on alternate days, and we always left camp before daylight. As the
hours wore on, the sun would grow hotter and hotter. In the middle of
the day there was generally a breeze blowing across the lava-beds,
and that breeze was like the blast from a furnace. There are few
whom the desert, at sunset and sunrise, fails to fascinate; but only
those who have the love of the wastes born in them feel the magic
of their appeal under the scorching noonday sun. Reptile life was
abundant; lizards scuttled away in every direction; there were some
rather large ones that held their tails up at an oblique angle above
the ground as they ran, which gave them a ludicrous appearance. A
species of toad whose back was speckled with red was rather common.
Jack-rabbits and cottontails were fairly numerous, and among the
birds Gambel’s quail and the whitewings, or sonora pigeons, were
most in evidence. I came upon one of these later on her nest in a
palo-verde-tree; the eggs were about the size of a robin’s and were
white, and the nest was made chiefly of galleta-grass. The whitewings
are very fond of the fruit of the saguaro; this fruit is of a
reddish-orange color when ripe, and the birds peck a hole in it and
eat the scarlet pulp within. It is delicious, and the Indians collect
it and dry it; the season was over when I was in the country, but
there was some late fruit on a few of the trees. When I was back in
camp at sunset it was pleasant to hear the pigeons trilling as they
flew down to the pool to drink.
One day we returned to the camp at about two. I was rather hot and
tired, so I made a cup of tea and sat under the trees and smoked my
pipe until almost four. Then I picked up my rifle and went out by
myself to look for sheep. I climbed to the top of a great crater hill
and sat down to look around with my field-glasses. Hearing a stone
move behind, I turned very slowly around. About a hundred and fifty
yards off, on the rim of the crater, stood six sheep, two of them
fine rams. Very slowly I put down the field-glasses and raised my
rifle, and I killed the finer of the rams. It was getting dark, so,
without bestowing more than a passing look upon him, I struck off
for camp at a round pace. Now the Mexicans, although good enough in
the saddle, were no walkers, and so Dominguez saddled a horse, put a
pack-saddle on a mule, and followed me back to where the sheep lay.
We left the animals at the foot of the hill, and although it was not
a particularly hard climb up to the sheep, the Mexican was blown and
weary by the time we reached it. The ram was a good one. His horns
measured sixteen and three-fourths inches around the base and were
thirty-five inches long, so they were larger in circumference though
shorter than my first specimen. He was very thin, however, and his
hair was falling out, so that one could pull it out in handfuls. All
the sheep that I saw in this country seemed thin and in poor shape,
while those near Tinah’alta were in very fair condition. The extreme
dryness and scarcity of grass doubtless in part accounted for this,
although the country in which I got my first two sheep was in no
sense green. Making our way back to camp through the lava-fields and
across the numerous gullies was a difficult task. The horses got
along much better than I should have supposed; indeed, they didn’t
seem to find as much difficulty as I did. Dominguez muttered that if
the road past Tule was the Camino del Diablo, this certainly was the
Camino del Infierno! When we reached camp my clothes were as wet as
if I had been in swimming. I set right to work on the headskin, but
it was eleven o’clock before I had finished it; that meant but four
hours’ sleep for me, and I felt somewhat melancholy about it. Indeed,
on this trip, the thing that I chiefly felt was the need of sleep,
for it was always necessary to make a very early start, and it was
generally after sunset before I got back to camp.
The Mexicans spoke about as much English as I spoke Spanish, which
was very little, and as they showed no signs of learning, I set
to work to learn some Spanish. At first our conversation was very
limited, but I soon got so that I could understand them pretty
well. We occasionally tried to tell each other stories but became
so confused that we would have to call it off. Dominguez had one
English expression which he would pronounce with great pride and
emphasis on all appropriate or inappropriate occasions; it was “You
betcher!” Once he and I had some discussion as to what day it was and
I appealed to Casares. “Ah, quien sabe, quien sabe?” (who knows, who
knows?) was his reply; he said that he never knew what day it was and
got on very comfortably without knowing--a point of view which gave
one quite a restful feeling. They christened our water-hole Tinaja
del Bévora, which means the tank of the rattlesnake. They so named it
because of the advent in camp one night of a rattler. It escaped and
got in a small lava-cave, from out of which the men tried long and
unsuccessfully to smoke it.
