glad of its warmth, for although the days were hot, the nights, with the
wind from the snow-covered peaks overhead, were very cold. The tall,
unbranching gray spruce-trunks rose round it like the pillars of a
colonnade. The forester blew up his air bed. In front of the
supper-fire, the shadowy figures of the cooks moved back and forward.
From a near-by glacier came an occasional crack, followed by a roar
which told of ice dropping into cavernous depths below. The Little Boy
cleaned his gun and dreamed of mighty exploits.
We rested all the next day at Camp Romany--rested and fished, while
three of the more adventurous spirits climbed a near-by mountain. Late
in the afternoon they rode in, bringing in their midst Joe, who had, at
the risk of his life, slid a distance which varied in the reports from
one hundred yards to a mile and a half down a snow-field, and had hung
fastened on the brink of eternity until he was rescued.
Very white was Joe that evening, white and bruised. It was twenty-four
hours before he began to regret that the camera had not been turned on
him at the time.
Not until we left Camp Romany did we feel that we were really off for
the trip. And yet that first day out from Romany was not agreeable
going. The trail was poor, although there came a time when we looked
back on it as superlative. The sun was hot, and there was no shade.
Years ago, prospectors hunting for minerals had started forest-fires to
level the ridges. The result was the burning-over of perhaps a hundred
square miles of magnificent forest. The second growth which has come up
is scrubby, a wilderness of young trees and chaparral, through which
progress was difficult and uninteresting.
Up the bottom of the great glacier-basin toward the mountain at its
head, we made our slow and painful way. More dust, more mosquitoes. Even
the beauty of the snow-capped peaks overhead could not atone for the
ugliness of that destroyed region. Yet, although it was not lovely, it
was vastly impressive. Literally, hundreds of waterfalls cascaded down
the mountain wall from hidden lakes and glaciers above, and towering
before us was the mountain wall which we were to climb later that day.
We had seen no human creature since leaving the lake, but as we halted
for luncheon by a steep little river, we suddenly found that we were not
alone. Standing beside the trail was an Italian bandit with a knife two
feet long in his hands.
Ha! Come adventure! Come romance! Come rifles and pistols and all the
arsenal, including the Little Boy, with pure joy writ large over him! A
bandit, armed to the teeth!
But this is a disappointing world. He was the cook from a mine--strange,
the way we met cooks, floating around loose in a world that seems to be
growing gradually cookless. And he carried with him his knife and his
bread-pan, which was, even then, hanging to a branch of a tree.
We fed him, and he offered to sing. The Optimist nudged me.
"Now, listen," he said; "these fellows can _sing_. Be quiet, everybody!"
The bandit twisted up his mustachios, smiled beatifically, and took up a
position in the trail, feet apart, eyes upturned.
And then--he stopped.
"I start a leetle high," he said; "I start again."
So he started again, and the woods receded from around us, and the
rushing of the river died away, and nothing was heard in that lonely
valley but the most hideous sounds that ever broke a primeval silence
into rags and tatters.
When, at last, he stopped, we got on our horses and rode on, a bitter
and disillusioned party of adventurers whose first bubble of enthusiasm
had been pricked.
It was four o'clock when we began the ascent of the switchback at the
top of the valley. Up and up we went, dismounting here and there, going
slowly but eagerly. For, once over the wall, we were beyond the reach
of civilization. So strange a thing is the human mind! We who were for
most of the year most civilized, most dependent on our kind and the
comforts it has wrought out of a primitive world, now we were savagely
resentful of it. We wanted neither men nor houses. Stirring in us had
commenced that primeval call that comes to all now and then, the longing
to be alone with Mother Earth, savage, tender, calm old Mother Earth.
And yet we were still in touch with the world. For even here man had
intruded. Hanging to the cliff were the few buildings of a small mine
which sends out its ore by pack-pony. I had already begun to feel the
aloofness of the quiet places, so it was rather disconcerting to have a
miner with a patch over one eye come to the doorway of one of the
buildings and remark that he had read some of my political articles and
agreed with them most thoroughly.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY L. D. LINDSLEY
_Looking out of ice-cave, Lyman Glacier_]
That was a long day. We traveled from early morning until long after
late sundown. Up the switchback to a green plateau we went, meeting
our first ice there, and here again that miracle of the mountains,
meadow flowers and snow side by side.
