Alcatraz

FREEDOM

Towards the Eagles, rolling up like wind-blown smoke, Alcatraz fled, cleared one by one the fences about the small fields near Glosterville, and so came at last to the broader domains under the foothills.  Here, on a rise of ground, he halted for the first time and looked back.

The heat waves, glimmering up endlessly, obscured Glosterville, but the wind, from some hidden house among the hills, bore to him wood-smoke scents with a mingling of the abhorrent odors of man.  It made many an old scar of spur-gore and biting whiplash tingle; it was a background of pain which was like seasoning for the new delight of freedom.

As though there was a poundage of joy and additional muscle in self-mastery, the frame of the chestnut filled, his neck arched, and there came into his eyes that gleam which no man can describe and which for lack of words he calls the light of the wild.

Fear, to be sure, was still with him; would ever be with him, for the thought of man followed like galloping horses surrounding him, but what a small shadow was that in the sunshine of this new existence!  His life had been the bitterness of captivity since Cordova took in part payment of a drunken gambling debt a sickly foal out of an old thoroughbred mare.  The sire was unknown, and Cordova, disgusted at having to accept this wretched horseflesh in place of money, had beaten the six months’ old colt soundly and turned it loose in the pasture.  There followed a brief season of happiness in the open pasture but when the new grass came, short and thick and sweet and crisp under tooth, Cordova came by the pasture and saw his yearling flirting away from the fastest of the older horses with a stretch gallop that amazed the Mexican.  He leaned a moment on the fence watching with glittering eyes and then he passed into a dream.  At the end of the dream he took Alcatraz out of the pasture and into the stable.  That had been to Alcatraz, like the first calamity falling on Job, the beginning of sorrow and for three years and more he had endured not in patience but with an abiding hatred.  For a great hatred is a great strength, and the hatred for Cordova made the chestnut big of heart to wait.  He had learned to season his days with the patience of the lynx waiting for the porcupine to uncurl or the patience of the cat amazingly still for hours by the rat-hole.  In such a manner Alcatraz endured.  Once a month, or once a year, he found an opening to let drive at the master with his heels, or to rear and strike, or to snap with his teeth wolfishly.  If he missed it meant a beating; if he landed it meant a beating postponed; and so the dream had grown to have the man one day beneath his feet.  Now, on the hilltop, every nerve in his forelegs quivered in memory of the feel of live flesh beneath his stamping hoofs.

It is said that sometimes one victory in the driving finish of a close race will give a horse a great heart for running and one defeat, similarly, may break him.  But Alcatraz, who had endured so many defeats, was at last victorious and the triumph was doubly sweet.  It was not the work of chance.  More than once he had tested the strength of that old halter rope, covertly, with none to watch, and had felt it stretch and give a little under the strain of his weight; but he had long since learned the futility of breaking ropes so long as there were stable walls or lofty corral fences to contain him.  A moment of local freedom meant nothing, and he had waited until he should find open sky and clear country; this was his reward of patience.

The short, frayed end of the rope dangled beneath his chin; his neck stung where the rope had galled him; but these were minor ills and freedom was a panacea.  Later he would work off the halter as he alone knew how.  The wind, swinging sharply to the north and the west, brought the fragrance of the forests on the slopes of the Eagles, and Alcatraz started on towards them.  He would gladly have waited and rested where he was but he knew that men do not give up easily.  What one fails to do a herd comes to perform.  Moreover, men struck by surprise, men stalked with infinite cunning; the moment when he felt most secure in his stall and ate with his head down, blinded by the manger, was the very moment which the Mexican had often chosen to play some cruel prank.  The lip of Alcatraz twitched back from his teeth as he remembered.  This lesson was written into his mind with the letters of pain:  in the moment of greatest peace, beware of man!

That day he journeyed towards the mountains; that night he chose the tallest hill he could find and rested there, trusting to the wide prospect to give him warning; and no matter how soundly he slept the horrid odor of man approaching would bring him to his feet.  No man came near but there were other smells in the night.  Once the air near the ground was rank with fox.  He knew that smell, but he did not know the fainter scent of wildcat.  Neither could he tell that the dainty-footed killer had slipped up within half a dozen yards of his back and crouched a long moment yearning towards the mountain of warm meat but knowing that it was beyond its powers to make the kill.

A thousand futile alarms disturbed Alcatraz, for freedom gave the nights new meanings for him.  Sometimes he wakened with a start and felt that the stars were the lighted lanterns of a million men searching for him; and sometimes he lay with his head strained high listening to the strange silence of the mountains and the night which has a pulse in it and something whispering, whispering forever in the distance.  Hunted men have heard it and to Alcatraz it was equally filled with charm and terror.  What made it he could not tell.  Neither can men understand.  Perhaps it is the calling of the wild animals just beyond ear shot.  That overtone of the mountains troubled and frightened Alcatraz on his first night; eventually he was to come to love it.