At the place where we were camped our arroyo had tunnelled its way
along the side of a hill; so that, from its bed, one bank was about
ten feet high and the other nearer fifty. In the rocky wall of this
latter side there were many caves. One, in particular, would have
furnished good sleeping quarters for wet weather. It was about
twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet deep, and it varied in height
from four to six feet. The signs showed that for generations it had
been a favorite abode of sheep; coyotes had also lived in it, and
in the back there was a big pack-rat’s nest. Pieces of the bisnaga
cactus, with long, cruel spikes, formed a prominent part of the nest.
After I had hunted for antelope in every direction from camp, and
within as large a radius as I could manage, I was forced to admit
the hopelessness of the task. The water-supply was getting low, but
I determined to put in another good long day with the sheep before
turning back. Accordingly, early one morning, I left the two Mexicans
in camp to rest and set off for the mountains on foot. I headed for
the main peak of Pinacate. It was not long before I got in among the
foot-hills. I kept down along the ravines, for it was very early,
and as a rule the sheep didn’t begin to go up the hills from their
night’s feeding until nine or ten o’clock; at this place, also, they
almost always spent the noon hours in caves. There were many little
chipmunks running along with their tails arched forward over their
backs, which gave them rather a comical look. At length I saw a
sheep; he was well up the side of a large hill, an old crater, as
were many of these mountains. I made off after him and found there
were steep ravines to be reckoned with before I even reached the
base of the hill. The sides of the crater were covered with choyas,
and the footing on the loose lava was so uncertain that I said to
myself, “I wonder how long it will be before you fall into one of
these choyas,” and only a few minutes later I was gingerly picking
choya burrs off my arms, which had come off worst in the fall. The
points of the spikes are barbed and are by no means easy to pull out.
I stopped many times to wait for my courage to rise sufficiently to
start to work again, and by the time I had got myself free I was so
angry that I felt like devoting the rest of my day to waging a war of
retaliation upon the cactus. The pain from the places from which I
had pulled out the spikes lasted for about half an hour after I was
free of them, and later, at Yuma, I had to have some of the spines
that I had broken off in my flesh cut out.
An hour or so later I came across a very fine bisnaga, or
“niggerhead,” cactus. I was feeling very thirsty, and, wishing to
save my canteen as long as possible, I decided to cut the bisnaga
open and eat some of its pulp, for this cactus always contains a
good supply of sweetish water. As I was busy trying to remove the
long spikes, I heard a rock fall, and looking round saw a sheep
walking along the opposite side of the gully, and not more than four
hundred yards away. He was travelling slowly and had not seen me,
so I hastily made for a little ridge toward which he was heading. I
reached some rocks near the top of the ridge in safety and crouched
behind them. I soon saw that he was only a two-year-old, and when
he was two hundred yards off I stood up to have a good look at him.
When he saw me, instead of immediately making off, he stood and
gazed at me. I slowly sat down and his curiosity quite overcame him.
He proceeded to stalk me in a most scientific manner, taking due
advantage of choyas and rocks; and cautiously poking his head out
from behind them to stare at me. He finally got to within fifty feet
of me, but suddenly, and for no apparent reason, he took fright and
made off. He did not go far, and, from a distance of perhaps five
hundred yards, watched me as I resumed operations on the cactus.
Not long after this, as I was standing on the top of a hill,
I made out two sheep, half hidden in a draw. There was a great
difference in the size of their horns, and, in the hasty glance I
got of them, one seemed to me to be big enough to warrant shooting.
I did not discover my mistake until I had brought down my game. He
was but a two-year-old, and, although I should have been glad of a
good specimen for the museum, his hide was in such poor condition
that it was quite useless. However, I took his head and some meat and
headed back for camp. My camera, water-bottle, and field-glasses were
already slung over my shoulder, and the three hours’ tramp back to
camp, in the very hottest part of the day, was tiring; and I didn’t
feel safe in finishing my canteen until I could see camp.
