The Mountains
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Stewart Edward White >> The Mountains
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The time was afternoon. As we watched, the
shadow of the canon wall darkened the valley.
Whereupon we looked up.
Now the upper air, of which we were dwellers for
the moment, was peopled by giants and clear
atmosphere and glittering sunlight, flashing like silver
and steel and precious stones from the granite domes,
peaks, minarets, and palisades of the High Sierras.
Solid as they were in reality, in the crispness of this
mountain air, under the tangible blue of this mountain
sky, they seemed to poise light as so many balloons.
Some of them rose sheer, with hardly a fissure; some
had flung across their shoulders long trailing pine
draperies, fine as fur; others matched mantles of the
whitest white against the bluest blue of the sky.
Towards the lower country were more pines rising in
ridges, like the fur of an animal that has been alarmed.
We dangled our feet over the edge and talked about it.
Wes pointed to the upper end where the sluggish lava-like
flow of the canon-bed first came into view.
"That's where we'll camp," said he.
"When?" we asked.
"When we get there," he answered.
For this canon lies in the heart of the mountains.
Those who would visit it have first to get into the
country--a matter of over a week. Then they have
their choice of three probabilities of destruction.
The first route comprehends two final days of
travel at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where
the snow lies in midsummer; where there is no feed,
no comfort, and the way is strewn with the bones of
horses. This is known as the "Basin Trail." After
taking it, you prefer the others--until you try them.
The finish of the second route is directly over the
summit of a mountain. You climb two thousand
feet and then drop down five. The ascent is heart-
breaking but safe. The descent is hair-raising and
unsafe: no profanity can do justice to it. Out of a
pack-train of thirty mules, nine were lost in the
course of that five thousand feet. Legend has it that
once many years ago certain prospectors took in a
Chinese cook. At first the Mongolian bewailed his
fate loudly and fluently, but later settled to a single
terrified moan that sounded like "tu-ne-mah! tu-ne-
mah!" The trail was therefore named the "Tu-ne-
mah Trail." It is said that "tu-ne-mah" is the very
worst single vituperation of which the Chinese
language is capable.
The third route is called "Hell's Half Mile." It is
not misnamed.
Thus like paradise the canon is guarded; but
like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when
you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle
of water seen from above has become a river with
profound darkling pools and placid stretches and
swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish
flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble
forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and
deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the
sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves
of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like snow,
the flakes of cotton float down through the air.
Moreover there are meadows, spacious lawns, opening
out, closing in, winding here and there through
the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually
waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a
brocade. Quaint tributary little brooks babble and
murmur down through these trees, down through
these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy
of innumerable bees. To right hand and to left,
in front of you and behind, rising sheer, forbidding,
impregnable, the cliffs, mountains, and ranges hem
you in. Down the river ten miles you can go: then
the gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only
look down the tumbling fierce waters and turn back.
Up the river five miles you can go, then interpose
the sheer snow-clad cliffs of the Palisades, and them,
rising a matter of fourteen thousand feet, you may
not cross. You are shut in your paradise as
completely as though surrounded by iron bars.
But, too, the world is shut out. The paradise is
yours. In it are trout and deer and grouse and bear
and lazy happy days. Your horses feed to the fatness
of butter. You wander at will in the ample
though definite limits of your domain. You lie on
your back and examine dispassionately, with an
interest entirely detached, the huge cliff-walls of the
valley. Days slip by. Really, it needs at least an
angel with a flaming sword to force you to move on.
We turned away from our view and addressed
ourselves to the task of finding out just when we were
going to get there. The first day we bobbed up and
over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet
elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the
wide bowl-like amphitheatre of a basin. The second
day we climbed over things and finally ended in a
small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an
elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet. There
we rested-over a day, camped under a single pine-
tree, with the quick-growing mountain grasses thick
about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides,
and the plunge into the canon on the other. As
we needed meat, we spent part of the day in finding
a deer. The rest of the time we watched idly for bear.
Bears are great travelers. They will often go
twenty miles overnight, apparently for the sheer
delight of being on the move. Also are they exceedingly
loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting
to places, and they hate to go down steep hills. You
see, their fore legs are short. Therefore they are
skilled in the choice of easy routes through the
mountains, and once having made the choice they
stick to it until through certain narrow places on
the route selected they have worn a trail as smooth
as a garden-path. The old prospectors used quite
occasionally to pick out the horse-passes by trusting
in general to the bear migrations, and many a
well-traveled route of to-day is superimposed over
the way-through picked out by old bruin long ago.
Of such was our own trail. Therefore we kept
our rifles at hand and our eyes open for a straggler.
But none came, though we baited craftily with
portions of our deer. All we gained was a rattlesnake,
and he seemed a bit out of place so high up in the air.
Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still
twenty-two hundred feet above our elevation. We
gazed on it sadly, for directly by its summit, and for
five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of
reputation was that trail beyond all others. The horses,
as we bunched them in preparation for the packing,
took on a new interest, for it was on the cards that
the unpacking at evening would find some missing
from the ranks.
"Lily's a goner, sure," said Wes. "I don't know
how she's got this far except by drunken man's luck.
She'll never make the Tunemah."
"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Tenderfoot,
naming his own fool horse; "I see where I start in to walk."
"Sort of a `morituri te salutamur,' " said I.
We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet,
leading our saddle-horses to save their strength.
Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily of
the rarified air. Then at the top of the world we
paused on the brink of nothing to tighten cinches,
while the cold wind swept by us, the snow glittered
in a sunlight become silvery like that of early April,
and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a
distance inconceivably remote, as though the horizon
had been set back for their accommodation.
To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you
will see drifted into a sharp crest across a corner of
your yard; only this windrow was twenty feet high
and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight
of its age. We climbed it and looked over directly
into the eye of a round Alpine lake seven or eight
hundred feet below. It was of an intense cobalt blue,
a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of
water, deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant
of Tyre. White ice floated in it. The savage fierce
granite needles and knife-edges of the mountain crest
hemmed it about.
But this was temporizing, and we knew it. The
first drop of the trail was so steep that we could flip
a pebble to the first level of it, and so rough in its
water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it
seemed that at the first step a horse must necessarily
fall end over end. We made it successfully, however,
and breathed deep. Even Lily, by a miracle of
lucky scrambling, did not even stumble.
"Now she's easy for a little ways," said Wes,
"then we'll get busy."
When we "got busy" we took our guns in our
hands to preserve them from a fall, and started in.
Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more places.
We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a
new trail around it. Six times a minute we held our
breaths and stood on tiptoe with anxiety, powerless
to help, while the horse did his best. At the
especially bad places we checked them off one after
another, congratulating ourselves on so much saved
as each came across without accident. When there
were no bad places, the trail was so extraordinarily
steep that we ahead were in constant dread of
a horse's falling on us from behind, and our legs did
become wearied to incipient paralysis by the constant
stiff checking of the descent. Moreover every
second or so one of the big loose stones with which
the trail was cumbered would be dislodged and come
bouncing down among us. We dodged and swore;
the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of
our legs. The day was full of an intense nervous
strain, an entire absorption in the precise present.
We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were
by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead.
All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred
and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot
tell you much about the scenery. The only outside
impression we received was that the canon floor
was slowly rising to meet us.
Then strangely enough, as it seemed, we stepped
off to level ground.
Our watches said half-past three. We had made
five miles in a little under seven hours.
Remained only the crossing of the river. This
was no mean task, but we accomplished it lightly,
searching out a ford. There were high grasses, and
on the other side of them a grove of very tall
cottonwoods, clean as a park. First of all we cooked
things; then we spread things; then we lay on our
backs and smoked things, our hands clasped back
of our heads. We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer
cliff of old Mount Tunemah, very much as a man
would cock his eye at a tiger in a cage.
Already the meat-hawks, the fluffy Canada jays,
had found us out, and were prepared to swoop down
boldly on whatever offered to their predatory skill.
We had nothing for them yet,--there were no
remains of the lunch,--but the fire-irons were out,
and ribs of venison were roasting slowly over the
coals in preparation for the evening meal. Directly
opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were
two huge mountain peaks, part of the wall that shut
us in, over against us in a height we had not dared
ascribe to the sky itself. By and by the shadow of
these mountains rose on the westerly wall. It crept
up at first slowly, extinguishing color; afterwards
more rapidly as the sun approached the horizon.
The sunlight disappeared. A moment's gray intervened,
and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid
on the peaks its enchantment. Little by little that
too faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in
the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded
by the glory of a dream that continued with it after
the others. Heretofore it had seemed to us an
insignificant peak, apparently overtopped by many, but
by this token we knew it to be the highest of them all.
Then ensued another pause, as though to give the
invisible scene-shifter time to accomplish his work,
followed by a shower of evening coolness, that seemed
to sift through the trees like a soft and gentle rain.
We ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a
trifle uncertainly at the food, wondering at the
distant mountain on which the Day had made its final
stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy dark that
flowed down the canon in the manner of a heavy smoke.
In the notch between the two huge mountains
blazed a star,--accurately in the notch, like the
front sight of a rifle sighted into the marvelous
depths of space. Then the moon rose.
