trail went softly, with the courtesy of great gentleness. Occasionally
we caught sight of other ridges,--also with pines,--across deep sloping
valleys, pine filled. The effect of the distant trees seen from above
was that of roughened velvet, here smooth and shining, there dark with
rich shadows. On these slopes played the wind. In the level countries
it sang through the forest progressively: here on the slope it struck a
thousand trees at once. The air was ennobled with the great voice, as
a church is ennobled by the tones of a great organ. Then we would drop
back again to the inner country, for our way did not contemplate the
descents nor climbs, but held to the general level of a plateau.
Clear fresh brooks ran in every ravine. Their water was snow-white
against the black rocks; or lay dark in bank-shadowed pools. As our
horses splashed across we could glimpse the rainbow trout flashing to
cover. Where the watered hollows grew lush were thickets full of
birds, outposts of the aggressively and cheerfully worldly in this
pine-land of spiritual detachment. Gorgeous bush-flowers, great of
petal as magnolias, with perfume that lay on the air like a heavy
drowsiness; long clear stretches of an ankle-high shrub of vivid
emerald, looking in the distance like sloping meadows of a peculiar
color-brilliance; patches of smaller flowers where for the trifling
space of a street's width the sun had unobstructed fall,--these from
time to time diversified the way, brought to our perceptions the
endearing trifles of earthiness, of humanity, befittingly to modify the
austerity of the great forest. At a brookside we saw, still fresh and
moist, the print of a bear's foot. From a patch of the little emerald
brush, a barren doe rose to her feet, eyed us a moment, and then
bounded away as though propelled by springs. We saw her from time to
time surmounting little elevations farther and farther away.
The air was like cold water. We had not lung capacity to satisfy our
desire for it. There came with it a dry exhilaration that brought high
spirits, an optimistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite. It
seemed that we could never tire. In fact we never did. Sometimes,
after a particularly hard day, we felt like resting; but it was always
after the day's work was done, never while it was under way. The
Tenderfoot and I one day went afoot twenty-two miles up and down a
mountain fourteen thousand feet high. The last three thousand feet
were nearly straight up and down. We finished at a four-mile clip an
hour before sunset, and discussed what to do next to fill in the time.
When we sat down, we found we had had about enough; but we had not
discovered it before.
All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt the benefit of the
change from the lower country. Here we were definitely in the
Mountains. Our plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in
altitude. Beyond it occasionally we could see three more ridges,
rising and falling, each higher than the last. And then, in the blue
distance, the very crest of the broad system called the
Sierras,--another wide region of sheer granite rising in peaks,
pinnacles, and minarets, rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal
snows.
[1] Do not fail to sound the final e.
IX
THE TRAIL
When you say "trail" to a Westerner, his eye lights up. This is
because it means something to him. To another it may mean something
entirely different, for the blessed word is of that rare and beautiful
category which is at once of the widest significance and the most
intimate privacy to him who utters it. To your mind leaps the picture
of the dim forest-aisles and the murmurings of tree-top breezes; to him
comes a vision of the wide dusty desert; to me, perhaps, a high wild
country of wonder. To all of us it is the slender, unbroken,
never-ending thread connecting experiences.
For in a mysterious way, not to be understood, our trails never do end.
They stop sometimes, and wait patiently while we dive in and out of
houses, but always when we are ready to go on, they are ready too, and
so take up the journey placidly as though nothing had intervened. They
begin, when? Sometime, away in the past, you may remember a single
episode, vivid through the mists of extreme youth. Once a very little
boy walked with his father under a green roof of leaves that seemed
farther than the sky and as unbroken. All of a sudden the man raised
his gun and fired upwards, apparently through the green roof. A pause
ensued. Then, hurtling roughly through still that same green roof, a
great bird fell, hitting the earth with a thump. The very little boy
was I. My trail must have begun there under the bright green roof of
leaves.
From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind you like a thread so
that never do you quite lose connection with your selves. There is
something a little fearful to the imaginative in the insistence of it.
