CHAPTER IXKAIBAB GRIZZLY
“I ’VE got to turn back, Sid,” gasped Colonel Colvin, as they halted at the foot of the vast slope that topped the second rim of the canyon like a house roof. “Climbing up out of here is a job for a young heart; mine would need half-soling before we’d ever make the rim again!”
From safety holds on tough pinyons that overhung the precipice of the second rim, they peered down at the chase far below. This second rim was an ungodly wall, perhaps a thousand feet sheer, and it no doubt cut a noticeable figure as viewed from El Tovar, where tourists at that moment were raving in absurd sentimentalities over the canyon. To the Colonel it meant a terminus, for him, of that particular cougar chase, for to add its weight to thelabors already in store on the climb back would be foolhardy to one of his age. They watched the tiny black dots weaving slowly across the lower slope, that must have been the dogs in hot chase of the cougar, and after them came two oval specks that were Scotty and Big John as viewed perpendicularly from their height. Then the whole business disappeared over a ledge and nothing but the baying of invisible hounds came floating up from the far depths.
Colonel Colvin shook his head. “It’s their meat, Sid. But there’s room enough in this country for two or three hunts to be going at the same time. They’ve got the dogs, but we’ve got Niltci, who’s better than a dog at forest hunting, I’ll warrant. We’ll climb back to the rim and start something of our own back in the breaks.”
Sid felt that his place was with his father, anyway, and he did not care much about being a tailender in a hunt that had already distanced them.
“Shrewd guess of Big John’s that was, Dad,” he replied. “It cut off at least half a mile for them. If the cat had gone north, along under the first rim wall, they’d have been out of it instead of us. Let’s ride back into the gulches and box canyons of thecountry behind the rim, and see what we can see.”
They looked up, seeking a place to climb back. A thousand feet above them towered the rim of rock, dented with columnar pinnacles, crowned with dwarfed pines that they knew were themselves at least a hundred feet high. The Colonel was winded and panting before they had climbed for fifteen minutes. The crumbly soil slid down underfoot; even zigzagging was slow and laborious toil,—not at all eased by ledge after ledge of rock outcroppings that called for hands, knees and feet to scramble up them. Niltci and Sid pulled and pushed the Colonel up, but an hour of dizzy, sweating work had gone by and all were spitting cotton before they stood at the base of the rim rock precipice.
Five hundred feet sheer it rose above them. For comparison Sid imagined that if he were looking up the Woolworth building to its very top and if, at the same time, he were standing on a narrow shelf of yellow and rotten rock with a slope three times as deep below, ending in blue nothingness—he would have some of the sensations that now overcame him as he looked up for some possible chimney up which to climb and wondered how they were ever going toget his father up it if they did find one. If he could only manage to stand off from this thing a little, so as to get some idea of its surface, it would be easy to find the break in the rim where they had come down. Which way did it lie, north or south? They discussed it, finally yielding to Niltci, who was sure that it lay north.
Along under the rim wall they crept. The narrow path was worn deep with cougar tracks. It was a regular runway for them, for they lived down here in the canyon and came over the rim at night to hunt in the deer and wild horse country of the hinterland. At any point they might come upon a cougar cave, here, and the Colonel, who was in advance, never passed around a pinnacle base without stepping warily, with his rifle poised for instant use.
“By George, Niltci, you’re wrong—we should have turned south!” barked out Sid after perhaps half an hour of this gingerly progress. “Look at these young Matterhorns coming up out of the canyon below us! I never noticed them before!”
The party stopped to take bearings. Certainly the lookout was new and unfamiliar. The canyon jutted out here in a great cape, and on its slopeNature had dropped, casually, three or four red and yellow mountains that rose below like pyramids. Anywhere else they would be objects of wonder and bear grandiloquent names.
But Niltci shook his head vigorously and led on without a word. The rim cliff ended abruptly a little further on in a huge tower of stone, and, rounding it, they found themselves in a vast amphitheater, a mile deep, and a mile across a valley of illimitable depths to its opposite point. All around it the cliffs rose sheer. Surely they never came down here! Niltci had to acknowledge that much, himself, but instead of turning back to retrace their steps he grunted impetuously and led them on, following the rim into that enormous basin.