Far behind us strung the pack-outfit, plodding doggedly along. From the
rim we could look back down that fire-swept valley toward Heart Lake and
the camp we had left. But there was little time for looking back.
Somewhere ahead was a brawling river descending in great leaps from
Lyman Lake, which lay in a basin above and beyond. Our camp, that night,
was to be on the shore of Lyman Lake, at the foot of Lyman Glacier. And
we had still far to go.
Mr. Hilligoss met us on the trail. He had found a camp-site by the lake
and had seen a bear and a deer. There were wild ducks also.
Now and then there are scenes in the mountains that defy the written
word. The view from Cloudy Pass is one; the outlook from Cascade Pass is
another. But for sheer loveliness there are few things that surpass
Lyman Lake at sunset, its great glacier turned to pink, the towering
granite cliffs which surround it dark purple below, bright rose at the
summits. And lying there, still with the stillness of the ages, the
quiet lake.
There was, as a matter of fact, nothing to disturb its quiet. Not a
fish, so far as we could discover, lived in its opalescent water, cloudy
as is all glacial water. It is only good to look at, is Lyman Lake, and
there are no people to look at it.
Set in its encircling, snow-covered mountains, it lies fifty-five
hundred feet above sea-level. We had come up in two days from eleven
hundred feet, a considerable climb. That night, for the first time, we
saw the northern lights--at first, one band like a cold finger set
across the sky, then others, shooting ribbons of cold fire, now bright,
now dim, covering the northern horizon and throwing into silhouette the
peaks over our heads.
XII
CLOUDY PASS AND THE AGNES CREEK VALLEY
I think I have said that one of the purposes of our expedition was to
hunt. We were to spend a day or two at Lyman Lake, and the sportsmen
were busy by the camp-fire that evening, getting rifles and shotguns in
order and preparing fishing-tackle.
At dawn the next morning, which was at four o'clock, one of the packers
roused the Big Boy with the information that there were wild ducks on
the lake. He was wakened with extreme difficulty, put on his bedroom
slippers, picked up his shotgun, and, still in his sleeping-garments,
walked some ten feet from the mouth of his tent. There he yawned,
discharged both barrels of his gun in the general direction of the
ducks, yawned again, and went back to bed.
I myself went on a hunting-excursion on the second day at Lyman Lake.
Now, theoretically, I am a mighty hunter. I have always expected to
shoot something worth while and be photographed with my foot on it, and
a "bearer"--whatever that may be--holding my gun in the background. So
when Mr. Fred proposed an early start and a search along the side of
Chiwawa Mountain for anything from sheep to goats, including a grizzly
if possible, my imagination was roused. So jealous were we that the
first game should be ours that the party was kept a profound secret. Mr.
Fred and Mrs. Fred, the Head, and I planned it ourselves.
We would rise early, and, armed to the teeth, would stalk the skulking
bear to his den.
Rising early is also a theory of mine. I approve of it. But I do not
consider it rising early to get up at three o'clock in the morning.
Three o'clock in the morning is late at night. The moon was still up. It
was frightfully cold. My shoes were damp and refused to go on. I could
not find any hairpins. And I recalled a number of stories of the extreme
disagreeableness of bears when not shot in a vital spot.
With all our hurry, it was four o'clock when we were ready to start. No
sun was in sight, but already a faint rose-colored tint was on the tops
of the mountains. Whiskers raised a sleepy head and looked at us from
Dan's bed. We tiptoed through the camp and started.
We climbed. Then we climbed some more. Then we kept on climbing. Mr.
Fred led the way. He had the energy of a high-powered car and the
hopefulness of a pacifist. From ledge to ledge he scrambled, turning now
and then to wave an encouraging hand. It was not long before I ceased to
have strength to wave back. Hours went on. Five hundred feet, one
thousand feet, fifteen hundred feet above the lake. I confided to the
Head, between gasps, that I was dying. We had seen no living thing; we
continued to see no living thing. Two thousand feet, twenty-five hundred
feet. There was not enough air in the world to fill my collapsed lungs.
Once Mr. Fred found a track, and scurried off in a new direction. Still
no result. The sun was up by that time, and I judged that it was about
noon. It was only six-thirty.
A sort of desperation took possession of us all. We would keep up with
Mr. Fred or die trying. And then, suddenly, we were on the very roof of
the world, on the top of Cloudy Pass. All the kingdoms of the earth lay
stretched out around us, and all the kingdoms of the earth were empty.
