come along with me to the clearing, and see mother, and get some supper.”

Dave flushed with pleasure at the invitation.

“Thank ye kindly, Mirandy, I reckon I will,” said he; and stepping to one side he picked up his rifle. But at the sight of the weapon Miranda’s new friendliness froze up, and a resentful gleam came into her great eyes.

“Let me heft it,” she demanded abruptly, holding out an imperative hand.

Dave gave it up at once, with a deprecating air, though a ghost of a smile flickered under the long, yellow droop of his moustache.

Miranda had no interest in the weight or balance of the execrated weapon: possession of it was all her purpose.

“I’ll carry it,” she remarked abruptly. “You take these,” and handing over to him the string of trout, she turned to the trail.

Dave followed, now at her side, now dropping respectfully behind, as the exigencies of the way required. Nothing was said for some time. The girl’s instinctive interest in the man whom she had so opportunely protected was now quenched in antagonism, as she thought upon his murderous calling. With sharp resentment she imagined him nursing an indulgent contempt for her friendship with the furry and furtive creatures. She burned with retrospective compassion for all the beasts which had fallen to his bullets, or his blind and brutal traps. A trap was, in her eyes, the unpardonable horror. Had she not once, when a small girl, seen a lynx—perhaps it was Ganner himself—caught by the hind quarters in a dead-fall? The beast was not quite dead—it had been for days dying; its eyes were dulled, yet widely staring, and its tongue, black and swollen, stuck out between its grinning jaws. She had seen at once that the case was past relief; and she would have ended the torture had her little hands known how to kill. But helpless and anguished as she was, she had fled from the spot, and shudderingly cried her eyes out for an hour. Then it had come over her with a wrenching of remorse that the dreadful tongue craved water; and she had flown back with a tin cup of the assuaging fluid, only to find the animal just dead. The pain of thinking that she might have eased its last torments, and had not, bit the whole scene ineffaceably into her heart; and now, with this splendid trapper, the kind friend of her babyhood, walking at her side, the picture and its pangs returned with a horrible incongruity. But what most of all hardened her heart against the man was a sense of threat which his atmosphere conveyed to her,—a menace, in some vague way, to her whole system of life, her sympathies, her contentments, her calm.

Dave, on his part, felt himself deep in the cold flood of disfavour, and solicitously pondered a way of return to the sunshine of his companion’s smile. His half-wild intuition told him at once that Miranda’s anger was connected with his rifle, and he in part understood her aversion to his craft. He hungered to conciliate her; and as he trod noiselessly the scented gloom of the arches, the mottled greens and greys and browns of the trail, he laid his plans with far-considering prudence. It was characteristic of his quietly masterful nature that he not once thought of conciliating by giving up gun and trap and turning to a vocation more humane. No, the ways and means which occupied his thoughts were the ways and means of converting Miranda to his own point of view. He felt, though not philosophic enough to formulate it clearly, that he had all nature behind him to help mould the girl to his will, while she stood not only alone, but with a grave peril of treason in her own heart.

His silence was good policy with Miranda, who was used to silence and loved it. But being a woman, she loved another’s silence even better than her own. “You are a hunter, ain’t you?” she inquired at last, without turning her head.

“Yes, Mirandy.”

“And a trapper, too?”

“Yes, Mirandy; so they call me.”

“And you like to kill the beasts?”

“Well, yes, Mirandy, kind of, least-ways, I like them; and, well, you’ve jest got to kill them, to live yourself. That’s jest what they do, kill each other, so’s they can live themselves. An’ it’s the only kind of life I can live—’way in the woods, with the shadows, an’ the silence, an’ the trees, an’ the sky, an’ the clean smells, an’ the whispers you can’t never understand.”

Dave shut his mouth with a firm snap at the close of this unwonted outburst. Never to any one before had he so explained his passion for the hunter’s life; and now Miranda, who had turned square about, was looking at him with a curious searching expression. It disconcerted him; and he feared, under those unescapable eyes, that he had talked nonsense. Nevertheless when she spoke there was a less chilling note in her voice, though the words were not encouraging.

“If you like killing the creatures,” she said slowly, “it’s no place for you here. So maybe you hadn’t better come to the clearing.”

“I don’t like killing your beasts, anyways,” he protested eagerly. “An’ ever sence I heard how you an’ the bears an’ the caribou was friends like, I’ve kep’ clear the other side of the divide, an’ never set a trap this side the Quah-Davic valley. As for these critters you take such stock in, Mirandy, I wouldn’t harm a hair of one of ’em, I swear!”

“You hadn’t better! I’d kill you myself,” she rejoined sharply, with a swift, dangerous flame in her strange gaze; “or I’d set Kroof on you,” she added, a gleam of mirth suddenly irradiating her face, and darkening her eyes richly, till Dave was confused by her loveliness. But he kept his wits sufficiently to perceive, as she set her face again up the trail, that he was permitted to go with her.

“Who’s Kroof?” he asked humbly, stepping close to her side and ignoring the fact that the pathway, just there, was but wide enough for one.

“My best friend,” answered Miranda. “You’ll see at the clearing. You’d better look out for Kroof, let me tell you!”

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