raisins, a tablespoonful of baking-powder, two of sugar, and about a
pound of fat salt pork cut into little cubes. This I mixed up into a
mess by means of a cup or so of water and a quantity of
larrupy-dope.[1] Then I dipped a flour-sack in hot water, wrung it
out, sprinkled it with dry flour, and half filled it with my pudding
mixture. The whole outfit I boiled for two hours in a kettle. It,
too, was good to the palate, and was even better sliced and fried the
following morning.
This brings us to the suspension of kettles. There are two ways. If
you are in a hurry, cut a springy pole, sharpen one end, and stick it
perpendicular in the ground. Bend it down towards your fire. Hang
your kettle on the end of it. If you have jabbed it far enough into
the ground in the first place, it will balance nicely by its own spring
and the elasticity of the turf. The other method is to plant two
forked sticks on either side your fire over which a strong cross-piece
is laid. The kettles are hung on hooks cut from forked branches. The
forked branches are attached to the cross-piece by means of thongs or
withes.
On this occasion we had deer, grouse, and ducks in the larder. The
best way to treat them is as follows. You may be sure we adopted the
best way.
When your deer is fresh, you will enjoy greatly a dish of liver and
bacon. Only the liver you will discover to be a great deal tenderer
and more delicate than any calf's liver you ever ate. There is this
difference: a deer's liver should be parboiled in order to get rid of a
green bitter scum that will rise to the surface and which you must skim
off.
Next in order is the "back strap" and tenderloin, which is always
tender, even when fresh. The hams should be kept at least five days.
Deer-steak, to my notion, is best broiled, though occasionally it is
pleasant by way of variety to fry it. In that case a brown gravy is
made by thoroughly heating flour in the grease, and then stirring in
water. Deer-steak threaded on switches and "barbecued" over the coals
is delicious. The outside will be a little blackened, but all the
juices will be retained. To enjoy this to the utmost you should take
it in your fingers and GNAW. The only permissible implement is your
hunting-knife. Do not forget to peel and char slightly the switches on
which you thread the meat, otherwise they will impart their fresh-wood
taste.
By this time the ribs are in condition. Cut little slits between them,
and through the slits thread in and out long strips of bacon. Cut
other little gashes, and fill these gashes with onions chopped very
fine. Suspend the ribs across two stones between which you have allowed
a fire to die down to coals.
There remain now the hams, shoulders, and heart. The two former furnish
steaks. The latter you will make into a "bouillon." Here inserts
itself quite naturally the philosophy of boiling meat. It may be
stated in a paragraph.
If you want boiled meat, put it in hot water. That sets the juices.
If you want soup, put it in cold water and bring to a boil. That sets
free the juices. Remember this.
Now you start your bouillon cold. Into a kettle of water put your deer
hearts, or your fish, a chunk of pork, and some salt. Bring to a boil.
Next drop in quartered potatoes, several small whole onions, a half
cupful of rice, a can of tomatoes--if you have any. Boil slowly for an
hour or so--until things pierce easily under the fork. Add several
chunks of bread and a little flour for thickening. Boil down to about
a chowder consistency, and serve hot. It is all you will need for that
meal; and you will eat of it until there is no more.
I am supposing throughout that you know enough to use salt and pepper
when needed.
So much for your deer. The grouse you can split and fry, in which case
the brown gravy described for the fried deer-steak is just the thing.
Or you can boil him. If you do that, put him into hot water, boil
slowly, skim frequently, and add dumplings mixed of flour,
baking-powder, and a little lard. Or you can roast him in your Dutch
oven with your ducks.
Perhaps it might be well here to explain the Dutch oven. It is a heavy
iron kettle with little legs and an iron cover. The theory of it is
that coals go among the little legs and on top of the iron cover. This
heats the inside, and so cooking results. That, you will observe, is
the theory.
In practice you will have to remember a good many things. In the first
place, while other affairs are preparing, lay the cover on the fire to
heat it through; but not on too hot a place nor too long, lest it warp
and so fit loosely. Also the oven itself is to be heated through, and
well greased. Your first baking will undoubtedly be burned on the
bottom. It is almost impossible without many trials to understand just
how little heat suffices underneath. Sometimes it seems that the
warmed earth where the fire has been is enough. And on top you do not
want a bonfire. A nice even heat, and patience, are the proper
ingredients. Nor drop into the error of letting your bread chill, and
so fall to unpalatable heaviness. Probably for some time you will
alternate between the extremes of heavy crusts with doughy insides, and
white weighty boiler-plate with no distinguishable crusts at all.
Above all, do not lift the lid too often for the sake of taking a look.
