PHOTOGRAPHING A BEARPHOTOGRAPHING A BEAR
The newspaper man offered to sketch me with a "bear" background. And he did. Now and then he would say:—
"Isn't there one behind me?"
"About twenty feet away," I would say.
"Good Lord!" But he went on drawing. I have that picture now. It is very good, but my eyes have the look of a scared rabbit.
Our friend still clung in the tree. The other man had ridden back to the hotel for camera films. Time went on and he did not return. We made would-be facetious remarks about his courage—from our own pinnacle. Almost an hour! The sketch was nearly finished, and twilight was falling. Still he had not come. Then he appeared. He had taken the wrong trail, and had beenriding those bear-infested regions alone. He was smiling, but pale. To visit bears in a party is one thing; to ride alone, with fleeting black and brown figures skulking behind fallen timber, is another. Not for a long time, I think, will that gentleman forget the hour or so when he was lost in the forest, with bears
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,In Vallombrosa."
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,In Vallombrosa."
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,
In Vallombrosa."
The poetic quotation is my own idea. What he said was entirely different. As a matter of fact, his own expression was: "Hell, the place is full of them!"
At last, very quietly, Mr. Higgins got up.
"Here's a grizzly," he said. "You might stand near the horses."
We did. The grizzly looked the exact size of a seven-passenger automobile with a limousine top, and he had the same gift of speed. The black bears looked at him andran. I looked at him and wanted to. The artist put away his sketch, and we strolled toward the horses. They had not objected to the black bears, beyond watching them with careful eyes. But now they pulled and flung about to free themselves. Wherever he goes, a grizzly bear owns his entire surroundings. He carries a patent of ownership.
He could have the woods, for all of me.
The black bears were in full retreat. A hound dog came loping up the trail and caught the scent. In an instant he was after them. Any hope I had ever had of outrunning a bear died then and there. The dog was running without a muffler. One of his frantic yelps changed to a howl as the rearmost bear turned and swatted him. A moment, and the chase was on again.
There is only one thing to do if a bear takes a sudden dislike to one. It is useless to climb or to run. Go toward it and trykindness. Ask about the children, in a carefully restrained tone. Make the Indian sign that you are a friend. If you have a sandwich about you, proffer it. Then, while the bear is staring at you in amazement, turn and walk quietly away.
It was growing dark. The grizzly, having driven off the black bears, turned his attention to us. We decided that it was almost dinner time, and that we did not care to be late. Anyhow, we had seen enough bears. Enough is enough. We mounted and rode down the trail.
Not all game is as plentiful as bears in Glacier Park or thrives so well. With the cutting-up of the range many of them have lost their winter grazing-grounds. Practically the last of the Rocky Mountain sheep and goats are in Glacier Park. Last winter numbers of these increasingly rare animals were found dead by the rangers. That is another thing the Government will do eventually.It may never see that the Blackfeet Indians have a square deal, but it will feed what is left of the game.
There is little of the old West left. Irrigation, wheat, the cutting-up of the Indian reservations into allotments, the homesteader, all spell the end of the most picturesque period of America's development.
Not for long, then, the cow-puncher in his gorgeous chaps, the pack-train winding its devious way along the trail. The boosting spirit has struck the West. Settlements of one street and thirteen houses, eleven of them saloons, are suddenly becoming cities. The railroads and the automobiles, by obliterating time, have done away with distance. The old West is almost gone. Now is the time to see it—not from a train window; not, if you can help it, from an automobile, but afoot or on horseback, leisurely, thoroughly.
The trip was over. I had seen such things as I had never dreamed of. I had done things which I intended to relate at home. But I had caught no fish to amount to anything. On a Monday night I was to take the train East. On Sunday came great tales of the Flathead River. But I had only one more day. How was it possible?
It was possible. Everything is possible to those Westerners. I could put on my oldest clothes and fish the Flathead for twenty miles or so the following day under the guidance of one George Locke, celebrated trout-sleuth. Then, rod and fish and all, I could take the Great Northern Eastern Express at a station and start on my three days' journey home. I did it.
