A Prairie Grove

CONCLUDING INSTALLMENT

CHAPTERS 27-37

Previous Chapters of ‘A Prairie Grove’

IN the early chapters of this book Donald Culross Peattie has traced the story of a prairie grove in Illinois from the time of the glaciers. Remembering for the trees and the great grass province and all the wild creatures that lived in and upon them, he has re-created the drama of the beasts — the wolf, cougar, lynx, and buffalo — that hunted and were hunted by others of their kind and by the Indians. The Indians in turn were startled, hunted, and robbed by the traders and the coureurs de bois, innocently or not so innocently aided by priests and explorers.

Among these dispossessors was Robert Du Gay, restless, ambitious, and practical, who came up the Kilimick with his coureurs to make alliance with Nikanapi, chief of an Illinois tribe. With him came two priests: Father Pierre Prud’homme, who got into trouble with the Indian medicine man and was sent off by Du Gay to evangelize the wild Sioux — to return seven years later, mad, but faithful to his priesthood; and Father Gabriel Forreste, who was to die of dysentery, but not before his stoicism, his brotherly love, and his vision won him the devotion and respect of the Indians.

Du Gay, fortified by the arrival of his faithful lieutenant, Rafael Pons, dealt shrewdly with the Indians, forestalling a dangerous conspiracy between the Illinois and the English-bribed Miamis. After building a fort he set off on an expedition to destroy the claims of Spain upon the lower Mississippi. While so engaged he was murdered by his own men; his concept of the new empire as a source and storehouse of raw materials, like the dreams of Indians and beasts, failed and faded — a false dawn anticipating by two centuries the conquest of the prairies by the white man.

For the real conquerors of the prairie were the ‘come-outers,’ the pioneers. Typical of the people who broke the tough prairie and made it into farms was the family of Asa Goodner, from New England — Asa, to whom good stock, whether in a family or in apple trees, was a first principle; Mary Tramble, his wife, delicate, perceptive, graceful, and orderly; Amasa, the oldest son; Patience, the model daughter, housekeeper, and cook; Rhoda, the tenderhearted one; Delia, who inherited her grandmother’s wild Irish blood; Franklin, the shrewd materialist; Timothy, the young naturalist; Sybil, the imaginative eleven-year-old; Nancy and John Paul, the twins; and the vigorous old grandfather, Amoy.

In the 1820’s they built their house in the prairie grove, befriended by Jean Kiercereau, the half-breed, and by Chance Randelman, a hunter who knew the arts of the frontier anti the wild freedom of the frontiersman. That he was to be disturbed and disturbing in his relationship to the women of the family both he and Mrs. Goodner perceived at once. And so, in a different way, did Rhoda, the excitement of her first autumn in the wildly beautiful prairies stirring the secret excitement in her heart. . . .

Now with each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A PRAIRIE GROVE

BY DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

CHAPTER XXVII

FRANKLIN came back from Chicago with ideas. The town was a mudhole, and full of riffraff, but there was money in it. It had a future, perhaps not as great as that of St. Louis, but shrewd men saw it already. Franklin, though he had the least interesting mind in the family, was witness, through a long life, of the city’s giant growth; the family to this day remembers scraps of his tales about its beginnings. And I am remembering for them the night when Franklin got home, a changed son and brother, his pockets and heart stuffed with secrets, some of which he told them.

He prepared them first by wonder tales of Chicago. Besides the officers at the fort, some of them with families, the town was aswarm with peddlers and grog sellers and sharpers. At the mere rumor of a canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois, land fever had infected the whole place, and men in its delirium were buying lots for which they would never have to pay because they would sell them to-morrow at a profit.

Everybody was pursuing claims. There were claims on the government and claims against the Indians. The Indian agents were charged with cheating their wards, and everybody was frantic to get into the Indian agents’ boots. The bounty on wolves had resulted in the importation of wolf hides from Canada; at the same time there were men who were trying to get the government to pay them for the pigs that the wolves had eaten, so they did not want the wolves killed at all.

Franklin had seen New York financiers there, their gray beaver hats stuffed full of promissory notes, mortgages, and summonses. There were hunters from beyond the Missouri, in their skins and beards like Robinson Crusoe’s; there were horse dealers and horse stealers — nearly identical professions, Franklin opined. In the mud, in the smells of pigs and horses, in the rank, fresh-water odor of the lake, much trade and more opportunity were abroad. There were profit taking and cheating going on all day without apparently the compensatory action of natural or moral laws; a big profit did not mean that someone else had to take a loss, and transgression of the commandments was not punished, in this place without a God. At night the people who tried to sleep in the handful of crowded log houses, in the fort, in the wagons, even on the beach, were kept awake by the dismal celebrations of the Indians; they howled and sang and_powwowed over their liquor in worse than savagery.

Now Franklin brought out his first secret and proposal. He was a young man of initiative. Unused money was a crime, in his view of it, and, like all moralists, he was ready to take on other people’s welfare. So he had taken seventy-five dollars of the family cash, to buy an option on five acres at the mouth of the Chicago River. I can hear the family conference on Franklin’s astounding coup. His transgression of their moral law was so obvious that they did not need to point it out to him, and at first they were dumb with astonishment, for they had their first revelation of Franklin’s own come-outance. They were unacquainted with the morality of the banker, which is, except as hemmed in by law, to seize every opportunity at the lowest price, use others’ money for their own good, and then honestly pay them their share of the profits.

Old Amoy’s voice: ‘What’s the land good for, Franklin?’

Asa: ‘Must be pretty swampy, right at the mouth of the river.’

Franklin’s mother: ‘Is it the sort of place we could take the girls, my son?’

Amasa protested: ‘ Seems to me we ’ve just got settled in here.’

To all these objections Franklin’s answers were entirely unsatisfactory. The land belonged to rushes and frogs; Franklin had seen things he had hoped his sisters would never hear about, and, most fantastic of all, the idea of purchasing the land was not to put it to any use at all, but only to wait until other men had improved the vicinage and the value inevitably soared.

Amasa toyed for a while with the charm of the problem. ‘We could ditch it,’ he said. ‘Maybe build docks. Or run a ferry.’

Asa said, ‘I call it bloodsucking. Why did n’t you buy land we could improve, if you had to buy more?’

‘Land,’ said Amoy, ‘ is worth what you can make it yield you. When this Chicago boom is over, the New York investors are going to find that out.’

Franklin argued, but it was like talking to children. He grew sarcastic and lost the tepid alliance of his older brother Amasa. Asa too patently forgave him, and his mother was gently sorry about his mistake. So Franklin stuck the option paper in his new hat, clapped it on his head, and slammed his way out of the log house.

He had to come back for supper, of course, with burrs all over his trousers, and he unfolded then his second secret. He had accepted a commission as an adjuster; in harsher language, this meant that he was going to ride all over the district collecting old bills for the Chicago, St. Louis, and Alton merchants, taking a percentage on the collections.

I can hear the irritated rasp of Asa’s chair as he pushed back from the table. The girls’ eyes widened at their father’s unprecedented outburst.

‘Now look here, Franklin, that’s not a Goodner way. There are two ways of making money; one is producing it out of the stuff God gave us on earth. The other’s the leech’s way.’

Franklin flamed back at him. ‘It’s just the same as what lawyers do, but they charge a lot more for it.’

‘It takes more brains to be a lawyer,’ murmured Amasa. ‘All you need for bill collecting is a hard heart.’

‘I say it’s a leech’s way.’ This is their father’s ringing voice. ‘It is n’t that I don’t believe in a man’s paying his honest debts, but these people out here have got a mighty heavy load to carry. We ’ll all have to haul it pulling together. The West has got its back teeth mortgaged to the East, and we can’t sell them what we’ve got, with the cost of transport over the mountains what it comes to. There’s no door for us but the New Orleans merchants, and they know it.’

‘There will be,’ said Franklin, ‘when you can sail from the Illinois to New York Harbor by the lakes and canals.’

So they got back to the five acres of swamp water at the mouth of the Chicago River. When the dispute was all over, the option was to be allowed to die, and the seventy-five dollars written down to loss, without fixing blame.

Franklin became an adjuster and removed to Chicago. That town was going to grow; women would have to come, bringing with them the need for luxury that made business flower. Jogging in to Chicago, the hocks of Washington spattered high with November mud, the wholly deciduous woods bare and the prairies rusty bleak, Franklin saw before his persuaded vision the stone house, the deep stair carpet, the small comb on the boudoir table with the fluff of gold in it.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Chance Randelman kept coming to the house. He did not know when he had hunted this kind of game in the bosom of a family, and he did not know for certain which girl he was courting. Suddenly Patience looked scarcely older than her sisters; the stove gave her face a pretty flush; she had pretty fingers, and her seriousness had a charm that Chance had never before tasted. She explained to him the mysteries of pearl ash, and he attended with mock gravity; the theory of biscuits did not interest him, but her practice of it was perfect, and this Yankee cooking, this domestic altar of a stove, the forgotten decoration of books on a shelf, piety, and so much mature innocence in a girl who would have been shocked by everything about him, had she understood him — these were the quiet room of Patience. He stood no more than in its doorway still, and he could not decide whether it would be more hard fun to come in or to draw the girl out by both her wrists.

He knew a bird when it was restless for departure, and he understood Delia better than her family, to whom she was one of the children. He might have had a cruel pleasure in showing her how well he understood her; he could have unmasked her unconcern and, drawing tight the noose of instinct, have made her tremble at herself.

With Rhoda he found himself marching to a tune she seemed to know better than he. She would not meet him one half as often as he wished; he could not say things to her that meant nothing; he had either to advance or to retreat. She had not her older sister’s touch of prudery, or Delia’s vanity. She had more warmth and more candor than either. Her eyes said, her arms said, Either I am your wife, or you are a stranger. So they quarreled. He got no more kisses, knowing that by one more he would stand revealed as either a husband or a seducer. Her breasts, proud tender twins, promised rest for him and his; all her body spoke to him, saying, I am woman; how much of a man are you? So under her eyes there could be no courting of her sisters, and when they were alone he did not make more than a stormy slow progress with her.

If Patience and Delia had known that Randelman was Rhoda’s suitor, they would have stayed out of the way. As it was, they tried to cast their spells in quiet without doing anything for which Mary Tramble could look at them with long intent. Silently that well-born lady combated her visitor. He bought his way into the house with stupendous turkeys, with quail, prairie chicken, venison, and duck, and Asa was always honestly glad for his woodman’s advice. Asa trusted the taste and sense of his daughters almost boundlessly; what they were too young to know, his wife would understand for them.