First we knew of it when it touched the crest of
our two mountains. The night has strange effects on
the hills. A moment before they had menaced black
and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the
moon their very substance seemed to dissolve, leaving
in the upper atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous,
fragile, ghostly simulacrums of themselves you could
imagine in the realms of fairy-land. They seemed
actually to float, to poise like cloud-shapes about to
dissolve. And against them were cast the inky silhouettes
of three fir-trees in the shadow near at hand.
Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out
to us with the voices of old accustomed friends in
another wilderness. The winds rustled.
XIII
TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS
As I have said, a river flows through the canon.
It is a very good river with some riffles that
can be waded down to the edges of black pools
or white chutes of water; with appropriate big trees
fallen slantwise into it to form deep holes; and with
hurrying smooth stretches of some breadth. In all of
these various places are rainbow trout.
There is no use fishing until late afternoon. The
clear sun of the high altitudes searches out mercilessly
the bottom of the stream, throwing its miniature
boulders, mountains, and valleys as plainly into
relief as the buttes of Arizona at noon. Then the
trout quite refuse. Here and there, if you walk far
enough and climb hard enough over all sorts of
obstructions, you may discover a few spots shaded by
big trees or rocks where you can pick up a half dozen
fish; but it is slow work. When, however, the
shadow of the two huge mountains feels its way
across the stream, then, as though a signal had been
given, the trout begin to rise. For an hour and a
half there is noble sport indeed.
The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course
some places were better than others. Near the upper
reaches the water boiled like seltzer around the base
of a tremendous tree. There the pool was at least ten
feet deep and shot with bubbles throughout the
whole of its depth, but it was full of fish. They rose
eagerly to your gyrating fly,--and took it away with
them down to subaqueous chambers and passages
among the roots of that tree. After which you broke
your leader. Royal Coachman was the best lure, and
therefore valuable exceedingly were Royal Coachmen.
Whenever we lost one we lifted up our voices
in lament, and went away from there, calling to mind
that there were other pools, many other pools, free
of obstruction and with fish in them. Yet such is the
perversity of fishermen, we were back losing more
Royal Coachmen the very next day. In all I managed
to disengage just three rather small trout from
that pool, and in return decorated their ancestral halls
with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of many flies.
Now this was foolishness. All you had to do was
to walk through a grove of cottonwoods, over a
brook, through another grove of pines, down a sloping
meadow to where one of the gigantic pine-trees
had obligingly spanned the current. You crossed
that, traversed another meadow, broke through a
thicket, slid down a steep grassy bank, and there you
were. A great many years before a pine-tree had
fallen across the current. Now its whitened skeleton
lay there, opposing a barrier for about twenty-five
feet out into the stream. Most of the water turned
aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end
as though trying to catch up with the rest of the
stream which had gone on without it, but some of it
dived down under and came up on the other side.
There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy
pool. Its constant action had excavated a very deep
hole, the debris of which had formed a bar immediately
below. You waded out on the bar and cast along
the length of the pine skeleton over the pool.
If you were methodical, you first shortened your
line, and began near the bank, gradually working
out until you were casting forty-five feet to the very
edge of the fast current. I know of nothing pleasanter
for you to do. You see, the evening shadow
was across the river, and a beautiful grass slope at your
back. Over the way was a grove of trees whose birds
were very busy because it was near their sunset, while
towering over them were mountains, quite peaceful
by way of contrast because THEIR sunset was still far
distant. The river was in a great hurry, and was talking
to itself like a man who has been detained and
is now at last making up time to his important
engagement. And from the deep black shadow beneath
the pine skeleton, occasionally flashed white bodies
that made concentric circles where they broke the
surface of the water, and which fought you to a finish
in the glory of battle. The casting was against the
current, so your flies could rest but the briefest possible
moment on the surface of the stream. That moment
was enough. Day after day you could catch your
required number from an apparently inexhaustible supply.
I might inform you further of the gorge downstream,
where you lie flat on your stomach ten feet
above the river, and with one hand cautiously
extended over the edge cast accurately into the angle
of the cliff. Then when you get your strike, you tow
him downstream, clamber precariously to the water's
level--still playing your fish--and there land him,--if
he has accommodatingly stayed hooked. A three-pound
fish will make you a lot of tribulation at this game.
We lived on fish and venison, and had all we
wanted. The bear-trails were plenty enough, and
the signs were comparatively fresh, but at the time
of our visit the animals themselves had gone over
the mountains on some sort of a picnic. Grouse,
too, were numerous in the popple thickets, and
flushed much like our ruffed grouse of the East.
They afforded first-rate wing-shooting for Sure-Pop,
the little shot-gun.
But these things occupied, after all, only a small
part of every day. We had loads of time left. Of
course we explored the valley up and down. That
occupied two days. After that we became lazy.
