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+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Mountains by Stewart Edward White
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+The Mountains
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+by Stewart Edward White
+
+March, 1996  [Etext #465]
+[Date last updated: November 3, 2003]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Mountains by Stewart Edward White
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+
+THE MOUNTAINS
+BY
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+AUTHOR OF
+"THE BLAZED TRAIL," "SILENT PLACES,"
+"THE FOREST," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The author has followed a true sequence of events
+practically in all particulars save in respect to the
+character of the Tenderfoot.  He is in one sense fictitious;
+in another sense real.  He is real in that he is the
+apotheosis of many tenderfeet, and that everything he does
+in this narrative he has done at one time or another in the
+author's experience.  He is fictitious in the sense that he
+is in no way to be identified with the third member of our
+party in the actual trip.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I.     THE RIDGE TRAIL
+II.    ON EQUIPMENT
+III.   ON HORSES
+IV.    HOW TO GO ABOUT IT
+V.     THE COAST RANGES
+VI.    THE INFERNO
+VII.   THE FOOT-HILLS
+VIII.  THE PINES
+IX.    THE TRAIL
+X.     ON SEEING DEER
+XI.    ON TENDERFEET 
+XII.   THE CANON
+XIII.  TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS
+XIV.   ON CAMP COOKERY 
+XV.    ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
+XVI.   THE VALLEY
+XVII.  THE MAIN CREST
+XVIII. THE GIANT FOREST
+XIX.   ON COWBOYS
+XX.    THE GOLDEN TROUT
+XXI.   ON GOING OUT
+XXII.  THE LURE OF THE TRAIL
+
+
+
+THE MOUNTAINS
+
+I
+
+THE RIDGE TRAIL
+
+Six trails lead to the main ridge.  They are all
+good trails, so that even the casual tourist in the
+little Spanish-American town on the seacoast need
+have nothing to fear from the ascent.  In some spots
+they contract to an arm's length of space, outside of
+which limit they drop sheer away; elsewhere they
+stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more hair-
+raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with
+loose boulders and shale.  A fall on the part of your
+horse would mean a more than serious accident; but
+Western horses do not fall.  The major premise stands:
+even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear,
+however scared he may become.
+
+Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way
+called the Cold Spring Trail.  We used to enjoy
+taking visitors up it, mainly because you come on
+the top suddenly, without warning.  Then we collected
+remarks.  Everybody, even the most stolid,
+said something.
+
+You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy
+and gradually ascending creek-bed of a canon, a half
+
+hour of laboring steepness in the overarching mountain
+lilac and laurel.  There you came to a great rock
+gateway which seemed the top of the world.  At the
+gateway was a Bad Place where the ponies planted
+warily their little hoofs, and the visitor played "eyes
+front," and besought that his mount should not
+stumble.
+
+Beyond the gateway a lush level canon into which
+you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring
+trail, up and always up toward the blue California
+sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood
+chaparral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the
+creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the
+upper regions.  Beyond the apparent summit you
+found always other summits yet to be climbed.  And
+all at once, like thrusting your shoulders out of a
+hatchway, you looked over the top.
+
+Then came the remarks.  Some swore softly; some
+uttered appreciative ejaculation; some shouted aloud;
+some gasped; one man uttered three times the word
+"Oh,"--once breathlessly, Oh! once in awakening
+appreciation, OH! once in wild enthusiasm, OH!
+Then invariably they fell silent and looked.
+
+For the ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual
+coquetry of foot-hills, broad low ranges, cross-systems,
+canons, little flats, and gentle ravines, inland
+dropped off almost sheer to the river below.  And
+from under your very feet rose, range after range, tier
+after tier, rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of
+wonderful tinted mountains to the main crest of the
+Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the mightiness of
+California's western systems.  The eye followed them
+up and up, and farther and farther, with the accumulating
+emotion of a wild rush on a toboggan.  There
+came a point where the fact grew to be almost too
+big for the appreciation, just as beyond a certain
+point speed seems to become unbearable.  It left you
+breathless, wonder-stricken, awed.  You could do
+nothing but look, and look, and look again, tongue-
+tied by the impossibility of doing justice to what you
+felt.  And in the far distance, finally, your soul, grown
+big in a moment, came to rest on the great precipices
+and pines of the greatest mountains of all, close under
+the sky.
+
+In a little, after the change had come to you, a
+change definite and enduring, which left your inner
+processes forever different from what they had been,
+you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles
+along the knife-edge Ridge Trail to where Rattlesnake
+Canon led you down and back to your accustomed
+environment.
+
+To the left as you rode you saw, far on the horizon,
+rising to the height of your eye, the mountains
+of the channel islands.  Then the deep sapphire of
+the Pacific, fringed with the soft, unchanging white
+of the surf and the yellow of the shore.  Then the
+town like a little map, and the lush greens of the
+wide meadows, the fruit-groves, the lesser ranges--
+all vivid, fertile, brilliant, and pulsating with vitality. 
+You filled your senses with it, steeped them in the
+beauty of it.  And at once, by a mere turn of the
+eyes, from the almost crude insistence of the bright
+primary color of life, you faced the tenuous azures
+of distance, the delicate mauves and amethysts, the
+lilacs and saffrons of the arid country.
+
+This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for
+ourselves, of showing to others.  And often,
+academically, perhaps a little wistfully, as one talks of
+something to be dreamed of but never enjoyed, we
+spoke of how fine it would be to ride down into that
+land of mystery and enchantment, to penetrate one
+after another the canons dimly outlined in the shadows
+cast by the westering sun, to cross the mountains
+lying outspread in easy grasp of the eye, to gain the
+distant blue Ridge, and see with our own eyes what
+lay beyond.
+
+For to its other attractions the prospect added that
+of impossibility, of unattainableness.  These rides of
+ours were day rides.  We had to get home by nightfall. 
+Our horses had to be fed, ourselves to be housed. 
+We had not time to continue on down the other side
+whither the trail led.  At the very and literal brink
+of achievement we were forced to turn back.
+
+Gradually the idea possessed us.  We promised
+ourselves that some day we would explore.  In our
+after-dinner smokes we spoke of it.  Occasionally,
+from some hunter or forest-ranger, we gained little
+items of information, we learned the fascination of
+musical names--Mono Canon, Patrera Don Victor,
+Lloma Paloma, Patrera Madulce, Cuyamas, became
+familiar to us as syllables.  We desired mightily to
+body them forth to ourselves as facts.  The extent
+of our mental vision expanded.  We heard of other
+mountains far beyond these farthest--mountains
+whose almost unexplored vastnesses contained great
+forests, mighty valleys, strong water-courses, beautiful
+hanging-meadows, deep canons of granite, eternal
+snows,--mountains so extended, so wonderful, that
+their secrets offered whole summers of solitary
+exploration.  We came to feel their marvel, we came
+to respect the inferno of the Desert that hemmed
+them in.  Shortly we graduated from the indefiniteness
+of railroad maps to the intricacies of geological
+survey charts.  The fever was on us.  We must go.
+
+A dozen of us desired.  Three of us went; and
+of the manner of our going, and what you must
+know who would do likewise, I shall try here to
+tell.
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON EQUIPMENT
+
+If you would travel far in the great mountains
+where the trails are few and bad, you will need
+a certain unique experience and skill.  Before you
+dare venture forth without a guide, you must be able
+to do a number of things, and to do them well.
+
+First and foremost of all, you must be possessed
+of that strange sixth sense best described as the sense
+of direction.  By it you always know about where
+you are.  It is to some degree a memory for back-
+tracks and landmarks, but to a greater extent an
+instinct for the lay of the country, for relative
+bearings, by which you are able to make your way
+across-lots back to your starting-place.  It is not an
+uncommon faculty, yet some lack it utterly.  If you
+are one of the latter class, do not venture, for you
+will get lost as sure as shooting, and being lost in
+the mountains is no joke.
+
+Some men possess it; others do not.  The distinction
+seems to be almost arbitrary.  It can be largely
+developed, but only in those with whom original
+endowment of the faculty makes development possible. 
+No matter how long a direction-blind man
+frequents the wilderness, he is never sure of himself. 
+Nor is the lack any reflection on the intelligence.  I
+once traveled in the Black Hills with a young fellow
+who himself frankly confessed that after much
+experiment he had come to the conclusion he could
+not "find himself."  He asked me to keep near him,
+and this I did as well as I could; but even then,
+three times during the course of ten days he lost
+himself completely in the tumultuous upheavals and
+canons of that badly mixed region.  Another, an old
+grouse-hunter, walked twice in a circle within the
+confines of a thick swamp about two miles square. 
+On the other hand, many exhibit almost marvelous
+skill in striking a bee-line for their objective point,
+and can always tell you, even after an engrossing and
+wandering hunt, exactly where camp lies.  And I
+know nothing more discouraging than to look up
+after a long hard day to find your landmarks changed
+in appearance, your choice widened to at least five
+diverging and similar canons, your pockets empty
+of food, and the chill mountain twilight descending.
+
+Analogous to this is the ability to follow a dim
+trail.  A trail in the mountains often means merely a
+way through, a route picked out by some prospector,
+and followed since at long intervals by chance travelers.
+
+It may, moreover, mean the only way through. 
+Missing it will bring you to ever-narrowing ledges,
+until at last you end at a precipice, and there is no
+room to turn your horses around for the return.  Some
+of the great box canons thousands of feet deep are
+practicable by but one passage,--and that steep and
+ingenious in its utilization of ledges, crevices, little
+ravines, and "hog's-backs"; and when the only
+indications to follow consist of the dim vestiges left by
+your last predecessor, perhaps years before, the affair
+becomes one of considerable skill and experience. 
+You must be able to pick out scratches made by
+shod hoofs on the granite, depressions almost filled
+in by the subsequent fall of decayed vegetation,
+excoriations on fallen trees.  You must have the sense
+to know AT ONCE when you have overrun these indications,
+and the patience to turn back immediately to
+your last certainty, there to pick up the next clue,
+even if it should take you the rest of the day.  In
+short, it is absolutely necessary that you be at least
+a persistent tracker.
+
+Parenthetically; having found the trail, be charitable. 
+Blaze it, if there are trees; otherwise "monument"
+it by piling rocks on top of one another.  Thus will 
+those who come after bless your unknown shade.
+
+Third, you must know horses.  I do not mean that
+you should be a horse-show man, with a knowledge
+of points and pedigrees.  But you must learn exactly
+what they can and cannot do in the matters of carrying
+weights, making distance, enduring without deterioration
+hard climbs in high altitudes; what they can or cannot 
+get over in the way of bad places.  This last is not 
+always a matter of appearance merely.  Some bits of trail,
+seeming impassable to anything but a goat, a Western 
+horse will negotiate easily; while others, not 
+particularly terrifying in appearance, offer 
+complications of abrupt turn or a single bit of unstable,
+leg-breaking footing which renders them exceedingly 
+dangerous.  You must, moreover, be able to manage your 
+animals to the best advantage in such bad places.  Of 
+course you must in the beginning have been wise as to 
+the selection of the horses.
+
+Fourth, you must know good horse-feed when
+you see it.  Your animals are depending entirely on
+the country; for of course you are carrying no dry
+feed for them.  Their pasturage will present itself
+under a variety of aspects, all of which you must
+recognize with certainty.  Some of the greenest,
+lushest, most satisfying-looking meadows grow nothing
+but water-grasses of large bulk but small nutrition;
+while apparently barren tracts often conceal small but
+strong growths of great value.  You must differentiate these.
+
+Fifth, you must possess the ability to pare a hoof,
+fit a shoe cold, nail it in place.  A bare hoof does not
+last long on the granite, and you are far from the
+nearest blacksmith.  Directly in line with this, you
+must have the trick of picking up and holding a
+hoof without being kicked, and you must be able to
+throw and tie without injuring him any horse that
+declines to be shod in any other way.
+
+Last, you must of course be able to pack a horse
+well, and must know four or five of the most essential
+pack-"hitches."
+
+With this personal equipment you ought to be
+able to get through the country.  It comprises the
+absolutely essential.
+
+But further, for the sake of the highest efficiency,
+you should add, as finish to your mountaineer's
+education, certain other items.  A knowledge of the
+habits of deer and the ability to catch trout with fair
+certainty are almost a necessity when far from the base
+of supplies.  Occasionally the trail goes to pieces
+entirely: there you must know something of the
+handling of an axe and pick.  Learn how to swim a
+horse.  You will have to take lessons in camp-fire
+cookery.  Otherwise employ a guide.  Of course
+your lungs, heart, and legs must be in good condition.
+
+As to outfit, certain especial conditions will
+differentiate your needs from those of forest and canoe
+travel.
+
+You will in the changing altitudes be exposed to
+greater variations in temperature.  At morning you
+may travel in the hot arid foot-hills; at noon you will
+be in the cool shades of the big pines; towards
+evening you may wallow through snowdrifts; and at
+dark you may camp where morning will show you
+icicles hanging from the brinks of little waterfalls. 
+Behind your saddle you will want to carry a sweater,
+or better still a buckskin waistcoat.  Your arms are
+never cold anyway, and the pockets of such a waistcoat,
+made many and deep, are handy receptacles for
+smokables, matches, cartridges, and the like.  For the
+night-time, when the cold creeps down from the high
+peaks, you should provide yourself with a suit of
+very heavy underwear and an extra sweater or a
+buckskin shirt.  The latter is lighter, softer, and more
+impervious to the wind than the sweater.  Here
+again I wish to place myself on record as opposed to
+a coat.  It is a useless ornament, assumed but rarely,
+and then only as substitute for a handier garment.
+
+Inasmuch as you will be a great deal called on to
+handle abrading and sometimes frozen ropes, you
+will want a pair of heavy buckskin gauntlets.  An
+extra pair of stout high-laced boots with small
+Hungarian hob-nails will come handy.  It is marvelous
+how quickly leather wears out in the downhill friction
+of granite and shale.  I once found the heels of
+a new pair of shoes almost ground away by a single
+giant-strides descent of a steep shale-covered thirteen-
+thousand-foot mountain.  Having no others I patched
+them with hair-covered rawhide and a bit of horseshoe. 
+It sufficed, but was a long and disagreeable
+job which an extra pair would have obviated.
+
+Balsam is practically unknown in the high hills,
+and the rocks are especially hard.  Therefore you will
+take, in addition to your gray army-blanket, a thick
+quilt or comforter to save your bones.  This, with
+your saddle-blankets and pads as foundation, should
+give you ease--if you are tough.  Otherwise take a
+second quilt.
+
+A tarpaulin of heavy canvas 17 x 6 feet goes under
+you, and can be, if necessary, drawn up to cover your
+head.  We never used a tent.  Since you do not have
+to pack your outfit on your own back, you can, if you
+choose, include a small pillow.  Your other personal
+belongings are those you would carry into the Forest.  
