THE LAND OF QUEER DELIGHTS
THEY left Mosquito the next morning, their pack replenished with a
generous supply of beef. Also, as the mountain ranch had a quantity of
stores on hand, they were allowed to purchase enough to bring their
supplies up to the limit of the burros’ carrying capacity. So now,
over a hundred miles from the desert ranch where they had left the
automobiles and at the beginning of their gruelling march to the Valley
of Arcana, they were as well equipped for the ordeal as at the very
start.
Four hours from Mosquito they topped the summit of the ridge, and
looked down upon a smiling lake three miles in length by one in width.
A carpet of dying grass surrounded the lake, near which but few trees
grew, because of the strongly alkaline soil. They wormed their way down
to the floor of the level mountain valley, and here they loosed the
saddle horses and cached their equipment in a near-by cañon. Shirttail
Henry guaranteed that the animals would not stray from the grazing
ground. Once more he took the lead, and, driving the reluctant burros
ahead of him, worked around the eastern end of the lake.
When they had completed a half-circle of the sheet of blue water and
were on the south side opposite the grazing horses, Shirttail Henry
made an abrupt turn to the left and hazed the string of burros up a
little creek. For two miles or more the creek flowed through virtually
level land, with mountain meadows on either side of it. Then gradually
the land grew steeper, and the creek banks narrowed. The forest grew
denser as they left the valley, and before half an hour had passed they
were in a country as wild and rugged as that below Mosquito Ranch.
They camped for a late nooning before attempting the fierce climb that
awaited them. When the burros had browsed an hour they were away again,
up the ever narrowing cañon.
The little creek was a plunging torrent now, leaping over boulders,
bellowing madly about snarls of ancient driftwood. Often there stood
in the burros’ path a huge boulder or outcropping that it seemed
impossible for them to surmount, but Henry always found a way to get
them over or around each obstacle. The burros climbed like goats when
forced to it. Several times the men were obliged to take off their
pack-bags so that they could squeeze through some gateway between
gigantic stones.
The party was still in the cañon when the early mountain night closed
down upon them. They fortunately had come upon a tiny level spot on
which there was room to move about with comfort. Here they camped to
await the coming of another day.
The night was cold and still, the sky cloudless. Nevertheless Shirttail
Henry set up his rain gauge, muttering that he could not imagine how he
was to send in his report if the gauge showed moisture in the morning.
But no rain or snow fell to discomfit him, and the weary trailers
passed the night in peace.
An hour after sunup the following day they came to the end of the
cañon, to find that the source of the creek was a series of springs
in a hillside. From the springs Henry set a course southwest through
unbroken forest land, across which the going would have been easy
but for the fact that the trail led continually up and down over a
seemingly endless system of ridges. The party would struggle wearily up
one steep hill, only to be obliged to clamber and slide down the other
side of it into a deep V-shaped cañon--and then up the near side of
another hill as steep as the one just mastered. Then down again, and up
again--forever and ever, it seemed.
“Henry,” said Mary, as they stood panting on the top of about the
fifteenth rise that they had negotiated, “is this ever going to end?”
“Why, yes’m,” Henry told her meekly. “These here little rises here get
bigger and bigger until we’re top o’ th’ mountains. Then we begin to
crawl.”
“Crawl!” puffed Mary. “I’ve done nothing else but crawl up and slide
down since we left the creek back there. I don’t feel like a human
being any more. I’m a four-footed beast. I growl and show my teeth when
a rock or a root gets in my way.”
“But what I’m talkin’ about,” said Henry patiently, “is reg’lar
crawlin’. Sure enough on yer hands an’ knees, ma’am. An’ f’r miles an’
miles at that. Th’ patch o’ chaparral we’ll have to go through ain’t
got its match in th’ whole West, I’m thinkin’.”
“Do you mean, Henry, that we’re actually to _crawl_ for miles and
miles? Like a father playing bear with his baby on the floor?”
“Jest crawl, ma’am,” replied Henry softly. “Unless we cut our way
through with th’ axes--an’ that would take forever ’n’ ever ’n’ after.”
“And you realize that, do you, Charmian?” Mary asked of the head of the
party.
“Oh, yes--it’s all been explained to me,” Charmian assured her.
“All right,” said Mary. “Then let’s find a place to eat. I’m so hungry
I could eat quirkus.”
“Which is?”--Andy’s question.
“Quirkus,” Mary explained, “is the stuff you skim off the top of a
kettle of fruit when you’re cooking it for canning. Or it’s the stuff
that grows on the bottom of a watering trough in summer. Or sometimes
it’s any soft stuff that you don’t know the name of, and that isn’t fit
to eat, but looks too valuable to throw away.”
