We discovered another beautiful sapphire lake in a setting of green
hills. Several ducks were gliding over its surface. We watched them, in
concealment of course, and we saw a fish hawk capture his dinner. Then we
quietly continued along the ridge of a high bluff until we came to an
outstretched point, where beneath us lay the Snake Valley with its
fickle-minded river winding through.
The sun was just dropping behind the great Tetons, massed in front of us
across the valley. We sat on our horses motionless, looking at the
peaceful and majestic scene, when out from the shadows on the sandy
flats far below us came a dark shadow, and then leisurely another and
another. They were elk, two bulls and a doe, grazing placidly in a little
meadow surrounded by trees.
We kept as still as statues.
Nimrod said. "There is your chance."
"Yes," I echoed, "here is my chance."
We waited until they passed into the trees again. Then we dismounted.
Nimrod handed me the rifle, saying:
"There are seven shots in it. I will stay behind with the horses."
I took the gun without a word and crept down the mountain side, keeping
under cover as much as possible. The sunset quiet surrounded me; the
deadly quiet of but one idea--to creep upon that elk and kill
him--possessed me. That gradual painful drawing nearer to my prey seemed
a lifetime. I was conscious of nothing to the right, or to the left of
me; only of what I was going to do. There were pine woods and scrub brush
and more woods. Then, suddenly, I saw him standing by the river about to
drink. I crawled nearer until I was within one hundred and fifty yards of
him, when at the snapping of a twig he raised his head with its crown of
branching horn. He saw nothing, so turned again to drink.
Now was the time. I crawled a few feet nearer and raised the deadly
weapon. The stag turned partly away from me. In another moment he would
be gone. I sighted along the metal barrel and a terrible bang went
booming through the dim secluded spot. The elk raised his proud, antlered
head and looked in my direction. Another shot tore through the air.
Without another move the animal dropped where he stood. He lay as still
as the stones beside him, and all was quiet again in the twilight.
I sat on the ground where I was and made no attempt to go near him.
So that was all. One instant a magnificent breathing thing, the
next--nothing.
Death had been so sudden. I had no regret, I had no triumph--just a sort
of wonder at what I had done--a surprise that the breath of life could be
taken away so easily.
Meanwhile, Nimrod had become alarmed at the long silence, and, tying the
horses, had followed me down the mountain. He was nearly down when he
heard the shots, and now came rushing up.
"I have done it," I said in a dull tone, pointing at the dark, quiet
object on the bank.
"You surely have."
Nimrod paced the distance--it was one hundred and thirty-five yards--as
we went up to the elk. How beautiful his coat was, glossy and shaded in
browns, and those great horns--eleven points--that did not seem so big
now to my eyes.
Nimrod examined the carcass.
"You are an apt pupil," he said. "You put a bullet through his heart and
another through his brain."
"Yes," I said; "he never knew what killed him." But I felt no glory in
the achievement.
V.
LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS.
Have you ever been lost in the mountains?--not the peaceful, cultivated
child hills of the Catskills, but in real mountains, where the first
outpost of civilisation, a lonely ranch house, is two weeks' travel away,
and where that stream on your left is bound for the Pacific Ocean, and
that stream on your right over there will, after four thousand miles,
find its way into the Atlantic Ocean, and where the air you breathe is
twelve thousand feet above those seas? I have.
The situation is naturally one you would not fish out of the grab bag of
fate if you could avoid it. When you suddenly find it on your hands,
however, there is only one thing to do--keep your nerve, grasp it firmly,
and look at it closely. If you have a horse and a gun and a cartridge,
it is not so bad. I had these and I had better than all these, I had
Nimrod--but only half of Nimrod. The working half was chained up by my
fears, for such is the power of a woman. I will explain. In crossing
over the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains, we were guests in the
pack train of a man who was equally at home in a New York drawing-room or
on a Wyoming bear hunt, and he had made mountain travelling a fine art.
Besides ourselves, there were the horse wrangler, the cook (of whom you
shall hear later), and sixteen horses, and we started from Jackson's Lake
for the Big Horn Basin, several hundred miles over the pathless
uninhabited mountains.
