THE GIANT BONES
About this time many people in Wareville, particularly the women and
children began to complain of physical ills, notably lassitude and a
lack of appetite; their food, which consisted largely of the game
swarming all around the forest, had lost its savor. There was no mystery
about it; Tom Ross, Mr. Ware and others promptly named the cause; they
needed salt, which to the settlers of Kentucky was almost as precious as
gold; it was obtained in two ways, either by bringing it hundreds of
miles over the mountains from Virginia in wagons or on pack horses, or
by boiling it out at the salt springs in the Indian-haunted woods.
They had neither the time nor the men for the long journey to Virginia,
and they prepared at once for obtaining it at the springs. They had
already used a small salt spring but the supply was inadequate, and they
decided to go a considerable distance northward to the famous Big Bone
Lick. Nothing had been heard in a long time of Indian war parties south
of the Ohio, and they believed they would incur no danger. Moreover they
could bring back salt to last more than a year.
When they first heard of the proposed journey, Paul Cotter pulled Henry
to one side. They were just outside the palisade, and it was a beautiful
day, in early spring. Already kindly nature was smoothing over the cruel
scars made by the axes in the forest, and the village within the
palisade began to have the comfortable look of home.
"Do you know what the Big Bone Lick is, Henry?" asked Paul eagerly.
"No," replied Henry, wondering at his chum's excitement.
"Why it's the most wonderful place in all the world!" said Paul, jumping
up and down in his wish to tell quickly. "There was a hunter here last
winter who spoke to me about it. I didn't believe him then, it sounded
so wonderful, but Mr. Pennypacker says it's all true. There's a great
salt spring, boiling out of the ground in the middle of a kind of marsh,
and all around it, for a long distance, are piled hundreds of large
bones, the bones of gigantic animals, bigger than any that walk the
earth to-day."
"See here, Paul," said Henry scornfully, "you can't stuff my ears with
mush like that. I guess you were reading one of the master's old
romances, and then had a dream. Wake up, Paul!"
"It's true every word of it!"
"Then if there were such big animals, why don't we see 'em sometimes
running through the forest?"
"My, they've all been dead millions of years and their bones have been
preserved there in the marsh. They lived in another geologic era--that's
what Mr. Pennypacker calls it--and animals as tall as trees strolled up
and down over the land and were the lords of creation."
Henry puckered his lips and emitted a long whistle of incredulity.
"Paul," he said, reprovingly, "you do certainly have the gift of
speech."
But Paul was not offended at his chum's disbelief.
"I'm going to prove to you, Henry, that it's true," he said. "Mr.
Pennypacker says it's so, he never tells a falsehood and he's a scholar,
too. But you and I have got to go with the salt-makers, Henry, and we'll
see it all. I guess if you look on it with your own eyes you'll believe
it."
"Of course," said Henry, "and of course I'll go if I can."
A trip through the forest and new country to the great salt spring was
temptation enough in itself, without the addition of the fields of big
bones, and that night in both the Ware and Cotter homes, eloquent boys
gave cogent reasons why they should go with the band.
"Father," said Henry, "there isn't much to do here just now, and they'll
want me up at Big Bone Lick, helping to boil the salt and a lot of
things."
Mr. Ware smiled. Henry, like most boys, seldom showed much zeal for
manual labor. But Henry went on undaunted.
"We won't run any risk. No Indians are in Kentucky now and, father, I
want to go awful bad."
Mr. Ware smiled again at the closing avowal, which was so frank. Just at
that moment in another home another boy was saying almost exactly the
same things, and another father ventured the same answer that Mr. Ware
did, in practically the same words such as these:
"Well, my son, as it is to be a good strong company of careful and
experienced men who will not let you get into any mischief, you can go
along, but be sure that you make yourself useful."
The party was to number a dozen, all skilled foresters, and they were to
lead twenty horses, all carrying huge pack saddles for the utensils and
the invaluable salt. Mr. Silas Pennypacker who was a man of his own will
announced that he was going, too. He puffed out his ruddy cheeks and
said emphatically:
"I've heard from hunters of that place; it's one of the great
curiosities of the country and for the sake of learning I'm bound to see
it. Think of all the gigantic skeletons of the mastodon, the mammoth and
other monsters lying there on the ground for ages!"
Henry and Paul were glad that Mr. Pennypacker was to be with them, as in
the woods he was a delightful comrade, able always to make instruction
entertaining, and the superiority of his mind appealed unconsciously to
both of these boys who--each in his way--were also of superior cast.