You may camp, you may linger, but some time or another, sooner or
later, you must go on, and when you do, then once again the Trail takes
up its continuity without reference to the muddied place you have
tramped out in your indecision or indolence or obstinacy or necessity.
It would be exceedingly curious to follow out in patience the chart of
a man's going, tracing the pattern of his steps with all its windings
of nursery, playground, boys afield, country, city, plain, forest,
mountain, wilderness, home, always on and on into the higher country of
responsibility until at the last it leaves us at the summit of the
Great Divide. Such a pattern would tell his story as surely as do the
tracks of a partridge on the snow.
A certain magic inheres in the very name, or at least so it seems to
me. I should be interested to know whether others feel the same
glamour that I do in the contemplation of such syllables as the Lo-Lo
Trail, the Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright Angel Trail. A
certain elasticity of application too leaves room for the more
connotation. A trail may be almost anything. There are wagon-trails
which East would rank as macadam roads; horse-trails that would compare
favorably with our best bridle-paths; foot-trails in the fur country
worn by constant use as smooth as so many garden-walks. Then again
there are other arrangements. I have heard a mule-driver overwhelmed
with skeptical derision because he claimed to have upset but six times
in traversing a certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in
charts of the mountains are marked many trails which are only "ways
through,"--you will find few traces of predecessors; the same can be
said of trails in the great forests where even an Indian is sometimes
at fault. "Johnny, you're lost," accused the white man. "Trail lost:
Injun here," denied the red man. And so after your experience has led
you by the campfires of a thousand delights, and each of those
campfires is on the Trail, which only pauses courteously for your stay
and then leads on untiring into new mysteries forever and ever, you
come to love it as the donor of great joys. You too become a
Westerner, and when somebody says "trail," your eye too lights up.
The general impression of any particular trail is born rather of the
little incidents than of the big accidents. The latter are exotic, and
might belong to any time or places; the former are individual. For the
Trail is a vantage-ground, and from it, as your day's travel unrolls,
you see many things. Nine tenths of your experience comes thus, for in
the long journeys the side excursions are few enough and unimportant
enough almost to merit classification with the accidents. In time the
character of the Trail thus defines itself.
Most of all, naturally, the kind of country has to do with this
generalized impression. Certain surprises, through trees, of vista
looking out over unexpected spaces; little notches in the hills beyond
which you gain to a placid far country sleeping under a sun warmer than
your elevation permits; the delicious excitement of the moment when you
approach the very knife-edge of the summit and wonder what lies
beyond,--these are the things you remember with a warm heart. Your
saddle is a point of vantage. By it you are elevated above the
country; from it you can see clearly. Quail scuttle away to right and
left, heads ducked low; grouse boom solemnly on the rigid limbs of
pines; deer vanish through distant thickets to appear on yet more
distant ridges, thence to gaze curiously, their great ears forward;
across the cañon the bushes sway violently with the passage of a
cinnamon bear among them,--you see them all from your post of
observation. Your senses are always alert for these things; you are
always bending from your saddle to examine the tracks and signs that
continually offer themselves for your inspection and interpretation.
Our trail of this summer led at a general high elevation, with
comparatively little climbing and comparatively easy traveling for days
at a time. Then suddenly we would find ourselves on the brink of a
great box cañon from three to seven thousand feet deep, several miles
wide, and utterly precipitous. In the bottom of this cañon would be
good feed, fine groves of trees, and a river of some size in which swam
fish. The trail to the cañon-bed was always bad, and generally
dangerous. In many instances we found it bordered with the bones of
horses that had failed. The river had somehow to be forded. We would
camp a day or so in the good feed and among the fine groves of trees,
fish in the river, and then address ourselves with much reluctance to
the ascent of the other bad and dangerous trail on the other side.
After that, in the natural course of events, subject to variation, we
could expect nice trails, the comfort of easy travel, pines, cedars,
redwoods, and joy of life until another great cleft opened before us or
another great mountain-pass barred our way.
