Pacific side was going to be easy. It was by far the most nerve-racking
part of the trip. Yet we started off blithely enough. Perhaps Buddy knew
that he was the first horse to make that desperate excursion. He
developed a strange nervousness, and took to leaping off the trail in
bad places, so that one moment I was a part of the procession and the
next was likely to be six feet above the trail on a rocky ledge, with no
apparent way to get down.
We had expected that there would be less snow on the western slope, but
at the beginning of the trip we found snow everywhere. And whereas
before the rock-slides had been wretchedly uncomfortable but at
comparatively low altitudes, now we found ourselves climbing across
slides which hugged the mountain thousands of feet above the valley.
Our nerves began to go, too, I think, on that last day. We were plainly
frightened, not for ourselves but each for the other. There were many
places where to dislodge a stone was to lose it as down a bottomless
well. There was one frightful spot where it was necessary to go through
a waterfall on a narrow ledge slippery with moss, where the water
dropped straight, uncounted feet to the valley below.
The Little Boy paused blithely, his reins over his arm, and surveyed the
scenery from the center of this death-trap.
"If anybody slipped here," he said, "he'd fall quite a distance." Then
he kicked a stone to see it go.
"_Quit that!_" said the Head, in awful tones.
Midway of the descent, we estimated that we should lose at least ten
horses. The pack was behind us, and there was no way to discover how
they were faring. But as the ledges were never wide enough for a horse
and the one leading him to move side by side, it seemed impossible that
the pack-ponies with their wide burdens could edge their way along.
[Illustration: _Watching the pack-train coming down at Cascade Pass_]
I had mounted Buddy again. I was too fatigued to walk farther, and,
besides, I had fallen so often that I felt he was more sure-footed than
I. Perhaps my narrowest escape on that trip was where a huge stone had
slipped across the ledge we were following. Buddy, afraid to climb its
slippery sides, undertook to leap it. There was one terrible moment when
he failed to make a footing with his hind feet and we hung there over
the gorge. After that, Dan Devore led him.
In spite of our difficulties, we got down to the timber-line rather
quickly. But there trouble seemed to increase rather than diminish.
Trees had fallen across the way, and dangerous detours on uncertain
footing were necessary to get round them. The warm rains of the Pacific
Slope had covered the mountain-sides with thick vegetation also. Our
way, hardly less steep than on the day before, was overgrown with
greenery that was often a trap for the unwary. And even when, at last,
we were down beyond the imminent danger of breaking our necks at every
step, there were more difficulties. The vegetation was rank,
tremendously high. We worked our way through it, lost to each other and
to the world. Wilderness snows had turned the small streams to roaring
rivers and spread them over flats through which we floundered. So long
was it since the trail had been used that it was often difficult to tell
where it took off from the other side of the stream. And our horses were
growing very weary. They had made the entire trip without grain and with
such bits of pasture as they could pick up in the mountains. Now it was
a long time since they had had even grass.
It will never be possible to know how many miles we covered in that
Cascade Pass trip. As Mr. Hilligoss said, mountain miles were measured
with a coonskin, and they threw in the tail. Often to make a mile's
advance we traveled four on the mountain-side.
So when they tell me that it was a trifle of sixteen miles from the top
of Cascade Pass to the camp-site we made that night, I know that it was
nearer thirty. In point of difficulties, it was a thousand.
Yet the last part of the trip, had we not been too weary to enjoy it,
was superbly beautiful. There was a fine rain falling. The undergrowth
was less riotous and had taken on the form of giant ferns, ten feet
high, which overhung the trail. Here were great cypress trees thirty-six
feet in circumference--a forest of them. We rode through green aisles
where even the death of the forest was covered by soft moss. Out of the
green and moss-covered trunks of dead giants, new growth had sprung, new
trees, hanging gardens of ferns.
There had been much talk of Mineral Park. It was our objective point for
camp that night, and I think I had gathered that it was to be a
settlement. I expected nothing less than a post-office and perhaps some
miners' cabins. When, at the end of that long, hard day, we reached
Mineral Park at twilight and in a heavy rain, I was doomed to
disappointment.
Mineral Park consists of a deserted shack in a clearing perhaps forty
feet square, on the bank of a mountain stream. All around it is
impenetrable forest. The mountains converge here so that the valley
becomes a canon. So dense was the growth that we put up our tents on the
trail itself.
