bravely forth. Some of the men sang. One had an accordion. Figures,
indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in the shadows,
suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity of firelight, there to
disclose themselves as visitors. Out on the plain the cattle lowed,
the horses nickered. The red firelight flashed from the metal of
suspended equipment, crimsoned the bronze of men's faces, touched with
pink the high lights on their gracefully recumbent forms. After a
while we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep, while a band of
coyotes wailed like lost spirits from a spot where a steer had died.
[1] See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail; and The Rawhide.
XX
THE GOLDEN TROUT
After Farewell Gap, as has been hinted, the country changes utterly.
Possibly that is why it is named Farewell Gap. The land is wild,
weird, full of twisted trees, strangely colored rocks, fantastic
formations, bleak mountains of slabs, volcanic cones, lava, dry powdery
soil or loose shale, close-growing grasses, and strong winds. You feel
yourself in an upper world beyond the normal, where only the freakish
cold things of nature, elsewhere crowded out, find a home. Camp is
under a lonely tree, none the less solitary from the fact that it has
companions. The earth beneath is characteristic of the treeless lands,
so that these seem to have been stuck alien into it. There is no
shelter save behind great fortuitous rocks. Huge marmots run over the
boulders, like little bears. The wind blows strong. The streams run
naked under the eye of the sun, exposing clear and yellow every detail
of their bottoms. In them there are no deep hiding-places any more
than there is shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows
as plainly as in an aquarium.
We saw them as we rode over the hot dry shale among the hot and twisted
little trees. They lay against the bottom, transparent; they darted
away from the jar of our horses' hoofs; they swam slowly against the
current, delicate as liquid shadows, as though the clear uniform golden
color of the bottom had clouded slightly to produce these tenuous
ghostly forms. We examined them curiously from the advantage our
slightly elevated trail gave us, and knew them for the Golden Trout,
and longed to catch some.
All that day our route followed in general the windings of this unique
home of a unique fish. We crossed a solid natural bridge; we skirted
fields of red and black lava, vivid as poppies; we gazed marveling on
perfect volcano cones, long since extinct: finally we camped on a side
hill under two tall branchless trees in about as bleak and exposed a
position as one could imagine. Then all three, we jointed our rods and
went forth to find out what the Golden Trout was like.
I soon discovered a number of things, as follows: The stream at this
point, near its source, is very narrow--I could step across it--and
flows beneath deep banks. The Golden Trout is shy of approach. The
wind blows. Combining these items of knowledge I found that it was no
easy matter to cast forty feet in a high wind so accurately as to hit a
three-foot stream a yard below the level of the ground. In fact, the
proposition was distinctly sporty; I became as interested in it as in
accurate target-shooting, so that at last I forgot utterly the
intention of my efforts and failed to strike my first rise. The
second, however, I hooked, and in a moment had him on the grass.
He was a little fellow of seven inches, but mere size was nothing, the
color was the thing. And that was indeed golden. I can liken it to
nothing more accurately than the twenty-dollar gold-piece, the same
satin finish, the same pale yellow. The fish was fairly molten. It
did not glitter in gaudy burnishment, as does our aquarium gold-fish,
for example, but gleamed and melted and glowed as though fresh from the
mould. One would almost expect that on cutting the flesh it would be
found golden through all its substance. This for the basic color. You
must remember always that it was a true trout, without scales, and so
the more satiny. Furthermore, along either side of the belly ran two
broad longitudinal stripes of exactly the color and burnish of the
copper paint used on racing yachts.
I thought then, and have ever since, that the Golden Trout, fresh from
the water, is one of the most beautiful fish that swims. Unfortunately
it fades very quickly, and so specimens in alcohol can give no idea of
it. In fact, I doubt if you will ever be able to gain a very clear
idea of it unless you take to the trail that leads up, under the end of
which is known technically as the High Sierras.
