The Mountains Part 15

Our last camp of this summer was built and broken in the full leisure of at least a three weeks' expectation. We had traveled south from the Golden Trout through the Toowah range. There we had viewed wonders which I cannot expect you to believe in,--such as a spring of warm water in which you could bathe and from which you could reach to dip up a cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast a fly into a trout stream, on the left. At length we entered a high meadow in the shape of a maltese cross, with pine slopes about it, and springs of water welling in little humps of green. There the long pine-needles were extraordinarily thick and the pine-cones exceptionally large. The former we sc.r.a.ped together to the depth of three feet for a bed in the lea of a fallen trunk; the latter we gathered in armfuls to pile on the camp-fire. Next morning we rode down a mile or so through the gra.s.ses, exclaimed over the thousands of mountain quail buzzing from the creek bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well-known pines and about at the grateful coolness of our accustomed green meadows and leaves;--and then, as though we had crossed a threshold, we emerged into chaparral, dry loose shale, yucca, Spanish bayonet, heated air and the bleached burned-out furnace-like country of arid California in midsummer. The trail dropped down through sage-brush, just as it always did in the California we had known; the mountains rose with the fur-like dark-olive effect of the coast ranges; the sun beat hot. We had left the enchanted land.

The trail was very steep and very long, and took us finally into the country of dry brown gra.s.ses, gray brush, waterless stony ravines, and dust. Others had traveled that trail, headed the other way, and evidently had not liked it. Empty bottles blazed the path. Somebody had sacrificed a pack of playing-cards, which he had stuck on thorns from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the discomforts of such travel. After an apparently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so startlingly in contrast to their surroundings.

By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled on horseback since four.

A variety of circ.u.mstances learned at the village made it imperative that both the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without the delay of a single hour. This left Wes to bring the horses home, which was tough on Wes, but he rose n.o.bly to the occasion.

When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we had acquired a team of wild broncos, a buckboard, an elderly gentleman with a white goatee, two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese. With these we hoped to reach the railroad shortly after midnight.

The elevation was five thousand feet, the road dusty and hot, the country uninteresting in sage-brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and general dryness. Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks in the good old fashion. Our driver had immigrated from Maine the year before, and by some chance had drifted straight to the arid regions.

He was vastly disgusted. At every particularly atrocious dust-hole or unlovely cactus strip he spat into s.p.a.ce and remarked in tones of bottomless contempt:--

"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"

This was evidently intended as a quotation.

Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, where we got out at every rise in order to ease the horses, and where we hurried the old gentleman beyond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.

It grew dark. Dimly the road showed gray in the twilight. We did not know how far exactly we were to go, but imagined that sooner or later we would top one of the small ridges to look across one of the broad plateau plains to the lights of our station. You see we had forgotten, in the midst of flatness, that we were still over five thousand feet up. Then the road felt its way between two hills;--and the blackness of night opened below us as well as above, and from some deep and tremendous abyss breathed the winds of s.p.a.ce.

It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two hours below the horizon. Somehow the trail turned to the right along that tremendous cliff. We thought we could make out its direction, the dimness of its glimmering; but equally well, after we had looked a moment, we could imagine it one way or another, to right and left. I went ahead to investigate. The trail to left proved to be the faint reflection of a clump of "old man" at least five hundred feet down; that to right was a burned patch sheer against the rise of the cliff. We started on the middle way.

There were turns-in where a continuance straight ahead would require an airship or a coroner; again turns-out where the direct line would telescope you against the state of California. These we could make out by straining our eyes. The horses plunged and snorted; the buckboard leaped. Fire flashed from the impact of steel against rock, momentarily blinding us to what we should see. Always we descended into the velvet blackness of the abyss, the canon walls rising steadily above us shutting out even the dim illumination of the stars. From time to time our driver, desperately scared, jerked out cheering bits of information.

"My eyes ain't what they was. For the Lord's sake keep a-lookin', boys."

"That nigh hoss is deef. There don't seem to be no use saying WHOA to her."

"Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts. I been figgerin' on tackin'

on a new shoe for a week."

"I never was over this road but onct, and then I was headed th' other way. I was driving of a corpse."

Then, after two hours of it, BING! BANG! SMASH! our tongue collided with a sheer black wall, no blacker than the atmosphere before it. The trail here took a sharp V turn to the left. We had left the face of the precipice and henceforward would descend the bed of the canon.

Fortunately our collision had done damage to nothing but our nerves, so we proceeded to do so.

The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet above us. They seemed to close together, like the sides of a tent, to leave only a narrow pale lucent strip of sky. The trail was quite invisible, and even the sense of its existence was lost when we traversed groves of trees. One of us had to run ahead of the horses, determining its general direction, locating the sharper turns. The rest depended on the instinct of the horses and pure luck.

It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run down through the blackness, shouting aloud to guide our followers, swinging to the slope, bathed to the soul in mysteries of which we had no time to take cognizance.

By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us like a star. The smell of fresh wood smoke and stale damp fire came to our nostrils. We gained the star and found it to be a log smouldering; and up the hill other stars red as blood. So we knew that we had crossed the zone of an almost extinct forest fire, and looked on the scattered camp-fires of an army of destruction.

The moon rose. We knew it by touches of white light on peaks infinitely far above us; not at all by the relieving of the heavy velvet blackness in which we moved. After a time, I, running ahead in my turn, became aware of the deep breathing of animals. I stopped short and called a warning. Immediately a voice answered me.

