THE CAMPING TRIP
A week later Norris and the boys arrived at the lumber camp on the Canyon
rim, where they were to await Long Lester,--Ace in a piratical and
plutocratic black Stetson sombrero, hiking boots and flannel shirt, a red
bandanna at his throat, and to supplement his khaki riding breeches he
had bestowed lovingly in his duffle bag the Mexican leather chaps. He
also displayed the eight-inch leather belt of the cow country, and elbow
length leather cuffs studded with silver nails.
Ted let it go at his second best blue overalls and heavy shoes, a green
plaid gingham shirt, with a brown one to change off and straw hat. Pedro
lounged gracefully about in corduroy trousers and elkskin boots, (which
Norris warned him would last about a week on such rough going), and a
wool jersey in the same soft tan. He took their guying good naturedly,
however, and in mockery of Ace's more picturesque accoutrement, gave a
first class imitation of a motion picture director with the Senator's son
for his prize Bad Man. Norris wore his second best uniform, and all had
sweaters and a change of socks and things, to say nothing of an extra
pair of shoes.
When word came that the old guide had had "some investment business" come
up to delay him, they decided to establish a make-shift camp. There was
not one chance in a hundred of any rain, but they decided a lean-to would
be convenient anyway. They got some shakes of an old lumberman whose
function it was to split the giant shingles from three foot lengths of
log.
Four poles for corner-posts made a substantial beginning. Smaller ones
morticed to lie crosswise gave something to which to nail the shakes,
which were overlapped shingle-fashion on both sides and roof. The
tarpaulins would make a curtain across the front. The floor was bedded
down a foot deep with springy silver fir boughs, laid butts down and
toward the foot. To this could be added fresh browse as it grew dry and
harsh.
Tables were made by borrowing a saw of the lumbermen and slicing a four
foot log into eight inch slices, then gouging these out on the under side
so that stout legs could be fitted in. Stools were made from short
lengths of a smaller log, and behold! the open air dining-room and
kitchen were furnished, at cost of a few hours' fun.
Norris even made a sort of steamer chair of poles, using a double
thickness of his tarp for the seat and back.
Next came a stone fireplace, with an old piece of sheet iron across the
top, and a great flat hearth-stone on which to warm the plates.
Each tin can as it was opened had its top neatly removed and was washed
and set aside as a chipmunk-proof container, and Pedro fashioned a
refrigerator by replacing the two sides of a cracker box with screen
wire, (bartered from the cook of the lumber camp), hinging the door with
discarded shoe tongues.
Cord was strung for clothes-line, and a supply of several kinds of fuel
brought in. The down logs were simply run into the fireplace, butt ends
first, and shoved closer as they burned. Ted devised a rake for gathering
together the dry twigs and cones and bark with which the ground was
strewn, by using nails for teeth, set in a small board fastened at an
angle to the stick that served as handle.
Following Norris's lead, each fellow heated water and took a sponge bath
daily, (except Ace, who took a cold plunge in the glacier-cold stream),
and afterwards washed out his change of socks and underwear and his
towel. The dish-washers also laundered the dish towels after each meal.
That way, everything was always ship-shape. And, be it noted, any cook
who burned the nested aluminum pans and kettles had to clean them
himself, and though Norris had made that easier by bringing along a box
of fine steel-wool, it was amazing how few scorched dishes occurred! Of
course where pots were used over the fire, the outsides got sooty, but
after all, it was only the insides that affected one's health.
The boys found that they slept warmer by doubling their blankets into
sleeping bags, pinning them shut with horse-blanket safety-pins, with
their tarps for a windproof outer layer. And many's the sleeping bag race
they ran,--or rather, hopped, to the amazement, no doubt, of the wild
folk who very likely watched from the shadows. Agile Ted won the grand
prize at one of these stunts by hopping the full length of a fallen log
in his bag, without once falling off.
There were also pine-cone battles and bait-casting contests, Pedro
excelling in the throw by reason of his big arm muscles. Thus day
succeeded cool and perfect day, and night followed star-strewn night, for
nearly a week. The tooth-brush brigade sallied forth as soon as the sun
began slanting its long morning rays through the forest aisles, and the
boys often began nodding at a ridiculously early hour around the
bon-fire, tired from their strenuous day in the open. But each day found
their spirits higher, their muscles harder, their eyes brighter,--and
their appetites more insatiable. Ted was plumping up and Pedro trimming
down on the self-same medicine.
