SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS
“Shore I’m shy a good hat!” exclaimed Big John whimsically, as they
slackened speed and began to look about through the gloom for some sign
of the Colonel and the pack train. He took off his old Montana Stetson
and twirled it ruefully in his hands. It was black as the night, where
it had been gray, and out of two holes up near the crown he stuck two
fingers and wiggled them at the boys. “I shore oughtta go on the stage
after that panther stunt, boys,” he drawled, his face breaking into a
slow grin. “When I left you, I worked around to whar the Injuns hed
their big fire an’ got me some charcoal. Then I crep’ over to them
rocks an’ lay thar, waitin’ till you come, and blackin’ up the ole cage
all over good. Then I cuts two holes in her, an’ dolls her up with
yore matches tied in two round bundles. Arter a while, when I thinks
you-all shore must be hyarabouts, I spits on me hands and rubs them
matches good. Shore ’twas funny!” he chuckled. “I looks me ole sombrero
over an’ like to hev scairt myself to death with them two fox-fire eyes
glarin’ at me out’n thet black hat! But ’twan’t a fleabite to the way
them redskins lit out, an’ you two boys allowed to sell yore lives dear
when I lets out that yelp intended to represent a panther’s call an’
oozes out into the scenery!”
“I was just frozen stiff with fright,” admitted Scotty frankly. “We
thought it was the Old Boy, himself, coming for us!--I’m not sure about
it, even now!”
Niltci grunted and stopped, transfixed with astonishment. “You?” he
asked, incredulously, pointing his finger at Big John.
“Shore ’twas me, Injun. Shore!” cackled the latter, facetiously.
“No!”
“Thunder, yes!” came back Big John, raising his voice all he dared.
“NO!--Heap big lie!” squeaked Niltci. “Dsilyi’s panther him come!” he
insisted.
“I tell you, it was a stroke of genius, John!” laughed Sid; “the
Indians must think it’s all over, or inside, with Niltci, now! That
idea came to me, back there when we were freeing him; so I kept
his thongs so they wouldn’t find anything. Makes it all the more
miraculous, you see. They won’t think of following us.”
Big John’s jaw dropped and he stopped dead. “Sid, you shore has a
headpiece on you!” he declared, admiringly. “I never thought of that
myself. My idee was jest to heave a gosh-almighty scare into ’em--but I
never thought I’d get you boys, too!” and he broke into a huge chuckle
again.
A tiny point of light winked twice out of the gloom ahead, and then all
was impenetrable darkness again.
“Over this way, fellows,” whispered Scotty, who had noticed it, “that’s
the Colonel’s flasher. He must have heard us.”
They headed over, and presently the dim outlines of the horses showed
up. Colonel Colvin greeted them delightedly and then explained briefly
to Niltci his plan. The Indian boy agreed, submissively, and they all
set off down into the canyon. A mile further they broke into a trot
with Niltci hanging to the Colonel’s stirrup.
“Of course there’s plenty of good hunting, boys, all over this
wonderful Arizona,” said the Colonel as they rode along. “All through
the canyons of the pine belt south of Flagstaff there is deer and bear,
and we could reach it by riding southwest from here. But I want you to
see the Grand Canyon,--the big sight that no American should permit
himself to miss,--and the way to get it all, and first-class big game
hunting besides, is from that vast network of canyons and crags back
of the north rim. It’s a desert ride, either way we decide to go,
southwest to the pine belt or west to the Ferry. We’ll take the latter.
It’s eighty miles from here and just one drink the whole way. Here’s
where our oats-and-water scheme scintillates, for we can do it in three
days, with good grain feed and water enough to keep the horses full of
pep.”
As they debouched from Canyon Cheyo the pack train was halted to make
these adjustments. All the pannier water cans were filled from the
brook and a full bucket of oats taken out of them was fed to each
horse. The rest was put in gunny sacks and the loads redistributed so
that there was an extra cayuse for Niltci to ride. They fixed up an
improvised saddle made of a tarp, a folded blanket and a cinch strap
for him, and then all the spare stuff was cached. Bidding the running
stream a last good-by, the train started climbing up a mighty ravine
that led out to the vast desert plateau to the west.
