Watching the pack-train coming down at Cascade PassWatching the pack-train coming down at Cascade Pass
Our nerves began to go, too, I think, on that last day. We were plainly frightened, not for ourselves but each for the other. There were many places where to dislodge a stone was to lose it as down a bottomless well. There was one frightful spot where it was necessary to go through a waterfall on a narrow ledge slippery with moss, where the water dropped straight, uncounted feet to the valley below.
The Little Boy paused blithely, his reins over his arm, and surveyed the scenery from the center of this death-trap.
"If anybody slipped here," he said, "he'd fall quite a distance." Then he kicked a stone to see it go.
"Quit that!" said the Head, in awful tones.
Midway of the descent, we estimated that we should lose at least ten horses. The pack was behind us, and there was no way to discover how they were faring. But as the ledges were never wide enough for a horse and the one leading him to move side by side, it seemed impossible that the pack-ponies with their wide burdens could edge their way along.
I had mounted Buddy again. I was too fatigued to walk farther, and, besides, I had fallen so often that I felt he was more sure-footed than I. Perhaps my narrowest escape on that trip was where a huge stone had slipped across the ledge we were following. Buddy, afraid to climb its slippery sides, undertook to leap it. There was one terrible moment when he failed to make a footing with his hind feet and we hung there over the gorge. After that, Dan Devore led him.
In spite of our difficulties, we got down to the timber-line rather quickly. But there trouble seemed to increase rather than diminish. Trees had fallen across the way, and dangerous détours on uncertain footing were necessary to get round them. The warm rains of the Pacific Slope had covered the mountain-sides with thick vegetation also. Our way, hardly less steep than on the day before, was overgrown with greenery that was often a trap for the unwary. And even when, at last, we were down beyond the imminent danger of breaking our necks at every step, there were moredifficulties. The vegetation was rank, tremendously high. We worked our way through it, lost to each other and to the world. Wilderness snows had turned the small streams to roaring rivers and spread them over flats through which we floundered. So long was it since the trail had been used that it was often difficult to tell where it took off from the other side of the stream. And our horses were growing very weary. They had made the entire trip without grain and with such bits of pasture as they could pick up in the mountains. Now it was a long time since they had had even grass.
It will never be possible to know how many miles we covered in that Cascade Pass trip. As Mr. Hilligoss said, mountain miles were measured with a coonskin, and they threw in the tail. Often to make a mile's advance we traveled four on the mountain-side.
So when they tell me that it was a trifle of sixteen miles from the top of Cascade Pass to the camp-site we made that night, I know that it was nearer thirty. In point of difficulties, it was a thousand.
Yet the last part of the trip, had we not been too weary to enjoy it, was superbly beautiful. There was a fine rain falling. The undergrowth was less riotous and had taken on the form of giant ferns, ten feet high, which overhung the trail. Here were great cypress trees thirty-six feet in circumference—a forest of them. We rode through green aisles where even the death of the forest was covered by soft moss. Out of the green and moss-covered trunks of dead giants, new growth had sprung, new trees, hanging gardens of ferns.
There had been much talk of Mineral Park. It was our objective point for camp that night, and I think I had gathered that it was to be a settlement. I expected nothing less than a post-office and perhaps some miners' cabins. When, at the end of that long, hard day, we reached Mineral Park at twilight and in a heavy rain, I was doomed to disappointment.
Mineral Park consists of a deserted shack in a clearing perhaps forty feet square, on the bank of a mountain stream. All around it is impenetrable forest. The mountains convergehere so that the valley becomes a cañon. So dense was the growth that we put up our tents on the trail itself.
In the little clearing round the empty shack, the horses were tied in the cold rain. It was impossible to let them loose, for we could never have found them again. Our hearts ached that night for the hungry creatures; the rain had brought a cold wind and they could not even move about to keep warm.
I was too tired to eat that night. I went to bed and lay in my tent, listening to the sound of the rain on the canvas. The camp-stove was set up in the trail, and the others gathered round it, eating in the rain. But, weary as I was, I did not sleep. For the first time, terror of the forest gripped me. It menaced; it threatened.