[Illustration: Making fast the sheep’s head]
The next day we collected as much galleta-grass as we could for the
horses, and, having watered them well, an operation which practically
finished our pool, we set out for Tule at a little after three. As
soon as the Mexicans got a little saddle-stiff they would stand up in
one stirrup, crooking the other knee over the saddle, and keeping the
free heel busy at the horses’ ribs. The result was twofold: the first
and most obvious being a sore back for the horses, and the second
being that the horses became so accustomed to a continual tattoo to
encourage them to improve their pace, that, with a rider unaccustomed
to that method, they lagged most annoyingly. The ride back to Tule
was as uneventful as it was lovely.
On the next day’s march, from Tule toward Win’s tank, I saw the only
Gila monster--the sluggish, poisonous lizard of the southwestern
deserts--that I came across throughout the trip. He was crossing the
trail in leisurely fashion and darted his tongue out angrily as I
stopped to admire him. Utting told me of an interesting encounter he
once saw between a Gila monster and a rattlesnake. He put the two in
a large box; they were in opposite corners, but presently the Gila
monster started slowly and sedately toward the rattler’s side of the
box. He paid absolutely no attention to the snake, who coiled himself
up and rattled angrily. When the lizard got near enough, the rattler
struck out two or three times, each time burying his fangs in the
Gila monster’s body; the latter showed not the slightest concern,
and, though Utting waited expectantly for him to die, he apparently
suffered no ill effects whatever from the encounter. He showed
neither anger nor pain; he simply did not worry himself about the
rattler at all.
We reached Wellton at about nine in the evening of the second day
from Pinacate. We had eaten all our food, and our pack-animals were
practically without loads; so we had made ninety miles in about
fifty-five hours. Dominguez had suffered from the heat on the way
back, and at Win’s tank, which was inaccessible to the horses, I
had been obliged myself to pack all the water out to the animals.
At Wellton I parted company with the Mexicans, with the regret one
always feels at leaving the comrades of a hunting trip that has
proved both interesting and successful.
IV
After Moose in New Brunswick
IV
AFTER MOOSE IN NEW BRUNSWICK
It was early in September when the four of us--Clarke, Jamieson,
Thompson, and myself--landed at Bathurst, on Chaleur Bay, and took
the little railroad which runs twenty miles up the Nepisiquit River
to some iron-mines. From that point we expected to pole up the river
about forty miles farther and then begin our hunting.
For the four hunters--“sports” was what the guides called us--there
were six guides. Three of them bore the name Venneau; there were
Bill Grey and his son Willie, and the sixth was Wirre (pronounced
Warry) Chamberlain. Among themselves the guides spoke French--or a
corruption of French--which was hard to understand and which has come
down from generation to generation without ever getting into written
form. A fine-looking six they were,--straight,--with the Indian
showing in their faces.
At the end of the third day of poling--a lazy time for the “sports,”
but three days of marvellously skilful work for the guides--our
heavily laden canoes were brought up to the main camp. From here
we expected to start our hunting expeditions, each taking a guide,
blankets, and food, and striking off for the more isolated cabins
in the woods. My purpose was to collect specimens for the National
Museum at Washington. I wanted moose, caribou, and beaver--a male and
female of each species. Whole skins and leg-bones were to be brought
out.
A hard rain woke us, and the prospects were far from cheerful as we
packed and prepared to separate. Bill Grey was to be my guide, and
the “Popple Cabin,” three miles away, was to be our shelter. Our
tramp through the wet woods--pine, hemlock, birch, and poplar--ended
at the little double lean-to shelter. After we had started a fire and
spread our blankets to dry we set off in search of game.
We climbed out of the valley in which we were camped and up to the
top of a hill from which we could get a good view of some small
barren stretches that lay around us. It was the blueberry season,
and these barrens were covered with bushes, all heavily laden. We
moved around from hill to hill in search of game, but saw only three
deer. We’d have shot one of them for meat, but didn’t care to run the
chance of frightening away any moose or caribou. The last hill we
climbed overlooked a small pond which lay beside a pine forest on the
edge of a barren strip. Bill intended to spend a good part of each
day watching this pond, and it was to a small hill overlooking it
that we made our way early next morning.
