"In case you need grub, lady," he said,"--and them two suitcases don"t hold a lot,--I"ll bring out anything you say: eggs and b.u.t.ter and garden truck at market prices. I"m no phylanthropist," he said, glaring at Tish, "but I"d be glad to help the girl, and that"s the truth. I been married to this here wife o" mine quite a spell, and to my first one for twenty years, and I"m a believer in married life."
"What girl?" I asked.
He turned right round in the seat and winked at me.
"All right," he said. "I"ll not b.u.t.t in unless you need me. But I"d like to know one thing: He hasn"t got a mother, he says, so I take it you"re his aunts. Am I on, ladies?"
We didn"t know what he was talking about, and we said so. But he only smiled. A mile or so from our destination the horse scared up a rabbit, and Tish could hardly be restrained from running after it with a leather thong. Aggie, however, turned a little pale.
"I"ll never be able to eat one, never!" she confided to me. "Did you see its eyes? Lizzie, do you remember Mr. Wiggins"s eyes? and the way he used to move his nose, just like that?"
At the end of fifteen miles the driver drew up his horses and took a fresh chew of tobacco.
"I guess this is about right," he said. "That trail there"ll take you to the lake. How long do you reckon it"ll be before you"ll need some fresh eggs?"
"We are quite able to look after ourselves," said Tish with hauteur, and got out of the wagon. She paid him off at once and sat down on her suitcase until he had driven out of sight. He drove slowly, looking back every now and then, and his last view of us must have been impressive--three middle-aged and determined women ready to conquer the wilderness, as Tish put it, and two suitcases.
It was as solitary a place as we could have wished. We had not seen a house in ten miles, and when the last creak of the wagon had died away there was a silence that made our city-broke ears fairly ache. Tish waited until the wagon was out of sight; then she stood up and threw out her arms.
"At last!" she said. "Free to have a lodge in some vast wilderness--to think, to breathe, to expand! Lizzie, do you suppose if we go back we can get that rabbit?"
I looked at my watch. It was one o"clock and there was not a berry-bush in sight. The drive had made me hungry, and I"d have eaten a rabbit that looked like Mr. Wiggins and called me by name if I"d had it. But there was absolutely no use going back for the one we"d seen on our drive.
Aggie was opening her suitcase and getting out her costume, which was a blue calico with short sleeves and a shoe-top skirt.
"Where"ll I put it on?" she asked, looking about her.
"Right here!" Tish replied. "For goodness sake, Aggie, try to discard false modesty and false shame. We"re here to get close to the great beating heart of Nature. Take off your switch before you do another thing."
None of us looked particularly well, I admit; but it was wonderful how much more comfortable we were. Aggie, who is very thin, discarded a part of her figure, and each of us parted with some pet hypocrisy. But I don"t know that I have ever felt better. Only, of course we were hungry.
We packed our things in the suitcases and hid them in a hollow tree, and Tish suggested looking for a spring. She said water was always the first requisite and fire the second.
"Fire!" said Aggie. "What for? We"ve nothing to cook."
Well, that was true enough, so we sent Aggie to look for water and Tish and I made a rabbit snare. We made a good many snares and got to be rather quick at it. They were all made like this ill.u.s.tration.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
First Tish, with her book open in front of her, made a running noose out of one of the buckskin thongs. Next we bent down a sapling and tied the noose to it, and last of all we bound the free part of the thong round a snag and thus held the sapling down. The idea is that a rabbit, bounding along, presumably with his eyes shut, will stick his head through the noose, kick the line clear of the snag and be drawn violently into the air. Tish figured that by putting up half a dozen snares we"d have three or four rabbits at least each day.
It was about three when we finished, and we drew off to a safe distance to watch the rabbit bound to his doom. But no rabbits came along.
I was very empty and rather faint, but Tish said she had never been able to think so clearly, and that we were all overfed and stodgy and would be better for fasting.
Aggie came in at three-thirty with a hornet sting and no water. She said there were no springs, but that she had found a place where a spring had existed before the dry spell, and there was a naked footprint in the mud, quite fresh! We all went to look at it, and Tish was quite positive it was not a man"s footprint at all, but only a bear"s.
"A bear!" said Aggie.
"What of it?" Tish demanded. "The "Young Woodsman" says that no bear attacks a human unless he is hungry, and at this time of the year with the woods full of food--"
"Humph!"--I could not restrain myself--"I wish you would show me a little of it. If no rabbit with acute melancholia comes along to commit suicide by hanging on that gallows of yours, I think we"ll starve to death."
"There will be a rabbit," Tish said tersely; and we started back to the snare.
