table-knife. We bound it with rawhide, and encased it with wood, and
wrapped it with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is proper.
After this we hunted out a very smooth, barkless log, laid the hide
across it, straddled it, and began graining.
Graining is a delightful process. You grasp the tool by either end,
hold the square edge at a certain angle, and push away from you
mightily. A half-dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair;
twice as many more will scrape away half as much of the seal-brown
grain, exposing the white of the hide. Then, if you want to, you can
stop and establish in your mind a definite proportion between the
amount thus exposed, the area remaining unexposed, and the muscular
fatigue of these dozen and a half of mighty pushes. The proportion
will be wrong. You have left out of account the fact that you are
going to get almighty sick of the job; that your arms and upper back
are going to ache shrewdly before you are done; and that as you go on
it is going to be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges firmly
enough to offer the required resistance to your knife. Besides--if you
get careless--you'll scrape too hard: hence little holes in the
completed buckskin. Also--if you get careless--you will probably leave
the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of them means a hard
transparent spot in the product. Furthermore, once having started in on
the job, you are like the little boy who caught the trolley: you cannot
let go. It must be finished immediately, all at one heat, before the
hide stiffens.
Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evaporated, and you are
thinking of fifty pleasant things you might just as well be doing.
Next you revel in grease,--lard oil, if you have it; if not, then lard,
or the product of boiled brains. This you must rub into the skin. You
rub it in until you suspect that your finger-nails have worn away, and
you glisten to the elbows like an Eskimo cutting blubber.
By the merciful arrangement of those who invented buckskin, this
entitles you to a rest. You take it--for several days--until your
conscience seizes you by the scruff of the neck.
Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy, soggy, snaky, cold
bundle of greasy horror to the bank of the creek, and there for endless
hours you wash it. The grease is more reluctant to enter the stream
than you are in the early morning. Your hands turn purple. The others
go by on their way to the trout-pools, but you are chained to the stake.
By and by you straighten your back with creaks, and walk home like a
stiff old man, carrying your hide rid of all superfluous oil. Then if
you are just learning how, your instructor examines the result.
"That's all right," says he cheerfully. "Now when it dries, it will be
buckskin."
That encourages you. It need not. For during the process of drying it
must be your pastime constantly to pull and stretch at every square
inch of that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres.
Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone. Now there is nothing on
earth that seems to dry slower than buckskin. You wear your fingers
down to the first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for
future use, you carry the hide to your instructor.
"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.
You go back and do it some more, putting the entire strength of your
body, soul, and religious convictions into the stretching of that
buckskin. It looks as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as
the turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant declares it
will not do.
"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it isn't dry. Go to
it!"
But at this point your outraged soul arches its back and bucks. You
sneak off and roll up that piece of buckskin, and thrust it into the
alforja. You KNOW it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come
out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of the camp.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one chump enough to do that
for a dollar a hide?" you inquire.
"Sure," say they.
"Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his dates," you conclude.
About a week later one of your companions drags out of the alforja
something crumpled that resembles in general appearance and texture a
rusted five-gallon coal-oil can that has been in a wreck. It is only
imperceptibly less stiff and angular and cast-iron than rawhide.
"What is this?" the discoverer inquires.
Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place before recognition
brings inevitable--and sickening--chaff. For you know it at a glance.
It is your buckskin.
Along about the middle of that century an old prospector with four
burros descended the Basin Trail and went into camp just below us.
Towards evening he sauntered in.
I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you just as he came down
through the fire-lit trees. He was about six feet tall, very leanly
built, with a weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was superimposed
a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-brows. These had originally been
brown, but the sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable
contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight twinkled far down
beneath the shadows of the brows and a floppy old sombrero hat. The
usual flannel shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter
completed the outfit. He might have been forty, but was probably
nearer sixty years of age.
"Howdy, boys," said he, and dropped to the fireside, where he promptly
annexed a coal for his pipe.
