The Ocean's Menace Read online

  But the deer did not know this. Doubtless he thought that his relentless enemy had at last overtaken him; for to the weird noises of the Ocean he added his piteous bell-call. None the less for his despair he struggled and fought with the sucking sands. Only a few yards away was the shore, the sound earth; but there the hound was, baying loudly. Sidney shouted at him to shut up, whereupon the dog retreated sullenly, eyeing his master in askance. He did not take in the situation. Sitting down on his haunches under a big pine he howled lugubriously until the hollow Ocean echoed, and the long corridors of the cypresses reverberated the mournful sound. Having thus vented his hurt feelings, he looked on the strange scene suspiciously, wondering what his master’s anger might signify; then he slunk off into a thicket, there to lick his paws and await developments.

  So the man and the buck he had tried to kill were left alone in the quicksands.

  Sidney’s thoughts, which had been wrenched away from the subject of the spectre, now returned to it with intensified meaning. Was this, then, that weird creature, lurking in the vast swamp; was this the silent spectre of the Ocean? Was this where the two brothers had been lost? How deep was it? What lay at its bottom? What hope was there of his escape?

  Six miles away, where the slow dark stream that drained the Ocean crossed the plantation road, there was a well-known strip of quicksands; a place where, within Sidney’s memory, a man and his horse had lost their lives; yet withal an enchanting spot. There grew purple flags, and the golden swamp-jasmine; there the green wampees lifted their glistening leaves above the sluggish water, and the purple nightshade swung her lamps among the misty willows. With that scene in his mind, Sidney glanced about him, fascinated, wondering if the same growths would indicate the same treacherous bottom beneath them. He saw the wampees, dewy and cool; he saw the flag stems, but no flowers; and the low bushes along the shore were festooned with jasmine and nightshade vines.

  If a man wanted to die, surely the haunt of the nameless spectre of the Ocean was a beautiful and luring place where life might end; but Sidney West had no intention of death; he was a young man, with all of life’s possibilities before him. He had been building up the Fanny Mead place; he had a sweetheart down in the village on the coast; he could not die. What would be said of him at home and in the community? His hound would slink back to his kennel, and that night would howl as a dog howls only over the dead. His horse would break away from his tether and would return to the plantation, to stand riderless before the front steps, there among the anxious watchers, a mute messenger of disaster. Then men would say that the spectre of the great Ocean had seized him. Others might explain his fate in different ways. Searching parties would come out for him, and would even penetrate this dread domain. Yet what would they—what could they—find? They would find the deep silence of the Ocean, the great beauty of its wondrous scenes, the profound mystery at its being. But they would not find the man who had sunk from sight into the abysmal pool, over whose head had closed forever the sucking sands, the oozing waters, and the heartless exuberant growths of the savage swamp.

  Plein-air charcoal drawing, Congaree National Park, 4:00 P.M., Wednesday, January 18, 2017.

  On his legs and his body the tugging of the sands had now become unbearable. Sidney had a flashing idea that the buck, laboring and panting under the double strain put upon him, had some knowledge of the strange place; for the crafty animal was no longer floundering; though he was slowly sinking, his feet seemed to be pushing this way and that, with desperate shifts, trying to get a footing. Once his shoulders heaved out of the bog; then something snapped, and he plunged down again. The hunter tried to ease his weight. He took the buck by the hip-bones, behind the cups where the flanks heave most, and with that grip he tried to draw out his feet. Slowly they came, but the deer’s haunches sank lower. The man made a sudden wrestling effort, and his feet came clear, though the buck went down so that the hunter’s hands disappeared in the grassy sand.

  This could not last long; for now the man had no support, or only that which was sinking. Gingerly he released his hold, lying almost prone on the morass. Then the great buck, tossing his antlers high and snorting defiance, gave a giant heave. Sidney, just in time, caught his old grip, and felt himself dragged bodily out of the quicksands. Half-blinded with water and sand, he hung on until the deer, well-nigh spent, sank under his weight on the shore.