Chance Randelman had family; that is, he had half of a family. The Randelmans were South Carolina, and he took the trouble to explain this to Asa and Mary Tramble. His father had n’t wanted to marry as the family saw fit. Asa clapped him kindly on the shoulder; Goodners feel that you can come-out in your marriage too. But Mary Tramble asked, ‘But why did they object?’

Melissa Babb, the bride of Broadus Randelman, had been a Tennessee mountain girl. There is no other record of her. But you can imagine the rest. She was young just one spring; perhaps Broadus first saw her barefoot in a brook, or amidst azaleas in flower. If Chance remembered that she smoked a corncob pipe in her old age, he did not tell the Goodners of it.

He had known Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and southern Illinois, in the slow nomadism of the family; he could just remember when his own house had had books in it. His father had given him fragments of a distant cultivation, so that when he hesitated, perplexed, over the three Goodner daughters, he remembered the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice. But he had a presentiment that he was the Prince of Morocco, destined to open the wrong box. For he knew himself. He had every art that a frontiersman needed; he was much less of a simpleton than Asa or Amasa; he was not afraid of anything physical; he was not entangled in sentiment. But the frontier is a thin strip and a shifting one. Guile like Franklin’s could get the better of all Chance’s wood wisdom; it would drive him out of his woods in the end. And wherever they could, women made the world as they would like to have it. What a woman’s trick those caskets were!

Winter came. All November there was no sun. The woods were sad; only the marshes had life in them, for the ducks and the geese were going over. Randelman had Timothy with him in the cattails, and he taught him to shoot flying and to leave the rank-fleshed mergansers alone and go for the delicate teal and the mallards. As he could do nothing with the boy’s sisters, Chance felt a craving to put his hand into this young life that women had made soft. He felt the pleasure of initiation when at last he got the youngster to enjoy a clean shot through the game’s heart. He taught him the cunning of traps and gave him a knife for skinning.

Timothy’s hand stopped fumbling; his reserve stiffened into confidence, He learned with an application that his teacher had never seen, but there was something growing in the boy for which Chance had no word. He had hardly heard the name of natural science; he did not recognize abstract interest when he met it, and thought it simply idle curiosity. Randelman threw skinned muskrats to his bitch Letty; the boy wanted to dissect them. Chance let him, thinking the lad’s morbid interest would soon flag. He found him just delicately teasing out the embryos from a little deer mouse. So that’s it, thought the man, and said, ‘Want to know about that? Most animals just have them in spring, but mice are at it the year around, if they get the chance. Like people.’

‘Know about it already,’ said the boy without looking up. ‘People are n’t my business. Mice are.’

December stormed in on the north wind raiding from Keewatin to the Staked Plains. There were three storms that you could scarcely distinguish, following each other with a long animal wail at the back of their white throats. The first locked up the rivers and devoured the scenery. The second scoured and sculptured the mountains of the first. The third cased the trees in sleet; it cracked tree limbs in its grip and dropped the little ice-freighted kinglets and longspurs dead from its paralyzing grasp.

Only when it was gone and the peace of death glittered marble and graven in the winter solstice did the temperature really begin to fall. The sun came out, but nothing thawed. The beautiful blue dead air lay inert over half the continent. Across crusts like the meaningless floor of the sea the glare made the men look down in pain, as animals will who are hurt by your stare. Nancy and Sybil would come running back sobbing from the privy. The older girls brought the linen in from the line, stiff and glittering with ice. Even Chance did n’t come; the snow was too deep for the roan. Amasa said it was warmer in the byre than the house. But the fire roared, and the whole family around it did not feel crowded; they shared seats, and children on the lap were warming.

The children liked the widespread disaster that was winter, and even the adults could still laugh at it. ‘January thaws, you know,’ promised Amoy. Patience blew on John Paul’s fingers; Timothy sewed on mink skins for his mother with Sybil on his left thigh, her head on his shoulder as she read aloud from her geography. She did not care for geography at all, but she had formed one of the passing unsentimental, unphysical attachments within the family that two Goodners will unexpectedly strike up, they don’t know why. All day the three older sisters were given to hugging and comforting each her own chilly upper arms; at night they lay together in their bed in the back room in a mutual happy warmth. In the trundle bed even Sybil and Nancy, who never got on together, slept close as kittens. The boys and Amoy slept in the low loft; Amasa swore when he had to put foot to the floor in the morning. But Timothy had a craving to lie coolly and by himself; he made a pallet on the planks, and the boards under his shoulder blades gave him something he wanted; they said, ‘Lie straight, take the hard, walk up-wind, see no murk, look in the crystal.’

In January, when no thaw came, he went to the river and toiled till he got the snow cleared off a patch of ice. Then in his bulky clothes he lay flat and put his hands edgewise to his temples to look deep in the locked water world. Presently, clearing more patches, he found what he was seeking — the tiny silver bubbles from the muskrat’s snout were fountaining up to collect beneath the ice as one luminous sphere.

Purified by its passage through the water, the oxygen gleamed there and the animal, swimming with his hind feet and his tail, the forelegs held squirrellike, rose sleek and gleaming with an eager nose to breathe back his translated breath. Then he saw the man shape dark and sprawled above him, bobbed sealwise, and shot with empty aching lungs for his deep suckhole in the bank.

The boy stood up and took the bearings by two willows and a naked clump of kinnikinnick, red switches spearing out of the drifts; he could come back here and break the ice and bait his trap. He was beginning to get the feel of something for which he knew no precise terms. He saw, for instance, that the teeth of the beasts could be written down as a specific dental formula, as his mother had learned at the seminary to identify flowers by their stamens and pistils. He had no books, and did not know the titles of any of those he wanted, but he could see species and families clear as he had seen the ribband strands of the eelgrass in the frozen river. His passion to collect was still juvenile enough, but he also wanted to know.

He could n’t wait for spring, when the ground would loosen and he could dig open the burrows of all the creatures that in the great horizontal scenery dwell underground. The feel of a small wild beast in the hand made his heart laugh, but then he would keep quiet, calming the vole or the shrew. And these little creatures had languages, but their voices were a whisper; no one seemed to hear them but Timothy. They moved so swiftly on the snow that others thought they had seen the shadow of a blowing leaf, but he always saw where they had dived into their ventholes, and, thrusting the crust and snow away, could overtake them and pocket them.

Living with field mice, skins of woodchucks, and the smell of mink was hard on the rest of the family, but they recognized that Timothy had some business not theirs.

CHAPTER XXIX

That was the winter of the wolves. In this grove then, on the naked sweeps, in all the sprawling county of Crawford, — name for an emptiness, — there was not man’s way, but wolf’s way. They had the last of their nights then; in a little while they would be rounded up in a hunting circle like their own; they would be shot down; they would die on the coming railroad tracks. There was no quarter for them, and they had to take the lead in their hearts and brains. They went out, scarlet rage and fear going suddenly black. They died with their hunger unfed, with the cubs unborn in the swaying bellies.

But there was a time, when the big cats were gone and the deer grown plentiful, when sheep and fowl and calves were first here to be raided, that the timber wolves and the prairie wolves were king for a decade. In the deeply penetrating disturbance of the old biota, kings fell from their thrones, and one species or another, in those unsettled times, might rise from jackal rank to leadership. But dynasty they could not have; they had their hour, and that was all.

The wolf pack was for the most part a family affair. The hunger would drive one pack upon another’s bailiwick. Together the two might flee an agonizing fast; then they would catch a third pack up in their flight from torment. But it was not all running; they only ran when there was something to catch. Else, they ate despair, and would sit about and weep for themselves like Indians.

When a man is hungry, long hungry, he is whipped. Soldiers will beg, wives will sell themselves; mothers will ask strangers to take their children if they will only feed them. But wolf’s hunger is a rack torture, and when the prey is flaired there is no begging for it and no price; only running then, mile after mile after mile, endurance on fatigue, craving as a whip, and at the end a desperate fight. When the kill went down, an hour was lived in an instant; it seemed as though the fangs had had but a morsel and the tongue had barely lapped blood. One buck to a pack made hunger only grow savagely joyous. It was a collective hunger, such as we know nothing about; there is nothing to compare it to but mob anger; to a mob, one victim may not be enough.

Old hunters’ wolf stories are colored till they glare with lies. Wolves were not brave; they were not as cunning as the foxes they hunted; they had the weakness as well as the strength of the herd. Indians did not think much of wolves; I have never read an Indian legend or narrative of wolves eating a live man. But they ate a dead one here that winter, twenty miles south of the grove. When what was left was found in spring, he was known by the diamond on his finger bone as a land shark from Wilmington who had turned a hundred and fifteen people out of Brown County in Indiana. But the wind had got him, and the drifts, and then the wolves. The pack caught his horse twelve miles away; it had strayed off the track when the rider dropped from the saddle.

They sprang the traps that winter, which Kiercereau and Timothy set, and stole the bait. Or they found the animals that had got caught there and ate them to the imprisoned paw. The twin John Paul ran in to tell of a skulking dog in the twilight. Patience went out with him to see, and what she saw was six dogs that were wolves. The slam of the door sent them flying.

Then they began to make the nights atrocious. That long plaint, generated deep in the throat, held long in the muzzle, wound through the dreams of the half-breed. He had a shack on the Seignelay, a rickety old structure built by some previous trapper, that it seemed the teeth of the north wind might crunch. The few who had ever looked inside it remembered a den of a home, with bits of things that he planned vaguely to turn some day to use lying about in dust and rot. The wolves knew his doorstep for its smell of musk and mink glands and squirrel fat, for he sat and cleaned skins there. When he saw their tracks around his place in the morning, he would swear. But now he was dreaming, the moon on his face, his fire almost out. In his dream there were running and pursuit and an aboriginal terror.

Chance Randelman woke up and heard what he called the singing. He had a cabin opposite Catfish Ferry, and, so far as I can place this to-day, it must have been near the mouth of the Kilimick, where the old Frenchman ran a raft across for the travelers for Chicago. He lived there with Bird, his servant; Bird was a Negro, for Chance was a real Southerner who could not be happy away from a race that he despised. Owning Bird was like having a dog, but a dog who could cook and keep house and clean the mud off your clothes. He supplied the welcome home, the fretful solicitude, and the admiration that a woman gives. Bird was afraid of wolves, afraid of ghosts, afraid of bad luck; he had Chance’s superstition for him, so that Chance could reassure himself by mocking the shivering black buck.

The song of the wolves stirred the hunter in Randelman; he lay tingling with unnamed desires. He thought how they spoiled the hunting and hated them hotly. He had once caught a wolf hardly more than a cub, right in the door; he grabbed it by the scruff, got the dog whip off the wall, and gave the rear quarters a long lesson; then he flung the young thief through the door and watched it scud with shamed tail for cover. He never quite knew why he had n’t simply drawn his revolver, but he had liked punishing that limb of hell. His traps belonged to him alone, and that wolf knew it now.

