Hidden Creek - Katharine Newlin Burt
"And," said Miss Blake, "we got to eat, ourselves."
"Hadn't we better go down to the post-office or to Rusty?" Sheila asked
nervously.
Miss Blake snapped at her. "Harness that team now? As much as your life
is worth, Sheila! And we can't make it on foot. We'd drop in our tracks
and freeze. If it comes to the worst we may have to try it, but--oh, I'll
get something to-morrow."
But to-morrow brought no better luck. During the hunting the dogs were
left on their chains, and Sheila, through the lonely hours, would watch
them through the window and could almost see the wolfishness grow in
their deep, wild eyes. She would try to talk to them, pat them, coax them
into doggy-ness. But day by day they responded more unwillingly. All but
Berg: Berg stayed with her in the house, lay on her feet, leaned against
her knee. He shared her meals. He was beginning to swing his heart from
Miss Blake to her, and this was the second cause for strife.
Since that one outbreak, Sheila had gone carefully. She was dignified,
aloof, very still. She obeyed and slaved as she had never done in the
summer days. The dread of physical violence hung on her brain like a
cloud. She encouraged Berg's affection, and wondered, if it came to a
struggle, whether he would side with her. She was given the opportunity
to put this matter to the test.
Miss Blake was very late that night. It was midnight, a stark midnight of
stars and biting cold, when Berg stood up from his sleep and barked his
low, short bark of welcome. Outside the other dogs broke into their
clamor, drowning all other sound, and in the midst of it the door flew
rudely open. Miss Blake stood and clung to the side of the door. Her face
was bluish-white. She put out her hand toward Sheila, clutching the air.
Sheila ran over to her.
"You're hurt?"
"Twisted my blamed ankle. God!" She hobbled over, a heavy arm round
Sheila, to her chair and sat there while the girl gave her some brandy,
removed the snowshoes, and cut away the boot from a swollen and
discolored leg.
"That's the end of my hunting," grunted the patient, who bore the agony
of rubbing and bathing stoically. "And, I reckon, I couldn't have stood
much more." She clenched her hand in Berg's mane. "God! Those dogs! I'll
have to shoot them--next." Sheila looked up to her with a sort of
horrified hope. There was then a way out from that fear.
"I'd rather die, I think," said the woman hoarsely. "I love those dogs."
Sheila looked up into a tender and quivering face--the face of a mother.
"They mean something to me--those brutes. I guess I kind of centered my
heart on 'em--out here alone. I raised 'em up, from puppies, all but Berg
and the mother. They were the cutest little fellows. I remember when
Wreck got porcupine quills in his nose and came to me and lay on his back
and whined to me. It was as if he said, 'Help me, momma.' Sure it was.
And he pretty near died. Oh, damn! If I have to shoot 'em I might just as
well shoot myself and be done with it...Thanks, Sheila. I'll eat my
supper here and then you can help me to bed. When my ankle's all well, we
can have a try for the post-office, perhaps." She leaned back and drew
Berg roughly up against her. She caressed him. He made little soft,
throaty sounds of tenderness.
Sheila came back with a tray and, as she came, Berg pulled himself away
from his mistress and went wagging over to greet her.
"Come here!" snapped Miss Blake. Berg hesitated, cuddled close to Sheila,
and kept step beside her.
Miss Blake's eyes went red. "Come here!" she said again. Berg did not
cringe or hasten. He reached Miss Blake's chair at the same instant as
Sheila, not a moment earlier.
Miss Blake pulled herself up. The tray went shattering to the floor. She
hobbled over to the fire, white with the anguish, took down the whip from
its nail. At that Berg cringed and whined. The woman fell upon him with
her terrible lash. She held herself with one hand on the mantel-shelf,
while with the other she scored the howling victim. His fur came off his
back under the dreadful, knife-edge blows.
"Oh, stop!" cried Sheila. "Stop! You're killing him!" She ran over and
caught Miss Blake's arm.
"Damn you!" said the woman fiercely. She stood breathing fast. Sweat
of pain and rage and exertion stood out on her face. "Do _you_ want
that whip?"
She half-turned, lifting her lash, and at that, with a snarl, Berg
crouched himself and bared his teeth.
Miss Blake started and stared at him. Suddenly she gave in. Pain and
anger twisted her spirit.
