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The Everlasting Whisper By: Jackson Gregory (1882-1943) |
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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 the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind many of the
artificialities of the twentieth century and remembered ancient
instincts... Continue reading book >>
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Genres for this book |
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Fiction |
Literature |
Westerns |
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Wikipedia – The Everlasting Whisper |
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