No one who has not tried it knows how difficult it is for two or three
men to keep so many pack animals in line, with no pathway to guide; and
once they are started going nicely, it is nothing short of a calamity to
stop them, especially when it is necessary to cover a certain number of
miles before nightfall in order that they may have feed.
We were on the Pacific side of the Wind River Divide, and must get to the
top that night. The horses were travelling nicely up the difficult
ascent, so when Nimrod got his feet wet crossing a stream about noon, he
and I thought we would just stop and have a little lunch, dry the shoes,
and catch up with the pack train in half an hour.
From the minute the last horse vanished out of sight behind a rock,
desolation settled upon me. That slender line of living beings somewhere
on ahead was the only link between us and civilisation--civilisation
which I understood, which was human and touchable--and the awful vastness
of those endless peaks, wherein lurked a hundred dangers, and which
seemed made but to annihilate me.
Of course, the fire would not burn, and the shoes would not dry. Blondey
wandered off and had to be brought back, and it seemed an age before we
were again in the saddle, following the trail the animals had made.
But Nimrod was blithe and unconcerned, so I made no sign of the craven
soul within me. For an hour or two we followed the trail, urging our
horses as much as possible, but the ascent was difficult, and we could
not gain on the speed of the pack train. Then the trail was lost in a
gully where the animals had gone in every direction to get through. My
nerves were now on the rack of suspense.
Where were they? Surely, we must have passed them! We were on the wrong
trail, perhaps going away from them at every step!
The screws of fear grew tighter every moment during the following hours.
Nimrod soon found what he considered to be the trail, and we proceeded.
At last we got to the top. No sign of them. I could have screamed aloud;
a great wave of soul destroying fear encompassed me--wild black fear. I
could not reason it out. We were lost!
Nimrod scoffed at me. The track was still plain, he said; but I could not
read the hieroglyphics at my feet, and there was no room in my mind for
confidence or hope. Fear filled it all.
There we were with the mighty forces of the insensate world around, so
pitiless, so silently cruel, it seemed to my city-bred soul. It was the
spot where Nature spread her wonders before us, one tiny spring dividing
its waters east and west for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, for this
was the highest point.
We attempted to cross that hateful divide, that at another time might
have looked so beautiful, when suddenly Nimrod's horse plunged withers
deep in a bog, and in his struggles to get out threw Nimrod head first
from the saddle into the mud, where he lay quite still.
I faced the horror of death at that moment. Of course, this was what I
had been expecting, but had not been able to put into words. Nimrod
killed! My other fears dwindled away before this one, or, rather, it
seemed to wrap them in itself, as in a cloak. For an instant I could not
move--there alone with a dead or wounded man on that awful mountain top.
But here was an emergency where I could do something besides blindly
follow another's lead. I caught the frightened animal as it dashed out of
the treacherous place (to be horseless is almost a worse fate than to be
wounded), and Nimrod, who was little hurt, quickly recovered and managed
to scramble to dry ground, and again into the saddle.
Forcing our tired horses onward, we again found a trail, supposedly the
right one, but there was that haunting fear that it was not. For the only
signs were the bending of the grass and the occasional rubbing of the
trees where the animals had passed. And these might have been done by a
band of elk.
It was growing dusk and still no pack train in sight. No criminal on
trial for his life could have felt more wretchedly apprehensive than I.
At last we came to a stream. Nimrod, who had dismounted to examine more
closely, said:
"The trail turns off here, but it is very dim in the grass."
"Where?" I asked, anxiously.
He pointed to the ground. I could make out nothing. "Oh, let us hurry!
They must have gone on."
"I think it would be safer to follow these tracks for a time at least, to
see where they come out. There are some tracks across the stream there,
but they are older and dimmer and might have been made by elk."
"Oh, do go on! Surely the tracks across the stream must be the ones." To
go on, on, and hurry, was my one thought, my one cry.
Nimrod yielded. Thus I and my wild fear betrayed the hunter's instinct.
We went on for many weary minutes. We lost all tracks. Then Nimrod fired
a shot into the air. He would not do it before, because he said we were
not lost, and that there was no need for worry--worry, when for hours
blind fear had held me in torture!
There was no answer to the shot.
In five minutes he fired again. Then we heard a report, very faint. I
would not believe that I had heard it at all. I raised my gun and fired.