We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell to him and Wes. It was
commonplace talk enough from one point of view: taken in essence it was
merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized man as to another's
itinerary--"Did you visit Florence? Berlin? St. Petersburg?"--and then
the comparing of impressions. Only here again that old familiar magic
of unfamiliar names threw its glamour over the terse sentences.
"Over beyond the Piute Monument," the old prospector explained, "down
through the Inyo Range, a leetle north of Death Valley--"
"Back in seventy-eight when I was up in Bay Horse Cañon over by Lost
River--"
"Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains?--North of th' Telescope
Range?--"
That was all there was to it, with long pauses for drawing at the
pipes. Yet somehow in the aggregate that catalogue of names gradually
established in the minds of us two who listened an impression of long
years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the face of the earth.
The old man had wintered here, summered a thousand miles away, made his
strike at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully tried
for a repetition of his luck at the other. I do not believe the
possibility of wealth, though always of course in the background, was
ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather
was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never
to-day, like the mediaeval Christian's idea of heaven. His interest
was in the search. For that one could see in him a real enthusiasm.
He had his smattering of theory, his very real empirical knowledge, and
his superstitions, like all prospectors. So long as he could keep in
grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life he loved, he was
happy.
Perhaps one of the chief elements of this remarkable interest in the
game rather than the prizes of it was his desire to vindicate his
guesses or his conclusions. He liked to predict to himself the outcome
of his solitary operations, and then to prove that prediction through
laborious days. His life was a gigantic game of solitaire. In fact,
he mentioned a dozen of his claims many years apart which he had
developed to a certain point,--"so I could see what they was,"--and
then abandoned in favor of fresher discoveries. He cherished the
illusion that these were properties to whose completion some day he
would return. But we knew better; he had carried them to the point
where the result was no longer in doubt and then, like one who has no
interest in playing on in an evidently prescribed order, had laid his
cards on the table to begin a new game.
This man was skilled in his profession; he had pursued it for thirty
odd years; he was frugal and industrious; undoubtedly of his long
series of discoveries a fair percentage were valuable and are
producing-properties to-day. Yet he confessed his bank balance to be
less than five hundred dollars. Why was this? Simply and solely
because he did not care. At heart it was entirely immaterial to him
whether he ever owned a dollar above his expenses. When he sold his
claims, he let them go easily, loath to bother himself with business
details, eager to get away from the fuss and nuisance. The few hundred
dollars he received he probably sunk in unproductive mining work, or
was fleeced out of in the towns. Then joyfully he turned back to his
beloved mountains and the life of his slow deep delight and his pecking
away before the open doors of fortune. By and by he would build
himself a little cabin down in the lower pine mountains, where he would
grow a white beard, putter with occult wilderness crafts, and smoke
long contemplative hours in the sun before his door. For tourists he
would braid rawhide reins and quirts, or make buckskin. The jays and
woodpeckers and Douglas squirrels would become fond of him. So he
would be gathered to his fathers, a gentle old man whose life had been
spent harmlessly in the open. He had had his ideal to which blindly he
reached; he had in his indirect way contributed the fruits of his labor
to mankind; his recompenses he had chosen according to his desires.
When you consider these things, you perforce have to revise your first
notion of him as a useless sort of old ruffian. As you come to know
him better, you must love him for the kindliness, the simple honesty,
the modesty, and charity that he seems to draw from his mountain
environment. There are hundreds of him buried in the great cañons of
the West.
Our prospector was a little uncertain as to his plans. Along toward
autumn he intended to land at some reputed placers near Dinkey Creek.
There might be something in that district. He thought he would take a
look. In the mean time he was just poking up through the country--he
and his jackasses. Good way to spend the summer. Perhaps he might run
across something 'most anywhere; up near the top of that mountain
opposite looked mineralized. Didn't know but what he'd take a look at
her to-morrow.