“Aw, rats!—what’s the use, Niltci, you’re crazy!” exploded Sid, as both he and the Colonel balked at going any further. For answer the Indian boy pointed to a thin fissure that cleft the rim from top nearly to bottom, up near the head of the basin. It was about half a mile away. How Niltci could know that that crevice could be practicable for ascent, Sid could not conjecture, but the red men were wise in the ways of Nature, so he followed on, albeit incredulously. But he had no idea what impassable obstaclemight await them to the south if they turned back. This, at least, looked possible!
Arrived at it, they peered up to where the last of it ended in a broken, jagged path, showing where water had come down during the rains. For fifty feet this rose up the cliff,—an absurd trail for anything but a fly to attempt; then began the in-cutting of the fissure.
Niltci started up it, amid a howl of protest from Sid and the Colonel. Like a creeping cat the Indian lad climbed steadily up until he had reached the fissure, where he turned with a whoop of triumph.
“Wow! We can’t let him get away with that, Father!” chuckled Sid. “Shut your eyes and climb! Forget mother, forget your insurance, and all the rest of it—it’s the only way!—I’ll be right behind you.”
The Colonel groaned, whimsically, and started up. Niltci came down again by some incredible feat of legerdemain—as they looked back upon that climb afterwards—and gave him a strong lift over the worst places, and so they all reached the bottom of the fissure. It was dark and gloomy, and it curved around a bend above, so that they had no idea how it was all going to turn out—most likely in somesheer wall, thought Sid. But the only way to get over these things was to go ahead and do them, so they climbed up into it. Part of the time Niltci was straddling both walls of it; part of the climb crawling up vertical ledges higher than his head. The curve mercifully hid from them the frightful depths below, should anyone fall. It grew better, once around it, cutting deeper and deeper into the rim wall and becoming less and less vertical. Masses of pine roots fringed it overhead, and finally their feet found a narrow bottom of yellow, crumbled rocks, which led up in a steep slant to the forest above.
“Great work, Niltci! That’s mountaineering for you!” laughed the Colonel as they dropped panting on the forest duff. “I suppose you could visualize this whole water crack, having once seen the fissure in the rim wall, eh?”
Niltci grunted happily. He had no idea what that speech was all about, but evidently his adored Lord Colonel was pleased! Sid rejoined them, a moment later, and all sat and looked ruefully at their clothing. Their bleeding knees peeped through frayed and torn riding breeches, their buckskin gloves were out at the fingers; Sid had a scraped thigh, caked with blood; all the uppers of their cruiser moccasinsgapped open in rent seams. Niltci, in his light cottons and buckskin leggings, seemed the least frazzled of the three, but his bare toes poked out from thin moccasins worn through on the rocks. It was half an hour before the Colonel sat up again.
“And now, where are we?” he queried, briskly. “We’ve got all the rest of the day, so we’ll find the horses and go hang up a buck for camp meat.”
They all rose and started off through the forest. A short walk through the high pines that covered the plateau brought the blue haze beyond, of the canyon again, and presently they came out on a rock pinnacle that commanded the whole prospect below. A sheer fall about a thousand feet lay below them. Beyond that smoky, purple depths showed beyond over the second rim.
“The place where we came down must lie to the west of here, boys,” declared the Colonel. “Big John and Scotty are somewhere down in this valley—they’ll be all day getting back! We’ll start west for another look-see.”
A second outlook from another point showed them the steep slope down which they had first come. Up in the ravine at the head of it would be thehorses, for there they had first started the cougar. Soon they were in it and had remounted.
“Sore and tattered, but still in the game!” ejaculated the Colonel as he put spurs to the roan and led back up the ravine into the hinterland.
