Produced by Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
THE EVERLASTING WHISPER
A Tale of the California Wilderness.
By JACKSON GREGORY
To Maxwell E. Perkins
With The Author'S Grateful Recognition Of His Countless Sympathetic
Criticisms And Suggestions
Chapter I
It was springtime in the California Sierra. Never were skies bluer,never did the golden sun-flood steep the endless forest lands in richerlife-giving glory. Ridge after ridge the mountains swept on and fellaway upon one side until in the vague distances they sank to themonotonous level of the Sacramento Valley; down there it was alreadysummer, and fields were hot and brown. Ridge after ridge the mountainsstretched on the other side, rising steadily, growing ever more augustand mighty and rocky; on their crests across the blue gorges the snowwas dazzling white and winter held stubbornly on at altitudes of seventhousand feet. Thus winter, springtime, and ripe, fruit-dropping summercoexisted, touching fingers across the seventy miles that lie betweenthe icy top of the Sierra and the burning lowlands.
Here, in a region lifted a mile into the rare atmosphere, was a ridgeall naked boulder and spire along its crest, its sides studded with pineand incense cedar. The afternoon sunlight streaked the big bronze treetrunks, making bright gay spots and patches of light, casting cool blackshadows across the open spaces where the brown dead needles lay in thickcarpets. It was early June, and thus far only had the springtimeadvanced in its vernal progress upward through the timbered solitudes.Some few small patches of snow still lingered on in spots sheltered fromthe sun, but now they were ebbing away in thin trickles. Down in ahollow at the base of the sunny slope was a round alpine lake no biggerthan a pond in a city park. It was of the same deep, perfect blue as thesky, whose colour it seemed not to reflect but to absorb.
A tiny fragment of this same heavenly azure drifted downward among thetrees like a bit of sky falling. A second bit of blue that had skimmedacross the lake and was visible now only as it rose and winged acrossthe contrasting coloured meadow rimming the pool was like a bit of thelake itself. Two bluebirds. They swerved before the meeting, their wingsfluttered, they lighted on branches of the same tree and shyly eyed eachother. Did a man need to have the still message of all the woods summedup in final emphasis, this it was: spring is here.
The man himself, as the birds had done before him, had the appearance ofmaterializing spontaneously from some distilled essence of hisenvironment. A moment ago the spaces between the wide-set cedar-treeswere empty. Yet he had been there a long time. It was only because hehad moved that he attracted attention even of the sharp-eyed forest folkwho were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had beenviewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour, so he,while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been drawn intothe entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he belonged. Here heblended, harmonized, disappeared when he held motionless. The well-worn,tall, laced boots were of brown leather, much scuffed, one in colourwith the soil dusting them. The khaki trousers gathered into theboot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the brown of the tree trunks;skin of hands and face and muscular throat were the bronze of ripepine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in a landscape spotted withlight and shadow, the head of black hair might have passed for a bit