"You'd turn my Berg against me!" she choked, and fell heavily down on the
rug in a dead faint.
When she came to she was grim and silent. She got herself with scant
help to bed, her big bed in the corner of the living-room, and for a week
she was kept there with fever and much pain. Berg lay beside her or
followed Sheila about her work, and the woman watched them both with
ruddy eyes.
CHAPTER XI
THE PACK
In January a wind blew steadily from the east and snow came as if to
bury them alive. The cabin turned to a cave, a small square of warmth
under a mountain of impenetrable white; one door and one window only,
opening to a space of sun. Against the others the blank white lids of
winter pressed. Sheila shoveled this space out sometimes twice a day.
The dog kennels were moved into it, and stood against the side of a
snow-bank eight feet high, up which, when they were unchained, the
gaunt, wolfish animals leapt in a loosely formed pack, the great mother,
Brenda, at their head, and padded off into the silent woods in their
hungry search for food.
But, one day, they refused to go. Miss Blake, her whip in her hand,
limped out. The snow had stopped. The day was still and bright again
above the snowy firs, the mountain scraped against the blue sky like a
cliff of broken ice. The dogs had crept out of their houses and were
squatted or huddled in the sun. As she came out they rose and strained at
their tethers. One of them whined. Brenda, the mother, bared her teeth.
One by one, as they were freed, they slunk close to Miss Blake, looking
up into her face. They crowded close at her heels as she went back to the
house. She had to push the door to in their very jaws and they pressed
against it, their heads hung low, sniffing the odor of food. Presently a
long-drawn, hideous howling rose from them. Time and again Miss Blake
drove them away with lash and voice. Time and again they came back. They
scratched at the threshold, whimpered, and whined.
Sheila and Miss Blake gave them what food they would have eaten
themselves that day. It served only to excite their restlessness, to hold
them there at the crack of the door, snuffling and slobbering. The outer
circle slept, the inner watched. Then they would shift, like sentries.
They had a horrible sort of system. Most of that dreadful afternoon Miss
Blake paced the floor, trying to strengthen her ankle for the trip to the
post-office. At sunset, when the small snow-banked room was nearly dark,
she stopped, threw up her head, and looked at Sheila. The girl was
sitting on the lowest step of the ladder washing some dried apples. Her
face had thinned to a silvery wedge between the thick square masses of
her hair. There was a haunted look in her clear eyes. The soft mouth had
tightened.
"How in God's name," said Miss Blake, "shall I get 'em on their
chains again?"
Sheila stopped her work, and her lips fell helplessly apart. She looked
up at the older woman and shook her head.
Miss Blake's fear snapped into a sort of frenzy. She gritted her teeth
and stamped. "You simpleton!" she said. "You never have a notion in
your head."
Sheila stood up quickly. Something told her that she had better be on her
feet. She kept very still. "You will know better than I could what to do
about the dogs," she said quietly. "They'll go back on their chains for
you, I should think. They're afraid of you."
"Aren't you?" Miss Blake asked roughly.
"No. Of course not."
"You little liar! You're scared half out of your wits. You're scared of
the whole thing--scared of the snow, scared of the cold, scared of the
dogs, and scared sick of me. Come, now. Tell me the truth."
It was almost her old bluff, bullying tone, but back of it was a
disorder of stretched nerves. Sheila weighed her words and tried to
weigh her thoughts.
"I don't think I am afraid, Miss Blake. Why should I be afraid of the
dogs, if you aren't? And why should I be afraid of you? You have been
good to me. You are a good woman."
At this Miss Blake threw back her head and laughed. She was terribly like
one of the dogs howling. There was something wild and wolfish in her
broad neck and in the sound she made. And she snapped back into silence
with wolfish suddenness.
"If you're not scared, then," she scoffed, "go and chain up the dogs
yourself."
For an instant Sheila quite calmly balanced the danger out of doors
against the danger within.
"I think," she said--and managed one of her drifting smiles--"I think I
am a great deal more afraid of the dogs than I am of you, Miss Blake."
The woman studied her for a minute in silence, then she walked over to
her elk-horn throne and sat down on it.
She leaned back in a royal way and spread her dark broad hands across the
arms.
"Well," she said coolly, "did you hear what I said? Go out and chain up
the dogs!"
