IN THE BITTER ROOT MOUNTAINS
“Go slow, boys, for God’s sake! If we miss this landing, we are lost. The rapids begin just around that bend.”
Four men stood upon a rude raft, and with roughly-made oars and long fir poles were trying to guide it out of the current of the swollen Clearwater River into a small sheltered inlet.
Both shores of the river rose abruptly to steep and terrible mountains. Not far above was the snow-line.
The men’s faces were white and haggard, their eyes anxious, half desperate. Huddled upon a stretcher at one end of the raft was a young man, little more than a boy, whose pallid, emaciated face was turned slightly to one side. His eyes were closed; the long black lashes lay like heavy shadows upon his cheeks. The weak November sunshine, struggling over the fierce mountains, shone through his thin nostrils, turning them pink, and giving an unearthly look to the face. A collie crouched close beside him, shivering with fear, yet ever and anon licking the cold hand lying outside the gray blanket; occasionally he lifted his head anduttered a long, mournful howl. Each time the four men shuddered and exchanged looks of despair,—so humanly appealing was it, and so deeply did it voice the terrible dread in their own hearts.
It was now two months since they had left Seattle on a hunting expedition in the Bitter Root Mountains in Idaho. For six weeks they had been lost in those awful snow fastnesses. Their hunting dogs had been killed by wild beasts. Their twelve pack-ponies had been left to starve to death when, finding further progress on land impossible on account of the snow, they constructed a raft and started on their perilous journey down the Clearwater.
The cook had been sick almost the entire time, and their progress had been necessarily slow and discouraging. They had now reached a point where the river was so full of boulders and so swift that they could proceed no farther on the raft.
For several days the cook had been unconscious, lying in a speechless stupor; but when they had, with much danger and excitement, landed and made him comfortable in a protected nook, he suddenly spoke,—faintly but distinctly.
“Polly,” he said, with deep tenderness, “lay your hand on my head. I guess it won’t ache so, then.”
The four men, looking at him, grew whiter. They could not look at each other. The dog, having already taken his place beside him, lifted his head and looked at him with pitiable eagerness.
“Oh, Polly!”—there was a heart-break in the voice,—“you don’t know what I’ve suffered! The cold, and then the fever! The pain has been awful. Oh, I’ve wanted you so, Polly—I’ve wanted you so!... But it’s all right, now that I’m home again.... Where’s the baby, Polly? Oh, the nights that I’ve laid, freezing and suffering in the snow, just kept alive by the thought o’ you an’ the little man! I knew it ’u’d kill you ’f I died—so Iw’u’dn’tgive up! An’ now I’m here ’t home again. Polly——”
“We must fix some supper, boys,” said Darnell, roughly, turning away to hide his emotion. “Let’s get the fire started.”
“We’ve just got enough for one more good meal,” said Roberts, in a tremulous voice. “There’s no game around here, either. Guide, you must try to find a way out of this before dark, so we can start early in the morning.”
Without speaking, the guide obeyed. It was dark when he returned. The men were sitting by the camp-fire, eating their supper. The dog still lay by his master, from whom even hunger could not tempt him.
The three men looked at the guide. He satdown and took his cup of coffee in silence. “Well,” said Darnell, at last, “can we go on?”
“Yes,” said the guide, slowly; “we can. In some places there’ll be only a few inches’ foothold; an’ we’ll hev to hang on to bushes up above us, with the river in some places hundreds o’ feet below; but we can do it, ’f we don’t get rattled an’ lose our heads.”
There was a deep and significant silence. Then Brotherton said, with white lips, “Do you mean that we can’t takehim?”
“That’s what I mean.” The guide spoke deliberately. He could not lift his eyes. Some of the coffee spilled as he lifted the cup to his lips. “We can’t take a thing, ’cept our hands and feet,—not even a blanket. It’ll be life an’ death to do it, then.”
There was another silence. At last Darnell said: “Then it is for us to decide whether we shall leave him to die alone while we save ourselves, or stay and die with him?”
“Yes,” said the guide.
“There is positively not the faintest chance of getting him out with us?”
“By God, no!” burst forth the guide, passionately. “It seems like puttin’ the responsibility on me, but you want the truth, an’ that’s it. He can’t be got out. It’s leave him an’ save ourselves, or stay with him an’ starve.”
After a long while Roberts said, in a low voice: “He’s unconscious. He wouldn’t know we had gone.”
