The Lookout Man Read online

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GUARDIAN OF THE FORESTS

  In mid July the pines and spruces and firs have lost their pale greenfingertips which they wave to the world in spring, and have settleddown to the placid business of growing new cones that shall bear theseed of future forests as stately as these. On the shadowed,needle-carpeted slopes there is always a whispery kind of calm; thecalm of Nature moving quietly about her appointed tasks, without hasteand without uncertainty, untorn by doubts or fears or futilequestioning; like a broad-souled, deep-bosomed mother contentedlyrearing her young in a sheltered home where love abides in the peacewhich passeth understanding.

  Gray squirrels, sleek and bright-eyed and graceful always, lope overthe brown needles, intent upon some urgent business of their own.Noisy little chipmunks sit up and nibble nervously at dainties theyhave found, and flirt their tails and gossip, and scold the carpingbluejays that peer down from overhanging branches. Perhaps a hoot owlin the hollow trees overhead opens amber eyes and blinks irritatedlyat the chattering, then wriggles his head farther down into hisfeathers, stretches a leg and a wing and settles himself for anothernap.

  Little streams go sliding down between banks of bright green grass,and fuss over the mossy rocks that lie in their beds. Deer lift headsoften to listen and look and sniff the breeze between mouthfuls of thetender twigs they love. Shambling, slack-jointed bears move shufflingthrough the thickets, like the deer, lifting suspicious noses to testfrequently the wind, lest some enemy steal upon them unaware.

  From his glass-walled eyrie, Jack Corey gazed down upon the woodedslopes and dreamed of what they hid of beauty and menace and calm andof loneliness. He saw them once drenched with rain; but mostly theylay warm under the hot sunshine of summer. He saw them darkling withnight shadows, he saw them silvered with morning fogs which turnedrose tinted with the first rays of sunrise, he saw them liesoft-shaded in the sunset's after glow, saw them held in the unearthlybeauty of the full moonlight.

  Like the deer and the bear down there, his head was lifted often tolook and to sniff the wind that blew strongly over the peak. For nowthe winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines. Theblue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air. Fourtimes in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mappedtable and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over thetreetops--the first betraying marks of the licking flames below. Hehad watched the puff balls grow until they exploded into rollingclouds of smoke, yellow where the flames mounted high in some deadpine or into a cedar, black where a pitch stump took fire.

  After he had telephoned the alarm to headquarters he would watchanxiously the spreading pall. To stand up there helpless while greattrees that had been a hundred years or more in the growing died thedeath of fire, gave him a tragic feeling of having somehow betrayedhis trust. Every pine that fell, whether by old age, fire or thewoodmen's axe, touched him with a sense of personal loss. It was asthough he himself had made the hills and clothed them with themajestic trees, and now stood godlike above, watching lest evil comeupon them. But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope hewatched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eatingaway its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind,helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand andwonder why God refused to send the rain that would save thesewonderful, living things, the trees.

  At night, when the forests drew back into the darkness, he would watchthe stars slide across the terrible depth of purple infinity thatseemed to deepen hypnotically as he stared out into it. Venus, Mars,Jupiter--at first he could not tell one from another, though hewatched them all. He had studied astronomy among other things inschool, but then it had been merely a hated task to be shirked andslighted and forgotten as one's palate forgets the taste of bittermedicine. Up here, with the stars all around him and above him formany nights, he was ashamed because he could not call them all byname. He would train his telescope upon some particularly bright starand watch it and wonder--Jack did a great deal of wondering in thosedays, after his first panicky fight against the loneliness and silencehad spent itself.

  First of all, he awoke to the fact that he was about as important tothe world as one of those little brown birds that hopped among therocks and perked its head at him so knowingly, and preened itsfeathers with such a funny air of consequence. He could not evenbelieve that his sudden disappearance had caused his mother any griefbeyond her humiliation over the manner and the cause of his going. Shewould hire some one to take care of the car, and she would go to herteas and her club meetings and her formal receptions and to churchjust the same as though he were there--or had never been there. If heever went back.... But he never could go back. He never could face hismother again, and listen to her calmly-condemnatory lectures that hadno love to warm them or to give them the sweet tang of motherlyscolding.

  It sounds a strange thing to say of Jack Corey, that scattered-brainedyoung fellow addicted to beach dancing and joy rides and all that goeswith these essentially frothy pastimes; a strange thing to say of himthat he was falling into a more affectionate attitude of personalnearness to the stars and to the mountains spread out below him thanhe had ever felt toward Mrs. Singleton Corey. Yet that is how hemanaged to live through the lonely days he spent up there in thelookout station.

  When Hank was about to start with another load of supplies up themountain, Jack had phoned down for all of the newspapers, magazinesand novels which Forest Supervisor Ross could buy or borrow; also adouble supply of smoking tobacco and a box of gum. When his tonguesmarted from too much smoking, he would chew gum for comfort And heread and read, until his eyes prickled and the print blurred. But thenext week he diffidently asked Ross if he thought he could get him abook on astronomy, explaining rather shame-facedly that there wassomething he wanted to look up. On his third trip Hank carried severalgovernment pamphlets on forestry. Which goes to prove how Jack wasslowly adapting himself to his changed circumstances, and fittinghimself into his surroundings.