The chipmunks soon became so tame that they ran all over the place, over
the boys' feet, on up to their shoulders, and into their pockets for the
goodies they sometimes found. But they never ran under any one's palm.
Pedro got one cornered and caught him with his bare hands, and put him on
a leash, but the furry mite spent the next half hour straining to get
away, too unhappy to eat,--cowering, trembling, when the boys stroked his
orange striped back with a gentle finger,--and Pedro finally gave him
back his freedom, (and a pyramid of peanuts).
"Camp Chipmunk" it was finally voted to call the place, and the name was
inscribed on the side of a huge fallen log with bits of yellow-green live
moss.
Though the chipmunks could easily have gone to the creek, as they must
have before the boys came, they displayed a preference for drinking out
of the same water pail the boys did, and they sometimes took an
unexpected and unappreciated plunge bath.
Besides the very tiny chipmunks, there were some of the ground-squirrel
size with the same orange and black. They were duller of wit, and more
timid, but they used to chase the little fellows to within an inch of
their lives. One day a big Sayes chipmunk attempted to fish a cheese rind
out of the fireplace. The ashes were still hot, and he plunged into the
soft stuff over his head, he was out and away, with a piercing squeal,
almost instantly, trailing white ash behind him.
The boys used to bury nuts just to see how fast the littlest chipmunks
would smell them out. After repeatedly finding the Dutch oven bread
nibbled around the edges, Pedro hung the bread-bag from the clothes-line
one night. He was awakened next morning by the shout Ted sent up when he
found two chipmunks running down the string and squeezing their way
delightedly into the bag.
Some one always had to watch while the meal was being laid, for the
mouselike villains would be right up on the table sampling the butter, if
some one did not keep an eye out. Or they would climb up the leg of the
table and peek over the edge with their beady eyes, wondering how far
they dared approach without danger to their agile persons. But the
funniest thing was when two chipmunks would quarrel,--as generally
happened when one unearthed a nut that another had buried. Nickering in
the angriest way imaginable, the two tiny things would come at each other
with ears laid back, in what appeared for all the world like a
head-butting contest. Around and around they would whirl in a spiral
nebula, till one got a head start on a race for home and mother.
Each morning they awoke to the hack-hack-hack of the sawyers and the
steady grating of the log saw, the twitter of the donkey engine and the
volcanic remarks with which the bull-puncher was urging his team forward.
The yellow sunshine sifted aslant through the giant trees, birds sang,
and chipmunks chattered. A water-packer passed them one day with his mule
plodding along under 40 gallons disposed in canvas bags on a wooden
frame, and beyond, across the singing creek, they could see the swampers
burning the brush they had cut from the pathway of the tree next to fall.
Breakfast dispatched, the boys hurried over to watch the two-bitted axe
biting its huge kerf in the side of a ten-foot trunk. When it had eaten a
third of the way through the giant trunk, the sawyers began on the
opposite side, nearly as high as the top of the kerf, resting the long
instrument on pegs driven into two holes that had been bored for the
purpose. Iron wedges were driven after the saw. The instant the tree
began to lean, the head chopper had driven a stake about 150 feet from
the base on the side of the kerf, declaring that the falling tree would
drive that stake into the ground, so accurately could they gauge the
direction of its fall. The swampers had cleared the way between. Then
came the cracking of neighboring branches, as the mammoth trunk swayed
and toppled to the forest floor. There was a crash that shook the ground,
which rebounded with a shower of chips and bark dust, and the stump gaped
raw and red where for perhaps 2,000 years it had upborne the plumed
Sequoia Gigantea.
The boys, far above whose heads the fallen trunk towered, scrambled up
the rough bark and raced each other up and down the novel roadway that it
made. Then, the excitement over, they suddenly realized that they were
hungry and ran another race back to camp.
