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Tenting To-Night; A Chronicle Of Sport And Adventure In Glacier Park And The Cascade Mountains

<h2>XIV</h2> <h3>DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE</h3> The first part of that adventurous day was quiet. We moved sedately along on an overgrown trail, mountain walls so close on each side that the valley lay in shadow. I rode next to Dan Devore that day, and on the trail he stopped his horse and showed me the place where Hughie McKeever was found. Dan Devore and Hughie McKeever went out one November to go up to Horseshoe Basin. Dan left before the heaviest snows came, leaving McKeever alone. When McKeever had not appeared by February, Dan went in for him. His cabin was empty. He had kept a diary up to the 24th of December, when it stopped abruptly. There were a few marten skins in the cabin, and his outfit. That was all. In some cottonwoods, not far from the camp, they found his hatchet and his bag hanging to a tree.[151] It looked for a time, as though the mystery of Hughie McKeever's disappearance would be one of the unsolved tragedies of the mountains. But a trapper, whose route took him along Thunder Creek that spring, noticed that his dog made a side trip each time, away from the trail. At last he investigated, and found the body of Hughie McKeever. He had probably been caught in a snow-slide, for his leg was broken below the knee. Unable to walk, he had put his snowshoes on his hands and, dragging the broken leg, had crawled six miles through the snow and ice of the mountain winter. When he was found, he was only a mile and a half from his cabin and safety. There are many other tragedies of that valley. There was a man who went up Bridge Creek to see a claim he had located there. He was to be out four days. But in ten days he had not appeared, which was not surprising, for there was twenty-five feet of snow, and when the snow had frozen so that rescuers could travel over the crust, they went up after him. He was lying in one of the bunks of his[152] cabin with a mattress over him, frozen to death. <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/facing_page152.jpg" width-obs="315" height-obs="400" alt="Mountain miles: The trail up Swiftcurrent Pass, Glacier National Park" title="Mountain miles: The trail up Swiftcurrent Pass, Glacier National Park" /> Mountain miles: The trail up Swiftcurrent Pass, Glacier National Park</div> So, Dan said, they covered him in the snow with a mattress, and went back in the spring to bury him. Every winter, in those mountain valleys, men who cannot get their outfits out before the snow shoot their horses or cut their throats rather than let them freeze or starve to death. It is a grim country, the Cascade country. One man shot nine in this very valley last winter. Our naturalist had been caught the winter before in the first snowstorm of the season. He was from daylight until eight o'clock at night making two miles of trail. He had to break it, foot by foot, for the horses. As we rode up the gorge toward the pass, it was evident, from the amount of snow in the mountains, that stories had not been exaggerated. The packers looked dubious. Even if we could make the climb to Doubtful Lake, it seemed impossible that we could get farther. But the monotony of the long ride was broken[153] that afternoon by our first sight, as a party, of a bear. It came out on a ledge of the mountain, perhaps three hundred yards away, and proceeded, with great deliberation, to walk across a rock-slide. It paid no attention whatever to us and to the wild excitement which followed its discovery. Instantly, the three junior Rineharts were off their horses, and our artillery attack was being prepared. At the first shot, the pack-ponies went crazy. They lunged and jumped, and even Buddy showed signs of strain, leaping what I imagine to be some eleven feet in the air and coming back on four rigid knees. Followed such a peppering of that cliff as it had never had before. Little clouds of rock-dust rose above the bear, in front of him, behind him, and below him. He stopped, mildly astonished, and looked around. More noise, more bucking on the trail, more dust. The bear walked on a trifle faster. It had been arranged that the first bear was to be left for the juniors. So the packers and the rest of the party watched and advised.[154] But, as I have related elsewhere in this narrative, there were no casualties. The bear, as far as I know, is living to-day, an honored member of his community, and still telling how he survived the great war. At last he disappeared into a cave, and we went on without so much as a single skin to decorate a college room. We went on. What odds and ends of knowledge we picked up on those long days in the saddle! That if lightning strikes a pine even lightly, it kills, but that a fir will ordinarily survive; that mountain miles are measured air-line, so that twenty-five miles may really be forty, and that, even then, they are calculated on the level, so that one is credited with only the base of the triangle while he is laboriously climbing up its hypotenuse. I am personally acquainted with the hypotenuses of a good many mountains, and there is no use trying to pretend that they are bases. They are not. Then we learned that the purpose of the National Forests is not to preserve timber but to[155] conserve it. The idea is to sell and reseed. About twenty-five per cent of the timber we saw was yellow pine. But most of the timber we saw on the east side of the Cascades will be safe for some time. I wouldn't undertake to carry out, from most of that region, enough pine-needles to make a sofa-cushion. It is quite enough to get oneself out. Up to now it had been hard going, but not impossible. Now we were to do the impossible. It is a curious thing about mountains, but they have a hideous tendency to fall down. Whole cliff-faces, a mile or so high, are suddenly seized with a wandering disposition. Leaving the old folks at home and sliding down into the valleys, they come awful croppers and sustain about eleven million compound comminuted fractures. These family breaks are known as rock-slides. Now to travel twenty feet over a rock-slide is to twist an ankle, bruise a shin-bone, utterly discourage a horse, and sour the most amiable disposition.