I was never so astonished in my life. There was a rabbit! It seems we had struck a runway without knowing it, although Tish said afterward that she had recognized it at once from the rabbit tracks. Anyhow, whether it died of design or curiosity, our supper was kicking at the top of the sapling, and Tish pretended to be calm and to have known all along that we"d get one. But it was not dead.
We got it down somehow or other and I held it by the ears while it kicked and scratched. I was hungry enough to have eaten it alive, but Aggie began to cry.
"You"ll be murderers, nothing else," she wailed. "Look at his little white tail and pitiful baby eyes!"
"Good gracious, Aggie," Tish snapped, "get a knife and cut its throat while I make a fire. If it"s any help to you, we"re not going to eat either its little white tail or its pitiful baby eyes."
As a matter of fact Aggie wouldn"t touch the rabbit and I did not care much about it myself. I do not like to kill things. My Aunt Sarah Mackintosh once killed a white hen that lived twenty minutes without its head; two weeks later she dreamed that that same hen, without a head, was sitting on the footboard of the bed, and the next day she got word that her cousin"s husband in Sacramento had died of the hiccoughs.
It ended with Tish giving me the fire-making materials and stalking off into the woods with the rabbit in one hand and the knife in the other.
[Ill.u.s.tration: It ended with Tish stalking off into the woods with the rabbit in one hand and the knife in the other]
Tish is nothing if not thorough, but she seemed to me inconsistent. She brought blankets and a canvas tepee and sandals and an aluminum kettle, but she disdained matches. I rubbed with that silly drill and a sort of bow arrangement until my wrists ached, but I did not get even a spark of fire. When Tish came back with the rabbit there was no fire, and Aggie had taken out her watch crystal and was holding it in the sun over a pile of leaves.
Tish got out the "Young Woodsman" from the suitcase. It seems I had followed cuts I and II, but had neglected cut III, which is: Hold the left wrist against the left shin, and the left foot on the fireblock. I had got my feet mixed and was trying to hold my left wrist against my right shin, which is exceedingly difficult. Tish got a fire in fourteen minutes and thirty-one seconds by Aggie"s watch, and had to wear a bandage on her hand for a week.
But we had a fire. We cooked the rabbit, which proved to be much older than Aggie had thought, and ate what we could. Personally I am not fond of rabbit, and our enjoyment was rather chastened by the fear that some mushrooms Tish had collected and added to the stew were toadstools _incognito_. To make things worse, Aggie saw some goldenrod nearby and began to sneeze.
It was after five o"clock, but it seemed wisest to move on toward the lake.
"Even if we don"t make it," said Tish, "we"ll be on our way, and while that bear is likely harmless we needn"t thrust temptation in his way."
We carried the fire with us in the kettle and we took turns with the tepee, which was heavy. Our suitcases with our city clothes in them we hid in a hollow tree, and one after the other, with Aggie last, we started on.
The trail, which was a sort of wide wagon road at first, became a footpath; as we went on even that disappeared at times under fallen leaves. Once we lost it entirely, and Aggie, falling over a hidden root, stilled the fire. She became exceedingly disagreeable at about that time, said she was sure Tish"s mushrooms were toadstools because she felt very queer, and suddenly gave a yell and said she had seen something moving in the bushes.
We all looked, and the bushes were moving.
III
It was dusk by that time and the path was only a thread between ma.s.ses of undergrowth. Tish said if it was the bear he would be afraid of the fire, so we put dry leaves in the kettle and made quite a blaze. By its light Tish read that bears in the summer are full fed and really frolicsome and that they are awful cowards. We felt quite cheered and brave, and Tish said if he came near to throw the fire kettle at him and he"d probably die of fright.
It was too late to put up the tepee, so we found a clearing near the path and decided to spend the night there. Aggie still watched the bushes and wanted to spend the night in a tree; but Tish"s calmness was a reproach to us both, and after we had emptied the kettle and made quite a fire to keep off animals, we unrolled our blankets and prepared for sleep. I could have slept anywhere, although I was still rather hungry. My last view was of Tish in the firelight grimly bending down a sapling and fastening a rabbit snare to it.
During the night I was wakened by somebody clutching my arm. It was Aggie who lay next to me. When I raised my head she pointed off into the woods to our left. At a height of perhaps four feet from the ground a ghastly red glow was moving rapidly away from us. It was not a torch; it was more a radiance, and it moved not evenly, but jerkily. I could feel the very hair rising on my head and it was all I could do to call Tish.
When we had roused her, however, the glow had faded entirely and she said we had had a nightmare.