Later they watched as the donkey engine, stronger than ten oxen, was made
fast to a stump and stoked till it could move itself into position to
haul the log lengths to the waiting ox team. Peelers with axes and long
steel bars had been peeling off the thick red bark, which the boys found
could be whittled into odd shapes and rubbed velvety at the cut ends. The
sawyers were sawing the trunk into lengths short enough to ride on box
cars, and the chain tenders were driving the "dogs" or steel hooks into
the forward segment preparatory to attaching the chain that was to draw
the log after the panting donkey engine. The block shifter was ready with
his pulley, and the gypsy tender was gathering down wood.
Suddenly, just as the chain had stretched till the log began to move,
some weak link snapped and with a rebound like that of a cannon it
flashed over the hillside, catching one man and toppling him over with a
broken leg. The camp cook, whose accomplishments varied from the ability
to deliver an impromptu and usually unsolicited sermon to that of calling
off the numbers at a stag dance, was summoned in haste and from a long
black bag that went with the framed diploma that hung at the head of his
bunk, this unusual individual administered surgical treatment. The
injured man took it philosophically,--his out of door constitution would
repair the damage with more than average speed,--and the work of getting
out the big log proceeded as before.
They also watched, fascinated, as the logs at a camp further back were
sent down a crude slide that slanted sheer to a sizeable lake. Ace
threatened to try riding a log some time, but Norris rendered one of his
rare ultimatums on that score.
"Let's take plenty to eat!" bargained Pedro, who was beginning to suspect
it was no afternoon stroll he had embarked upon. "Hadn't we better 'phone
old Lester to lay in some extra supplies?"
"There is always fish," Norris reminded him.
"One gets tired of fish. I say let's take plenty of grub, if we're going
away off where for weeks we may not see a living soul to buy a pound of
bacon of. Eating's half the fun of camping. And if we get up there on the
John Muir Trail, we can't even catch fish, can we--always?"
"That's the stuff!" seconded Ace. "If we aren't tied too tightly to the
problem of rustling grub, we will be freer to roam where we please. But
gosh! Won't it take a whole train-load of burros to pack enough stuff?
Five men, three times a day, that's fifteen meals. And thirty days would
make it 450 meals. Besides we'll eat just about double the normal number
of calories,--the way I feel already. And twice 450 meals is 900."
"Whoa, there!" begged Norris. "How much can a burro carry, anyway? We
can't take all our food, or we'll have such a pack-train we won't have
time for anything but donkey driving, and if we carry feed to keep them
going on the trail, we'll have to take more burros to pack the feed, and
they will have to have feed too, and--there's no end to it."
"Well, of course we'll fish, when we can," amended Pedro. "And we can
take compact rations, dried stuff, instead of watery canned goods.
They're just as good, aren't they? Only the water's been taken out of
them, and we can put it back in each night before we eat it. What's the
use of packing tin cans that are mostly full of water?"
"I wouldn't call canned peaches mostly water," retorted Ace, who though
less dependent than the plumper Pedro on his three square meals per day,
was even more particular what those three meals tasted like.
"It isn't only the juice," said Pedro. "The peaches themselves are half
water. Dried peaches are the same thing except for that, and two pounds
of dried peaches will go a whole heap farther than a two-pound can, let
me tell you!"
"All right," said Ace. "Dried peaches! What else? Mr. Norris, you've had
a lot of experience on these back-country trips."
"H'm!" said the young Survey man, his eyes lighting reminiscently. "Did
you ever eat black bean soup with salt pork and garlic to flavor it?"
"I have," said Pedro. "It's a meal in itself, with black rye bread and
dill pickle. And what about fried frogs' legs and watercress? Broiled
mushrooms, stewed mushrooms and onions, and crayfish soup?"
"Sounds good to me," Ace admitted. "But have we a mushroom expert in our
midst? I'm not ready to commit suicide just yet."
"Nor I," laughed Norris.
"Nobody asked you to," Pedro looked aggrieved. "Goodness knows I'm no
expert, but I do know a few kinds, and I know those few kinds for sure."
"Hot dog!" commented the Senator's son. "Go to it, ol' boy!"
"Then," Norris continued, "there've been times in my life when I didn't
turn up my nose at corned beef hash browned."
"And spuds!" Ace completed the recipe. "And onions."
"Dehydrated," Norris admitted. "Can't carry potatoes for more than the
first few days, and dried onion is just as flavorful as fresh."
"An onion a day--" began Ace.
