Tales of lonely trails Part 41

"Where?... By Golly! that's another bear. He's black. Yours is red....

Look sharp. Next time he shows smoke him!"

I saw a flash of black across an open s.p.a.ce--I heard a scattering of gravel. But I had no chance to shoot. Then both of us heard a bear running in thick leaves.

"He's gone down the canyon," said Copple. "Now look for your bear."

"Listen Ben. The hounds are coming fast. There's Rock.--There's Sue."

"I see them. Old Dan--what do you think of that old dog?... There!--your red bear's still comin' ... He's bad hurt."

Though Copple tried hard to show me where, and I strained my eyes, I could not see the bear. I could not locate the threshing of brush. I knew it seemed close enough for me to be glad I was not down in that thicket. How the hounds made the welkin ring! Rock was in the lead. Sue was next. And Old Dan must have found the speed of his best days.

Strange he did not bay all down that slope! When Rock and Sue headed the bear then I saw him. He sat up on his haunches ready to fight, but they did not attack him. Instead they began to yelp wildly. I dared not shoot again for fear of hitting one of them. Old Dan just beat the rest of the pack to the bear. Up pealed a yelping chorus. I had never heard Old Dan bay a bear at close range. With deep, hoa.r.s.e, quick, wild roars he dominated that medley. A box canyon took up the bays, cracking them back in echo from wall to wall.

From the saddle of the great ridge above pealed down R.C.'s: "Waahoo!"

I saw him silhouetted dark against the sky line. He waved and I answered. Then he disappeared.

Nielsen bellowed from the craggy cape above and behind us. From down the canyon Edd sent up his piercing: "Ki Yi!" Then Takahashi appeared opposite to us, like a goat on a promontory. How his: "Banzai!" rang above the baying of the hounds!

"We'd better hurry down an' across," said Copple. "Reckon the hounds will jump that bear or some one else will get there first. We got to skedaddle!"

As before we fell into a manzanita thicket and had to crawl. Then we came out upon the rim of a box canyon where the echoes made such a din.

It was too steep to descend. We had to head it, and Copple took chances.

Loose boulders tripped me and stout bushes saved me. We knocked streams of rock and gravel down into this gorge, sending up a roar as of falling water. But we got around. A steep slope lay below, all pine needles and leaves. From this point I saw Edd on the opposite slope.

"I stopped one bear," I yelled. "Hurry. Look out for the dogs!"

Then, imitating Copple, I sat down and slid as on a toboggan for some thirty thrilling yards. Some of my anatomy and more of my rags I left behind me. But it was too exciting then to think of hurts. I managed to protect at least my rifle. Copple was charging into the thicket below. I followed him into the dark gorge, where huge boulders lay, and a swift brook ran, and leaves two feet deep carpeted the shady canyon bed. It was gloomy down into the lower part. I saw where bear had turned over the leaves making a dark track.

"The hounds have quit," called Copple suddenly. "I told you he was your bear."

We yelled. Somebody above us answered. Then we climbed up the opposite slope, through a dense thicket, crossing a fresh bear track, a running track, and soon came into an open rocky slide where my bear lay surrounded by the hounds, with Old Dan on guard. The bear was red in color, with silky fur, a long keen head, and fine limbs, and of goodly size.

"Cinnamon," declared Copple, and turning him over he pointed to a white spot on his breast. "Fine bear. About four hundred pounds. Maybe not so heavy. But he'll take some packin' up to the rim!"

Then I became aware of the other men. Takahashi had arrived on the scene first, finding the bear dead. Edd came next, and after him Pyle.

I sat down for a much needed rest. Copple interested himself in examining the bear, finding that my first shot had hit him in the flank, and my second had gone through the middle of his body. Next Copple amused himself by taking pictures of bear and hounds. Old Dan came to me and lay beside me, and looked as if to say: "Well, we got him!"

Yells from both sides of the canyon were answered by Edd. R.C. was rolling the rocks on his side at a great rate. But Nielsen on the other side beat him to us. The Norwegian crashed the brush, sent the avalanches roaring, and eventually reached us, all dirty, ragged, b.l.o.o.d.y, with fire in his eye. He had come all the way from the rim in short order. What a performance that must have been! He said he thought he might be needed. R.C. guided by Edd's yells, came cracking the brush down to us. Pale he was and wet with sweat, and there were black brush marks across his face. His eyes were keen and sharp. He had started down for the same reason as Nielsen's. But he had to descend a slope so steep that he had to hold on to keep from sliding down. And he had jumped a big bear out of a bed of leaves. The bed was still warm. R.C. said he had smelled bear, and that his toboggan slide down that slope, with bears all around for all he knew, had started the cold sweat on him.