He camped near us during three days. I never saw a more modest,
self-effacing man. He seemed genuinely, childishly, almost helplessly
interested in our fly-fishing, shooting, our bear-skins, and our
travels. You would have thought from his demeanor--which was sincere
and not in the least ironical--that he had never seen or heard anything
quite like that before, and was struck with wonder at it. Yet he had
cast flies before we were born, and shot even earlier than he had cast
a fly, and was a very Ishmael for travel. Rarely could you get an
account of his own experiences, and then only in illustration of
something else.
"If you-all likes bear-hunting," said he, "you ought to get up in
eastern Oregon. I summered there once. The only trouble is, the brush
is thick as hair. You 'most always have to bait them, or wait for them
to come and drink. The brush is so small you ain't got much chance. I
run onto a she-bear and cubs that way once. Didn't have nothin' but my
six-shooter, and I met her within six foot."
He stopped with an air of finality.
"Well, what did you do?" we asked.
"Me?" he inquired, surprised. "Oh, I just leaked out of th' landscape."
He prospected the mountain opposite, loafed with us a little, and then
decided that he must be going. About eight o'clock in the morning he
passed us, hazing his burros, his tall, lean figure elastic in defiance
of years.
"So long, boys," he called; "good luck!"
"So long," we responded heartily. "Be good to yourself."
He plunged into the river without hesitation, emerged dripping on the
other side, and disappeared in the brush. From time to time during the
rest of the morning we heard the intermittent tinkling of his
bell-animal rising higher and higher above us on the trail.
In the person of this man we gained our first connection, so to speak,
with the Golden Trout. He had caught some of them, and could tell us
of their habits.
Few fishermen west of the Rockies have not heard of the Golden Trout,
though, equally, few have much definite information concerning it.
Such information usually runs about as follows:
It is a medium size fish of the true trout family, resembling a rainbow
except that it is of a rich golden color. The peculiarity that makes
its capture a dream to be dreamed of is that it swims in but one little
stream of all the round globe. If you would catch a Golden Trout, you
must climb up under the very base of the end of the High Sierras.
There is born a stream that flows down from an elevation of about ten
thousand feet to about eight thousand before it takes a long plunge
into a branch of the Kern River. Over the twenty miles of its course
you can cast your fly for Golden Trout; but what is the nature of that
stream, that fish, or the method of its capture, few can tell you with
any pretense of accuracy.
To be sure, there are legends. One, particularly striking, claims that
the Golden Trout occurs in one other stream--situated in Central
Asia!--and that the fish is therefore a remnant of some pre-glacial
period, like Sequoia trees, a sort of grand-daddy of all trout, as it
were. This is but a sample of what you will hear discussed.
Of course from the very start we had had our eye on the Golden Trout,
and intended sooner or later to work our way to his habitat. Our
prospector had just come from there.
"It's about four weeks south, the way you and me travels," said he.
"You don't want to try Harrison's Pass; it's chock full of tribulation.
Go around by way of the Giant Forest. She's pretty good there, too,
some sizable timber. Then over by Redwood Meadows, and Timber Gap, by
Mineral King, and over through Farewell Gap. You turn east there, on a
new trail. She's steeper than straight-up-an'-down, but shorter than
the other. When you get down in the cañon of Kern River,--say, she's a
fine cañon, too,--you want to go downstream about two mile to where
there's a sort of natural overflowed lake full of stubs stickin' up.
You'll get some awful big rainbows in there. Then your best way is to
go right up Whitney Creek Trail to a big high meadows mighty nigh to
timber-line. That's where I camped. They's lots of them little yaller
fish there. Oh, they bite well enough. You'll catch 'em. They's a
little shy."
So in that guise--as the desire for new and distant things--did our
angel with the flaming sword finally come to us.
We caught reluctant horses reluctantly. All the first day was to be a
climb. We knew it; and I suspect that they knew it too. Then we
packed and addressed ourselves to the task offered us by the Basin
Trail.