+I have elsewhere described what they should be.
+
+Now as to the equipment for your horses.
+
+The most important point for yourself is your riding-
+saddle.  The cowboy or military style and seat are
+the only practicable ones.  Perhaps of these two the
+cowboy saddle is the better, for the simple reason that
+often in roping or leading a refractory horse, the horn
+is a great help.  For steep-trail work the double cinch
+is preferable to the single, as it need not be pulled so
+tight to hold the saddle in place.
+
+Your riding-bridle you will make of an ordinary
+halter by riveting two snaps to the lower part of the
+head-piece just above the corners of the horse's mouth. 
+These are snapped into the rings of the bit.  At night
+you unsnap the bit, remove it and the reins, and leave
+the halter part on the horse.  Each animal, riding and
+packing, has furthermore a short lead-rope attached
+always to his halter-ring.
+
+Of pack-saddles the ordinary sawbuck tree is by all
+odds the best, provided it fits.  It rarely does.  If you
+can adjust the wood accurately to the anatomy of the
+individual horse, so that the side pieces bear evenly
+and smoothly without gouging the withers or chafing
+the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine
+made for the purpose.  Should individual fitting prove
+impracticable, get an old LOW California riding-tree
+and have a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the
+cantle.  You can hang the loops of the kyacks or
+alforjas--the sacks slung on either side the horse
+--from the pommel and this iron spike.  Whatever
+the saddle chosen, it should be supplied with breast-
+straps, breeching, and two good cinches.
+
+The kyacks or alforjas just mentioned are made
+either of heavy canvas, or of rawhide shaped square
+and dried over boxes.  After drying, the boxes are
+removed, leaving the stiff rawhide like small trunks
+open at the top.  I prefer the canvas, for the reason
+that they can be folded and packed for railroad
+transportation.  If a stiffer receptacle is wanted for
+miscellaneous loose small articles, you can insert a soap-box
+inside the canvas.  It cannot be denied that the rawhide
+will stand rougher usage.
+
+Probably the point now of greatest importance is
+that of saddle-padding.  A sore back is the easiest
+thing in the world to induce,--three hours' chafing
+will turn the trick,--and once it is done you are in
+trouble for a month.  No precautions or pains are too
+great to take in assuring your pack-animals against
+this.  On a pinch you will give up cheerfully part
+of your bedding to the cause.  However, two good-
+quality woolen blankets properly and smoothly
+folded, a pad made of two ordinary collar-pads sewed
+parallel by means of canvas strips in such a manner
+as to lie along both sides of the backbone, a well-fitted
+saddle, and care in packing will nearly always suffice. 
+I have gone months without having to doctor a single
+abrasion.
+
+You will furthermore want a pack-cinch and a
+pack-rope for each horse.  The former are of canvas
+or webbing provided with a ring at one end and a
+big bolted wooden hook at the other.  The latter
+should be half-inch lines of good quality.  Thirty-three
+feet is enough for packing only; but we usually
+bought them forty feet long, so they could be used
+also as picket-ropes.  Do not fail to include several
+extra.  They are always fraying out, getting broken,
+being cut to free a fallen horse, or becoming lost.
+
+Besides the picket-ropes, you will also provide for
+each horse a pair of strong hobbles.  Take them to
+a harness-maker and have him sew inside each ankle-
+band a broad strip of soft wash-leather twice the width
+of the band.  This will save much chafing.  Some advocate
+sheepskin with the wool on, but this I have found
+tends to soak up water or to freeze hard.  At least
+two loud cow-bells with neck-straps are handy to
+assist you in locating whither the bunch may have
+strayed during the night.  They should be hung on
+the loose horses most inclined to wander.
+
+Accidents are common in the hills.  The repair-kit
+is normally rather comprehensive.  Buy a number of
+extra latigos, or cinch-straps.  Include many copper
+rivets of all sizes--they are the best quick-repair
+known for almost everything, from putting together
+a smashed pack-saddle to cobbling a worn-out boot. 
+Your horseshoeing outfit should be complete with
+paring-knife, rasp, nail-set, clippers, hammer, nails,
+and shoes.  The latter will be the malleable soft iron,
+low-calked "Goodenough," which can be fitted cold. 
+Purchase a dozen front shoes and a dozen and a half
+hind shoes.  The latter wear out faster on the trail. 
+A box or so of hob-nails for your own boots, a waxed
+end and awl, a whetstone, a file, and a piece of buckskin
+for strings and patches complete the list.
+
+Thus equipped, with your grub supply, your cooking-
+utensils, your personal effects, your rifle and your
+fishing-tackle, you should be able to go anywhere
+that man and horses can go, entirely self-reliant,
+independent of the towns.
+
+
+
+III
+
+ON HORSES
+
+I really believe that you will find more variation
+of individual and interesting character
+in a given number of Western horses than in an
+equal number of the average men one meets on the
+street.  Their whole education, from the time they
+run loose on the range until the time when, branded,
+corralled, broken, and saddled, they pick their way
+under guidance over a bad piece of trail, tends to
+develop their self-reliance.  They learn to think for
+themselves.
+
+To begin with two misconceptions, merely by way
+of clearing the ground: the Western horse is generally
+designated as a "bronco."  The term is considered
+synonymous of horse or pony.  This is not so. 
+A horse is "bronco" when he is ugly or mean or
+vicious or unbroken.  So is a cow "bronco" in the
+same condition, or a mule, or a burro.  Again, from
+certain Western illustrators and from a few samples,
+our notion of the cow-pony has become that of a lean,
+rangy, wiry, thin-necked, scrawny beast.  Such may
+be found.  But the average good cow-pony is apt
+to be an exceedingly handsome animal, clean-built,
+graceful.  This is natural, when you stop to think of
+it, for he is descended direct from Moorish and Arabian
+stock.
+
+Certain characteristics he possesses beyond the
+capabilities of the ordinary horse.  The most marvelous
+to me of these is his sure-footedness.  Let me give
+you a few examples.
+
+I once was engaged with a crew of cowboys in
+rounding up mustangs in southern Arizona.  We would
+ride slowly in through the hills until we caught sight
+of the herds.  Then it was a case of running them
+down and heading them off, of turning the herd,
+milling it, of rushing it while confused across country
+and into the big corrals.  The surface of the ground
+was composed of angular volcanic rocks about the
+size of your two fists, between which the bunch-grass
+sprouted.  An Eastern rider would ride his horse very
+gingerly and at a walk, and then thank his lucky
+stars if he escaped stumbles.  The cowboys turned
+their mounts through at a dead run.  It was beautiful
+to see the ponies go, lifting their feet well up and
+over, planting them surely and firmly, and nevertheless
+making speed and attending to the game.  Once,
+when we had pushed the herd up the slope of a
+butte, it made a break to get through a little hog-
+back.  The only way to head it was down a series of
+rough boulder ledges laid over a great sheet of
+volcanic rock.  The man at the hog-back put his little
+gray over the ledges and boulders, down the sheet of
+rock,--hop, slip, slide,--and along the side hill in
+time to head off the first of the mustangs.  During the
+ten days of riding I saw no horse fall.  The animal
+I rode, Button by name, never even stumbled.
+
+In the Black Hills years ago I happened to be one
+of the inmates of a small mining-camp.  Each night
+the work-animals, after being fed, were turned loose
+in the mountains.  As I possessed the only cow-pony
+in the outfit, he was fed in the corral, and kept up
+for the purpose of rounding up the others.  Every
+morning one of us used to ride him out after the
+herd.  Often it was necessary to run him at full speed
+along the mountain-side, over rocks, boulders, and
+ledges, across ravines and gullies.  Never but once in
+three months did he fall.
+
+On the trail, too, they will perform feats little short
+of marvelous.  Mere steepness does not bother them
+at all.  They sit back almost on their haunches, bunch
+their feet together, and slide.  I have seen them go
+down a hundred feet this way.  In rough country
+they place their feet accurately and quickly, gauge
+exactly the proper balance.  I have led my saddle-
+horse, Bullet, over country where, undoubtedly to
+his intense disgust, I myself have fallen a dozen times
+in the course of a morning.  Bullet had no such
+troubles.  Any of the mountain horses will hop cheerfully
+up or down ledges anywhere.  They will even walk
+a log fifteen or twenty feet above a stream.  I have
+seen the same trick performed in Barnum's circus as
+a wonderful feat, accompanied by brass bands and
+breathlessness.  We accomplished it on our trip with
+out any brass bands; I cannot answer for the breathlessness. 
+As for steadiness of nerve, they will walk
+serenely on the edge of precipices a man would hate
+to look over, and given a palm's breadth for the soles
+of their feet, they will get through.  Over such a place
+I should a lot rather trust Bullet than myself.
+
+In an emergency the Western horse is not apt to
+lose his head.  When a pack-horse falls down, he lies
+still without struggle until eased of his pack and told
+to get up.  If he slips off an edge, he tries to double
+his fore legs under him and slide.  Should he find
+himself in a tight place, he waits patiently for you to
+help him, and then proceeds gingerly.  A friend of
+mine rode a horse named Blue.  One day, the trail
+being slippery with rain, he slid and fell.  My friend
+managed a successful jump, but Blue tumbled about
+thirty feet to the bed of the canon.  Fortunately he
+was not injured.  After some difficulty my friend
+managed to force his way through the chaparral to
+where Blue stood.  Then it was fine to see them. 
+My friend would go ahead a few feet, picking a route. 
+When he had made his decision, he called Blue.  Blue
+came that far, and no farther.  Several times the little
+horse balanced painfully and unsteadily like a goat,
+all four feet on a boulder, waiting for his signal to
+advance.  In this manner they regained the trail, and
+proceeded as though nothing had happened.  Instances
+could be multiplied indefinitely.
+
+A good animal adapts himself quickly.  He is
+capable of learning by experience.  In a country
+entirely new to him he soon discovers the best method
+of getting about, where the feed grows, where he can
+find water.  He is accustomed to foraging for himself. 
+You do not need to show him his pasturage.
+If there is anything to eat anywhere in the district he
+will find it.  Little tufts of bunch-grass growing
+concealed under the edges of the brush, he will search out. 
+If he cannot get grass, he knows how to rustle for the
+browse of small bushes.  Bullet would devour sage-
+brush, when he could get nothing else; and I have
+even known him philosophically to fill up on dry
+pine-needles.  There is no nutrition in dry pine-
+needles, but Bullet got a satisfyingly full belly.  On the
+trail a well-seasoned horse will be always on the forage,
+snatching here a mouthful, yonder a single spear of
+grass, and all without breaking the regularity of his
+gait, or delaying the pack-train behind him.  At the
+end of the day's travel he is that much to the good.
+
+By long observation thus you will construct your
+ideal of the mountain horse, and in your selection
+of your animals for an expedition you will search
+always for that ideal.  It is only too apt to be
+modified by personal idiosyncrasies, and proverbially an
+ideal is difficult of attainment; but you will, with
+care, come closer to its realization than one accustomed
+only to the conventionality of an artificially
+reared horse would believe possible.
+
+The ideal mountain horse, when you come to pick
+him out, is of medium size.  He should be not
+smaller than fourteen hands nor larger than fifteen. 
+He is strongly but not clumsily built, short-coupled,
+with none of the snipy speedy range of the valley
+animal.  You will select preferably one of wide full
+forehead, indicating intelligence, low in the withers,
+so the saddle will not be apt to gall him.  His sureness
+of foot should be beyond question, and of course
+he must be an expert at foraging.  A horse that knows
+but one or two kinds of feed, and that starves unless
+he can find just those kinds, is an abomination.  He
+must not jump when you throw all kinds of rattling
+and terrifying tarpaulins across him, and he must not
+mind if the pack-ropes fall about his heels.  In the
+day's march he must follow like a dog without the
+necessity of a lead-rope, nor must he stray far when
+turned loose at night.
+
+Fortunately, when removed from the reassuring
+environment of civilization, horses are gregarious. 
+They hate to be separated from the bunch to which
+they are accustomed.  Occasionally one of us would
+stop on the trail, for some reason or another, thus
+dropping behind the pack-train.  Instantly the saddle-
+horse so detained would begin to grow uneasy.  Bullet
+used by all means in his power to try to induce me
+to proceed.  He would nibble me with his lips, paw
+the ground, dance in a circle, and finally sidle up to
+me in the position of being mounted, than which he
+could think of no stronger hint.  Then when I had
+finally remounted, it was hard to hold him in.  He
+would whinny frantically, scramble with enthusiasm
+up trails steep enough to draw a protest at ordinary
+times, and rejoin his companions with every symptom
+of gratification and delight.  This gregariousness and
+alarm at being left alone in a strange country tends to
+hold them together at night.  You are reasonably
+certain that in the morning, having found one, you will
+come upon the rest not far away.
+
+The personnel of our own outfit we found most
+interesting.  Although collected from divergent
+localities they soon became acquainted.  In a crowded
+corral they were always compact in their organization,
+sticking close together, and resisting as a solid phalanx
+encroachments on their feed by other and stranger
+horses.  Their internal organization was very amusing. 
+A certain segregation soon took place.  Some became
+leaders; others by common consent were relegated to
+the position of subordinates.
+
+The order of precedence on the trail was rigidly
+preserved by the pack-horses.  An attempt by Buckshot
+to pass Dinkey, for example, the latter always
+met with a bite or a kick by way of hint.  If the
+gelding still persisted, and tried to pass by a long
+detour, the mare would rush out at him angrily, her
+ears back, her eyes flashing, her neck extended.  And
+since Buckshot was by no means inclined always to
+give in meekly, we had opportunities for plenty
+of amusement.  The two were always skirmishing. 
+When by a strategic short cut across the angle of
+a trail Buckshot succeeded in stealing a march on
+Dinkey, while she was nipping a mouthful, his triumph
+was beautiful to see.  He never held the place
+for long, however.  Dinkey's was the leadership by
+force of ambition and energetic character, and at the
+head of the pack-train she normally marched.
+
+Yet there were hours when utter indifference
+seemed to fall on the militant spirits.  They trailed
+peacefully and amiably in the rear while Lily or Jenny
+marched with pride in the coveted advance.  But the
+place was theirs only by sufferance.  A bite or a kick
+sent them back to their own positions when the true
+leaders grew tired of their vacation.
+
+However rigid this order of precedence, the saddle-
+animals were acknowledged as privileged;--and
+knew it.  They could go where they pleased.  Furthermore
+theirs was the duty of correcting infractions
+of the trail discipline, such as grazing on the march,
+or attempting unauthorized short cuts.  They appreciated
+this duty.  Bullet always became vastly indignant
+if one of the pack-horses misbehaved.  He would
+run at the offender angrily, hustle him to his place with
+savage nips of his teeth, and drop back to his own
+position with a comical air of virtue.  Once in a great
+while it would happen that on my spurring up from
+the rear of the column I would be mistaken for one
+of the pack-horses attempting illegally to get ahead. 