They spent two nights in the forest, forging onward throughout the
short, cold, crystal days in the same southwesterly direction, up and
down, up and down, but always gaining in altitude. They had left the
Canadian Zone and were well into the Hudsonian, which constitutes the
belt of forest just below timberline. Lodgepole pine, Alpine hemlock,
silver pine, and white-bark pine had replaced the Jeffrey pine, red
firs and aspens of the life zone immediately below them. They were
over eight thousand feet above the sea, Henry told them, when at last,
about ten o’clock of the third day after leaving the creek, the woods
began to grow thinner, and they encountered frequent patches of short
chaparral, bleak and rugged and rock strewn. They were entering the
Arctic-Alpine Zone, comprising an elevation of from ten thousand five
hundred feet to the tops of the highest peaks.
On and on, always climbing higher into an atmosphere more
breath-taking, more crystalline. The chilled silences became awesome.
Unfamiliar growths presented themselves, stunted, grotesque. An
occasional patch of snow was crossed. A snow-white bird as large as
a pigeon fluttered down to their camping ground, cocked his head on
one side, and surveyed them with comical curiosity. A few grains of
rolled barley, left by the wasteful burros, lay on the ground, for a
small quantity had been brought along to tempt them back to camp when
they wandered, browsing throughout the nights. The white bird pecked
contemplatively at these, chattered his bill over one, and dropped it
as unfit for avian consumption. As he hopped about, still intent on
trying the unfamiliar particles that looked like food, his course took
him directly over the foot of Charmian, who was standing very still and
watching him. Utterly without fear of these human beings, he hopped
upon the toe of her hiking shoe, and from that vantage point lifted his
body and gazed about as a robin does for worms.
“The dear thing!” breathed the girl. “I guess he’s never before seen
a human being, and can’t have any conception of what brutes we are. I
wonder if I could pick it up!”
“Try it,” urged the doctor softly.
Charmian stooped, her hands outspread. The movement caused the bird to
hop from her shoe, but it did not make away. The girl stooped lower and
lower, outspread fingers on either side of it. Her hands closed in to
within six inches of the warm, white body. The bird looked up at her
and hopped off sedately, without a sign of fear, but as much as to say,
“Familiarity breeds contempt.”
“I could have grabbed it, but I wouldn’t!” maintained the widow. “But I
_did_ just want to touch it once!”
They decided that their visitor was an albino robin, probably a native
of the regions above the line of perpetual snow, and that never before
had it seen a human being.
“It makes me sort of shuddery,” said Mary Temple. “That’s no way for
a bird to act, even if he is a country jake. It isn’t right that he
shouldn’t be afraid of us. It’s uncanny--and this is getting to be
mighty uncanny country. Things get queerer and queerer every day, and I
feel queerer and queerer every hour. I can just barely breathe in this
light air. My head is on a spree and my feet are dead drunk.”
“It only goes to show,” argued Charmian, “how the wild creatures
would consider us if only we were as decent as they are. There is no
reason on earth why any wild thing should fear a human being. I have
read arguments built up about the hypothesis that wild animals fear
man instinctively, that they naturally recognize him as their master.
More of man’s monumental egotism! When an animal distrusts man,
that distrust is bred in him by reason of his ancestors having been
obliged to escape from human ruthlessness. Or the individual itself has
suffered at the hands of man.”
And not many days had passed before she proved, in part at least, that
her contentions were correct; for the farther they forged into that
untamed wilderness the more trusting the wild life became. Small, queer
birds which none of them could name, most of them with long bills and
heads that seemed almost as large as their bodies, followed them on the
trail, perched above them in the chaparral and cocked their heads one
side to stare down in puzzlement, and often flew to their very knees or
alighted on their shoulders.
Upward and ever upward, over the sprawling toes and then over the
generous knees of Dewlap Mountain. The only bird seen now was an
occasional rosy finch; the mammals encountered consisted of the Alpine
chipmunk, the grey bushy-tailed woodrat, and that quaint and ingenious
native of the bleak altitudes, the Yosemite cony. This little animal,
called variously rock rabbit, little chief hare, pika, or cony, is
less than seven inches over all, and, much more so than the rabbit,
has a tail which “mustn’t be talked about.” It has short rounded ears,
dense hair, and, though closely resembling the rabbit, it runs an all
fours, with a hobbling gait. It never sits up on its haunches, as does
the rabbit, nor does it leave the Alpine Zone for a warmer clime when
blizzards rage. Its home is in rock slides, where it cuts, dries, and
stores up hay for use when the land is covered deep with snow. Often
the travellers saw one perched on a lofty granite rock and heard its
strange bleating cry of alarm.
The actinic quality of the light in this Boreal Zone made the few
plants that the trailers came upon present rare, pure colours
delectable to the eye. Most of these plants were cushion plants,
spread out over the barren rocks where a little soil had gathered, and
from the centre of the cushion the flower stalks arose. The doctor
named the golden draba, the Alpine flox, and others; but the yellow
columbine--not a cushion plant--was most remarkable of all. On the
highest peaks flourished the Alpine buttercup, the Sierra primrose, and
small Alpine willow trees, not above an inch in height. And at the very
outskirts of snow banks they discovered the steer’s head, a queer relic
of pre-glacial times, whose flowers, modestly lopped over, resembled
the heads of a sleepy bunch of cattle. Often this flower grew with snow
all about it and seemed to thrive.
