Excerpt from The Lonesome Trail

The Old Cry

O Mourner in the silence of the hills,
0 Thing of ancient griefs, art thou a wolf?
I heard a cry that shook me - was it thine?

Low in the mystic purple of the west
The weird moon hangs, a tarnished silver slug:
Vast, vast the hollow empty night curves down,
Stabbed with the glass-like glinting of the stars,
And, save when that wild cry grows up anon,
No sound but this dull murmur of the hush -
The winter hush.

Hark! once again thy cry!
Thy strange, sharp, ice-like, tenuous complaint,
As though the spirit of this frozen waste
Pinched with the cruel frost yearned summerward!

I know thou art a wolf that criest so:
Though hidden in the shadow, I can see
Thy four feet huddled in the numbing frost,
Thy snout, breath-whitened, pointing to the sky:
Poor pariah of the plains, I know 'tis thou.

And yet - and yet - I heard a kinsman shout!
Down through the intricate centuries it came,
A far-blown cry! From old-world graves it grew,
Up through the tumbled walls of ancient realms,
Up through the lizard-haunted heaps of stone,
Up through the choking ashes of old fanes,
The pitiful debris where Grandeur dwelt,
Out of the old-world wilderness it grew -
The cry I know! And I have heard my Kin!

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