Part 43

His optimism struck me as being rather unprofessional, for if you travel half a night to a case, it seems to me, it ought not to be brushed aside with a laugh. And I was rather sorry that I had such a good breakfast waiting for them. Duncan, it's true, did not eat a great deal, but the way that red-faced doctor lapped up my coffee with clotted cream and devoured bacon and eggs and hot muffins should have disturbed any man with an elementary knowledge of dietetics. And by noon Dinkie was pretty much his old self again. I half expected that Duncan would rub it in a little. But he has remained discreetly silent.

Next time, of course, I'll have a better idea of what to do. But I've been thinking that this exquisite and beautiful animalism known as the maternal instinct can sometimes emerge from its exquisiteness. Children are a joy and a glory, but you pay for that joy and glory when you see them stretched out on a bed of pain, with the shadow of Death hovering over them.

When I tried to express something like this to Dunkie last night, somewhat apologetically, he looked at me with an odd light in his somber old Scotch Canadian eye.

"Wait until you see him really ill," he remarked, man-like, stubbornly intent on justifying himself. But I was too busy saying a little prayer, demanding of Heaven that such a day might never come, to bother about delivering myself of the many laboriously concocted truths which I'd assembled for my bone-headed lord and master. I was grateful enough for things as they were, and I could afford to be generous.

Sunday the Ninth

For the first time since I came out on the prairie, I dread the thought of winter. Yet it's really something more than the winter I dread, since snow and cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back about ten short months and think of those crystal-clear winter days of ours, with the sleigh piled up with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on the endless sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking team frosted with their own breath, the caroling sleigh-bells, and the man who still meant so much to me at my side. Then the homeward drive at night, under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, to the warmth and peace and coziness of one's own hearth! It was often razor-edge weather, away below zero, but we had furs enough to defy any threat of frost-nip.

We still have the furs, it's true, but there's the promise of a different kind of frost in the air now, a black frost that creeps into the heart which no furs can keep warm....

We still have the furs, as I've already said, and I've been looking them over. They're so plentiful in this country that I've rather lost my respect for them. Back in the old days I used to invade those mirrored and carpeted salons where a trained and deferential saleswoman would slip sleazy and satin-lined moleskin coats over my arms and adjust baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson-seal next to my skin. It always gave me a very luxurious and Empressy sort of feeling to see myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver-fox and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft pelts and observe how well one's skin looked above seal-brown or shaggy bear.

But I never knew what it cost. I never even considered where they came from, or what they grew on, and it was to me merely a vague and unconfirmed legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a little closer to that legend, and now that I know what I do, it makes a difference.

For with the coming of the cold weather, last winter, Francois and Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, to fill in the farm-work hiatus. They made it a campaign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting stretching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning rabbit-snares and overhauling wicked-looking iron traps, which were quite ugly enough even before they became stained and clotted and rusted with blood.

They had a very successful season, but even at the first it struck me as odd to see two men, not outwardly debased, so soberly intent on their game of killing. And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cutting-boards and the smell of pelts being cured. For every pelt, I began to see, meant pain and death. In one trap Francois found only the foot of a young red fox: it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom from those vicious iron jaws that had bitten so suddenly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also told me of finding a young bear which had broken the anchor-chain of a twelve-pound trap and dragged it over one hundred miles. All the fight, naturally, was gone out of the little creature. It was whimpering like a woman when Francois came up with it--poor little tortured broken-hearted thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan, on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat, without ever dreaming it's a patchwork of animal sufferings that is keeping her fat body warm, and that she's trying to make herself beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild.

If women only thought of these things! But we women have a very convenient hand-made imagination all our own, and what upsets us as perfect ladies we graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in that ermine coat were compelled to behold from her box-chair in the Metropolitan, not a musty old love-affair set to music, but the spectacle of how each little animal whose skin she has appropriated had been made to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper made the rounds of his sets, it had been carefully strangled to death by that frugal harvester, to the end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned only as a "second"--if the weasel-decked lady, I repeat, had to witness all this with her own beaded eyes, our wilderness would not be growing into quite such a lonely wilderness.