Sheila held herself like a slim little cavalier. "If I go out," she said
coolly, "I will not take a whip. I'll take a gun."
"And shoot my dogs?"
"Miss Blake, what else is left for us to do? We can't let them claw down
the door and tear us into bits, can we?"
"You'd shoot my dogs?"
"You said yourself that we might have to shoot them."
Miss Blake gave her a stealthy and cunning look. "Take my gun, then"--her
voice rose to a key that was both crafty and triumphant--"and much good
it will do you! There's shot enough to kill one if you are a first-rate
shot. I lost what was left of my ammunition the day I hurt my ankle. The
new stuff is down at the post-office by now, I guess."
The long silence was filled by the shifting of the dog-watch outside the
door.
"We must chain them up at any cost," said Sheila. Her lips were dry and
felt cold to her tongue.
"Go out and do it, then." The mistress of the house leaned back and
crossed her ankles.
"Miss Blake, be reasonable. You have a great deal of control over the
dogs and I have none. I _am_ afraid of them and they will know it.
Animals always know when you're afraid..." Again she managed a smile.
"I shall begin to think you are a coward," she said.
At that Miss Blake stood up from her chair. Her face was red with a
violent rush of blood and the sparks in her eyes seemed to have broken
into flame.
"Very good, Miss," she said brutally. "I'll go out and chain 'em up and
then I'll come back and thrash you to a frazzle. Then you'll know how to
obey my orders next time."
She caught up her whip, swung it in her hand, and strode to the door.
"And mind you, Sheila, you won't be able to hide yourself from me. Nor
make a getaway. I'll lock this door outside and winter's locked the
other. You wait. You'll see what you'll get for calling me a coward. Your
friend Berg's gone off on a long hunt ... he's left his friends outside
there and he's left you.... Understand?"
She shouted roughly to the dogs, snapped her whip, threw open the door,
and stepped out boldly. She shut the door behind her and shot a bolt. It
creaked as though it had grown rusty with disuse.
In the stillness--for, except for a quick shuffling of paws, there was no
sound at first--Sheila chose her weapon of defense. She took down from
its place the Eskimo ivory spear, and, holding it short in her hand, she
put herself behind the great elk-horn chair. Her Celtic blood was
pounding gloriously now. She was not afraid; though if there had been
time to notice it, she would have confessed to an abysmal sense of horror
and despair. And again she wondered at her own loneliness and youth and
the astounding danger that she faced. Yes, it was more astonishment than
any other emotion that possessed her consciousness. The horror was below
the threshold practicing its part.
Then anger, astonishment, horror itself were suddenly thrown out of her.
She was left like an empty vessel waiting to be filled with fear. Miss
Blake had cried aloud, "Help, Sheila! Help!" This was followed by a
dreadful screaming. Sheila dropped her spear and leapt to the door. On
it, outside, Miss Blake beat and screamed, "Open, for God's sake!"
Sheila shouted in as dreadful a key. "On your side--the bolt! Miss
Blake--the bolt!"
Fingers clawed at the bolt, but it would not slip. Through all the
horrible sounds the woman made, Sheila could hear the snarling and
leaping and snapping of the dogs. She dashed to the small, tight window,
broke a pane with her fist, and thrust out her arm. She meant to reach
the bolt, but what she saw took the warm life out of her. Miss Blake had
gone down under the whirling, slobbering pack. The screaming had stopped.
In that one awful look the poor child saw that no human help could save.
She dropped down on the floor and lay there moaning, her hands pressed
over her ears....
So she lay, shuddering and gasping, the great part of the night. At last
the intense cold drove her to the fire. She heaped up the logs high and
hung close above them. Her very heart was cold. Liquid ice moved
sluggishly along her veins. The morning brought no comfort or courage to
her, only a freshening of horror and of fear. The dogs had gone, and all
the winter world lay still about the house.