Arrived at the head of it, a high mesa greeted them, stretching for
miles to the northwest. Under its flanks the party rode, while the
soft, cold desert wind sifted the desert sand in a faintly audible
ticking around the horses’ feet. It was a tired and sleepy party that
saw the sunrise, five hours later, with thirty miles of travel behind
them. Bare desolation, and color, color, color, everywhere the eye
roamed! Blue cliffs, red cliffs, yellow cliffs, black buttes; and, to
the west, the enchanted walls of the ghostly White Mesa.
During the heat of the day the train halted under the shade of a
rocky nest of bowlders as high as a house, and the horses were fed
and watered and picketed out to nibble what sparse vegetation they
could find. The four men spread out bed rolls, and, with the four dogs
insisting on bunking in their midst, slept in an indescribable huddle,
too tired to boot them off.
It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. The others slept
around him. A distant coyote raised his piercing cry, soft and
plaintive in the vast solitude; the blurred forms of the horses dotted
the little swale in front of their camp. Then came the false dawn of
the moon, and Big John awoke and nudged Niltci, whom he had elected
assistant horse wrangler, and they began silently to pack the animals.
The sight of them at work was too much for Sid; he awoke his father and
Scotty, for at least they could attend to the saddle horses and help
break camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an enormous red moon
rose slowly over the mesas to the east. Higher and higher it soared,
becoming smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the haze over
the desert. Then, in a splendor of white light, clear as daylight and
pricking out the buttes in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the
pack train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; color was there
none, but of sharp contrast, of strangely rugged and distorted rock
formations, of vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a play
as to place one in imagination in some selenitic valley of the moon.
The afternoon of the third day found the pack train climbing down the
frightful escarpments of a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado.
There had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst torture, no
accident; but all were weary, the men silent, the dogs limping
painfully, the horses plodding on persistently. A ringing whoop from
Big John and the roar and rumble of waters announced the sighting of
the famous Red River. Out of the gray ramparts of Cataract Canyon it
swept, to flood past them in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful
in its headlong drive for the sea--the river that has more to show for
its labors than any other river in the whole world.
Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the opposite bank, to man the
flatboat which crosses here by an overhead wire and trolley wheel
tackle. Swiftly it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging
on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate the whole party, and,
paying the toll, the horses were ridden onto its capacious flat floor.
The reluctant dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out for
its return trip across the Colorado. As the water boiled and swirled
around its gunwales Sid looked downstream at the mighty chasm of black
gneiss into which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless boom like
the thunder of a distant Niagara. He could not keep his eyes off it.
From there on the canyon would become inconceivably grander and more
majestic, one of the seven wonders of the world,--yet what was it, in
the infinite program of Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an
inconspicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which is our world?
If this remnant of a stream was so awe-inspiring to man, what must it
have been when that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up to
Wyoming was flooding out through these same gates to the ocean! The
very thought gave Sid a glimpse,--like a rift through the clouds at
some mountain top,--of the unapproachable dignity of Nature. Man, at
his best, is but a mere insult in her presence, an audacious, unspanked
microbe, that has occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her
cosmic processes, even when his whole history is told from start to
finish.
A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giving the horses unlimited
oats and water once more, and then they pushed southwest through a
bare and sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain dominated the
Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing in his nine thousand feet of
snow-topped height. Once around its flanks they were in a fine country
of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the rocky buttes
and parapets and pinnacles that overhung the enormous slopes of the
Grand Canyon basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the rim
they established camp. The boys’ little green five-by-six-foot wall
tent was set up, with a pair of shears in front and its ridge rope run
back to encircle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little tent
was a wonder of a forest home, for its five pounds of weight. High
enough to stand up in, it had a gauze window in the rear wall, with
a flap to it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed in
when it stormed; it had a netting front door over a sill a foot high,
and the cover flap of the front door was V-shaped, so that it formed a
porch when held out horizontally by two upright poles, making a shady
place to sit under and one sheltered from rain for a cooking space when
needed.