Before we had been watching many minutes, a cow moose with a calf
appeared at the edge of the woods. She hesitated for several minutes,
listening intently and watching sharply, and then stepped out across
the barren on her way to the pond. Before she had gone far, the path
she was following cut the trail we had made on our way to the lookout
hill. She stopped immediately and began to sniff at our tracks, the
calf following her example; a few seconds were enough to convince
her, but for some reason, perhaps to make doubly sure, she turned
and for some minutes followed along our trail with her nose close to
the ground. Then she swung round and struck off into the woods at a
great slashing moose trot.
Not long after she had disappeared, we got a fleeting glimpse of two
caribou cows; they lacked the impressive ungainliness of the moose,
and in the distance might easily have been mistaken for deer.
It was a very cold morning, and throughout the day it snowed and
sleeted at intervals. We spent the time wandering from hill to hill.
For the next week we hunted industriously in every direction from the
Popple Cabin. In the morning and the evening we shifted from hill
to hill; the middle of the day we hunted along the numerous brooks
that furrowed the country. With the exception of one or two days, the
weather was uniformly cold and rainy; but after our first warm sunny
day we welcomed rain and cold, for then, at least, we had no black
flies to fight. On the two sunny days they surrounded us in swarms
and made life almost unbearable; they got into our blankets and kept
us from sleeping during the nights; they covered us with lumps and
sores--Bill said that he had never seen them as bad.
[Illustration: A noonday halt on the way down river, returning from
the hunting country]
It was lovely in the early morning to stand on some high hill and
watch the mist rising lazily from the valley; it was even more lovely
to watch the approach of a rain-storm. The sunlight on some distant
hillside or valley would suddenly be blotted out by a sheet of rain;
a few minutes later the next valley would be darkened as the storm
swept toward us, and perhaps before it reached us we could see the
farther valleys over which it had passed lightening again.
We managed to cover a great deal of ground during that week, and were
rewarded by seeing a fair amount of game--four caribou, of which one
was a bull, a bull and three cow moose, and six does and one buck
deer. I had but one shot, and that was at a buck deer. We wanted meat
very much, and Bill said that he didn’t think one shot would disturb
the moose and caribou. He was a very large buck, in prime condition;
I never tasted better venison. Had our luck been a little better, I
would have had a shot at a moose and a caribou; we saw the latter
from some distance, and made a long and successful stalk until Wirre,
on his way from the main camp with some fresh supplies, frightened
our quarry away.
On these trips between camps, Wirre several times saw moose and
caribou within range.
After a week we all foregathered at the main camp. Clarke had shot
a fine bear and Jamieson brought in a good moose head. They started
down-river with their trophies, and Thompson and I set out for new
hunting-grounds. As Bill had gone with Jamieson, I took his son
Willie, a sturdy, pony-built fellow of just my age. We crossed the
river and camped some two miles beyond it and about a mile from the
lake we intended to hunt. We put up a lean-to, and in front of it
built a great fire of old pine logs, for the nights were cold.
My blankets were warm, and it was only after a great deal of wavering
hesitation that I could pluck up courage to roll out of them in the
penetrating cold of early morning. On the second morning, as we made
our way through dew-soaked underbrush to the lake, we came out upon a
little glade, at the farther end of which stood a caribou. He sprang
away as he saw us, but halted behind a bush to reconnoitre--the
victim of a fatal curiosity, for it gave me my opportunity and I
brought him down. Although he was large in body, he had a very poor
head. I spent a busy morning preparing the skin, but in the afternoon
we were again at the lake watching for moose. We spent several
fruitless days there.
One afternoon a yearling bull moose appeared: he had apparently lost
his mother, for he wandered aimlessly around for several hours,
bewailing his fate. This watching would have been pleasant enough
as a rest-cure, but since I was hunting and very anxious to get my
game, it became a rather irksome affair. However, I could only follow
Saint Augustine’s advice, “when in Rome, fast on Saturdays,” and I
resigned myself to adopting Willie’s plan of waiting for the game
to come to us instead of pursuing my own inclination and setting
out to find the game. Luckily, I had some books with me, and passed
the days pleasantly enough reading Voltaire and Boileau. There was
a beaver-house at one end of the lake, and between four and five
the beaver would come out and swim around. I missed a shot at one.