They departed on a fine morning--the spring was early and held
steady--and all Wareville saw them go. It was a brilliant little
cavalcade; the horses, their heads up to scent the breeze from the
fragrant wilderness, and the men, as eager to start, everyone with a
long slender-barreled Kentucky rifle on his shoulder, the fringed and
brilliantly colored deerskin hunting shirt falling almost to his knees,
and, below that deerskin leggings and deerskin moccasins adorned with
many-tinted beads. It was a vivid picture of the young West, so young,
and yet so strong and so full of life, the little seed from which so
mighty a tree was soon to grow.
All of them stopped again, as if by an involuntary impulse, at the edge
of the forest, and waved their hands in another, and, this time, in a
last good-by to the watchers at the fort. Then they plunged into the
mighty wilderness, which swept away and away for unknown thousands of
miles.
They talked for a while of the journey, of the things that they might
see by the way, and of those that they had left behind, but before long
conversation ceased. The spell of the dark and illimitable woods, in
whose shade they marched, fell upon them, and there was no noise, but
the sound of breathing and the tread of men and horses. They dropped,
too, from the necessities of the path through the undergrowth, into
Indian file, one behind the other.
Henry was near the rear of the line, the stalwart schoolmaster just in
front of him, and his comrade Paul, just behind. He was full of
thankfulness that he had been allowed to go on this journey. It all
appealed to him, the tale that Paul told of the giant bones and the
great salt spring, the dark woods full of mystery and delightful danger,
and his own place among the trusted band, who were sent on such an
errand. His heart swelled with pride and pleasure and he walked with a
light springy step and with endurance equal to that of any of the men
before him. He looked over his shoulder at Paul, whose face also was
touched with enthusiasm.
"Aren't you glad to be along?" he asked in a whisper.
"Glad as I can be," replied Paul in the same whisper.
Up shot the sun showering golden beams of light upon the forest. The air
grew warmer, but the little band did not cease its rapid pace northward
until noon. Then at a word from Ross all halted at a beautiful glade,
across which ran a little brook of cold water. The horses were tethered
at the edge of the forest, but were allowed to graze on the young grass
which was already beginning to appear, while the men lighted a small
fire of last year's fallen brushwood, at the center of the glade on the
bank of the brook.
"We won't build it high," said Ross, who was captain as well as guide,
"an' then nobody in the forest can see it. There may not be an Indian
south of the Ohio, but the fellow that's never caught is the fellow that
never sticks his head in the trap."
"Sound philosophy! sound philosophy! your logic is irrefutable, Mr.
Ross," said the schoolmaster.
Ross grinned. He did not know what "irrefutable" meant, but he did know
that Mr. Pennypacker intended to compliment him.
Paul and Henry assisted with the fire. In fact they did most of the
work, each wishing to make good his assertion that he would prove of use
on the journey. It was a brief task to gather the wood and then Ross and
Shif'less Sol lighted the fire, which they permitted merely to smolder.
But it gave out ample heat and in a few minutes they cooked over it
their venison and corn bread and coffee which they served in tin cups.
Henry and Paul ate with the ferocious appetite that the march and the
clean air of the wilderness had bred in them, and nobody restricted
them, because the forest was full of game, and such skillful hunters and
riflemen could never lack for a food supply.
Mr. Pennypacker leaned with an air of satisfaction against the upthrust
bough of a fallen oak.
"It's a wonderful world that we have here," he said, "and just to think
that we're among the first white men to find out what it contains."
"All ready!" said Tom Ross, "then forward we go, we mustn't waste time
by the way. They need that salt at Wareville."
Once more they resumed the march in Indian file and amid the silence of
the woods. About the middle of the afternoon Ross invited Mr.
Pennypacker and the two boys to ride three of the pack horses. Henry at
first declined, not willing to be considered soft and pampered, but as
the schoolmaster promptly accepted and Paul who was obviously tired did
the same, he changed his mind, not because he needed rest, but lest Paul
should feel badly over his inferiority in strength.
Thus they marched steadily northward, Ross leading the way, and
Shif'less Sol who was lazy at the settlement, but never in the woods
where he was inferior in knowledge and skill to Ross only, covering the
rear. Each of these accomplished borderers watched every movement of the
forest about him, and listened for every sound; he knew with the eye of
second sight what was natural and if anything not belonging to the usual
order of things should appear, he would detect it in a moment. But they
saw and heard nothing that was not according to nature: only the wind
among the boughs, or the stamp of an elk's hoof as it fled, startled at
the scent of man. The hostile tribes from north and south, fearful of
the presence of each other, seemed to have deserted the great wilderness
of Kentucky.