I can still see the faces of the people in that magnificent club car when a woman in riding-clothes, stained and torn, wearing an old sweater and a man's hat, and carrying a camera, a fishing-rod, and a cutthroat trout weighing three and a half pounds, invaded their bored and elegant privacy. The woman was burned to a deep cerise. She summoned the immaculate porter and held out the trout to him. He was very dubious about taking it. Thereupon the woman put on her most impressive manner and told him how she wished it placed on the ice and how the cook was to fix it and various other details.
It had been a day to live for. The Flathead River does not flow; it runs. It is a series of rapids, incredibly swift, with here and there a quiet pool. Attempts to picture the rapids as we ran them were abortive. We reeled and wallowed, careened and whirled. And always the fisherman-guide was calm,and the gentleman who engineered the party was calm, and I pretended to be calm.
At the foot of each rapids we fished. I was beginning to learn that twist of the wrist that sends out the line in curves, and drops the fly delicately on to the surface of the water.
As I learned, so that he did not close his eyes each time I raised my rod, George Locke told of the Easterner he had taken down the river some time before.
"He wanted a lesson in casting," he said. "And I worked over him pretty hard. I told him all I knew. Then, after I'd told him all I knew, and he'd had all the fun with me he wanted, he just stood up in the bow of the boat and put out ninety feet of line without turning a hair. Cast? He could have cast from a spool of thread."
In a boat behind us was a moving-picture man. For weeks he had always been just behind or just ahead. When the time cameto leave the West, I missed that moving-picture man. He had come to be a part of the landscape. I can still see him trying to get past us down those rapids, going at lightning speed to gain some promontory where he could set up his weapon and catch our boat in case it upset or did anything else worth recording.
APPISTOKI FALLS NEAR TWO MEDICINE CHALETSAPPISTOKI FALLS NEAR TWO MEDICINE CHALETS
He had two pieces of luck on that trip. I had hooked my first trout and was busy trying to throw it in the boatman's face when it escaped. He caught me at the exact instant when the triumph of my face turned to a purple rage; and later on in the day he had the machine turned on me when I caught two trout on two flies at the same time. Incidentally, I slipped off the stone I was standing on at the same moment. He probably got that, too.
I caught twelve trout in as many minutes from that same rock and furnished the luncheon for the party. I took back loudlyeverything I had said against the fishing in Glacier Park. I ate more trout than anybody else, as was my privilege. If there were nothing else to it, I would still go back to the Montana Rockies for the fishing in the Flathead River.
At noon we stopped for luncheon. The trout was fried with bacon, and coffee was made. We ate on a little tongue of land around which the river brawled and rushed.
From the time we had left Lake McDermott we had seen no single human being. Mostly the river ran through tall canyons of its own cutting; always it looked dangerous. Generally, indeed, it was! But never once did the boatman lose control. It reminded me of the story Mark Twain told of the passenger who says to the pilot something like this:—
"I suppose you know where every hidden rock and sunken tree and sandbar is in this river?"
To which the pilot replies: "No, sir-ee. But I know where they ain't."
The train swung on into the summer twilight, past the ruins of old mining-towns, now nothing but names, past brawling streams and great deep woods.
The large trout was cooked and served. It had been worth the effort. There were four of us to eat it—the moving-picture man, the chief ranger of the park, the gentleman from St. Paul who had engineered the fishing-trip, and myself.
At Glacier Park Station my wardrobe, which I had not seen for weeks, was put on the train. "They do you very well," as the English say, in the West. Everything was pressed. Even my shoes had been freshly polished.
A crowd of people had gathered at the station. My supper companions left the train. There were many good-byes. Thenthe train moved slowly off. I stood on the platform as long as I could and watched the receding lights. Behind the hotel rose the purple-black silhouette of the mountains, touched with faint gold by the lingering finger of the sun.
Stealthy coyotes had taken advantage of the dusk to creep close to the track. A light glimmered from a tent on the Indian reservation. Flat, treeless country, a wagon drawn by tired horses, range cattle that were only shadows.
Then night—and the East.
THE END
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The Riverside PressCAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTSU.S.A.