The roar of the river sounded like the rush of flame. I lay there and wondered what would happen if the forest took fire. For the gentle summer rain would do little good once a fire started. There would be no way out. The giant cliffs would offer no refuge. We could noteven have reached them through the jungle had we tried. And forest-fires were common enough. We had ridden over too many burned areas not to realize that.
It was still raining in the morning. The skies were gray and sodden and the air was moist. We stood round the camp-fire and ate our fried ham, hot coffee, and biscuits. It was then that the Head, prompted by sympathy, fed his horse the rain-soaked biscuit, the apple, the two lumps of sugar, and the raw egg.
Yet, in spite of the weather, we were jubilant. The pack-train had come through without the loss of a single horse. Again the impossible had become possible. And that day was to see us out of the mountains and in peaceful green valleys, where the horses could eat their fill.
The sun came out as we started. Had it not been for the horses, we should have been entirely happy. But sympathy for them had become an obsession. We rode slowly to save them; we walked when we could. It wasstrange to go through that green wonderland and find not a leaf the horses could eat. It was all moss, ferns, and evergreens.
From the semi-arid lands east of the Cascades to the rank vegetation of the Pacific side was an extraordinary change. Trees grew to enormous sizes. In addition to the great cedars, there were hemlocks fifteen and eighteen feet in circumference. Only the strong trees survive in these valleys, and by that ruthless selection of nature weak young saplings die early. So we found cedar, hemlock, lodge-pole pine, white and Douglas fir, cottonwood, white pine, spruce, and alder of enormous size.
The brake ferns were the most common, often growing ten feet tall. We counted five varieties of ferns growing in profusion, among them brake ferns, sword-ferns, and maidenhair, most beautiful and luxuriant. The maidenhair fern grew in masses, covering dead trunks of trees and making solid walls of delicate green beside the trail.
"Silent Lawrie" knew them all. He knew every tiniest flower and plant that thrust itshead above the leaf-mould. He saw them all, too. Peanuts, his horse, made his own way now, and the naturalist sat a trifle sideways in his saddle and showed me his discoveries.
I am no naturalist, so I rode behind him, notebook in hand, and I made a list something like this. If there are any errors they are not the naturalist's, but mine, because, although I have written a great deal on a horse's back, I am not proof against the accident of Whiskers stirring a yellow-jackets' nest on the trail, or of Buddy stumbling, weary beast that he was, over a root on the path.
This is my list: red-stemmed dogwood; bunchberries, in blossom on the higher reaches, in bloom below; service-berries, salmon-berries; skunk-cabbage, beloved by bears, and the roots of which the Indians roast and eat; above four thousand feet, white rhododendrons, and, above four thousand five hundred feet, heather; hellebore also in the high places; thimble-berries and red elderberries, tag-alder, red honeysuckle, long stretches of willows in the creek-bottoms; vining maples, too, and yewtrees, the wood of which the Indians use for making bows.
A field of bear-grasscopyright by fred h. kiser, portland, oregonA field of bear-grass
Around Cloudy Pass we found the red monkey-flower. In different places there was the wild parsnip; the ginger-plant, with its heart-shaped leaf and blossom, buried in the leaf-mould, its crushed leaves redolent of ginger; masses of yellow violets, twinflowers, ox-eye daisies, and sweet-in-death, which is sold on the streets in the West as we sell sweet lavender. There were buttercups, purple asters, bluebells, goat's-beard, columbines, Mariposa lilies, bird's-bill, trillium, devil's-club, wild white heliotrope, brick-leaved spirea, wintergreen, everlasting.
And there are still others, where Buddy collided with the yellow-jacket, that I find I cannot read at all.
Something lifted for me that day as Buddy and I led off down that fat, green valley, with the pass farther and farther behind—a weight off my spirit, a deadly fear of accident, not to myself but to the Family, which had obsessed me for the last few days. But now I could twistin my saddle and see them all, ruddy and sound and happy, whistling as they rode. And I knew that it was all right. It had been good for them and good for me. It is always good to do a difficult thing. And no one has ever fought a mountain and won who is not the better for it. The mountains are not for the weak or the craven, or the feeble of mind or body.