They were in a land of nothingness--cold and bleak and comfortless. On
all sides wastes of loose stones and snow patches swept away from them.
About them were the lofty peaks, so diamond clear in their dazzling
whiteness that it pained the eye to look at them. They were crossing
the knees of Dewlap mountain, making toward the south. They camped on
windswept reaches, their mattresses the cold, hard rocks. Melted snow
formed their water supply, and fuel that they had picked up in the
warmer zone below them was nursed with miserly discretion.
After a day and a night in this forbidding land Shirttail Henry loosed
the burros, for nothing grew for them to eat except the inch-high dwarf
willows, and these were few. Burros will continue content for days and
days without food or water, but Charmian demanded their release after
twenty-four hours of deprivation. With indignant snorts, they kicked up
their heels, and the bell burro set a bee-line course over the backward
trail. When they reached the Hudsonian Zone, Henry said, they would
browse their way gradually down through the Canadian, and into the
Transition, where they would find an abundance of chaparral; and later
they would reach the horses at the lake and remain close to them until
snow drove the entire band to the lower contours, from whence they
might wander even to the home ranch on the desert.
A rather serious catastrophe overtook the United States Weather Bureau
on the day before the burros were released. Shirttail Henry had
installed his rain gauge for the night, and had no more than turned his
back on it when the bell burro was attracted by the brightness of its
brass. She approached it with mincing steps, and, as is the custom of
her kind, began trying to eat it. A burro seems incapable of deciding
whether an object is for food by looking at it or smelling of it. He
starts in to eat it, assuming that all things are good to eat until
proved otherwise. The burro soon decided that in this instance she had
made a grave mistake, and forthwith dropped the gauge. But not until
the thin cylinder of brass had been dented and pinched in so that, as a
recorder of the fall of rain, it was absolutely useless.
Mary Temple witnessed the desecration, but shouted too late. Henry
wheeled in time, however, to capture the miscreant. He held her by the
leather band that encircled her neck, and to which her tinkling bell
was fastened, and looked her fiercely in the eye.
“Ass,” he said, “ye ain’t my canary, an’ I know ye ain’t got no sense.
But if ye _was_ mine, d’ye know what I’d do to ye? I’d hold ye by this
here strap here, an’ I’d get me a club, an’ I’d take it an’ I’d knock
yer gysh-danged head off. Heh-heh-heh!”
Snow covered the greater part of the land where the explorers had
loosed the asses. Henry rigged up his drag, and on it stowed the
outfit. Henry and Andy took the lead ropes, and Dr. Shonto walked
behind to push. By following a zigzag course the leaders were able to
keep the sledge running upon snow for the greater part of the time, and
when only bare rocks lay before them the party portaged the cargo and
the sledge to snowy stretches beyond.
Their up-and-down course continued, and many a slope taxed the strength
of all to get the laden sledge to the summit. But the general trend was
downward, for they were crossing the knees of Dewlap, the only divide
which gave access to the country wherein lay the mysterious valley of
their quest. Gradually, after days of slow travel, the snow patches
grew fewer and fewer, and the air grew noticeably warmer as they worked
downward into the Hudsonian Zone once more. Then altogether the snow
disappeared; scattering trees greeted them, Alpine hemlocks, silver
pines--trees more friendly, it seemed to the awed wanderers, than any
they ever had seen before. They saw a wolverine--infrequent animal--a
white-tailed jackrabbit, and on one rare day a pure white squirrel,
with pink-lidded eyes, quite curious and friendly.
They discarded the sledge, cached such tin-protected provisions as
they could not carry on their backs, and forged on into a land of
growing delights. They left the semi-bleak Hudsonian Zone above them
and entered the friendly Canadian, where the Yosemite fox sparrow, the
Sierra grouse, and the ruby-crowned kinglet greeted them; and among
the mammals the jumping mouse, the yellow-haired porcupine, the Sierra
chickaree, and the navigator shrew. The forest was heavy again, and
there was firewood and the shelter of companionable conifers. Straight
into the south Shirttail Henry led the way, down into a gigantic cup of
the mountain range where grasses grew and sunlight flooded the land.
The forest became patchy, broken by occasional mountain meadows, rubble
slides, cañons through which fires had spread their devastation and
left sentinel trees and slopes covered with chaparral. Deep, impassible
gorges forced them miles and miles to the east or the west, and
sometimes turned them in the direction from whence they came. And in
descending into one of these, after having followed its grim lip for
many miles in search of a crossing, the redoubtable Mary fell, rolled
down a steep incline, and terminated her mad descent in an ice-cold
creek.
“Well,” she remarked, as her anxious friends stumbled and slid down to
her, “it’s lucky I landed close to water, for right here I stay until
the rest of you forsake your life of sin and come back to me on your
way home. I’ve sprained my ankle terribly. Two of you hold me while
Doctor Shonto pulls my leg.”