The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor of their tent,
sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their sleeping bags, and hung
wall pockets at the head of each bed to hold all their small camp
belongings. Then they went out to inspect the Colonel’s bivouac. Near
their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and lightness for one lone
hiker. A stretcher bed hung on two stout poles, which were lashed to a
pair of shears about a foot above the soil, and over the shears ran
a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it and pegged down behind to
form a windbreak. Its front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so
that the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, in out of
the rain; and he could sit on the bed and tend his meal or clean his
rifle, or just loaf or lie at ease on it. As the boys approached he was
filling the bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse.
“Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. The Service camp
cot is the coldest thing to sleep on ever devised by the brain of
man,--unless you put a layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then
it is good, and comfortable and warm.”
He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay down, to dream
indolently in the sunny, pine-scented glade, while through a rift in
the foliage his eyes drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon.
“This is good enough, for the present, boys,” he grunted, stretching
his arms in lazy happiness. “I haven’t any idea when we’ll ever bother
to leave here again, but to-morrow we’ll hang up a deer and try to get
the dogs on a cougar.”
Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest of the camp. The tinkle
of horse bells came from a little mountain meadow where their ponies
had been turned out. Up near them a gray and black patterned blanket,
hanging in a tree, told where Niltci had staked out his claim for
sleeping quarters. Under a nest of big pines lay Big John’s bed roll on
a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring in the ravine, that
facetious child of Montana was at work making a stone fireplace, and
already he had a saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather
above the rodent zone.
It was all good; too good to be true; too wild and beautiful and
sublime, and filled to the brim with Nature’s plenty for any but very
honest men to live there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural
lassitude had come over the boys. Nature gives these periods, when
she is in her mild and genial moods, for times of recuperation to her
children. They are not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty
sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, round pinnacle of
yellow rock, invited by the mists of immense distance that lay beyond
it. On its brink they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had found
a lodgment there. Below and before them stretched the vast gulf of the
canyon, clear to its south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to
do anything but lie there and look. There are spectacles of Nature that
man never tires of dreaming over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling
surf. This canyon is one of them. For a long time neither youth said a
word.
“It’s just the Canyon, yet,” said Sid, at length. “Wait till we get
down _into_ it--then we’ll begin to appreciate it!”
Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out refreshed and ready to
perform prodigies. The horses were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off
through a high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with Ruler
and the pups all over the timber, running in wide casts around the
main course of the cavalcade. Down into the shallow gulches and across
wooded promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These ravines were
the gentlest beginnings of that vast shore line which once rimmed the
course of the Colorado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long
wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always the great physical
fact of the Canyon was there. You couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t
forget it for a moment.
Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bellow, a houndy song that
told the world he had found something. The pups dashed over at
his call. Big John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and
dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already unraveling the trail,
his long, ropy tail swinging in circles as he snuffed along, yelping at
intervals as he ran. The party gathered around the track, while Niltci
bent down with his face almost in it. A faint impression was there, in
the leaves, large and round, but without any particular formation.
“Cougar. Beeg!” pronounced the Navaho boy after a careful examination.
“I told you they was lion-broke!” exulted Big John. “Them runs we had
after the Black Panther spiled ’em for small stuff,--Ruler’s broke,
anyway.”
A ringing, resounding chime of hound voices rang up from the depths of
the ravine below. All four of them were in that chorus, even Lee who
was proving backward and slow in his development.
“Ride, boys! They’ve started him!” whooped Colonel Colvin, vaulting
into his saddle. He thundered off down the ravine, with Sid and Niltci
hard after him.
Big John headed his horse up across the slope. “Come on, son!” he
called to Scotty. “We’ll ooze for a point an’ watch which way the
varmint goes. He mought turn an’ come back up, an’ he’d git away if no
one was up here.”