He was a bewildered man, although his gun sight was so steady. He lived, you would have said, like one who knew precisely what he wanted and the short way to getting it. But he was not unimaginative, and he saw the closing of a circle. He had virtues that had been worth life itself in the first stages of pioneering. That was the time when this people, we, these Americans, were cutting a way slow but clean through the hardwood forest and the mountains. That was Boone’s age, but the Boone men are sad men now. When there are no savages to slaughter to the glory of the Lord, their virtues sour. Sometimes we have to hang them; sometimes they are only lazy husbands, killing a succession of wives; perhaps the rich ones go to Africa and pretend.

Randelman was young, only twentyeight that winter; there must have been bloom on him. He had heart to warm and discomfort his selfishness. He had breeding, so that he knew how much of breeding was lacking in him. Where he did not indulge himself, he kept a strict discipline. His first law for himself was liberty; he had never worked in his life, in the sense in which the Yankees meant work, and fences were enough to make him move on. Moving on was in the blood of his kind; they were the ones who went first, but they could never remain where they went. What they did took a courage that only they had, but they did it because it was for them the easiest way out of encroaching responsibility. He and all of them were bewildered people, because they hated the wolves with a Biblical righteousness, yet when the cocks instead of the muzzles cried on midnight, they followed the pack.

He, Chance, would have been over the Rock River and into the Military Tract before this had not the circle been already closing around him. He had not imagined before that there was any circumference that could bind him, but the linked hands of three girls held him fast. He was a seducer, but he had never intentionally harmed any innocent girl or woman; his had all met him halfway; they expected nothing of him and no better behavior of themselves. They were reckless young animals who had decided to run with the wolves.

But now he heard the damnation and the ever-unsatisfied lust in the pack’s voices. He found himself on the other side, and instincts that he had not known he possessed were twined with his own appetites. A door that he could lock on his happiness, a roof wider and holier than this one, a bed made by a white hand — he could have them, for the price of giving his name and losing his identity. He had no illusion that Goodners could be changed; you would have to be one of them under their eyes. He saw how his father had broken with his family; Goodners may live in the South and have other names, and even a marriage may appear illicit to them. He supposed that perhaps his father had looked to them like the weak member of the clan. Which of the girls was the link that you could break?

Mary Tramble crept back to bed from the round of her family and the replenishing of the fire. She got into warmth again, and lay with her cheek serenely on one fine hand, listening to the shuddering misery of the wolf cry. Behind dutifully closed eyes she faced her wolves. She had a literary and a moral mind. She was not imminently nor seriously afraid of fangs; the door was locked, the gun hung over the mantel; she had men about her. It was not wild beasts that she feared. Life has so many dangers in it that you cannot risk trepidation; Mary Tramble Goodner remained calm about her daughters. But she always wanted to slam the door when she let Chance Randelman out of it. She knew too much about women to think that the girls were safe because they slept at home. Woman is never safe from her instincts; when the floodgates of her generosity open she may be swept out of the safest home.

Even what was called a happy life was stern to woman. Mary herself had felt the irresistible invasion of personality that love brings, and pregnancy, and a single devotion to family. These brought their own rewards, but they cost a round price. Simple women do not count it over; this one was not simple; she had will, she had mentality for which the biology of her career found no employment; at best, it might only be passed on to her children. It flowered also into a delicate realization of life which makes her letters invaluable to me.

Mary Tramble, I see, would never pity her daughters, any more than herself, for being consumed by an honorable destiny. To nourish life was the best métier. Waste was another thing, and not waste wholly was the spent hare that, miles away, under that winter moon, felt the jaws close. Flesh and bones had a long moment of agony; then they became wolf. Tenderness and flight were made into speed and hate and sight in the dark.

CHAPTER XXX

At last even the beauty of winter was taken down. The ice casing dropped from the trees; the height and the purity were gone from the sky, and the snow departed from the high places and in dark runnels seeped to the low ones, marsh water lying upon old ice that slowly rotted. This was the moment of the great hunger among the beasts, when the hibernators came forth and found nothing green to eat. Lean, they woke to weather colder than when they had waddled to bed. The carnivores, spent, shedding their winter fur, arrived at the mating season; it was just one new hunger to try short cat and dog tempers. The gray fox — there were no red ones here in those days — the big dog gray fox bit the vixen for her coquetry, but a bite, like one blow, may not be enough. He had to bound half a brush behind her, nipping and panting, till she had had enough punishment. There was no place on the earth to curl up in comfort, no sun or leaves yet, only cold mud and low sky. The beautiful white tips of the buntings’ plumage began to wear off. The winter was old and shabby, and could bring nothing better than an end.

The Goodner children could not be philosophic any longer. The twins complained, and Sybil longed to quarrel with anyone who would challenge her tart tongue. Timothy was sick in his mother’s four-poster, and he could not get his brothers to make the rounds of his traps now because fur at this season was of no value. He saw his specimens mauled or rotting, and coughed with continual restlessness. Delia had discovered now that she and Rhoda were rivals — she disregarded Patience; she was angry with Rhoda for her reserve and because the red dress so became her. She knew that she had succeeded in making Chance Randelman long to kiss her, and weather and family conspired to keep her from seeing him alone. The vast, muddy-footed good temper of her father and eldest brother put her out of sorts with all men. But in her adorable young face you could not read the exciting pleasure she found in deceiving everyone and planning their confusion.

Old Amoy took the intensest of endurable heat upon the cap of his knees where he sat in the attitude of a grasshopper up against the fire, cracking nuts. He was the only one of them all not discontented, confined, tired of it, and hungering. How beautiful it was, he thought, to be just deaf enough so that you could n’t hear ordinary scratches and thumps! To be able to nap in the day, to think of death without horror, to have earned already the rest of your dinners, to have your children tell you what to do and never tell you what they were going to do, to wonder sometimes what had become of all the threats with which you had been kept from life’s longest and saltiest voyages — these made up old age. Surprisingly, it was as much a mixed drink as youth had been. But Amoy had learned to down his elixirs neat.

Well, it was a long trip from toothlessness to toothlessness, as far as from Amoy, China, to Amoy in Illinois. He had chosen the forks in the road by the random of whim, and he had been intuitive or lucky. Suppose he’d stuck with the seafaring Goodners of Salem! It had sounded like a fine life in those days: travel and money, merchants and pirates, womenfolk and ladyfolk. But if he’d gone sailoring, some other man would have got Catherine, and somebody else would have raised the finest merino wool in the United States. He had lent money to these quarter-deck male relatives of his when the great days of New England’s maritime empire were over. That fool war with England had pretty well spoiled their fun, and he was glad he’d kept his feet dry. True, wool too had spun out pretty thin when the South discovered cotton. When you have a contest between a fine product and a sleazy one, the fine one loses — lingeringly, disdainfully, and certainly.

Amoy Goodner, holding the upturned flatiron between his knees, smashed another hickory shell with a hammer blow, in a neat anger.

His granddaughter Delia got her magical hair, her long, statue-like hips, and the laughter of her quick-lashed eyes from Catherine O’Brien. But she got her sheer fire-worshiping passions from the now-silvered Amoy.

How he had worshiped the fire through the woman he chose! He had tasted the impish enjoyment of confounding his family beyond Delia’s frail powers when he married his Kate. He had let them agonize over the fear that a Goodner had gone over to Rome, without bothering to tell them that Katie laughed at the priests. Poor old Pope, there were so many things in this world he wasn’t allowed to find out, so many mistakes he might make, so many oceans he could not stop, that it was no wonder his name was Innocent. That’s what Kate had said, with her hair tickling his ear and his arm under her.

He could just remember the secrecy, the bubbling, the unquestionable right of it. He had forgotten the deep astonishment, the scar of a treacherous weapon that will be left on any lover who stands by woman. The look of her eyes widening and darkening with pain, the spectacle of courage glittering and towering up before you, the final chaos, and the astounding insignificance of the result of it all, tadpole-shaped and uncertain whether to continue this new endeavor of snuffling in air and wailing it out — he had supposed that you could never forget what the bill was like when it came in, but he had forgotten it, serenely; because women forgive you all those debts.

Well, and now he could feel in his bones that spring was beginning again, all the old ruckus. You never could crack the hardest nuts, and he had had enough of coddling this chimney. They did n’t know, when he unfolded himself from his hot corner, that Amoy had decided their winter was over. But he knew that you could n’t hold times and tempers back, and for his part he would always open the door for them.

So without even his muffler or cap he went and stood in the doorway, bent at the knees, bent at the hips, bent at the shoulders, achieving balance without anywhere being able, any more than an old tree, to hold a limb plumb. He took in a long, wavering breath — suddenly aware that there were not so many of those left to him — and with it in his lungs he tasted what was in it. He saw the haze that was not yet greenness, but only quickness in the high ultimate twigs; he saw ground silver holding a little blue in it. The eaves were dripping and the sun was shining through the drops. He was not so old but that the promise of disturbance and joy was decipherable to him, although not meant for him. It’s over, he thought; it’s beginning.

He said, ‘Let’s stand the door open for a while, my dears; the wind’s turned south. Well, I guess we wintered it out.’

CHAPTER XXXI

That spring the island grove was for the last time indeed an island, when the waters of the Kilimick and of the Seignelay rose up in their sullen anger and showed their power. The ploughs were to come; the old prairie roots and culms would go, and dutiful cereals, manageable and shallow of their hold, would take their place. The ditches of small farmholdings would leech the land. So the great floods would go. At last even the mud would go, with the falling water table of the land, the drying of the sloughs.

But the old accounts, all the early travelers’ tales, tell the story of the might of vernal water. ‘For two days, though in the heart of the continent, our wheels were never once out of water.’ ‘A year ago we had passed this way dryshod in autumn, over the prairie grass blackened with fire; then we were put to it to find a stagnant puddle to drink, a spot big enough to wet a heron’s foot. Now we seemed, like Noah, to wander on a watery waste.’ ‘Our oxcarts were five days in making seven miles through the thaw and the muddy sea.’ ‘An old man having died in the wagons, we could not find a dry place to lay his body until the end of the third day.’ ‘The trace — you could hardly call it a road — disappeared at the edge of our girdled rise of wooded ground as two ruts in the bitter cold and dirty water. We should never have begun our journey at this season, nor would we have done so but for the land fever and the rumor that all the best sites would be secured from the government before autumn.’

The sign for water is in all the old zodiacs, whether invented for spring beside the Ho or the Tigris. Before there can be growth and flowering, fruit and plenty, there must be water. This is law, and the writ runs too along the Ohio and the Muskingum, the Wabash and the Seignelay. In the Old World you have the symbol of the Fishes and the Water Carrier. The Ioway called March the Moon of Frogs.