In the little clearing round the empty shack, the horses were tied in
the cold rain. It was impossible to let them loose, for we could never
have found them again. Our hearts ached that night for the hungry
creatures; the rain had brought a cold wind and they could not even move
about to keep warm.
I was too tired to eat that night. I went to bed and lay in my tent,
listening to the sound of the rain on the canvas. The camp-stove was set
up in the trail, and the others gathered round it, eating in the rain.
But, weary as I was, I did not sleep. For the first time, terror of the
forest gripped me. It menaced; it threatened.
The roar of the river sounded like the rush of flame. I lay there and
wondered what would happen if the forest took fire. For the gentle
summer rain would do little good once a fire started. There would be no
way out. The giant cliffs would offer no refuge. We could not even have
reached them through the jungle had we tried. And forest-fires were
common enough. We had ridden over too many burned areas not to realize
that.
XVII
OUT TO CIVILIZATION
It was still raining in the morning. The skies were gray and sodden and
the air was moist. We stood round the camp-fire and ate our fried ham,
hot coffee, and biscuits. It was then that the Head, prompted by
sympathy, fed his horse the rain-soaked biscuit, the apple, the two
lumps of sugar, and the raw egg.
Yet, in spite of the weather, we were jubilant. The pack-train had come
through without the loss of a single horse. Again the impossible had
become possible. And that day was to see us out of the mountains and in
peaceful green valleys, where the horses could eat their fill.
The sun came out as we started. Had it not been for the horses, we
should have been entirely happy. But sympathy for them had become an
obsession. We rode slowly to save them; we walked when we could. It was
strange to go through that green wonderland and find not a leaf the
horses could eat. It was all moss, ferns, and evergreens.
From the semi-arid lands east of the Cascades to the rank vegetation of
the Pacific side was an extraordinary change. Trees grew to enormous
sizes. In addition to the great cedars, there were hemlocks fifteen and
eighteen feet in circumference. Only the strong trees survive in these
valleys, and by that ruthless selection of nature weak young saplings
die early. So we found cedar, hemlock, lodge-pole pine, white and
Douglas fir, cottonwood, white pine, spruce, and alder of enormous size.
The brake ferns were the most common, often growing ten feet tall. We
counted five varieties of ferns growing in profusion, among them brake
ferns, sword-ferns, and maidenhair, most beautiful and luxuriant. The
maidenhair fern grew in masses, covering dead trunks of trees and making
solid walls of delicate green beside the trail.
"Silent Lawrie" knew them all. He knew every tiniest flower and plant
that thrust its head above the leaf-mould. He saw them all, too.
Peanuts, his horse, made his own way now, and the naturalist sat a
trifle sideways in his saddle and showed me his discoveries.
I am no naturalist, so I rode behind him, notebook in hand, and I made a
list something like this. If there are any errors they are not the
naturalist's, but mine, because, although I have written a great deal on
a horse's back, I am not proof against the accident of Whiskers stirring
a yellow-jackets' nest on the trail, or of Buddy stumbling, weary beast
that he was, over a root on the path.
This is my list: red-stemmed dogwood; bunchberries, in blossom on the
higher reaches, in bloom below; service-berries, salmon-berries;
skunk-cabbage, beloved by bears, and the roots of which the Indians
roast and eat; above four thousand feet, white rhododendrons, and, above
four thousand five hundred feet, heather; hellebore also in the high
places; thimble-berries and red elderberries, tag-alder, red
honeysuckle, long stretches of willows in the creek-bottoms; vining
maples, too, and yew trees, the wood of which the Indians use for
making bows.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT BY FRED H. KISER, PORTLAND, OREGON
_A field of bear-grass_]
Around Cloudy Pass we found the red monkey-flower. In different places
there was the wild parsnip; the ginger-plant, with its heart-shaped leaf
and blossom, buried in the leaf-mould, its crushed leaves redolent of
ginger; masses of yellow violets, twinflowers, ox-eye daisies, and
sweet-in-death, which is sold on the streets in the West as we sell
sweet lavender. There were buttercups, purple asters, bluebells,
goat's-beard, columbines, Mariposa lilies, bird's-bill, trillium,
devil's-club, wild white heliotrope, brick-leaved spirea, wintergreen,
everlasting.
And there are still others, where Buddy collided with the yellow-jacket,
that I find I cannot read at all.