+Immediately Dinkey or Buckshot would snake his
+head out crossly to turn me to the rear.  It was really
+ridiculous to see the expression of apology with which
+they would take it all back, and the ostentatious,
+nose-elevated indifference in Bullet's very gait as he
+marched haughtily by.  So rigid did all the animals
+hold this convention that actually in the San Joaquin
+Valley Dinkey once attempted to head off a Southern
+Pacific train.  She ran at full speed diagonally
+toward it, her eyes striking fire, her ears back, her
+teeth snapping in rage because the locomotive would
+not keep its place behind her ladyship.
+
+Let me make you acquainted with our outfit.
+
+I rode, as you have gathered, an Arizona pony
+named Bullet.  He was a handsome fellow with a
+chestnut brown coat, long mane and tail, and a
+beautiful pair of brown eyes.  Wes always called him
+"Baby."  He was in fact the youngster of the party,
+with all the engaging qualities of youth.  I never saw
+a horse more willing.  He wanted to do what you
+wanted him to; it pleased him, and gave him a
+warm consciousness of virtue which the least observant
+could not fail to remark.  When leading he
+walked industriously ahead, setting the pace; when
+driving,--that is, closing up the rear,--he attended
+strictly to business.  Not for the most luscious bunch
+of grass that ever grew would he pause even for an
+instant.  Yet in his off hours, when I rode irresponsibly
+somewhere in the middle, he was a great hand
+to forage.  Few choice morsels escaped him.  He
+confided absolutely in his rider in the matter of bad
+country, and would tackle anything I would put him
+at.  It seemed that he trusted me not to put him at
+anything that would hurt him.  This was an invaluable
+trait when an example had to be set to the reluctance
+of the other horses.  He was a great swimmer. 
+Probably the most winning quality of his nature was
+his extreme friendliness.  He was always wandering
+into camp to be petted, nibbling me over with his
+lips, begging to have his forehead rubbed, thrusting
+his nose under an elbow, and otherwise telling how
+much he thought of us.  Whoever broke him did a
+good job.  I never rode a better-reined horse.  A mere
+indication of the bridle-hand turned him to right or
+left, and a mere raising of the hand without the 
+slightest pressure on the bit stopped him short.  And how
+well he understood cow-work!  Turn him loose after
+the bunch, and he would do the rest.  All I had to do
+was to stick to him.  That in itself was no mean task,
+for he turned like a flash, and was quick as a cat on
+his feet.  At night I always let him go foot free. 
+He would be there in the morning, and I could always
+walk directly up to him with the bridle in plain
+sight in my hand.  Even at a feedless camp we once
+made where we had shot a couple of deer, he did
+not attempt to wander off in search of pasture, as
+would most horses.  He nosed around unsuccessfully
+until pitch dark, then came into camp, and with great
+philosophy stood tail to the fire until morning.  I
+could always jump off anywhere for a shot, without
+even the necessity of "tying him to the ground," by
+throwing the reins over his head.  He would wait for
+me, although he was never overfond of firearms.
+
+Nevertheless Bullet had his own sense of dignity. 
+He was literally as gentle as a kitten, but he drew a
+line.  I shall never forget how once, being possessed
+of a desire to find out whether we could swim our
+outfit across a certain stretch of the Merced River, I
+climbed him bareback.  He bucked me off so quickly
+that I never even got settled on his back.  Then he
+gazed at me with sorrow, while, laughing irrepressibly
+at this unusual assertion of independent ideas,
+I picked myself out of a wild-rose bush.  He did not
+attempt to run away from me, but stood to be saddled,
+and plunged boldly into the swift water where
+I told him to.  Merely he thought it disrespectful in
+me to ride him without his proper harness.  He was
+the pet of the camp.
+
+As near as I could make out, he had but one fault. 
+He was altogether too sensitive about his hind quarters,
+and would jump like a rabbit if anything touched
+him there.
+
+Wes rode a horse we called Old Slob.  Wes, be
+it premised, was an interesting companion.  He had
+done everything,--seal-hunting, abalone-gathering,
+boar-hunting, all kinds of shooting, cow-punching
+in the rough Coast Ranges, and all other queer and
+outlandish and picturesque vocations by which a
+man can make a living.  He weighed two hundred
+and twelve pounds and was the best game shot with
+a rifle I ever saw.
+
+As you may imagine, Old Slob was a stocky
+individual.  He was built from the ground up.  His
+disposition was quiet, slow, honest.  Above all, he
+gave the impression of vast, very vast experience. 
+Never did he hurry his mental processes, although
+he was quick enough in his movements if need arose. 
+He quite declined to worry about anything.  Consequently,
+in spite of the fact that he carried by far the
+heaviest man in the company, he stayed always fat
+and in good condition.  There was something almost
+pathetic in Old Slob's willingness to go on working,
+even when more work seemed like an imposition. 
+You could not fail to fall in love with his mild
+inquiring gentle eyes, and his utter trust in the
+goodness of human nature.  His only fault was an excess
+of caution.  Old Slob was very very experienced.  He
+knew all about trails, and he declined to be hurried
+over what he considered a bad place.  Wes used
+sometimes to disagree with him as to what constituted
+a bad place.  "Some day you're going to take
+a tumble, you old fool," Wes used to address him,
+"if you go on fiddling down steep rocks with your
+little old monkey work.  Why don't you step out?" 
+Only Old Slob never did take a tumble.  He was
+willing to do anything for you, even to the assuming
+of a pack.  This is considered by a saddle-animal
+distinctly as a come-down.
+
+The Tenderfoot, by the irony of fate, drew a
+tenderfoot horse.  Tunemah was a big fool gray that
+was constitutionally rattle-brained.  He meant well
+enough, but he didn't know anything.  When he
+came to a bad place in the trail, he took one good
+look--and rushed it.  Constantly we expected him
+to come to grief.  It wore on the Tenderfoot's nerves. 
+Tunemah was always trying to wander off the trail,
+trying fool routes of his own invention.  If he were
+sent ahead to set the pace, he lagged and loitered and
+constantly looked back, worried lest he get too far in
+advance and so lose the bunch.  If put at the rear, he
+fretted against the bit, trying to push on at a senseless
+speed.  In spite of his extreme anxiety to stay with
+the train, he would once in a blue moon get a strange
+idea of wandering off solitary through the mountains,
+passing good feed, good water, good shelter.  We
+would find him, after a greater or less period of difficult
+tracking, perched in a silly fashion on some elevation. 
+Heaven knows what his idea was: it certainly
+was neither search for feed, escape, return whence he
+came, nor desire for exercise.  When we came up
+with him, he would gaze mildly at us from a foolish
+vacant eye and follow us peaceably back to camp. 
+Like most weak and silly people, he had occasional
+stubborn fits when you could beat him to a pulp
+without persuading him.  He was one of the type
+already mentioned that knows but two or three kinds
+of feed.  As time went on he became thinner and
+thinner.  The other horses prospered, but Tunemah
+failed.  He actually did not know enough to take
+care of himself; and could not learn.  Finally, when
+about two months out, we traded him at a cow-camp
+for a little buckskin called Monache.
+
+So much for the saddle-horses.  The pack-animals
+were four.
+
+A study of Dinkey's character and an experience
+of her characteristics always left me with mingled
+feelings.  At times I was inclined to think her
+perfection: at other times thirty cents would have been
+esteemed by me as a liberal offer for her.  To enumerate
+her good points: she was an excellent weight-
+carrier; took good care of her pack that it never
+scraped nor bumped; knew all about trails, the
+possibilities of short cuts, the best way of easing herself
+downhill; kept fat and healthy in districts where
+grew next to no feed at all; was past-mistress in the
+picking of routes through a trailless country.  Her
+endurance was marvelous; her intelligence equally
+so.  In fact too great intelligence perhaps accounted
+for most of her defects.  She thought too much for
+herself; she made up opinions about people; she
+speculated on just how far each member of the party,
+man or beast, would stand imposition, and tried
+conclusions with each to test the accuracy of her
+speculations; she obstinately insisted on her own way in
+going up and down hill,--a way well enough for
+Dinkey, perhaps, but hazardous to the other less skillful
+animals who naturally would follow her lead.  If
+she did condescend to do things according to your
+ideas, it was with a mental reservation.  You caught
+her sardonic eye fixed on you contemptuously.  You
+felt at once that she knew another method, a much
+better method, with which yours compared most
+unfavorably.  "I'd like to kick you in the stomach,"
+Wes used to say; "you know too much for a horse!"
+
+If one of the horses bucked under the pack, Dinkey
+deliberately tried to stampede the others--and
+generally succeeded.  She invariably led them off
+whenever she could escape her picket-rope.  In
+case of trouble of any sort, instead of standing still
+sensibly, she pretended to be subject to wild-eyed
+panics.  It was all pretense, for when you DID yield to
+temptation and light into her with the toe of your
+boot, she subsided into common sense.  The spirit of
+malevolent mischief was hers.
+
+Her performances when she was being packed
+were ridiculously histrionic.  As soon as the saddle
+was cinched, she spread her legs apart, bracing them
+firmly as though about to receive the weight of an
+iron safe.  Then as each article of the pack was thrown
+across her back, she flinched and uttered the most
+heart-rending groans.  We used sometimes to amuse
+ourselves by adding merely an empty sack, or
+other article quite without weight.  The groans and
+tremblings of the braced legs were quite as pitiful
+as though we had piled on a sack of flour.  Dinkey,
+I had forgotten to state, was a white horse, and
+belonged to Wes.
+
+Jenny also was white and belonged to Wes.  Her
+chief characteristic was her devotion to Dinkey.  She
+worshiped Dinkey, and seconded her enthusiastically. 
+Without near the originality of Dinkey, she was yet
+a very good and sure pack-horse.  The deceiving
+part about Jenny was her eye.  It was baleful with
+the spirit of evil,--snaky and black, and with green
+sideways gleams in it.  Catching the flash of it, you
+would forever after avoid getting in range of her
+heels or teeth.  But it was all a delusion.  Jenny's
+disposition was mild and harmless.
+
+The third member of the pack-outfit we bought at
+an auction sale in rather a peculiar manner.  About
+sixty head of Arizona horses of the C. A. Bar outfit
+were being sold.  Toward the close of the afternoon
+they brought out a well-built stocky buckskin of
+first-rate appearance except that his left flank was
+ornamented with five different brands.  The auctioneer
+called attention to him.
+
+"Here is a first-rate all-round horse," said he. 
+"He is sound; will ride, work, or pack; perfectly
+broken, mild, and gentle.  He would make a first-rate
+family horse, for he has a kind disposition."
+
+The official rider put a saddle on him to give him
+a demonstrating turn around the track.  Then that
+mild, gentle, perfectly broken family horse of kind
+disposition gave about as pretty an exhibition of
+barbed-wire bucking as you would want to see.  Even
+the auctioneer had to join in the wild shriek of delight
+that went up from the crowd.  He could not get a
+bid, and I bought the animal in later very cheaply.
+
+As I had suspected, the trouble turned out to be
+merely exuberance or nervousness before a crowd. 
+He bucked once with me under the saddle; and twice
+subsequently under a pack,--that was all.  Buckshot
+was the best pack-horse we had.  Bar an occasional
+saunter into the brush when he got tired of the trail,
+we had no fault to find with him.  He carried a heavy
+pack, was as sure-footed as Bullet, as sagacious on
+the trail as Dinkey, and he always attended strictly
+to his own business.  Moreover he knew that business
+thoroughly, knew what should be expected of him,
+accomplished it well and quietly.  His disposition
+was dignified but lovable.  As long as you treated
+him well, he was as gentle as you could ask.  But
+once let Buckshot get it into his head that he was
+being imposed on, or once let him see that your
+temper had betrayed you into striking him when
+he thought he did not deserve it, and he cut loose
+vigorously and emphatically with his heels.  He
+declined to be abused.
+
+There remains but Lily.  I don't know just how
+to do justice to Lily--the "Lily maid."  We named
+her that because she looked it.  Her color was a pure
+white, her eye was virginal and silly, her long bang
+strayed in wanton carelessness across her face and
+eyes, her expression was foolish, and her legs were
+long and rangy.  She had the general appearance of
+an overgrown school-girl too big for short dresses and
+too young for long gowns;--a school-girl named
+Flossie, or Mamie, or Lily.  So we named her that.
+
+At first hers was the attitude of the timid and
+shrinking tenderfoot.  She stood in awe of her
+companions; she appreciated her lack of experience. 
+Humbly she took the rear; slavishly she copied the
+other horses; closely she clung to camp.  Then in a
+few weeks, like most tenderfeet, she came to think
+that her short experience had taught her everything
+there was to know.  She put on airs.  She became
+too cocky and conceited for words.
+
+Everything she did was exaggerated, overdone. 
+She assumed her pack with an air that plainly said,
+"Just see what a good horse am I!"  She started out
+three seconds before the others in a manner intended
+to shame their procrastinating ways.  Invariably she
+was the last to rest, and the first to start on again. 
+She climbed over-vigorously, with the manner of
+conscious rectitude.  "Acts like she was trying to
+get her wages raised," said Wes.
+
+In this manner she wore herself down.  If
+permitted she would have climbed until winded, and
+then would probably have fallen off somewhere for
+lack of strength.  Where the other horses watched the
+movements of those ahead, in order that when a halt
+for rest was called they might stop at an easy place on
+the trail, Lily would climb on until jammed against
+the animal immediately preceding her.  Thus often
+she found herself forced to cling desperately to
+extremely bad footing until the others were ready to
+proceed.  Altogether she was a precious nuisance, that
+acted busily but without thinking.
+
+Two virtues she did possess.  She was a glutton
+for work; and she could fall far and hard without
+injuring herself.  This was lucky, for she was always
+falling.  Several times we went down to her fully
+expecting to find her dead or so crippled that she would
+have to be shot.  The loss of a little skin was her only
+injury.  She got to be quite philosophic about it.  On
+losing her balance she would tumble peaceably, and
+then would lie back with an air of luxury, her eyes
+closed, while we worked to free her.  When we had
+loosened the pack, Wes would twist her tail.  Thereupon
+she would open one eye inquiringly as though
+to say, "Hullo!  Done already?"  Then leisurely
+she would arise and shake herself.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT
+
+One truth you must learn to accept, believe as
+a tenet of your faith, and act upon always.  It
+is that your entire welfare depends on the condition
+of your horses.  They must, as a consequence, receive
+always your first consideration.  As long as they have
+rest and food, you are sure of getting along; as soon
+as they fail, you are reduced to difficulties.  So
+absolute is this truth that it has passed into an idiom. 
+When a Westerner wants to tell you that he lacks
+a thing, he informs you he is "afoot" for it.  "Give
+me a fill for my pipe," he begs; "I'm plumb afoot
+for tobacco."