Immediately they topped the slope, the white mustang began to race off
through the dense young timber that covered the promontory. Scotty
drove in his spurs and hung low over his saddle, guarding his eyes from
the slap of branches. It took some riding to keep up with Big John!
After a time the ground pitched down dizzily. Through the trees Scotty
got glimpses of the purple void out there, and above him rose the long
lines of pinnacles of yellow buttes. Far down below he could hear the
constant chiming of the hounds. The chase was crossing their front.
Then the trees grew suddenly sparse and short below them, and Big John
reined the white mustang sharply up on his haunches where he slid with
all four hoofs braced in the crumbly soil.
It was awful, on ahead! The land seemed to end nowhere, with unheard-of
voids below. Looking up, Scotty could see the yellow cliffs frowning
high above him, now, while the clayey rock they were standing in was
reddish.
“Right yere’s whar we ties up and takes to shank’s mare!” said Big
John, dismounting, tethering his mustang to a stout sapling and taking
off his lariat coil. Scotty followed suit, wondering how they were
ever going to get up again. And then a queer shiver of realization
burst upon him. This red rock was only the next below the _top_ of all
those long bars of color that line the infinite slopes of the Grand
Canyon!
They slid down to the brink of the ledge and looked over. A great
slope, acres in area and covered with sparse timber, appeared below.
Ruler was streaking down through it, volleying his approval of the
trail. Almost vertically below Scotty was Pepper’s sturdy back, the
hound hesitating over the passage of some shelf below him. Bourbon and
Lee were far up the slope, while the small figures of the Colonel, Sid
and the Navaho could be seen far above to the left, sliding down a high
roof of yellow clay.
A sheer fall of two hundred feet lay directly in front of them. It
seemed nothing at all in this abyss of infinite distances. Big John ran
along the brink of it, dislodging stones which shot out, to hit the
slope below after a tense interval of fall, and then go bounding on
down to disappear from sight over the brink of shelves that led on down
to yet lower depths. Scotty worked after him, somewhat more cautiously,
but with none of the respect that he would have had for such a
precipice as this anywhere else. His sense of proportion was utterly
lost here.
A crumbled corner of the shelf gave them a steep slide, down which
without a second’s hesitation Big John plunged. Whizz! Ankle-deep in
red earth, accompanied by a cloud of big and little stones, he shot
down the slope. Scotty followed, giving himself no time to let his
imagination work. They tore on after the hounds, through thick, bushy
pines and spruces that covered the slope. Without any warning at all,
save the interminable blue distance ahead, it suddenly ended in another
frightful precipice. Scotty brought up on the brink of it, hugging a
sapling and glad to see that for once Big John had stopped.
Over to the right the trees trailed down to a point, terminated by a
tall red cliff, craggy-faced, indented with great slabs and bowlders,
which threw huge shadows of themselves on the next cliff beyond. A sort
of chasm or chimney led down its side, a mighty cleft full of bowlders
in which all the skyscrapers in the world could be piled and never be
found. Down this impossible, preposterous thing the dogs were climbing,
as their voices proclaimed.
Scotty looked up. Already the entire world seemed to have been stood
up on end above him. The green pines and yellow pinnacles of the rim
above looked like a line of mere dents in it, with a little dark moss
covering their tops. It would be days and days of work getting up
there again! But Big John had only paused to get the location of the
dogs in mind before he set off again along that precipice wall. Scotty
followed. He might as well be killed sticking close to Big John as be
killed anyhow, by some fall which could only end up in the Colorado
itself, perhaps half a mile yet below him in a vertical line!
Ruler had charged out of the bottom of the chimney, barking a regular
hullabaloo of a treeing call. If the dogs had slid down this cleft, men
could climb down it, the boy reasoned as he began descending an almost
perpendicular chimney, hanging to small, stout pines and catching his
toes in crevices in the rock. They came upon Lee, whining piteously,
afraid of being left behind, afraid to make the jump that would land
in a sort of chute already worn with dog and cougar tracks where the
others had gone down. Big John picked him up unceremoniously and tossed
him into the chute, where he sprawled and slid with lightning speed
down to the slope below. Without a word the man climbed on down after
him, with Scotty panting and laboring behind.