"Come on, straight ahead. They're not on the road."

When within five feet I made out the huge freight wagons in which were lying the teamsters, and very dimly the big freight mules standing tethered to the wheels.

"It's a dark night, friend, and you're out late."

"A dark night," I agreed, and plunged on. Behind me rattled and banged the abused buckboard, snorted the half-wild broncos, groaned the unrepaired brake, softly cursed my companions.

Then at once the abrupt descent ceased. We glided out to the silvered flat, above which sailed the moon.

The hour was seen to be half past one. We had missed our train.

Nothing was visible of human habitations. The land was frosted with the moonlight, enchanted by it, etherealized. Behind us, huge and formidable, loomed the black ma.s.s of the range we had descended.

Before us, thin as smoke in the magic lucence that flooded the world, rose other mountains, very great, lofty as the sky. We could not understand them. The descent we had just accomplished should have landed us on a level plain in which lay our town. But here we found ourselves in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain ranges through which there seemed to be no pa.s.s less than five or six thousand feet in height.

We reined in the horses to figure it out.

"I don't see how it can be," said I. "We've certainly come far enough.

It would take us four hours at the very least to cross that range, even if the railroad should happen to be on the other side of it."

"I been through here only once," repeated the driver,--"going the other way.--Then I drew a corpse." He spat, and added as an afterthought, "BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"

We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. They rose above us sheer and forbidding. In the bright moonlight plainly were to be descried the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the canons, the granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a thread of a waterfall high up where the clouds would be if the night had not been clear.

"We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the Tenderfoot.

"Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. "It's bound to go somewhere. We might as well give up the railroad and find a place to turn-in."

"It can't be far," encouraged the Tenderfoot; "this valley can't be more than a few miles across."

"Gi dap!" remarked the driver.

We moved forward down the white wagon trail approaching the mountains.

And then we were witnesses of the most marvelous transformation. For as we neared them, those impregnable mountains, as though panic-stricken by our advance, shrunk back, dissolved, dwindled, went to pieces. Where had towered ten-thousand-foot peaks, perfect in the regular succession from timber to snow, now were little flat hills on which grew tiny bushes of sage. A pa.s.sage opened between them. In a hundred yards we had gained the open country, leaving behind us the mighty but unreal necromancies of the moon.

Before us gleamed red and green lights. The ma.s.s of houses showed half distinguishable. A feeble glimmer illuminated part of a white sign above the depot. That which remained invisible was evidently the name of the town. That which was revealed was the supplementary information which the Southern Pacific furnishes to its patrons. It read: "Elevation 482 feet." We were definitely out of the mountains.

XXII

THE LURE OF THE TRAIL

The trail's call depends not at all on your common sense. You know you are a fool for answering it; and yet you go. The comforts of civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are not lightly to be renounced: the ease of having your physical labor done for you; the joy of cultivated minds, of theatres, of books, of partic.i.p.ation in the world's progress; these you leave behind you. And in exchange you enter a life where there is much long hard work of the hands--work that is really hard and long, so that no man paid to labor would consider it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety; you voluntarily place yourself where cold, wet, hunger, thirst, heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts will wait upon you daily. A thousand times in the course of a woods life even the stoutest-hearted will tell himself softly--very softly if he is really stout-hearted, so that others may not be annoyed--that if ever the fates permit him to extricate himself he will never venture again.

These times come when long continuance has worn on the spirit. You beat all day to windward against the tide toward what should be but an hour's sail: the sea is high and the spray cold; there are sunken rocks, and food there is none; chill gray evening draws dangerously near, and there is a foot of water in the bilge. You have swallowed your tongue twenty times on the alkali; and the sun is melting hot, and the dust dry and pervasive, and there is no water, and for all your effort the relative distances seem to remain the same for days. You have carried a pack until your every muscle is strung white-hot; the woods are breathless; the black flies swarm persistently and bite until your face is covered with blood. You have struggled through clogging snow until each time you raise your snowshoe you feel as though some one had stabbed a little sharp knife into your groin; it has come to be night; the mercury is away below zero, and with aching fingers you are to prepare a camp which is only an antic.i.p.ation of many more such camps in the ensuing days. For a week it has rained, so that you, pushing through the dripping brush, are soaked and sodden and comfortless, and the bushes have become horrible to your shrinking goose-flesh. Or you are just plain tired out, not from a single day's fatigue, but from the gradual exhaustion of a long hike. Then in your secret soul you utter these sentiments:--

"You are a fool. This is not fun. There is no real reason why you should do this. If you ever get out of here, you will stick right home where common sense flourishes, my son!"

Then after a time you do get out, and are thankful. But in three months you will have proved in your own experience the following axiom--I should call it the widest truth the wilderness has to teach:--

"In memory the pleasures of a camping trip strengthen with time, and the disagreeables weaken."

I don't care how hard an experience you have had, nor how little of the pleasant has been mingled with it, in three months your general impression of that trip will be good. You will look back on the hard times with a certain fondness of recollection.

I remember one trip I took in the early spring following a long drive on the Pine River. It rained steadily for six days. We were soaked to the skin all the time, ate standing up in the driving downpour, and slept wet. So cold was it that each morning our blankets were so full of frost that they crackled stiffly when we turned out.

Dispa.s.sionately I can appraise that as about the worst I ever got into.