XIV
ON CAMP COOKERY
One morning I awoke a little before the others, and lay on my back
staring up through the trees. It was not my day to cook. We were
camped at the time only about sixty-five hundred feet high, and the
weather was warm. Every sort of green thing grew very lush all about
us, but our own little space was held dry and clear for us by the
needles of two enormous red cedars some four feet in diameter. A
variety of thoughts sifted through my mind as it followed lazily the
shimmering filaments of loose spider-web streaming through space. The
last thought stuck. It was that that day was a holiday. Therefore I
unlimbered my six-shooter, and turned her loose, each shot being
accompanied by a meritorious yell.
The outfit boiled out of its blankets. I explained the situation, and
after they had had some breakfast they agreed with me that a
celebration was in order. Unanimously we decided to make it gastronomic.
"We will ride till we get to good feed," we concluded, "and then we'll
cook all the afternoon. And nobody must eat anything until the whole
business is prepared and served."
It was agreed. We rode until we were very hungry, which was eleven
o'clock. Then we rode some more. By and by we came to a log cabin in
a wide fair lawn below a high mountain with a ducal coronet on its top,
and around that cabin was a fence, and inside the fence a man chopping
wood. Him we hailed. He came to the fence and grinned at us from the
elevation of high-heeled boots. By this token we knew him for a
cow-puncher.
"How are you?" said we.
"Howdy, boys," he roared. Roared is the accurate expression. He was
not a large man, and his hair was sandy, and his eye mild blue. But
undoubtedly his kinsmen were dumb and he had as birthright the voice
for the entire family. It had been subsequently developed in the
shouting after the wild cattle of the hills. Now his ordinary
conversational tone was that of the announcer at a circus. But his
heart was good.
"Can we camp here?" we inquired.
"Sure thing," he bellowed. "Turn your horses into the meadow. Camp
right here."
But with the vision of a rounded wooded knoll a few hundred yards
distant we said we'd just get out of his way a little. We crossed a
creek, mounted an easy slope to the top of the knoll, and were
delighted to observe just below its summit the peculiar fresh green
hump which indicates a spring. The Tenderfoot, however, knew nothing
of springs, for shortly he trudged a weary way back to the creek, and
so returned bearing kettles of water. This performance hugely
astonished the cowboy, who subsequently wanted to know if a "critter
had died in the spring."
Wes departed to borrow a big Dutch oven of the man and to invite him to
come across when we raised the long yell. Then we began operations.
Now camp cooks are of two sorts. Anybody can with a little practice
fry bacon, steak, or flapjacks, and boil coffee. The reduction of the
raw material to its most obvious cooked result is within the reach of
all but the most hopeless tenderfoot who never knows the salt-sack from
the sugar-sack. But your true artist at the business is he who can
from six ingredients, by permutation, combination, and the genius that
is in him turn out a full score of dishes. For simple example: GIVEN,
rice, oatmeal, and raisins. Your expert accomplishes the following:
ITEM--Boiled rice.
ITEM--Boiled oatmeal.
ITEM--Rice boiled until soft, then stiffened by the addition of quarter
as much oatmeal.
ITEM--Oatmeal in which is boiled almost to the dissolving point a third
as much rice.
These latter two dishes taste entirely unlike each other or their
separate ingredients. They are moreover great in nutrition.
ITEM--Boiled rice and raisins.
ITEM--Dish number three with raisins.
ITEM--Rice boiled with raisins, sugar sprinkled on top, and then baked.
ITEM--Ditto with dish number three.
All these are good--and different.
Some people like to cook and have a natural knack for it. Others hate
it. If you are one of the former, select a propitious moment to
suggest that you will cook, if the rest will wash the dishes and supply
the wood and water. Thus you will get first crack at the fire in the
chill of morning; and at night you can squat on your heels doing light
labor while the others rustle.
In a mountain trip small stout bags for the provisions are necessary.
