Margaret McCarter - Winning the Wilderness

Beyond a westward sweeping curve of the river’s course the chase became a climb up a long slope that grew steeper and steeper, cutting off the view of the stream. Here Juno’s speed slackened, then dropped into a steady canter, as she listened for a command to turn back.

“We’ll go on to the edge of that bluff, lady, now we are here, and see what is across the river,” Virginia said. “Then we will hurry home to Asher and prairie hay.”

When they came at last over a rough shale outcrop to the highest headland, the river bed lay between its base and a barren waste of sand dunes, with broad grassy regions beyond them spreading southward. The view from the bluff’s top was magnificent. Virginia held Juno to the place and looked in wonder at the vast southwest on this strange September afternoon. Across a reach of level land, miles wide, a prairie fire was sweeping in the majesty of mastery. The lurid flames leaped skyward, while roll on surging roll of black smoke-waves, with folds of gray ashes smothering between, poured out along the horizon. Beyond the fire was the dark blue storm-cloud, banded across the front by the hail mark of coppery green.

Virginia sat enchanted by the grandeur of the scene. The veil had fallen from her head, and with white face and fascinated eyes, she watched the glowing fury, a graceful rider on a graceful black horse, on the crest of the lone headland outlined against the sky.

Suddenly the terror of it broke upon her. She was miles from the cabin with its double fireguard. Asher had said such fires could leap rivers. Between her and safety were many level banks where the sandy stream bed was narrow, and many grassy stretches where there was no water at all.

Distance, storm wind, fire and hail, all seemed ready to close down upon her, making her senses reel. One human being, alone before the wrath of Nature! In all the years that followed, she never forgot that scene. For in that moment a whisper came from somewhere out of the void, “The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms,” and she clasped her hands in a wordless prayer.

The wind that had been cruel all day grew suddenly kind. A dead calm held the air in a hot stillness. Then with a whip and a whirl, it swung its course about and began to pour cool and strong out of the northwest.

“The wind is changing,” Virginia cried, as she felt its chill and saw the flame and smoke tower upward and bend back from the way. “It is blowing the fire to the east, to the southeast. But, will it catch Asher? Oh, you good Wind, blow south! blow south!” she pleaded, as she dashed down the long slope for the homeward race.

When Asher reached his claim, he looked in vain for Virginia’s face as he passed the cabin window. He hurried the ponies into the corral, and the wagon under the lean-to beside the stable, half conscious that something was missing inside. Then he hastened to the cabin, but Virginia was not there.

“She may be in the stable.” He half whispered the words in his anxiety.

The ponies in the corral were greedily eating their hay, but the black mare Juno was gone. As Asher turned toward the house, he caught the low roaring of the tempest and felt a rush of cool wind from somewhere. A huge storm-wave of yellow dust was rolling out of the southwest; beyond it the heavens were copper-green, and back of that, midnight darkness; while, borne onward by its force, low waves of prairie fire were swept along the ground.

Down at the third bend of the river where long growths overhung the stream, the flames crossed easily. Even as Asher Aydelot watched the storm cloud, long tongues of fire came licking up the valley toward him, not a towering height, but a swift crawling destruction which he looked at with unseeing eyes, for his only thought was for Virginia.

“How could I have missed her if she started to meet me? Yet, where can she be now?” he groaned.

The hungry flames gnawed vainly about his broad fireguard, then wavered back and forth along the south prairie, while he watched them under the fascination the mastery of the elements can exert. He turned at last from the fire and storm to see Juno and her rider swinging down the northwest prairie, keeping close to the river line before the chill north wind.

“Oh, Virgie, Virgie,” he cried, as she slipped from the saddle and he caught her in his arms. “I’ve lived a hundred years since I left you this afternoon. What made you run away?”

In the joy of her safe return, he forgot the fire.

“Why, don’t you see the wind is from the north? And it is blowing everything south now? I saw it begin away up the river. Did that guard really keep off that thing I saw from the high bluff up yonder?”

“I put it there to do it, and I’d take the chances. Awful as it is, it can’t do anything but burn, and there’s nothing here to burn. If it hadn’t been there, everything would have been gone and you would have come back to a pile of ashes if the wind had left a pile.”

“And you put your puny hands to the plow handles and say to that awful fury, ‘So far, and no farther. This is my home.’ You, one little human being!” Virginia’s eyes were glowing with wonder at the miracle.

“Yes, with my puny hands. Me – a little man,” Asher smiled quizzically, as he spread his broad brown hands before his face and drew himself up to his full six feet of height. “Only I say, ’our home.’ But I was so scared about you, I forgot to notice the change in the wind. The fire is chasing to the south, and the hailstorm has veered off down that stream this side of those three headlands over there. The wind gives and the wind takes away. You can’t plow a guard around it.”

They sat down by the cabin door to watch the storm and flame blown far away in whirls of glaring light and surging cloud, until the rain at last drowned all the fury and washed it over the edge of the south horizon out of the world.

“Sometime we’ll plant hedges and forest trees and checker the country with windbreaks until days like this will belong only to an old pioneer’s memory,” Asher said, as the storm swept wide away.

“Then, I’m glad I came early enough to see this. I’m getting ’plains-broke’ along with Juno. Isn’t it wonderful to be a real pioneer? Back in Virginia we were two centuries of generations away from the first settlers,” Virginia exclaimed.

But Asher did not answer. He was thinking of Jim Shirley’s declaration: “She’s got endurance as well as grace and beauty.”

Virginia Aydelot soon grew brown as a berry in the tanning prairie winds, and it seemed impossible that this strong young woman of the sod cabin, with her simple dress and her cheeks abloom, could have been the dainty child of the old Southern mansion house.

No other autumn had ever seemed quite so beautiful to the Aydelots as this, their first autumn together. Life was before them with its call to victory. Youth and health, exuberant spirits and love were theirs. Theirs, too, was the great boundless world of mists and mirages, of rainbow tinted grasses and opal heavens, where no two sunsets were ever the same. They could laugh at their poverty, believing in a time when Ease and Plenty would rule the land where now they must fight for the bare necessities of existence, picturing life not as it was then with its many hardships, but as it would be in a future day when the real world whose last outpost they had left almost fifty miles to the eastward, should move toward them and help to people the prairies.