Henry noted the beauty of the country as they passed along; the gently
rolling hills, the rich dark soil and the beautiful clear streams. Once
they came to a river, too deep to wade, but all of them, except the
schoolmaster, promptly took off their clothing and swam it.
"My age and my calling forbid my doing as the rest of you do," said the
schoolmaster, "and I think I shall stick to my horse."
He rode the biggest of the pack horses, and when the strong animal began
to swim, Mr. Pennypacker thrust out his legs until they were almost
parallel with the animal's neck, and reached the opposite bank,
untouched by a drop of water. No one begrudged him his dry and unlabored
passage; in fact they thought it right, because a schoolmaster was
mightily respected in the early settlements of Kentucky and they would
have regarded it as unbecoming to his dignity to have stripped, and swum
the river as they did.
Henry and Paul in their secret hearts did not envy the schoolmaster.
They thought he had too great a weight of dignity to maintain and they
enjoyed cleaving the clear current with their bare bodies. What! be
deprived of the wilderness pleasures! Not they! The two boys did not
remount, after the passage of the river, but, fresh and full of life,
walked on with the others at a pace so swift that the miles dropped
rapidly behind them. They were passing, too, through a country rarely
trodden even by the red men; Henry knew it by the great quantities of
game they saw; the deer seemed to look from every thicket, now and then
a magnificent elk went crashing by, once a bear lumbered away, and twice
small groups of buffalo were stampeded in the glades and rushed off,
snorting through the undergrowth.
"They say that far to the westward on plains that seem to have no end
those animals are to be seen in millions," said Mr. Pennypacker.
"It's so, I've heard it from the Indians," confirmed Ross the guide.
They stopped a little while before sundown, and as the game was so
plentiful all around them, Ross said he would shoot a deer in order to
save their dried meat and other provisions.
"You come with me, while the others are making the camp," he said to
Henry.
The boy flushed with pride and gratification, and, taking his rifle,
plunged at once into the forest with the guide. But he said nothing,
knowing that silence would recommend him to Ross far more than words,
and took care to bring down his moccasined feet without sound. Nor did
he let the undergrowth rustle, as he slipped through it, and Ross
regarded him with silent approval. "A born woodsman," he said to
himself.
A mile from the camp they stopped at the crest of a little hill, thickly
clad with forest and undergrowth, and looked down into the glade beyond.
Here they saw several deer grazing, and as the wind blew from them
toward the hunters they had taken no alarm.
"Pick the fat buck there on the right," whispered Ross to Henry.
Henry said not a word. He had learned the taciturnity of the woods, and
leveling his rifle, took sure aim. There was no buck fever about him
now, and, when his rifle cracked, the deer bounded into the air and
dropped down dead. Ross, all business, began to cut up and clean the
game, and with Henry's aid, he did it so skillfully and rapidly that
they returned to the camp, loaded with the juicy deer meat, by the time
the fire and everything else was ready for them.
Henry and Paul ate with eager appetites and when supper was over they
wrapped themselves in their blankets and lay down before the fire under
the trees. Paul went to sleep at once, but Henry did not close his eyes
so soon. Far in the west he saw a last red bar of light cast by the
sunken sun and the deep ruddy glow over the fringe of the forest. Then
it suddenly passed, as if whisked away by a magic hand, and all the
wilderness was in darkness. But it was only for a little while. Out came
the moon and the stars flashed one by one into a sky of silky blue. A
south wind lifting up itself sang a small sweet song among the branches,
and Henry uttered a low sigh of content, because he lived in the
wilderness, and because he was there in the depths of the forest on an
important errand. Then he fell sound asleep, and did not awaken until
Ross and the others were cooking breakfast.
A day or two later they reached the wonderful Big Bone Lick, and they
approached it with the greatest caution, because they were afraid lest
an errand similar to theirs might have drawn hostile red men to the
great salt spring. But as they curved about the desired goal they saw no
Indian sign, and then they went through the marsh to the spring itself.
Henry opened his eyes in amazement. All that the schoolmaster and Paul
had told was true, and more. Acres and acres of the marsh lands were
fairly littered with bones, and from the mud beneath other and far
greater bones had been pulled up and left lying on the ground. Henry
stood some of these bones on end, and they were much taller than he.