This was the web and woof of our summer. But through it ran the
patterns of fantastic delight such as the West alone can offer a man's
utter disbelief in them. Some of these patterns stand out in memory
with peculiar distinctness.
Below Farewell Gap is a wide cañon with high walls of dark rock, and
down those walls run many streams of water. They are white as snow
with the dash of their descent, but so distant that the eye cannot
distinguish their motion. In the half light of dawn, with the yellow
of sunrise behind the mountains, they look like gauze streamers thrown
out from the windows of morning to celebrate the solemn pageant of the
passing of many hills.
Again, I know of a cañon whose westerly wall is colored in the dull
rich colors, the fantastic patterns of a Moorish tapestry. Umber, seal
brown, red, terra-cotta, orange, Nile green, emerald, purple, cobalt
blue, gray, lilac, and many other colors, all rich with the depth of
satin, glow wonderful as the craftiest textures. Only here the fabric
is five miles long and half a mile wide.
There is no use in telling of these things. They, and many others of
their like, are marvels, and exist; but you cannot tell about them, for
the simple reason that the average reader concludes at once you must be
exaggerating, must be carried away by the swing of words. The cold
sober truth is, you cannot exaggerate. They haven't made the words.
Talk as extravagantly as you wish to one who will in the most childlike
manner believe every syllable you utter. Then take him into the Big
Country. He will probably say, "Why, you didn't tell me it was going
to be anything like THIS!" We in the East have no standards of
comparison either as regards size or as regards color--especially
color. Some people once directed me to "The Gorge" on the New England
coast. I couldn't find it. They led me to it, and rhapsodized over
its magnificent terror. I could have ridden a horse into the
ridiculous thing. As for color, no Easterner believes in it when such
men as Lungren or Parrish transposit it faithfully, any more than a
Westerner would believe in the autumn foliage of our own hardwoods, or
an Englishman in the glories of our gaudiest sunsets. They are all
true.
In the mountains, the high mountains above the seven or eight thousand
foot level, grows an affair called the snow-plant. It is, when full
grown, about two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely constructed
pine-cone set up on end. Its entire substance is like wax, and the
whole concern--stalk, broad curling leaves, and all--is a brilliant
scarlet. Sometime you will ride through the twilight of deep pine woods
growing on the slope of the mountain, a twilight intensified, rendered
more sacred to your mood by the external brilliancy of a glimpse of
vivid blue sky above dazzling snow mountains far away. Then, in this
monotone of dark green frond and dull brown trunk and deep olive
shadow, where, like the ordered library of one with quiet tastes,
nothing breaks the harmony of unobtrusive tone, suddenly flames the
vivid red of a snow-plant. You will never forget it.
Flowers in general seem to possess this concentrated brilliancy both of
color and of perfume. You will ride into and out of strata of perfume
as sharply defined as are the quartz strata on the ridges. They lie
sluggish and cloying in the hollows, too heavy to rise on the wings of
the air.
As for color, you will see all sorts of queer things. The ordered
flower-science of your childhood has gone mad. You recognize some of
your old friends, but strangely distorted and changed,--even the dear
old "butter 'n eggs" has turned pink! Patches of purple, of red, of
blue, of yellow, of orange are laid in the hollows or on the slopes
like brilliant blankets out to dry in the sun. The fine grasses are
spangled with them, so that in the cup of the great fierce countries
the meadows seem like beautiful green ornaments enameled with jewels.
The Mariposa Lily, on the other hand, is a poppy-shaped flower varying
from white to purple, and with each petal decorated by an "eye" exactly
like those on the great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their
effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come to rest. They
hover over the meadows poised. A movement would startle them to
flight; only the proper movement somehow never comes.