“He cannot possibly live three days, under any circumstances,” said Brotherton. “Mortification has already begun in his legs.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Darnell, jumping up and beginning to walk rapidly forth and back, before the fire. “I must go home, boys! My wife—when I think of her, I am afraid of losing my reason! When I think what she is suffering——”
Brotherton looked at him. Then he sunk his face into both his hands. He, too, had a wife. The guide put down his coffee; large tears came into his honest eyes. He had no wife, but there was one——
Roberts got up suddenly. He had the look of a tortured animal in his eyes. “Boys,” he said, “my wife is dead. My life doesn’t matter so much, but—I’ve three little girls! Imustget back, somehow!”
The sick man spoke. They all started guiltily, and looked toward him. “Yes, yes, Polly,” he said, soothingly, “I know how you worried about me. I know how you set strainin’ your eyes out the window day an’ night, watchin’ fer me. But now I’m home again, an’ it’s all right. I guess you prayed, Polly; an’ I guess God heard you....There’s a boy fer you! He knows me, too.”
The silence that fell upon them was long and terrible. The guide arose at last, and, without speaking, made some broth from the last of the canned beef, and forced it between the sick man’s lips. When he came back to the fire, Darnell took a silver dollar out of his pocket.
“Boys,” he said, brokenly, “I don’t want to be the one to settle this, and I guess none of you do. It is an awful thing to decide. I shall throw this dollar high into the air. If it falls heads up, we go; tails—we stay.”
The men had lifted their heads and were watching him. They were all very white; they were all trembling.
“Are you willing to decide it in this way?”
Each answered, “Yes.”
“I swear,” said Darnell, slowly and solemnly, “that I will abide by this decision. Do you all swear the same?”
Each, in turn, took the oath. Trembling now perceptibly, Darnell lifted his hand slowly and cast the piece of silver into the air. Their eyes followed its shining course. For a second it disappeared; then it came singing to the earth.
Like drunken men they staggered to the spot where it had fallen, and fell upon their knees, staring with straining eyes and bloodless lips.
“It is heads,” said Darnell. He wiped the cold perspiration from his brow.
At that moment the dog lifted his head and sent a long, mournful howl to die in faint echoes in the mountains across the river.
At daylight they were ready to start. Snow lay on the ground to a depth of six inches. But a terrible surprise awaited them. At the last moment they discovered that the cook was conscious.
“You’re not going—to leave me?” he said, in a whisper. His eyes seemed to be leaping out of their hollow sockets with terror.
“Only for a few hours,” said Brotherton, huskily. “Only to find a way out of this,—to make a path over which we can carry you.”
“Oh,” he said, faintly; “I thought—— but you wouldn’t. In the name o’ God, don’t leave me to die alone!”
They assured him that they would soon return. Then, making him as comfortable as possible, they went,—without hesitation, without one backward look. There was no noise. The snow fell softly and silently through the firs; the river flowed swiftly through its wild banks. The sick man lay with closed eyes, trustfully. But the dog knew. For the first time he left his master. He ran after them, and threw himself before them, moaning. His lifted eyes had a soul in them.He leaped before them, and upon them, licking their hands and clothing; he cast himself prone upon their feet, like one praying. No human being ever entreated for his life so passionately, so pathetically, as that dog pleaded for his master’s.
At last, half desperate as they were, they kicked him savagely and flung him off. With a look in his eyes that haunted them as long as they lived, he retreated then to his master’s side, and lay down in a heavy huddle of despair, still watching them. As they disappeared, he lifted his head, and for the last time they heard that long, heart-breaking howl.
It was answered by a coyote in the canyon above.
A week later the Associated Press sent out the following dispatch:
“The Darnell party, who were supposed to have perished in the Bitter Root Mountains, returned last night. Their hardships and sufferings were terrible. There is great rejoicing over their safe return. They were compelled to leave the cook, who had been sick the entire time, to die in the mountains. But for their determined efforts to bring him out alive, they would certainly have returned a month earlier.”
“The Darnell party, who were supposed to have perished in the Bitter Root Mountains, returned last night. Their hardships and sufferings were terrible. There is great rejoicing over their safe return. They were compelled to leave the cook, who had been sick the entire time, to die in the mountains. But for their determined efforts to bring him out alive, they would certainly have returned a month earlier.”
The world read the dispatch and rejoiced with those rejoicing. But one woman, reading it, fell, as one dead, beside her laughing boy.