it is true that we frightened some bears away, but later we got on good
terms. I saw the first bear on “Going-to-the-Sun” Mountain. No one, of
course, is allowed to shoot bears in Glacier National Park, though it
is not many years since hunters hunted them there with Indians and with
dogs, and one may read of the bear-hunting adventures of Emerson Hough
and others. Now without dogs or guns the bear has been won over and he
has ceased to fear mankind.
It was a beautiful morning and Vachel had been sitting in Baring Creek,
letting Balchis, as he called the waterfall, flow over him, and he was
now lying in a blanket on the ferns and meditating when I heard an
unwonted stump, stump, crash, in the undergrowth.
“Is it a man?” I asked.
Crash, stump, stump, it went again, and peering through the trees I
saw a black bear coming towards us, glossy and shaggy. I called Vachel,
but at that the bear stopped short, raised his intent, listening ears
and then made away from us in another direction. We saw no more of him.
After that I recognised the sound of the bear’s feet in the forest,
quite a characteristic sound, and we knew there were many bears. But
the next occasion of a personal encounter was some weeks later near
Heaven’s Peak. Vachel had got himself an extra long wisp of old canvas
from a ruined tent. We slept by a large fire, and when the fire went
out a bear came to us. Vachel and I were lying close to one another
and both had our blankets over our faces, for it was cold. Vachel, as
he told me afterwards, was awakened by something and lay listening to
my breathing. He thought to himself, “Stephen is certainly making a
terrible racket; he must have a cold”; and then he thought again lazily
and unsuspectingly, “Stephen surely must have caught a cold to be
snuffing and snorting in that way.” Then he thought again, “He seems to
be moving about, I wonder what he’s doing.”
* * * * *
THEN Vachel put his head out of his blanket and what should he see
standing beside us but a big black bear. As for me, I was sleeping like
a babe, and the bear apparently had been snuffing at me to see whether
I were live meat or dead meat. Vachel gave one terrific shout. “THE SON
OF A GUN,” said he, and I wakened up.
“Wake up, Stephen; it’s a bear,” said he. At this Brother Bear walked
across from my side, where I had a pile of boiled eggs, which he had
scattered, and leisurely began to knock our tin cans about on the other
side and try and find the ham which we had bought the day before. In
a most unsaintly way we drove him off. We forgot the example of St.
Seraphim, and Brother Bear was fain to depart. I repented too late
and followed the old scallywag up the moon-bathed forest glade quite
a way. But he would not be called by his pet name after the abuse
we had hurled at him and went away and away till he was lost in the
moon-beams. “He was smelling you to find out whether you were good
to eat,” said Vachel, laughing. “He wouldn’t begin on you unless he
were sure you were carrion.” “Curious,” said I, “isn’t it; we used as
children to look at pictures of bears smelling men who were shamming
dead in order to escape being eaten by them. In children’s books, the
bear won’t eat carrion. Out here in the Rockies you can’t keep them out
of the garbage cans of the camps at night.”
On another occasion, however, when three bears came trundling down
after our supper was over, I approached one with some bread, which he
very gently took from my fingers, and I scratched his nose and put
myself on speaking terms.
“Curious,” said I to Vachel, “is it not? These are the same bears which
used to figure so largely in adventure stories of the Rocky Mountains.
It follows they are ready to be good citizens of the forest if treated
‘good.’”
You’d have had a different experience had they been grizzlies, we were
told later.
Maybe. But St. Seraphim himself did not tackle grizzlies.
[Illustration]
_So we’ve met the bear:
The bear has snuffed at us
And wondered what we were.
Humans with a forest smell to us,
No doubt quite game;
Sleeping out too, very quietly.
Good to eat no doubt,
Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite?
Would they mind?
I’ve bitten most of the animals in the wood
Except them--
In my time._
[Illustration: ELEMENTS OF GOOD COFFEE
MOSQUITO
NETTING
WATERFALL
COFFEE POT
FIR TREE
COFFEE BEANS
STONE
PYRE
LOVE]
XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE
THE wind blew all night long, a wind that seemed to be cleaning up and
burnishing all the spaces between the stars. The rock wall against
which I leaned my back kept stealing away the warmth from my blanket.