She was shaken by a regular pulse of nervous sobbing. But, driven by a
sort of restlessness, she made herself coffee and forced some food down
her contracted throat. Then she put on her coat, took down Miss Blake's
six-shooter and cartridge belt, and saw, with a slight relaxing of the
cramp about her heart, that there were four shots in the chamber. Four
shots and eight dogs, but--at least--she could save herself from _that_
death! She strapped the gun round her slim hips, filled her pockets with
supplies--a box of dried raisins, some hard bread, a cake of chocolate,
some matches--pulled her cap down over her ears, and took her snowshoes
from the wall. With closed eyes she put her arm out through the broken
pane, and, after a short struggle, slipped the rusty bolt. Then she went
over to the door and, leaning against it, prayed. Even with the
mysterious strength she drew from that sense of kinship with a superhuman
Power, it was a long time before she could force herself to open. At
last, with a big gasp, she flung the door wide, skirted the house, her
hands against the logs, her eyes shut, ran across the open space,
scrambled up the drift, tied on her snowshoes, and fled away under the
snow-laden pines. There moved in all the wilderness that day no more
hunted and fearful a thing.
The fresh snow sunk a little under her webs, but she was a featherweight
of girlhood, and made quicker and easier progress than would have been
possible to any one else but a child. And her fear gave her both strength
and speed. Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder; always she
strained her ears for the pad of following feet. It was a day of rainbows
and of diamond spray, where the sun struck the shaken snow sifted from
overweighted branches. Sheila remembered well enough the route to the
post-office. It meant miles of weary plodding, but she thought that she
could do it before night. If not, she would travel by starlight and the
wan reflection of the snow. There was no darkness in these clear, keen
nights. She would not tell herself what gave her strength such impetus.
She thought resolutely of the post-office, of the old, friendly man, of
his stove, of his chairs and his picture of the President, of his gun
laid across two nails against his kitchen wall--all this, not more than
eighteen miles away! And she thought of Hilliard, too; of his young
strength and the bold young glitter of his eyes.
She stopped for a minute at noon to drink some water from Hidden Creek
and to eat a bite or so of bread. She was pulling on her gloves again
when a distant baying first reached her ears. She turned faint, seemed to
stand in a mist; then, with her teeth set defiantly, she started again,
faster and steadier, her body bent forward, her head turned back. Before
her now lay a great stretch of undulating, unbroken white. At its farther
edge the line of blue-black pines began again. She strained her steps to
reach this shelter. The baying had been very faint and far away--it might
have been sounded for some other hunting. She would make the woods, take
off her webs, climb up into a tree and, perhaps, attracted by those four
shots--no, three, she must save one--some trapper, some unimaginable
wanderer in the winter forest, would come to her and rescue her before
the end. So her mind twisted itself with hope. But, an hour later, with
the pines not very far away, the baying rose so close behind that it
stopped her heart. Twenty minutes had passed when above a rise of ground
she saw the shaggy, trotting black-gray body of Brenda, the leader of the
pack. She was running slowly, her nose close to the snow, casting a
little right and left over the tracks. Sheila counted eight--Berg, then,
had joined them. She thought that she could distinguish him in the rear.
It was now late afternoon, and the sun slanted driving back the shadows
of the nearing trees, of Sheila, of the dogs. It all seemed
fantastic--the weird beauty of the scene, the weird horror of it. Sheila
reckoned the distance before her, reckoned the speed of the dogs. She
knew now that there was no hope. Ahead of her rose a sharp, sudden
slope--she could never make it. There came to her quite suddenly, like a
gift, a complete release from fear. She stopped and wheeled. It seemed
that the brutes had not yet seen her. They were nose down at the scent.
One by one they vanished in a little dip of ground, one by one they
reappeared, two yards away. Sheila pulled out her gun, deliberately aimed
and fired.
A spurt of snow showed that she had aimed short. But the loud, sudden
report made Brenda swerve. All the dogs stopped and slunk together
circling, their haunches lowered. Wreck squatted, threw up his head, and
howled. Sheila spoke to them, clear and loud, her young voice ringing out
into that loneliness.
"You Berg! Good dog! Come here."
One of the shaggy animals moved toward her timidly, looking back,
pausing. Brenda snarled.
"Berg, come here, boy!"
Sheila patted her knee. At this the big dog whined, cringed, and began
to swarm up the slope toward her on his belly. His eyes shifted, the
struggle of his mind was pitifully visible--pack-law, pack-power, the
wolf-heart and the wolf-belly, and against them that queer hunger for the
love and the touch of man. Sheila could not tell if it were hunger or
loyalty that was creeping up to her in the body of the beast. She kept
her gun leveled on him. When he had come to within two feet of her, he
paused. Then, from behind him rose the starved baying of his brothers.