"Keeps everybody away," finished the young Survey man laughingly. "And
that reminds me of apples,--dried apple pie, apple pudding, apple
dumplings, (baked or boiled), apple fritter, (made with pancake flour),
and apple pan-dowdy with cinnamon."
"Pan-dowdy!" queried both boys.
"Yes, when the cook has to roll it out with a bottle, or an oar handle,
or a smooth stone instead of a rolling pin, and perhaps bake it in the
frying pan, and he hesitates to label the result, he terms it pan-dowdy,
and then nobody has any kick coming if it isn't exactly flesh, fish or
fowl, if you get me."
"We get you!" grinned Ted, who had thus far been a silent partner to the
plans. But as usually happened at such times, he had been doing a lot of
thinking. He now added his contribution: "How about rainbow trout broiled
with pork scraps, and served with horseradish? Let's take a bottle of
horseradish."
"Dried horseradish and a grater," amended Pedro.
"All right. Then there's trout baked with tomato and onion sauce, trout
baked in clay, trout boiled for a change, with lemon, (we could start the
trip with a few), trout skewered, griddled, baked in ashes, baked on a
stone, fried--of course, and roasted and stuffed with sage. Let's take
sage. Then how about cold boiled trout salad with mustard dressing, and
fish chowder a la canned milk, with dry-dated--what do you call it?
Dehydrated potatoes and evaporated onions? Eh? And garlic isn't such a
bad idea. It's the handiest little bit of flavoring I know of,--if we all
go in for it alike."
"We'll all go in for it good and strong," winked Ace.
"Strong is the word," chuckled Norris.
"Anyway," Ted defended his suggestion. "I've camped through the
back-country a heap in my time, and I've generally found it isn't the
sameness of the fish-three-times-a-day that lays you out, but the lack of
flavorings. Now I even take caraway seed to give a different flavor to a
batch of biscuit, and raisins, or some anise seed, or a little strong
cheese, that you can grate into it or on it and then toast it till it
melts. Then there's cinnamon and cheese toast for dessert, and plain
cinnamon and sugar melted on white bread makes it just bully! And why do
we have to eat white bread all the time anyway?"
"Of course we'll have cornmeal and buckwheat in our pancake mixture,"
said Norris.
"Bully! But why not take part rye flour too, and part oatmeal to mix in?
It bakes fine and flaky. And there's oatmeal cookies mixed with peanut
butter and sweetened!"
"Good!" Norris pronounced.
"Y'r _all right_, kid!" Ace thumped affectionately on his thin shoulder
blade, "y'r all right," but at the threatened repetition of the bearlike
caress, Ted dodged.
"Another idea," Pedro broke in. "Why eat bread all the time anyway? Why
not macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti and tomato paste?"
"And garlic?" teased Ace.
"Surest thing you know! And vermicelli, and noodles, and all those
things. They're all made of flour, and they're different."
"A little bulky," protested Norris.
"Oh, well, for the start of the trip, then. They're not so heavy, parked
up on top of a burro's regular pack."
"Good!" agreed the leader of the expedition. "We may come to cattle
ranches where we can get beef and mutton occasionally, though not after
we get into the higher altitudes. And we can start off with a few fresh
eggs, for compactness and safety broken a dozen at a time into glass
jars. After that--I don't know whether you fellows would like scrambled
eggs or not, made of egg powder. Personally I don't. Nor the famous
erbswurst."
"Aw!" drawled Ted, barely concealing his impatience. "The thing that
stands by you best on a hard trip, after all, is jerky and pemmican. I
think old Lester jerked some venison himself last fall, and he's probably
got it yet. And he'll grind us some pemmican, if we get him word before
he starts."
"Gee Whiz! Those are emergency rations!" vetoed Ace.
"We'll have to have a long distance conversation with him to-night," said
Norris. "Meantime we mustn't forget pilot biscuit and peanut butter for a
pocket lunch and shelled peanuts, of course, and rice, and tea and
coffee, and sugar, and baking powder."
"There are two things that can compactly," conceded the Castilian boy at
this point. "The best grade of canned beets and spinach are pretty solid
weight. I'll make no kick if we load on some of that until we get to the
steeper grades."
"Hey!" shouted Ace. "In all this time nobody's mentioned bacon."
