The Silent Battle

George Gibbs

George Gibbs

The Silent Battle

I

LOST

Gallatin wearily lowered the creel from his shoulders and dropped it by his rod at the foot of a tree. He knew that he was lost—had known it, in fact, for an hour or more, but with the certainty that there was no way out until morning, perhaps not even then, came a feeling of relief, and with the creel, he dropped the mental burden which for the last hour had been plaguing him, first with fear and then more recently with a kind of ironical amusement.

What did it matter, after all? He realized that for twenty-eight years he had made a mess of most of the things he had attempted, and that if he ever got back to civilization, he would probably go diligently on in the way he had begun. There was time enough to think about that to-morrow. At present he was so tired that all he wanted was a place to throw his weary limbs. He had penetrated miles into the wilderness, he knew, but in what direction the nearest settlement lay he hadn’t the vaguest notion—to the southward probably, since his guide had borne him steadily northward for more than two weeks.

That blessed guide! With the omniscience of the inexperienced, Gallatin had left Joe Keegón alone at camp after breakfast, with a general and hazy notion of whipping unfished trout pools. He had disregarded his mentor’s warning to keep his eye on the sun and bear to his left hand, and in the joy of the game, had lost all sense of time and direction. He realized now from his aching legs that he had walked many miles farther than he had wanted to walk, and that, at the last, the fish in his creel had grown perceptibly heavier. The six weeks at Mulready’s had hardened him for the work, but never, even at White Meadows, had his muscles ached as they did now. He was hungry, too, ravenously hungry, and a breeze which roamed beneath the pines advised him that it was time to make a fire.

It was a wonderful hunger that he had, a healthful, beastlike hunger—not the gnawing fever, for that seemed to have left him, but a craving for Joe’s biscuits and bacon (at which he had at first turned up his pampered aristocratic nose), which now almost amounted to an obsession. Good old Joe! Gallatin remembered how, during the first week of their pilgrimage, he had lain like the sluggard that he was, against the bole of a tree, weary of the ache within and rebellious against the conditions which had sent him forth, cursing in his heart at the old Indian for his taciturnity, while he watched the skillful brown fingers moving unceasingly at the evening task. Later he had begun to learn with delight of his own growing capabilities, and as the habit of analysis fell upon him, to understand the dignity of the vast silences of which the man was a part.

Not that Gallatin himself was undignified in the worldly way, for he had lived as his father and his father’s fathers before him had lived, deeply imbued with the traditions of his class, which meant large virtues, civic pride, high business integrity, social punctilio, and the only gentlemanly vice the Gallatin blood had ever been heir to. But a new idea of nobility had come to him in the woods, a new idea of life itself, which his conquest of his own energy had made possible. The deep aisles of the woods had spoken the message, the spell of the silent places, the mystery of the eternal which hung on every lichened rock, which sang in every wind that swayed the boughs above.

Heigho! This was no time for moralizing. There was a fire to light, a shelter of some sort to build and a bed to make. Gallatin got up wearily, stretching his tired muscles and cast about in search of a spot for his camp. He found two young trees on a high piece of ground within a stone’s throw of the stream, which would serve as supports for a roof of boughs, and was in the act of gathering the wood for his fire, when he caught the crackling of a dry twig in the bushes at some distance away. Three weeks ago, perhaps, he would not have heard or noticed, but his ear, now trained to the accusto