+
+Consequently you think last of your own comfort. 
+In casting about for a place to spend the night, you
+look out for good feed.  That assured, all else is of
+slight importance; you make the best of whatever
+camping facilities may happen to be attached.  If
+necessary you will sleep on granite or in a marsh,
+walk a mile for firewood or water, if only your
+animals are well provided for.  And on the trail you
+often will work twice as hard as they merely to save
+them a little.  In whatever I may tell you regarding
+practical expedients, keep this always in mind.
+
+As to the little details of your daily routine in the
+mountains, many are worth setting down, however
+trivial they may seem.  They mark the difference
+between the greenhorn and the old-timer; but, more
+important, they mark also the difference between the
+right and the wrong, the efficient and the inefficient
+ways of doing things.
+
+In the morning the cook for the day is the first man
+afoot, usually about half past four.  He blows on his
+fingers, casts malevolent glances at the sleepers, finally
+builds his fire and starts his meal.  Then he takes
+fiendish delight in kicking out the others.  They do not
+run with glad shouts to plunge into the nearest pool,
+as most camping fiction would have us believe.  Not
+they.  The glad shout and nearest pool can wait until
+noon when the sun is warm.  They, too, blow on their
+fingers and curse the cook for getting them up so
+early.  All eat breakfast and feel better.
+
+Now the cook smokes in lordly ease.  One of the
+other men washes the dishes, while his companion
+goes forth to drive in the horses.  Washing dishes is
+bad enough, but fumbling with frozen fingers at stubborn
+hobble-buckles is worse.  At camp the horses are caught, 
+and each is tied near his own saddle and pack.
+
+The saddle-horses are attended to first.  Thus they
+are available for business in case some of the others
+should make trouble.  You will see that your saddle-
+blankets are perfectly smooth, and so laid that the
+edges are to the front where they are least likely to
+roll under or wrinkle.  After the saddle is in place,
+lift it slightly and loosen the blanket along the back
+bone so it will not draw down tight under the weight
+of the rider.  Next hang your rifle-scabbard under
+your left leg.  It should be slanted along the horse's
+side at such an angle that neither will the muzzle
+interfere with the animal's hind leg, nor the butt with
+your bridle-hand.  This angle must be determined by
+experiment.  The loop in front should be attached to
+the scabbard, so it can be hung over the horn; that
+behind to the saddle, so the muzzle can be thrust
+through it.  When you come to try this method, you
+will appreciate its handiness.  Besides the rifle, you
+will carry also your rope, camera, and a sweater or
+waistcoat for changes in temperature.  In your saddle
+bags are pipe and tobacco, perhaps a chunk of bread,
+your note-book, and the map--if there is any.  Thus
+your saddle-horse is outfitted.  Do not forget your
+collapsible rubber cup.  About your waist you will wear
+your cartridge-belt with six-shooter and sheath-knife. 
+I use a forty-five caliber belt.  By threading a buck
+skin thong in and out through some of the cartridge
+loops, their size is sufficiently reduced to hold also the
+30-40 rifle cartridges.  Thus I carry ammunition for
+both revolver and rifle in the one belt.  The belt
+should not be buckled tight about your waist, but
+should hang well down on the hip.  This is for two
+reasons.  In the first place, it does not drag so heavily
+at your anatomy, and falls naturally into position when
+you are mounted.  In the second place, you can jerk
+your gun out more easily from a loose-hanging holster. 
+Let your knife-sheath be so deep as almost to
+cover the handle, and the knife of the very best steel
+procurable.  I like a thin blade.  If you are a student
+of animal anatomy, you can skin and quarter a deer
+with nothing heavier than a pocket-knife.
+
+When you come to saddle the pack-horses, you
+must exercise even greater care in getting the saddle-
+blankets smooth and the saddle in place.  There is
+some give and take to a rider; but a pack carries
+"dead," and gives the poor animal the full handicap
+of its weight at all times.  A rider dismounts in bad
+or steep places; a pack stays on until the morning's
+journey is ended.  See to it, then, that it is on right.
+
+Each horse should have assigned him a definite
+and, as nearly as possible, unvarying pack.  Thus you
+will not have to search everywhere for the things
+you need.
+
+For example, in our own case, Lily was known as
+the cook-horse.  She carried all the kitchen utensils,
+the fire-irons, the axe, and matches.  In addition her
+alforjas contained a number of little bags in which
+were small quantities for immediate use of all the
+different sorts of provisions we had with us.  When
+we made camp we unpacked her near the best place
+for a fire, and everything was ready for the cook. 
+Jenny was a sort of supply store, for she transported
+the main stock of the provisions of which Lily's little
+bags contained samples.  Dinkey helped out Jenny,
+and in addition--since she took such good care
+of her pack--was intrusted with the fishing-rods,
+the shot-gun, the medicine-bag, small miscellaneous
+duffle, and whatever deer or bear meat we happened
+to have.  Buckshot's pack consisted of things not
+often used, such as all the ammunition, the horse-
+shoeing outfit, repair-kit, and the like.  It was rarely
+disturbed at all.
+
+These various things were all stowed away in the
+kyacks or alforjas which hung on either side.  They
+had to be very accurately balanced.  The least difference
+in weight caused one side to sag, and that in
+turn chafed the saddle-tree against the animal's
+withers.
+
+So far, so good.  Next comes the affair of the top
+packs.  Lay your duffle-bags across the middle of the
+saddle.  Spread the blankets and quilts as evenly as
+possible.  Cover all with the canvas tarpaulin suitably
+folded.  Everything is now ready for the pack-rope.
+
+The first thing anybody asks you when it is
+discovered that you know a little something of pack-
+trains is, "Do you throw the Diamond Hitch?" 
+Now the Diamond is a pretty hitch and a firm one,
+but it is by no means the fetish some people make
+of it.  They would have you believe that it represents
+the height of the packer's art; and once having
+mastered it, they use it religiously for every weight,
+shape, and size of pack.  The truth of the matter is
+that the style of hitch should be varied according to
+the use to which it is to be put.
+
+The Diamond is good because it holds firmly, is
+a great flattener, and is especially adapted to the
+securing of square boxes.  It is celebrated because it
+is pretty and rather difficult to learn.  Also it possesses
+the advantage for single-handed packing that it can
+be thrown slack throughout and then tightened, and
+that the last pull tightens the whole hitch.  However,
+for ordinary purposes, with a quiet horse and a
+comparatively soft pack, the common Square Hitch holds
+well enough and is quickly made.  For a load of
+small articles and heavy alforjas there is nothing like
+the Lone Packer.  It too is a bit hard to learn.  Chiefly
+is it valuable because the last pulls draw the alforjas
+away from the horse's sides, thus preventing their
+chafing him.  Of the many hitches that remain, you
+need learn, to complete your list for all practical
+purposes, only the Bucking Hitch.  It is complicated,
+and takes time and patience to throw, but it is
+warranted to hold your deck-load through the most
+violent storms bronco ingenuity can stir up.
+
+These four will be enough.  Learn to throw them,
+and take pains always to throw them good and tight. 
+A loose pack is the best expedient the enemy of your
+soul could possibly devise.  It always turns or comes
+to pieces on the edge of things; and then you will
+spend the rest of the morning trailing a wildly buck-
+ing horse by the burst and scattered articles of camp
+duffle.  It is furthermore your exhilarating task, after
+you have caught him, to take stock, and spend most
+of the afternoon looking for what your first search
+passed by.  Wes and I once hunted two hours for
+as large an object as a Dutch oven.  After which you
+can repack.  This time you will snug things down. 
+You should have done so in the beginning.
+
+Next, the lead-ropes are made fast to the top of
+the packs.  There is here to be learned a certain knot. 
+In case of trouble you can reach from your saddle
+and jerk the whole thing free by a single pull on a
+loose end.
+
+All is now ready.  You take a last look around to
+see that nothing has been left.  One of the horsemen
+starts on ahead.  The pack-horses swing in behind. 
+We soon accustomed ours to recognize the whistling
+of "Boots and Saddles" as a signal for the advance. 
+Another horseman brings up the rear.  The day's
+journey has begun.
+
+To one used to pleasure-riding the affair seems
+almost too deliberate.  The leader plods steadily,
+stopping from time to time to rest on the steep slopes. 
+The others string out in a leisurely procession.  It
+does no good to hurry.  The horses will of their own
+accord stay in sight of one another, and constant
+nagging to keep the rear closed up only worries them
+without accomplishing any valuable result.  In going
+uphill especially, let the train take its time.  Each
+animal is likely to have his own ideas about when and
+where to rest.  If he does, respect them.  See to it
+merely that there is no prolonged yielding to the
+temptation of meadow feed, and no careless or malicious
+straying off the trail.  A minute's difference in
+the time of arrival does not count.  Remember that
+the horses are doing hard and continuous work on a
+grass diet.
+
+The day's distance will not seem to amount to
+much in actual miles, especially if, like most
+Californians, you are accustomed on a fresh horse to make
+an occasional sixty or seventy between suns; but
+it ought to suffice.  There is a lot to be seen and
+enjoyed in a mountain mile.  Through the high country
+two miles an hour is a fair average rate of speed,
+so you can readily calculate that fifteen make a pretty
+long day.  You will be afoot a good share of the time. 
+If you were out from home for only a few hours' jaunt,
+undoubtedly you would ride your horse over places where 
+in an extended trip you will prefer to lead him.  It is 
+always a question of saving your animals.
+
+About ten o'clock you must begin to figure on
+water.  No horse will drink in the cool of the morning,
+and so, when the sun gets well up, he will be
+thirsty.  Arrange it.
+
+As to the method of travel, you can either stop at
+noon or push straight on through.  We usually arose
+about half past four; got under way by seven; and
+then rode continuously until ready to make the next
+camp.  In the high country this meant until two or
+three in the afternoon, by which time both we and the
+horses were pretty hungry.  But when we did make
+camp, the horses had until the following morning to
+get rested and to graze, while we had all the remainder
+of the afternoon to fish, hunt, or loaf.  Sometimes,
+however, it was more expedient to make a lunch-camp
+at noon.  Then we allowed an hour for grazing, and
+about half an hour to pack and unpack.  It meant
+steady work for ourselves.  To unpack, turn out the
+horses, cook, wash dishes, saddle up seven animals,
+and repack, kept us very busy.  There remained not
+much leisure to enjoy the scenery.  It freshened the
+horses, however, which was the main point.  I should
+say the first method was the better for ordinary
+journeys; and the latter for those times when, to reach
+good feed, a forced march becomes necessary.
+
+On reaching the night's stopping-place, the cook
+for the day unpacks the cook-horse and at once sets
+about the preparation of dinner.  The other two attend
+to the animals.  And no matter how tired you
+are, or how hungry you may be, you must take time
+to bathe their backs with cold water; to stake the
+picket-animal where it will at once get good feed and
+not tangle its rope in bushes, roots, or stumps; to
+hobble the others; and to bell those inclined to
+wander.  After this is done, it is well, for the peace and
+well-being of the party, to take food.
+
+A smoke establishes you in the final and normal
+attitude of good humor.  Each man spreads his tarpaulin
+where he has claimed his bed.  Said claim is
+indicated by his hat thrown down where he wishes
+to sleep.  It is a mark of pre-emption which every one
+is bound to respect.  Lay out your saddle-blankets,
+cover them with your quilt, place the sleeping-
+blanket on top, and fold over the tarpaulin to cover
+the whole.  At the head deposit your duffle-bag.  Thus
+are you assured of a pleasant night.
+
+About dusk you straggle in with trout or game. 
+The camp-keeper lays aside his mending or his
+repairing or his note-book, and stirs up the cooking-
+fire.  The smell of broiling and frying and boiling
+arises in the air.  By the dancing flame of the campfire
+you eat your third dinner for the day--in the
+mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones
+at that.  The curtain of blackness draws down close. 
+Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and
+mist-like in the moon.  You tell stories.  You smoke
+pipes.  After a time the pleasant chill creeps down
+from the eternal snows.  Some one throws another
+handful of pine-cones on the fire.  Sleepily you prepare
+for bed.  The pine-cones flare up, throwing their
+light in your eyes.  You turn over and wrap the soft
+woolen blanket close about your chin.  You wink
+drowsily and at once you are asleep.  Along late in
+the night you awaken to find your nose as cold as a
+dog's.  You open one eye.  A few coals mark where
+the fire has been.  The mist mountains have drawn
+nearer, they seem to bend over you in silent
+contemplation.  The moon is sailing high in the heavens.
+
+With a sigh you draw the canvas tarpaulin over
+your head.  Instantly it is morning.
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE COAST RANGES
+
+At last, on the day appointed, we, with five
+horses, climbed the Cold Spring Trail to the
+ridge; and then, instead of turning to the left, we
+plunged down the zigzag lacets of the other side. 
+That night we camped at Mono Canon, feeling ourselves
+strangely an integral part of the relief map we
+had looked upon so many times that almost we had
+come to consider its features as in miniature, not
+capacious for the accommodation of life-sized men. 
+Here we remained a day while we rode the hills in
+search of Dinkey and Jenny, there pastured.
+
+We found Jenny peaceful and inclined to be corralled. 
+But Dinkey, followed by a slavishly adoring
+brindle mule, declined to be rounded up.  We chased
+her up hill and down; along creek-beds and through
+the spiky chaparral.  Always she dodged craftily,
+warily, with forethought.  Always the brindled mule,
+wrapt in admiration at his companion's cleverness,
+crashed along after.  Finally we teased her into a
+narrow canon.  Wes and the Tenderfoot closed the
+upper end.  I attempted to slip by to the lower, but
+was discovered.  Dinkey tore a frantic mile down the
+side hill.  Bullet, his nostrils wide, his ears back, raced
+parallel in the boulder-strewn stream-bed, wonderful
+in his avoidance of bad footing, precious in his
+selection of good, interested in the game, indignant at the
+wayward Dinkey, profoundly contemptuous of the
+besotted mule.  At a bend in the canon interposed
+a steep bank.  Up this we scrambled, dirt and stones
+flying.  I had just time to bend low along the saddle
+when, with the ripping and tearing and scratching of
+thorns, we burst blindly through a thicket.  In the
+open space on the farther side Bullet stopped, panting
+but triumphant.  Dinkey, surrounded at last, turned
+back toward camp with an air of utmost indifference. 
+The mule dropped his long ears and followed.
+
+At camp we corralled Dinkey, but left her friend
+to shift for himself.  Then was lifted up his voice in
+mulish lamentations until, cursing, we had to ride out
+bareback and drive him far into the hills and there
+stone him into distant fear.  Even as we departed up
+the trail the following day the voice of his sorrow,
+diminishing like the echo of grief, appealed uselessly
+to Dinkey's sympathy.  For Dinkey, once captured,
+seemed to have shrugged her shoulders and accepted
+inevitable toil with a real though cynical philosophy.