Back in here they found the huge flanks of Buckskin all cut up with rocky glades grown up with yellow pines, and gulches which led to high, walled canyons, all leading out to a discharge into the Grand Canyon, somewhere. Great pines grew heavily in the swales. It was a wonderful, rich, plentiful game country! Again and again Niltci grunted, to point down at deer tracks, wolf tracks, and the round hoof-prints of wild horses, and there seemed to be a cougar after every deer, judging from their frequent footprints!
“Hist!” called the Colonel, suddenly, stooping down to whip out his .35 from its scabbard. The bushes shook, up in a densely grown ravine that lost itself somewhere in the upper flanks of the mountain. Gray shapes bounded across it, stiff-legged, flashing into sight occasionally, to disappear as quickly.
The Colonel’s rifle barked, followed by Sid’s. One of the gray shapes plunged, and there was a madscramble in the timber. They were mule deer, a whole drove of them! Sid fired at another, running bewilderedly up a bush-strewn slope in full flight. Then all was still again.
“I nailed mine,” said the Colonel. “We’ll wait a while. Once he lies down he’ll never get up.—Lord, boys, there must have been thirty in that drove!”
He got out his pipe and lit it, while the horses switched flies patiently. Then Niltci, who had been scouting through the bush, called to them with a low grunt of eagerness. There seemed to be suppressed excitement in it, too, and the tones of his voice thrilled Sid with a nameless feeling as he urged his horse over to where Niltci stood, pointing down at the track.
“Come over here, Father—for the love of Pete, look!” called Sid, tingling with shivery sensations as he looked down from his horse at a deep hollow in the needles, over which Niltci still stood, his wild eyes snapping meaningly.
The Colonel came over and halted his horse. The track looked as if someone had set down a long oval bowl there. It was all of fourteen inches long, and the foot that made it had borne down so heavily thata trilobed palm and the five toeprints, huddled together like a human foot, were distinctly visible. And such toes! Each one was the size of two human thumbs laid down together! Some distance beyond each was a long, pointed gash in the soil at least five inches from base to tip, the claw marks, all heading together.
“Good Lord! That’s more than a grizzly, Sid!” ejaculated the Colonel after studying it awhile. “I tell you what!—in the old days we used to have the giant yellow grizzly of California, a whale of a brute. He’d carry off a whole horse, and many’s the cowman who has been suddenly charged by one from ambush. The old boy wanted the horse, but he didn’t mind fetching its rider a swipe, incidentally, that knocked him into kingdom come. A .45-90,—even the old Sharps .45-105 with the 550-grain bullet—never fazed him. That tribe of grizzlies has been extinct since the early ’90’s in California, boys, but I’ll miss my guess if here isn’t one! First track like this I’ve seen in thirty years. Here, if anywhere, there’d be a few survivors. He’s my meat, Sid! You got old Ring-Neck, up in Montana; this bird ismine!” declared the old Indian fighter, his eyes flashing. “How old is that track, Niltci?”
The Indian boy knelt down and smelled it for some time. Then he raised his head and held up one finger.
“One day, eh? It’s a good thing we got two bucks, Sid. We’ll get one of them out of here for camp meat and leave the other for bait.”
Niltci pointed silently into the bush ahead of him. Here was another deep footprint, and, sighting along it, a dim line of them led up the ravine flank. They followed slowly on the horses, who were shivering and plunging violently, for even up to their nostrils had come that faint grizzly odor that a horse fears above all other things. Up on the ridge the track crossed bare rock, and on a little sandy spot a huge track lay, a beautiful print, like an enormous, flat, stubby hand with long, sharp, in-pointing nails for fingers. Beyond the ridge lay a hideous gulch, a bad-land, all bowlders and scraggly pinyons, twisting and writhing among the rocks in weird contortions. It would invite a broken foreleg to attempt to work the horses in there.
“No use following him any further,” said Colonel Colvin as they reined up to look it over. “We’d only leave our own scent around,—though I doubt ifhe’dcare any! We’ll go get the bucks.”
They retraced their way and went up on the hill. The Colonel’s buck lay some fifty feet from where he had been hit, his double-Y antlers and black crown proclaiming him a mule deer. Sid’s lay further up in the bush and was a mere spikehorn.