Vachel slept off the level on the ferns, at a forty-five degree tilt
downward. We both looked out to the mountains and the stars, and it
was an epical summer night on the Rockies.
The mountains were compact and black and clear, and a dim light behind
them glorified each. A young moon arose and poised herself above us,
and only slowly and very unobtrusively crept across the sky. It was a
night of persistent gale but of a steadfast starry universe. It seemed
to call for rain, but there never came a cloud, only the metallic
interstellar spaces grew lustrous and more lustrous, and the mountains
more and more romantic. Our eyes were religiously and adoringly
spellbound. Our hands--our feet--that is a different tale.
Their hearts were pure,
Their hands were horribly red,
as Balzac said of two young ladies of France.
Vachel, who had tied the tassels of his old steamer rug together and
made a sleeping-bag, was meditative of Peary and Shackleton and their
companions, and though he had procured an extra flannel shirt and
had tied himself up in all he possessed, he still could not find the
temperature at which corn ripens in central Illinois. We heard the
waters of the creek pouring down below, we heard movements among the
trees, and the idea of a bear coming to us was not unsuggested. Vachel
picked up his steamer rug and came across to my rock and laid him down
nearer to me. We slept then till dawn, slept with one eye open and one
shut; one ear alert, the other muffled.
* * * * *
THE lovely light of the east flooded upward and over us from Lake St.
Mary, bathing our mountain-side in a peach blossom glamour; small birds
winged it through the wedge of air ’twixt mountain and mountain. The
creek poured more loudly into our consciousness, and the sharp points
of our rocky bed jibbed upward towards our bones. Then it was morning.
Then it was coffee time.
I shall never forget the poet as he looked in the dawn, with his red
handkerchief tied over his old felt hat and under his chin, and the
concentration of his gaze as he plodded about in three pairs of socks
and half-laced boots seeking extra twigs to make that fire burn. He
looked like a true dwarf or old man of the woods from a page of a
fairy-book, but not really visible to human eyes.
And it was an unpractical fairy who expected damp wood and large wood
to burn as easily as dry withered pine. It sometimes took a long while
to set our pot a-boilin’. Once, however, that had been achieved, great
was our reward. We had our coffee, “Lindsay’s stone coffee,” as we
named it, better than any other coffee in the United States.
* * * * *
“STEPHEN,” said Vachel quietly to me one day, “you must let them know
just how this coffee is made. I’m not one of those selfish people who
keep such secrets to themselves. The ladies especially will like to
have our secret.”
The first point is that you take a stone which has never seen either
sunset or sunrise, a stone lying at the feet of trees not less than
100 feet high. It must have lain there not less than 4000 years and
listened to the music of a waterfall. That is the important point. Any
decent coffee beans ground in any kind of clean grinder will do. A pot
that has seen more than one continent is preferred.
You then cut a square piece of white mosquito net sufficient to hold
the coffee and the stone. Tie up carefully like a plum-pudding, but
leave seven or eight inches of string attached to it so that you can
pull the coffee sack up and down in the pot at will. Vachel in this
matter of coffee is a complete immersionist. The coffee must go right
under.
It is prepared, moreover, in silence and without fear of flame and
smoke. The pot stands on a funeral pyre, and is allowed to lift its lid
several times before a hand swathed up in a towel darts in to rescue it.
We pour it out into our tin cups. It is black, it is good, it has a
kick like a mule; it searches the vitals and chases out the damps; it
comforts the spine and gives tone to the heart. And the poet, silent
hitherto, sits holding his large cup before him. Then he takes a sip
and looks at me.
“Thadd touches the spadd,” says he at last in a deep gastronomical
gestatory voice which seems to lend expression to his ears and
shoulders. “Thadd touches the spadd,” says he in happy relief.
[Illustration]
_Coffee should be made with love;
That’s the first ingredient.
It’s all very well about the stone,
Say I, but it needs a heart as well.
The coffee knows if you really care,
And will do its best if you lend it encouragement.
You can flatter the coffee whilst it is in the pot,
And it will rise to your persuasion.
But the commonest cause of coffee being just indifferent
Is your indifference towards the coffee._
[Illustration: TO THE WORLD’S END]
XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD
AFTER an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to
drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them
fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original
couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made
paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them--his pet
hobby for a number of days.
One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the
Treaty of Versailles.