For the frogs racially remember the watery eras, the age of the world marshes, when the club mosses, great and branched as trees, were showering down the spores that laid the coal measures. Now, first, the swamp tree frogs began to pipe, in the night, and the thin eery creaking stole to the cars of Patience, wakeful and remembering a rocky spring sweet with arbutus. Pip-pip-pip, they called; creak, crack, crick. The sound upwelled as a choral of unearthly rejoicing in something pre-Adamite and hostile to his sons. Peep-pee-yeap; by day the chanting ringed the grove around, and, reechoing, stretched away to the aqueous and lonely rim of March.

Then was the convocation of amphibians, when the many kinds of salamanders mingled at the vast breeding waters. The spotted species in the icy darkness danced their courting saraband, males and females weaving through the shallows, till the little grinning dragon males set their spermatophoric cones, and the females swept them up in the thin cloacal lips.

The frogs were met, by moonlight, in tremulous liquid: the tiny swamp tree frog’s throat swelled out, a pearly sack as great as all his body, to pipe the female to him. The green frogs clasped in the long and cold embrace, and when the roe at last was laid, the milt was cast upon the waters, to come back alive and swarming.

The green frogs plucked their cello strings; the deep note gurgled in the flood. The bass male chuckling of the wood frogs ran under the long snoring croak of the leopards, and over the swamp peepers’ choral soared thinly the wail of the hylas, the tree frogs, prophesying rain to come, more rain to fall, and waters still to rise.

The old ice rotted; it rose and melted; it sank and was refrozen, and, continually turning in convective thermostat, it ringed the grove with a saltless arctic sea, where the grebes bobbed and dived, and the mergansers and the loons did turns around the isle.

The killdeer came, complaining, slanting in sideways as if hunting for one dry spot to rest their breasts. The spring clouds flew, darkening drowned meadows to a slaty sea. In the stern light the false groves of cottonwood and aspen rose white-limbed and awed. Then the clouds broke, and the sunlight shafted, wanly, to be drunk deep by the black earth, eager of absorption. Reside the cabin door, like Noah’s dove, a single bluebird lighted, earth-scorning, and, sitting on an upright stump, shook out the soft contralto song a moment to the sunlight.

Secretly the rough-shanked willows round the interior sloughs began to limber, with a yellowing of the twigs that snap off at a touch. Delia, walking in the wind with billowing skirts, broke off a switch and whistled it angrily through the air. She was deeply restless, increasingly belligerent to all her family.

Asa Goodner left his books and walked down through the oak openings and over the wild wet sod, to see what had become of his apple seedlings. The little withes looked dead — frozen and drowned and done for. He scratched them with a horny nail, one, and then another, but they were gone-the delicate Greenings, the brave young Winesaps, the Pumpkin-Sweets and Summer Queens and Fall Pippins. Only somehow, he found, the Rambos had survived. Hardy, trusty, lucky, sweet, they had pulled through by a miracle. He remembered where he had planted them, on the higher ground, and how he’d battled with the choking grass and had its roots out all around the Rambo roots. From the first, all the way in the long wagon haul, he’d pampered them. Mary Tramble had opined he thought more of those Rambos than of his daughters; you’d give them, she had teased, the last cupful of water in a desert.

Well, they had their fill of water now, and with sea-blue Goodner eyes he looked west across the receding waste of mud. Another, in that moment, might have owned himself a beaten man, a foolhardy adventurer who had lost the race by running at the start too fast and far. He was sick enough with disappointment to lean upon his rigid arm, against an oak bole where the bark algas were green with the poisonous-looking verdure of spring at the rank. But Asa Goodner was the sort who tries again — the Sisyphus who defeats the stone and the whim of gods. Before him st retched the sodden prairie, waiting to try him with its might, to dull his ploughshare and kill his team. Behind the tender blue of the sky lurked the raw cobalt of August, the drought, and the searing. He had come with axe and fire and share and woman and child. But the untamed continent kept last words to say. It had the buffalo flies to loose upon his cattle, and the ague in its breath. It could send the crows and the pigeons, the prairie chickens and the squirrels, to pick his grain; and, like the ill will of Nikanapi, it packed the scorching west wind in its medicine bag. Frailly erect, looking like a hibernator just emerged, in the baggy last of his winter clothes, Asa Goodner stood and stared down aboriginal enemy with an indomitable dream.

Where the bitterns humped in the impenetrable mud world, amidst the stalks of the dead year’s weeds, he saw the tender wheat, upthrusting through the future springs. Where his drowned seedlings leaned, he saw the good trees rise, wide-spaced, well pruned, scarlet and crimson globes behind clean leaves. I walk there now, in the vestige of that orchard. Now the apple trees stoop like old women who thrust their hands into the pains and hollows of their backs; they lean upon the props we give them. Yet they refuse old age, except its dignity. Each spring they bear their fragile blow, and some of it —a little still — will ripen to the pome, tart and sprightly at the lips. And this grain, to-day, is high where Asa looked across the miasmal savannah.

Your kingdom, Asa Goodner, your power and your glory. The barn swallows thank you for the barn with the hand-hewn, snuff-brown beams. Swifts thank you for the chimneys that, one after the other, you and your sons raised here. The bluegrass and the orchard grass, the timothy and redtop, dimple and beck in the young wind, clash leaves and whisper Asa, Asa.

But the old high grass went when you broke the virgin sod; the marshes went with the ditches. They locked with you in battle, and you aged each other. Your seed is here. And the wild grass is gone.

CHAPTER XXXII

The sound began before the sunrise, when the light was a violet paling over the stars. And it began out on the world’s rim and was picked up, relayed, washed on, and boastfully flung back. It came to the sleeping grove and ringed the shagbarks and the burr oaks round. There were booming surges of this sound that came in, first a crest and then a just discernible trough of silence, closed by another wave.

Some who can remember still how the prairie chicken used to boom have called it blowing, and some, crowing. Others say he looted, cooed, whistled ‘between the call of a bobwhite and the hoarse blowing of the nighthawk.’ Most of the old accounts agree that it rang out, in the rising pitch of do, re, mi, as ‘boom-ah-BOOM.’ But Bird, the Negro, claimed they ‘hollered’ Ole-Mull-Doom.

Ole-Mull-Doom — the challenge thudded, and the bird upon the last tuft of the young springing grass at the edge of the grove rose up and replied to it, swelling out the enormous orange sacs in his throat in answer. He lifted wings halfway, like a Frenchman shrugging to his elbows, to his fingertips, But this was the opening gesture of a combat dance. Now male pride erected the stiff tail brush till the excited white feathers showed like the cottontail’s scut or the snowy hairs on the deer’s rump. And male rage lowered the bird’s head, where the neck tufts shot up, black and white and conspicuous as a second tail. Between this gorgeous featherwork the throat sacs bulged like painted war drums, crowing the retort to all other males who had the insolence to live. The tympanum resonated till the furious whoop ran rippling with the greater, the composite wave, toward the shores of dawn.

Mirror image of the cockbird’s rage, another bird upon another tuft faced east to the first bird’s west and looked, no less, a creature of two tails and a furious drum that bounded about on feathered legs. First bird with a rolling gait stamped his knoll till it gave off a dull subthunder to the anger of the living drum. And second bird did likewise. First bird sprang clear of the knoll, in an ecstasy of annoyance, performing thereby the third step in the ancient ritualistic dance of which he knew, though he had never practised them before, the figures. He whirled around as he leaped, and came down crest to crest with second bird, who leaped and met his rival at halfway. They whirled about like fencers, backed, and boomed, ran in to close and became a blur. Out of the first swift passage both emerged to boom again, leaving a drift of feathers on the grass.

Five females had come up to watch the sword dance; the dark bright eyes, unblinking, took it in. The crowing held them thralled; the swelling of the painted throats was glory in their sight. The outcome did not, personally, engage them; whichever triumphed, a gaudy tyrant would possess them, meek in the dust. In their ears was nothing, anywhere, from earth to sky, and south to north, but the booming, filling up the world with the trumpet blast of an instinct that belongs to spring and youth and yet is older than the very senses, older than sight or sound or smell or nerve. Behind the cluster of the hens were other pairs of cockbirds stamping and crowing to attract their notice. And beyond these, far as a chicken could run or heavily flutter in a day, darted and flirted the gross minuet, and the war cries were repealed to the end of timeless morning and the receding rim of the prairie mirror.

On earth between two dancing rivals moved something which was not of earth, which hung threadlessly in the lightening sky. It moved without sound, and the hawk was directly over them. The crowing throttled in the swollen throats, the gorgeous sacs collapsed, and dull feathers instantly closed over them; the crests drooped, the proud tails were dejected with the counter-instinct of terror; the legs sank and the whole form squatlered into the prairie duns and grays and bronzes which the plumage aped to deception. The hawk tilted by, bill swirled back on the first astonished cock in a banked glide, and had her talons in his tail before he could scutter. The ground bird flapped and clawed, leaving a welter of his feathers on the earth he loved. But once she got him in the air, the she-hawk was mistress, and her beak was law. Yet this savage deed was brief, and lost in the mating combats that were their own kind of savagery. The sound of death went up unheard for the booming.

Boom-ah-BOOM — the sun was up. The sun, renewing in the year, was coming to his lordly realm. The tender grass was shooting, sweet grass that the Indian girls once wove in baskets, holy grass with the odor of a woman’s hair, which is the first to bloom, gleaming bronze in the young morning with its anthers dangling on the day. Young day, young steppe, life old and young at once — they were all met here, by annual appointment; and met, unknowing, this season for their last in their old perfection — the habitat unique of ponderous sod and almost flightless and magnificently polygamous birds, of the wild grain and the locust hordes and the sunflower seeds that were the prairie chickens’ fare.

In the old biota, the prairie picture, do not look for the framed composition; the prairie scene with its triumphant horizontal bursts frames apart. Every way it suggests infinity—the bottomless loam, the bottomless blue zenith, the unfixable horizon, and the returning circle. Do not ask of prairie Nature that it shall be pretty, for it is male. It had a shaggy hide and a hoarse voice. It had pride, but was not appealing; it never, like a dainty scene, begged you to spare it, and it did not spare the seed of its own loins. Ungovernably its climate flung from drought to flood and back; it mated its children with a propulsive palm. It had an Indian’s penchant for the fat, the gras— the tons of the wild grain, the mountains of buffalo steak, that are gone. But the prairie chicken, the pinnated grouse, was here still in the childhood of men and women that I have questioned.