This time a shot rattled through the branches overhead, unpleasantly
near. It was clearly from behind us. We turned, and after another
interchange of shots, the cook appeared.
I was too exhausted to be glad, but a feeling of relief glided over me.
He led us to the stream where Nimrod had wanted to turn off, and from
there we were quickly in camp, very much to our host's relief. I dropped
at the foot of a tree, and said nothing for an hour--my companions were
men, so I did not have to talk if I could not--then I arose as usual and
was ready for supper.
Of course, Nimrod was blamed for not being a better mountaineer. 'He
ought to have seen that broken turf by the trail,' or those 'blades of
fresh pulled grass in the pine fork.' How could they know that a woman
and her fears had hampered him at every step, especially as you see there
was no need?
Always regulate your fears according to the situation, and then you will
not go into the valley of the shadow of death, when you are only lost in
the mountains.
VI.
THE COOK.
I had but a bare speaking acquaintance with the grim silent mountaineer
who was cook to our party. Two days after he had appeared like an angel
of heaven on our gloomy path I had an opportunity of knowing him better.
I quote from my journal:
Camp Jim, Shoshone Range, September 23: They left me alone in camp today.
No, the cook was there. They left me the cook for protection against the
vast solitude, the mighty grandeur of the mountains, and the possible,
but improbable, bear. Nice man, that cook--he confessed with pride to
many robberies and three murders! Only a month before engaging as cook on
this trip, he had been serving a life term for murder; but had been
released through some political 'pull.'
Our host, in company with another game warden, had discovered him in the
mountains, where he had gone immediately from the penitentiary and
resumed his unlawful life of killing game. But he had hidden his prizes
so effectively that there was no evidence but his own, which, of course,
is not accepted in law. Thus he welcomed these two men of justice to his
camp, told graphically of his killing--then offered them a smoke, smiling
the while at their discomfiture.
Both his face and hands were scarred from many bar room encounters, and
he unblushingly dated most of his remarks by the period when he 'was
rusticatin' in the Pen.' He had brought his own bed and saddle and pack
horses on the trip so that he could 'cut loose' from the party in case
'things got too hot' for him.
Such was the cook.
Immediately after breakfast Nimrod and our host equipped themselves for
the day's hunt, and went off in opposite directions, like _Huck Finn_ and
_Tom Sawyer_ on the occasion of their memorable first smoke.
Our camp was beside a rushing brook in a little glade that was tucked at
the foot of towering mountains where no man track had been for years, if
ever. Around us sighed the mighty pines of the limitless forest.
Hundreds of miles away, beyond the barrier of nature, were human hives
weary of the noise and strife of their own making. Here, alone in the
solitudes, were two human atoms wandering on the trail of the hunted,
and--the cook and I.
I sat on my rubber bed in the tent and thought--there was nothing else to
do--and was cold, cold from the outside in, and from the inside out.
There wasn't a thing alive, not even myself--no one but the cook.
Outside, I could hear him washing the breakfast tinware, and whistling
some kind of a jiggling tune that ran up and down me like a shiver. This
went on for an eternity.
Suddenly it stopped, and I heard the faintest crunch on the thin layer of
snow and the rattling of more snow as it slid off my tent from a blow
that had been struck on the outside.
I jumped to the door of the tent. It was the cook.
"Purty cold in there, ain't it? You'd a good sight better come to the
fire. Ain't you got a slicker?"
I put on a mackintosh and overshoes and went to the fire. The weather
was now indulging in a big flake snow that slid stealthily to the ground
and disappeared into water on whatever obstacle it found there. It found
me. The cook was cleaning knives--the cooking knives, the eating knives,
and a full set of hunting knives, long and short, slim and broad, all
sharp and efficacious.
He handled them lovingly, rubbed off some blood rust here and there, and
occasionally whetted one to a still more razor edge and threw it into a
near by tree, where it stuck, quivering.
There was no conversation, but I did not feel forgotten.
I turned my back on the cook and gazed into the fire, a miserable
smouldering affair, and speculated on why I had never before noticed how
much spare time there was in a minute. It may have been five of these
spacious minutes, it may have been fifteen, that had passed away when the
cook approached me. I could _feel_ him coming. He came very close to
me--and to the fire.