The great redwoods, too, add to the colored-edition impression of the
whole country. A redwood, as perhaps you know, is a tremendous big
tree sometimes as big as twenty feet in diameter. It is exquisitely
proportioned like a fluted column of noble height. Its bark is
slightly furrowed longitudinally, and of a peculiar elastic appearance
that lends it an almost perfect illusion of breathing animal life. The
color is a rich umber red. Sometimes in the early morning or the late
afternoon, when all the rest of the forest is cast in shadow, these
massive trunks will glow as though incandescent. The Trail, wonderful
always, here seems to pass through the outer portals of the great
flaming regions where dwell the risings and fallings of days.
As you follow the Trail up, you will enter also the permanent
dwelling-places of the seasons. With us each visits for the space of a
few months, then steals away to give place to the next. Whither they
go you have not known until you have traveled the high mountains.
Summer lives in the valley; that you know. Then a little higher you
are in the spring-time, even in August. Melting patches of snow linger
under the heavy firs; the earth is soggy with half-absorbed snow-water,
trickling with exotic little rills that do not belong; grasses of the
year before float like drowned hair in pellucid pools with an air of
permanence, except for the one fact; fresh green things are sprouting
bravely; through bare branches trickles a shower of bursting buds,
larger at the top, as though the Sower had in passing scattered them
from above. Birds of extraordinary cheerfulness sing merrily to new
and doubtful flowers. The air tastes cold, but the sun is warm. The
great spring humming and promise is in the air. And a few thousand
feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts while a winter wind
searches your bones. I used to think that Santa Claus dwelt at the
North Pole. Now I am convinced that he has a workshop somewhere among
the great mountains where dwell the Seasons, and that his reindeer paw
for grazing in the alpine meadows below the highest peaks.
Here the birds migrate up and down instead of south and north. It must
be a great saving of trouble to them, and undoubtedly those who have
discovered it maintain toward the unenlightened the same delighted and
fraternal secrecy with which you and I guard the knowledge of a good
trout-stream. When you can migrate adequately in a single day, why
spend a month at it?
Also do I remember certain spruce woods with openings where the sun
shone through. The shadows were very black, the sunlight very white.
As I looked back I could see the pack-horses alternately suffer eclipse
and illumination in a strange flickering manner good to behold. The
dust of the trail eddied and billowed lazily in the sun, each mote
flashing as though with life; then abruptly as it crossed the sharp
line of shade it disappeared.
From these spruce woods, level as a floor, we came out on the rounded
shoulder of a mountain to find ourselves nearly nine thousand feet
above the sea. Below us was a deep cañon to the middle of the earth.
And spread in a semicircle about the curve of our mountain a most
magnificent panoramic view. First there were the plains, represented by
a brown haze of heat; then, very remote, the foot-hills, the
brush-hills, the pine mountains, the upper timber, the tremendous
granite peaks, and finally the barrier of the main crest with its
glittering snow. From the plains to that crest was over seventy miles.
I should not dare say how far we could see down the length of the
range; nor even how distant was the other wall of the cañon over which
we rode. Certainly it was many miles; and to reach the latter point
consumed three days.
It is useless to multiply instances. The principle is well enough
established by these. Whatever impression of your trail you carry away
will come from the little common occurrences of every day. That is
true of all trails; and equally so, it seems to me, of our Trail of
Life sketched at the beginning of this essay.
But the trail of the mountains means more than wonder; it means hard
work. Unless you stick to the beaten path, where the freighters have
lost so many mules that they have finally decided to fix things up a
bit, you are due for lots of trouble. Bad places will come to be a
nightmare with you and a topic of conversation with whomever you may
meet. We once enjoyed the company of a prospector three days while he
made up his mind to tackle a certain bit of trail we had just
descended. Our accounts did not encourage him. Every morning he used
to squint up at the cliff which rose some four thousand feet above us.
"Boys," he said finally as he started, "I may drop in on you later in
the morning." I am happy to say he did not.