Presently George Haught joined us, having come down the bed of the canyon.

"We knew you'd got a bear," said George. "Father heard the first two bullets. .h.i.t meat. An' I heard him rollin' down the slope."

"Well!" exclaimed R.C. "That's what made those first two shots sound so strange to me. Different from the last two. Sounded like soft dead pats!

And it was lead hitting flesh. I heard it half a mile away!"

This matter of the sound of bullets. .h.i.tting flesh and being heard at a great distance seemed to me the most remarkable feature of our hunt.

Later I asked Haught. He said he heard my first two bullets strike and believed from the peculiar sound that I had my bear. And his stand was fully a mile away. But the morning was unusually still and sound carried far.

The men hung my bear from the forks of a maple. Then they decided to give us time to climb up to our stands before putting the hounds on the other fresh trail.

Nielsen, R.C., and I started to climb back up to the points. Only plenty of time made it possible to scale those rugged bluffs. Nielsen distanced us, and eventually we became separated. The sun grew warm. The bees hummed. After a while we heard the baying of the hounds. They were working westward under the bases of the bluffs. We rimmed the heads of several gorges, climbed and crossed the west ridge of Dude Canyon, and lost the hounds somewhere as we traveled.

R.C. did not seem to mind this misfortune any more than I. We were content. Resting a while we chose the most accessible ridge and started the long climb to the rim. Westward under us opened a great n.o.ble canyon full of forests, thicketed slopes, cliffs and caves and crags. Next time we rested we again heard the hounds, far away at first, but gradually drawing closer. In half an hour they appeared right under us again.

Their baying, however, grew desultory, and lacked the stirring note.

Finally we heard Edd calling and whistling to them. After that for a while all was still. Then pealed up the clear tuneful melody of Edd's horn, calling off the chase for that day and season.

"All over," said R.C. "Are you glad?"

"For Old Dan's sake and Tom's and the bears--yes," I replied.

"Me, too! But I'd never get enough of this country."

We proceeded on our ascent over and up the broken ma.s.ses of rock, climbing slowly and easily, making frequent and long rests. We liked to linger in the sun on the warm piny mossy benches. Every shady cedar or juniper wooed us to tarry a moment. Old bear tracks and fresh deer tracks held the same interest, though our hunt was over. Above us the gray broken ma.s.s of rim towered and loomed, more formidable as we neared it. Sometimes we talked a little, but mostly we were silent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MEAT IN CAMP]

[Ill.u.s.tration: (2) MEAT IN CAMP]

Like an Indian, at every pause, I gazed out into the void. How sweeping and grand the long sloping lines of ridges from the rim down! Away in the east ragged spurs of peaks showed hazily, like uncertain mountains on the desert. South ranged the upheaved and wild Mazatzals. Everywhere beneath me, for leagues and leagues extended the timbered hills of green, the gray outcroppings of rocks, the red bluffs, the golden patches of gra.s.sy valleys, lost in the canyons. All these swept away in a vast billowy ocean of wilderness to become dim in the purple of distance. And the sun was setting in a blaze of gold. From the rim I took a last lingering look and did not marvel that I loved this wonderland of Arizona.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BURROS PACKED FOR THE TRAIL]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEADLY CHOLLA, MOST POISONOUS AND PAIN INFLICTING OF THE CACTUS]

CHAPTER V

DEATH VALLEY

Of the five hundred and fifty-seven thousand square miles of desert-land in the southwest Death Valley is the lowest below sea level, the most arid and desolate. It derives its felicitous name from the earliest days of the gold strike in California, when a caravan of Mormons, numbering about seventy, struck out from Salt Lake, to cross the Mojave Desert and make a short cut to the gold fields. All but two of these prospectors perished in the deep, iron-walled, ghastly sink-holes, which from that time became known as Death Valley.

The survivors of this fatal expedition brought news to the world that the sombre valley of death was a treasure mine of minerals; and since then hundreds of prospectors and wanderers have lost their lives there.

To seek gold and to live in the lonely waste places of the earth have been and ever will be driving pa.s.sions of men.