[156] <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/facing_page156.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="297" alt="Where the rock-slides start (Glacier National Park)" title="Where the rock-slides start (Glacier National Park)" /> copyright, 1916, by a. j. baker, kalispell, mont. Where the rock-slides start (Glacier National Park) </div> There is no flat side to these wandering rocks. With the diabolical ingenuity that nature can show when she goes wrong, they lie edge up. Do you remember the little mermaid who wished to lose her tail and gain legs so she could follow the prince? And how her penalty was that every step was like walking on the edges of swords? That is a mountain rock-slide, but I do not recall that the little mermaid had to drag a frightened and slipping horse, which stepped on her now and then. Or wear riding-boots. Or stop every now and then to be photographed, and try to persuade her horse to stop also. Or keep looking up to see if another family jar threatened. Or look around to see if any of the party or the pack was rolling down over the spareribs of that ghastly skeleton. No; the little mermaid's problem was a simple and uncomplicated one. We were climbing, too. Only one thing kept us going. The narrow valley twisted, and around each cliff-face we expected the end—either death or solid ground. But not so, or, at least, not for some hours. Riding-boots[157] peeled like a sunburnt face; stones dislodged and rolled down; the sun beat down in early September fury, and still we went on. Only three miles it was, but it was as bad a three miles as I have ever covered. Then—the naturalist turned and smiled. "Now we are all right," he said. "We start to climb soon!"[158] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>XV</h2> <h3>DOUBTFUL LAKE</h3> Of all the mountain-climbing I have ever done the switchback up to Doubtful Lake is the worst. We were hours doing it. There were places when it seemed no horse could possibly make the climb. Back and forth, up and up, along that narrow rock-filled trail, which was lost here in a snow-bank, there in a jungle of evergreen that hung out from the mountain-side, we were obliged to go. There was no going back. We could not have turned a horse around, nor could we have reversed the pack-outfit without losing some of the horses. As a matter of fact, we dropped two horses on that switchback. With infinite labor the packers got them back to the trail, rolling, tumbling, and roping them down to the ledge below, and there salvaging them. It was heart-breaking, nerve-racking work. Near the top was an ice-patch across a brawling waterfall. To slip on that ice-patch meant a drop of in[159]credible distance. From broken places in the crust it was possible to see the stream below. Yet over the ice it was necessary to take ourselves and the pack. "Absolutely no riding here," was the order, given in strained tones. For everybody's nerves were on edge. Somehow or other, we got over. I can still see one little pack-pony wandering away from the others and traveling across that tiny ice-field on the very brink of death at the top of the precipice. The sun had softened the snow so that I fell flat into it. And there was a dreadful moment when I thought I was going to slide. Even when I was safely over, my anxieties were just beginning. For the Head and the Juniors were not yet over. And there was no space to stop and see them come. It was necessary to move on up the switchback, that the next horse behind might scramble up. Buddy went gallantly on, leaping, slipping, his flanks heaving, his nostrils dilated. Then, at last, the familiar call,[160]— <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/facing_page160-tb.jpg" alt="Switchbacks on the trail (Glacier National Park)" title="Switchbacks on the trail (Glacier National Park)" /> <div class='caption2'>copyright by fred h. kiser, portland, oregon Switchbacks on the trail (Glacier National Park)</div> </div> "Are you all right, mother?" And I knew it was all right with them—so far. Three thousand feet that switchback went straight up in the air. How many thousand feet we traveled back and forward, I do not know. But these things have a way of getting over somehow. The last of the pack-horses was three hours behind us in reaching Doubtful Lake. The weary little beasts, cut, bruised, and by this time very hungry, looked dejected and forlorn. It was bitterly cold. Doubtful Lake was full of floating ice, and a chilling wind blew on us from the snow all about. A bear came out on the cliff-face across the valley. But no one attempted to shoot at him. We were too tired, too bruised and sore. We gave him no more than a passing glance. It had been a tremendous experience, but a most alarming one. From the brink of that pocket on the mountain-top where we stood the earth fell away to vast distances beneath. The little river which empties Doubtful Lake[161] slid greasily over a rock and disappeared without a sound into the void. Until the pack-outfit arrived, we could have no food. We built a fire and