+
+The trail rose gradually by imperceptible gradations
+and occasional climbs.  We journeyed in the
+great canons.  High chaparral flanked the trail,
+occasional wide gray stretches of "old man" filled the air
+with its pungent odor and with the calls of its quail. 
+The crannies of the rocks, the stretches of wide loose
+shale, the crumbling bottom earth offered to the
+eye the dessicated beauties of creamy yucca, of yerba
+buena, of the gaudy red paint-brushes, the Spanish
+bayonet; and to the nostrils the hot dry perfumes of
+the semi-arid lands.  The air was tepid; the sun hot. 
+A sing-song of bees and locusts and strange insects
+lulled the mind.  The ponies plodded on cheerfully. 
+We expanded and basked and slung our legs over
+the pommels of our saddles and were glad we had come.
+
+At no time did we seem to be climbing mountains. 
+Rather we wound in and out, round and about,
+through a labyrinth of valleys and canons and
+ravines, farther and farther into a mysterious shut-in
+country that seemed to have no end.  Once in a while,
+to be sure, we zigzagged up a trifling ascent; but it
+was nothing.  And then at a certain point the Tenderfoot
+happened to look back.
+
+"Well!" he gasped; "will you look at that!"
+
+We turned.  Through a long straight aisle which
+chance had placed just there, we saw far in the distance
+a sheer slate-colored wall; and beyond, still
+farther in the distance, overtopping the slate-colored
+wall by a narrow strip, another wall of light azure blue.
+
+"It's our mountains," said Wes, "and that blue
+ridge is the channel islands.  We've got up higher
+than our range."
+
+We looked about us, and tried to realize that we
+were actually more than halfway up the formidable
+ridge we had so often speculated on from the Cold
+Spring Trail.  But it was impossible.  In a few
+moments, however, our broad easy canon narrowed. 
+Huge crags and sheer masses of rock hemmed us
+in.  The chaparral and yucca and yerba buena gave
+place to pine-trees and mountain oaks, with little
+close clumps of cottonwoods in the stream bottom. 
+The brook narrowed and leaped, and the white of
+alkali faded from its banks.  We began to climb
+in good earnest, pausing often for breath.  The view
+opened.  We looked back on whence we had come,
+and saw again, from the reverse, the forty miles of
+ranges and valleys we had viewed from the Ridge Trail.
+
+At this point we stopped to shoot a rattlesnake. 
+Dinkey and Jenny took the opportunity to push
+ahead.  From time to time we would catch sight
+of them traveling earnestly on, following the trail
+accurately, stopping at stated intervals to rest, doing
+their work, conducting themselves as decorously as
+though drivers had stood over them with blacksnake
+whips.  We tried a little to catch up.
+
+"Never mind," said Wes, "they've been over this
+trail before.  They'll stop when they get to where
+we're going to camp."
+
+We halted a moment on the ridge to look back
+over the lesser mountains and the distant ridge,
+beyond which the islands now showed plainly.  Then
+we dropped down behind the divide into a cup valley
+containing a little meadow with running water on
+two sides of it and big pines above.  The meadow
+was brown, to be sure, as all typical California is at
+this time of year.  But the brown of California and
+the brown of the East are two different things.  Here
+is no snow or rain to mat down the grass, to suck
+out of it the vital principles.  It grows ripe and sweet
+and soft, rich with the life that has not drained away,
+covering the hills and valleys with the effect of beaver
+fur, so that it seems the great round-backed hills must
+have in a strange manner the yielding flesh-elasticity
+of living creatures.  The brown of California is the
+brown of ripeness; not of decay.
+
+Our little meadow was beautifully named Madulce,[1] 
+and was just below the highest point of this
+section of the Coast Range.  The air drank fresh with
+the cool of elevation.  We went out to shoot supper;
+and so found ourselves on a little knoll fronting the
+brown-hazed east.  As we stood there, enjoying the
+breeze after our climb, a great wave of hot air swept
+by us, filling our lungs with heat, scorching our faces
+as the breath of a furnace.  Thus was brought to our
+minds what, in the excitement of a new country, we
+had forgotten,--that we were at last on the eastern slope, 
+and that before us waited the Inferno of the desert.
+
+
+[1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.
+
+
+That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of
+Madulce, and talked of it.  Wes had been across it
+once before and did not possess much optimism with
+which to comfort us.
+
+"It's hot, just plain hot," said he, "and that's all
+there is about it.  And there's mighty little water,
+and what there is is sickish and a long ways apart. 
+And the sun is strong enough to roast potatoes in."
+
+"Why not travel at night?" we asked.
+
+"No place to sleep under daytimes," explained
+Wes.  "It's better to keep traveling and then get
+a chance for a little sleep in the cool of the night."
+
+We saw the reasonableness of that.
+
+"Of course we'll start early, and take a long
+nooning, and travel late.  We won't get such a lot of
+sleep."
+
+"How long is it going to take us?"
+
+Wes calculated.
+
+"About eight days," he said soberly.
+
+The next morning we descended from Madulce
+abruptly by a dirt trail, almost perpendicular until we
+slid into a canon of sage-brush and quail, of mescale
+cactus and the fierce dry heat of sun-baked shale.
+
+"Is it any hotter than this on the desert?" we inquired.
+
+Wes looked on us with pity.
+
+"This is plumb arctic," said he.
+
+Near noon we came to a little cattle ranch situated
+in a flat surrounded by red dikes and buttes
+after the manner of Arizona.  Here we unpacked,
+early as it was, for through the dry countries one has
+to apportion his day's journeys by the water to be
+had.  If we went farther to-day, then to-morrow night
+would find us in a dry camp.
+
+The horses scampered down the flat to search out
+alfilaria.  We roosted under a slanting shed,--where
+were stock saddles, silver-mounted bits and spurs,
+rawhide riatas, branding-irons, and all the lumber of
+the cattle business,--and hung out our tongues and
+gasped for breath and earnestly desired the sun to
+go down or a breeze to come up.  The breeze shortly
+did so.  It was a hot breeze, and availed merely to
+cover us with dust, to swirl the stable-yard into our
+faces.  Great swarms of flies buzzed and lit and stung. 
+Wes, disgusted, went over to where a solitary cow-
+puncher was engaged in shoeing a horse.  Shortly
+we saw Wes pressed into service to hold the horse's
+hoof.  He raised a pathetic face to us, the big round
+drops chasing each other down it as fast as rain.  We
+grinned and felt better.
+
+The fierce perpendicular rays of the sun beat down. 
+The air under the shed grew stuffier and more
+oppressive, but it was the only patch of shade in all that
+pink and red furnace of a little valley.  The Tenderfoot
+discovered a pair of horse-clippers, and, becoming
+slightly foolish with the heat, insisted on our
+barbering his head.  We told him it was cooler with
+hair than without; and that the flies and sun would
+be offered thus a beautiful opportunity, but without
+avail.  So we clipped him,--leaving, however, a beautiful
+long scalp-lock in the middle of his crown.  He
+looked like High-low-kickapoo-waterpot, chief of
+the Wam-wams.  After a while he discovered it, and
+was unhappy.
+
+Shortly the riders began to come in, jingling up to
+the shed, with a rattle of spurs and bit-chains.  There
+they unsaddled their horses, after which, with great
+unanimity, they soused their heads in the horse-trough. 
+The chief, a six-footer, wearing beautifully decorated
+gauntlets and a pair of white buckskin chaps, went
+so far as to say it was a little warm for the time of
+year.  In the freshness of evening, when frazzled
+nerves had regained their steadiness, he returned to
+smoke and yarn with us and tell us of the peculiarities
+of the cattle business in the Cuyamas.  At present
+he and his men were riding the great mountains, driving
+the cattle to the lowlands in anticipation of a
+rodeo the following week.  A rodeo under that sun!
+
+We slept in the ranch vehicles, so the air could get
+under us.  While the stars still shone, we crawled
+out, tired and unrefreshed.  The Tenderfoot and I
+went down the valley after the horses.  While we
+looked, the dull pallid gray of dawn filtered into the
+darkness, and so we saw our animals, out of proportion,
+monstrous in the half light of that earliest morning. 
+Before the range riders were even astir we had
+taken up our journey, filching thus a few hours from
+the inimical sun.
+
+Until ten o'clock we traveled in the valley of the
+Cuyamas.  The river was merely a broad sand and
+stone bed, although undoubtedly there was water
+below the surface.  California rivers are said to flow
+bottom up.  To the northward were mountains typical
+of the arid countries,--boldly defined, clear in
+the edges of their folds, with sharp shadows and hard,
+uncompromising surfaces.  They looked brittle and
+hollow, as though made of papier mache and set down
+in the landscape.  A long four hours' noon we spent
+beneath a live-oak near a tiny spring.  I tried to hunt,
+but had to give it up.  After that I lay on my back
+and shot doves as they came to drink at the spring. 
+It was better than walking about, and quite as effective
+as regards supper.  A band of cattle filed stolidly
+in, drank, and filed as stolidly away.  Some half-wild
+horses came to the edge of the hill, stamped, snorted,
+essayed a tentative advance.  Them we drove away,
+lest they decoy our own animals.  The flies would
+not let us sleep.  Dozens of valley and mountain
+quail called with maddening cheerfulness and energy. 
+By a mighty exercise of will we got under way again. 
+In an hour we rode out into what seemed to be a grassy 
+foot-hill country, supplied with a most refreshing breeze.
+
+The little round hills of a few hundred feet rolled
+gently away to the artificial horizon made by their
+closing in.  The trail meandered white and distinct
+through the clear fur-like brown of their grasses.  
+Cattle grazed.  Here and there grew live-oaks, planted
+singly as in a park.  Beyond we could imagine the
+great plain, grading insensibly into these little hills.
+
+And then all at once we surmounted a slight
+elevation, and found that we had been traveling on a
+plateau, and that these apparent little hills were in
+reality the peaks of high mountains.
+
+We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet-
+creased range that dipped down and down to miniature
+canons far below.  Not a single little boulder
+broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses. 
+Out from beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and
+inert with heat.
+
+Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague
+brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little
+distance.  But only for a little distance.  Almost
+at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of
+atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay
+palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil,
+hiding the distance in mystery and in dread.  It was
+a land apart; a land to be looked on curiously from
+the vantage-ground of safety,--as we were looking
+on it from the shoulder of the mountain,--and then
+to be turned away from, to be left waiting behind
+its brown veil for what might come.  To abandon
+the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the
+known, deliberately to seek the presence that lay
+in wait,--all at once it seemed the height of
+grotesque perversity.  We wanted to turn on our heels. 
+We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes
+and clear water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our
+trails and the sweet upper air.
+
+For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses,
+gazing down.  Some unknown disturbance lazily
+rifted the brown veil by ever so little.  We saw, lying
+inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a
+great round lake.  We knew the water to be bitter,
+poisonous.  The veil drew together again.  Wes shook
+himself and sighed, "There she is,--damn her!" said he.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE INFERNO
+
+For eight days we did penance, checking off the
+hours, meeting doggedly one after another the
+disagreeable things.  We were bathed in heat; we
+inhaled it; it soaked into us until we seemed to radiate
+it like so many furnaces.  A condition of thirst
+became the normal condition, to be only slightly
+mitigated by a few mouthfuls from zinc canteens of
+tepid water.  Food had no attractions: even smoking
+did not taste good.  Always the flat country stretched
+out before us.  We could see far ahead a landmark
+which we would reach only by a morning's travel. 
+Nothing intervened between us and it.  After we
+had looked at it a while, we became possessed of an
+almost insane necessity to make a run for it.  The
+slow maddening three miles an hour of the pack-
+train drove us frantic.  There were times when it
+seemed that unless we shifted our gait, unless we
+stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which
+the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our
+minds and run round and round in circles--as people
+often do, in the desert.
+
+And when the last and most formidable hundred
+yards had slunk sullenly behind us to insignificance,
+and we had dared let our minds relax from the
+insistent need of self-control--then, beyond the cotton. 
+woods, or creek-bed, or group of buildings, whichever
+it might be, we made out another, remote as
+paradise, to which we must gain by sunset.  So again
+the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its
+staggering sun, its miles made up of monotonous inches,
+each clutching for a man's sanity.
+
+We sang everything we knew; we told stories;
+we rode cross-saddle, sidewise, erect, slouching; we
+walked and led our horses; we shook the powder of
+years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles,
+--and at the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell
+to morose silence and the red-eyed vindictive
+contemplation of the objective point that would not
+seem to come nearer.
+
+For now we lost accurate sense of time.  At first it
+had been merely a question of going in at one side
+of eight days, pressing through them, and coming out
+on the other side.  Then the eight days would be
+behind us.  But once we had entered that enchanted
+period, we found ourselves more deeply involved. 
+The seemingly limited area spread with startling
+swiftness to the very horizon.  Abruptly it was borne
+in on us that this was never going to end; just as
+now for the first time we realized that it had begun
+infinite ages ago.  We were caught in the entanglement
+of days.  The Coast Ranges were the experiences
+of a past incarnation: the Mountains were a myth. 
+
+Nothing was real but this; and this would endure
+forever.  We plodded on because somehow it was
+part of the great plan that we should do so.  Not
+that it did any good:--we had long since given up
+such ideas.  The illusion was very real; perhaps it
+was the anodyne mercifully administered to those
+who pass through the Inferno.
+
+Most of the time we got on well enough.  One
+day, only, the Desert showed her power.  That day,
+at five of the afternoon, it was one hundred and
+twenty degrees in the shade.  And we, through necessity
+of reaching the next water, journeyed over the
+alkali at noon.  Then the Desert came close on us and
+looked us fair in the eyes, concealing nothing.  She
+killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had traveled
+the wild countries so long; she struck Wes
+and the Tenderfoot from their horses when finally
+they had reached a long-legged water tank; she even
+staggered the horses themselves.  And I, lying under
+a bush where I had stayed after the others in the hope
+of succoring Deuce, began idly shooting at ghostly
+jack-rabbits that looked real, but through which the
+revolver bullets passed without resistance.
+
+After this day the Tenderfoot went water-crazy. 
+Watering the horses became almost a mania with
+him.  He could not bear to pass even a mud-hole
+without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance to fill 
+up, even though that animal had drunk freely not twenty 
+rods back.  As for himself, he embraced every opportunity; 
+and journeyed draped in many canteens.
+
+After that it was not so bad.  The thermometer
+stood from a hundred to a hundred and five or six,
+to be sure, but we were getting used to it.  Discomfort,
+ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept
+as the normal environment of man.  It is astonishing
+how soon uniformly uncomfortable conditions, by
+very lack of contrast, do lose their power to color
+the habit of mind.  I imagine merely physical
+unhappiness is a matter more of contrasts than of actual
+circumstances.  We swallowed dust; we humped
+our shoulders philosophically under the beating of
+the sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we
+cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle fly-
+infested hours waiting for the noon to pass; we slept
+in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind
+stables, in hay, anywhere.  There was little water,
+less wood for the cooking.
