Fur-robed about the smoky fires that stung
Their eyes to streaming, when a freak gust flung
The sharp reek back with flaws of powdered snow.
And much the old men talked of long ago,
Invoking ghostly Winters from the Past,
Till cold snap after cold snap followed fast,
And none might pile his verbal snow so deep
But some athletic memory could heap
The drifts a trifle higher; give the cold
A greater rigor in the story told;
Put bellows to a wind already high.
And ever greater reverence thereby
The old men won from gaping youths, who heard,
Like marginalia to the living word,
The howling of the poplars tempest-bent,
The smoke-flap cracking sharply at the vent,
The lodge poles creaking eerily. And O!
The happy chance of living long ago,
Of having wrinkles now and being sires
With many tales to tell around the fires
Of days when things were bigger! All night long
White hands came plucking at the buckskin thong
That bound the door-flap, and the writhing dark
Was shrill with spirits. By the snuffling bark
Of dogs men knew that homesick ghosts were there.
And often in a whirl of chilling air
The weird ones entered, though the flap still held,
Built up in smoke the shapes they knew of eld,
Grew thin and long to vanish as they came.
Now had the scandal, like a sudden flame
Fed fat with grasses, perished in the storm.
The fundamental need of keeping warm
Sufficed the keenest gossip for a theme;
And whimsies faded like a warrior’s dream
When early in the dawn the foemen cry.
The time when calves are black had blustered by—
A weary season—since the village saw
The chiefs wife pitching for her son-in-law
The nuptial lodge she fashioned. Like a bow
That feels the arrow’s head, the moon hung low
That evening when they gave the wedding gifts;
And men had seen it glaring through the rifts
Of wintry war as up the east it reeled,
A giant warrior’s battle-bitten shield—
But now it braved no more the charging air.
Meanwhile the lodge of Carpenter stood there
Beside the chieftain’s, huddled in the snows,
And, like a story everybody knows,
Was little heeded now.
But there was one
Who seldom noted what was said or done
Among his comrades; he would sit and look
Upon the fire, as one who reads a book
Of woeful doings, ever on the brink
Of ultimate disaster. It was Fink:
And seeing this, Talbeau was sick at heart
With dreading that his friends might drift apart
And he be lost, because he loved them both.
But, knowing well Mike’s temper, he was loath
To broach the matter. Also, knowing well
That silence broods upon the hottest hell,
He prayed that Fink might curse.
So worried past
The days of that estrangement. Then at last
One night when round their tent the blizzard roared
And, nestled in their robes, the others snored,
Talbeau could bear the strain no more and spoke.
He opened with a random little joke,
Like some starved hunter trying out the range
Of precious game where all the land is strange;
And, as the hunter, missing, hears the grim
And spiteful echo-rifles mocking him,
His own unmirthful laughter mocked Talbeau.
He could have touched across the ember-glow
Mike’s brooding face—yet Mike was far away.
And O that nothing more than distance lay
Between them—any distance with an end!
How tireless then in running to his friend
A man might be! For suddenly he knew
That Mike would have him choose between the two.
How could he choose ’twixt Carpenter and Fink?
How idle were a choice ’twixt food and drink
When, choosing neither, one were sooner dead!
Thus torn within, and hoarse with tears unshed,
He strove again to find his comrade’s heart:
“O damn it, Mike, don’t make us drift apart!
Don’t do it, Mike! This ain’t a killin’ fuss,
And hadn’t ought to faze the three of us
That’s weathered many a rough-and-tumble fight!
W’y don’t you mind that hell-a-poppin’ night
At Baton Rouge three years ago last fall—
The time we fit the whole damned dancin’ hall
And waded out nigh belly-deep in men?
O who’d have said a girl could part us, then?
And, Mike, that fracas in the Vide Poche dive!
Can you forget it long as you’re alive?—
A merry time! Us strollin’ arm-in-arm
From drink to drink, not calculatin’ harm,
But curious, because St. Louis town
Fair boiled with greasy mountain men, come down
All brag and beaver, howlin’ for a spree!
And then—you mind?—a feller jostled me—
’Twas at the bar—a chap all bones and big.
Says he in French: ‘You eater of a pig,
Make room for mountain men!’ And then says you
In Irish, aimin’ where the whiskers grew,
And landin’ fair: ‘You eater of a dog,
Make room for boatmen!’ Like a punky log
That’s water-soaked, he dropped. What happened then?
A cyclone in a woods of mountain men—
That’s what! O Mike, you can’t forget it now!
And what in hell’s a woman, anyhow,
To memories like that?”
So spoke Talbeau,
And, pausing, heard the hissing of the snow,
The snoring of the sleepers, and the cries
Of blizzard-beaten poplars. Still Fink’s eyes
Upon the crumbling embers pored intent.
Then momently, or so it seemed, there went
Across that alien gaze a softer light,
As when bleak windows in a moony night
Flush briefly with a candle borne along.
And suddenly the weary hope grew strong
In him who saw the glimmer, and he said:
“O Mike, I see the good old times ain’t dead!
Why don’t you fellers shoot the whisky cup
The way you used to do?”
Then Fink looked up.
’Twas bad the way the muscles twitched and worked
About his mouth, and in his eyes there lurked
Some crouchant thing. “To hell wid you!” he cried.
So love and hate that night slept side by side;
And hate slept well, but love lay broad awake
And, like a woman, for the other’s sake
Eked out the lonely hours with worrying.
Now came a heartsick yearning for the spring
Upon Talbeau; for surely this bad dream
Would vanish with the ice upon the stream,
Old times be resurrected with the grass!
But would the winter ever, ever pass,
The howling of the blizzard ever cease?
So often now he dreamed of hearing geese
Remotely honking in the rain-washed blue;
And ever when the blur of dawn broke through
The scudding rack, he raised the flap to see,
By sighting through a certain forkèd tree,
How much the sun made northward.
Then, one day,
The curtain of the storm began to fray;
The poplars’ howling softened to a croon;
The sun set clear, and dusk revealed the moon—
A thin-blown bubble in a crystal bowl.
All night,