The Golden Trout lives only in this one stream, but occurs there in
countless multitudes. Every little pool, depression, or riffles has
its school. When not alarmed they take the fly readily. One afternoon
I caught an even hundred in a little over an hour. By way of
parenthesis it may be well to state that most were returned unharmed to
the water. They run small,--a twelve-inch fish is a monster,--but are
of extraordinary delicacy for eating. We three devoured sixty-five
that first evening in camp.
Now the following considerations seem to me at this point worthy of
note. In the first place, the Golden Trout occurs but in this one
stream, and is easily caught. At present the stream is comparatively
inaccessible, so that the natural supply probably keeps even with the
season's catches. Still the trail is on the direct route to Mount
Whitney, and year by year the ascent of this "top of the Republic" is
becoming more the proper thing to do. Every camping party stops for a
try at the Golden Trout, and of course the fish-hog is a sure
occasional migrant. The cowboys told of two who caught six hundred in a
day. As the certainly increasing tide of summer immigration gains in
volume, the Golden Trout, in spite of his extraordinary numbers at
present, is going to be caught out.
Therefore, it seems the manifest duty of the Fisheries to provide for
the proper protection and distribution of this species, especially the
distribution. Hundreds of streams in the Sierras are without trout
simply because of some natural obstruction, such as a waterfall too
high to jump, which prevents their ascent of the current. These are
all well adapted to the planting of fish, and might just as well be
stocked by the Golden Trout as by the customary Rainbow. Care should be
taken lest the two species become hybridized, as has occurred following
certain misguided efforts in the South Fork of the Kern.
So far as I know but one attempt has been made to transplant these
fish. About five or six years ago a man named Grant carried some in
pails across to a small lake near at hand. They have done well, and
curiously enough have grown to a weight of from one and a half to two
pounds. This would seem to show that their small size in Volcano Creek
results entirely from conditions of feed or opportunity for
development, and that a study of proper environment might result in a
game fish to rival the Rainbow in size and certainly to surpass him in
curious interest.
A great many well-meaning people who have marveled at the abundance of
the Golden Trout in their natural habitat laugh at the idea that
Volcano Creek will ever become "fished out." To such it should be
pointed out that the fish in question is a voracious feeder, is without
shelter, and quickly landed. A simple calculation will show how many
fish a hundred moderate anglers, camping a week apiece, would take out
in a season. And in a short time there will be many more than a
hundred, few of them moderate, coming up into the mountains to camp
just as long as they have a good time. All it needs is better trails,
and better trails are under way. Well-meaning people used to laugh at
the idea that the buffalo and wild pigeons would ever disappear. They
are gone.
XXI
ON GOING OUT
The last few days of your stay in the wilderness you will be consumedly
anxious to get out. It does not matter how much of a savage you are,
how good a time you are having, or how long you have been away from
civilization. Nor does it mean especially that you are glad to leave
the wilds. Merely does it come about that you drift unconcernedly on
the stream of days until you approach the brink of departure: then
irresistibly the current hurries you into haste. The last day of your
week's vacation; the last three of your month's or your summer's or
your year's outing,--these comprise the hours in which by a mighty but
invisible transformation your mind forsakes its savagery, epitomizes
again the courses of social evolution, regains the poise and
cultivation of the world of men. Before that you have been content;
yes, and would have gone on being content for as long as you please
until the approach of the limit you have set for your wandering.
In effect this transformation from the state of savagery to the state
of civilization is very abrupt. When you leave the towns your clothes
and mind are new. Only gradually do they take on the color of their
environment; only gradually do the subtle influences of the great
forest steal in on your dulled faculties to flow over them in a tide
that rises imperceptibly. You glide as gently from the artificial to
the natural life as do the forest shadows from night to day. But at
the other end the affair is different. There you awake on the appointed
morning in complete resumption of your old attitude of mind. The tide
of nature has slipped away from you in the night.
Then you arise and do the most wonderful of your wilderness traveling.