+
+It is now all confused, an impression of events with
+out sequence, a mass of little prominent purposeless
+things like rock conglomerate.  I remember leaning
+my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a
+poker game going on in the room of a dive.  The
+light came from a sickly suspended lamp.  It fell
+on five players,--two miners in their shirt-sleeves, a
+Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat,
+and a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman.  The men
+held their cards close to their bodies, and wagered in
+silence.  Slowly and regularly the great drops of sweat
+gathered on their faces.  As regularly they raised the
+backs of their hands to wipe them away.  Only the
+Chinaman, broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha,
+save for a little crafty smile in one corner of his eye,
+seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool as autumn. 
+His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he
+moved his hand forward, laying his bets.  A jade
+bracelet slipped back and forth as smoothly as on
+yellow ivory.
+
+Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea
+of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we
+rode by a sheep-herder's camp.  The flicker of a fire
+threw a glow out into the dark.  A tall wagon, a
+group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting
+dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination. 
+And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light,
+now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were
+the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by
+mysterious thousands into the mass of night.  We
+passed them.  They looked up, squinting their eyes
+against the dazzle of their fire.  The night closed
+about us again.
+
+Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after
+a hot and trying day, a little inn kept by a French
+couple.  And there, in the very middle of the Inferno,
+was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a meal
+such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with
+the potage, the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout, 
+the chicken and salad, the cheese and the black coffee,
+even the vin ordinaire.  I have forgotten the name
+of the place, its location on the map, the name of its
+people,--one has little to do with detail in the
+Inferno,--but that dinner never will I forget, any
+more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight
+of water the day when the Desert "held us up."
+
+Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward.  We,
+souls struggling, saw great mountains and the whiteness
+of eternal snow.  That noon we crossed a river,
+hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its
+current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien
+from the high country.
+
+These things should have been as signs to our
+jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our
+penance, but discipline had seared over our souls, and
+we rode on unknowing.
+
+Then we came on a real indication.  It did not
+amount to much.  Merely a dry river-bed; but the
+farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into a low swell
+of land.  We skirted it.  Another swell of land, like
+the sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way. 
+Then we crossed a ravine.  It was not much of a
+ravine; in fact it was more like a slight gouge in the
+flatness of the country.  After that we began to see
+oak-trees, scattered at rare intervals.  So interested
+were we in them that we did not notice rocks beginning
+to outcrop through the soil until they had
+become numerous enough to be a feature of the 
+landscape.  The hills, gently, quietly, without abrupt
+transition, almost as though they feared to awaken
+our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth, glided
+from little swells to bigger swells.  The oaks gathered
+closer together.  The ravine's brother could almost be
+called a canon.  The character of the country had
+entirely changed.
+
+And yet, so gradually had this change come about
+that we did not awaken to a full realization of our
+escape.  To us it was still the plain, a trifle modified
+by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its
+wonted aspect.  We plodded on dully, anodyned
+with the desert patience.
+
+But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek
+of a slope, we encountered an errant current of air. 
+It came up to us curiously, touched us each in turn,
+and went on.  The warm furnace heat drew in on us
+again.  But it had been a cool little current of air, with
+something of the sweetness of pines and water and
+snow-banks in it.  The Tenderfoot suddenly reined
+in his horse and looked about him.
+
+"Boys!" he cried, a new ring of joy in his voice,
+"we're in the foot-hills!"
+
+Wes calculated rapidly.  "It's the eighth day
+to-day:  I guessed right on the time."
+
+We stretched our arms and looked about us.  They
+were dry brown hills enough; but they were hills, and
+they had trees on them, and canons in them, so to our
+eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE FOOT-HILLS
+
+At once our spirits rose.  We straightened in our
+saddles, we breathed deep, we joked.  The
+country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail,
+almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long
+easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep
+in dust; the ravines were still dry of water.  But it
+was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed.  After
+a while we crossed high above a river which dashed
+white water against black rocks, and so were happy.
+
+The country went on changing.  The change was
+always imperceptible, as is growth, or the stealthy
+advance of autumn through the woods.  From moment 
+to moment one could detect no alteration. Something 
+intangible was taken away; something impalpable added.  
+At the end of an hour we were in the oaks and sycamores; 
+at the end of two we were in the pines and low 
+mountains of Bret Harte's Forty-Nine.
+
+The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into
+the hills.  It had not been used as a stage-route for
+years, but the freighting kept it deep with dust, that
+writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high to
+our horses, like a living creature.  We felt the swing
+and sweep of the route.  The boldness of its stretches,
+the freedom of its reaches for the opposite slope, the
+wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us with the
+breath of an expansion which as yet the broad low
+country only suggested.
+
+Everything here was reminiscent of long ago.  The
+very names hinted stories of the Argonauts.  Coarse
+Gold Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub Gulch, Fine
+Gold Post-Office in turn we passed.  Occasionally,
+with a fine round dash into the open, the trail drew
+one side to a stage-station.  The huge stables, the
+wide corrals, the low living-houses, each shut in its
+dooryard of blazing riotous flowers, were all familiar. 
+Only lacked the old-fashioned Concord coach, from
+which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle. 
+As for M'liss, she was there, sunbonnet and all.
+
+Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer
+diggings.  Elaborate little ditches for the deflection
+of water, long cradles for the separation of gold,
+decayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons and
+tons of pay dirt which had been turned over pound
+by pound in the concentrating of its treasure.  Some
+of the old cabins still stood.  It was all deserted now,
+save for the few who kept trail for the freighters, or
+who tilled the restricted bottom-lands of the flats. 
+Road-runners racked away down the paths; squirrels
+scurried over worn-out placers; jays screamed and
+chattered in and out of the abandoned cabins.  Strange
+and shy little creatures and birds, reassured by the
+silence of many years, had ventured to take to
+themselves the engines of man's industry.  And the warm
+California sun embalmed it all in a peaceful forgetfulness.
+
+Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more
+impressive.  We should call them mountains in the East. 
+Pines covered them to the top, straight slender pines
+with voices.  The little flats were planted with great
+oaks.  When we rode through them, they shut out
+the hills, so that we might have imagined ourselves
+in the level wooded country.  There insisted the effect
+of limitless tree-grown plains, which the warm drowsy
+sun, the park-like landscape, corroborated.  And yet
+the contrast of the clear atmosphere and the sharp air
+equally insisted on the mountains.  It was a strange
+and delicious double effect, a contradiction of natural
+impressions, a negation of our right to generalize from
+previous experience.
+
+Always the trail wound up and up.  Never was it
+steep; never did it command an outlook.  Yet we
+felt that at last we were rising, were leaving the level
+of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the high
+country.
+
+Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clearings
+and gazed at us, responding solemnly to our
+salutations.  They dwelt in cabins and held to
+agriculture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle. 
+From them we heard of the high country to which
+we were bound.  They spoke of it as you or I
+would speak of interior Africa, as something inconceivably
+remote, to be visited only by the adventurous,
+an uninhabited realm of vast magnitude and
+unknown dangers.  In the same way they spoke of
+the plains.  Only the narrow pine-clad strip between
+the two and six thousand feet of elevation they felt
+to be their natural environment.  In it they found the
+proper conditions for their existence.  Out of it those
+conditions lacked.  They were as much a localized
+product as are certain plants which occur only at
+certain altitudes.  Also were they densely ignorant of
+trails and routes outside of their own little districts.
+
+All this, you will understand, was in what is known
+as the low country.  The landscape was still brown;
+the streams but trickles; sage-brush clung to the
+ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills.
+
+But one day we came suddenly into the big pines and 
+rocks; and that very night we made our first camp in a 
+meadow typical of the mountains we had dreamed about.
+
+
+
+THE PINES
+
+VIII
+
+THE PINES
+
+I do not know exactly how to make you feel the charm 
+of that first camp in the big country.  Certainly I can 
+never quite repeat it in my own experience.
+
+Remember that for two months we had grown
+accustomed to the brown of the California landscape,
+and that for over a week we had traveled in the
+Inferno.  We had forgotten the look of green grass,
+of abundant water; almost had we forgotten the taste
+of cool air.  So invariably had the trails been dusty,
+and the camping-places hard and exposed, that we
+had come subconsciously to think of such as typical
+of the country.  Try to put yourself in the frame of
+mind those conditions would make.
+
+Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or
+so up into a high ridge country of broad cup-like
+sweeps and bold outcropping ledges.  Imagine a forest
+of pine-trees bigger than any pines you ever saw
+before,--pines eight and ten feet through, so huge
+that you can hardly look over one of their prostrate
+trunks even from the back of your pony.  Imagine,
+further, singing little streams of ice-cold water, deep
+refreshing shadows, a soft carpet of pine-needles
+through which the faint furrow of the trail runs as
+over velvet.  And then, last of all, in a wide opening,
+clear as though chopped and plowed by some back-
+woodsman, a park of grass, fresh grass, green as a
+precious stone.
+
+This was our first sight of the mountain meadows. 
+From time to time we found others, sometimes a half
+dozen in a day.  The rough country came down close
+about them, edging to the very hair-line of the magic
+circle, which seemed to assure their placid sunny
+peace.  An upheaval of splintered granite often tossed
+and tumbled in the abandon of an unrestrained passion
+that seemed irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities
+of a whole region; but somewhere, in the very forefront
+of turmoil, was like to slumber one of these little 
+meadows, as unconscious of anything but its own 
+flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in mid-ocean.  
+Or, away up in the snows, warmed by the fortuity of 
+reflected heat, its emerald eye looked bravely out to 
+the heavens.  Or, as here, it rested confidingly in the 
+very heart of the austere forest.
+
+Always these parks are green; always are they clear
+and open.  Their size varies widely.  Some are as
+little as a city lawn; others, like the great Monache,[2]
+are miles in extent.  In them resides the possibility
+of your traveling the high country; for they supply
+the feed for your horses.
+
+
+[2] Do not fail to sound the final e.
+
+
+Being desert-weary, the Tenderfoot and I cried out
+with the joy of it, and told in extravagant language
+how this was the best camp we had ever made.
+
+"It's a bum camp," growled Wes.  "If we couldn't
+get better camps than this, I'd quit the game."
+
+He expatiated on the fact that this particular
+meadow was somewhat boggy; that the feed was too
+watery; that there'd be a cold wind down through
+the pines; and other small and minor details.  But
+we, our backs propped against appropriately slanted
+rocks, our pipes well aglow, gazed down the twilight
+through the wonderful great columns of the trees to
+where the white horses shone like snow against the
+unaccustomed relief of green, and laughed him to
+scorn.  What did we--or the horses for that matter
+--care for trifling discomforts of the body?  In these
+intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment
+of the spirit.
+
+The following day we rode through the pine
+forests growing on the ridges and hills and in the
+elevated bowl-like hollows.  These were not the so-
+called "big trees,"--with those we had to do later,
+as you shall see.  They were merely sugar and yellow
+pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer specimens. 
+They were planted with a grand sumptuousness
+of space, and their trunks were from five to
+twelve feet in diameter and upwards of two hundred
+feet high to the topmost spear.  Underbrush, ground
+growth, even saplings of the same species lacked 
+entirely, so that we proceeded in the clear open aisles
+of a tremendous and spacious magnificence.
+
+This very lack of the smaller and usual growths,
+the generous plan of spacing, and the size of the trees
+themselves necessarily deprived us of a standard
+of comparison.  At first the forest seemed immense. 
+But after a little our eyes became accustomed to its
+proportions.  We referred it back to the measures of
+long experience.  The trees, the wood-aisles, the
+extent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of an
+Eastern pinery.  And then we would lower our gaze. 
+The pack-train would come into view.  It had become
+lilliputian, the horses small as white mice, the men 
+like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an 
+enchantment.  But in a moment, with the rush of a mighty
+transformation, the great trees would tower huge again.
+
+In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a
+certain close-clipped parasitic moss.  In color it is
+a brilliant yellow-green, more yellow than green.  In
+shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with
+itself like very fine shavings.  In consistency it is dry
+and brittle.  This moss girdles the trunks of trees
+with innumerable parallel inch-wide bands a foot or
+so apart, in the manner of old-fashioned striped
+stockings.  It covers entirely sundry twigless branches. 
+Always in appearance is it fantastic, decorative,
+almost Japanese, as though consciously laid in with its
+vivid yellow-green as an intentional note of a tone
+scheme.  The somberest shadows, the most neutral
+twilights, the most austere recesses are lighted by it
+as though so many freakish sunbeams had severed
+relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly in
+the coolnesses of the ancient forest.
+
+Underfoot the pine-needles were springy beneath
+the horse's hoof.  The trail went softly, with the
+courtesy of great gentleness.  Occasionally we caught sight
+of other ridges,--also with pines,--across deep
+sloping valleys, pine filled.  The effect of the distant
+trees seen from above was that of roughened velvet,
+here smooth and shining, there dark with rich
+shadows.  On these slopes played the wind.  In the
+level countries it sang through the forest progressively:
+here on the slope it struck a thousand trees at
+once.  The air was ennobled with the great voice, as
+a church is ennobled by the tones of a great organ. 
+Then we would drop back again to the inner country,
+for our way did not contemplate the descents nor
+climbs, but held to the general level of a plateau.
+
+Clear fresh brooks ran in every ravine.  Their water
+was snow-white against the black rocks; or lay dark
+in bank-shadowed pools.  As our horses splashed
+across we could glimpse the rainbow trout flashing
+to cover.  Where the watered hollows grew lush were 
+thickets full of birds, outposts of the aggressively
+and cheerfully worldly in this pine-land of spiritual
+detachment. Gorgeous bush-flowers, great of petal
+as magnolias, with perfume that lay on the air like
+a heavy drowsiness; long clear stretches of an ankle-
+high shrub of vivid emerald, looking in the distance
+like sloping meadows of a peculiar color-brilliance;
+patches of smaller flowers where for the trifling space
+of a street's width the sun had unobstructed fall,--
+these from time to time diversified the way, brought
+to our perceptions the endearing trifles of earthiness,
+of humanity, befittingly to modify the austerity of
+the great forest.  At a brookside we saw, still fresh
+and moist, the print of a bear's foot.  From a patch
+of the little emerald brush, a barren doe rose to
+her feet, eyed us a moment, and then bounded away
+as though propelled by springs.  We saw her from
+time to time surmounting little elevations farther and
+farther away.
+
+The air was like cold water.  We had not lung
+capacity to satisfy our desire for it.  There came with
+it a dry exhilaration that brought high spirits, an
+optimistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite. 