Others he could not lift.
"The mastodon, the mammoth and I know not what," said Mr. Pennypacker in
a transport of delight. "Henry, you and Paul are looking upon the
remains of animals, millions of years old, killed perhaps in fights with
others of their kind, over these very salt springs. There may not be
another such place as this in all the world."
Mr. Pennypacker for the first day or two was absolutely of no help in
making the salt, because he was far too much excited about the bones and
the salt springs themselves.
"I can understand," said Henry, "why the animals should come here after
the salt, since they crave salt just as we do, but it seems strange to
me that salt water should be running out of the ground here, hundreds of
miles from the sea."
"It's the sea itself that's coming up right at our feet," replied the
schoolmaster thoughtfully. "Away back yonder, a hundred million years
ago perhaps, so far that we can have no real conception of the time, the
sea was over all this part of the world. When it receded, or the ground
upheaved, vast subterranean reservoirs of salt water were left, and now,
when the rain sinks down into these full reservoirs a portion of the
salt water is forced to the surface, which makes the salt springs that
are scattered over this part of the country. It is a process that is
going on continually. At least, that's a plausible theory, and it's as
good as any other."
But most of the salt-makers did not bother themselves about causes, and
they accepted the giant bones as facts, without curiosity about their
origin. Nor did they neglect to put them to use. By sticking them deep
in the ground they made tripods of them on which they hung their kettles
for boiling the salt water, and of others they devised comfortable seats
for themselves. To such modern uses did the mastodon come! But to the
schoolmaster and the two boys the bones were an unending source of
interest, and in the intervals of labor, which sometimes were pretty
long, particularly for Mr. Pennypacker, they were ever prowling in the
swamp for a bone bigger than any that they had found before.
But the salt-making progressed rapidly. The kettles were always boiling
and sack after sack was filled with the precious commodity. At night
wild animals, despite the known presence of strange, new creatures,
would come down to the springs, so eager were they for the salt, and the
men rarely molested them. Only a deer now and then was shot for food,
and Henry and Paul lay awake one night, watching two big bull buffaloes,
not fifty yards away, fighting for the best place at a spring.
Ross and Shif'less Sol did not do much of the work at the salt-boiling,
but they were continually scouting through the forest, on a labor no
less important, watching for raiding war parties who otherwise might
fall unsuspected upon the toilers. Henry, as a youth of great promise,
was sometimes taken with them on these silent trips through the woods,
and the first time he went he felt badly on Paul's account, because his
comrade was not chosen also. But when he returned he found that his
sympathy was wasted. Paul and the master were deeply absorbed in the
task of trying to fit together some of the gigantic bones that is, to
re-create the animal to which they thought the bones belonged, and Paul
was far happier than he would have been on the scout or the hunt.
The day's work was ended and all the others were sitting around the camp
fire, with the dying glow of the setting sun flooding the springs, the
marshes and the camp fire, but Paul and the master toiled zealously at
the gigantic figure that they had up-reared, supported partly with
stakes, and bearing a remote resemblance to some animal that lived a few
million years or so ago. The master had tied together some of the bones
with withes, and he and Paul were now laboriously trying to fit a
section of vertebræ into shape.
Shif'less Sol who had gone with Henry sat down by the fire, stuffed a
piece of juicy venison into his mouth and then looked with eyes of
wonder at the two workers in the cause of natural history.
"Some people 'pear to make a heap o' trouble for theirselves," he said,
"now I can't git it through my head why anybody would want to work with
a lot o' dead old bones when here's a pile o' sweet deer meat just
waitin' an' beggin' to be et up."
At that moment the attempt of Paul and the schoolmaster to reconstruct a
prehistoric beast collapsed. The figure that they had built up with so
much care and labor suddenly slipped loose somewhere, and all the bones
fell down in a heap. The master stared at them in disgust and exclaimed:
"It's no use! I can't put them together away out here in the
wilderness!"
Then he stalked over to the fire, and taking a deer steak, ate hungrily.
The steak was very tender, and gradually a look of content and peace
stole over Mr. Pennypacker's face.
"At least," he murmured, "if it's hard to be a scholar here, one can
have a glorious appetite, and it is most pleasant to gratify it."
As the dark settled down Ross said that in one day more they ought to
have all the salt the horses could carry, and then it would be best to
depart promptly and swiftly for Wareville. A half hour later all were
asleep except the sentinel.