Unexplored!

CHAPTER III

LIVING OFF THE WILDERNESS

On every side stretched a sea of peaks. They might have been in mid-ocean, stranded on a desert island, had they not been on a mountain-top instead.

For one glorious fortnight they had camped beside white cascading rivers, and along the singing streams that fed them, following their windings through flower perfumed forests and on up into the granite country where glacier lakes lay cupped between the peaks to unfathomable cobalt depths. They had seen deer by the dozen feeding in the brush of the lower country, – graceful, big-eyed creatures who allowed them to approach to within a stone’s throw before they went bounding to cover. They had thrown crumbs to the grouse and quail that came hesitatingly to inspect their camp site, protected at this season by the game laws and so unaccustomed to human kind that they were all but tame. They had crossed and recrossed rivers not too deep to ford, and rivers not too swift to swim. They had scaled cliffs where nothing on hooves save a burro – or a Rocky Mountain goat – could have followed after.

But always the shaggy gray donkeys had kept at their heels like dogs, – save when they got temperamental or went on strike, – waggling their long ears in a steady rhythm, exactly as if these appendages had been on ball bearings. The burros, five in number, had each his individuality. There was Pepper, the old prospector’s own comrade of many a mountain trail, who, knowing his superior knowledge of the ways of slide rock and precipices, insisted always on being in the lead. This preference on his part he enforced with a pair of the swiftest heels the boys had ever seen. There was old Lazybones, as Pedro had named the one who, presenting the greatest girth, had to carry the largest pack. There was Trilby, of the dainty hooves, who never made a misstep. He – for the cognomen had been somewhat misplaced – was entrusted with the things they valued most, their personal kit and the trout rods. The Bird was the one who did the most singing, – though they all joined in on the chorus when they thought it was time for the table scraps to be apportioned. And finally there was Mephistopheles, whose disposition may have been soured under some previous ownership, – since the blame must be placed somewhere. Ace had added him to Long Lester’s four when a lumberman had offered him for fifteen dollars. The name came afterwards. But though he sometimes held up operations on the trail, he was big enough to carry 150 pounds of “grub,” and that meant a lot of good eating.

Despite their hee-hawing, however, the diminutive pack animals did a deal of talking with their ears. When startled, these prominent members were laid forward to catch the sound. When displeased, the long ears were flattened along the backs of their necks. If browse was good, they remained in the home meadow, – after first circling it to make sure there was no foe in ambush. If not, they wandered till they found good feed, – and one night they wandered so many miles, hobbled as they were, that it took all of the next forenoon to find them and bring them back to camp.

They could walk a log with their packs to cross a stream, or, packs removed and pullied across, they could swim it, if they were started up current and left to guide themselves. They would not slip on smooth rock ledges, they could hop up or down bowlders like so many bipeds. It was a constant marvel to Ace and Pedro what they could do. No lead ropes were necessary at all.

Long Lester was meticulous in their care. Every afternoon when the packs were removed he sponged their backs with cold water. And though the party was on its way by seven every morning, – having risen with the first light of dawn, – and though by ten they would have covered half of their average twelve miles a day, the old guide never watered them till the sun was warm, which was generally not till after the middle of the forenoon. For a wilderness trip comes to grief when any one member, man or beast, gives out, as he knew from a lifetime of experience in that rugged and unpeopled region.

They had figured on about three pounds of food per day per person, for the four weeks’ trip. That loaded each burro with a grub list of ninety pounds, and about ten pounds of personal equipment, besides the axes and aluminums and such incidentals as soap and matches. Ease of packing was secured by slipping into each of the food kyacks a case such as those in which a pair of five gallon coal oil cans come.

Their kit included neats’ foot oil, (scrupulously packed), for the wearing qualities of their footwear along those stony trails depended in large degree on keeping the leather soft. No mosquito netting was necessary in the mountains, – it was too dry and cool for the insects, – but each member of the party had a pair of buckskin gloves, six good pairs of all wool socks, – worn two at a time to pad the feet against stone-bruise, – extra shoe laces, and a pair of sneakers to rest his feet around camp. Norris carried a pocket telescope, and Long Lester a hone made of the side of a cigar box with fine emery cloth pasted on one side, coarse on the other. They saved on blankets by doubling each into three crosswise, – except the old guide, who was too tall, – and on the higher, colder elevations they found that to wear a fresh wool union suit, and socks warm from the fire, to sleep in, was as good as an extra blanket, if not better.

Everything was to be turn and turn about, – Ace had been the most insistent member of the party in not leaving Long Lester to do the lion’s share, – they were obliged, each in turn, even Norris, to learn certain fundamental rules of cookery. Long Lester got it down to this formula:

Put fresh vegetables into boiling salted water.

Put dried vegetables (peas and beans) into cold, unsalted water.

Soak dried fruit overnight.

To fry, have the pan just barely smoking.

To clean the frying pan, fill it with water and let it boil over, then hang it up to dry. Jab greasy knives into the ground, – provided it is not stony.

You can fry more trout in a pan if you cut off their heads.

As the boiling point drops one degree for every 800 foot rise, twenty hours’ steady cooking will not boil beans in the higher altitudes unless you use soft water. They may be best cooked overnight in a hole lined with coals, if put in when boiling, with the lid of the Dutch oven covered with soil.

