A city child would have
either gone mad with terror or else made that fatal struggle to reach the
forbidden place, but Joan had learned many things among the mountains, and
among others, she knew the difference between the tame and the free. The
old dappled cow was tame, for instance; and the Maltese cat, which came too
close to Bart the year before and received a broken back for its
carelessness, had been tame; and the brown horse with the white face and
the dreary eyes was tame. They could be handled, and teased, and petted and
bossed about at will. Other creatures were different. For instance, the
scream of the hawk always made her shrink a little closer to the ground, or
else run helter-skelter for the house, and sometimes, up the gulches, she
had heard the wailing of a mountain lion on the trail, hunting swiftly, and
very hungry. There was even something about the dead eyes of certain lynxes
and coyotes and bobcats which Daddy Dan trapped that made Joan feel these
animals belonged to a world where the authority of man was only the
strength of his hand or his cunning.
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