"We took that for granted," laughed Norris. "I'll bet Long Lester would
never start out without it, whether we told him to or not. But I'm
awfully afraid we'll use more tea than coffee. It's bulky, and worse, it
loses flavor."
"Oh," said Ted, "I know the answer to that. Powdered coffee isn't one
quarter so bulky, and put up in little separate tins, we keep opening
them fresh, don't you see?"
"I've never yet seen a powdered coffee that could compare with the real
thing," Ace complained.
"Why couldn't Les buy the real thing and then get it powdered and sealed
into little separate tins for us?"
"He could," agreed Norris, "I suppose,--if we're going to be as fussy as
all that." (Ace flushed.) "But with our woods' appetites----"
"Oh, and citric acid tablets," the Senator's son hastened to change the
subject. "For lemonade, you know."
The discussion was cut short by Pedro's discovery that a bear had invaded
the lean-to.
The American black bear, and his California cousin whose coat has
generally lightened to the cinnamon brown of the soil, is all but tame in
the National Parks, where for years he has been unmolested. A friendly
fellow even in the wild state,--for the most part,--he roams the Giant
Forest as much a prized part of the landscape as the Big Trees
themselves. He has learned to visit the garbage dump regularly every
night, and it causes no sensation whatever to meet one on the trail. It
was much the same about the lumber camp.
But to have him visit uninvited, and serve his own refreshments from
their selected stores, was a less attractive trick. Nor did he show the
slightest inclination to take alarm and vacate when the boys returned. On
the contrary, he snarled and showed his teeth when they would have driven
him from the maple sugar can, and even Ace felt at the moment that
discretion was in order. It was not till Old Shaggy-Sides had pretty well
demolished everything in sight, and then carried the ham off under his
arm, that he took a reluctant departure.
This would never do. That night the unprotected edibles were hoisted just
too high for a possible visitor to reach, on a rope slung over the limb
of a tree. The boys still slept under the stars, for they knew enough
about bears, (all but Pedro), not to be afraid. Pedro, however, got
little sleep that night, though he would not have confessed to the fact
for anything on earth.
"There was one bear in Sequoia Park," remembered Ace, "who got too fresh,
that way, and raided some one's tent, and they had to send for help to
get him out. When it happened half a dozen times, he was ordered shot.
But he was the only one I've ever heard of acting that way. Now I'll bet,
if we'd inquire, we'd find this bear had been half tamed, and altogether
spoiled by these lumbermen.
"We were driving through Yellowstone last summer when one of those half
tame bears came out to beg. We stopped the machine and I fed him some
candy. Then we parked, and went up to the hotel for dinner. When we came
back, we found he had mighty near clawed the back seat to pieces,--and
why do you suppose?--To get at a side of bacon we had stowed away in
there."
"Did he find it?"
"We never did."
"That reminds me of something I heard," laughed Norris. "Some friends of
mine in Sequoia left their lunch boxes in the machine while they went to
climb Moro Rock. When they came back they found a cub calmly sitting up
there behind the wheel, eating one lunch after another."
Pedro was in for moving their headquarters to a great hollow Big Tree,
the cavity in which was as large as a good sized room, with a Gothic sort
of opening they could have made a door for. But the very next morning the
old prospector arrived with the train of pack-burros, and they were off.
"How do you explain the Sequoias, Mr. Norris? Will we find more of them?"
asked Pedro, with a last wistful backward glance.
"The Big Trees are by no means confined to Sequoia National Park and
other well known groves," said the Survey man. "The Sequoia gigantea is
to be found in scattered groves for a distance of 250 miles or more, up
and down the West slope of the Sierras, at altitudes just lower than that
of the belt of silver firs,--that is, anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 feet
above sea level. And in fact, south of Kings' River, the Sequoias stretch
in an almost unbroken forest for seventy miles. Nor are they all of the
proportions so often cited, where a man standing at their base looks like
a fly on the wall by comparison with these prehistoric giants. Nor did
they all get their start in life 4,000 years ago. There are young trees
in plenty, saplings and seedlings, who will doubtless reach the
patriarchal stage some 4,000 years hence. On what kind of earth will they
look then? On what stage in the evolution of civilization? Will another
ice age have re-carved these mountains? And how will man have learned to
protect himself from the added severity of those winters?"