Now, the usual way to climb Cloudy Pass is to take a good businesslike
horse and sit on his back. Then, by devious and circuitous routes, with
frequent rests, the horse takes you up. When there is a place the horse
cannot manage, you get off and hold his tail, and he pulls you. Even at
that, it is a long business and a painful one. But it is better--oh,
far, far better!--than the way we had taken.
Have you ever reached a point where you fix your starting eyes on a
shrub or a rock ten feet ahead and struggle for it? And, having achieved
it, fix on another five feet farther on, and almost fail to get it?
Because, if you have not, you know nothing of this agony of tearing
lungs and hammering heart and throbbing muscles that is the
mountain-climber's price for achievement.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT BY L. D. LINDSLEY
_Looking southeast from Cloudy Pass_]
And then, after all, while resting on the top of the world with our feet
hanging over, discussing dilated hearts, because I knew mine would never
go back to normal, to see a ptarmigan, and have Mr. Fred miss it because
he wanted to shoot its head neatly off!
Strange birds, those ptarmigan. Quite fearless of man, because they know
him not or his evil works, on alarm they have the faculty of almost
instantly obliterating themselves. I have seen a mother bird and her
babies, on an alarm, so hide themselves on a bare mountain-side that not
so much as a bit of feather could be seen. But unless frightened, they
will wander almost under the hunter's feet.
I dare say they do not know how very delicious they are, especially
after a diet of salt meat.
As we sat panting on Cloudy Pass, the sun rose over the cliff of the
great granite bowl. The peaks turned from red to yellow. It was
absolutely silent. No trees rustled in the morning air. There were no
trees. Only, here and there, a few stunted evergreens, two or three feet
high, had rooted on the rock and clung there, gnarled and twisted from
their winter struggles.
Ears that had grown tired of the noises of cities grew rested. But our
ears were more rested than our bodies.
I have always believed that it is easier to go downhill than to go up.
This is not true. I say it with the deepest earnestness. After the first
five hundred feet of descent, progress down became agonizing. The
something that had gone wrong with my knees became terribly wrong; they
showed a tendency to bend backward; they shook and quivered.
The last mile of that four-mile descent was one of the most dreadful
experiences of my life. A broken thing, I crept into camp and tendered
mute apologies to Budweiser, my horse, called familiarly "Buddy."
(Although he was not the sort of horse one really became familiar with.)
The remainder of that day, Mrs. Fred and I lay under a mosquito-canopy,
played solitaire, and rested our aching bodies. The Forest Supervisor
climbed Lyman Glacier. The Head and the Little Boy made the circuit of
the lake, and had to be roped across the rushing river which is its
outlet. And the horses rested for the real hardship of the trip, which
was about to commence.
One thing should be a part of the equipment of every one who intends to
camp in the mountains near the snow-fields. This is a mosquito-tent.
Ours was brought by that experienced woodsman and mountaineer, Mr.
Hilligoss, and was made with a light-muslin top three feet long by the
width of double-width muslin. To this was sewed sides of cheese-cloth,
with double seams and reinforced corners. At the bottom it had an extra
piece of netting two feet wide, to prevent the insects from crawling
under.
Erecting such a shelter is very simple. Four stakes, five feet high,
were driven into the ground and the mosquito-canopy simply hung over
them.
We had no face-masks, except the red netting, but, for such a trip, a
mask is simple to make and occasionally most acceptable. The best one I
know--and it, too, is the Woodsman's invention--consists of a four-inch
band of wire netting; above it, whipped on, a foot of light muslin to be
tied round the hat, and, below, a border of cheese-cloth two feet deep,
with a rubber band. Such a mask does not stick to the face. Through the
wire netting, it is possible to shoot with accuracy. The rubber band
round the neck allows it to be lifted with ease.
I do not wish to give the impression that there were mosquitoes
everywhere. But when there were mosquitoes, there was nothing
clandestine about it.
The next day we crossed Cloudy Pass and started down the Agnes Creek
Valley. It was to be a forced march of twenty-five miles over a trail
which no one was sure existed. There had, at one time, been a trail, but
avalanches have a way, in these mountain valleys, of destroying all
landmarks, and rock-slides come down from the great cliffs, fill
creek-beds, and form swamps. Whether we could get down at all or not was
a question. To the eternal credit of our guides, we made it. For the
upper five miles below Cloudy Pass it was touch and go. Even with the
sharp hatchet of the Woodsman ahead, with his blazes on the trees where
the trail had been obliterated, it was the hardest kind of going.
