The Everlasting Whisper

The Everlasting Whisper, by
Jackson Gregory

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Title: The Everlasting Whisper
Author: Jackson Gregory
Release Date: November 22, 2003 [EBook #10213]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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 richer
life-giving glory. Ridge after ridge the mountains swept on and fell
away upon one side until in the vague distances they sank to the
monotonous level of the Sacramento Valley; down there it was already
summer, and fields were hot and brown. Ridge after ridge the
mountains stretched on the other side, rising steadily, growing ever
more august and mighty and rocky; on their crests across the blue
gorges the snow was dazzling white and winter held stubbornly on at
altitudes of seven thousand feet. Thus winter, springtime, and ripe,
fruit-dropping summer coexisted, touching fingers across the seventy
miles that lie between the icy top of the Sierra and the burning
lowlands.
Here, in a region lifted a mile into the rare atmosphere, was a ridge all
naked boulder and spire along its crest, its sides studded with pine and
incense cedar. The afternoon sunlight streaked the big bronze tree
trunks, making bright gay spots and patches of light, casting cool black
shadows across the open spaces where the brown dead needles lay in
thick carpets. It was early June, and thus far only had the springtime
advanced in its vernal progress upward through the timbered solitudes.
Some few small patches of snow still lingered on in spots sheltered
from the sun, but now they were ebbing away in thin trickles. Down in
a hollow at the base of the sunny slope was a round alpine lake no
bigger than a pond in a city park. It was of the same deep, perfect blue
as the sky, whose colour it seemed not to reflect but to absorb.
A tiny fragment of this same heavenly azure drifted downward among

the trees like a bit of sky falling. A second bit of blue that had skimmed
across the lake and was visible now only as it rose and winged across
the contrasting coloured meadow rimming the pool was like a bit of the
lake itself. Two bluebirds. They swerved before the meeting, their
wings fluttered, they lighted on branches of the same tree and shyly
eyed each other. Did a man need to have the still message of all the
woods summed up in final emphasis, this it was: spring is here.
The man himself, as the birds had done before him, had the appearance
of materializing spontaneously from some distilled essence of his
environment. A moment ago the spaces between the wide-set
cedar-trees were empty. Yet he had been there a long time. It was only
because he had moved that he attracted attention even of the sharp-eyed
forest folk who were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had
been viewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour,
so he, while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been
drawn into the entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he
belonged. Here he blended, harmonized, disappeared when he held
motionless. The well-worn, tall, laced boots were of brown leather,
much scuffed, one in colour with the soil dusting them. The khaki
trousers gathered into the boot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the
brown of the tree trunks; skin of hands and face and muscular throat
were the bronze of ripe pine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in
a landscape spotted with light and shadow, the head of black hair might
have passed for a bit of such pitch-black shadow as a tuft of thick
foliage casts upon the light-smitten ground.
Beyond this outward harmony there was something at once more
intangible and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece
with the natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so
many months of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true
brother of the wild; that he had shed coat after coat of artificial veneer
as he took on