And of all the bird families that ever surrendered the sky for a life of gorging on earth’s prodigal table, the grouse and all their kind best merit the thick and carnal name of fowl. Heavy with meat upon their breasts, slow to take off on wings evolving to disuse, amorous as Turks, proliferous and sporting, they tempt the carnivore in man, as they tempt it in the dog and falcon. With their noisy venery they furnish him an outlet for a pent-up laugh. In their turkey posturings and struts, their cockbirds satirize a man, and the scurrying hens make women silly.

So Chance Randelman, riding out that morning across the drying grass, riding the marches of Illinois from sunup to the grove, had no mercy on the chickens. He would shoot them down in spring as gladly as in autumn; they were fatter, to be sure, in fall, but they were so brassy and so game when in the lists of love that he ‘liked fine,’ as Bird would have said, to pluck them at the red flowering.

He thought sincerely that he loved the quarry that he struck. He had the hunter’s philosophy of kill — that a gallant victim earns the honor of a clean, short death. No hawk tore the body, no coyote jaws enjoyed the dying struggles. Instead, the bullet dealt a blow, neat, almost abstract. An accurate intelligence in the brain of a centaur hunter sent the quarry a death without time — not even lime to fear. Alan and horse, rifle, bird dog, and lusty bird — they made one whole, for Chance, a perfect synchronization of instincts, skills, purposes, and worths, Mounted, he was no longer a frontiersman behind the frontier, a man with half of good blood, a lover whose best boast would be that he had never harmed a girl good enough to marry. On the mare’s back he felt, as he looked, twice as tall as any Goodner. Letty, the retriever, trotted at his stirrup, adoring as a daughter. He felt extended by his gun, as education extends one man or money another. Armed, he was the king of beasts, in this morning.

He loved a dead bird in the hand, and his lover’s hand went naturally to the heavy breast. As he rode he raised a dead brace up, lashed together by the stiff legs, and, lifting them to the level of his eyes, he gave each bird upon its wind-stirred feathers just a light salute of his lips, while he made the mockery of a smacking sound, homage to beauty of a sort. Then he swung the game out and up toward the sun, with a gay and military gesture. In his way, perhaps, he thanked some Master of Life for these lives, and for his mastery of them.

CHAPTER XXXIII

If Chance had been there when Asa and Amasa went out to break prairie with a Yankee bar-share plough, he would have laughed to see its gar-nosed blade flung out, as fast as the men could sot it in, by the proud violated roots. He would never have ploughed the prairie at all, but if he had been there to advise them he would have had them use a Southern jumper plough, for you can make it jump uncompromising snags. It was born of the forest era, among a people who planted between stumps and let it go at that.

If he had been there, Chance would have ridden ahead and shot the turkeys and chickens and the rabbits as they sprang up, routed. But Chance was absent, at the taming of the virgin prairie. It was Kiercereau who brought news of him, and a note in Rhoda’s hand. Between the lines, wherein Mary Tramble read that her second daughter had been married at New Buffalo, Rhoda was trying to say that Chance had insisted on an elopement. Mary Tramble saw — as Kiercereau saw — that Rhoda was more in love than Chance. And to carry her on pillion away had been his way of showing them that he would fling off the cultivating blade from his very roots.

Rhoda did not say where she was going to live, or when she would come to see them, because she evidently did not know. New Buffalo, they knew from Franklin’s disgusted communicalions, was outstripping Chicago and would, of course, become the zenith city of the Great Lakes. But no one hoped that Chance would keep Rhoda in such comfort. Kiercereau supposed that the young fellow would take her back to his camp on the Kilimick, and there have two slaves instead of one. As the little swart man went away from the Goodners’ startled home, he pondered upon the strange ways of maids and men. It seemed to him that they had everything to fear from each other, and that the briefer their necessary encounters, the better. He understood foxes and beavers, muskrats and the river otters, but not why men must be such fools.

Goodners as a rule are willing to talk things out, but never their regrets. On these they are taciturn, and Asa and Amasa, who regarded themselves as the most injured parties, being foremost in responsibility for Rhoda, turned to the prairie with a Biblical anger and took it out upon the refractory sod. A storm was breaking up; blue sky was winning, and the west wind scudded the clouds before it, so that shadow rushed across the grass drenching the sappy brightness with a darker green. The spots of sunshine hounded shadow, leaped the woods and sped across the river and on to the lakes lost in the reeds. The men sweated, and were chilled again when the wind came.

Already sweet grass was in the grain, and the bluestem, the porcupine grass, and the wild rye were shooting. Prairie was late with spring, and when it flowered it did so shyly. It winked with blue-eyed grass and yellow grassflowers, and there were acres and miles of birdfoot violets, with shooting stars, a New World cyclamen, sprung on their tense slim stalks, the shower of blossoms bursting at the top of its trajectory, the petals flaring up and back as if with the wind of descent. Above the silvery carpeting of pussytoes in spring grew little forests of horsetail; they drooped down to the watery hollows in the land, where the wire rushes were just bursting tiny husky flowers. This was the surface of the prairie, a soft fragrant cheek turned to the sun; this was the most passing and innocent vernal aspect, before the coming to full stature, to the war-paint colors of final bloom.

But under the sweetness lurked strength, root linked with root to the horizon. They had the intent, those frail flowers, to keep this undespoiled fertility all to themselves. They locked grips, hugged earth as only the truly native can.

The lark sparrows— they are almost a vanished species now around the grove — went chittering in anger before the struggling mules. The ground squirrels at their holes sat up and, with retreat secure, looked on in curiosity until the earth too near them trembled. The rattlers, lords there from unreckoned time, reared back, lashed out, and fled. Amasa could break their backs with a slap of the oxhide whip, but they were as many as a crop of dragon’s teeth.

High overhead, floating dots of dusk on the sunny prairie, the hawks kept watching. They had a sharp eye for this profound disturbance of their hunting ground. They shifted uneasily upon air currents, and wheeled away, and came back.

When noon came, the womenfolk saw that Amasa and Asa were already more tired than they had ever looked before. Asa looked really old, and his smile came delayed. Amasa scowled, as though he had met with something he couldn’t figure how to beat. When they went back, Delia went with them to look. There were just two short ribbons of the blackest earth she had ever seen, turned over to the sun, and not a stone or a pebble glinting in its midnight.

She stood awhile hugging her arms against the wind and watched them at their grinding slow victory. She saw the reeling of the plough and she heard the whip singing above the shouts of her menfolk; it seemed that the mules were on the side of the obdurate wilderness; their sloping, struggling backs were unwilling. And, woman to her fingertips, she found the whole picture brutal and unnecessary. This way, this costly relentlessness that her father and brother never doubted, she doubted. There were men who came home at night to their white front doors in decent streets, handed their canes to servants, and embraced their wives and daughters, without taint of sweat or grime. There was a man who could bring down all his woman and he might need for their hunger, with one clean shot to the sky. A wild, wind-blown figure, she turned perversely from where her bread would grow.

The ploughshare, resisted, tossed, and dulled, lying weary on its side while the men rested, drove on after a long breath, devouring an aboriginal purity. It went shearing through the juicy roots of the prairie clover, and clove the sunflower tubers through the meat. With every yard it gained, it ended grass empire. It turned the old campus of the buffalo under, and evicted the deer mice and the meadow mice, the voles and the spermophilcs. They would come back and fatten in the wheat stubble, but every year now they would be turned out again.

The land fought back. First the offside mule was lamed with snake bite, then Asa walked off the field with a wrenched shoulder, and the second mule fell forward with a burst heart. But the will behind the plough, collective and racial, could not be broken. Oxen were brought, and another better plough. With a big wheel to run in the furrow and a small one to ride the sod, the plough bit in, Timothy spelling Amasa. The turned turf lay smooth to the light, and the ancient roots began their rot in a deep ferment. This way they broke the prairie’s heart, an acre a day at the best.

Behind the plough, the seeds began to fall. It was a sound you could not hear, but the noise of thunder is emptier.

When the wild flags were fading on their fat green ovaries, the sack at Amasa’s side was empty and the sun was setting. It was going down in cloudy glory that promised rain. Now let it rain, and the sound upon the roof would sing a triumph. For time out of mind, he thought, it had only rained to make the floods and grow the useless herbs. He gave a last long look of satisfaction at the perfect furrows running to the very mark that he had set. Beyond, against that thunderbird west, was still the fated but unconquered tangle, darkening momently, grass horizon, ebbing sea that would not come to flood again.

CHAPTER XXXIV

I see the young wheat spring now, and we have corn and barley, the blue alfalfa and the foamy buckwheat flowers, and oats — how beautiful are oats, when the first wavering ranks of green come spearing bravely in the light! I see the mellow earth turned with mechanical perfection and harrowed; I see the patchwork of the fields, purple clover growing where last year they threshed the spelt. The furrows, with the rhythm of waves or music, follow and curve and vanish. They slice away from the bit of an orchard, leaving a tongue of springy pollinating grass under the trees. The orchard, with its short bent columns and its rudely vaulted low roof, is a rustic chapel in the ploughed productive breadth. And when the wheat is coming up, the blossoms fall, dissolve like foam, are swallowed by the earth, gone like departed breath.

So we see it, Asa Goodner, as you planned it. Or nearly as you planned it; you would not understand everything in the grove to-day. You could not approve it all, and perhaps you would be right. But you understood growing, and you knew that the bloom must go for the pome to come.

We have to remember back, and with an effort realize that this bounty and these lawns and the dry swift, roads were not what you looked at. Your apple trees clung then with thin roots to their life, but in the woods the wild crabs with the great frail paddle-shaped petals, spoonhollowed and set in stars of five, shone from their thorns at the end of every tangled natural alley of the wood perspectives. In the fall the hard fruits tumble, green as young leaves, coated in a soft wax and bringing back the tart perfume that went on the wind last spring.

Then in your day, Asa, there was a boundary where the sown and unsown met. It was a tension point; man’s will met with roots’ will. Beyond, in the high grass, the herbage struggled up through its own bronze ruin. The seasons there had their appointed flowering, their rising levels, and shallowly the spring flowers rooted, deep the autumn grasses thrust after the falling water table of the year. In the sown were all foes cleared away, all but the one good species being outlawed with the name of weeds, the seeds spaced, the turned furrow shading to conserve the dew, order beautiful and intolerant brought into primeval thoughtlessness.

