Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/110

102 as the sun climbed up over the far, white peaks. He had a sense of having returned, after long and futile wanderings, to his own home. Always there had been blind, little-understood gropings in his own soul, a reaching outward; and had he found his destiny at last?

Up Silver Creek came the salmon, returning to their home waters for their last days. Four years had they dwelt in the dark bewilderment of the sea, but they came back to their own places in the end. Did they, all through those four years of their exile, carry in the deepest recesses of their beings a vision of their Lost Land to which they would return to die? Did they know a vague bewilderment, blind gropings in their fishy souls, an unfamiliarity with the gray wastes and the incessant waves that was not to end until they could know again the shallows and cataracts and waterfalls of their native river? Did peace come to them then? It was repatriation,—and Hugh felt that he had repatriated too. Only the exile had not been confined to his own little life. Instead of four years it was—more likely—four generations, even four centuries. He had been an alien in those far, tumultuous cities, but he had come home to the open places at last.

"You are an Anglo-Saxon," the Old Colonel had said, and that had meant that for as many years as could be counted in a day his people had been tillers of the soil. The Anglo-Saxon was never one to gather into cities. He knew the