He put on some beans.
Then he went away, and there were many more minutes, many more.
Then something touched my arm. At last it had come (what we expect, if it
be disagreeable, usually does come). I never moved a muscle. This time
the pressure on my arm was unmistakable. I turned quickly and saw--the
cook--with a gun!
The cook, gun, knives, fire, snow, and stars danced a mad jig before me
for an instant. Then the cook suddenly resumed his proper position, and I
saw that his disengaged hand was held in an attitude of warning for
silence. He pointed off into the woods and appeared to be listening. Soon
I thought I heard a snapping of a branch away off up the mountain.
"Bear," the cook whispered. "Follow me."
I followed. It was hard work to get over logs and stones without noise,
in a long mackintosh, and, besides, I wished that I had brought a gun. I
should have felt more comfortable about both man and beast. I struggled
on for a while, when the thought suddenly struck home that if I went
farther I should not be able to find my way back to camp. Everything is
relative, and those empty tents and smouldering fire seemed a haven of
security compared to the situation of being unarmed, and lost in the
wilderness--with the cook.
I watched my chance and sneaked back to camp to get a gun. I was willing
to believe the cook's bear story, but I wanted a gun. When I got to camp
there were many good reasons for not going back.
After a time I heard two shots close at hand, and soon the cook appeared.
He said he could not find the bear's track, and lost me, so thought he
had better look me up and be on hand in case I had returned to camp, and
the bear should come.
I thanked the cook for his solicitude.
To while away the time, I put up a target and commenced practising with a
30-30 rifle at fifty yards range.
I shot very badly.
The cook obligingly interested himself in my performance and kept tally
on my aim, pointing out to me when it was high, when it was low, to the
right or to the left.
Then he took his six shooter and put a half dozen bullets in the
bull's-eye offhand.
I lost my interest in shooting.
The cook gave me some lunch, and while I was eating he stood before the
fire looking at it through the fingers of his. Outstretched hand, with a
queer squint in his cold gray eyes, as though sighting along a rifle
barrel, while a cigarette hung limply from his mouth.
Then in response to a winning smile (after all, a woman's best weapon) he
opened the floodgates of his thoughts and poured into my ears a
succession of bloodcurdling adventures over which the big, big 'I' had
dominated. "Yes," he said musingly of his _second_ murder, as he
removed his squint from the fire to me, and a ghost of a smile played
around his lips; "yes, it took six shots to keep him quiet, and you could
have covered all the holes with a cap box--and his pard nearly got me."
"That was the year I lost my pard, Dick Elsen. We was at camp near Fort
Fetterman. We called a man 'Red'--his name was Jim Capse. Drink was at
the bottom of it. Red he sees my pard passing a saloon, and he says,
'Hello, where did you come from? Come and have a drink!' Pard says, 'No,
I don't want nothing!' 'Oh, come along and have a drink!' Dick says, 'No,
thanks, pard, I'm not drinking to-night.' 'Well, I guess you'll have a
drink with me'; and Red pulls out his six shooter. Dick wasn't quick
enough about throwing up his hands, and he gets killed. Then Irish Mike
says to Red, 'You better hit the breeze,' but we ketched him--a telegraph
pole was handy--I says, 'Have you got anything to say?' 'You write to my
mother and tell her that, a horse fell on me. Don't tell her that I got
hung,' Red says; and we swung him."
By the time he had thus proudly stretched out his three dead men before
my imagination, in a setting of innumerable shooting scraps and horse
stealings, the hunters returned--my day with the multi-murderous cook was
over--and nothing had happened.
It is only fair to quote Nimrod's reply to one who criticised him for
leaving me thus:
"Humph! Do you think I don't know those wild mountaineers? They are
perfectly chivalrous, and I could feel a great deal safer in leaving my
wife in care of that desperado than with one of your Eastern dudes."
VII.
AMONG THE CLOUDS.
Many a time as a child I used to lie on my back in the grass and stare
far into the wide blue sky above. It seemed so soft, so caressing, so far
away, and yet so near. Then, perhaps, a tiny woolly cloud would drift
across its face, meet another of its kind, then another and another,
until the massed up curtain hid the playful blue, and amid grayness and
chill, where all had been so bright, I would hurry under shelter to avoid
the storm. That, outside of fairy books, an earthbound being could
actually be in a cloud, was beyond my imagination. Indeed, it seems
strange now, and were it not for the absence of a cherished quirt, I
should be ready to think that my cloud experience had been a dream.