Here were ditches that the horses leaped; here were rushing streams
where they could hardly keep their footing. Again, a long mile or two of
swamp and almost impenetrable jungle, where only the Woodsman's
axe-marks gave us courage to go on. We were mired at times, and again
there were long stretches over rock-slides, where the horses scrambled
like cats.
But with every mile there came a sense of exhilaration. We were making
progress.
There was little or no life to be seen. The Woodsman, going ahead of us,
encountered a brown bear reaching up for a cluster of salmon-berries. He
ambled away, quite unconcerned, and happily ignorant of that desperate
trio of junior Rineharts, bearing down on him with almost the entire
contents of the best gun shop in Spokane.
It should have been a great place for bears, that Agnes Creek Valley.
There were ripe huckleberries, service-berries, salmon-and
manzanita-berries. There were plenty of places where, if I had been a
bear, I should have been entirely happy--caves and great rocks, and
good, cold water. And I believe they were there. But thirty-one horses
and a sort of family tendency to see if there is an echo anywhere about,
and such loud inquiries as, "Are you all right, mother?" and "Who the
dickens has any matches?"--these things are fatal to seeing wild life.
Indeed, the next time I am overcome by one of my mad desires to see a
bear, I shall go to the zoo.
It was fifteen years, I believe, since Dan Devore had seen the Agnes
Creek Valley. From the condition of the trail, I am inclined to think
that Dan was the last man who had ever used it. And such a wonderland
as it is! Such marvels of flowers as we descended, such wild
tiger-lilies and columbines and Mariposa lilies! What berries and
queen's-cup and chalice-cup and bird's-bill! There was trillium, too,
although it was not in bloom, and devil's-club, a plant which stings and
sets up a painful swelling. There were yew trees, those trees which the
Indians use for making their bows, wild white rhododendron and spirea,
cottonwood, white pine, hemlock, Douglas spruce, and white fir.
Everywhere there was mountain-ash, the berries beloved of bears. And
high up on the mountain there was always heather, beautiful to look at
but slippery, uncertain footing for horse and man.
Twenty-five miles, broken with canter and trot, is not more than I have
frequently taken on a brisk sunny morning at home. But twenty-five miles
at a slow walk, now in a creek-bed, now on the edge of a cliff, is a
different matter. The last five miles of the Agnes Creek trip were a
long despair. We found and located new muscles that the anatomists have
overlooked.--A really first-class anatomist ought never to make a chart
without first climbing a high mountain and riding all day on the
creature alluded to in this song of Bob's, which gained a certain
popularity among the male members of the party.
"A sailor's life is bold and free.
He lives upon the bright blue sea.
He has to work like h----, of course,
But he doesn't have to ride on a darned old horse."
It was dark when we reached our camp-ground at the foot of the valley. A
hundred feet below, in a gorge, ran the Stehekin River, a noisy and
turbulent stream full of trout. We groped through the darkness for our
tents that night and fell into bed more dead than alive. But at three
o'clock the next morning, the junior Rineharts, following Mr. Fred, were
off for bear, reappearing at ten, after breakfast was over, with an
excited story of having seen one very close but having unaccountably
missed it.
There was no water for the horses at camp that night, and none for them
in the morning. There was no way to get them down to the river, and the
poor animals were almost desperate with thirst. They were having little
enough to eat even then, at the beginning of the trip, and it was hard
to see them without water, too.
XIII
CANON FISHING AND A TELEGRAM
It was eleven o'clock the next morning before I led Buddy--I had
abandoned "Budweiser" in view of the drought--into a mountain stream and
let him drink. He would have rolled in it, too, but I was on his back
and I fiercely restrained him.
The next day was a comparatively short trip. There was a trapper's cabin
at the fork of Bridge Creek in the Stehekin River. There we were to
spend the night before starting on our way to Cascade Pass. As it turned
out, we spent two days there. There was a little grass for the horses,
and we learned of a canon, some five or six miles off our trail, which
was reported as full of fish.
The most ardent of us went there the next day--Mr. Hilligoss, Weaver,
and "Silent Lawrie" and the Freds and Bob and the Big Boy and the Little
Boy and Joe. And, without expecting it, we happened on adventure.
