THROUGH THE REGION OF WEIR
We awoke with light hearts on the second morning of the voyage. All
about us was the sacred silence of the wilderness dawn. The coming sun
had smitten the chill night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the
valley like a fairy lake.
We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and there were no birds to sing; but
crows, wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung doleful voices downward
into the morning hush--the spirit of the place grown vocal.
Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire of driftwood glowed ruddily.
What is there about the tang of wood-smoke in a lonesome place that
fills one with glories that seem half memory and half dream? Crouched on
my haunches, shivering just enough to feel the beauty there is in fire,
I needed only to close my eyes, smarting with the smoke, to feel myself
the first man huddled close to the first flame, blooming like a mystic
flower in the chill dawn of the world!
Perhaps that is what an outing is for--to strip one down to the lean
essentials, press in upon one the glorious privilege of being one's
self, unique in all the universe of innumerable unique things. Crouched
close to your wilderness campfire, the great Vision comes easily out of
the smoke. Once again you feel the bigness of your world, the tremendous
significance of everything in it--including yourself--and a far-seeing
sadness grips you. Living in the flesh seems so transient, almost a
pitiful thing in the last analysis. But somehow you feel that there is
something bigger--not beyond it, but all about it continually. And you
wonder that you ever hated anyone. You know, somehow, there in the smoky
silence, why men are noble or ignoble; why they lie or die for a
principle; why they kill, or suffer martyrdom; why they love and hate
and fight; why women smile under burdens, sin splendidly or
sordidly--and why hearts sometimes break.
And expanded by the bigness of the empty silent spaces about you, like a
spirit independent of it and outside of it all, you love the great red
straining Heart of Man more than you could ever love it at your desk in
town. And you want to get up and move--push on through purple
distances--whither? Oh, anywhere will do! What you seek is at the end of
the rainbow; it is in the azure of distance; it is just behind the glow
of the sunset, and close under the dawn. And the glorious thing about it
is that you know you'll never find it until you reach that lone, ghostly
land where the North Star sets, perhaps. You're merely glad to know that
you're not a vegetable--and that the trail never really ends anywhere.
Just now, however, the longing for the abstract had the semblance of a
longing for the concrete. It always has that semblance, for that matter.
You never really want what you think you are seeking. Touch the
substance--and away you go after the shadow!
[Illustration: "ATOM" SAILING UP-STREAM IN A HEAD WIND.]
[Illustration: TYPICAL RAPIDS ON UPPER MISSOURI.]
Around the bend lay Sioux City. Around what bend? What matter? Somewhere
down stream the last bend lay, and in between lay the playing of the
game. Any bend will do to sail around! There's a lot of fun in merely
being able to move about and do things. For this reason I am overwhelmed
with gratitude whenever I think that, through some slight error in the
cosmic process, the life forces that glow in me might have been flung
into a turnip--_but weren't_! The thought is truly appalling--isn't it?
The avoidance of that one awful possibility is enough to make any man
feel lucky all his life. It's such fun to awaken in the morning with all
your legs and arms and eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used
again! So strong was this thought in me when we cast off, that even the
memory of Bill's amateurish pancakes couldn't keep back the whistle.
The current of the Black Bluffs Rapids whisked us from the bank with a
giddy speed, spun us about a right-angled bend, and landed us in a long
quiet lake. Contrary to the average opinion, the Upper Missouri is
merely a succession of lakes and rapids. In the low-water season, this
statement should be italicised. When you are pushing down with the power
of your arms alone the rapids show you how fast you want to go, and the
lakes show you that you can't go that fast. For the teaching of
patience, the arrangement is admirable. But when head winds blow, a
three-mile reach means about a two-hour fight.
This being a very invigorating morning, however, the engine decided to
take a constitutional. It ran. Below the mouth of the Marias River,
twenty minutes later, we grounded on Archer's Bar and shut down. After
dragging her off the gravel, we discovered that the engine wished to
sleep. No amount of cranking could arouse it. Now and then it would say
"_squash_," feebly rolling its wheel a revolution or two--like a
sleepy-head brushing off a fly with a languid hand.