Three aluminum pails, nested, provided dish pan and kettles for hot and cold water. Butter packed in pound tins kept fresh indefinitely in those cool heights, and salt and sugar traveled well in waterproof tent silk bags. Long Lester had figured on a minimum of a quarter of a pound each of sugar and bacon per day per person, three pounds of pepper and twenty-five of salt.

Of course the one thing each member carried right on his person was a pepper tin of matches, made waterproof with a strip of adhesive tape. For the snow fields, they also had tinted spectacles, as a precaution against snow-blindness.

Axmanship came to be the chief measure of their campcraft. Ace had wanted to bring one of the double-bitts he saw the lumbermen using, but the old guide vetoed it as more dangerous to the amateur than a butcher knife in the hands of a baby.

The light weight single-bitt was the axe he had brought for the boys, reserving a heavier one for himself. These he had had ground thin, but so that the blade would be thickest in the center and not stick fast in the log. Both axe-heads wore riveted leather sheaths.

They took turn and turn about getting in the night wood. Fortunately the boys, (Norris, too), had watched the lumbermen like lynxes, even Ted thinking to get a few points from them. They noted, for one thing, that the professional choppers struck rhythmically, landing each blow with precision on top of the other, working slowly and apparently at ease, – certainly untiringly, – and making no effort to sink the axe deeply.

They had also noticed that a lumberman will clear away all brush and vines within axe reach before beginning, lest the instrument catch and deliver him a cut.

They had learned, in logging up a down tree, not to notch it first on the top, then discover too late that they could not turn the thing over to get at the under side; but to stand on the log with feet as far apart as convenient, and nick it on first one side, then the other, with great nicks as wide as the log itself.

Pedro had to be shown how to chop kindling, as his first attempt resulted in a black and blue streak across his cheek where a flying chip struck him. Long Lester had to show him how to lay his branches across a log. And the old man insisted on his so doing, every time, for, he said, he knew a man who had lost an eye by failing to observe this precaution. He also barely saved the boys’ axe from being driven into the ground by the well-meaning tenderfoot and nicked on some buried stone. But when he found the Spanish boy starting to kerf a prostrate log that lay on stony ground, he expressed himself so fluently that Pedro never again, as long as he lived, forgot to place another log under the butt, or else clear the stones from the ground around it.

The boys also learned to look for the hard yellow pine, when there was any to be found, for their back-log, but for a quick fire to select fir balsam, spruce or aspen. (Of course if they couldn’t get these, they used whatever they could lay hands on.)

Pedro made the mistake, about this time, of tying a burro to a tree with two half hitches, which, when the burro tugged, were all but impossible to undo. After that he used the regular hitching tie. As the burros were always turned out at night, without even a hobble save for the leader, it became necessary to be able to lasso them in the morning if they failed to come at call. There was also the diamond hitch that had to be acquired if each was to do his share with the pack-animals, all of which occupied fascinated hours around the night-fire.

So much for the first two weeks. It was now time to circle around and start back – some other way. Ace had done the packing the day they climbed above timber line for an outlook. As Trilby had cut her foot, (or his foot, to be accurate), the boy had added her pack to that of broad-backed Mephistopheles, in whose kyacks he had – much against Long Lester’s teachings – entrusted the entire remainder of their food. Pepper carried their personal equipment, and now that half their supplies were eaten, the Bird and Lazybones carried firewood for them from the wooded slopes below, that they might luxuriate beside a night fire. So far, so good. But the peak of their night’s bivouac was flanked by higher peaks that cut off their anticipated view, and before the little party could scale these, they must descend the gorge of another leaping, singing stream that lay between.

As the pack train followed nimbly down the glacier-smoothed slope, and along a ledge where the cliff rose sheer on one side, dropping as sheer on the other, Mephistopheles gave a sudden shrill squeal, and before any one knew what it was all about, went hurtling over the edge. The boys stared speechless as the luckless animal hit the cascades below and went tumbling through the rapids and over a waterfall, till the body was whirled to the bank and caught in a crevice of the rock.

Here they were, ten days’ hike from the nearest base of supplies, and the entire remainder of their food, – they did not mourn the burro – three thousand feet below, or more likely washed a mile down stream by this time, what had not sunk to the bottom.

They might have been in mid-ocean, as Ted had remarked, – stranded on a desert island, – but for their trout rods, and one rifle. The game laws could be disregarded in their extremity. But they were days from the last deer they had sighted, and their main dependence must be on the fishing.

Ahead, the trail wound down into a grove of rich tan trunks against the green of juniper. Gray granite worn into fantastic shapes, – castles and giant tables, – dwarfed and twisted trees rooted in rock crevices, white waters roaring against the canyon wall like a storm-wind in the tree-tops, fallen trunks, patches of flaming fire-weed. This was the wilderness against which they must pit their wild-craft if they would eat.

By the time the sun slanted at five o’clock, Norris called a halt by the side of a moist green meadow where the burros would find browse, and all hands turning to and unpacking the kyacks, they hobbled the animals with a neat loop about their fore-legs. Then they cut, each of them, a good armful of browse for his bed. Long Lester strode off with his rifle in search of anything he might find for the pot, while Norris and the boys scrambled down to the river with their trout rods.

He broke trail along a narrow ledge, just such a one as the luckless burro had gone hurtling over when his pack scraped the rising wall. Almost a sheer drop, and the rapids roared in torrents of white foam. Pedro clung to every root and every rock crack for fear of growing dizzy.