  Panting and sweating the hunter rose to his feet. The buck lay there looking up at him, and Sidney saw a flesh wound in the shoulder from which the blood was slowly running. He reached for his knife; but even while he remembered where and how he had lost it, he felt a revulsion of feeling and a sudden sense of manly shame. He knelt by the deer and examined the wound. It was but slight, and would be healed in a few days. Sidney stroked the big buck’s neck, ran his hand over the magnificent velvet antlers, patted his deliverer’s flank, then turned on the back track out of the Ocean.

  Afterword

  Jim Casada

  One distinguishing characteristic of Archibald Rutledge’s narrative writing throughout his years was that he covered subjects with which he had intimate familiarity. His tales on hunting, history, plantation life, African Americans, natural history, and related topics exude an aura of matchless authority. But there was another aspect of his incredible productivity which has garnered far less attention than it deserves. Throughout his lengthy literary career, Rutledge was fascinated by strange places, dangerous beasts, the supernatural, and indeed anything likely to captivate the imagination of readers. That was because, almost without exception, the things Old Flintlock wrote about drew on personal experiences or interaction with others who knew a great deal about his subjects. For example, his Civil War–related material grew out of his father’s life. Colonel Rutledge was a part of that great conflict from the early stages right through to Appomattox. Thanks to sources such as his father and a lifetime of being out and about on his native heath, Rutledge was able to soak up information like a literary sponge, nicely match it with exceptional observational abilities, and finish it off in delightful fashion utilizing his fetching way with words.

  In short, he was a writer of the “been there, done that” school. As a man who recognized that there was no substitute for being involved firsthand when it came to capturing the thrill of a gobbler giving voice at daybreak, hearing whistling wings of waterfowl heading to the roost in the gloaming, or joying in the sight of a lordly deer easing through a swamp well ahead of a pack of dogs, he arguably had no match when it came to his versatility as a writer on the natural world.

  He understood that tales of anything strange or unusual formed particularly fine fodder for his fertile imagination, but that provides only part of the explanation of why he so frequently focused on chimeras and daunting landscapes. He instinctively knew what editors and readers wanted, but he also had a deeply-rooted personal obsession with this type of subject matter. The tract of land known to him and others living in the Hampton area as “The Ocean” is a telling case study in this regard.

  While the title of this piece might lead those only marginally familiar with Rutledge’s writing to think of a story with subject matter along the lines of a massive shark (he wrote such a piece, “Death in the Moonlight”), rogue tides, or a hurricane, the Ocean was actually a wild, mysterious region that appears repeatedly in his tales. I particularly like the description of it he provides in “The Philosopher among Dogs,” found on pages 63–84 of one of his rarer books, Bolio and Other Dogs. “About four miles from home,” he writes, “there is a strange, wild region known as ‘the Big Ocean.’ It is a singular stretch of inviolate country. I have been deep into its mysterious heart; but there are parts of it that no human eye has ever seen.”

  Never one to miss an opportunity to gild the lily a bit when the situation demanded or as it suited his fancy, Old Flintlock almost certainly overreached when he suggested that no human had seen portions of the Ocean. While it encompassed thousands of foreboding acres, mostly
of a swampy nature, and was decidedly inaccessible when compared to nearby terrain, it was by no means terra incognita. Nor, unless you are an aficionado of the paranormal, do Rutledge’s suggestions of a specter at twilight haunting its borders or “unearthly cries” of those who were the specter’s victims stand up to close scrutiny. Similarly, he offers ample evidence of his firmly entrenched if unstated conviction that it was a poor piece of cloth that could use no embroidery when he writes, multiple times, of stretches of quicksand found in the Ocean’s expanses. True quicksand does not exist in South Carolina, although I suppose anyone who has had harrowing encounters with particularly sticky pluff mud or deep bogs might make the case that those come uncomfortably close to quicksand.

