Shepherds of the Wild quotes

The fledglings, the little weasel noticed as he climbed here and there through the branches, were just the July size—still soft with the fat of squabhood but yet big enough to make a pleasing lump in the stomach.

The pines are a wonderful calendar in themselves; and only to the eyes of human beings, badly in need of spectacles, do they seem never to change.

They go from a deep, rich green to a strange dusky blue, and now they were just about halfway between. This fact, as well as the size and developments of their cones, indicated as clearly as a printed calendar that the month was July.

Spread Horn made it his business to walk into the face of the wind just as much as possible, and in that way he was aware of all living creatures in the foreground before they were aware of him.

To walk down the wind, all creatures know, is to announce one’s self as clearly as to wear a bell around the neck.

Neither did the great elk make any sounds in particular. If indeed a twig cracked from time to time beneath his foot it was not enough to arouse any interest.

There was nothing here to perish or change. It had been the same for uncounted centuries—since the first dim days when the nomads drove their flocks over the plains of Asia.

Cities are born, grow great, are cursed with wickedness, and perish. The flocks still wander on the hills.

Men catch new fancies, follow new teachings, build new orders, and pursue new ways. The firelight of the herder still glows in the twilight. Civilization rises and falls like the tide. The beasts of prey still lurk in the thickets to slay the sheep.

Cities are born, grow great, are cursed with wickedness, and perish. The flocks still wander on the hills. Men catch new fancies, follow new teachings, build new orders, and pursue new ways. The firelight of the herder still glows in the twilight.

Civilization rises and falls like the tide.

The beasts of prey still lurk in the thickets to slay the sheep. Fashions, hobbies, pleasures, habits and modes of life, faiths and doctrines, even kingdoms and palaces start up, flourish, change and die—and still the shepherd dog keeps his watch.

The night shuddered with them: the agony of the deer in the cougar’s claws; the crunch of fangs when the wolves tracked down their game; even the shrill, terrible death-cry of the birds when the climbing marten overtook them on their perches.

Not for nothing does the buzzard watch all day from the clouds.

He knows; and whoever listens to the wilderness voices knows too. The wild, despairing song of the pack, the wail of the coyote, even the murmur of the pines is a song of death, immutable and dark, at the end of their little days.

A word came to Hugh’s lips and he spoke it in the silence.

“Service,” he said softly. “Old fellow, you give service.”

Suddenly he knew that this was the great debt that all living things owed: service in the great cause of existence that no man fully understands. He tried to remember what service he himself had given. Dim regrets swept over him.

It was his own presence as much as the growlings of the dog that kept the puma at a distance. Except for him, white fangs even now would be tearing at the throats of the lambs.

For the first time in his life he was serving.

Was not his gun resting in his hands? For once in his life he was bearing arms in the oldest war that mankind knows—the war against the menace of the wild. The blood leaped and sang in his veins.

but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn’t make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine.

“When Quill-back escapes the hunter,” the saying goes, “the buzzards will be full-fed tomorrow.”

The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards.

And in that dim light he saw that only a few seconds remained in which to attempt a rescue. The wild waters broke against the rocks between which the lamb lay; and in a few seconds more it would cease its struggles.

It was only an animal, a baby sheep that was one of three thousand, a little armful of warm flesh that would never be missed.

To rescue it would tax the last ounce of strength in Hugh’s body. It might very easily cost him his life. It wasn’t worth it.

For the coyotes do not keep their afflictions to themselves. Their voice suddenly shudders out of the half-darkness, a long wail broken by half-sobs—infinitely despairing and sad.

Very few of the wilderness voices are joyful.

Even the whistling of the birds—close observers find out at last—have a plaintive note that seems never entirely absent. No man can doubt the sadness in the wailing cries of the passing geese—telling of the bleak, glooming marshes where they live and die.

Nor was it kindly and wholesome old age that had come to him: the ripened wisdom of venerable years. It was a false age, and it had given him a wholly false outlook on life.

Two weeks ago he had felt infinitely old and tired, and now he had been born again.

His vision hadn’t been quite straight. He had taken his own little sphere of life to represent the whole magnificent sphere in which the continents rise above the sea.

It had become quite easy to laugh at simple, wholesome pleasantries. Yet there was no familiarity here. Alice had told the truth: last names take time; and time, in the West, is precious. Names were designations of people, rather than people the representatives of names.

Names didn’t matter and people did.

“Dan called me Alice too,” she went on, suddenly remembering to remind Hugh that he was in the same class, as far as privileges went, with his predecessors.

Yet the thought kept creeping back, haunting her, filling her—in those little seconds of stress in which the pack leaped nearer—with an unnamable horror. It couldn’t be that they were so frantic that they would tear her down in order to get at their prey.

Fate did not have that in store for her at least⁠—their cruel fangs at her tender flesh, their leaping, frenzied bodies lingering just an instant beside her, then racing on after the terrified sheep.

It occurred to her that there might be time, even yet, to spring up a tree and leave the sheep to their fate. Yet was not she the shepherdess, the guardian of the flock?

The wolves ran their game, and since in the hot, stifling days exhaustion came quickly to their prey, perhaps they benefited, rather than suffered, from the drought. But these gray hunters can always be expected to benefit.

“Mercy from Cold-Eye is the season that betrays the wolf,”

is one of those strange maxims among the forest people, and it needs, like most of the forest sayings, a certain amount of interpretation.

Living an artificial life, he had seen only exteriors. He had flattered himself—in his subconscious mind rather than conscious—that they were close and lasting friends. Now he knew that only the fire of conflict and stress can weld a lasting friendship between man and man.

Friendship is too dear and precious a thing to find in soft ways.

That, like all of the other rewards of life, goes only to the warrior.

Rather the fire that he had ignited had crept into them also: the pupils were oddly contracted and bright as points of steel. He seemed somewhat breathless, too, stirred to the depths with a madness unknown even to the wild creatures.

There is no more wholesome emotion on earth than the love for the open fire.

It was the first friend, and its comradeship and protection are remembered from the immeasurable past. And there is no madness that is so devastating and terrible as that of incendiarism. José was not, ordinarily, a man given to excesses.

It cast a red glow over the whole forest world. The warm color deepened as the night encroached upon the twilight, and all semblance of reality faded from the land.

It was as if it had been dipped in red wine.

The great trees were incarnadine, the canyons swam in red vapor, even the sheep had red wool. No longer was this the green and lovely mountain realm they had known. Rather it was an inferno of mythology, an underworld lighted by sulphurous fires.

He seemed to know that from this shaggy forest creature he was to receive a sign that must not be ignored or missed.

“The wild folk show the way,” is one of the oldest maxims of the forest, and Hugh had learned his lesson.

He was the shepherd, but also he was the forester. And the simple faith, the humbleness, the sure and inner knowledge of the Indian had come to him at last.

She looked down in desperate appeal, and she knew her answer when she found a strange little ghost of a smile at his white lips.

“But a good herder⁠—doesn’t leave his sheep,” he told her soberly.

The tone was perfectly simple, wholly sincere, utterly free from emotionalism or self-pity. Yet it thrilled and moved her to the depths of her being.

the frontiersman, striking out from his beloved hearth to seek new dominions; the bloodstained paths of armies; the builder, stretching his bridges across roaring rivers and his railroads into uncharted lands.

Through the long roll of the ages she saw the shepherd on the rugged hills, alone and wondering and full of thoughts, watching his sheep.

The man he had been—the waster and the egotist—was wholly gone now. Only the shepherd remained. Hugh saw himself as he really was—just a pawn by which Destiny works out vast and invisible schemes of its own. His life didn’t matter here.