“He’ll do fine for camp meat, though. Get him up, Sid; we’ll paunch him somewhere away from here. The old yellow grizzly may clear out, if there’s too much human sign around, but still, mighty few people ever hunt this country and hemayhave that bad temper of the old-timers.”
He halted his horse and looked over the scene, planning where to locate his ambush and the probable course of the charge and battle that would surely ensue if the first shot from the .35 did not prove mortal. Sid and Niltci got up the buck and tied its legs to the saddle thongs. Then they all rode back to camp, silent, subdued, thinking over that twilight vigil of the Colonel’s by the bait, to come.
After rustling a meal, all three went out to the rim rock to await the return of Scotty and Big John. It was nearly sunset before they heard voices below, and then Big John’s sombrero—what was left of it—appeared over the rim. His face was caked with dirt, bloody, and streaked with sweat lines.
“Shore I ain’t got enough clothes left on me to flag a tote-train!” he grinned, spitting the dust out of a grimy mouth as he turned to haul on a bundle below him. “Hyar’s yore cat skin—I needs another skin myself, b’gosh! Anyone which same wants a kitty out’n that canyon kin go an’ get him, an’ keep right on goin’!—Thar!”—he gave the rope a final haul and sat down on the brim with a mighty “Whoosh!” of relief.
Scotty came up, pushing behind the bundle. He hadn’t a word, but an unconquerable grin beamed out of his eyes. He flopped down on the needles, and after him struggled Ruler, to lie down with his long, red tongue hanging out and his sides panting. Pepper crawled over the rim in his wake and curled up in a doggy heap of legs and ears, licking morosely at various red wounds that gashed his sides and thighs. The other two pups were yelping disconsolately at the foot of the slide and Sid and Niltci sprang down to carry them up.
“Whoosh! That was reg’lar Bronx Park huntin’, I’ll say!” exclaimed Big John, yawning, with a mighty stretch of his arms. “Where in thunder was you-all? Scotty, here, got him.”
Sid grinned as he looked over the ragged assembly.Scotty was a sight! He was covered with yellow dirt from head to foot; his breeches were split wide open and a jagged red cut showed on his thigh. Big John’s knees were bloody, with the fringes of his home-spuns encircling them like whiskers. Ruler licked steadily at a great red tear on his thigh where the skin hung open like a small hairy tent flap, and shook his ears continually as they dripped blood from long slits in them.
“Father couldn’t make it, boys,” he explained. “It takes a heart like a hunk of sole leather to attempt the canyon. He was wise to stay out. We turned back at the first rim, when you fellows and the dogs went over the second. We’ve got a buck hanging up in camp.”
“Roast her whole, boys,—I could eat a rhinoc’ros raw!” gaped Big John. “We’ve been climbin’ since ten o’clock ’smornin’. Lucky I thought to take my rope down with me. We had to haul them dawgs up the chutes, one at a time.”
Sid and Niltci picked up the cougar skin and the whole party started for camp. An hour later a monumental mulligan, compounded of cougar chunks, spuds, onions, peas, tomatoes and macaroni, boiled in an eight-quart pail, was served. Big Johnand Scotty were still prodding into the bottom of it with their spoons when Sid and Niltci sat back utterly stuffed. The Colonel had long since departed for his lonely vigil near the buck carcass, awaiting the coming of the Yellow Grizzly.
They stretched out the cougar skin and measured it—nine feet two inches, with three feet six of tail—but could get nothing but uninterested grunts from those two, who still scooped in the mulligan pail for more. Then Scotty and Big John rolled over without a further word and fell sound asleep where they lay.
