Abruptly the Indian paused and held up his hand. Hugh crept near.
“⸺ Big animal—close,” the guide whispered. “Maybe you get a shot.”
Hugh stood still, listening. Far distant he heard the usual, faint mysterious sounds that the early night hours always bring to the wilderness world; but if anything, the primordial silence was more heavy and portentous than ever. The snow peaks still gleamed faintly, and he sensed their majesty and grandeur as never before. It was not alone an impression of beauty. Beauty is an external thing alone: in this moment of farseeing, he understood something of their mighty symbolism, their eternal watch over the waste places. He saw them as they were: grand, silent, unutterably aloof.
“How do you know?” he asked, in reply to his guide. “I don’t hear anything.”
The truth was that Pete would have found considerable difficulty in telling just how he knew. Rather it was a sixth sense, an essence in the air that blunter senses could not have perceived. “We’re near flock—maybe lot of varmints hanging close. Always is—around sheep. Don’t know what animal came near just now—cougar, I think.”
“Maybe old Broken Fang himself?”
“I don’t know. Heap maybe not. Country’s big.”
Pete was given to telling lies, on occasion, but he had told the truth for once. Hugh’s eyes leaped from peak to peak, and he began to realize something of the vast, tremendous distances of the region. They pushed on, over the ridge and through the last of a heavy wall of brush.
They came out on the edge of a small meadow—one of those grassy, treeless stretches that are so often encountered in the high ranges. Silver Creek ran through it: a stream that was a “creek” only in the Western sense. In reality it carried more water than many a famous river. It was narrow, however, lined with thickets, and evidently deep and swift. Five hundred yards beyond the great forest encroached again, and the meadow was even more narrow, parallel to the creek. And at the first glance Hugh might have thought that the meadow was covered with deep snow.
It was the sheep. They were bedding down for the night—a flock that could not contain less than three thousand ewes and lambs. They had crowded so close together that they occupied, in all, a space hardly more than a hundred yards square, and the only break in the white drift was an occasional spot of inky black. These, in a moment’s inspection, revealed themselves as black sheep—animals that occur in every western flock and are generally used by the herdsmen as markers.
Their numbers staggered Hugh. He wondered how any one herder could care for them. And he was suddenly amazed at the strange thoughts that flooded him.
The truth was that Hugh was an exceedingly sensitive man, finely tuned to all manner of external impressions. Something about that snowy band touched a side of his nature of which he had never been aware before. He couldn’t quite identify the thoughts that stirred him. They dwelt in an unknown realm of his being; he grasped for them but always they flitted away. He held hard on himself and tried to understand. The sheep bleated, the shadows grew over the distant mountains. He began to think that the plaintive bleat of the sheep was playing tricks upon his imagination. It sounded to him almost as a direct appeal for help and protection. He realized at once the truth of a fact he had heard long ago—that sheep, above all other domestic animals, are dependent upon men for their very lives. A horse may run freely in the waste places, fighting off with slashing fore feet and terrible teeth such wild enemies as molest it. The cattle can range far in comparative safety: for even the great grizzly has been known to avoid the horned steer. Even the hogs, half-wild in the underbrush, have some means of self-protection. These sheep had none.
But the thoughts he had went deeper than that. He was dimly aware of a vague symbolism, a realization that in this mountain scene could be read some of the great, essential truths of life. He had a curious impression of being face to face, for the first time in his life, with realities—in spite of the paradoxical fact that a vagueness, seemingly a bewilderment, was upon him.
All his life Hugh Gaylord had dwelt in cities. He had traveled far: sometimes in motors, usually in luxurious sleeping cars, occasionally in steamships. Yet he had never really been outside of cities. He knew the hurrying throngs, the great buildings, the busy streets. The shops, the theaters, the gaiety had been acquaintances as long as he could remember. He had never dreamed of a world without these things. Yet, in an instant, all of them seemed infinitely distant. Strangest of all, they suddenly didn’t seem to matter.
It was an impression that all his life there had been a cloud before his vision, and all at once he could see clear. Here, not in those swarming cities, was reality. The cities had been built in a day; the other factors that had been so necessary in his life—his clubs, his motor cars, his amusements, even much of the great world of business—were merely mushroom growths of a little handful of centuries that men called the age of civilization. Strangely, they no longer seemed to him the basic things of existence. Rather now, for the first time in his days, he was face to face with life—life