+It seemed that we could never tire.  In fact we never
+did.  Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, we
+felt like resting; but it was always after the day's
+work was done, never while it was under way.  The
+Tenderfoot and I one day went afoot twenty-two
+miles up and down a mountain fourteen thousand
+feet high.  The last three thousand feet were nearly
+straight up and down.  We finished at a four-mile
+clip an hour before sunset, and discussed what to
+do next to fill in the time.  When we sat down, we
+found we had had about enough; but we had not
+discovered it before.
+
+All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt
+the benefit of the change from the lower country. 
+Here we were definitely in the Mountains.  Our
+plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in
+altitude.  Beyond it occasionally we could see three more
+ridges, rising and falling, each higher than the last. 
+And then, in the blue distance, the very crest of the
+broad system called the Sierras,--another wide region
+of sheer granite rising in peaks, pinnacles, and minarets,
+rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal snows.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE TRAIL
+
+When you say "trail" to a Westerner, his eye
+lights up.  This is because it means something
+to him.  To another it may mean something
+entirely different, for the blessed word is of that rare
+and beautiful category which is at once of the widest
+significance and the most intimate privacy to him
+who utters it.  To your mind leaps the picture of
+the dim forest-aisles and the murmurings of tree-top
+breezes; to him comes a vision of the wide dusty
+desert; to me, perhaps, a high wild country of wonder. 
+To all of us it is the slender, unbroken, never-
+ending thread connecting experiences.
+
+For in a mysterious way, not to be understood, our
+trails never do end.  They stop sometimes, and wait
+patiently while we dive in and out of houses, but
+always when we are ready to go on, they are ready
+too, and so take up the journey placidly as though
+nothing had intervened.  They begin, when?  Sometime,
+away in the past, you may remember a single
+episode, vivid through the mists of extreme youth. 
+Once a very little boy walked with his father under a
+green roof of leaves that seemed farther than the sky
+and as unbroken.  All of a sudden the man raised
+his gun and fired upwards, apparently through the
+green roof.  A pause ensued.  Then, hurtling roughly
+through still that same green roof, a great bird fell,
+hitting the earth with a thump.  The very little boy
+was I.  My trail must have begun there under the
+bright green roof of leaves.
+
+From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind
+you like a thread so that never do you quite lose
+connection with your selves.  There is something a
+little fearful to the imaginative in the insistence of it. 
+You may camp, you may linger, but some time or
+another, sooner or later, you must go on, and when
+you do, then once again the Trail takes up its
+continuity without reference to the muddied place you
+have tramped out in your indecision or indolence or
+obstinacy or necessity.  It would be exceedingly
+curious to follow out in patience the chart of a man's
+going, tracing the pattern of his steps with all its
+windings of nursery, playground, boys afield, country,
+city, plain, forest, mountain, wilderness, home,
+always on and on into the higher country of responsibility
+until at the last it leaves us at the summit of the 
+Great Divide.  Such a pattern would tell his story as 
+surely as do the tracks of a partridge on the snow.
+
+A certain magic inheres in the very name, or at
+least so it seems to me.  I should be interested to
+know whether others feel the same glamour that I do
+in the contemplation of such syllables as the Lo-Lo
+Trail, the Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright
+Angel Trail.  A certain elasticity of application too
+leaves room for the more connotation.  A trail may
+be almost anything.  There are wagon-trails which
+East would rank as macadam roads; horse-trails that
+would compare favorably with our best bridle-paths;
+foot-trails in the fur country worn by constant use as
+smooth as so many garden-walks.  Then again there
+are other arrangements.  I have heard a mule-driver
+overwhelmed with skeptical derision because he
+claimed to have upset but six times in traversing a
+certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in charts
+of the mountains are marked many trails which are
+only "ways through,"--you will find few traces of
+predecessors; the same can be said of trails in the
+great forests where even an Indian is sometimes at
+fault.  "Johnny, you're lost," accused the white man. 
+"Trail lost: Injun here," denied the red man.  And
+so after your experience has led you by the campfires
+of a thousand delights, and each of those campfires
+is on the Trail, which only pauses courteously
+for your stay and then leads on untiring into new
+mysteries forever and ever, you come to love it as the
+donor of great joys.  You too become a Westerner, and 
+when somebody says "trail," your eye too lights up.
+
+The general impression of any particular trail is
+born rather of the little incidents than of the big
+accidents.  The latter are exotic, and might belong to
+any time or places; the former are individual.  For
+the Trail is a vantage-ground, and from it, as your
+day's travel unrolls, you see many things.  Nine
+tenths of your experience comes thus, for in the long
+journeys the side excursions are few enough and
+unimportant enough almost to merit classification with
+the accidents.  In time the character of the Trail thus
+defines itself.
+
+Most of all, naturally, the kind of country has to
+do with this generalized impression.  Certain surprises,
+through trees, of vista looking out over unexpected
+spaces; little notches in the hills beyond which
+you gain to a placid far country sleeping under a sun
+warmer than your elevation permits; the delicious
+excitement of the moment when you approach the
+very knife-edge of the summit and wonder what lies
+beyond,--these are the things you remember with a
+warm heart.  Your saddle is a point of vantage.  By
+it you are elevated above the country; from it you
+can see clearly.  Quail scuttle away to right and left,
+heads ducked low; grouse boom solemnly on the
+rigid limbs of pines; deer vanish through distant
+thickets to appear on yet more distant ridges, thence
+to gaze curiously, their great ears forward; across the
+canon the bushes sway violently with the passage of
+a cinnamon bear among them,--you see them all
+from your post of observation.  Your senses are
+always alert for these things; you are always bending
+from your saddle to examine the tracks and signs  that
+continually offer themselves for your inspection
+and interpretation.
+
+Our trail of this summer led at a general high
+elevation, with comparatively little climbing and
+comparatively easy traveling for days at a time.  Then
+suddenly we would find ourselves on the brink of a
+great box canon from three to seven thousand feet
+deep, several miles wide, and utterly precipitous.  In
+the bottom of this canon would be good feed, fine
+groves of trees, and a river of some size in which
+swam fish.  The trail to the canon-bed was always
+bad, and generally dangerous.  In many instances we
+found it bordered with the bones of horses that had
+failed.  The river had somehow to be forded.  We
+would camp a day or so in the good feed and among
+the fine groves of trees, fish in the river, and then
+address ourselves with much reluctance to the ascent
+of the other bad and dangerous trail on the other
+side.  After that, in the natural course of events,
+subject to variation, we could expect nice trails, the
+comfort of easy travel, pines, cedars, redwoods, and
+joy of life until another great cleft opened before us
+or another great mountain-pass barred our way.
+
+This was the web and woof of our summer.  But
+through it ran the patterns of fantastic delight such
+as the West alone can offer a man's utter disbelief in
+them.  Some of these patterns stand out in memory
+with peculiar distinctness.
+
+Below Farewell Gap is a wide canon with high
+walls of dark rock, and down those walls run many
+streams of water.  They are white as snow with the
+dash of their descent, but so distant that the eye
+cannot distinguish their motion.  In the half light of
+dawn, with the yellow of sunrise behind the mountains,
+they look like gauze streamers thrown out from
+the windows of morning to celebrate the solemn
+pageant of the passing of many hills.
+
+Again, I know of a canon whose westerly wall is
+colored in the dull rich colors, the fantastic patterns
+of a Moorish tapestry.  Umber, seal brown, red, terra-
+cotta, orange, Nile green, emerald, purple, cobalt
+blue, gray, lilac, and many other colors, all rich with
+the depth of satin, glow wonderful as the craftiest
+textures.  Only here the fabric is five miles long and
+half a mile wide.
+
+There is no use in telling of these things.  They,
+and many others of their like, are marvels, and exist;
+but you cannot tell about them, for the simple reason
+that the average reader concludes at once you
+must be exaggerating, must be carried away by the
+swing of words.  The cold sober truth is, you cannot
+exaggerate.  They haven't made the words.  Talk
+as extravagantly as you wish to one who will in the
+most childlike manner believe every syllable you
+utter.  Then take him into the Big Country.  He will
+probably say, "Why, you didn't tell me it was
+going to be anything like THIS!"  We in the East have
+no standards of comparison either as regards size or
+as regards color--especially color.  Some people
+once directed me to "The Gorge" on the New
+England coast.  I couldn't find it.  They led me to it,
+and rhapsodized over its magnificent terror.  I could
+have ridden a horse into the ridiculous thing.  As for
+color, no Easterner believes in it when such men as
+Lungren or Parrish transposit it faithfully, any more
+than a Westerner would believe in the autumn foliage
+of our own hardwoods, or an Englishman in the
+glories of our gaudiest sunsets.  They are all true.
+
+In the mountains, the high mountains above the
+seven or eight thousand foot level, grows an affair
+called the snow-plant.  It is, when full grown, about
+two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely
+constructed pine-cone set up on end.  Its entire
+substance is like wax, and the whole concern--stalk,
+broad curling leaves, and all--is a brilliant scarlet. 
+Sometime you will ride through the twilight of deep
+pine woods growing on the slope of the mountain,
+a twilight intensified, rendered more sacred to your
+mood by the external brilliancy of a glimpse of vivid
+blue sky above dazzling snow mountains far away. 
+Then, in this monotone of dark green frond and dull
+brown trunk and deep olive shadow, where, like
+the ordered library of one with quiet tastes, nothing
+breaks the harmony of unobtrusive tone, suddenly
+flames the vivid red of a snow-plant.  You will never
+forget it.
+
+Flowers in general seem to possess this concentrated 
+brilliancy both of color and of perfume.  You
+will ride into and out of strata of perfume as sharply
+defined as are the quartz strata on the ridges.  They
+lie sluggish and cloying in the hollows, too heavy to
+rise on the wings of the air.
+
+As for color, you will see all sorts of queer things. 
+The ordered flower-science of your childhood has
+gone mad.  You recognize some of your old friends,
+but strangely distorted and changed,--even the dear
+old "butter 'n eggs" has turned pink!  Patches of
+purple, of red, of blue, of yellow, of orange are laid
+in the hollows or on the slopes like brilliant blankets
+out to dry in the sun.  The fine grasses are spangled
+with them, so that in the cup of the great fierce
+countries the meadows seem like beautiful green
+ornaments enameled with jewels.  The Mariposa
+Lily, on the other hand, is a poppy-shaped flower
+varying from white to purple, and with each petal
+decorated by an "eye" exactly like those on the
+great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their
+effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come
+to rest.  They hover over the meadows poised.  A
+movement would startle them to flight; only the
+proper movement somehow never comes.
+
+The great redwoods, too, add to the colored-
+edition impression of the whole country.  A redwood,
+as perhaps you know, is a tremendous big tree sometimes
+as big as twenty feet in diameter.  It is exquisitely
+proportioned like a fluted column of noble
+height.  Its bark is slightly furrowed longitudinally, and
+of a peculiar elastic appearance that lends it an almost
+perfect illusion of breathing animal life.  The color
+is a rich umber red.  Sometimes in the early morning
+or the late afternoon, when all the rest of the forest
+is cast in shadow, these massive trunks will glow as
+though incandescent.  The Trail, wonderful always,
+here seems to pass through the outer portals of the
+great flaming regions where dwell the risings and
+fallings of days.
+
+As you follow the Trail up, you will enter also the
+permanent dwelling-places of the seasons.  With us
+each visits for the space of a few months, then steals
+away to give place to the next.  Whither they go you
+have not known until you have traveled the high
+mountains.  Summer lives in the valley; that you
+know.  Then a little higher you are in the spring-
+time, even in August.  Melting patches of snow
+linger under the heavy firs; the earth is soggy with
+half-absorbed snow-water, trickling with exotic little
+rills that do not belong; grasses of the year before
+float like drowned hair in pellucid pools with an air
+of permanence, except for the one fact; fresh green
+things are sprouting bravely; through bare branches
+trickles a shower of bursting buds, larger at the top,
+as though the Sower had in passing scattered them
+from above.  Birds of extraordinary cheerfulness sing
+merrily to new and doubtful flowers.  The air tastes
+cold, but the sun is warm.  The great spring 
+humming and promise is in the air.  And a few thousand
+feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts
+while a winter wind searches your bones.  I used to
+think that Santa Claus dwelt at the North Pole. 
+Now I am convinced that he has a workshop somewhere
+among the great mountains where dwell the
+Seasons, and that his reindeer paw for grazing in the
+alpine meadows below the highest peaks.
+
+Here the birds migrate up and down instead of
+south and north.  It must be a great saving of trouble
+to them, and undoubtedly those who have discovered
+it maintain toward the unenlightened the same
+delighted and fraternal secrecy with which you and I
+guard the knowledge of a good trout-stream.  When
+you can migrate adequately in a single day, why
+spend a month at it?
+
+Also do I remember certain spruce woods with
+openings where the sun shone through.  The shadows
+were very black, the sunlight very white.  As I looked
+back I could see the pack-horses alternately suffer
+eclipse and illumination in a strange flickering manner
+good to behold.  The dust of the trail eddied
+and billowed lazily in the sun, each mote flashing
+as though with life; then abruptly as it crossed the
+sharp line of shade it disappeared.
+
+From these spruce woods, level as a floor, we came
+out on the rounded shoulder of a mountain to find
+ourselves nearly nine thousand feet above the sea. 
+Below us was a deep canon to the middle of the
+earth.  And spread in a semicircle about the curve
+of our mountain a most magnificent panoramic view. 
+First there were the plains, represented by a brown
+haze of heat; then, very remote, the foot-hills, the
+brush-hills, the pine mountains, the upper timber,
+the tremendous granite peaks, and finally the barrier
+of the main crest with its glittering snow.  From the
+plains to that crest was over seventy miles.  I should
+not dare say how far we could see down the length of 
+the range; nor even how distant was the other wall of 
+the canon over which we rode.  Certainly it was many 
+miles; and to reach the latter point consumed three days.
+
+It is useless to multiply instances.  The principle
+is well enough established by these.  Whatever
+impression of your trail you carry away will come from
+the little common occurrences of every day.  That is true 
+of all trails; and equally so, it seems to me, of our 
+Trail of Life sketched at the beginning of this essay.
+
+But the trail of the mountains means more than
+wonder; it means hard work.  Unless you stick to
+the beaten path, where the freighters have lost so
+many mules that they have finally decided to fix
+things up a bit, you are due for lots of trouble.  Bad
+places will come to be a nightmare with you and a
+topic of conversation with whomever you may meet. 
+We once enjoyed the company of a prospector three
+days while he made up his mind to tackle a certain
+bit of trail we had just descended.  Our accounts did
+not encourage him.  Every morning he used to squint
+up at the cliff which rose some four thousand feet
+above us.  "Boys," he said finally as he started, "I
+may drop in on you later in the morning."  I am
+happy to say he did not.