A seed may not be sentient, but it is a thing alive. Only in the spore, the seed, the first embryonic days of any living thing, are so much treasure and future mightily packed. The seeds swelled with the rains, and the thin wary radicles pushed out and, shunning light, thirsted toward veins of moisture. When they found it, they gave way next to the deep geotropism within them, the pull to earth’s core. The black loam absorbed the light as no other hue of soil will do, and light and warmth bespoke the seed and called the seed leaf up. The single cotyledon of the cereal gained the air; the first shoot sprang beside it and day by day unpacked from the starchy kernel the stuff of growth stored there by last year’s sun. The tide of chlorophyll, green chemical of manufactory, appeared incredibly out of tissue where no greenness had been. Now this system was established, water and salt passing through the rootlet membrane and sent up, dead against gravity, to the leaves. These leaves spread to catch the sunshine. Forever that energy has poured away into black space, and only earth’s blowing film of greenery can trap it. Sun in the wheat leaf altered and rebuilt the raw earth matter carried soluble from the root — the first step toward the bread, light kneading starch and sugar, foretelling all the sweetness of the kernel, the whiteness of the loaf.

But all the eye saw was the running emerald of the wheat field, the blowing sheet of growth fire.

The eye of Asa found it good. In his philosophy, life ought to be simple, simple as wheat. Everything could earn its way, harm nothing, and turn out of some account. A man had his way diagramed for him by everything that grew, woman even more plainly. God had tried to make it easy, but men had concocted such a lot of deviltries that they grew all rootless and bootless or let smut into the kernel.

I have seen eyes that I think must have been like Asa’s. They are not afraid to look into strong sunlight; it is not that which hurts them, but the miserable things revealed.

When she rode home alone for the first time, Rhoda asked for her father right away. They said he was out looking the wheat over. So he turned and found her coming up beside him.

I suppose they talked as a father and daughter will who are divided now by life and indinseverable by affection. You can hear her ask, ‘How is it coming?’ the way we mortals do when we can see perfectly well how it is going. A little time away from him gave her perspective on his years. The battle with the prairie had set the wrinkles deeper and just perceptibly turned the shoulders in. And old men’s eyes grow paler, as though life lost its color for them.

All I know for fact, about what had happened to Rhoda is that they say she came home and kissed them all and did n’t say much. ‘When Rhoda was a girl,’ belongs to one part of the family stories about her, and everything else to another part. Of course they asked her, ‘How’s it coming?’ But, as with the wheat field, the answer was not spoken, for it could be read. The answer is that change cannot be stayed.

Chance, in the cabin opposite Catfish Ferry, had certain notions of comfort, which for her part his wife meant to alter. To Chance the supreme luxury was to give commands and be obeyed in them. Rhoda was docile; her invasion of his rule was by soft means. His diet, till she came, was almost all game, garnished with wild rice and laced with golden whiskey; the meats now were never quite so rare as he liked them. He had the prodigality of the forest-born about hearth fires, and her waking and sleeping in the goose-feather bed were wreathed in wood smoke and tobacco smoke. The house was full of furs and skins; there were only three windows to as many rooms, and none of them curtained. But though there was nothing to look in but the owls, Rhoda put up bright-patterned stuff that shut out the stars.

To have kept house in this princely kennel in the ways in which she had been brought up would have necessitated first an eviction, then razing it and building it over. To begin with, Rhoda sent Bird from the kitchen and scrubbed and scolded after him. She thought of the tears of Patience had she been obliged to cook at that crooked and smoky hearth. She thought of Chance and the good she was to this home of his, and was comforted.

To the river weekly now went an astounded but chuckling Bird to perform a washerwoman’s needed task. He came to love all Rhoda’s clothing like a child’s, and laughed to see it blowing alongside Chance’s shirts. There had not been a sadiron in the place till Rhoda brought a pair. As she took neat stitches in her clothes, and ripped out Bird’s gross sewing from garments of his master’s, she wondered where her next dresses were to come from. She understood that there were Chicago and Alton merchants who trusted Chance no end; everybody trusted him, but Rhoda began sharply to wonder when he ever paid up and with what. There was more to be mended here, she saw, than a shirt.

But, loyal in wifehood, she said nothing when she rode for a visit to the house in the clearing that she still thought of as ‘back home.’ When the light was lengthening, she rode away again, laconic and grown to them disturbing and mysterious. But they expected still that she would somehow bring Chance back with her to them. They thought then, our people, in that hard beginning that was yet so deceptively abundant, that you could mate with the wilderness, teach it and tame it and keep it living with you still.

CHAPTER XXXV

In the year when the Goodners broke prairie, the public found northern Illinois. Goodners were pioneers, but the public means everybody. It means preachers and lawyers and land sharks, land suckers and idealists and knaves. These people were only a few of them fitted to a wilderness life, and they did not come intending to lead one. They came with a rush to found villages, — though of course they called them cities, — to edit a newspaper before the subscribers got there. And women came. There were girls looking for husbands and schoolteachers looking for schools. They came childless, and pregnant, and nursing, and clucking a covey of children around them, and, like the men, they took one look at the wilderness and thought how they could change it. Whether you blame them or admire them for the domesticity of their souls, you have to remember that they were all propelled between the shoulders by predestinarian forces. Thrust west, or running to outstrip tlie thrust, they saw and thought and acted as they were accustomed to do.

So would you. You like to think that if you had to live in Basutoland you would still be a good American and never let down decent standards of living or rational thought processes. This is just the way people felt when from the prairie sea they raised the island groves on the horizon, and brought to them a Pennsylvania Dutch mentality, a ‘way down Maine’ mentality. Herkimer County Shakers, Chester County Quakers, Baltimore Catholics, people who knew Emerson by sight on the streets of Concord and thought their judgments permanently elevated as a result — all these pietists knew God wanted them to get first into virgin prairie and sow the only good seed.

When a great and seemingly simple event occurs, you usually find that it took the concurrence of many forces to make it possible. The country had just gone through a terrific boom and panic. In July of 1835 it cost an Eastern workingman 21 per cent more to live than in April of 1834. By October 1836, everything he bought cost 64 per cent more. We began to have labor troubles, and a dangerously radical element agitated for the idle existence of a ten-hour day. There were strikes in Philadelphia, Hartford, Boston, Trenton, Washington, Natchez, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville. A perilously popular and left-leaning President was, of course, indirectly responsible for the way that this succulent ham of a country was hurtling to the jaws of Cerberus. The money inflated like a bladder burst in 1837, strikes ended (always a sign of coming woe), and the public could no longer be held back from the westward exodus. Although Henry Clay tried to discourage this draining of cheap labor from the East, by holding Western lands at the high price of a dollar and a quarter per acre, he does not seem to have succeeded when he commanded the billows to stop rolling.

Thousands went west by the Erie Canal; passage was so slow, one old woman has told me with a chuckle, that the children used to get off the canalboat and run alongside to pick apples in the orchards. The canal had been completed at the expense of the taxpayers of New York, but it was only a hole in their pockets. It still had to be paid for, and everyone who sold his lands and went west cheapened the value of the New York farms. So they got aboard the bandwagon — the farmers who owned those orchards — and when they got out West, whether they felt better or whether they felt stung, they wrote back home and urged the conservative to come after them.

Advertising looked west; it flooded the distressed industrial cities with persuasions. Margaret Fuller found that God was on the prairie just the same as on Boston Common. Gasped the editor of a Chicago paper, ‘This town is rapidly filling up with strangers!’

Four hundred and fifty vessels arrived that year in the mouth of Chicago’s reedy river; docks built out from the swampy land (the option on which had wrenched free and fluttered from Franklin’s hands) received them. In 1836 not a bushel of wheat was exported in northern Illinois; four years later ten thousand bushels would leave those docks in a season. Much of it would go directly to Europe; the golden stream of American wheat drove the European peasant out of business, so he had to come to America.

If you did not come by lake boat, you could go down the Ohio and up to St. Louis by river boat. This craft was considered a floating palace; red carpets, brassbound, climbed the stairs; ladies saw themselves in mirrors wherever they turned, so that the crowd was skillfully exaggerated. The breadth of the river and its height in flood gave you the sense that God had opened a splendid highway for America’s manifest destiny.

From St. Louis the stagecoach took you through dust or mud in an aura of mould and horsehide to the edge of frog song, the beginning of thirst, and the land where there is never anything around the corner.

That first summer the Goodners and the prairie grove enter recorded history. I can identify them by three unmistakable references. Ebenezer Wellcomb was a circuit-riding preacher who left his prosy memoirs so squarely in the middle of early bibliography that you have to read them. The Lord enabled this His servant to be right on all occasions, and, as he had a habit of pointing people out like an old prophet, he refers to the Goodners by name as a family whose hospitality he enjoyed, but one with a deplorable lack of godliness. As it seemed to him, they were unaware of the perilous situation of their souls. Goodners have souls and know it, but they seldom refer to them. The Reverend Ebenezer Wellcomb turns up in Goodner tradition as a character of comedy, one who distressed and embarrassed them as much as he secretly tickled them.

They are so affable, these Goodners, you would never suspect how hard it is to crack them. They tolerate pontiffs and swamis and Marxists, and they read books about them and have these on their library shelves. It seems hard for a swami to believe that, having heard, they will not follow; he declares that after all they are a shallow people and material. But the truth is that their faith is so firmly rooted in their courage and independence that it is a rocky task to convert them from it.

Ebenezer Wellcomb had arrived, as he tells, exhausted with prairie heat, his horse maddened with buffalo flies, and both of them thirsty as dust. At first he was delighted with the sympathy and solicitude be received, but he was not happy about Asa Goodner’s natural religion. Asa loved cherishingly to repeat, ‘The groves are God’s first temples’; he walked beneath his oaks and felt this with all his heart. But Ebenezer Wellcomb appears to have smelled pantheism, and the next morning he spurred his horse into the gadflies and the shimmering wide heat waves.

Eliza Tuttle’s autobiography is a foundation stone in the early history of western Wisconsin. She was an Englishwoman to the end of her days, though she lived sixty years in America. She did not like New York City and almost exhausted her opprobrious adjectives on it; when she saw Chicago, she was very nearly speechless. As she journeyed west in a dearborn, with a husband beginning to shake with ague (she attributes this to the unwholesome humors of Chicago), her situation was really pitiable. She had probably been cheated on the horses; the driver did not in the least know his way, had lost the Galena trace, and dragged the poor woman and her sick husband through sloughs and over grass hummocks for a whole wasted day.

It was almost sunset when a beautiful grove of trees rose out of this desert, and a beckoning plume of smoke betrayed a human habitation. My heart beat fast with hope, but so many had been my disappointments that I could not but reflect upon our melancholy predicament. What manner of the human race awaited us here in the wilderness? Would we again be leeched for our money, treated to rude Yankee contempt, and forced to sup on ‘Johnnieeake’ and fried pork? But we were in no position to select our lodging for the night; unless we preferred to remain on the open prairie, exposed to unwholesome exhalations and serenaded by the dismal raving of the prairie wolves, we should be obliged to shelter beneath the unknown roof there under those trees.