Have faith.
There are other ways of baking bread. In the North Country forests,
where you carry everything on your back, you will do it in the
frying-pan. The mixture should be a rather thick batter or a rather
thin dough. It is turned into the frying-pan and baked first on one
side, then on the other, the pan being propped on edge facing the fire.
The whole secret of success is first to set your pan horizontal and
about three feet from the fire in order that the mixture may be
thoroughly warmed--not heated--before the pan is propped on edge.
Still another way of baking is in a reflector oven of tin. This is
highly satisfactory, provided the oven is built on the scientific
angles to throw the heat evenly on all parts of the bread-pan and
equally on top and bottom. It is not so easy as you might imagine to
get a good one made. These reflectors are all right for a permanent
camp, but too fragile for transportation on pack-animals.
As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by way of change. It
is really very good,--just salt, water, flour, and a very little sugar.
For those who like their bread "all crust," it is especially toothsome.
The usual camp bread that I have found the most successful has been in
the proportion of two cups of flour to a teaspoonful of salt, one of
sugar, and three of baking-powder. Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on top
is sometimes pleasant. Test by thrusting a splinter into the loaf. If
dough adheres to the wood, the bread is not done. Biscuits are made by
using twice as much baking-powder and about two tablespoonfuls of lard
for shortening. They bake much more quickly than the bread.
Johnny-cake you mix of corn-meal three cups, flour one cup, sugar four
spoonfuls, salt one spoonful, baking-powder four spoonfuls, and lard
twice as much as for biscuits. It also is good, very good.
The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable, and extremely
indigestible when made of flour, as is ordinarily done. However, the
self-raising buckwheat flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is
likewise good for your insides. The batter is rather thin, is poured
into the piping hot greased pan, "flipped" when brown on one side, and
eaten with larrupy-dope or brown gravy.
When you come to consider potatoes and beans and onions and such
matters, remember one thing: that in the higher altitudes water boils
at a low temperature, and that therefore you must not expect your
boiled food to cook very rapidly. In fact, you'd better leave beans at
home. We did. Potatoes you can sometimes tease along by quartering
them.
Rolled oats are better than oatmeal. Put them in plenty of water and
boil down to the desired consistency. In lack of cream you will
probably want it rather soft.
Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let boil for about
two minutes, and immediately set off. Settle by letting a half cup of
cold water flow slowly into the pot from the height of a foot or so.
If your utensils are clean, you will surely have good coffee by this
simple method. Of course you will never boil your tea.
The sun was nearly down when we raised our long yell. The cow-puncher
promptly responded. We ate. Then we smoked. Then we basely left all
our dishes until the morrow, and followed our cow-puncher to his log
cabin, where we were to spend the evening.
By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped down from the mountains.
We built a fire in a huge stone fireplace and sat around in the
flickering light telling ghost-stories to one another. The place was
rudely furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and chairs hewn by
the axe. Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers, branding-irons in turn caught
the light and vanished in the shadow. The skin of a bear looked at us
from hollow eye-sockets in which there were no eyes. We talked of the
Long Trail. Outside the wind, rising, howled through the shakes of the
roof.
[1] Camp-lingo for any kind of syrup.
XV
ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
The winds were indeed abroad that night. They rattled our cabin, they
shrieked in our eaves, they puffed down our chimney, scattering the
ashes and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though a shell had
burst. When we opened the door and stepped out, after our good-nights
had been said, it caught at our hats and garments as though it had been
lying in wait for us.
To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very dark. There would be
a moon later, but at present even the stars seemed only so many
pinpoints of dull metal, lustreless, without illumination. We felt our
way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses, the uncertainty of
stones.
At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath the rating of the
storm. Its embers glowed sullen and red, alternately glaring with a
half-formed resolution to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation.
Once a feeble flame sprang up for an instant, but was immediately
pounced on and beaten flat as though by a vigilant antagonist.
We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets. Across the brow of
the knoll lay a huge pine trunk. In its shelter we respread our
bedding, and there, standing, dressed for the night. The power of the
wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for spoil. A towel, shaken
by accident from the interior of a sweater, departed white-winged, like
a bird, into the outer blackness. We found it next day caught in the
bushes several hundred yards distant. Our voices as we shouted were
snatched from our lips and hurled lavishly into space. The very breath
of our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced the elements, we
breathed in gasps, with difficulty.
Then we dropped down into our blankets.
At once the prostrate tree-trunk gave us its protection. We lay in a
little back-wash of the racing winds, still as a night in June. Over
us roared the battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches; as
though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant we should enter a
zone of danger. So we lay quietly on our backs and stared at the
heavens.