“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it,” said I.
“Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers,” said he.
Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their
signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been
leaving original poems in the valleys.
We set off from Sun Mountain for the high walls of the Canadian line.
Vachel was in no passion for climbing, and confessed that if he were a
woman, he would, at this point in our adventure, “lie down on the floor
and scream.” So our progress was slow and punctuated by long waits. We
went through tree thickets and breast-high flowers and through tearing
thorns, and we came to many red-rock promontories. Rocks grew up out of
the jungle and topped the highest trees, and we climbed them and looked
out from their smooth, wind-swept summits and listened to the bears,
and Vachel, with paper and pencil, drew maps and put Czecho-Slovakia
in the scheme of things, and asked the God who made the world where
Turkestan might be.
* * * * *
AT length, at noon, we came unto a mighty cliff, an end of the world,
rosy red and flamingly joyful, but very final. The poet was a quarter
of a mile behind me, and I watched him patiently grubbing his way
through the exuberant green, trackless jungle, hit in the face by
branches, choked up to the fork of his legs by the weeds. And when he
came to the end of the world he asked no questions but just sat down
and began drawing a map. “Where,” asked he, “is Seven Rivers Land and
the Desert of Pamir?”
I left him sitting down below and began climbing the giddy cliff with
a tin can in my hand. For growing like wall-flowers on the rocks above
were dwarf raspberry bushes all hung with tiny rosy lights--and these
were fruits. I got up to them and standing on half-inch ledges and
holding to twigs and weeds I picked a cupful of the hot berries all
half-cooked by the sun’s rays. And when I got down again we had a
wonderful repast of raspberries and sugar.
When we resumed tramping we crossed a crag-strewn valley, which was
very rough on our boots. My boots were cracking; Lindsay’s were very
floral. His held out a little while longer, but mine died that day. As
we each carried two pairs of boots we were prepared for the emergency.
Mine had been a stout pair of pre-war boots (Americans please read
“shoes”). I used them first in North Norway and Russia. I tramped in
them in France. They were repaired first by a Russian at Kislovodsk
in the Caucasus; repaired for the second time in Georgia by a negro
cobbler. For I did Sherman’s march and walked from Atlanta to the
sea in them in 1919. And they were repaired for the last time by a
Frenchman in Hazebrouck last year. I had tramped in them over the
battlefields of Gallipoli, and had worn them when the weather was bad
in Constantinople, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, and almost every
other capital of Europe.
“We must burn them,” said Vachel, “and have a special ceremony. These
are no ordinary shoes (Englishmen please read ‘boots’) to be abandoned
in the wilds without the meed of some melodious tear.” So we burned
one on a high flaming fire with young pine-shoots for incense, and the
other we threw into a rushing mountain torrent, and bade it continue
its world journey to the world’s end.
* * * * *
WE lay stretched on our blankets by the pine fire that night and talked
of the world. We arrived at some ideas. “You are not drawing the map
merely as part of a geography lesson,” said I. “You are drawing the
poetry of it.”
A poetical map of the world has never yet been drawn. “It should have
ships on its oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mermaids under it,
and stars over it,” said Vachel. “Imagine how Blake would have drawn
it.”
First, you put in the North and South Poles, symbols of man’s love
of the inaccessible and the paradox of his striving life; then Cape
Horn, stormiest point in the world, cape of innumerable wrecks, of
the innumerable adventures of daring sailors. Then put in the Panama
Canal, symbol of utilitarianism and our modern life. Draw in the Bering
Strait, which is the pre-historic link of the Old World and the New,
and then the Rocky Mountains, which the red men climbed.
Then draw in a dotted line the keel track of Columbus over the ocean
and put an eye upon a peak in the Darien looking downward and outward
to the great Pacific. Draw the Mason and Dixon line. Draw 54° 40´--the
“fifty-four forty or fight” line. Then for the old world, make the
coast-line of China and then mark the Chinese Wall built to keep out
the Huns, then draw the caravans of the hordes, and may arrows fly
over the desert of Asia, spitting against Bokhara and Samarkand,
spitting against the empire of Darius, spitting against the Scythians,
the Slavs, stampeding the Goths and the North Men and ruining Rome and
starting the modern world!
