from the base of supplies for a ten days' trip with only a saddle-horse
apiece. This was near first principles, as our total provisions
consisted of two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and sugar. Among other
things we climbed Mt. Harney. The trail, after we left the horses, was
as plain as a strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another that
tenderfoot managed to get off it. I hunted him up. We gained the top,
watched the sunset, and started down. The tenderfoot, I thought, was
fairly at my coat-tails, but when I turned to speak to him he had gone;
he must have turned off at one of the numerous little openings in the
brush. I sat down to wait. By and by, away down the west slope of the
mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint, despairing yell.
I, also, shot and yelled. After various signals of the sort, it became
evident that the tenderfoot was approaching. In a moment he tore by at
full speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his six-shooter popping at every
jump. He passed within six feet of me, and never saw me. Subsequently
I left him on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions.
"There's the mountain range. You simply keep that to your left and
ride eight hours. Then you'll see Rapid City. You simply CAN'T get
lost. Those hills stick out like a sore thumb."
Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having wandered off
somewhere to the east. How he had done it I can never guess. That is
his secret.
The tenderfoot is always in hard luck. Apparently, too, by all tests
of analysis it is nothing but luck, pure chance, misfortune. And yet
the very persistence of it in his case, where another escapes, perhaps
indicates that much of what we call good luck is in reality unconscious
skill in the arrangement of those elements which go to make up events.
A persistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes to be pitied, but more
often to be booted. That philosophy will be cryingly unjust about once
in ten.
But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human. Ordinarily that doesn't
occur to you. He is a malevolent engine of destruction--quite as
impersonal as heat or cold or lack of water. He is an unfortunate
article of personal belonging requiring much looking after to keep in
order. He is a credulous and convenient response to practical jokes,
huge tales, misinformation. He is a laudable object of attrition for
the development of your character. But somehow, in the woods, he is
not as other men, and so you do not come to feel yourself in close
human relations to him.
But Algernon is real, nevertheless. He has feelings, even if you do
not respect them. He has his little enjoyments, even though he does
rarely contemplate anything but the horn of his saddle.
"Algernon," you cry, "for heaven's sake stick that saddle of yours in a
glass case and glut yourself with the sight of its ravishing beauties
next WINTER. For the present do gaze on the mountains. That's what you
came for."
No use.
He has, doubtless, a full range of all the appreciative emotions,
though from his actions you'd never suspect it. Most human of all, he
possesses his little vanities.
Algernon always overdoes the equipment question. If it is
bird-shooting, he accumulates leggings and canvas caps and belts and
dog-whistles and things until he looks like a picture from a
department-store catalogue. In the cow country he wears Stetson hats,
snake bands, red handkerchiefs, six-shooters, chaps, and huge spurs
that do not match his face. If it is yachting, he has a chronometer
with a gong in the cabin of a five-ton sailboat, possesses a
nickle-plated machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a
brass-bound yachting-cap and all the regalia. This is merely amusing.
But I never could understand his insane desire to get sunburned. A man
will get sunburned fast enough; he could not help it if he would.
Algernon usually starts out from town without a hat. Then he dares not
take off his sweater for a week lest it carry away his entire face. I
have seen men with deep sores on their shoulders caused by nothing but
excessive burning in the sun. This, too, is merely amusing. It means
quite simply that Algernon realizes his inner deficiencies and wants to
make up for them by the outward seeming. Be kind to him, for he has
been raised a pet.
The tenderfoot is lovable--mysterious in how he does it--and awfully
unexpected.
XII
THE CAÑON
One day we tied our horses to three bushes, and walked on foot two
hundred yards. Then we looked down.
It was nearly four thousand feet down. Do you realize how far that is?
There was a river meandering through olive-colored forests. It was so
distant that it was light green and as narrow as a piece of tape. Here
and there were rapids, but so remote that we could not distinguish the
motion of them, only the color. The white resembled tiny dabs of
cotton wool stuck on the tape. It turned and twisted, following the
turns and twists of the cañon. Somehow the level at the bottom
resembled less forests and meadows than a heavy and sluggish fluid like
molasses flowing between the cañon walls. It emerged from the bend of
a sheer cliff ten miles to eastward: it disappeared placidly around the
bend of another sheer cliff an equal distance to the westward.
The time was afternoon. As we watched, the shadow of the cañon wall
darkened the valley. Whereupon we looked up.
Now the upper air, of which we were dwellers for the moment, was
peopled by giants and clear atmosphere and glittering sunlight,
flashing like silver and steel and precious stones from the granite
domes, peaks, minarets, and palisades of the High Sierras. Solid as
they were in reality, in the crispness of this mountain air, under the
tangible blue of this mountain sky, they seemed to poise light as so
many balloons. Some of them rose sheer, with hardly a fissure; some
had flung across their shoulders long trailing pine draperies, fine as
fur; others matched mantles of the whitest white against the bluest
blue of the sky. Towards the lower country were more pines rising in
ridges, like the fur of an animal that has been alarmed.
