A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY
Emerald Lake is beautiful, but less beautiful, I think, than Lake
Louise. It is more like a lake among mountains, and less like a lake
in a dream. I went to it because I wanted to get into the Yoho
Valley, if only for a day, and the trail from Emerald Lake into the
Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque of all. Even
superficially to see the valley takes four days, and I had left
myself with only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit that I
asked the manageress of the lake chalet if I could at least get
within sight of the valley and back before dark. She said that if I
started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony, the thing could just be
done. I said that I had tried one or two mountain ponies, and did
not care about them when I was in a hurry.
[Illustration: ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY.]
'Oh, but I'll give you a slicker,' said the manageress. 'You see
there's no run on {207} the ponies at present, and I'll ask the man
to give you his very best. He'll just get you there and back in
time.'
I thanked her and said I would try the slicker; and, half an hour
later, the slicker and I were skirting the wooded shore of the
Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain pony, quite a fast trot. We
were alone together. There were a few guests at the chalet, but the
lateness of the season and the snow-clouds that loomed on the horizon
had deterred any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley trip that
day. Earlier in the year, there would have been quite a party riding
together with a guide in the direction I was taking, for there are
four camps in the valley, placed at picturesque points an easy day's
ride apart, where you may rest and sleep, one night beneath a
waterfall, the next on the edge of a glacier, with the ponies
tethered round, and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so that you
feel that you are pioneering, but pioneering luxuriously.
But now, as I have said, it was late in the season, and the
snow-clouds were holding themselves in the sky ready for further
attacks, and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so that no one else
thought the Yoho Valley {208} tempting enough, and it was certain I
should have it all to myself if I got there.
The trail was not difficult to follow. There, at the end of the
lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white
line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The
slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake;
he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might
have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp,
green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles); and he trotted up
the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for
an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide.
The trail was less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling stones,
and though it wound continually, its most generous spirals left it,
to my fancy, almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders and
hanging trees and little cataracts that shot through air from some
invisible lips of stone above--between shadowy crags and over
unprotected places where the sun glared. In the end the slicker
brought me to the pass itself, and we rode into a dark wood there,
and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and the trail grew stickier and
stickier, and the {209} pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far
below, was the Yoho Valley.
The story of the boy who cried 'wolf' when there was no wolf is a
familiar one, but much more familiar in everyday life is the story of
the man who cries 'lion' when there is no lion. You know him and you
don't believe him. You know that, moved by the immoderate enthusiasm
which is the chief qualification for the profession of writing, he is
doing his level best to make you believe that the object he is
presenting to you is a lion, for the simple reason that if you
believe it, you will be more attracted by it and him. Canada, being
a much-advertised country at present, is full of lions. 'The finest
view in Canada. Yes, sir.' How often I heard that remark! How
often it turned out to be an overstatement. How distrustfully I came
to listen to it.
Was it, then, that for some months I had imbibed the Canadian air,
that when I reached the Rockies I too was carried away, and became as
immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian? I do not know. I merely
have to confess that I was carried away, that I have already cried
'lion' more than once, and that I must do so once again now that I
have got to the Yoho Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity--and
{210} that of literature--by using an asterisk at these critical
points, or two asterisks if his emotions are very poignant. But I,
who have to fill paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid of
exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho. This valley of enormous trees
spiring up from unseen gorges to wellnigh unseen heights; of
cataracts that fall in foam a thousand feet; of massed innumerable
glaciers; this valley into which it seems you could drop all
Switzerland, and still look down--is not easily overpraised. The
difficulty is to praise it at all adequately.