They should be big enough to contain, say, five pounds of corn-meal,
and should tie firmly at the top. It will be absolutely labor lost for
you to mark them on the outside, as the outside soon will become
uniform in color with your marking. Tags might do, if occasionally
renewed. But if you have the instinct, you will soon come to recognize
the appearance of the different bags as you recognize the features of
your family. They should contain small quantities for immediate use of
the provisions the main stock of which is carried on another
pack-animal. One tin plate apiece and "one to grow on"; the same of tin
cups; half a dozen spoons; four knives and forks; a big spoon; two
frying-pans; a broiler; a coffee-pot; a Dutch oven; and three light
sheet-iron pails to nest in one another was what we carried on this
trip. You see, we had horses. Of course in the woods that outfit
would be materially reduced.
For the same reason, since we had our carrying done for us, we took
along two flat iron bars about twenty-four inches in length. These,
laid across two stones between which the fire had been built, we used
to support our cooking-utensils stove-wise. I should never carry a
stove. This arrangement is quite as effective, and possesses the added
advantage that wood does not have to be cut for it of any definite
length. Again, in the woods these iron bars would be a senseless
burden. But early you will learn that while it is foolish to carry a
single ounce more than will pay in comfort or convenience for its own
transportation, it is equally foolish to refuse the comforts or
conveniences that modified circumstance will permit you. To carry only
a forest equipment with pack-animals would be as silly as to carry only
a pack-animal outfit on a Pullman car. Only look out that you do not
reverse it.
Even if you do not intend to wash dishes, bring along some "Gold Dust."
It is much simpler in getting at odd corners of obstinate kettles than
any soap. All you have to do is to boil some of it in that kettle, and
the utensil is tamed at once.
That's about all you, as expert cook, are going to need in the way of
equipment. Now as to your fire.
There are a number of ways of building a cooking fire, but they share
one first requisite: it should be small. A blaze will burn everything,
including your hands and your temper. Two logs laid side by side and
slanted towards each other so that small things can go on the narrow
end and big things on the wide end; flat rocks arranged in the same
manner; a narrow trench in which the fire is built; and the flat irons
just described--these are the best-known methods. Use dry wood.
Arrange to do your boiling first--in the flame; and your frying and
broiling last--after the flames have died to coals.
So much in general. You must remember that open-air cooking is in many
things quite different from indoor cooking. You have different
utensils, are exposed to varying temperatures, are limited in
resources, and pursued by a necessity of haste. Preconceived notions
must go by the board. You are after results; and if you get them, do
not mind the feminines of your household lifting the hands of horror
over the unorthodox means. Mighty few women I have ever seen were good
camp-fire cooks; not because camp-fire cookery is especially difficult,
but because they are temperamentally incapable of ridding themselves of
the notion that certain things should be done in a certain way, and
because if an ingredient lacks, they cannot bring themselves to
substitute an approximation. They would rather abandon the dish than
do violence to the sacred art.
Most camp-cookery advice is quite useless for the same reason. I have
seen many a recipe begin with the words: "Take the yolks of four eggs,
half a cup of butter, and a cup of fresh milk--" As if any one really
camping in the wilderness ever had eggs, butter, and milk!
Now here is something I cooked for this particular celebration. Every
woman to whom I have ever described it has informed me vehemently that
it is not cake, and must be "horrid." Perhaps it is not cake, but it
looks yellow and light, and tastes like cake.
First I took two cups of flour, and a half cup of corn-meal to make it
look yellow. In this I mixed a lot of baking-powder,--about twice what
one should use for bread,--and topped off with a cup of sugar. The
whole I mixed with water into a light dough. Into the dough went
raisins that had previously been boiled to swell them up. Thus was the
cake mixed. Now I poured half the dough into the Dutch oven, sprinkled
it with a good layer of sugar, cinnamon, and unboiled raisins; poured
in the rest of the dough; repeated the layer of sugar, cinnamon, and
raisins; and baked in the Dutch oven. It was gorgeous, and we ate it
at one fell swoop.
While we are about it, we may as well work backwards on this particular
orgy by describing the rest of our dessert. In addition to the cake
and some stewed apricots, I, as cook of the day, constructed also a
pudding.