My companion on this trip was a Norwegian named Nielsen. On most of my trips to lonely and wild places I have been fortunate as to comrades or guides. The circ.u.mstances of my meeting Nielsen were so singular that I think they will serve as an interesting introduction. Some years ago I received a letter, brief, clear and well-written, in which the writer stated that he had been a wanderer over the world, a sailor before the mast, and was now a prospector for gold. He had taken four trips alone down into the desert of Sonora, and in many other places of the southwest, and knew the prospecting game. Somewhere he had run across my story _Desert Gold_ in which I told about a lost gold mine. And the point of his letter was that if I could give him some idea as to where the lost gold mine was located he would go find it and give me half. His name was Sievert Nielsen. I wrote him that to my regret the lost gold mine existed only in my imagination, but if he would come to Avalon to see me perhaps we might both profit by such a meeting. To my surprise he came. He was a man of about thirty-five, of magnificent physique, weighing about one hundred and ninety, and he was so enormously broad across the shoulders that he did not look his five feet ten. He had a wonderful head, huge, round, solid, like a cannon-ball. And his bronzed face, his regular features, square firm jaw, and clear gray eyes, fearless and direct, were singularly attractive to me. Well educated, with a strange calm poise, and a cool courtesy, not common in Americans, he evidently was a man of good family, by his own choice a rolling stone and adventurer.

Nielsen accompanied me on two trips into the wilderness of Arizona, on one of which he saved my life, and on the other he rescued all our party from a most uncomfortable and possibly hazardous situation--but these are tales I may tell elsewhere. In January 1919 Nielsen and I traveled around the desert of southern California from Palm Springs to Picacho, and in March we went to Death Valley.

Nowadays a little railroad, the Tonapah and Tidewater Railroad, runs northward from the Santa Fe over the barren Mojave, and it pa.s.ses within fifty miles of Death Valley.

It was sunset when we arrived at Death Valley Junction--a weird, strange sunset in drooping curtains of transparent cloud, lighting up dark mountain ranges, some peaks of which were clear-cut and black against the sky, and others veiled in trailing storms, and still others white with snow. That night in the dingy little store I heard prospectors talk about float, which meant gold on the surface, and about high grade ores, zinc, copper, silver, lead, manganese, and about how borax was mined thirty years ago, and hauled out of Death Valley by teams of twenty mules. Next morning, while Nielsen packed the outfit, I visited the borax mill. It was the property of an English firm, and the work of hauling, grinding, roasting borax ore went on day and night. Inside it was as dusty and full of a powdery atmosphere as an old-fashioned flour mill. The ore was hauled by train from some twenty miles over toward the valley, and was dumped from a high trestle into shutes that fed the grinders. For an hour I watched this constant stream of borax as it slid down into the hungry crushers, and I listened to the chalk-faced operator who yelled in my ear. Once he picked a piece of gypsum out of the borax. He said the mill was getting out twenty-five hundred sacks a day. The most significant thing he said was that men did not last long at such labor, and in the mines six months appeared to be the limit of human endurance. How soon I had enough of that choking air in the room where the borax was ground! And the place where the borax was roasted in huge round revolving furnaces--I found that intolerable. When I got out into the cool clean desert air I felt an immeasurable relief. And that relief made me thoughtful of the lives of men who labored, who were chained by necessity, by duty or habit, or by love, to the hard tasks of the world. It did not seem fair. These laborers of the borax mines and mills, like the stokers of ships, and coal-diggers, and blast-furnace hands--like thousands and millions of men, killed themselves outright or impaired their strength, and when they were gone or rendered useless others were found to take their places. Whenever I come in contact with some phase of this problem of life I take the meaning or the lesson of it to myself. And as the years go by my respect and reverence and wonder increase for these men of elemental lives, these h.o.r.n.y-handed toilers with physical things, these uncomplaining users of brawn and bone, these giants who breast the elements, who till the earth and handle iron, who fight the natural forces with their bodies.

That day about noon I looked back down the long gravel and greasewood slope which we had ascended and I saw the borax-mill now only a smoky blot on the desert floor. When we reached the pa.s.s between the Black Mountains and the Funeral Mountains we left the road, and were soon lost to the works of man. How strange a gladness, a relief! Something dropped away from me. I felt the same subtle change in Nielsen. For one thing he stopped talking, except an occasional word to the mules.