The reader who has thus far followed our chequered fortunes in Yankeeland will judge with what astonishment I found myself made welcome in a house which, although rude, was spotlessly clean and even boasted the cultural attainment of books. These people called themselves ‘New Englanders,’ and indeed I could find it in my heart to call these good folk germane to mine. My husband was at once given every comfort that the primitive surroundings allowed, and I was so relieved by the sense of home and decency about me that I gave way at last to tears in the arms of the lady of the house.

The Ohmites were a band of Pennsylvania Germans led by Father Georg Ohm, in search of free soil and God’s grace. It is not clear why these were not available at home, but either the neighbors frowned or religious leaders lack originality and have all to begin with an hegira. The Oh mites walked the entire distance from southeastern Pennsylvania to the Pecatonica. Only a week from their destination, when they arrived at Goodner’s Grove they were a weary band of the chosen in the world of what they called the Gentiles. Their few wagons containing seeds, bedsteads, sick, and old were allowed by Asa to draw up in the shade of the great oaks, not far from the well.

‘The sound of our hymns rising through this grove of trees saluted our salvation and good fortune.’ Long did the grove remember them, for when the Ohmites departed they had somehow left behind a legacy of buffalo bugs, emerged from their carpeting and bedding, and if ever I write the entomological history of Goodner’s Grove the periodical outbreaks of Anthrenus scrophulariæ in attics and horsehair trunks must make a sad item in it . Ploughing tamed the terrible prairie flies; the burrows of their larvæ are cleft and dried. Buffalo bugs have another way with them; they travel our roads and live in our goods and do their work while we forget them.

The trace by usage became a road of sorts, two deepening ruts, a beaten trough that grooved lower as the surrounding grass grew taller. The squeal of the hubs seemed to Asa’s family continuous; I am only glad they cannot hear the Sunday flood of traffic on the paved highway, or see the trailers wagging by on summer week-ends.

For now we have to rush at demon speed to get to a place where there is silence enough to shout in. Our elbows are worn with rubbing; we have so many neighbors that we come to ignore all of them. Then, Rhoda reported that the old Frenchman was making twenty trips a day at Catfish Ferry. Chance, the family gathered, was cursing this immigration and threatening to remove, horse, gun, dog, slave, and woman, into the Military Tract beyond the Rock River. At the thought of Rhoda in the country that Black Hawk had so recently harried with the scalping knife, Mary Tremble’s head trembled.

For herself, she was growing older, and felt it, and felt the warmth that other women brought in their coming. It sustained her to be wiser and sustaining, to hold in her arms and comfort a woman nearly beaten by the loneliness and the space.

Then one day, when the thrush had fallen silent for the summer and the cicadas had begun to run their buzz saw, Burt Millerand drove up to the north end of the island with a paper fresh from the land office, titling him to a tract that marched with Asa’s. He and his wife and sister and six children lived that summer in their wagons, as the Goodners had lived the year before. The Goodner children went to play with the young Millerands, and over all their voices rang the axes and the ripping sound of trees falling.

Nothing was different in the log house or under the burr oaks but the feeling of the air; it had neighbors in it. Mary Tramble and Patience enjoyed being able to lend to and advise the new womenfolk. Amasa was filled with agricultural and architectural theory, and when Burt Millerand, a self-confident man, would not listen to him, Amasa gained the car of Burt’s sister Jessie, who attended so well that she obviously meant to be the wife for him.

So root was beginning to link with root; the new seed had fallen. The first crops were rushing up, nourished on an untouched fertility. Corn had been planted after the wheat, and now for the moment the wilderness animals were drawn by the astounding new biological fact of the growing granary. The ground squirrels had never lasted such a banquet; the fox squirrels left the woods for the fields. Rodent teeth gnawed and stripped, and the prairie chickens came like domestic fowl to profit. As the corn ripened, paroquets, tropically green and gaudy yellow and orange, flocked in the field to rasp with hooked bills and talk with raucous self-congratulation as they fed. The Goodners could not keep these pests away; Chance came and helped shoot them from the fields; Delia loaded his guns and handed them to him as fast as they were emptied — flushed, laughing, and flattering at his prowess. But no losses diminished the paroquets, the prairie chickens, and the squirrels. And yet it appeared that there would be harvest enough for all. In its grand impartial bounty this America, this continent, put her man child and her wilderness offspring each to a flowing breast.

CHAPTER XXXVI

I have before me materials that I gathered with the intention of one day writing a biography of Timothy Goodner. For the records of natural science in the early Midwest are as alluring as they are sparse. We have Audubon and Michaux, and Thomas Say had taken a tentative and somewhat Philadelphian sniff of our air. There are mad Rafinesque collecting the shells at the Falls of the Ohio, and Thomas Nuttall drifting lonely as a curlew along the Great Lakes in a trip of which there is no longer any clear record; and you have Bradbury’s Travels (a collector’s item, that) and Lesueur after fresh-water fishes, and George Engelmann riding the Illinois prairies searching out its marsh flora, and Timothy Goodner, a boy still, but at twenty already a Smithsonian correspondent. Four years later he had left the island grove first for Colorado, and then for California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and there came an end to the specimens sent from the prairie sloughs and the oak openings to Copenhagen and Berlin and Paris.

I have a letter from Petersburg before me; Ledebour is asking Timothy to collect under authority of the Tsar in Russian America. The passport — my best treasure — stamped with the double eagle of the vanished empire, crackles as I draw it from the tattered envelope. I have the photostat of a communication from Sir Richard Owen, who wants ‘some of your American marsupials’ to dissect (he is talking, in his way, about opossums). In other letters — copies mostly — Agassiz asks Cope for sturgeon and Cope asks Goodner for them, and Brünnich wants gallinule and tern eggs, and skins of rails and phalaropes and Bartramian sandpipers, both sexes to be in full breeding plumage.

But I am less lucky than I seem, for the self-documented portion of Timothy Goodner’s life only begins after he had quit the island grove, not again to gather patient testimony of its changing forms. For he returned only as a visitor to a family grown vain of him — who talked with the great at Washington, and was given a room and desk as soon as he entered the rich Philadelphia Academy, and ordained, under seal, to be the naturalist with the Oregon boundary survey.

Their Timothy was the vanished boy who had filled the house with the odor of muskrat, and had brought home the bird’s nest roofed over with thistledown out of which, to the horror of Patience, three naked baby mice had squirmed on to her breadboard. But they accepted with an unsurprised pride the Timothy who came to say good-bye to them before he went to Oregon.

While Goodners tolerate and defend the no-account among them, neither are they astonished when they have bred distinction. When in after years they took the theatre tickets she had sent them and went up to Chicago to see Sybil Sorell, they recalled indulgently that she always had been a histrionic child, fond of her mirror and her moods. They spoke of this obliquely, dining at Franklin’s elegant home on aristocratic Wabash Avenue, because his wife, a Fleming of West Newton, was morally embarrassed by such a sister-in-law.

Amidst all the worthless letters, the diaries kept by Amasa’s daughter who took herself so seriously and was so unimportant, the account books of Asa’s horticulturally perfect and financially thin-soled apple business, there is not a scrap of reminiscence by Timothy Goodner. If he had lived to the age of remembering, he might have set down something about those years when there was only the log cabin in the grove and all the birds were still there. But as it is, I have almost nothing to go on, and I long ago perceived that the biography will never be written.

That would have had to be a severely historical work, in deference to the scientist that Timothy became. But my Timothy of the virgin prairie can never be authenticated, so he must go unsung or be evoked out of what I know of a boy’s watching and wondering and finding out.

I can walk in his footsteps, conscious that I am treading zoölogically classic ground (though it is a bit like visiting the shore of Piræus hunting for Aristotle the marine biologist). Deep in the woods there are sloughs still left, shrunk to tiny Arals and Chads, for Asa’s crack willows; have pumped them shallow as he meant them to, and now they overhang the stagnant water and cast green darkness on it. These are frogs’ province, and when my footstep shakes the soggy earth they raise the signal of abrupt silence, and the herons understand it and are sailing heavily away above the trees before I get there.

In the years I have known the sloughs that were once greater and were Timothy’s, I have listed twenty-six species of marsh bird. But there was a freshwater avifauna in his day that does not return. It moved with the seasons, from the prairies to the pampas and return, with a last crying in the wide interior marshes and a storm of wings when the rails and the plovers and the sandpipers settled on the black sickle that is shore between windy water and whistling grass. On the air then the husky and the plaintive blent, voices first-American, aboriginal, and, it would seem now, alien.

Living thus, between the linked continents’ two mountain chains, the birds were a half-secret society in which were members seldom seen along the coast, species, like the black rail, that bad become rare almost as soon as they became known. I have handled Timothy Goodner’s specimens, in an Eastern museum, of the wary old hen rail and three dusky chicks. They lie as skins now, gutted and limp, labeled in Latin in one of the sliding drawers that reach to the ceiling. What was the sky like, Timothy, that day your heart leaped to see them? Did you hate to shoot them, yet know you must? For Bachman and Swainson and Audubon himself would cry aloud with pleasure to see and touch this Creciscus that had not been collected since Gmelin named it from Jamaica in 1770.

It is late now, well-nigh too late, for the lost life of the continental heart. Some saw it, briefly, and remember; they tell us that ducks that are driven now to breed in Canada then nested on the Kilimick; the whistling swans went over in a cloud, and the cormorants flapped up the Seignelay in flight, formation, black against old sunsets embering into night. Those were the days of the golden plovers pausing to rest and drink in my sloughs, in spring on their way from Patagonia to Ungava; even Timothy never saw them in fall, for they take a different route for their southward journey and from Acadia launch across Atlantic waste without ceasing their wing beats till they see green Guiana rising from the Caribbean.

The bitter salt marshes of the coast had nothing more beautiful than the king rail by the sweet, waters, or the Florida gallinules, color of a threatening sky. Over the reed lake where the Ottawa guides had led Du Gay astray, the black terns skimmed swallow-wise above their floating nests, with piercing cries. Wary, graceful, tender, the long-billed curlews followed the whistling leader and came down, with folded wings and legs depending daintily till the marsh grass received and concealed them. The hiding Timothy must have seen them as they emerged, at a mincing run across the soppy sod to the brown waters’ edge and, in little ranks, sipped like communicants of the dark water.

I never see the phalaropos, these days — not in this countryside, at least. But they were here in Timothy’s times, and I wonder what he made of their strange ways. I hear that it is the female that wears the brilliant plumage and does the courting, and that she is polyandrous as some island queen. They fear that the Eskimo curlew is extinct now, and the sand-hill crane is going.