A light breeze had sprung up out of the west. The stream ran east and
northeast. We hastily rigged a tarp on a pair of oars spliced for a
mast, and proceeded at a care-free pace. The light breeze ruffled the
surface of the slow stream;
"----yet still the sail made on
A pleasant noise till noon."
In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river
draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse
patches of greenery, seemed to waver as though seen through shimmering
silken gauze. And over it all was the hush of a dream, except when, in a
spasmodic freshening of the breeze, the rude mast creaked and a sleepy
watery murmur grew up for a moment at the wake.
Now and then at a break in the bluffs, where a little coulee entered the
stream, the gray masses of the bull-berry bushes lifted like smoke, and
from them, flame-like, flashed the vivid scarlet of the berry-clusters,
smiting the general dreaminess like a haughty cry in a silence.
A wilderness indeed! It seemed that waste land of which Tennyson sang,
"where no man comes nor hath come since the making of the world." I
thought of the steamboats and the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the
thousands of men who had pushed through this dream-world and the thought
was unconvincing. Fairies may have lived here, indeed; and in the youth
of the world, a glad young race of gods might have dreamed gloriously
among the yellow crags. But surely we were the first men who had ever
passed that way--and should be the last.
Suddenly the light breeze boomed up into a gale. The _Atom_, with
bellying sail, leaped forward down the roughening water, swung about a
bend, raced with a quartering wind down the next reach, shot across
another bend--and lay drifting in a golden calm. Still above us the
great wind buzzed in the crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the
waters about us lay like a sheet of flawless glass.
With paddles we pushed on lazily for an hour. At the next bend, where
the river turned into the west, the great gale that had been roaring
above us, suddenly struck us full in front. Sucking up river between the
wall rocks on either side, its force was terrific. You tried to talk
while facing it, and it took your breath away. In a few minutes, in
spite of our efforts with the paddles, we lay pounding on the shallows
of the opposite shore.
We got out. Two went forward with the line and the third pushed at the
stern. Progress was slow--no more than a mile an hour. The clear water
of the upper river is always cold, and the great wind chilled the air.
Even under the August noon it took brisk work to keep one's teeth from
chattering. The bank we were following became a precipice rising sheer
from the river's edge, and the water deepened until we could no longer
wade. We got in and poled on to the next shallows, often for many
minutes at a time barely holding our own against the stiff gusts. For
two hours we dragged the heavily laden boat, sometimes walking the bank,
sometimes wading in mid-stream, sometimes poling, often swimming with
the line from one shallow to another. And the struggle ended as suddenly
as it began. Upon rounding the second bend the head wind became a stern
wind, driving us on at a jolly clip until nightfall.
During the late afternoon, we came upon a place where the Great Northern
Railroad touches the river for the last time in five hundred miles. Here
we saw two Italian section hands whiling away their Sunday with fishing
rods. I went ashore, hoping to buy some fish. Neither of the two could
speak English, and Italian sounds to me merely like an unintelligible
singing. However, they gave me to understand that the fish were not for
sale, and my proffered coin had no persuasive powers.
Still wanting those fish, I rolled a smoke, carelessly whistling the
while a strain from an opera I had once heard. For some reason or other
that strain had been in my head all day. I had gotten up in the morning
with it; I had whistled it during the fight with the head wind. The Kid
called it "that Dago tune." I think it was something from _Il
Trovatore_.
Suddenly one of the little Italians dropped his rod, stood up to his
full height, lifted his arms very much after the manner of an orchestra
leader and joined in with me. I stopped--because I saw that he _could_
whistle. He carried it on with much expression to the last thin note
with all the ache of the world in it. And then he grinned at me.
"Verdi!" he said sweetly.
I applauded. Whereat the little Italian produced a bag of tobacco. We
sat down on the rocks and smoked together, holding a wordless but
perfectly intelligble conversation of pleasant grins.