We dangled our feet over the edge and talked about it. Wes pointed to
the upper end where the sluggish lava-like flow of the cañon-bed first
came into view.
"That's where we'll camp," said he.
"When?" we asked.
"When we get there," he answered.
For this cañon lies in the heart of the mountains. Those who would
visit it have first to get into the country--a matter of over a week.
Then they have their choice of three probabilities of destruction.
The first route comprehends two final days of travel at an altitude of
about ten thousand feet, where the snow lies in midsummer; where there
is no feed, no comfort, and the way is strewn with the bones of horses.
This is known as the "Basin Trail." After taking it, you prefer the
others--until you try them.
The finish of the second route is directly over the summit of a
mountain. You climb two thousand feet and then drop down five. The
ascent is heart-breaking but safe. The descent is hair-raising and
unsafe: no profanity can do justice to it. Out of a pack-train of
thirty mules, nine were lost in the course of that five thousand feet.
Legend has it that once many years ago certain prospectors took in a
Chinese cook. At first the Mongolian bewailed his fate loudly and
fluently, but later settled to a single terrified moan that sounded
like "tu-ne-mah! tu-ne-mah!" The trail was therefore named the
"Tu-ne-mah Trail." It is said that "tu-ne-mah" is the very worst
single vituperation of which the Chinese language is capable.
The third route is called "Hell's Half Mile." It is not misnamed.
Thus like paradise the cañon is guarded; but like paradise it is
wondrous in delight. For when you descend you find that the tape-wide
trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound
darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the
dark green sluggish flow in the cañon-bed has disintegrated into a
noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank
thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the birds are
cheerful, and groves of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like
snow, the flakes of cotton float down through the air. Moreover there
are meadows, spacious lawns, opening out, closing in, winding here and
there through the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually
waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a brocade. Quaint
tributary little brooks babble and murmur down through these trees,
down through these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy of
innumerable bees. To right hand and to left, in front of you and
behind, rising sheer, forbidding, impregnable, the cliffs, mountains,
and ranges hem you in. Down the river ten miles you can go: then the
gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only look down the
tumbling fierce waters and turn back. Up the river five miles you can
go, then interpose the sheer snow-clad cliffs of the Palisades, and
them, rising a matter of fourteen thousand feet, you may not cross.
You are shut in your paradise as completely as though surrounded by
iron bars.
But, too, the world is shut out. The paradise is yours. In it are
trout and deer and grouse and bear and lazy happy days. Your horses
feed to the fatness of butter. You wander at will in the ample though
definite limits of your domain. You lie on your back and examine
dispassionately, with an interest entirely detached, the huge
cliff-walls of the valley. Days slip by. Really, it needs at least an
angel with a flaming sword to force you to move on.
We turned away from our view and addressed ourselves to the task of
finding out just when we were going to get there. The first day we
bobbed up and over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet
elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the wide bowl-like
amphitheatre of a basin. The second day we climbed over things and
finally ended in a small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an
elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet. There we rested-over a
day, camped under a single pine-tree, with the quick-growing mountain
grasses thick about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides, and
the plunge into the cañon on the other. As we needed meat, we spent
part of the day in finding a deer. The rest of the time we watched
idly for bear.
Bears are great travelers. They will often go twenty miles overnight,
apparently for the sheer delight of being on the move. Also are they
exceedingly loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting to places,
and they hate to go down steep hills. You see, their fore legs are
short. Therefore they are skilled in the choice of easy routes through
the mountains, and once having made the choice they stick to it until
through certain narrow places on the route selected they have worn a
trail as smooth as a garden-path. The old prospectors used quite
occasionally to pick out the horse-passes by trusting in general to the
bear migrations, and many a well-traveled route of to-day is
superimposed over the way-through picked out by old bruin long ago.
Of such was our own trail. Therefore we kept our rifles at hand and
our eyes open for a straggler. But none came, though we baited craftily
with portions of our deer. All we gained was a rattlesnake, and he
seemed a bit out of place so high up in the air.
Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still twenty-two hundred feet
above our elevation. We gazed on it sadly, for directly by its summit,
and for five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of reputation was
that trail beyond all others. The horses, as we bunched them in
preparation for the packing, took on a new interest, for it was on the
cards that the unpacking at evening would find some missing from the
ranks.
"Lily's a goner, sure," said Wes. "I don't know how she's got this far
except by drunken man's luck. She'll never make the Tunemah."
"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Tenderfoot, naming his own fool
horse; "I see where I start in to walk."
"Sort of a 'morituri te salutamur,'" said I.