Red squirrels were very plentiful and would chatter excitedly at us
from a distance of a few feet. There was one particularly persistent
little chap who did everything in his power to attract attention. He
would sit in the conventional squirrel attitude upon a branch, and
chirp loudly, bouncing stiffly forward at each chirp, precisely as if
he were an automaton.
When we decided that it was useless to hunt this lake any longer, we
went back to the river to put in a few days hunting up and down it. I
got back to the camp in the evening and found Thompson there. He had
had no luck and intended to leave for the settlement in the morning.
Accordingly, the next day he started downstream and we went up. We
hadn’t been gone long before we heard what we took to be two shots,
though, for all we knew, they might have been a beaver striking the
water with his tail. That night, when we got back to camp, we found
that, on going round a bend in the river about a mile below camp,
Thompson had come upon a bull and a cow moose, and had bagged the
bull.
The next morning it was raining as if it were the first storm after
a long drought, and as we felt sure that no sensible moose would
wander around much amid such a frozen downpour, we determined to put
in a day after beaver. In one of my long tramps with Bill we had
come across a large beaver-pond, and at the time Bill had remarked
how easy it would be to break the dam and shoot the beaver. I had
carefully noted the location of this pond, so managed successfully
to pilot Willie to it, and we set to work to let the water out. This
breaking the dam was not the easy matter I had imagined. It was a big
pond, and the dam that was stretched across its lower end was from
eight to ten feet high. To look at its solid structure and the size
of the logs that formed it, it seemed inconceivable that an animal
the size of a beaver could have built it. The water was above our
heads, and there was a crust of ice around the edges. We had to get
in and work waist-deep in the water to enlarge our break in the dam,
and the very remembrance of that cold morning’s work, trying to pry
out logs with frozen fingers, makes me shiver. It was even worse when
we had to stop work and wait and watch for the beavers to come out.
They finally did, and I shot two. They were fine large specimens;
the male was just two inches less than four feet and the female only
one inch shorter. Shivering and frozen, we headed back for camp. My
hunting costume had caused a good deal of comment among the guides;
it consisted of a sleeveless cotton undershirt, a many-pocketed coat,
a pair of short khaki trousers reaching to just above my knees, and
then a pair of sneakers or of high boots--I used the former when I
wished to walk quietly. My knees were always bare and were quite as
impervious to cold as my hands, but the guides could never understand
why I didn’t freeze. I used to hear them solemnly discussing it in
their broken French.
I had at first hoped to get my moose by fair stalking, without the
help of calling, but I had long since abandoned that hope; and
Willie, who was an excellent caller, had been doing his best, but
with no result. We saw several cow moose, and once Willie called out
a young bull, but his horns could not have had a spread of more than
thirty-five inches, and he would have been quite useless as a museum
specimen. Another time, when we were crawling up to a lake not far
from the river, we found ourselves face to face with a two-year-old
bull. He was very close to us, but as he hadn’t got our wind, he was
merely curious to find out what we were, for Willie kept grunting
through his birch-bark horn. Once he came up to within twenty feet of
us and stood gazing. Finally he got our wind and crashed off through
the lakeside alders.
As a rule, moose answer a call better at night, and almost every
night we could hear them calling around our camp; generally they were
cows that we heard, and once Willie had a duel with a cow as to which
should have a young bull that we could hear in an alder thicket,
smashing the bushes with his horns. Willie finally triumphed, and the
bull headed toward us with a most disconcerting rush; next morning
we found his tracks at the edge of the clearing not more than twenty
yards from where we had been standing; at that point the camp smoke
and smells had proved more convincing than Willie’s calling-horn.
Late one afternoon I had a good opportunity to watch some beaver at
work. We had crawled cautiously up to a small lake in the vain hope
of finding a moose, when we came upon some beaver close to the shore.
Their house was twenty or thirty yards away, and they were bringing
out a supply of wood, chiefly poplar, for winter food. To and fro
they swam, pushing the wood in front of them. Occasionally one would
feel hungry, and then he would stop and start eating the bark from
the log he was pushing. It made me shiver to watch them lying lazily
in that icy water.