That night we had fish for supper! I got them for a song--or, rather,
for a whistle. I was fed with more than fish. And I went to sleep that
night with a glorious thought for a pillow: Truth expressed as Art is
the universal language. One immortal strain from Verdi, poorly whistled
in a wilderness, had made a Dago and a Dutchman brothers!
Scarcely had the crackling of the ruddy log lulled us to sleep, when the
night had flitted over like a shadow, and we were cooking breakfast. A
lone, gray wolf, sitting on his haunches a hundred paces away, regarded
us curiously. Doubtless we were new to his generation; for in the
evening dusk we had drifted well into the Bad Lands.
Bad Lands? Rather the Land of Awe!
A light stern wind came up with the sun. During the previous evening we
had rigged a cat-sail, and noiselessly we glided down the glinting trail
of crystal into the "Region of Weir."
On either hand the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow masses against
the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea,
carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented a panorama of
wonders.
Rows of huge colonial mansions with pillared porticoes looked from their
dizzy terraces across the stream to where soaring mosques and mystic
domes of worship caught the sun. It was all like the visible dream of a
master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister ruins of medieval castles
sprawled down the slopes of unassailable summits. Grim brown towers,
haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance on the unappearing foe. Titanic
stools of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely gods had once
strolled in that far time when the stars sang and the moon was young.
Dark red walls of regularly laid stone--huge as that the Chinese flung
before the advance of the Northern hordes--held imaginary empires
asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's eagle stared into the eye of the
sun, and raised his wings for the flight deferred these many centuries.
Kneeling face to face upon a lonesome summit, their hands clasped before
them, their backs bent as with the burdens of the race, two women prayed
the old, old woman prayer. The snow-white ruins of a vast cathedral lay
along the water's edge, and all about it was a hush of worship. And near
it, arose the pointed pipes of a colossal organ--with the summer silence
for music.
With a lazy sail we drifted through this place of awe; and for once I
had no regrets about that engine. The popping of the exhaust would have
seemed sacrilegious in this holy quiet.
Seldom do men pass that way. It is out of the path of the tourist. No
excursion steamers ply those awesome river reaches. Across the sacred
whiteness of that cathedral's imposing mass, no sign has ever been
painted telling you the merits of the best five-cent cigar in the world!
Few besides the hawks and the crows would see it, if it were there.
And yet, for all the quiet in this land of wonder, somehow you cannot
feel that the place is unpeopled. Surely, you think, invisible knights
clash in tourney under those frowning towers. Surely a lovelorn maiden
spins at that castle window, weaving her heartache into the magic
figures of her loom. Stately dames must move behind the shut doors of
those pillared mansions; devotees mutter Oriental prayers beneath those
sun-smitten domes. And amid the awful inner silence of that cathedral,
white-robed priests lift wan faces to their God.
Under the beat of the high sun the light stern wind fell. The slack sail
drooped like a sick-hearted thing. Idly drifting on the slow glassy
flood, we seemed only an incidental portion of this dream in which the
deepest passions of man were bodied forth in eternal fixity. Towers of
battle, domes of prayer, fanes of worship, and then--the kneeling women!
Somehow one couldn't whistle there. Bill and the Kid, little given to
sentiment, sat quietly and stared.
Late in the afternoon we found ourselves out of this "Region of Weir."
Great wall rocks soared above us. Consulting our map, we found that we
were nearing Eagle Rapids, the first of a turbulent series. I had fondly
anticipated shooting them all under power. So once more I decided to go
over that engine. We landed at the wooded mouth of a little ravine,
having made a trifle over twenty miles that day.
With those tools of the engine doctor--an air of mystery and a
monkey-wrench--I unscrewed everything that appeared to have a thread on
it, and pulled out the other things. The odds, I figured, were in my
favor. A sick engine is useless, and I felt assured of either killing or
curing. I did something--I don't know what; but having achieved the
complete screwing up and driving in of things--_it went_!