On those days you look back fondly, of them you boast afterwards in
telling what a rapid and enduring voyager you are. The biggest day's
journey I ever undertook was in just such a case. We started at four
in the morning through a forest of the early spring-time, where the
trees were glorious overhead, but the walking ankle deep. On our backs
were thirty-pound burdens. We walked steadily until three in the
afternoon, by which time we had covered thirty miles and had arrived at
what then represented civilization to us. Of the nine who started, two
Indians finished an hour ahead; the half breed, Billy, and I staggered
in together, encouraging each other by words concerning the bottle of
beer we were going to buy; and the five white men never got in at all
until after nine o'clock that night. Neither thirty miles, nor thirty
pounds, nor ankle-deep slush sounds formidable when considered as
abstract and separate propositions.
In your first glimpse of the civilized peoples your appearance in your
own eyes will undergo the same instantaneous and tremendous revulsion
that has already taken place in your mental sphere. Heretofore you
have considered yourself as a decently well appointed gentleman of the
woods. Ten to one, in contrast to the voluntary or enforced simplicity
of the professional woodsman you have looked on your little luxuries of
carved leather hat-band, fancy knife sheath, pearl-handled six-shooter,
or khaki breeches as giving you slightly the air of a forest exquisite.
But on that depot platform or in presence of that staring group on the
steps of the Pullman, you suddenly discover yourself to be nothing less
than a disgrace to your bringing up. Nothing could be more evident
than the flop of your hat, the faded, dusty appearance of your blue
shirt, the beautiful black polish of your khakis, the grime of your
knuckles, the three days' beard of your face. If you are a fool, you
worry about it. If you are a sensible man, you do not mind;--and you
prepare for amusing adventures.
The realization of your external unworthiness, however, brings to your
heart the desire for a hot bath in a porcelain tub. You gloat over the
thought; and when the dream comes to be a reality, you soak away in as
voluptuous a pleasure as ever falls to the lot of man to enjoy. Then
you shave, and array yourself minutely and preciously in clean clothes
from head to toe, building up a new respectability, and you leave
scornfully in a heap your camping garments. They have heretofore
seemed clean, but now you would not touch them, no, not even to put
them in the soiled-clothes basket, let your feminines rave as they may.
And for at least two days you prove an almost childish delight in mere
raiment.
But before you can reach this blissful stage you have still to order
and enjoy your first civilized dinner. It tastes good, not because
your camp dinners have palled on you, but because your transformation
demands its proper aliment. Fortunate indeed you are if you step
directly to a transcontinental train or into the streets of a modern
town. Otherwise the transition through the small-hotel provender is
apt to offer too little contrast for the fullest enjoyment. But aboard
the dining-car or in the cafe you will gather to yourself such
ill-assorted succulence as thick, juicy beefsteaks, and creamed
macaroni, and sweet potatoes, and pie, and red wine, and real cigars
and other things.
In their acquisition your appearance will tell against you. We were
once watched anxiously by a nervous female head waiter who at last
mustered up courage enough to inform me that guests were not allowed to
eat without coats. We politely pointed out that we possessed no such
garments. After a long consultation with the proprietor she told us it
was all right for this time, but that we must not do it again. At
another place I had to identify myself as a responsible person by
showing a picture in a magazine bought for the purpose.
The public never will know how to take you. Most of it treats you as
though you were a two-dollar a day laborer; some of the more astute are
puzzled. One February I walked out of the North Country on snowshoes
and stepped directly into a Canadian Pacific transcontinental train. I
was clad in fur cap, vivid blanket coat, corded trousers, German
stockings and moccasins; and my only baggage was the pair of snowshoes.