One always does in a permanent camp. So did
the horses. Active--or rather restless interest in
life seemed to die away. Neither we nor they had
to rustle hard for food. They became fastidious
in their choice, and at all times of day could be
seen sauntering in Indian file from one part of the
meadow to the other for the sole purpose apparently
of cropping a half dozen indifferent mouthfuls. The
rest of the time they roosted under trees, one hind
leg relaxed, their eyes half closed, their ears
wabbling, the pictures of imbecile content. We were
very much the same.
Of course we had our outbursts of virtue. While
under their influence we undertook vast works. But
after their influence had died out, we found ourselves
with said vast works on our hands, and so came to
cursing ourselves and our fool spasms of industry.
For instance, Wes and I decided to make buckskin
from the hide of the latest deer. We did not
need the buckskin--we already had two in the
pack. Our ordinary procedure would have been to
dry the hide for future treatment by a Mexican, at a
dollar a hide, when we should have returned home.
But, as I said, we were afflicted by sporadic activity,
and wanted to do something.
We began with great ingenuity by constructing a
graining-tool out of a table-knife. We bound it with
rawhide, and encased it with wood, and wrapped it
with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is
proper. After this we hunted out a very smooth,
barkless log, laid the hide across it, straddled it, and
began graining.
Graining is a delightful process. You grasp the
tool by either end, hold the square edge at a certain
angle, and push away from you mightily. A half-
dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair;
twice as many more will scrape away half as much
of the seal-brown grain, exposing the white of the
hide. Then, if you want to, you can stop and establish
in your mind a definite proportion between the
amount thus exposed, the area remaining unexposed,
and the muscular fatigue of these dozen and
a half of mighty pushes. The proportion will be
wrong. You have left out of account the fact that you
are going to get almighty sick of the job; that your
arms and upper back are going to ache shrewdly
before you are done; and that as you go on it is going
to be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges
firmly enough to offer the required resistance to your
knife. Besides--if you get careless--you'll scrape
too hard: hence little holes in the completed buckskin.
Also--if you get careless--you will probably
leave the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of
them means a hard transparent spot in the product.
Furthermore, once having started in on the job, you
are like the little boy who caught the trolley: you
cannot let go. It must be finished immediately, all
at one heat, before the hide stiffens.
Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evaporated,
and you are thinking of fifty pleasant things
you might just as well be doing.
Next you revel in grease,--lard oil, if you have
it; if not, then lard, or the product of boiled brains.
This you must rub into the skin. You rub it in
until you suspect that your finger-nails have worn
away, and you glisten to the elbows like an Eskimo
cutting blubber.
By the merciful arrangement of those who
invented buckskin, this entitles you to a rest. You
take it--for several days--until your conscience
seizes you by the scruff of the neck.
Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy,
soggy, snaky, cold bundle of greasy horror to the
bank of the creek, and there for endless hours you
wash it. The grease is more reluctant to enter the
stream than you are in the early morning. Your
hands turn purple. The others go by on their way
to the trout-pools, but you are chained to the stake.
By and by you straighten your back with creaks,
and walk home like a stiff old man, carrying your
hide rid of all superfluous oil. Then if you are just
learning how, your instructor examines the result.
"That's all right," says he cheerfully. "Now when
it dries, it will be buckskin."
That encourages you. It need not. For during
the process of drying it must be your pastime
constantly to pull and stretch at every square inch of
that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres.
Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone. Now
there is nothing on earth that seems to dry slower
than buckskin. You wear your fingers down to the
first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for
future use, you carry the hide to your instructor.
"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.
You go back and do it some more, putting the
entire strength of your body, soul, and religious
convictions into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks
as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the
turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant
declares it will not do.
"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it
isn't dry. Go to it!"
But at this point your outraged soul arches its back
and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of
buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You KNOW
it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come
out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of
the camp.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one chump
enough to do that for a dollar a hide?" you inquire.
"Sure," say they.
"Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his
dates," you conclude.
About a week later one of your companions drags out of
the alforja something crumpled that resembles in general
appearance and texture a rusted five-gallon coal-oil
can that has been in a wreck. It is only imperceptibly
less stiff and angular and cast-iron than rawhide.
"What is this?" the discoverer inquires.
Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place
before recognition brings inevitable--and sickening
--chaff. For you know it at a glance. It is your
buckskin.
Along about the middle of that century an old
prospector with four burros descended the Basin
Trail and went into camp just below us. Towards
evening he sauntered in.
I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you
just as he came down through the fire-lit trees. He
was about six feet tall, very leanly built, with a
weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was
superimposed a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-
brows. These had originally been brown, but the
sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable
contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight
twinkled far down beneath the shadows of the brows
and a floppy old sombrero hat. The usual flannel
shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter
completed the outfit. He might have been forty, but
was probably nearer sixty years of age.
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