Sheila looked up. They were bounding toward her, all wolf these--but more
dangerous after their taste of human blood than wolves--to the bristling
hair along their backs and the bared fangs. Again she fired. This time
she struck Wreck's paw. He lifted it and howled. She fired again. Brenda
snapped sideways at her shoulder, but was not checked. There was one shot
left. Sheila knew how it must be used. Quickly she turned the muzzle up
toward her own head.
Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion. Brenda leapt high into
the air and fell at Sheila's feet. At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled
with shadow swiftness through the trees. For the rest, it was as though
a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell
upon death. Crack, crack, crack--one after another, they came up,
leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow. At the end Sheila
turned blindly. A yard behind her and slightly above her there under
the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the
smoking muzzle lowered. Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping
with her hands.
He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his
arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.
"I heard your shots," he said breathlessly. "You're within a hundred
yards of my house.... For months I've been trying to make up my mind to
come to you. God forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!"
Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his
arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the
woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.
CHAPTER XII
THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN
Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid
her down in that big bedroom that "got the morning sun." For a while it
seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did
regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the
shock of Miss Blake's death that she lay there too weak to smile or
speak, too weak almost to breathe. Hilliard turned nurse, a puzzled,
anxious nurse. He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and
when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall prone on the elk-hide
rug before his fire.
At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house. She spent
a day in the big log chair before Hilliard's hearth, looking very wan,
shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.
"Aren't you ever going to smile for me again?" he asked her, after a long
half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the
pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.
She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough. But it
brought tears. They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed
her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her
lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands. Hilliard went over to her
and took the small, cold hands in both of his.
"Tell me about what happened, Sheila," he begged her. "It will help."
Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed
and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face. He
gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp
oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.
"God!" he said at the last. "And she told you I had gone from the
country! The devil! I can't help saying it, Sheila--she tortured you. She
deserved what God sent her."
"Oh, no!"--Sheila rocked to and fro--"no one could deserve such dreadful
terror and pain. She--she wasn't sane. I was--foolish to trust her ... I
am so foolish--I think I must be too young or too stupid for--for all
this. I thought the world would be a much safer place." She looked up
again, and speech had given her tormented nerves relief, for her eyes
were much more like her own, clear and young again. "Mr. Hilliard--what
shall I do with my life, I wonder? I've lost my faith and trustingness.
I'm horribly afraid."
He stood before her and spoke in a gentle and reasonable tone. "I'll tell
you the answer to that, ma'am," he said. "I've thought that all out
while I've been taking care of you."
She waited anxiously with parted lips.
"Well, ma'am, you see--it's like this. I'm plumb ashamed of myself
through and through for the way I have acted toward you. I was a fool to
listen to that dern lunatic. She told me--lies about you."
"Miss Blake did?"
"Yes, ma'am." His face crimsoned under her look.
Sheila closed her eyes and frowned. A faint pink stole up into her face.
She lifted her lids again and he saw the brightness of anger. "And, of
course, you took her lies for the truth?"
"Oh, damn! Now you're mad with me and you won't listen to my plan!"
He was so childish in this outbreak that Sheila was moved to dim
amusement. "I'm too beaten to be angry at anything," she said. "Just tell
me your plan."
"No," he said sullenly. "I'll wait. I'm scared to tell you now!"
She did not urge him, and it was not till the next morning that he spoke
about his plan. She had got out to her chair again and had made a
pretense of eating an ill-cooked mess of canned stuff which he had
brought to her on a tray. It was after he had taken this breakfast away
that he broke out as though his excitement had forced a lock.
"I'm going down to Rusty to-day," he said. His eyes were shining. He
looked at her boldly enough now.
"And take me?" Sheila half-started up. "And take me?"
"No, ma'am. You're to stay here safe and snug." She dropped back. "I'll
leave everything handy for you. There's enough food here for an army
and enough fuel.... You're as safe here as though you were at the foot
of God's throne. Don't look like that, girl. I can't take you. You're
not strong enough to make the journey in this cold, even on a sled. And
we can't"--his voice sunk and his eyes fell--"we can't go on like this,
I reckon."