"It certainly gives one something to think about," mused Pedro. "It is
only in these younger specimens that you can see what a graceful tree it
is!" He glanced from a feathery Big Tree youngster of perhaps 500
summers, with its slender branches drooping in blue-green plumes toward
the base, with purple-barked limbs out-thrust on the horizontal half way
up, and at the top reaching ardently heavenward. Near it stood a parent
tree of perhaps middle age, born around the time of Christ, whose crown
was still firmly rounded with the densely massed foliage, now
yellow-brown, and the bark red-brown.
The millions of two inch cones, surprisingly tiny for such a tree, hang
heavy with seeds,--they counted 300 in a single green cone.
"With such millions of seeds," puzzled Pedro, "I should think the trees
would grow so thick that there would be no walking between them."
"No," said Norris. "In the first place, remember that not one seed in a
million escapes these busy Douglas squirrels and the big woodcocks that
you hear drumming everywhere. Then even the millionth seed has to risk
forest fires and snow-slides, lumbermen and lightning. But I'll tell you
something funny about them. You'd naturally think, from the number of
streams in these forests, that they required a lot of moisture. Well,
they don't. Further South they grow and flourish on perfectly dry ground.
But their roots retain so much rain and snow water that their tendency is
to _make_ streams. The dense crown helps too, by preventing evaporation.
You'll find Sequoias flourishing in a mere rift in a granite precipice.
But wherever you find a dense growth, as you do here, there you will find
their roots giving out the seepage that feeds a million streamlets, and
these in turn feed the great rivers.
"You see these trees _must_ be able to survive drouth or they could not
have survived the changes of so many thousand years. Why, these Sequoias
might have formed one continuous forest from the American River on South,
if it had not been for the glaciers that swept down the great basins of
the San Joaquin and Kings' River, the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus."
"But why didn't the glaciers clean them off the basins of the Kaweah and
the Tule Rivers, too?"
"Ah! There the giant rock spurs of the canyons of the King and the Kern
protected the Tule and the Kaweah, by shunting the ice off to right and
left."
"There's one thing more I'd like to know," said Pedro. "Where will we
find the nut pines that have the pine nuts? Aren't they delicious?"
"There are several kinds," said Norris. "There is a queer little one with
cones growing like burrs on the trunk as well as on the limbs, but that
is only found on burnt ground. Another, that forms a dietary staple with
the Indians of Nevada, is to be found only on the East slope of the
Sierra, and the little nut pine that our California Indians harvest is
away down in the foothills among the white oaks and manzanitas, so I'm
afraid whatever else we come across on this trip, we won't want to count
on pine nuts."
"What interests _me_ more," said Ted, "is whether we are going to come
across any gold or not."
"Now you're talking!" the old prospector suddenly spoke up.
Ted's eyes shone.
Ace had an experience about this time that flavored his nightmares for
some time to come. Following a lumber chute, one of these three board
affairs, up the side of a particularly steep slope one day, where at the
time of the spring floods the yellow pine logs had been sent down to the
river, he thought to try a little target shooting with Long Lester's
rifle. But at the first shot a bunch of range cattle,--of whose presence
he had not known,--began crowding curiously near. He fired again, and a
cow with a calf took alarm and started to charge him, but was driven back
with a few clods and a flourished stick.
He fired again. This time, quite by accident, his bullet hit an old bull
squarely on the horn. The shock at first stunned the animal, and he fell
forward on his knees. Recovering in an instant, however, the enraged
animal made for Ace.
[Illustration: Leaping aboard a log he sent it shooting to the stream
below.]
The Senator's son had that day worn his heavy leather chaps. He had found
them burdensome enough on his slow climb upward. They now impeded him
till he could not have outrun the animal had he tried, nor was there any
tree handy between him and it.
Then a wild thought struck him. The log slide!--It was mighty risky, but
then, so was the bull. Leaping aboard a log that still lay at the head of
the slide, he pulled the lever and sent it shooting to the stream below,
and the fallen pine needles flew out in a cloud before him, as the log
hurled down the grade. His heavy leather chaps really helped him balance
now, and his hob-nails helped him cling.
The log came to a stand-still before it reached the river,--but Ace did
not. And the bull was hopelessly out-distanced.