It was the season of light travel. A single Englishman touring the
world as the crow flies occupied the car. He looked at me so askance
that I made an opportunity of talking to him. I should like to read
his "Travels" to see what he made out of the riddle. In similar
circumstances, and without explanation, I had fun talking French and
swapping boulevard reminiscences with a member of a Parisian theatrical
troupe making a long jump through northern Wisconsin. And once, at six
of the morning, letting myself into my own house with a latch-key, and
sitting down to read the paper until the family awoke, I was nearly
brained by the butler. He supposed me a belated burglar, and had armed
himself with the poker. The most flattering experience of the kind was
voiced by a small urchin who plucked at his mother's sleeve: "Look,
mamma!" he exclaimed in guarded but jubilant tones, "there's a real
Indian!"
Our last camp of this summer was built and broken in the full leisure
of at least a three weeks' expectation. We had traveled south from the
Golden Trout through the Toowah range. There we had viewed wonders
which I cannot expect you to believe in,--such as a spring of warm
water in which you could bathe and from which you could reach to dip up
a cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast a fly into a trout
stream, on the left. At length we entered a high meadow in the shape
of a maltese cross, with pine slopes about it, and springs of water
welling in little humps of green. There the long pine-needles were
extraordinarily thick and the pine-cones exceptionally large. The
former we scraped together to the depth of three feet for a bed in the
lea of a fallen trunk; the latter we gathered in armfuls to pile on the
camp-fire. Next morning we rode down a mile or so through the grasses,
exclaimed over the thousands of mountain quail buzzing from the creek
bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well-known pines and about at the
grateful coolness of our accustomed green meadows and leaves;--and
then, as though we had crossed a threshold, we emerged into chaparral,
dry loose shale, yucca, Spanish bayonet, heated air and the bleached
burned-out furnace-like country of arid California in midsummer. The
trail dropped down through sage-brush, just as it always did in the
California we had known; the mountains rose with the fur-like
dark-olive effect of the coast ranges; the sun beat hot. We had left
the enchanted land.
The trail was very steep and very long, and took us finally into the
country of dry brown grasses, gray brush, waterless stony ravines, and
dust. Others had traveled that trail, headed the other way, and
evidently had not liked it. Empty bottles blazed the path. Somebody
had sacrificed a pack of playing-cards, which he had stuck on thorns
from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the
discomforts of such travel. After an apparently interminable interval
we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water,
and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so
startlingly in contrast to their surroundings.
By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled on horseback since four.
A variety of circumstances learned at the village made it imperative
that both the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without the delay of
a single hour. This left Wes to bring the horses home, which was tough
on Wes, but he rose nobly to the occasion.
When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we had acquired a team
of wild broncos, a buckboard, an elderly gentleman with a white goatee,
two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese. With these we hoped
to reach the railroad shortly after midnight.
The elevation was five thousand feet, the road dusty and hot, the
country uninteresting in sage-brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and
general dryness. Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks in the
good old fashion. Our driver had immigrated from Maine the year
before, and by some chance had drifted straight to the arid regions.
He was vastly disgusted. At every particularly atrocious dust-hole or
unlovely cactus strip he spat into space and remarked in tones of
bottomless contempt:--
"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"
This was evidently intended as a quotation.
Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, where we got out at every
rise in order to ease the horses, and where we hurried the old
gentleman beyond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.
It grew dark. Dimly the road showed gray in the twilight. We did not
know how far exactly we were to go, but imagined that sooner or later
we would top one of the small ridges to look across one of the broad
plateau plains to the lights of our station. You see we had forgotten,
in the midst of flatness, that we were still over five thousand feet
up. Then the road felt its way between two hills;--and the blackness
of night opened below us as well as above, and from some deep and
tremendous abyss breathed the winds of space.
It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two hours below the
horizon. Somehow the trail turned to the right along that tremendous
cliff. We thought we could make out its direction, the dimness of its
glimmering; but equally well, after we had looked a moment, we could
imagine it one way or another, to right and left. I went ahead to
investigate. The trail to left proved to be the faint reflection of a
clump of "old man" at least five hundred feet down; that to right was a
burned patch sheer against the rise of the cliff. We started on the
middle way.