So on the morning of the fourth day, we were up early, eager for the
shooting of rapids. We had understood from the conversation of the
seemingly wise, that Eagle Rapids was the first of a series that made
the other rapids we had passed through look like mere ripples on the
surface. In some of those we had gone at a very good clip, and several
times we had lost our rudder.
I remembered how the steamboats used to be obliged to throw out cables
and slowly wind themselves up with the power of the "steam nigger." I
also remembered the words of Father de Smet: "There are many rapids, ten
of which are very difficult to ascend and very dangerous to go down."
We had intended from the very first to get wrecked in one or all of
these rapids. For this reason we had distributed forward, aft, and
amidships, eight five-gallon cans, soldered air-tight. The frail craft
would, we figured, be punctured. The cans would displace nearly three
hundred and fifty pounds of water, and the boat and engine, submerged,
would lose a certain weight. I had made the gruesome calculation with
fond attention to detail. I decided that she should be wrecked quite
arithmetically. We should be able, the figures said, to recover the
engine and patch the boat. We had provided three life-preservers, but
one had been stolen; so I had fancied what a bully fight one might have
if he should be thrown out into the mad waters without a life-preserver.
I have never been able to explain it satisfactorily; it is one of the
paradoxes; but human nature seems to take a weird delight in placing in
jeopardy that which is dearest. Even a coward with his fingers clenched
desperately on the ragged edge of hazard, feels an inexplicable thrill
of glory. Having several times been decently scared, I know.
One likes to take a sly peep behind the curtain of the big play, hoping
perhaps to get a slight hint as to what machinery hoists the moon, and
what sort of contrivance flings the thunder and lightning, and many
other things that are none of his business. Only, to be sure, he intends
to get away safely with his information. When you think you see your
finish bowing to receive you, something happens in your head. It's like
a sultry sheet of rapid fire lapping up for a moment the thunder-shaken
night--and discovering a strange land to you. And it's really good for
you.
Under half speed we cruised through the windless golden morning; and the
lonesome canyon echoed and re-echoed with the joyful chortle of the
resurrected engine. We had covered about ten miles, when a strange
sighing sound grew up about us. It seemed to emanate from the soaring
walls of rock. It seemed faint, yet it arose above the din of the
explosions, drowned out the droning of the screw.
Steadily the sound increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned
and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in--a sibilant,
metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly over a thin
steel edge.
[Illustration: WOLF POINT, THE FIRST TOWN IN 500 MILES.]
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE BAD LANDS.]
We knew it to be the mourning voice of the Eagle Rapids; but far as we
could see, the river was quiet as a lake. We jogged on for a mile,
with the invisible moaning presence about us. It was somewhat like the
intangible something you feel about a powerful but sinister personality.
The golden morning was saturated with it.
Suddenly, turning a sharp bend about the wall of rock that flanked the
channel, a wind of noise struck us. It was like the hissing of
innumerable snakes against a tonal background of muffled continuous
thunder. A hundred yards before us was Eagle Rapids--a forbidding patch
of writhing, whitening water, pricked with the upward thrust of
toothlike rocks.
The first sight of it turned the inside of me mist-gray. Temporarily,
wrecks and the arithmetic of them had little charm for me. I seized the
spark-lever, intending to shut down. Instead, I threw it wide open. With
the resulting leap of the craft, all the gray went out of me.
I grasped the rudder ropes and aimed at a point where the sinuous
current sucked through a passage in the rocks like a lean flame through
a windy flue. Did you ever hear music that made you see purple? It was
that sort of purple I saw (or did I hear it like music?) when we plunged
under full speed into the first suck of the rapids. We seemed a
conscious arrow hurled through a gray, writhing world, the light of
which was noise. And then, suddenly, the quiet, golden morning flashed
back; and we were ripping the placid waters of a lake.
The Kid broke out into boisterous laughter that irritated me strangely:
"Where the devil do you suppose our life-preservers are?" he bawled.
"They're clear down under all the cargo!"
