The Man and the Mountain Page #3

"The Man and the Mountain" by Bret Harte is a short story that explores themes of solitude, nature, and the human spirit. Set against the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the narrative follows a solitary miner who embodies the rugged individualism of the American West. Through encounters with nature and other characters, Harte delves into the complexities of loneliness, aspiration, and the search for meaning in an untamed landscape. The story captures the stark beauty of the wilderness while highlighting the inner struggles of its protagonist, ultimately reflecting on the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

• Short story

								

mind as a revelation of something weak and puerile, quite inconsistent
with his practical common sense and strong simplicity, and wished he had
not alluded to it. I never asked him to tell me the story. It was a year
later, and only when he had invited me to come to the opening of a new
hotel, erected by him at a mountain spa of great resort, that he himself
alluded to it.

The hotel was a wonderful affair, even for those days, and Rutli's
outlay of capital convinced me that by this time he must have made the
"mooch money" he coveted. Something of this was in my mind when we sat
by the window of his handsomely furnished private office, overlooking
the pines of a Californian canyon. I asked him if the scenery was like
Switzerland.

"Ach! no!" he replied; "but I vill puild a hotel shoost like dis dare."

"Is that a part of your revenge?" I asked, with a laugh.

"Ah! so! a bart."

I felt relieved; a revenge so practical did not seem very malicious or
idiotic. After a pause he puffed contemplatively at his pipe, and then
said, "I dell you somedings of dot story now."

He began. I should like to tell it in his own particular English, mixed
with American slang, but it would not convey the simplicity of the
narrator. He was the son of a large family who had lived for centuries
in one of the highest villages in the Bernese Oberland. He attained his
size and strength early, but with a singular distaste to use them in
the rough regular work on the farm, although he was a great climber and
mountaineer, and, what was at first overlooked as mere boyish fancy, had
an insatiable love and curious knowledge of plants and flowers. He knew
the haunts of Edelweiss, Alpine rose, and blue gentian, and had brought
home rare and unknown blossoms from under the icy lips of glaciers.
But as he did this when his time was supposed to be occupied in looking
after the cows in the higher pastures and making cheeses, there was
trouble in that hard-working, practical family. A giant with the tastes
and disposition of a schoolgirl was an anomaly in a Swiss village.
Unfortunately again, he was not studious; his record in the village
school had been on a par with his manual work, and the family had not
even the consolation of believing that they were fostering a genius. In
a community where practical industry was the highest virtue, it was not
strange, perhaps, that he was called "lazy" and "shiftless;" no one knew
the long climbs and tireless vigils he had undergone in remote solitudes
in quest of his favorites, or, knowing, forgave him for it. Abstemious,
frugal, and patient as he was, even the crusts of his father's table
were given him grudgingly. He often went hungry rather than ask the
bread he had failed to earn. How his great frame was nurtured in those
days he never knew; perhaps the giant mountains recognized some kin
in him and fed and strengthened him after their own fashion. Even his
gentleness was confounded with cowardice. "Dot vos de hardtest," he said
simply; "it is not goot to be opligit to half crush your brudder, ven he
would make a laugh of you to your sweetheart." The end came sooner than
he expected, and, oddly enough, through this sweetheart. "Gottlieb," she
said to him one day, "the English Fremde who stayed here last night met
me when I was carrying some of those beautiful flowers you gave me. He
asked me where they were to be found, and I told him only YOU knew. He
wants to see you; go to him. It may be luck to you." Rutli went. The
stranger, an English Alpine climber of scientific tastes, talked with
him for an hour. At the end of that time, to everybody's astonishment,
he engaged this hopeless idler as his personal guide for three months,
at the sum of five francs a day! It was inconceivable, it was unheard
of! The Englander was as mad as Gottlieb, whose intellect had always
been under suspicion! The schoolmaster pursed up his lips, the pastor
shook his head; no good could come of it; the family looked upon it as
another freak of Gottlieb's, but there was one big mouth less to feed
and more room in the kitchen, and they let him go. They parted from him
as ungraciously as they had endured his presence.

Then followed two months of sunshine in Rutli's life--association with
his beloved plants, and the intelligent sympathy and direction of a
cultivated man. Even in altitudes so dangerous that they had to take
other and more experienced guides, Rutli was always at his master's
side. That savant's collection of Alpine flora excelled all previous
ones; he talked freely with Rutli of further work in the future, and
relaxed his English reserve so far as to confide to him that the outcome
of their collection and observation might be a book. He gave a flower
a Latin name, in which even the ignorant and delighted Rutli could
distinguish some likeness to his own. But the book was never compiled.
In one of their later and more difficult ascents they and their two
additional guides were overtaken by a sudden storm. Swept from their
feet down an ice-bound slope, Rutli alone of the roped-together party
kept a foothold on the treacherous incline. Here this young Titan, with
bleeding fingers clenched in a rock cleft, sustained the struggles and
held up the lives of his companions by that precious thread for more
than an hour. Perhaps he might have saved them, but in their desperate
efforts to regain their footing the rope slipped upon a jagged edge of
outcrop and parted as if cut by a knife. The two guides passed without
an outcry into obscurity and death; Rutli, with a last despairing
exertion, dragged to his own level his unconscious master, crippled by a
broken leg.

Your true hero is apt to tell his tale simply. Rutli did not dwell upon
these details, nor need I. Left alone upon a treacherous ice slope
in benumbing cold, with a helpless man, eight hours afterwards he
staggered, half blind, incoherent, and inarticulate, into a "shelter"
hut, with the dead body of his master in his stiffened arms. The
shelter-keepers turned their attention to Rutli, who needed it most.
Blind and delirious, with scarce a chance for life, he was sent the next
day to a hospital, where he lay for three months, helpless, imbecile,
and unknown. The dead body of the Englishman was identified, and sent
home; the bodies of the guides were recovered by their friends; but no
one knew aught of Rutli, even his name. While the event was still fresh
in the minds of those who saw him enter the hut with the body of his
master, a paragraph appeared in a Berne journal recording the heroism of
this nameless man. But it could not be corroborated nor explained by the
demented hero, and was presently forgotten. Six months from the day he
had left his home he was discharged cured. He had not a kreutzer in his
pocket; he had never drawn his wages from his employer; he had preferred

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