It was broad daylight when Sid awoke again, and the sun must have been ten o’clock high. The Colonel had not returned. Scotty and Big John slept heavily, for Nature had a lot of fixing up to do on them yet. Niltci was gone. Sid hoped that he had tracked his father to the rocky gulch, for he felt mighty uneasy about that great yellow bear of the fourteen-inch track, with only a lone hunter to face him. All he had ever read about the California Silver-Tip came to mind. The largest one ever measured weighed 1,150 pounds and was nine feet from nose to tail and over ten feet across the fore paws. That was as large as any Alaska brown bear, yetwith the ferociousness and agility of the grizzly to back all that weight and strength. The Black Panther would be a mere kitten compared to this brute! The average Bengal tiger weighed 340 pounds and would go something over eleven feet; the largest cougar was under three hundred pounds. Even the Black Panther would not reach over three hundred, judging from the skin of the cat Scotty had killed. The Yellow Grizzly was three times as big as any of them, and quite as active and ferocious. He doubted whether the .35 was rifle enough to stop him.
Sid had about decided to take Scotty’s .405 and try to ride to the gulch to see what had happened, when he looked up, to see a Navaho Indian standing silently before him. The man’s face looked somehow familiar. Sid thought he recognized him as one of the bucks at the Fire Dance, as the red man held out a grimy envelope and proffered it with a bronzed and friendly smile.
Sid tore it open, although it was addressed to Colonel Colvin.
“Dear Colonel[it read]:“All halleluiah has broken loose in wagon loads, here. I hate to send for the Agent, and perhaps getout a troop of soldiers, but I’ll have to do it if it gets much worse. The Indians have spirited old Neyani off somewhere, and I reckon they’ll make a sacrifice of him to appease Dsilyi in spite of all I can do for him. I found a wild story about the Black Panther having taken Niltci, the boy, when I got here. You had left for the Canyon, but the Panther came back only a few nights later and took another sheep from Neyani’s corral. You can understand how the Indians took that! They wanted to wipe out Neyani’s whole family. If I had dogs I’d track that confounded cougar and do away with him, somehow, but I can’t lay for him and shoot him here or my influence over these redskins would be gone forever. If you can break your hunt to come over here with the dogs I would be eternally grateful. Meet me in Canyon Cheyo, near the mouth of Monument Canyon, which is a good landmark. I’ll be there, and we’ll put something over on this superstitious bunch of redskins. I declare, I lose all patience with them sometimes!“Yours in haste,“J. F. Hinchman, Maj. U. S. A. Ret’d.”
“Dear Colonel[it read]:
“All halleluiah has broken loose in wagon loads, here. I hate to send for the Agent, and perhaps getout a troop of soldiers, but I’ll have to do it if it gets much worse. The Indians have spirited old Neyani off somewhere, and I reckon they’ll make a sacrifice of him to appease Dsilyi in spite of all I can do for him. I found a wild story about the Black Panther having taken Niltci, the boy, when I got here. You had left for the Canyon, but the Panther came back only a few nights later and took another sheep from Neyani’s corral. You can understand how the Indians took that! They wanted to wipe out Neyani’s whole family. If I had dogs I’d track that confounded cougar and do away with him, somehow, but I can’t lay for him and shoot him here or my influence over these redskins would be gone forever. If you can break your hunt to come over here with the dogs I would be eternally grateful. Meet me in Canyon Cheyo, near the mouth of Monument Canyon, which is a good landmark. I’ll be there, and we’ll put something over on this superstitious bunch of redskins. I declare, I lose all patience with them sometimes!
“Yours in haste,“J. F. Hinchman, Maj. U. S. A. Ret’d.”
Sid made up his mind at once. It was necessary to get rid of the Indian runner, first, so that their movements could be made unwatched by the Navaho. He went to his tent and tore a fly leaf out of a smallleather notebook in his tent wall pocket. He wrote a brief message that they were coming, rolled it small, and slipped it into an empty rifle cartridge. Corking it with a bit of pine, he returned to hand it to the runner.
“You take, White Father Hinch,” he ordered. “Pronto! Savvy? You got meat and oats?”
The Indian shook his head, pointing to the small bag of meal at his loin cloth. Sid cut him a flank from the buck, gave him a bag of oats and a handful of cartridges for a present, and sent him on his way. Then he saddled Pinto and rode toward the gulch, leaving Scotty and Big John still snoring in camp.