You must put in Athens the birthplace of the ideal, and Marathon and
then Rome, the birthplace of materialism, the capital of capitals, seat
of the Caesars. And then St. Helena, symbol of the doom of would-be
Caesars.
Mark in the mysterious Nile, and the place where the Sphinx looks out
from the sand. Mark Bethlehem and then Jerusalem----
Thus we schemed and mused and made many maps in fancy, and we took
to ourselves just before the stars said good-night the title Geo.
Ast.--geographical astrologers.
“I dare you to register as such,” said Vachel, “when we get out of all
this and reach a hotel at last.”
[Illustration]
_Poor old world, you’re a playground.
And we are the children who romp in you now.
Those maps of you are wrong
Which show trade winds
Instead of winds of inspiration,
Where names of business-places are in bold black print
And railway lines are ruled,
And capitals are marked with blots
And other places are invisible._
[Illustration: THE EAGLE SEES WHAT IS IN THE PIT]
XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW
“WITE man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” cries Vachel playfully from
behind me as we get out of forests and up among the naked rocks. “Wite
man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” or again, “You might as well kill a
man as scare him to death.”
“This is no place to bring ladies,” I ventured.
“And no place to bring a poet, either,” says Vachel. “Look here,
Stephen, I make one rule. I’ll only be scared out of my wits once a
day.”
The poet riveted his eyes on me, and I was a curious sight, being torn
to tatters from head to foot. I had been mending my trousers with the
stuff of my vest and the lining of my coat. “Stephen,” cries Vachel,
“when I get tired of looking at the scenery I look at your pants.” And
I employed much time when we rested sewing up the triangles and flaps
on my knees with white thread drawn from our mosquito netting.
We saw now the wonderful cathedral-shaped mountain behind us, blue
and white and scarred and crumpled. It lifted its clerestory with
grandiosity up into the colder and rarer air. Its rivelled snow hung
in great white copes; its earthquake rents and chasms yawned, and
its dreadful steeps, up which no man ever climbed, drew sternly and
austerely up to summits and spires and towers. Grandiose mountain! And
what little flies, what microscopical insects we were upon it!
* * * * *
WE came to the top of the Valley of Boulder Creek, stretching away
from the heart of the Rockies to the tents of the Indians and the
indeterminate plains, one of the grandest of views to my companion, who
loves the prairie like the prairie child, an aperçu of America seen
from the mountains. “That is what we want to get,” said Vachel, “a
Rocky Mountain point of view on all things American. That is the true
meaning of calling it a national park.”
“Not only that, but a world-point-of-view can be found,” said I.
“That is why it was called Going-to-the-Sun Mountain--the sun sees
everything.”
We turned, however, into a wild and obscure region and blundered and
staggered among a miscellany of all kinds of boulders. Blue lakelets
and pools lay at the foot of djinns of snow, and there were dreadful
iceberg-like reflections in the weird blueness of the water. We
camped on a plateau, or rather in a wide, high trough surrounded by
mountain-sides, and we made a fire of old resinous roots and stumps of
dead, dwarfed trees. There were shallow lakes in sight, but the way
to them was over undulating, quaking moss. Mists encircled us before
nightfall and made our fire ghostly. We lay all night in a great
stillness, and the fire glowered and smouldered and the mist uneasily
crept into rain with a breeze or settled again into mist with the calm.
Next day was a cold and chilling morning like November in England,
and we heaped higher the fire with wood and slept till wind and sun
conquered cloud and damp. And that was nearly noon.
* * * * *
“ONWARD,” cried Vachel, “upward, higher, purer, better, nobler,
sweeter, stronger”--which was his favourite war-cry at the time, and
amid stark upper-mountain scenery we made a glorious afternoon march to
a place of great height. At length, on what seemed a terrifically high
pedestal of black rock, we gleaned a coffee-pot full of fresh snow and
proposed to make tea. And I upset the evaporated milk, but licked it
up off the rocks with the flat of my tongue. This Vachel was too proud
to do, so I have surmised that his progenitors were Lowland Scottish
gentlemen farmers, but mine were Border cattle thieves and “land
loupers.”
We had supper that evening in a great, open mountain space, with
glaciers as large as cities brooding and impending over abysses,
and we looked downward to dark and gloomy rising forests gone tired
on their way up towards us, and we looked upwards to the grandeur of
snow-covered crags and tumultuous, heaven-climbing waves of rock.
