They told me this
tale--in broken bits they gave it, a sentence at a time. They were
ready to talk but knew not how. Few their words, and those they used
would be empty on paper, meaningless without the puckered lip, the
interhiss, the brutal semi-snarl restrained by human mastery, the snap
and jerk of wrist and gleam of steel-gray eye, that really told the
tale, of which the spoken word was mere headline. Another, a subtler
theme was theirs that night; not in the line but in the interline it
ran; and listening to the hunter's ruder tale, I heard as one may hear
the night bird singing in the storm; amid the glitter of the mica I
caught the glint of gold, for theirs was a parable of hill-born power
that fades when it finds the plains. They told of the giant redwood's
growth from a tiny seed; of the avalanche that, born a snowflake,
heaves and grows on the peaks, to shrink and die on the level lands
below. They told of the river at our feet: of its rise, a thread-like
rill, afar on Tallac's side, and its growth--a brook, a stream, a
little river, a river, a mighty flood that rolled and ran from hills
to plain to meet a final doom so strange that only the wise believe.
Yes, I have seen it; it is there to-day--the river, the wonderful
river, that unabated flows, but that never reaches the sea.
I give you the story then as it came to me, and yet I do not give it,
for theirs is a tongue unknown to script: I give a dim translation;
dim, but in all ways respectful, reverencing the indomitable spirit of
the mountaineer, worshiping the mighty Beast that nature built a
monument of power, and loving and worshiping the clash, the awful
strife heroic, at the close, when these two met.
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