  He had to do that or go all warped and wrong, for he had no intentionof leaving the peak, which was at once a refuge and a place where hecould accumulate money; not much money, according to Jack's standardof reckoning--his mother had often spent as much for a gown or a ringas he could earn if he stayed all summer--but enough to help him outof the country if he saved it all.

  When his first four days vacation was offered him, Jack thought a longwhile over the manner of spending it. Quincy did not offer much in theway of diversion, though it did offer something in the way of risk. Sohe cut Quincy out of his calculations and decided that he would phonedown for a camp outfit and grub, and visit one or two of the placesthat he had been looking at for so long. For one thing, he could climbdown to the lake he had been staring into for nearly a month, and seeif he could catch any trout. Occasionally he had seen fishermen downthere casting their lines in, but none of them had seemed to have muchluck. For all that the lake lured him, it was so blue and clear, setaway down there in the cupped mountain top. Hank had advised him tobait with a salmon-roe on a Coachman fly. Jack had never heard of thatcombination, and he wanted to try it.

  But after all, the lake was too near to appeal to him except by way ofpassing. Away on the next ridge was the black, rocky hump calledGrizzly Peak on the map. Hank spoke of it casually as Taylor Rock, andsometimes called it King Solomon. That was where the bears had theirwinter quarters, and that was where Jack wanted to go and camp. Hewanted to see a bear's den, and if the bears were all gone--Hankassured him that they never hung out up there in the summer, butranged all over the mountains--he wanted to go inside a den and seewhat it was like. And for a particular, definite ambition, withoutwhich all effort is purposeless, he wanted to kill a bear.

  Hank brought him all the things he needed, talked incessantly of whatJack should do and what he shouldn't do, and even offered to pack hisoutfit over to the Peak for him. So Jack went, and got his first tasteof real camping out in a real wilderness, and gained
a more intimateknowledge of the country he had to guard.

  By the time his second relief was at hand, he was tempted to take whatmoney he had earned and go as far as it would take him. He did notbelieve he could stand another month of that terrible isolation, evenwith his new friendliness toward the stars and the forest to lighten alittle of his loneliness. Youth hungers for a warmer, more personalcompanionship than Nature, and Jack was never meant for a hermit. Hegrew sullen. He would stand upon his pinnacle where he could look downat Crystal Lake, and hate the tourists who came with lunches and theirfishing tackle, and scrambled over the rocks, and called shrilly toone another, and laughed, and tried to invent new ways of stringingtogether adjectives that seemed to express their enthusiasm. He wouldmake biting remarks to them which the distance prevented theirhearing, and he would wish savagely that they would fall in the lake,or break a leg on some of the boulders.

  When those with a surplus of energy started up the steep climb to thepeak, he would hurry into his little glass room, hastily part andplaster his hair down as a precaution against possible recognition,and lock his door and retire to a certain niche in a certain pile ofrocks, where he would be out of sight and yet be close enough to hearthe telephone, and would chew gum furiously and mutter savage thingsunder his breath. Much as he hungered for companionship he had aperverse dread of meeting those exclamatory sightseers. It seemed toJack that they cheapened the beauty of everything they exclaimed over.

  He could hear them gabble about Mount Lassen, and his lip would curlwith scorn over the weakness of their metaphors. He would grind histeeth when they called his glass prison "cute," and wondered ifanybody really lived there. He would hear some man trying to explainwhat he did not know anything at all about, and he would grinpityingly at the ignorance of the human male, forgetting that he hadbeen just as ignorant, before fate picked him up and shoved himhead-foremost into a place where he had to learn.

  Sometimes he was not forewarned of their visits, and would be trappedfairly; and then he would have to answer their foolish questions andshow them what the map was for, and what the pointer was for, andadmit that it did get lonesome sometimes, and agree with them that itwas a fine view, and point out where Quincy lay, and all the rest ofit. It amazed him how every one who came said practically the samethings, asked the same questions, linked the same adjectives together.

  Thus passed his second month, which might be called his pessimisticmonth. But he did not take his money and go. He decided that he wouldwait until he had grown a beard before he ventured. He realizedbitterly that he was a fugitive, and that it would go hard with himnow if he were caught. From the papers which Supervisor Ross had senthim every week he had learned that the police were actually anddefinitely looking for him. At least they had been a month ago, and hesupposed that they had not given up the search, even though laterevents had pushed his disgrace out of print. The man they had shot washovering close to death in a hospital, the last Jack read of the case.It certainly would be wiser to wait a while. So he took his campoutfit to Taylor Rock again and stayed there until his four days weregone.

  That time he killed a deer and got a shot at a young bear, and cameback to his post in a fairly good humor. The little glass room had ahomey look, with the late afternoon sunlight lying warm upon the mapand his piles of magazines and papers stacked neatly on their shelf.Since he could not be where he wanted to be, Jack felt that he wouldrather be here than anywhere else. So his third month began with ableak kind of content.