Vachel fried the beans to an accompaniment of rhythmical remarks.
Poetry possessed us both. All about us was in grand, romantic, heroic
strain. Vachel remarked how the forests were like harps with long harp
strings, and the strings were the lines which mountain stones and
avalanches had furrowed there for ages. The carpet on which we lay was
of yellow vetches and dark-blue gentians, with lichened stones all
interspersed. Heaven itself was not flat-roofed above us, but raised
at the zenith, a blue vault above us, like the dome of a world-temple.
And the fire burned a black patch on the green and puffed and flamed
symbolically as if we were children of the Old Testament sacrificing
there to our God.
[Illustration]
_Two stars arose above the mountain’s head,
Two stars looked down upon the world in bed;
Looked through the window-panes and saw the world at home,
From Babylon to Tyre, and Rome to Rome.
What if the stars, lifting their tiny lamps,
Were but like us, a couple of old tramps?
Heaven’s tramps the stars, blazing their trails they go,
From mountain-top to mountain-top and snow to snow._
[Illustration: ‘I HAD RATHER BE A PEACOCK THAN A HOG’ SAID THE PEACOCK]
XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE
MANY years ago one of the Springfield newspapers offered a prize to the
reader who should send in the best answer to the question: _What would
you do with a million dollars?_ Young Vachel sent in an answer. His
was: “I would change them to dimes and have them thrown into the State
House yard and any one who wanted them could come and take as much as
he liked.” The answer was printed in the paper with a lot of others and
gave considerable offence. The telephone was kept busy that morning by
those who thought fit to tell his father and mother that they ought to
look after him better and not let him make a fool of himself.
“I did not get the prize,” said Vachel sadly. “The editor probably
thought that with a million dollars one could do just a million
dollars’ worth of good. He thinks, as does my dearest friend, that
you can employ people to do good at a salary, and the one who got the
prize probably allotted ten thousand dollars to this charity and ten
thousand dollars to that and endowed this thing and endowed that and
did not even dare to buy himself an ice-cream soda. They’ve got such a
high idea of money that it’s almost an attribute of God himself. Now, I
rank money low. I’m right up against the weekly magazine advertisement
point of view--‘Doing good is only possible when you’ve a lot of money.
Get money! Oh, get money first somehow, then you can do good. Wear good
clothes and then you’ll be in the way of doing good.’”
* * * * *
WE had made our camp under a great overhanging rock beside rushing
cataracts. The huge vague scenery about us was made more immense by a
cloud screen which prevented one knowing exactly how high the mountains
were, and we looked outward at a vastitude of scarred precipitous
cliffs. Our fire warmed the rock against which we had laid our
blankets, and we had found a delightfully cosy place in which to be at
home. Night came down upon us, but we lay long in the flamelight and
talked.
“I don’t think,” said Vachel, “that this money incentive is really a
strong one or leads far. That is where I part company with the radicals
of this country. They have all founded their faith on the economic
theory of history. I’d like to write for them a ‘romantic theory’ of
history. I believe in the romantic theory; I do NOT believe in the
economic theory.”
“All right, dear Vachel,” said I constrainedly. “There are only you and
I present, and God. Say it more quietly.”
“Vanity and ambition have always been stronger motives than the desire
of gain. And that is good. I put vanity a whole lot higher than greed.
In a country of hogs the peacock is a praiseworthy bird.”
“You say that because you are a peacock.”
“I KNOW IT. I AM A PEACOCK. I AM NOT A HOG.”
“All right, Vachel. Now, if money is not so strong an incentive how do
you account for the fact that in your own beautiful State of Illinois
Governor Small has been under arrest for appropriation of funds, and at
Chicago members of one of the greatest baseball teams in America are
under trial for selling championship games to the other side?”
“That’s the influence of the magazine advertisement--praise of dollars
and the implication that everything in the world has a commercial value
or it has no value. And there are no other honours but money honours.”
* * * * *
IT was evidently more that a mere opinion of my companion. It was a
creed. He passionately believed what he said. And thus it was that I
discovered in Glacier wilderness a very rare bird, the American black
swan, and that in the poet of Springfield whom the village in its
ignorance was once scandalised about.