He rode along the flanks of Buckskin, trying hard to remember the lay of the ravines, even though he had passed through them twice before. It was not easy. Several times he was sure he was lost, but each time some familiar tree or rock formation reassured him and he rode on. When he finally reached their ravine he was not sure of it, even then. Scraggly pinyons covered its rocky slopes, but there were dozens of others just like it, and there was absolutely nothing living to be seen in it. But, as for men or animals, what are they in Nature’s vastlandscapes, where half a mile of verdure is tilted up as a mere wrinkle in one of her mountains! Buckskin was twenty miles long, a straight knife-edge as seen from across the canyon, cloud-covered, dim, and distant, as inaccessible to the traveling world as the North Pole, and it had hundreds of ravines like this.
Sid halted his pony, looking down into the ravine with half a mind to push on further. Then a sort of break in the pinyons attracted his eye. That was not natural; something lay there! He rode over to it, and long before he reached it a great brown mass of fur appeared dimly, huddled up in a mass of tough, craggy trees that had been broken off like jackstraws. He dismounted and walked over to it with rifle at ready, for by no urging would Pinto come a step nearer. The brown mass did not move as he climbed through the crags toward it.
A shiver went through Sid. Why, this was the place the Colonel had chosen for his hide! It was a hundred yards from where the buck lay, down hill, there, on the ravine flank! Then he got sight of the animal’s head. Big as a brown bowlder it was, with incurved snout-bone doubled up on a great beard of furry whiskers. The great round ears wereerect, but the eyes were closed and a streak of blood ran from under long, glistening tushes still bared in the snarl of death. It was the Yellow Grizzly, Sid realized—butwherewas his father! He stood looking over the carcass and peering about through the pinyons, fearfully. There were cakes of matted blood all over the long hair on the bear’s chest, and great cavities where the bullets had come out on the other side, and there in that side was a knife, still buried to the hilt—Niltci’s!
Sid looked around, bewildered. The pines were all torn and mangled about him. There had been a terrific fight, here!
Then a feebly cry electrified him. “Water!” it called, more a moan than an articulate voice.
Sid rushed over. Down in a pit of bowlders he saw the brown khaki-clad back of a man, lying face downward doubled up on his side. Those broad shoulders could be none other than his father’s, the boy realized, as he scrambled toward the spot with sobs of anguish welling up in him.
Gently he turned him over, and sat him up in a more comfortable position. Down the Colonel’s side, from his shoulder to knee, he saw a frightful row of red marks, as if some set of steel cultivatorhooks had gouged its way there. The rocks around were all red, and the Colonel’s clothing was soaked and dripping.
But the old warrior’s eyes opened and looked at him steadfastly as Sid slipped his arm tenderly behind his head, calling to him softly, the tears raining down his cheeks. He motioned for water. Sid nodded and raced to where he had tied Pinto. Ripping off the canteen from the saddle hook, he dashed back and held its life-giving stream to Colonel Colvin’s lips. Then he set about bandaging his claw wounds.
“Better now, Father?” asked Sid, tremulously, as he finished.
The Colonel opened his eyes again. “Niltci!” he gasped, waving his arm feebly. “Don’t mind me—now.”
Sid rested him back, comfortably, and set out in the direction the Colonel had indicated, searching the bowlders under the low pinyons. Fifty feet further on, he made out a white cotton shirt lying under the shade of a scraggy pine. One buckskinned leg was drawn up in the act of creeping; the other lay limp and was red with blood.
“Gosh,—that boy would have crawled all the wayto camp for help, if he hadn’t fainted!” exclaimed Sid, as he rushed to him with his canteen. “I need all kinds of help, here! It’s time I fired our signal.”
Niltci came to and grabbed at the canteen, his eyes speaking volumes as he drank. Sid looked around. A glint of blue steel caught his eye. It was the Colonel’s .35—with its stock smashed off close behind the lever. Its magazine was empty, and he dared not move the Colonel again to take more cartridges from his belt. He ran over to the bear’s carcass, grabbed up his own Army .30, and raised it to the sky.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!—Bang!” whipped out its sharp report.