We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet, leading our saddle-horses
to save their strength. Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily
of the rarified air. Then at the top of the world we paused on the
brink of nothing to tighten cinches, while the cold wind swept by us,
the snow glittered in a sunlight become silvery like that of early
April, and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a distance
inconceivably remote, as though the horizon had been set back for their
accommodation.
To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you will see drifted into a
sharp crest across a corner of your yard; only this windrow was twenty
feet high and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight of its
age. We climbed it and looked over directly into the eye of a round
Alpine lake seven or eight hundred feet below. It was of an intense
cobalt blue, a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of water,
deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant of Tyre. White ice floated
in it. The savage fierce granite needles and knife-edges of the
mountain crest hemmed it about.
But this was temporizing, and we knew it. The first drop of the trail
was so steep that we could flip a pebble to the first level of it, and
so rough in its water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it seemed
that at the first step a horse must necessarily fall end over end. We
made it successfully, however, and breathed deep. Even Lily, by a
miracle of lucky scrambling, did not even stumble.
"Now she's easy for a little ways," said Wes, "then we'll get busy."
When we "got busy" we took our guns in our hands to preserve them from
a fall, and started in. Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more
places. We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a new trail
around it. Six times a minute we held our breaths and stood on tiptoe
with anxiety, powerless to help, while the horse did his best. At the
especially bad places we checked them off one after another,
congratulating ourselves on so much saved as each came across without
accident. When there were no bad places, the trail was so
extraordinarily steep that we ahead were in constant dread of a horse's
falling on us from behind, and our legs did become wearied to incipient
paralysis by the constant stiff checking of the descent. Moreover
every second or so one of the big loose stones with which the trail was
cumbered would be dislodged and come bouncing down among us. We dodged
and swore; the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of our
legs. The day was full of an intense nervous strain, an entire
absorption in the precise present. We promptly forgot a difficulty as
soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead.
All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant,
like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much about the scenery.
The only outside impression we received was that the cañon floor was
slowly rising to meet us.
Then strangely enough, as it seemed, we stepped off to level ground.
Our watches said half-past three. We had made five miles in a little
under seven hours.
Remained only the crossing of the river. This was no mean task, but we
accomplished it lightly, searching out a ford. There were high
grasses, and on the other side of them a grove of very tall
cottonwoods, clean as a park. First of all we cooked things; then we
spread things; then we lay on our backs and smoked things, our hands
clasped back of our heads. We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer cliff
of old Mount Tunemah, very much as a man would cock his eye at a tiger
in a cage.
Already the meat-hawks, the fluffy Canada jays, had found us out, and
were prepared to swoop down boldly on whatever offered to their
predatory skill. We had nothing for them yet,--there were no remains of
the lunch,--but the fire-irons were out, and ribs of venison were
roasting slowly over the coals in preparation for the evening meal.
Directly opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were two
huge mountain peaks, part of the wall that shut us in, over against us
in a height we had not dared ascribe to the sky itself. By and by the
shadow of these mountains rose on the westerly wall. It crept up at
first slowly, extinguishing color; afterwards more rapidly as the sun
approached the horizon. The sunlight disappeared. A moment's gray
intervened, and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid on the peaks
its enchantment. Little by little that too faded, until at last, far
away, through a rift in the ranks of the giants, but one remained
gilded by the glory of a dream that continued with it after the others.
Heretofore it had seemed to us an insignificant peak, apparently
overtopped by many, but by this token we knew it to be the highest of
them all.
Then ensued another pause, as though to give the invisible
scene-shifter time to accomplish his work, followed by a shower of
evening coolness, that seemed to sift through the trees like a soft and
gentle rain. We ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a trifle
uncertainly at the food, wondering at the distant mountain on which the
Day had made its final stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy
dark that flowed down the cañon in the manner of a heavy smoke.
In the notch between the two huge mountains blazed a star,--accurately
in the notch, like the front sight of a rifle sighted into the
marvelous depths of space. Then the moon rose.
First we knew of it when it touched the crest of our two mountains.
The night has strange effects on the hills. A moment before they had
menaced black and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the moon
their very substance seemed to dissolve, leaving in the upper
atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous, fragile, ghostly simulacrums of
themselves you could imagine in the realms of fairy-land. They seemed
actually to float, to poise like cloud-shapes about to dissolve. And
against them were cast the inky silhouettes of three fir-trees in the
shadow near at hand.
Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out to us with the voices
of old accustomed friends in another wilderness. The winds rustled.
XIII
TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS
As I have said, a river flows through the cañon. It is a very good
river with some riffles that can be waded down to the edges of black
pools or white chutes of water; with appropriate big trees fallen
slantwise into it to form deep holes; and with hurrying smooth
stretches of some breadth. In all of these various places are rainbow
trout.