The first impression thence given was of stars sailing serene and
unaffected, remote from the turbulence of what until this instant had
seemed to fill the universe. They were as always, just as we should
see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads chirped clearly
audible at half a mile. The importance of the tempest shrank. Then
below them next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.
Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucination; something
not objective; something real, but within the soul of him who looked
upon it. It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days when
nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant sun, shines with
superlative brilliancy. Emotions of a power to shake the foundations
of life seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow symbols.
For after all, we were contented at heart and tranquil in mind, and
this was but the outer gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience
we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves responded to it
automatically. We became excited, keyed to a high tension, and so lay
rigid on our backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls.
It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses that perforce
automatically our experience had to conclude it psychical. We were in
air absolutely still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and
turned and bent and struck back, evidently in the power of a mighty
force. Across the calm heavens the murk of flying atmosphere--I have
always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could SEE the
wind--the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the
air;--these faintly hinted at intense movement rushing down through
space. A roar of sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasionally it
intermitted, falling abruptly in volume like the mysterious rare
hushings of a rapid stream. Then the familiar noises of a summer night
became audible for the briefest instant,--a horse sneezed, an owl
hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind. And with a howl the
legions of good and evil took up their warring. It was too real, and
yet it was not reconcilable with the calm of our resting-places.
For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and
stress, which it seemed could not fail to develop us, to mould us, to
age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse
or despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience direct from
the sources of life. And then abruptly we were exhausted, as we should
have been by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morning dawned
still and clear, and garnished and set in order as though such things
had never been. Only our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in
the direction the mighty elements had departed.
XVI
THE VALLEY
Once upon a time I happened to be staying in a hotel room which had
originally been part of a suite, but which was then cut off from the
others by only a thin door through which sounds carried clearly. It
was about eleven o'clock in the evening. The occupants of that next
room came home. I heard the door open and close. Then the bed
shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it. There breathed across
the silence a deep restful sigh.
"Mary," said a man's voice, "I'm mighty sorry I didn't join that
Association for Artificial Vacations. They guarantee to get you just as
tired and just as mad in two days as you could by yourself in two
weeks."
We thought of that one morning as we descended the Glacier Point Trail
in Yosemite.
The contrast we need not have made so sharp. We might have taken the
regular wagon-road by way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to
the trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization within an
hundred yards of the brink. It, the sign, was tourists. They were
male and female, as the Lord had made them, but they had improved on
that idea since. The women were freckled, hatted with alpines, in
which edelweiss--artificial, I think--flowered in abundance; they
sported severely plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and
unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing pounds. The men
had on hats just off the sunbonnet effect, pleated Norfolk jackets,
bloomers ditto ditto to the women, stockings whose tops rolled over
innumerable times to help out the size of that which they should have
contained, and also enormous square boots. The female children they
put in skin-tight blue overalls. The male children they dressed in
bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All carried toy
hatchets with a spike on one end built to resemble the pictures of
alpenstocks.
They looked business-like, trod with an assured air of veterans and a
seeming of experience more extended than it was possible to pack into
any one human life. We stared at them, our eyes bulging out. They
painfully and evidently concealed a curiosity as to our pack-train. We
wished them good-day, in order to see to what language heaven had
fitted their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment. They inquired the
way to something or other--I think Sentinel Dome. We had just arrived,
so we did not know, but in order to show a friendly spirit we blandly
pointed out A way. It may have led to Sentinel Dome for all I know.
They departed uttering thanks in human speech.
Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently staying at the
Glacier Point, and so was fresh. But in the course of that morning we
descended straight down a drop of, is it four thousand feet? The trail
was steep and long and without water. During the descent we passed
first and last probably twoscore of tourists, all on foot. A good half
of them were delicate women,--young, middle-aged, a few gray-haired and
evidently upwards of sixty. There were also old men, and fat men, and
men otherwise out of condition. Probably nine out of ten, counting in
the entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at home where grow
street-cars and hansoms, to even the mildest sort of exercise. They
had come into the Valley, whose floor is over four thousand feet up,
without the slightest physical preparation for the altitude. They had
submitted to the fatigue of a long and dusty stage journey. And then
they had merrily whooped it up at a gait which would have appalled
seasoned old stagers like ourselves. Those blessed lunatics seemed
positively unhappy unless they climbed up to some new point of view
every day. I have never seen such a universally tired out, frazzled,
vitally exhausted, white-faced, nervous community in my life as I did
during our four days' stay in the Valley. Then probably they go away,
and take a month to get over it, and have queer residual impressions of
the trip. I should like to know what those impressions really are.