It seemed to me as I rode on along the high trail that sometimes
edged out to the gulf below and sometimes swerved back from it, that
one of the wonders of the valley was a thing that in smaller places
would have made for disappointment, and that is that it lies, and
always has lain, outside the human radius. It has none of those
connections with men that set us thrilling in other parts. No
Hannibal ever led his army by this route across these mountains. No
hardy tribesmen watched the approach of an enemy among its crags, or
bred among them a race of mountaineers. No gods dwelt on its
heights, and no poets ever came near to sing them. History {211} has
nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little valleys have their
stories and their songs, their memories and their miracles. They are
haunted still with those forgotten mysteries which stir men's fancies
more deeply than things remembered or discovered can. This valley
walled about with mountains has been above and beyond men's ken from
the beginning of the world: and now that men have come into it, they
find nothing to discover in it except its vastness and immunity from
the touch of men. It strikes one even now as not only devoid of
human adjuncts but needless of them. A man no more looks for legends
there than he would look for them in the centre of a typhoon.
I suppose that men did pass through it--even before the valley became
a known part of the world, and even a sight for tourists. It was
not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by the foot of man. A few
prospectors must have passed this way from time to time many years
ago. Some may have died there for all one knows. Indian hunters,
too, would enter the valley in pursuit of game. But no one possessed
it; no one gave it the human air: or, if they did, the records are
lost. Prospectors tell us only of their finds, nothing {212} of
their lives. Of the Indians, some one someday may, perhaps, find
some traces. At present their white brothers are little troubled by
them or their history or their origin. Canadians are content to
think of them as a primitive, decaying people who came from God knows
where to a country they never realised was God's. It will be easier
to forget them than to understand them, these strange men with faces
no more expressive than wood, who, if they ever came to the Yoho
Valley, must have passed through it more like trees walking among the
trees than like men that stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and
a name.
Shadowy, disregardable creatures, then, as uninfluential as the
slicker and myself, may have roamed the valley in times past and left
no more traces upon it. We two realising, I trust, our minuteness
and unimportance, went on, as it turned out, far beyond the point
intended for our afternoon's excursion. In contemplation of the
valley I had given the slicker the rein, and he, poor pony, no doubt
thought that he was bound for the first camp, there to rest the night
in the ordinary course. Presently I found him, his two front feet
planted firmly together, sliding down the {213} slipperiest piece of
trail we had yet encountered, sliding and sliding till we had got to
the very bottom of the valley--whereupon I discovered that we had
indeed attained the first camp.
It was a queer, unexpected sight--a few little lean-to tents and a
couple of log huts, standing side by side on a flat piece of the
valley floor, just beyond the spray of a cascade that dropped from
ledge to ledge of the mountain opposite, starting so high up that it
seemed to spring from the sky. The place seemed deserted, but while
the slicker and I paused to look about us, out of the biggest tent
there came a small, silent, yellow figure. It did not speak to me,
but only stared, and I, having stared back for a little and having
wondered if it were some gnome peculiar to the valley, suddenly saw
that it had a pigtail, and remembered that I had been told that there
was a Chinese cook in every camp.
'Is this the first camp?' I therefore asked.
'Yup!'
'Can you give me some tea?'
'Yup!' he repeated, and vanished into the tent whence he had come.
By the time I had tethered the slicker on the grassiest spot I could
find, that boy had {214} tea ready. He stared at me while I ate it,
stared at me when I paid him for it, and stared at me when, having
offered the slicker some bread and sugar in vain, I remounted him and
set him on the homeward trail. I had not a watch with me. But it
was evident from the position of the sun that we had very little
daylight left for the return ride. Dusk, indeed, came on just as we
reached the other side of the pass, with a mountain side still to
descend. Dusk and an exceedingly cold wind--in the face of which
that corkscrew trail seemed doubly steep. It was one of those
occasions when vowing candles to one's patron saint might have added
to one's peace of mind. But I have no patron saint and could but
give the reins to the slicker, and he rewarded me for my trust by not
falling down till we had actually accomplished the descent and were
on the pebbled beach. Then, in the pitch-dark night, we both rolled
over together. A match, lighted with difficulty, revealed the fact
that neither of us was injured; and so, very steadily and cautiously,
we moved on to the chalet, where we arrived to find dinner finished.
But we had seen splendid things, the slicker and I.
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