Something lifted for me that day as Buddy and I led off down that fat,
green valley, with the pass farther and farther behind--a weight off my
spirit, a deadly fear of accident, not to myself but to the Family,
which had obsessed me for the last few days. But now I could twist in
my saddle and see them all, ruddy and sound and happy, whistling as they
rode. And I knew that it was all right. It had been good for them and
good for me. It is always good to do a difficult thing. And no one has
ever fought a mountain and won who is not the better for it. The
mountains are not for the weak or the craven, or the feeble of mind or
body.
We went on, to the distant tinkle of the bell on the lead-horse of the
pack-train.
It was that day that "Silent Lawrie" spoke I remember, because he had
said so little before, and because what he said was so well worth
remembering.
"Why can't all this sort of thing be put into music?" he asked. "It _is_
music. Think of it, the drama of it all!"
Then he went on, and this is what "Silent Lawrie" wants to have written.
I pass it on to the world, and surely it can be done. It starts at dawn,
with the dew, and the whistling of the packers as they go after the
horses. Then come the bells of the horses as they come in, the smoke of
the camp-fire, the first sunlight on the mountains, the saddling and
packing. And all the time the packers are whistling.
Then the pack starts out on the trail, the bells of the leaders
jingling, the rattle and crunch of buckles and saddle-leather, the click
of the horses' feet against the rocks, the swish as they ford a singing
stream. The wind is in the trees and birds are chirping. Then comes the
long, hard day, the forest, the first sight of snow-covered peaks, the
final effort, and camp.
After that, there is the thrush's evening song, the afterglow, the
camp-fire, and the stars. And over all is the quiet of the night, and
the faint bells of grazing horses, like the silver ringing of the bell
at a mass.
I wish I could do it.
At noon that day in the Skagit Valley, we found our first civilization,
a camp where a man was cutting cedar blocks for shingles. He looked
absolutely astounded when our long procession drew in around his shanty.
He meant only one thing to us; he meant oats. If he had oats, we were
saved. If he had no oats, it meant again long hours of traveling with
our hungry horses.
He had a bag of oats. But he was not inclined, at first, to dispose of
them, and, as a matter of fact, he did not sell them to us at all. When
we finally got them from him, it was only on our promise to send back
more oats. Money was of no use to him there in the wilderness; but oats
meant everything.
Thirty-one horses we drove into that little bit of a clearing under the
cedar trees, perhaps a hundred feet by thirty. Such wild excitement as
prevailed among the horses when the distribution of oats began, such
plaintive whinnying and restless stirring! But I think they behaved much
better than human beings would have under the same circumstances. And at
last each was being fed--such a pathetically small amount, too, hardly
more than a handful apiece, it seemed. In his eagerness, the Little
Boy's horse breathed in some oats, and for a time it looked as though he
would cough himself to death.
The wood-cutter's wife was there. We were the one excitement in her
long months of isolation. I can still see her rather pathetic face as
she showed me the lace she was making, the one hundred and one ways in
which she tried to fill her lonely hours.
All through the world there are such women, shut away from their kind,
staying loyally with the man they have chosen through days of aching
isolation. That woman had children. She could not take them into the
wilderness with her, so they were in a town, and she was here in the
forest, making things for them and fretting about them and longing for
them. There was something tragic in her face as she watched us mount to
go on.
We were to reach Marblemont that day and there to leave our horses.
After they had rested and recovered, Dan Devore was to take them back
over the range again, while we went on to civilization and a railroad.
We promised the wood-cutter to send the oats back with the outfit; and
when we sent them, we sent at the same time some magazines to that
lonely wife and mother on the Skagit.
Late in the afternoon, we emerged from the forest. It was like coming
from a darkened room into the light. One moment we were in the aisles of
that great green cathedral, the next there was an open road and the
sunlight and houses. We prodded the horses with our heels and raced down
the road. Surprised inhabitants came out and stared. We waved to them;
we loved them; we loved houses and dogs and cows and apple trees. But
most of all we loved level places.
We were in time, too, for the railroad strike had not yet taken place.
As Bob got off his horse, he sang again that little ditty with which,
during the most strenuous hours of the trip, we had become familiar:--
"Oh, 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."
THE END
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
The poems on pages 140 and 188, were punctuated differently. This was
retained.
On page 90, Dvorak is printed with a hacek over the r. The contraints of
text preclude this from being used in this one instance.
End of Project Gutenberg's Tenting To-night, by Mary Roberts Rinehart