The most discouraging to the tenderfoot, but in reality the safest of
all bad trails, is the one that skirts a precipice. Your horse
possesses a laudable desire to spare your inside leg unnecessary
abrasion, so he walks on the extreme outer edge. If you watch the
performance of the animal ahead, you will observe that every few
moments his outer hind hoof slips off that edge, knocking little stones
down into the abyss. Then you conclude that sundry slight jars you have
been experiencing are from the same cause. Your peace of mind deserts
you. You stare straight ahead, sit VERY light indeed, and perhaps turn
the least bit sick. The horse, however, does not mind, nor will you,
after a little. There is absolutely nothing to do but to sit steady
and give your animal his head. In a fairly extended experience I never
got off the edge but once. Then somebody shot a gun immediately ahead;
my horse tried to turn around, slipped, and slid backwards until he
overhung the chasm. Fortunately his hind feet caught a tiny bush. He
gave a mighty heave, and regained the trail. Afterwards I took a look
and found that there were no more bushes for a hundred feet either way.
Next in terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by lacets up a very
steep side hill. The effect is cumulative. Each turn brings you one
stage higher, adds definitely one more unit to the test of your
hardihood. This last has not terrified you; how about the next? or the
next? or the one after that? There is not the slightest danger. You
appreciate this point after you have met head-on some old-timer. After
you have speculated frantically how you are to pass him, he solves the
problem by calmly turning his horse off the edge and sliding to the
next lacet below. Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not
much matter whether you get off such a trail or not.
The real bad places are quite as likely to be on the level as on the
slant. The tremendous granite slides, where the cliff has avalanched
thousands of tons of loose jagged rock-fragments across the passage,
are the worst. There your horse has to be a goat in balance. He must
pick his way from the top of one fragment to the other, and if he slips
into the interstices he probably breaks a leg. In some parts of the
granite country are also smooth rock aprons where footing is especially
difficult, and where often a slip on them means a toboggan chute off
into space. I know of one spot where such an apron curves off the
shoulder of the mountain. Your horse slides directly down it until his
hoofs encounter a little crevice. Checking at this, he turns sharp to
the left and so off to the good trail again. If he does not check at
the little crevice, he slides on over the curve of the shoulder and
lands too far down to bury.
Loose rocks in numbers on a very steep and narrow trail are always an
abomination, and a numerous abomination at that. A horse slides,
skates, slithers. It has always seemed to me that luck must count
largely in such a place. When the animal treads on a loose round
stone--as he does every step of the way--that stone is going to roll
under him, and he is going to catch himself as the nature of that stone
and the little gods of chance may will. Only furthermore I have
noticed that the really good horse keeps his feet, and the poor one
tumbles. A judgmatical rider can help a great deal by the delicacy of
his riding and the skill with which he uses his reins. Or better
still, get off and walk.
Another mean combination, especially on a slant, is six inches of snow
over loose stones or small boulders. There you hope for divine favor
and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to
fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a
glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold, where a horse
clambers up the least bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a
projection, and is hurled into outer space. You must recognize these,
for he will be busy with his feet.
Some of the mountain rivers furnish pleasing afternoons of sport. They
are deep and swift, and below the ford are rapids. If there is a
fallen tree of any sort across them,--remember the length of California
trees, and do not despise the rivers,--you would better unpack, carry
your goods across yourself, and swim the pack-horses. If the current
is very bad, you can splice riatas, hitch one end to the horse and the
other to a tree on the farther side, and start the combination. The
animal is bound to swing across somehow. Generally you can drive them
over loose. In swimming a horse from the saddle, start him well
upstream to allow for the current, and never, never, never attempt to
guide him by the bit. The Tenderfoot tried that at Mono Creek and
nearly drowned himself and Old Slob. You would better let him alone,
as he probably knows more than you do. If you must guide him, do it by
hitting the side of his head with the flat of your hand.
Sometimes it is better that you swim. You can perform that feat by
clinging to his mane on the downstream side, but it will be easier both
for you and him if you hang to his tail. Take my word for it, he will
not kick you.