A world of wonderful beauty was forging past us. In the golden calm, the
scintillant sheet of water seemed to be rushing backward, splitting
itself over the prow, like a fabric woven of gold and silver drawn
rapidly against a keen stationary blade.
The sheer cliffs had fallen away into pine-clad slopes, and vari-colored
rocks flung notes of scarlet and gold through the sombre green of the
pines--like the riotous treble cries of an organ pricking the sullen
murmur of the bass. So still were the clean waters that we seemed midway
between two skies.
We skirted the base of a conical rock that towered three hundred feet
above us--a Titan sentinel. It was the famous Sentinel Rock of the old
steamboat days. I shut the engine down to quarter speed, for somehow
from the dizzy summit a sad dream fell upon me and bade me linger.
I stared down into the cold crystal waters at the base of the rock.
Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear,
black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung
there. I remembered an old spring I used to haunt when I was just old
enough to be awed by the fact of life and frightened at the possibility
of death. Just such mosses grew in the depths of that spring. I used to
stare into it for hours.
It fascinated me in a terrible way. I thought Death looked like that.
Even now I am afraid I could not swim long in clear waters with those
fearful colors under me. I am sure they found Ophelia floating like a
ghastly lily in such a place.
Filled with a shadow of the old childish dread, I looked up to the
austere summit of the Sentinel. Scarred and haggard with time it caught
the sun. I thought of how long it had stood there just so, under the
intermittent flashing of moon and sun and star, since first its flinty
peak had pricked through the hot spume of prehistoric seas.
Fantastic reptiles, winged and finned and fanged, had basked upon
it--grotesque, tentative vehicles of the Flame of Life! And then these
flashed out, and the wild sea fell, and the land arose--hideous and
naked, a steaming ooze fetid with gasping life. And all the while this
scarred Sentinel stared unmoved. And then a riot of giant vegetation all
about it--divinely extravagant, many-colored as fire. And this too
flashed out--like the impossible dream of a god too young. And the Great
Change came, and the paradox of frost was in the world, stripping life
down to the lean essentials till only the sane, capable things might
live. And still the Titan stared as in the beginning. And then, men were
in the land--gaunt, terrible, wolf-like men, loving and hating. And La
Verendrye forged past it; and Lewis and Clark toiled under it through
these waters of awful quiet. And then the bull boats and the mackinaws
and the packets. And all these flashed out; and still it stood unmoved.
And I came--and I too would flash out, and all men after me and all
life.
I viewed the colossal watcher with something like terror--the aspect of
death about its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight at its top. I
flung the throttle open, and we leaped forward through the river hush.
I wanted to get away from this thing that had seen so much of life and
cared so little. It depressed me strangely; it thrust bitter questions
within the charmed circle of my ego. It gave me an almost morbid desire
for speed, as though there were some place I should reach before the
terrible question should be answered against me.
We fled down five or six miles of depressingly quiet waters. Once again
the wall rocks closed about us. We seemed to be going at a tediously
slow pace, yet the two thin streams of water rushed hissing from prow to
stern. A strange mood was upon me. Once when I was a boy and far from
home, I awoke in the night with a bed of railroad ties under me, and the
chill black blanket of the darkness about me. I wanted to get up and run
through that damned night--anywhere, just so I went fast
enough--stopping only when exhaustion should drag me down. And yet I was
afraid of nothing tangible; hunger and the stranger had sharpened
whatever blue steel there was in my nature. I was afraid of being still!
Were you ever a homesick boy, too proud to tell the truth about it?
I felt something of that boy's ache as we shot in among the wall rocks
again. It was a psychic hunger for something that does not exist. Oh, to
attain the terrible speed one experiences in a fever-dream, to get
somewhere before it is too late, before the black curtain drops!
To some this may sound merely like the grating of overwrought nerves.
But it is more than that. All religions grew out of that most human
mood. And whenever one is deeply moved, he feels it. For even the most
matter-of-fact person of us all has now and then a suspicion that this
life is merely episodic--that curtain after curtain of darkness is to be
pierced, world after world of consciousness and light to be passed
through.