The day before, we had been in a great hurry to cross the Wind River
Divide before a heavy snowfall made travel difficult, if not impossible.
We had no wish to be snowbound for the winter in those wilds, with only
two weeks' supply of food, and it was for this same reason we had not
stopped to hunt that grizzly who had left a fourteen inch track over on
Wiggins' Creek--the same being Wahb of the Big Horn Basin, about whom I
shall have something to say later.
We were now camped in a little valley whose creek bubbled pleasantly
under the ice. Having cleared away three feet of snow for our tents, we
decided to rest a day or two and hunt, as we were within two days' easy
travel of the first ranch house.
It was cold and snowy when Nimrod and I started out next morning to look
for mountain sheep. I followed Nimrod's horse for several miles as in a
trance, the white flakes falling silently around me, and wondered how it
would be possible for any human being to find his way back to camp; but
I had been taught my lesson, and kept silent.
I even tried to make mental notes of various rocks and trees we passed,
but it was hopeless. They all looked alike to me. In a city, no matter
how big or how strange, I can find home unerringly, and Nimrod is
helpless as a babe. In the mountains it is different. When I finally
raised my eyes from the horse's tail in front, it was because the tail
and the horse belonging to it had stopped suddenly.
We were in the middle of a brook. It is highly unpleasant to be stopped
in the middle of an icy brook when your horse's feet break through the
ice at each step, and you cannot be sure how deep the water is, nor how
firm the bottom he is going to strike, especially as ice-covered
brooks are Blondey's pet abhorrence, and the uncertainty of my
progress, was emphasised by Blondey's attempts to cross on one or two
feet instead of four.
However, I looked dutifully in the direction Nimrod indicated and saw a
long line of elk heads peering over the ridge in front and showing darkly
against the snow. They were not startled.
Those inquisitive heads, with ears alert, looked at us for some time, and
then leisurely moved out of sight. We scrambled out of the stream and
commenced ascending the mountain after them. The damp snow packed on
Blondey's hoofs, so that he was walking on snowballs. When these got
about five inches high, they would drop off and begin again. It is
needless to say that these varying snowballs did not help Blondey's
sure-footedness, especially as the snow was just thick enough to conceal
the treacherous slaty rocks beneath. For the first time I understood the
phrase, to be 'all balled up.'
Between being ready to clear myself from the saddle and jump off on the
up side, in case Blondey should fall, and keeping in sight of the tail of
the other horse, I had given no attention to the landscape.
Suddenly I lost Nimrod, and everything was swallowed up in a dark misty
vapour that cut me off from every object. Even Blondey's nose and the
ground at my feet were blurred. Regardless of possibly near-by elk, I
raised a frightened, yell. My voice swirled around me and dropped. I
tried again, but the sound would not carry.
The icy vapour swept through me--a very lonely forlorn little being
indeed. I just clung to the saddle, trusting to Blondey's instinct to
follow the other animal, and tried to enjoy the fact that I was getting a
new sensation. Even when one could see, every step was treacherous, but
in that black fog I might as well have been blind and deaf. Then Blondey
dislodged some loose rock, and went sliding down the mountain with it.
There was not a thing I could do, so I shut my eyes for an instant. We
brought up against a boulder, fortunately, with no special damage--except
to my nerves. Not being a man, I don't pretend to having enjoyed that
experience--and there, not six feet away, was a ghostly figure that I
knew must be Nimrod.
He did not greet me as a long lost, for such I surely felt, but merely
remarked in a whisper:
"We are in a cloud cap. It is settling down. The elk are over there.
Keep close to me." And he started along the ridge. I felt it was so
thoughtful of him to give me this admonition. I would much rather have
been returned safely to camp without further injury and before I froze to
the saddle; but I grimly kept Blondey's nose overlapping his mate's back
and said nothing--not even when I discovered that my cherished riding
whip had left me. It probably was not fifty feet away, on that toboggan
slide, but it seemed quite hopeless to find anything in the freezing
misty grayness that surrounded us.