We went on, to the distant tinkle of the bell on the lead-horse of the pack-train.
It was that day that "Silent Lawrie" spoke I remember, because he had said so little before, and because what he said was so well worth remembering.
"Why can't all this sort of thing be put into music?" he asked. "Itismusic. Think of it, the drama of it all!"
Then he went on, and this is what "Silent Lawrie" wants to have written. I pass it on to the world, and surely it can be done. It starts at dawn, with the dew, and the whistling of the packers as they go after the horses. Then come the bells of the horses as they come in, the smoke of the camp-fire, the first sunlight onthe mountains, the saddling and packing. And all the time the packers are whistling.
Then the pack starts out on the trail, the bells of the leaders jingling, the rattle and crunch of buckles and saddle-leather, the click of the horses' feet against the rocks, the swish as they ford a singing stream. The wind is in the trees and birds are chirping. Then comes the long, hard day, the forest, the first sight of snow-covered peaks, the final effort, and camp.
After that, there is the thrush's evening song, the afterglow, the camp-fire, and the stars. And over all is the quiet of the night, and the faint bells of grazing horses, like the silver ringing of the bell at a mass.
I wish I could do it.
At noon that day in the Skagit Valley, we found our first civilization, a camp where a man was cutting cedar blocks for shingles. He looked absolutely astounded when our long procession drew in around his shanty. He meant only one thing to us; he meant oats. If he had oats, we were saved. If he had no oats,it meant again long hours of traveling with our hungry horses.
He had a bag of oats. But he was not inclined, at first, to dispose of them, and, as a matter of fact, he did not sell them to us at all. When we finally got them from him, it was only on our promise to send back more oats. Money was of no use to him there in the wilderness; but oats meant everything.
Thirty-one horses we drove into that little bit of a clearing under the cedar trees, perhaps a hundred feet by thirty. Such wild excitement as prevailed among the horses when the distribution of oats began, such plaintive whinnying and restless stirring! But I think they behaved much better than human beings would have under the same circumstances. And at last each was being fed—such a pathetically small amount, too, hardly more than a handful apiece, it seemed. In his eagerness, the Little Boy's horse breathed in some oats, and for a time it looked as though he would cough himself to death.
The wood-cutter's wife was there. We werethe one excitement in her long months of isolation. I can still see her rather pathetic face as she showed me the lace she was making, the one hundred and one ways in which she tried to fill her lonely hours.
All through the world there are such women, shut away from their kind, staying loyally with the man they have chosen through days of aching isolation. That woman had children. She could not take them into the wilderness with her, so they were in a town, and she was here in the forest, making things for them and fretting about them and longing for them. There was something tragic in her face as she watched us mount to go on.
We were to reach Marblemont that day and there to leave our horses. After they had rested and recovered, Dan Devore was to take them back over the range again, while we went on to civilization and a railroad.
We promised the wood-cutter to send the oats back with the outfit; and when we sent them, we sent at the same time some magazines to that lonely wife and mother on the Skagit.
Late in the afternoon, we emerged from the forest. It was like coming from a darkened room into the light. One moment we were in the aisles of that great green cathedral, the next there was an open road and the sunlight and houses. We prodded the horses with our heels and raced down the road. Surprised inhabitants came out and stared. We waved to them; we loved them; we loved houses and dogs and cows and apple trees. But most of all we loved level places.
We were in time, too, for the railroad strike had not yet taken place.
As Bob got off his horse, he sang again that little ditty with which, during the most strenuous hours of the trip, we had become familiar:—
"Oh, a sailor's life is bold and free,He lives upon the bright blue sea:He has to work like h—, of course,But he doesn't have to ride on a darned old horse."
Transcriber's Note:The poems on pages 140 and 188, were punctuated differently. This was retained.
The poems on pages 140 and 188, were punctuated differently. This was retained.