Once more the rocks took on grotesque shapes--utterly ultra-human in
their suggestiveness. Those who have marveled at the Hudson's beauty
should drop down this lonesome stretch.
We shot through the Elbow Rapids at the base of the great
Hole-in-the-wall Rock. It was deep and safe--much like an exaggerated
mill-race. It ran in heavy swells, yet the day was windless.
In the late afternoon we shot the Dead Man's Rapids, a very turbulent
and rocky stretch of water. We went through at a freight-train speed,
and began to develop a slight contempt for fast waters. That night we
camped at the mouth of the Judith River on the site of the now forgotten
Fort Chardon. We had made only ninety-eight miles in four days. It began
to appear that we might be obliged to finish on skates!
We were up and off with the first gray of the morning. We knew Dauphin
Rapids to be about seventeen miles below, and since this particular
patch of water had by far the greatest reputation of all the rapids, we
were eager to make its acquaintance.
The engine began to show unmistakable signs of getting tired of its job.
Now and then it barked spitefully, had half a notion to stop, changed
its mind, ran faster than it should, wheezed and slowed down--acting in
an altogether unreasonable way. But it kept the screw humming
nevertheless.
Fortunately it was going at a mad clip when we sighted the Dauphin.
There was not that sibilance and thunder that had turned me a bit gray
inside at first sight of the Eagle. The channel was narrow, and no rocks
appeared above the surface. But speed _was_ there; and the almost
noiseless rolling of the swift flood ahead had a more formidable
appearance than that of the Eagle. Rocks above the surface are not much
to be feared when you have power and a good rudder. But we drew about
twenty-two inches of water, and I thought of the rocks under the
surface.
I had, however, only a moment to think, for we were already traveling a
good eighteen miles, and when the main swirl of the rapids seized us, we
no doubt reached twenty-five. I was grasping the rudder ropes and we
were all grinning a sort of idiotic satisfaction at the amazing spurt of
speed, when----
Something was about to happen!
The Kid and I were sitting behind the engine in order to hold her screw
down to solid water. Bill, decorated with a grin, sat amidships facing
us. I caught a pink flash in the swirl just under our bow, and then _it
happened_!
The boat reared like a steeple-chaser taking a fence! The Kid shot
forward over the engine and knocked the grin off Bill's face! Clinging
desperately to the rudder ropes, I saw, for a brief moment, a good
three-fourths of the frail craft thrust skyward at an angle of about
forty-five degrees. Then she stuck her nose in the water and her screw
came up, howling like seven devils in the air behind me! Instinctively,
I struck the spark-lever; the howling stopped,--and we were floating in
the slow waters below Dauphin Rapids.
All the cargo had forged forward, and the persons of Bill and the Kid
were considerably tangled. We laughed loud and long. Then we gathered
ourselves up and wondered if she might be taking water under the cargo.
It developed that she wasn't. But one of our grub boxes, containing all
the bacon, was missing. So were the short oars that we used for paddles.
While we laughed, these had found some convenient hiding-place.
We had struck a smooth bowlder and leaped over it. A boat with the
ordinary launch construction would have opened at every seam. The light
springy tough construction of the _Atom_ had saved her. Whereat I
thought of the Information Bureau and was well pleased.
Altogether we looked upon the incident as a purple spot. But we were
many miles from available bacon, and when, upon trial, the engine
refused to make a revolution, we began to get exceedingly hungry for
meat.
Having a dead engine and no paddles, we drifted. We drifted very slowly.
The Kid asked if he might not go ashore and drive a stake in the bank.