He was up in the first grey of the dawn hunting for food and he found it in the form of bunchgrass.  He had been so entirely a stable-raised horse that this fodder was new to him.  His nose assured him over and over again that this was nourishment, but his eyes scorned the dusty patches eight or ten inches across and half of that in height, with a few taller spears headed out for seed.  When he tried it he found it delicious, and as a matter of fact it is probably the finest grass in the world.

He ate slowly, for he punctuated his cropping of the grass with glances towards the mountains.  The Eagles were growing out of the night, turning from purple-grey to purple-blue, to daintiest lavender mist in the hollows and rosy light on the peaks, and last the full morning came over the sky at a step and the day wind rose and fluffed his mane.

He regarded these changes with a kindly eye, much as one who has never seen a sunrise before; and just as he had always made the corral into which he was put his private possession, and dangerous ground for any other creature, so now he took in the down-sweep of the upper range and the big knees of the mountains pushing out above the foothills and the hills themselves modelled softly down towards the plain, and it seemed to Alcatraz that this was one great corral, his private property.  The horizon was his fence, advancing and receding to attend him; all between was his proper range.  He took his station on a taller hilltop and gave voice to his lordliness in a neigh that rang and re-rang down a hollow.  Then he canted his head and listened.  A bull bellowed an answer fainter than the whistle of a bird from the distance, and just on the verge of earshot trembled another sound.  Alcatraz did not know it, but it made him shudder; before long he was to recognize the call of the lofer wolf, that grey ghost which runs murdering through the mountains.

Small though the sounds were, they convinced Alcatraz that his claim to dominion would be mightily disputed.  But what is worth having at all if it is not worth fighting for?  He journeyed down the hillside stepping from grass knot to grass knot.  All the time he kept his sensitive nostrils alert for the ground-smell of water and raised his head from moment to moment to catch the upper-air scents in case there might be danger.  At length, before prime, he came down-wind from a water-hole and galloped gladly to it.  It was a muddy place with a slope of greenish sun-baked earth on all sides.  Alcatraz stood on the verge, snuffed the stale odor in disgust and then flirted the surface water with his upper lip before he could make himself drink.  Yet the taste was far from evil, and there was nothing of man about it.  Yonder a deer had stepped, his tiny footprint sun-burned into the mud, and there was the sprawling, sliding track of a steer.

Alcatraz stepped further in.  The feel of the cool slush was pleasant, working above his hoofs and over the sensitive skin of the fetlock joint.  He drank again, bravely and deep, burying his nose as a good horse should and gulping the water.  And when he came out and stamped the mud from his feet he was transformed.  He had slept and eaten and drunk in his own home.

After that, he idled through the hills eating much, drinking often, and making up as busily as he could in a few weeks for the long years of semi-starvation under the regime of the Mexican.  His body responded amazingly.  His coat grew sleek, his barrel rounded, his neck arched with new muscles and the very quality of mane and tail changed; he became the horse of which he had previously been the caricature.  It was a lonely life in many ways but the very loneliness was sweet to the stallion.  Moreover, there was much to learn, and his brain, man-trained by his long battle against a man, drank in the lessons of the wild country with astonishing rapidity.  Had it not been for intervention from the Great Enemy, he might have continued for an indefinite period in the pleasant foothills.

But Man found him.  It was after some weeks, while he was intently watching a chipmunk colony one day.  Each little animal chattered at the door of his home and so intent was Alcatraz’s attention that he had no warning of the approach of a rider up the wind until the gravel close behind spurted under the rushing hoofs of another horse and the deadly shadow of the rope swept over him.  Terror froze him for what seemed a long moment under the swing of the rope, in reality his side-leap was swift as the bound of the wild cat and the curse of the unlucky cowpuncher roared in his ear.

Alcatraz shot away like a thrown stone.  The pursuit lasted only five minutes, but to the stallion it seemed five ages, with the shouting of the man behind him, for while he fled every scar pricked him and once again his bones ached from every blow which the Mexican had struck.  At the end of the five minutes Alcatraz was hopelessly beyond reach and the cowpuncher merely galloped to the highest hilltop to watch the runner.  As far as he could follow the course, that blinding speed was not abated, and the cowpuncher watched with a lump growing in his throat.  He had fallen into a dream of being mounted on a stallion which no horse in the mountains could overtake and which no horse in the mountains could escape.  To be safe in flight, to be inescapable in pursuit—­that was, in a small way, to be like a god.

But when Alcatraz disappeared in the horizon haze, the cowpuncher lowered his head with a sigh.  He realized that such a creature was not for him, and he turned his horse’s head and plodded back towards the ranchhouse.  When he arrived, he told the first story of the wild red-chestnut, beautiful, swift as an eagle.  He talked with the hunger and the fire which comes on the faces of those who love horses.  It was not his voice but his manner which convinced his hearers, and before he ended every eye in the bunkhouse was lighted.

That moment was the beginning of the end for Alcatraz.  From the moment men saw him and desired him the days of his freedom were limited; but great should be the battle before he was subdued!