There were turns-in where a continuance straight ahead would require an
airship or a coroner; again turns-out where the direct line would
telescope you against the state of California. These we could make out
by straining our eyes. The horses plunged and snorted; the buckboard
leaped. Fire flashed from the impact of steel against rock,
momentarily blinding us to what we should see. Always we descended
into the velvet blackness of the abyss, the cañon walls rising steadily
above us shutting out even the dim illumination of the stars. From
time to time our driver, desperately scared, jerked out cheering bits
of information.
"My eyes ain't what they was. For the Lord's sake keep a-lookin',
boys."
"That nigh hoss is deef. There don't seem to be no use saying WHOA to
her."
"Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts. I been figgerin' on tackin'
on a new shoe for a week."
"I never was over this road but onct, and then I was headed th' other
way. I was driving of a corpse."
Then, after two hours of it, BING! BANG! SMASH! our tongue collided
with a sheer black wall, no blacker than the atmosphere before it. The
trail here took a sharp V turn to the left. We had left the face of
the precipice and henceforward would descend the bed of the cañon.
Fortunately our collision had done damage to nothing but our nerves, so
we proceeded to do so.
The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet above us. They seemed
to close together, like the sides of a tent, to leave only a narrow
pale lucent strip of sky. The trail was quite invisible, and even the
sense of its existence was lost when we traversed groves of trees. One
of us had to run ahead of the horses, determining its general
direction, locating the sharper turns. The rest depended on the
instinct of the horses and pure luck.
It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run down through the
blackness, shouting aloud to guide our followers, swinging to the
slope, bathed to the soul in mysteries of which we had no time to take
cognizance.
By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us like a star. The smell
of fresh wood smoke and stale damp fire came to our nostrils. We
gained the star and found it to be a log smouldering; and up the hill
other stars red as blood. So we knew that we had crossed the zone of
an almost extinct forest fire, and looked on the scattered camp-fires
of an army of destruction.
The moon rose. We knew it by touches of white light on peaks
infinitely far above us; not at all by the relieving of the heavy
velvet blackness in which we moved. After a time, I, running ahead in
my turn, became aware of the deep breathing of animals. I stopped short
and called a warning. Immediately a voice answered me.
"Come on, straight ahead. They're not on the road."
When within five feet I made out the huge freight wagons in which were
lying the teamsters, and very dimly the big freight mules standing
tethered to the wheels.
"It's a dark night, friend, and you're out late."
"A dark night," I agreed, and plunged on. Behind me rattled and banged
the abused buckboard, snorted the half-wild broncos, groaned the
unrepaired brake, softly cursed my companions.
Then at once the abrupt descent ceased. We glided out to the silvered
flat, above which sailed the moon.
The hour was seen to be half past one. We had missed our train.
Nothing was visible of human habitations. The land was frosted with
the moonlight, enchanted by it, etherealized. Behind us, huge and
formidable, loomed the black mass of the range we had descended.
Before us, thin as smoke in the magic lucence that flooded the world,
rose other mountains, very great, lofty as the sky. We could not
understand them. The descent we had just accomplished should have
landed us on a level plain in which lay our town. But here we found
ourselves in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain ranges
through which there seemed to be no pass less than five or six thousand
feet in height.
We reined in the horses to figure it out.
"I don't see how it can be," said I. "We've certainly come far enough.
It would take us four hours at the very least to cross that range, even
if the railroad should happen to be on the other side of it."
"I been through here only once," repeated the driver,--"going the other
way.--Then I drew a corpse." He spat, and added as an afterthought,
"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"
We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. They rose above us sheer
and forbidding. In the bright moonlight plainly were to be descried
the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the cañons, the
granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a
thread of a waterfall high up where the clouds would be if the night
had not been clear.
"We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the Tenderfoot.
"Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. "It's bound to go
somewhere. We might as well give up the railroad and find a place to
turn-in."
"It can't be far," encouraged the Tenderfoot; "this valley can't be
more than a few miles across."
"Gi dap!" remarked the driver.