  Matters of literary license aside, Rutledge clearly realized the storytelling possibilities provided by the Ocean. He used the place in the titles of at least three of his tales—the one offered here, as well as “Daybreak in the Ocean” (pages 30–31 and 55–56 of Outdoor Life, February 1936, subsequently published on pages 425–33 of what is probably his best-known book on the outdoors, An American Hunter), and “Riding the Ocean” (initially in Outlook magazine, October 15, 1924, pages 251–56 and subsequently in Children of Swamp and Wood, pages 212–25). He also mentions the locality by name in a number of other pieces.

  As is true of the other tales selected for inclusion in this series of chapbooks, “The Ocean’s Menace” appeared in the rare, privately printed version of Old Plantation Days, but not in the subsequent commercial edition carrying the same title. It is possible—indeed likely—that the story was first published in one of the popular magazines for boys which enjoyed considerable success in the pre–World War I era. Rutledge was by no means an astute businessman when it came to managing his literary endeavors, and in fact he sold all rights to what is likely his most printed work, Life’s Extras, for a mere pittance. However, what he did understand and constantly employ was the practice of recycling magazine articles as chapters in books. Virtually all his books on hunting and natural history are anthologies comprised of loosely connected stories, and the vast majority of the selections included in those volumes first saw the printed light of day as magazine articles.

  That being duly recognized, I have been unable to locate any publication of this piece in a magazine. Articles from the time frame in which it falls, somewhere in the first decade of the twentieth century or quite shortly thereafter, are not particularly well indexed. This is especially true for youth magazines. The standard index for that era, Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, while invaluable to scholars, has limitations when it comes to the range of periodicals covered. It focuses almost exclusively on popular publications for adults and select scholarly serials. That translates to gaping holes in existing Rutledge bibliographies, and several such bibliographies have been undertaken as masters’ theses or doctoral dissertations. Indeed, while conducting research for a biography of Rutledge I have uncovered scores, if not hundreds, of writings by him that are generally unknown, and that does not include his poetry. In all likelihood, the only way to locate this piece as a magazine article would be through sheer happenstance or a long, concerted slog combing all youth magazines for the period issue by issue.

  For today’s readers, the fact that this piece was almost certainly intended for an adolescent audience may come as something of a surprise. It is quite sophisticated in terms of language, and I suspect that if one applied a software program (and such software exists) to determine its current level of readership, the result would be eleventh or twelfth grade, or possibly post-high school. This is not the place to take off down a rabbit trail on levels of literacy today as compared to a century ago, but there is no denying that by contemporary standards this is adult fare.

  While I have been unable to locate this piece in periodical form, this is not the first time it has appeared in print other than in the scarce version of Old Plantation Days. When this series of chapbooks was planned, the underlying concept was that they constituted lost literary treasure because of the scarcity of the book in which they appeared. However, during the course of research on Rutledge connected with a fellowship I held at the National Sporting Library and Museum, I took some time to read every Rutledge story on the outdoors ever published in any of his many books. To my surprise I discovered that this piece is included in one of his later works, From the Hills to the Sea (pages 167–75). While it carries the title “The Demon of the Ocean,” the tale is the same one with only a few minor changes.

  Initially that troubled me enough to let the good folks at the University of South Carolina Press know about the situation. In reality, other than necessitating a bit of revision in promotional claims such as “unseen for a century,” it really doesn’t matter much. From the Hills to the Sea has been out of print for many decades, and it is not nearly as well-known as more popular Rutledge titles such as An American Hunter, Home by the River, Days Off in Dixie, or Hunter’s Choice. Thus there is every likelihood that reading this offering will involve plowing new ground for all but a handful of Rutledge enthusiasts.

  The Ocean’s distinctive features form the underpinning of this fanciful tale, and as is so often the case in Old Flintlock’s finest writing, a deer hunter is his protagonist. Where normally he wrote of slaying mighty bucks, in this instance the whitetail which was the quarry of his hunter proves to be the nimrod’s savior. With overtones of anthropomorphism, Rutledge’s trademark verve for describing the physical features of the world around Hampton he knew so well, and an ending that would have done O. Henry proud, this is the sage of the Santee at his finest.