Have you ever climbed down a canon with rocky sides, a straight and
precipitous five hundred feet, clinging with your finger nails to any
bit of green that grows from the cliff, and to footholds made by an axe,
and carrying a fly-book and a trout-rod which is an infinitely precious
trout-rod? Also, a share of the midday lunch and twenty pounds more
weight than you ought to have by the beauty-scale? Because, unless you
have, you will never understand that trip.
It was a series of wild drops, of blood-curdling escapes, of slips and
recoveries, of bruises and abrasions. But at last we made it, and there
was the river!
I have still in mind a deep pool where the water, rushing at tremendous
speed over a rocky ledge, fell perhaps fifteen feet. I had fixed my eyes
on that pool early in the day, but it seemed impossible of access. To
reach it it was necessary again to scale a part of the cliff, and,
clinging to its face, to work one's way round along a ledge perhaps
three inches wide. When I had once made it, with the aid of friendly
hands and a leather belt, by which I was lowered, I knew one thing--knew
it inevitably. I was there for life. Nothing would ever take me back
over that ledge.
However, I was there, and there was no use wasting time. For there were
fish there. Now and then they jumped. But they did not take the fly. The
water seethed and boiled, and I stood still and fished, because a slip
on that spray-covered ledge and I was gone, to be washed down to Lake
Chelan, and lie below sea-level in the Cascade Mountains. Which might be
a glorious sort of tomb, but it did not appeal to me.
I tried different flies with no result. At last, with a weighted line
and a fish's eye, I got my first fish--the best of the day, and from
that time on I forgot the danger.
Some day, armed with every enticement known to the fisherman, I am going
back to that river. For there, under a log, lurks the wiliest trout I
have ever encountered. In full view he stayed during the entire time of
my sojourn. He came up to the fly, leaped over it, made faces at it.
Then he would look up at me scornfully.
[Illustration: _Stream fishing_]
"Old tricks," he seemed to say. "Old stuff--not good enough." I dare say
he is still there.
Late in the day, we got out of that canon. Got out at infinite peril and
fatigue, climbed, struggled, stumbled, held on, pulled. I slipped once
and had a bad knee for six weeks. Never once did I dare to look back and
down. It was always up, and the top was always receding. And when we
reached camp, the Head, who had been on an excursion of his own, refused
to be thrilled, and spent the evening telling how he had been climbing
over the top of the world on his hands and knees. In sheer scorn, we let
him babble.
But my hat is off to him, after all, for he had ready for us, and swears
to this day to its truth, the best fish-story of the trip.
Lying on the top of one of our packing-cases was a great bull-trout. Now
a bull-trout has teeth, and held in a vise-like grip in the teeth of
this one was a smaller trout. In the mouth of the small trout was a
gray-and-black fly. The Head maintained that he had hooked the small
fish and was about to draw it to shore when the bull-trout leaped out of
the water, caught the small fish, and held on grimly. The Head thereupon
had landed them both.
In proof of this, as I have said, he had the two fish on top of a
packing-case. But it is not a difficult matter to place a small trout
cross-wise in the jaws of a bull-trout, and to this day we are not quite
certain.
There _were_ tooth-marks on the little fish, but, as one of the guides
said, he wouldn't put it past the Head to have made them himself.
That night we received a telegram. I remember it with great
distinctness, because the man who brought it in charged fifteen dollars
for delivering it. He came at midnight, and how he had reached us no one
will ever know. The telegram notified us that a railroad strike was
about to take place and that we should get out as soon as possible.
Early the next morning we held a conference. It was about as far back as
it was to go ahead over the range. And before us still lay the Great
Adventure of the pass.
We took a vote on it at last and the "ayes" carried. We would go ahead,
making the best time we could. If the railroads had stopped when we got
out, we would merely turn our pack-outfit toward the east and keep on
moving. We had been all summer in the saddle by that time, and a matter
of thirty-five hundred miles across the continent seemed a trifle.
Dan Devore brought us other news that morning, however. Cascade Pass was
closed with snow. A miner who lived alone somewhere up the gorge had
brought in the information. It was a serious moment. We could get to
Doubtful Lake, but it was unlikely we could get any farther. The
comparatively simple matter thus became a complicated one, for Doubtful
Lake was not only a detour; it was almost inaccessible, especially for
horses. But we hated to acknowledge defeat. So again we voted to go
ahead.