huddled round it, and now and then one of us would go to the edge of the pit which lay below to listen. The summer evening was over and night had fallen before we heard the horses coming near the top of the cliff. We cheered them, as, one by one, they stumbled over the edge, dark figures of horses and men, the animals with their bulging packs. They had put up a gallant fight. And we had no food for the horses. The few oats we had been able to carry were gone, and there was no grass on the little plateau. There was heather, deceptively green, but nothing else. And here, for the benefit of those who may follow us along the trail, let me say that oats should be carried, if two additional horses are required for the purpose—carried, and kept in reserve for the last hard days of the trip. The two horses that had fallen were un[162]packed first. They were cut, and on their cuts the Head poured iodine. But that was all we could do for them. One little gray mare was trembling violently. She went over a cliff again the next day, but I am glad to say that we took her out finally, not much the worse except for a badly cut shoulder. The other horse, a sorrel, had only a day or two before slid five hundred feet down a snow-bank. He was still stiff from his previous accident, and if ever I saw a horse whose nerve was gone, I saw one there—a poor, tragic, shaken creature, trembling at a word. That night, while we lay wrapped in blankets round the fire while the cooks prepared supper at another fire near by, the Optimist produced a bottle of claret. We drank it out of tin cups, the only wine of the journey, and not until long afterward did we know its history—that a very great man to whose faith the Northwest owes so much of its development had purchased it, twenty-five years before, for the visit to this country of Albert, King of the Belgians.[163] That claret, taken so casually from tin cups near the summit of the Cascades, had been a part of the store of that great dreamer and most abstemious of men, James J. Hill, laid in for the use of that other great dreamer and idealist, Albert, when he was his guest. While we ate, Weaver said suddenly,— "Listen!" His keen ears had caught the sound of a bell. He got up. "Either Johnny or Buck," he said, "starting back home!" Then commenced again that heart-breaking task of rounding up the horses. That is a part of such an expedition. And, even at that, one escaped and was found the next morning high up the cliffside, in a basin. It was too late to put up all the tents that night. Mrs. Fred and I slept in our clothes but under canvas, and the men lay out with their faces to the sky. Toward dawn a thunder-storm came up. For we were on the crest of the Cascades now, where the rain-clouds empty themselves[164] before traveling to the arid country to the east. Just over the mountain-wall above us lay the Pacific Slope. The rain came down, and around the peaks overhead lightning flashed and flamed. No one moved except Joe, who sat up in his blankets, put his hat on, said, "Let 'er rain," and lay down to sleep again. Peanuts, the naturalist's horse, sought human companionship in the storm, and wandered into camp, where one of the young bear-hunters wakened to find him stepping across his prostrate and blanketed form. Then all was still again, except for the solid beat of the rain on canvas and blanket, horse and man. It cleared toward morning, and at dawn Dan was up and climbed the wall on foot. At breakfast, on his return, we held a conference. He reported that it was possible to reach the top—possible but difficult, and that what lay on the other side we should have to discover later on. A night's sleep had made Joe all business[165] again. On the previous day he had been too busy saving his camera and his life—camera first, of course—to try for pictures. But now he had a brilliant idea. "Now see here," he said to me; "I've got a great idea. How's Buddy about water?" "He's partial to it," I admitted, "for drinking, or for lying down and rolling in it, especially when I am on him. Why?" "Well, it's like this," he observed: "I'm set up on the bank of the lake. See? And you ride him into the water and get him to scramble up on one of those ice-cakes. Do you get it? It'll be a whale of a picture." "Joe," I said, in a stern voice, "did you ever try to make a horse go into an icy lake and climb on to an ice-cake? Because if you have, you can do it now. I can turn the camera all right. Anyhow," I added firmly, "I've been photographed enough. This film is going to look as if I'd crossed the Cascades alone. Some of you other people ought to have a chance." But a moving-picture man after a picture is[166] as determined as a cook who does not like the suburbs. I rode Buddy to the brink of the lake, and there spoke to him in friendly tones. I observed that this lake was like other lakes, only colder, and that it ought to be mere play after the day before. I also selected a large ice-cake, which looked fairly solid, and pointed Buddy at it. Then I kicked him. He took a step and began to shake. Then he leaped six feet to one side and reared, still shaking. Then he turned round and headed for the camp. By that I was determined on the picture. There is nothing like two wills set in opposite directions to determine a woman. Buddy and I again and again approached the lake, mostly sideways. But at last he went in, took twenty steps out, felt the cold on his poor empty belly, and—refused the ice-cake. We went out much faster than we went in, making the bank in a great bound and a very bad humor—two very bad humors.[167] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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