For what purpose? Why, to ascertain whether we were going up or down
stream! While we drifted in the now blistering sun, we talked about
_meat_. With a devilish persistence we quite exhausted the subject. We
discussed the best methods for making a beefsteak delicious. It made us
very hungry for meat. The Kid announced that he could feel his backbone
sawing at the front of his shirt. But perhaps that was only the
hyperbole of youth. Bill confessed that he had once grumbled at his good
wife for serving the steak too rare. He now stated that at the first
telegraph station he would wire for forgiveness. I advised him to wire
for money instead and buy meat with it. Personally I felt a sort of
wistful tenderness for packing-houses.
That day passed somehow, and the next morning we were still hungry for
meat. We spent most of the morning talking about it. In the blistering
windless afternoon, we drifted lazily. Now and then we took turns
cranking the engine.
We were going stern foremost and I was cranking. We rounded a bend
where the wall rocks sloped back, leaving a narrow arid sagebrush strip
along both sides of the stream. I had straightened up to get the kink
out of my back and mop the sweat out of my eyes, when I saw something
that made my stomach turn a double somersault.
A good eight hundred yards down stream at the point of a gravel-bar,
something that looked like and yet unlike a small cluster of drifting,
leafless brush moved slowly into the water. Now it appeared quite
distinct, and now it seemed that a film of oil all but blotted it out. I
blinked my eyes and peered hard through the baffling yellow glare. Then
I reached for the rifle and climbed over the gunwhale. I smelled raw
meat.
Fortunately, we were drifting across a bar, and the slow water came only
to my shoulders. The thing eight hundred yards away was forging across
stream by this time--heading for the mouth of a coulee. I saw plainly
now that the brush grew out of a head. It was a buck with antlers.
Just below the coulee's mouth, the wall rocks began again. The buck
would be obliged to land above the wall rocks, and the drifting boat
would keep him going. I reached shore and headed for that coulee. The
sagebrush concealed me. At the critical moment, I intended to show
myself and start him up the steep slope. Thus he would be forced to
approach me while fleeing me. When I felt that enough time had passed, I
stood up. The buck, shaking himself like a dog, stood against the yellow
sandstone at the mouth of the gulch. He saw me, looked back at the
drifting boat, and appeared to be undecided.
I wondered what the range might be. Back home in the plowed field where
I frequently plug tin cans at various long ranges, I would have called
it six hundred yards--at first. Then suddenly it seemed three or four
hundred. Like a thing in a dream the buck seemed to waver back and forth
in the oily sunlight.
"Call it four hundred and fifty," I said to myself, and let drive. A
spurt of yellow stone-dust leaped from the cliff a foot or so above the
deer's back. Only four hundred? But the deer had made up his mind. He
had urgent business on the other side of that slope--he appeared to be
overdue.
[Illustration: FRESH MEAT.]
[Illustration: SUPPER!]
I pumped up another shell and drew fine at four hundred. That time
his rump quivered for a second as though a great weight had been dropped
on it. But he went on with increased speed. Once more I let him have it.
That time he lost an antler. He had now reached the summit, two hundred
feet up at the least.
He hesitated--seemed to be shivering. I have hunted with a full stomach
and brought down game. But there's a difference when you are empty. In
that moment before you kill, you became the sort of fellow your mother
wouldn't like. Perhaps the average man would feel a little ashamed to
tell the truth about that savage moment. I got down on my knee and put a
final soft-nosed ball where it would do the most good. The buck reared,
stiffened, and came down, tumbling over and over.
That night we pitched camp under a lone scrubby tree at the mouth of an
arid gulch that led back into the utterly God-forsaken Bad Lands. It was
the wilderness indeed. Coyotes howled far away in the night, and diving
beaver boomed out in the black stream.
We built half a dozen fires and swung above them the choice portions of
our kill. And how we ate--with what glorious appetites!
It is good to sit with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful
banter across very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a country table
at Christmas time with turkey and pumpkin-pies and old-fashioned
puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply
happy with apples and cider before an open fireplace. I have been
present when the brilliant sword-play of wit flashed across a banquet
table--and it thrilled me. _But_----
There is no feast like the feast in the open--the feast in the flaring
light of a night fire--the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the
wild and the tang of the smoke in it!