The cranes are mentioned in any full account of the prairie days. ‘The cranes were always first back when the spring came.’ ‘They stood almost as tall as a man, but they were hard to see, because they seemed to melt into the prairies and the twilight.’ ‘They used to keep a sentry while they were feeding on the arrowhead, so you could never get at them.’ ‘All of us farm boys knew the sand-hill cranes, but we could n’t find the eggs no matter how we looked.’

But Timothy found them, and he says, in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society: —

Often, in the night, when they are migrating, these paludicoline birds proclaim their advent by the trumpeting that seems to shake the air for miles about. When daylight comes, we see them traveling in pairs even so early in the year. Their food at this season consists largely in the hips of the prairie rose, which all sorts of animals as if by common consent first allow the long winters to mollify before they will touch them. The cranes habitually stalk, with some majesty and yet no little ludicronsness, over the bare plains, gathering their manna, but nothing is more difficult than to approach them. With the wariness of old prairie scouts they set sentinels to guard their flocks, and, Doing mounted on their long legs, they stand almost as high as a man and by their telescopic eyes are enabled to see even farther. I have often, however, watched their mating dance, from a concealment of old cattails and in early spring, just after dawn has broken. Nothing is more singular and yet moving than to see them prancing about, lifting their heads, or suddenly lowering them to the ground, hopping and bouncing, with half-raised wings, crossing and recrossing each others’ paths, until, their speed increasing, they become a blur of bouncing balls.

I think, from the chronology I have worked out for Goodner’s life, that this must have been written from the narrow cell-like room in the Smithsonian, where the books shut out the light of the dusty slit-like window in the absurdly medieval tower. The last that I can learn about sand-hill cranes on my prairie is what I have heard from a man old enough to have looked at Lincoln in his coffin when it rested in Chicago Courthouse. In the seventies, he says, he saw a single bird and occasionally two and three together flying high above the city and making off to the north.

Already then the long freight trains were shuttling on the prairie, and southward just over the horizon there were a din of hammers and an inhuman clash of metal where the steel mills were going up. And Timothy Goodner lay dead by Cape Mendocino, in sound of the sorrowful breakers, where west at last comes to an end, and there is nothing beyond America, our home, but alien east.

It had to be — the shrinking of the slough, the tilling and the fencing, the shuddering bang of the freight cars, the shriek of the mill. Many good things have come this way; there is no weariness now like the weariness of breaking prairie; children do not have to die, without a doctor, in the lonely house; there is no danger — and no hope — of loneliness. Mire and ague are gone. The wind blows dry across the clean, plain palm of Illinois.

But once it cupped the grassy sloughs, and treasured the hidden lake where the eel grass and the wild celery fed the waterfowl millions. Something went away, step by step, first with the buffalo, then the elk, then the prairie chicken and the clamoring, prancing crane—something that was ample and native and dark, like the first loam and the slough water.

CHAPTER XXXVII

The last great flight of the passenger pigeons recorded from the island grove took place when Rhoda’s child Flint was ten years old. I know this because there is Flint’s letter written to his Uncle Timothy in California. They found it among Goodner’s papers, and it says: —

DEAR UNCLE TIM —
You aught to of been here to see the pigeon we been having. Mother says there was more the first year they came here. I don’t see how there could of been. Bird and I shot till our guns was all hot. We been eating pigeon pie till we are sick of it. Peple came from all around lots we never saw before. Some boys that did not have any gun but pertended they did would pick up my pigeons. Uncle Am said there was plenty for everbody but he is always so easy goin. Old Milerand drove in his hogs the third day to get fat on the dead birds. . . .

The pigeons did not come every year to the grove, but only at rare and unforgettable intervals. They came when the mast in the Michigan forests gave out. Alexander Wilson calculated that, a pigeon daily ate half a pint of acorns or beechnuts, and that a flock consumed 17,000,424 bushels in a day; Audubon makes it 18,000,000. Wilson said that he saw a column a mile broad, every bird in it moving at the rate of a mile a minute. He watched it for four hours, which means that, at his conservative estimate of three pigeons in a square yard, the ribbon of wings was 240 miles long and contained 2,230,272,000 passenger pigeons. This was but a single band, and of these birds not one to-day is living.

They are so gone that all we hear of them is fabulous. Alexander Wilson was standing one day at a pioneer’s door when there was a tremendous roar out of the sky; the sun was so instantly darkened that he took this happening for a tornado and expected to see the trees torn up. ‘It is only the pigeons,’ said the frontiersman. Audubon saw a hawk pounce on a pigeon flight; the birds beneath it plummeted almost to earth like the funnel of a twister, and every bird coming after them executed the same figure, dashing into the vortex and by an unseen force shot out of it again. Everyone speaks of the roar of the wings; it ploughed the forest boughs into billows. Their droppings fell like shot through the leaves till the ground was covered with them, and the voices forever called upon each other. Imagine the tender contented throaty plaint of the barnyard pigeon amplified by a million voices to a portentous crying thunder torn with the speed of flight. Imagine all your county under forest and all that forest one vast pigeon roost; in such quantities they nested or they rested.

If the evidence lay only on the word of a few, it might not be credible, but the agreement among the skeptical and the rivals is too telling. ‘The boughs of the trees were constantly breaking under the weight of the birds.’ ‘ You could hear a pigeon-roost miles away.’ ‘The sun was dark for hours when they went over.’

They say that their wings flashed in the sun; the soft rose breasts, the delicate blue heads, the wings changeable green and blue and bronze, all had pearl-like lustre. The lustre is gone from the sad museum specimen that looks at a curious public with a glass eye. But there is Audubon’s plate, painted from the life with every nacreous gleam of a pinion, and the dour soul who is embarrassed by Audubon can read the testimony of the cautious Wilson, who makes the pigeon sound as though Audubon’s brush had understated it . Such a head-shaker may not want to believe anything that a mere writer would write, like James Fenimore Cooper, but he will have to accept the numbers and the might of the passenger pigeon when told of them by those who suffered from them and so could not love or extol them. ‘The whole forest was like one vast chicken house; it smelled like it and sounded like it.’ ‘Sometimes they would be gone for years, and then they would come back when the nuts were plopping. They would clean up the woods of everything edible and turn their attention to the farmer’s corn. In an hour they would ruin him.’

I have just Flint’s letter to go upon, and it would hardly make an item in a serious ornithological survey of Goodner’s Grove, but Rhoda Goodner could not have heard the pigeons coming without feeling their shadow forecast upon her heart.

Hers was the last tragedy in a tragic summer. There was a saving that the first crops that grew so lushly from the virgin soil ran all to leaf, and that the grain was sick. At first the Goodners thought they had the ‘bread sick’ from eating the unwholesome grain, but they saw at last that the prairie, outraged and angered, was shooting down these mortals with its final arrows. From ancient boggy sod it loosed its malarial and enteric fevers so that Asa was doubled up with an ‘ague cake’ in his side. Patience was shaken with chills, and Timothy suffered then the injury to his heart that was to fell him suddenly in far-off foggy Humboldt County.

The mornings would wake enchantingly, a little dew still in the shade, and though the birds were mostly silent now, the flickers and the blue jays did their best to be musical for an hour. But by eight o’clock the world was already blazing and intolerable. It was an era in which cool and scant clothing was unthinkable, and will and stoicism surmounted the tortures of the tight basque and the ample skirt. But the heat drew iron wires about the head; the arrows flew. Elizabeth Millerand was down, two of her children were ailing, and Mary Tramble came and went with broths and possets and cherry-bark infusions. Only Delia seemed somehow magically untouched, more than ever radiant, more than ever absent from the house. Much of her time was not accounted for, and amidst so much sickness her comings and goings were not watched. Only afterwards were they noticed and understood.

The prairie withered though the sky was humid. The sun got up and peered through the jaundiced blue where the dust began to gather. Far off, the grass was burning, and the smoke did not roll away but hung there in gloomy pillars; it smelled of burning humus, and somewhere in it there curled an odor of roasting, ghostly and savage. A wind like a fever blew the mists away, and clear honest sunshine, flaming and terrible, scorched the clearing between the oaks. Now surely the last dampness was baked out of this unfalhomed soil; surely the last arrow was shot. The ague melted away out of the weary bones of Asa; Patience got a little color. The twins played in the scant shade, for the hickory leaves were beginning to fall without ever having turned to gold. John Paul and Nancy came in looking both flushed and white and Mary Tramble felt their foreheads, no longer damp under the soft hair, but burning.

Eight days later John Paul was dead of bilious fever, and Nancy died the next morning. They were buried on the following day in terrilic heat that made all eyes look scorched. Rhoda and Chance were there, and Rhoda stayed with her mother.

The second week in September a wind rose in the night and stripped the last of the hickories bare. In the morning the sky was blue and chill and warblers were being flung through the woods on the clear storm blowing from Lake Superior. The prairie, gone early to seed in the heat, was suddenly beautiful with the down of its numberless composites, and in the woods the haws turned color, it seemed almost overnight. You could hear the crows and jays and grackles and the big-crested flycatcher all shouting above 1 he wind, but the young wind tore their calls away. It was a day for running, for letting the hair free. That was how they saw Delia for the last time, before the woods swallowed her.

It was Bird who came to tell Asa. He scraped and wept a little and vowed his own fidelity to Rhoda, and it was Asa who had to put the fact in words, in a question, to make sure of it. Yes, Randelman was gone and Miss Delia with him. Asa walked away from him and stood a long time looking at his fields before he found the strength to tell Rhoda.

He was telling her when the pigeons came. Without warning the cloud, not yet arrived, shook the air and passed over the sun like a shadow on the heart. Rhoda went to the door away from her father and looked up with blind eyes at the river in the sky. So wilderness had shaken and darkened her life; so it must pass. In that moment she was cut down, but she was hardy and the seed was in her. She would prevail like the little Rambo trees, when lawless flowering was frostbitten and blackened. Still the pigeons kept coming, a winged crying torrent, and, standing straight, she shaded glittering eyes with her hand to watch their passage. Her pain forecast our loss; we should have known that desire of it would drive the wilderness over the last border.

That year, that time when the pigeons went over, no one in the grove, out of some Goodner sense of fitness, fired a shot. The flying river shed no drop, though it was four days and nights in passing, thinning sometimes, coming again to flood. It went on into the autumn, south as the sun went, with the shortening days, and inevitably it ended; a sky meek now, without death or portent in it, was clear of the great horde.

The last feathered arrow is spent and the last abundance vanished; the medicine bag is empty, and the year, the annus mirabilis, is over. The seed is in, fateful and indomitable; we have populated where we have slain. Still somelimes, when in fall or spring the wind turns, coming from a fresh place, we smell wilderness on it, and this is heartbreak and delight.

(The End)