Or some day, let's put it, as one of these beaver-clad ladies tripped through the Ramble in Central Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap suddenly and quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stockinged ankle and she writhed and moaned there in public, over the week-end. Then possibly her cries of suffering might make her sisters see a little more light. But the beaver, they tell me, is trapped under the ice, always in running water. A mud-ball is placed a little above the waiting trap, to leave the water opaque, and when the angry iron jaws have snapped shut on their victim, that victim drowns, a prisoner. Francois used to contend shruggingly that it was an easy death. It may be easy compared with some of the other deaths imposed on his furry captives. But it's not my idea of bliss, drowning under a foot or two of ice with a steel trap mangling your ankle for full measure!

"We live forward, but we understand backward." I don't know who first said it. But the older I grow the more I realize how true it is.

Sunday the Umptieth

I've written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, and asking about the Pasadena bungalow.

It seems the one way out. I'm tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all day long above the snow-line. I'm tired of this blind alley of inaction. I'm tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on the over-smudged canvas of life.

To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can mean only a winter of discontent and drifting--and drifting closer and closer to uncharted rocky ledges. There's no ease for the mouth where one tooth aches, as the Chinese say.

Dinky-Dunk, I think, has an inkling of how I feel. He is very thoughtful and kind in small things, and sometimes looks at me with the eyes of a boy's dog which has been forbidden to follow the village gang a-field. And it's not that I dislike him, or that he grates on me, or that I'm not thankful enough for the thousand and one little kind things he does. But it's rubbing on the wrong side of the glass. It can't bring back the past. My husband of to-day is not the Dinky-Dunk I once knew and loved and laughed with. To go back to dogs, it reminds me of Chinkie's St. Bernard, "Father Tom," whom Chinkie petted and trained and loved almost to adoration. And when poor old Father Tom was killed Chinkie in his madness insisted that a taxidermist should stuff and mount that dead dog, which stood, thereafter, not a quick and living companion but a rather gruesome monument of a vanished friendship. It was, of course, the shape and color of the thing he had once loved; but you can't feed a hungry heart by staring at a pair of glass eyes and a wired tail without any wag in it.

Saturday the Ninth

Struthers and I have been busy making clothes, during the absence of Dinky-Dunk, who has been off duck-shooting for the last three days. He complained of being a bit tuckered out and having stood the gaff too long and needing a change. The outing will do him good. The children miss him, of course, but he's promised to bring Dinkie home an Indian bow-and-arrow. I can see death and destruction hanging over the glassware of this household.... The weather has been stormy, and yesterday Whinnie and Struthers put up the stove in the bunk-house. They were a long time about it, but I was reluctant to stop the flutterings of Cupid's wings.

Tuesday the Twelfth

I had a brief message from Peter stating the Pasadena house is entirely at my disposal.... Dinky-Dunk came back with a real pot-hunter's harvest of wild ducks, which we'll pick and dress and freeze for winter use. I'm taking the breast-feathers for my pillows and Whinstane Sandy is taking what's left for a sleeping-bag--from which I am led to infer that he's still reconciled to a winter of solitude. Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than that, lined with downier feathers from the pinions of Eros. But, as I've said before, Fate, being blind, weaves badly.

Friday the Fifteenth

I've just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take the kiddies to California for the winter months. He rather surprised me by agreeing with everything I suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there's danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been doing. And it's really a commonplace for the prairie rancher--when he can afford it--to slip down to California for the winter. They go by the thousand, by the train-load.

Friday the Sixth

It's three long weeks since I've had time for either ink or retrospect. But at last I'm settled, though I feel as though I'd died and ascended into Heaven, or at least changed my world, as the Chinks say, so different is Pasadena to the prairie and Alabama Ranch. For as I sit here on the loggia of Peter's house I'm bathed in a soft breeze that is heavy with a fragrance of flowers, the air is the air of our balmiest midsummer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a mocking-bird is singing for all it's worth. It seems a poignantly beautiful world. And everything suggests peace. But it was not an easy peace to attain.

In the first place, the trip down was rather a nightmare. It brought home to me the fact that I had three young barbarians to break and subjugate, three untrained young outlaws who went wild with their first plunge into train-travel and united in defiance of Struthers and her foolishly impressive English uniform which always makes me think of Regent Park. I have a suspicion that Dinky-Dunk all the while knew of the time I'd have, but sagely held his peace.