Not but that Nature has done everything in her power to oblige them.
The things I am about to say are heresy, but I hold them true.
Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying to me as some of the
other big box cañons, like those of the Tehipite, the Kings in its
branches, or the Kaweah. I will admit that its waterfalls are better.
Otherwise it possesses no features which are not to be seen in its
sister valleys. And there is this difference. In Yosemite everything
is jumbled together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist with a
linen duster and but three days' time at his disposal. He can turn
from the cliff-headland to the dome, from the dome to the half dome, to
the glacier formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it, with
hardly the necessity of stirring his feet. Nature has put samples of
all her works here within reach of his cataloguing vision. Everything
is crowded in together, like a row of houses in forty-foot lots. The
mere things themselves are here in profusion and wonder, but the
appropriate spacing, the approach, the surrounding of subordinate
detail which should lead in artistic gradation to the supreme
feature--these things, which are a real and essential part of esthetic
effect, are lacking utterly for want of room. The place is not natural
scenery; it is a junk-shop, a storehouse, a sample-room wherein the
elements of natural scenery are to be viewed. It is not an arrangement
of effects in accordance with the usual laws of landscape, but an
abnormality, a freak of Nature.
All these things are to be found elsewhere. There are cliffs which to
the naked eye are as grand as El Capitan; domes, half domes, peaks as
noble as any to be seen in the Valley; sheer drops as breath-taking as
that from Glacier Point. But in other places each of these is led up
to appropriately, and stands the central and satisfying feature to
which all other things look. Then you journey on from your cliff, or
whatever it happens to be, until, at just the right distance, so that
it gains from the presence of its neighbor without losing from its
proximity, a dome or a pinnacle takes to itself the right of
prominence. I concede the waterfalls; but in other respects I prefer
the sister valleys.
That is not to say that one should not visit Yosemite; nor that one
will be disappointed. It is grand beyond any possible human belief;
and no one, even a nerve-frazzled tourist, can gaze on it without the
strongest emotion. Only it is not so intimately satisfying as it
should be. It is a show. You do not take it into your heart. "Whew!"
you cry. "Isn't that a wonder!" then after a moment, "Looks just like
the photographs. Up to sample. Now let's go."
As we descended the trail, we and the tourists aroused in each other a
mutual interest. One husband was trying to encourage his young and
handsome wife to go on. She was beautifully dressed for the part in a
marvelous, becoming costume of whipcord--short skirt, high laced
elkskin boots and the rest of it; but in all her magnificence she had
sat down on the ground, her back to the cliff, her legs across the
trail, and was so tired out that she could hardly muster interest
enough to pull them in out of the way of our horses' hoofs. The man
inquired anxiously of us how far it was to the top. Now it was a long
distance to the top, but a longer to the bottom, so we lied a lie that
I am sure was immediately forgiven us, and told them it was only a
short climb. I should have offered them the use of Bullet, but Bullet
had come far enough, and this was only one of a dozen such cases. In
marked contrast was a jolly white-haired clergyman of the bishop type
who climbed vigorously and hailed us with a shout.
The horses were decidedly unaccustomed to any such sights, and we
sometimes had our hands full getting them by on the narrow way. The
trail was safe enough, but it did have an edge, and that edge jumped
pretty straight off. It was interesting to observe how the tourists
acted. Some of them were perfect fools, and we had more trouble with
them than we did with the horses. They could not seem to get the
notion into their heads that all we wanted them to do was to get on the
inside and stand still. About half of them were terrified to death, so
that at the crucial moment, just as a horse was passing them, they had
little fluttering panics that called the beast's attention. Most of
the remainder tried to be bold and help. They reached out the hand of
assistance toward the halter rope; the astonished animal promptly
snorted, tried to turn around, cannoned against the next in line. Then
there was a mix-up. Two tall clean-cut well-bred looking girls of our
slim patrician type offered us material assistance. They seemed to
understand horses, and got out of the way in the proper manner, did
just the right thing, and made sensible suggestions. I offer them my
homage.
They spoke to us as though they had penetrated the disguise of long
travel, and could see we were not necessarily members of Burt Alvord's
gang. This phase too of our descent became increasingly interesting to
us, a species of gauge by which we measured the perceptions of those we
encountered. Most did not speak to us at all. Others responded to our
greetings with a reserve in which was more than a tinge of distrust.
Still others patronized us. A very few overlooked our faded flannel
shirts, our soiled trousers, our floppy old hats with their rattlesnake
bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to respond to us heartily.
Them in return we generally perceived to belong to our totem.