Yet she did not want to go. It was as if the voice of reason within her—the voice that urged her forth—were obscured by the incorporeal voices that spoke in her inner being. One was that of the forest, and it spoke in warning. “Come not on to my darkened trails,” it might have said. “They are thine in the daylight hours, but at night they belong to the beasts. This is the time of talon and fang, and thy flesh is tender. I am old and wise, but also I am new, with the newness of the young world. And my spirit is Death.” And the other voice was that of the ruddy camp fire behind her. “Stay, stay, stay,” it crackled. “Here is thy hearth and thy heart. Stay, tender one.”
As the shadows encroached and the firelight grew ever more dim, she found herself looking back—again and again—to the bright blaze. Tonight it was home, and these forest trails were dark and silent. She entered the forest, but ever she saw its cheering gleam between the trees—a bright haven of refuge where Danger could not come. She didn’t entirely understand. She had ventured forth into the forests at night before, but never with such regret.
She could still see the form of Hugh seated beside the fire; and the sight moved her strangely. But she would not admit—even to herself—that part of the appeal of that bright circle of light was due to his presence. It had never seemed so dear, so much like home before, but it could not be because of the straight, manly form that abode there. Was he not just a lowly sheep herder, a weakling whose metal had been proven false in the crucible of life? What did he mean to her: just an employee that would soon pass on to other occupations. Yet she had felt wholly secure and comforted beside his fire. She remembered the play of his shoulders as he had hewed the fir log; and she found herself longing for his protection now. Yet what right had she to think that this weakened city man would be a fort in time of stress? She was of the mountain strain, and unlike many of her city cousins she did not accept the fact of his masculinity alone as being a tower of strength. Such dangers as did abide in the Smoky Land forest were no respecters of the males of the species: strength and courage alone must be tried and proven. Hugh had failed in life, she thought; why should he not also fail in courage and strength? The mountain women do not love weak men. They are down to realities, life is a constant battle for existence, and they want a warrior—whether gentleman or not—beside them through the long, dangerous hours of night. Hers were the mountain standards. And what could she expect from Hugh?
She headed into the forest, and she saw the light of the camp fire wink out behind her. It left her singularly alone. A vague depression came upon her, an uneasiness that she could not name or place. There was a sense of utter isolation never felt before. The feel of her pistol butt in her pocket—her belt had been packed among the supplies—reassured her. Then she hastened on, down the moonlit trail.
The forest was never so mysterious. The moonlight had struck away all sense of familiarity. The silver patches between the trees were of fairyland, the dusk of the shadowed thicket was incredibly black; even the changeless pines, majestic and inscrutable emblems of the wilderness, were like great, nebulous ghosts of giants. The woodland was full of ghosts: fleet-footed phantoms that sped along the trail before her, ghostly shadows that leaped behind; little, feeble ghosts of noises that couldn’t be real, and ghostly messages in the wind that whimpered and cried in the distant thickets. Yet she could not feel the wind’s breath on her face. Rather the forest was breathless, tense, vaguely sinister as never before.
Steep was the trail she took, and ever the silence seemed to deepen. She kept watch ahead for the flock, pale white in the moonlight. She found herself listening closely for any sound that might indicate their position, either the faint bleat of the ewes or the triumph cries of such beasts of prey that had killed from their numbers. But while she did not hear these things, the silence was full of other, lesser sounds. All the creatures of the forest were stirring in their night occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her.
She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then