Once on the slope below a columnar yellow pine loomed up far down the
slide. It had survived avalanches, rock slides, ice rifts--was Nature’s
survival of the fittest, to seed the slopes beneath it and below it.
Upon one of its branches the tawny body of the cougar crouched, treed,
spitting at the dogs prancing below, twitching his tail angrily, ready
to spring on the instant.
“Shoot, you little wart--if you miss I’ll pisen yore grub!” barked
Big John at Scotty, holding his own rifle at the ready. Scotty braced
himself and poised the heavy .405. He had always prided himself on
his shooting, but never in any such condition as this. His whole body
shook with fatigue; he was covered with a scalding perspiration. Hold
as he might, the bead refused to steady. Its square white patch nearly
covered the cougar at that range, yet it could not have been over two
hundred yards. Scotty finally attempted trigger release on the swing.
The rifle went off, driving his shoulder back a foot with its recoil
and, as they watched, a huge spall of bark flew out of the tree trunk
above the cougar’s back. Instantly he sprang down among the yelping
dogs. A whirlwind of unbelievably swift action ensued. Yellow and
brown were inextricably mixed as the cougar struck this way and that,
the dogs darting in from every angle, the cat turning to strike as each
grabbed a new hold. Big John raced forward, his rifle at shoulder,
ready to put in a shot at the first possible instant.
Then the cougar made a sidewise swipe of his paw, so swift that the eye
could not follow it. The steel hooks of his claws caught in Ruler’s
ear and the cat pulled him towards a snarling open mouth, towards the
glistening white fangs that awaited him. But with a furious tug the dog
tore himself loose, his ear slitting to ribbons. Big John fired at that
tense instant when dog and cougar were braced in the fixed rigidity of
their tug of war. The cat leaped in the air, high above the whole mob
of dogs, landed running, and darted like a squirrel over the brink of
the ledge.
The dogs tore after him. Big John and Scotty raced down the slope in
giant strides, that for Scotty kept getting longer and longer as his
momentum gained. He finally threw himself sideways to the ground as he
felt himself falling downhill rather than running.
“Thar he is!--Mark left!” rasped Big John hoarsely, pointing below. The
ledge was a mere escarpment, and along its base the cougar was flying,
his tail erect and bushy like a scared household tabby. Pepper clung
like a viper to his hock, while Ruler was trying to forge ahead and get
a throat hold. Then the cat disappeared into a rock crevice taking the
dogs with him.
Putting in their last burst of speed, Scotty and Big John threw
themselves over to it. The huge rocky knife-edge that made the cleft,
stuck up like a fan,--one of those little insignificant spalls on the
cliff faces, as seen from El Tovar. Here it was enormous, and led down
to no one knew where. A hoarse, snarling murmur and the worrying and
fighting of dogs came up from inside it.
“Run down to the lower edge, Scotty!” yelled Big John. “I’ll drop a
rock in here an’ he’ll come out to you like a bat out of hades.”
Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the lower edge of the
crack where the rock fan sprang up ten feet thick from the cliff. The
narrow crack between it and the wall was dark as a pocket; nothing came
from there but the maddening roars of Ruler and the snarling of the
cat. Then Big John whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock
resounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the cougar exploded in
a frightful cat-spit. His rear was covered with dogs, but his chest
showed clear and tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy
.405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its recoil. A reeking
mass of animals shot past him in a fury of flying paws, rolled over and
over down the slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst of
a nest of scraggy pinyons.
“Did you git him?” yelled Big John’s voice from above.
“You bet!” crowed Scotty. “Come on down and help me with the dogs.”
There was a rumble of falling stones and Big John dropped down beside
him.
“I _knowed_ one good poak from thet ole cannon of the Doc’s would fotch
him,” he laughed. “Good shootin’, son! Git some clubs, now, an’ we’ll
gentle them pesky dawgs.”
They needed to,--for a glorious dog-fight was in full swing over the
dead body of the cougar.