There is no use fishing until late afternoon. The clear sun of the
high altitudes searches out mercilessly the bottom of the stream,
throwing its miniature boulders, mountains, and valleys as plainly into
relief as the buttes of Arizona at noon. Then the trout quite refuse.
Here and there, if you walk far enough and climb hard enough over all
sorts of obstructions, you may discover a few spots shaded by big trees
or rocks where you can pick up a half dozen fish; but it is slow work.
When, however, the shadow of the two huge mountains feels its way
across the stream, then, as though a signal had been given, the trout
begin to rise. For an hour and a half there is noble sport indeed.
The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course some places were
better than others. Near the upper reaches the water boiled like
seltzer around the base of a tremendous tree. There the pool was at
least ten feet deep and shot with bubbles throughout the whole of its
depth, but it was full of fish. They rose eagerly to your gyrating
fly,--and took it away with them down to subaqueous chambers and
passages among the roots of that tree. After which you broke your
leader. Royal Coachman was the best lure, and therefore valuable
exceedingly were Royal Coachmen. Whenever we lost one we lifted up our
voices in lament, and went away from there, calling to mind that there
were other pools, many other pools, free of obstruction and with fish
in them. Yet such is the perversity of fishermen, we were back losing
more Royal Coachmen the very next day. In all I managed to disengage
just three rather small trout from that pool, and in return decorated
their ancestral halls with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of
many flies.
Now this was foolishness. All you had to do was to walk through a
grove of cottonwoods, over a brook, through another grove of pines,
down a sloping meadow to where one of the gigantic pine-trees had
obligingly spanned the current. You crossed that, traversed another
meadow, broke through a thicket, slid down a steep grassy bank, and
there you were. A great many years before a pine-tree had fallen
across the current. Now its whitened skeleton lay there, opposing a
barrier for about twenty-five feet out into the stream. Most of the
water turned aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end as
though trying to catch up with the rest of the stream which had gone on
without it, but some of it dived down under and came up on the other
side. There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy pool. Its
constant action had excavated a very deep hole, the debris of which had
formed a bar immediately below. You waded out on the bar and cast
along the length of the pine skeleton over the pool.
If you were methodical, you first shortened your line, and began near
the bank, gradually working out until you were casting forty-five feet
to the very edge of the fast current. I know of nothing pleasanter for
you to do. You see, the evening shadow was across the river, and a
beautiful grass slope at your back. Over the way was a grove of trees
whose birds were very busy because it was near their sunset, while
towering over them were mountains, quite peaceful by way of contrast
because THEIR sunset was still far distant. The river was in a great
hurry, and was talking to itself like a man who has been detained and
is now at last making up time to his important engagement. And from
the deep black shadow beneath the pine skeleton, occasionally flashed
white bodies that made concentric circles where they broke the surface
of the water, and which fought you to a finish in the glory of battle.
The casting was against the current, so your flies could rest but the
briefest possible moment on the surface of the stream. That moment was
enough. Day after day you could catch your required number from an
apparently inexhaustible supply.
I might inform you further of the gorge downstream, where you lie flat
on your stomach ten feet above the river, and with one hand cautiously
extended over the edge cast accurately into the angle of the cliff.
Then when you get your strike, you tow him downstream, clamber
precariously to the water's level--still playing your fish--and there
land him,--if he has accommodatingly stayed hooked. A three-pound fish
will make you a lot of tribulation at this game.
We lived on fish and venison, and had all we wanted. The bear-trails
were plenty enough, and the signs were comparatively fresh, but at the
time of our visit the animals themselves had gone over the mountains on
some sort of a picnic. Grouse, too, were numerous in the popple
thickets, and flushed much like our ruffed grouse of the East. They
afforded first-rate wing-shooting for Sure-Pop, the little shot-gun.
But these things occupied, after all, only a small part of every day.
We had loads of time left. Of course we explored the valley up and
down. That occupied two days. After that we became lazy. One always
does in a permanent camp. So did the horses. Active--or rather
restless interest in life seemed to die away. Neither we nor they had
to rustle hard for food. They became fastidious in their choice, and
at all times of day could be seen sauntering in Indian file from one
part of the meadow to the other for the sole purpose apparently of
cropping a half dozen indifferent mouthfuls. The rest of the time they
roosted under trees, one hind leg relaxed, their eyes half closed,
their ears wabbling, the pictures of imbecile content. We were very
much the same.
Of course we had our outbursts of virtue. While under their influence
we undertook vast works. But after their influence had died out, we
found ourselves with said vast works on our hands, and so came to
cursing ourselves and our fool spasms of industry.
For instance, Wes and I decided to make buckskin from the hide of the
latest deer. We did not need the buckskin--we already had two in the
pack. Our ordinary procedure would have been to dry the hide for
future treatment by a Mexican, at a dollar a hide, when we should have
returned home. But, as I said, we were afflicted by sporadic activity,
and wanted to do something.