+
+The most discouraging to the tenderfoot, but in
+reality the safest of all bad trails, is the one that skirts
+a precipice.  Your horse possesses a laudable desire
+to spare your inside leg unnecessary abrasion, so he
+walks on the extreme outer edge.  If you watch the
+performance of the animal ahead, you will observe
+that every few moments his outer hind hoof slips off
+that edge, knocking little stones down into the abyss. 
+Then you conclude that sundry slight jars you have
+been experiencing are from the same cause.  Your
+peace of mind deserts you.  You stare straight ahead,
+sit VERY light indeed, and perhaps turn the least bit
+sick.  The horse, however, does not mind, nor will
+you, after a little.  There is absolutely nothing to do
+but to sit steady and give your animal his head.  In
+a fairly extended experience I never got off the edge
+but once.  Then somebody shot a gun immediately
+ahead; my horse tried to turn around, slipped, and
+slid backwards until he overhung the chasm. 
+Fortunately his hind feet caught a tiny bush.  He gave
+a mighty heave, and regained the trail.  Afterwards
+I took a look and found that there were no more
+bushes for a hundred feet either way.
+
+Next in terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by
+lacets up a very steep side hill.  The effect is
+cumulative.  Each turn brings you one stage higher, adds
+definitely one more unit to the test of your hardihood. 
+This last has not terrified you; how about the
+next? or the next? or the one after that?  There is
+not the slightest danger.  You appreciate this point
+after you have met head-on some old-timer.  After
+you have speculated frantically how you are to pass
+him, he solves the problem by calmly turning his
+horse off the edge and sliding to the next lacet below. 
+Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not
+much matter whether you get off such a trail or not.
+
+The real bad places are quite as likely to be on
+the level as on the slant.  The tremendous granite
+slides, where the cliff has avalanched thousands of
+tons of loose jagged rock-fragments across the passage,
+are the worst.  There your horse has to be a goat
+in balance.  He must pick his way from the top of
+one fragment to the other, and if he slips into the
+interstices he probably breaks a leg.  In some parts
+of the granite country are also smooth rock aprons
+where footing is especially difficult, and where often
+a slip on them means a toboggan chute off into space. 
+I know of one spot where such an apron curves
+off the shoulder of the mountain.  Your horse slides
+directly down it until his hoofs encounter a little
+crevice.  Checking at this, he turns sharp to the left
+and so off to the good trail again.  If he does not
+check at the little crevice, he slides on over the curve
+of the shoulder and lands too far down to bury.
+
+Loose rocks in numbers on a very steep and narrow
+trail are always an abomination, and a numerous
+abomination at that.  A horse slides, skates, slithers. 
+It has always seemed to me that luck must count
+largely in such a place.  When the animal treads on
+a loose round stone--as he does every step of the
+way--that stone is going to roll under him, and he
+is going to catch himself as the nature of that stone
+and the little gods of chance may will.  Only furthermore
+I have noticed that the really good horse keeps
+his feet, and the poor one tumbles.  A judgmatical
+rider can help a great deal by the delicacy of his
+riding and the skill with which he uses his reins.  Or
+better still, get off and walk.
+
+Another mean combination, especially on a slant,
+is six inches of snow over loose stones or small
+boulders.  There you hope for divine favor and flounder
+ahead.  There is one compensation; the snow is soft
+to fall on.  Boggy areas you must be able to gauge
+the depth of at a glance.  And there are places, beautiful
+to behold, where a horse clambers up the least
+bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a projection,
+and is hurled into outer space.  You must recognize
+these, for he will be busy with his feet.
+
+Some of the mountain rivers furnish pleasing
+afternoons of sport.  They are deep and swift, and below
+the ford are rapids.  If there is a fallen tree of any sort
+across them,--remember the length of California
+trees, and do not despise the rivers,--you would
+better unpack, carry your goods across yourself, and
+swim the pack-horses.  If the current is very bad, you
+can splice riatas, hitch one end to the horse and the
+other to a tree on the farther side, and start the
+combination.  The animal is bound to swing across
+somehow.  Generally you can drive them over loose.  In
+swimming a horse from the saddle, start him well
+upstream to allow for the current, and never, never,
+never attempt to guide him by the bit.  The Tenderfoot
+tried that at Mono Creek and nearly drowned
+himself and Old Slob.  You would better let him
+alone, as he probably knows more than you do.  If
+you must guide him, do it by hitting the side of his
+head with the flat of your hand.
+
+Sometimes it is better that you swim.  You can
+perform that feat by clinging to his mane on the
+downstream side, but it will be easier both for you
+and him if you hang to his tail.  Take my word for
+it, he will not kick you.
+
+Once in a blue moon you may be able to cross
+the whole outfit on logs.  Such a log bridge spanned
+Granite Creek near the North Fork of the San Joaquin
+at an elevation of about seven thousand feet. 
+It was suspended a good twenty feet above the water,
+which boiled white in a most disconcerting manner
+through a gorge of rocks.  If anything fell off that
+log it would be of no further value even to the
+curiosity seeker.  We got over all the horses save
+Tunemah.  He refused to consider it, nor did peaceful
+argument win.  As he was more or less of a fool,
+we did not take this as a reflection on our judgment,
+but culled cedar clubs.  We beat him until we were
+ashamed.  Then we put a slip-noose about his neck. 
+The Tenderfoot and I stood on the log and heaved
+while Wes stood on the shore and pushed.  Suddenly
+it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly
+mind to come, he would probably do it all at once,
+in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about
+as much show for life as fossil formations.  I didn't
+say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched
+my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find
+out how good I was at wing-shooting horses.  But
+Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. 
+"All right," said we, "die then," with the embellishment
+of profanity.  So we stripped him naked, and
+stoned him into the raging stream, where he had one
+chance in three of coming through alive.  He might
+as well be dead as on the other side of that stream. 
+He won through, however, and now I believe he'd
+tackle a tight rope.
+
+Of such is the Trail, of such its wonders, its
+pleasures, its little comforts, its annoyances, its dangers. 
+And when you are forced to draw your six-shooter
+to end mercifully the life of an animal that has served
+you faithfully, but that has fallen victim to the leg-
+breaking hazard of the way, then you know a little
+of its tragedy also.  May you never know the greater
+tragedy when a man's life goes out, and you unable
+to help!  May always your trail lead through fine trees, 
+green grasses, fragrant flowers, and pleasant waters!
+
+
+
+X
+
+ON SEEING DEER
+
+Once I happened to be sitting out a dance with
+a tactful young girl of tender disposition who
+thought she should adapt her conversation to the
+one with whom she happened to be talking.  Therefore
+she asked questions concerning out-of-doors.  She
+knew nothing whatever about it, but she gave a very
+good imitation of one interested.  For some occult
+reason people never seem to expect me to own evening
+clothes, or to know how to dance, or to be able
+to talk about anything civilized; in fact, most of
+them appear disappointed that I do not pull off a
+war-jig in the middle of the drawing-room.
+
+This young girl selected deer as her topic.  She
+mentioned liquid eyes, beautiful form, slender ears;
+she said "cute," and "darlings," and "perfect dears." 
+Then she shuddered prettily.
+
+"And I don't see how you can ever BEAR to shoot
+them, Mr. White," she concluded.
+
+"You quarter the onions and slice them very thin,"
+said I dreamily.  "Then you take a little bacon fat
+you had left over from the flap-jacks and put it in
+the frying-pan.  The frying-pan should be very hot. 
+While the onions are frying, you must keep turning
+them over with a fork.  It's rather difficult to get
+them all browned without burning some.  I should
+broil the meat.  A broiler is handy, but two willows,
+peeled and charred a little so the willow taste won't
+penetrate the meat, will do.  Have the steak fairly
+thick.  Pepper and salt it thoroughly.  Sear it well
+at first in order to keep the juices in; then cook
+rather slowly.  When it is done, put it on a hot
+plate and pour the browned onions, bacon fat and
+all, over it."
+
+"What ARE you talking about?" she interrupted.
+
+"I'm telling you why I can bear to shoot deer,"
+said I.
+
+"But I don't see--" said she.
+
+"Don't you?" said I.  "Well; suppose you've
+been climbing a mountain late in the afternoon when
+the sun is on the other side of it.  It is a mountain of
+big boulders, loose little stones, thorny bushes.  The
+slightest misstep would send pebbles rattling, brush
+rustling; but you have gone all the way without
+making that misstep.  This is quite a feat.  It means
+that you've known all about every footstep you've
+taken.  That would be business enough for most
+people, wouldn't it?  But in addition you've managed
+to see EVERYTHING on that side of the mountain
+--especially patches of brown.  You've seen lots of
+patches of brown, and you've examined each one
+of them.  Besides that, you've heard lots of little
+rustlings, and you've identified each one of them.  To
+do all these things well keys your nerves to a high
+tension, doesn't it?  And then near the top you look
+up from your last noiseless step to see in the brush
+a very dim patch of brown.  If you hadn't been looking
+so hard, you surely wouldn't have made it out. 
+Perhaps, if you're not humble-minded, you may
+reflect that most people wouldn't have seen it at all. 
+You whistle once sharply.  The patch of brown
+defines itself.  Your heart gives one big jump.  You
+know that you have but the briefest moment, the
+tiniest fraction of time, to hold the white bead of
+your rifle motionless and to press the trigger.  It has
+to be done VERY steadily, at that distance,--and you
+out of breath, with your nerves keyed high in the
+tension of such caution."
+
+"NOW what are you talking about?" she broke in
+helplessly.
+
+"Oh, didn't I mention it?" I asked, surprised. 
+"I was telling you why I could bear to shoot deer."
+
+"Yes, but--" she began.
+
+"Of course not," I reassured her.  "After all, it's
+very simple.  The reason I can bear to kill deer is
+because, to kill deer, you must accomplish a skillful
+elimination of the obvious."
+
+My young lady was evidently afraid of being
+considered stupid; and also convinced of her inability to
+understand what I was driving at.  So she temporized
+in the manner of society.
+
+"I see," she said, with an air of complete enlightenment.
+
+Now of course she did not see.  Nobody could see the 
+force of that last remark without the grace of further
+explanation, and yet in the elimination of the obvious 
+rests the whole secret of seeing deer in the woods.
+
+In traveling the trail you will notice two things:
+that a tenderfoot will habitually contemplate the
+horn of his saddle or the trail a few yards ahead
+of his horse's nose, with occasionally a look about at
+the landscape; and the old-timer will be constantly
+searching the prospect with keen understanding eyes. 
+Now in the occasional glances the tenderfoot takes,
+his perceptions have room for just so many impressions. 
+When the number is filled out he sees nothing
+more.  Naturally the obvious features of the landscape
+supply the basis for these impressions.  He sees
+the configuration of the mountains, the nature of their
+covering, the course of their ravines, first of all.  Then
+if he looks more closely, there catches his eye an odd-
+shaped rock, a burned black stub, a flowering bush,
+or some such matter.  Anything less striking in its
+appeal to the attention actually has not room for
+its recognition.  In other words, supposing that a
+man has the natural ability to receive x visual
+impressions, the tenderfoot fills out his full capacity with
+the striking features of his surroundings.  To be able
+to see anything more obscure in form or color, he
+must naturally put aside from his attention some one
+or another of these obvious features.  He can, for
+example, look for a particular kind of flower on a side
+hill only by refusing to see other kinds.
+
+If this is plain, then, go one step further in the
+logic of that reasoning.  Put yourself in the mental
+attitude of a man looking for deer.  His eye sweeps
+rapidly over a side hill; so rapidly that you cannot
+understand how he can have gathered the main features
+of that hill, let alone concentrate and refine his
+attention to the seeing of an animal under a bush. 
+As a matter of fact he pays no attention to the main
+features.  He has trained his eye, not so much to see
+things, as to leave things out.  The odd-shaped rock,
+the charred stub, the bright flowering bush do not
+exist for him.  His eye passes over them as unseeing
+as yours over the patch of brown or gray that represents
+his quarry.  His attention stops on the unusual,
+just as does yours; only in his case the unusual is
+not the obvious.  He has succeeded by long training
+in eliminating that.  Therefore he sees deer where
+you do not.  As soon as you can forget the naturally
+obvious and construct an artificially obvious, then you
+too will see deer.
+
+These animals are strangely invisible to the
+untrained eye even when they are standing "in plain
+sight."  You can look straight at them, and not see
+them at all.  Then some old woodsman lets you sight
+over his finger exactly to the spot.  At once the figure
+of the deer fairly leaps into vision.  I know of no
+more perfect example of the instantaneous than this. 
+You are filled with astonishment that you could for
+a moment have avoided seeing it.  And yet next time
+you will in all probability repeat just this "puzzle
+picture" experience.
+
+The Tenderfoot tried for six weeks before he
+caught sight of one.  He wanted to very much. 
+Time and again one or the other of us would hiss
+back, "See the deer! over there by the yellow bush!"
+but before he could bring the deliberation of his
+scrutiny to the point of identification, the deer would
+be gone.  Once a fawn jumped fairly within ten feet
+of the pack-horses and went bounding away through
+the bushes, and that fawn he could not help seeing. 
+We tried conscientiously enough to get him a shot;
+but the Tenderfoot was unable to move through the
+brush less majestically than a Pullman car, so we had
+ended by becoming apathetic on the subject.
+
+Finally, while descending a very abrupt mountain-
+side I made out a buck lying down perhaps three
+hundred feet directly below us.  The buck was not
+looking our way, so I had time to call the Tenderfoot. 
+He came.  With difficulty and by using my
+rifle-barrel as a pointer I managed to show him the
+animal.  Immediately he began to pant as though
+at the finish of a mile race, and his rifle, when he
+leveled it, covered a good half acre of ground.  This
+would never do.
+
+"Hold on!" I interrupted sharply.
+
+He lowered his weapon to stare at me wild-eyed.
+
+"What is it?" he gasped.
+
+"Stop a minute!" I commanded.  "Now take
+three deep breaths."
+
+He did so.
+
+"Now shoot," I advised, "and aim at his knees."
+
+The deer was now on his feet and facing us, so
+the Tenderfoot had the entire length of the animal
+to allow for lineal variation.  He fired.  The deer
+dropped.  The Tenderfoot thrust his hat over one
+eye, rested hand on hip in a manner cocky to behold.
+
+"Simply slaughter!" he proffered with lofty scorn.
+
+We descended.  The bullet had broken the deer's
+back--about six inches from the tail.  The Tenderfoot
+had overshot by at least three feet.
+
+You will see many deer thus from the trail,--in
+fact, we kept up our meat supply from the saddle,
+as one might say,--but to enjoy the finer savor of
+seeing deer, you should start out definitely with that
+object in view.  Thus you have opportunity for the
+display of a certain finer woodcraft.  You must know
+where the objects of your search are likely to be found,
+and that depends on the time of year, the time of days
+their age, their sex, a hundred little things.  When
+the bucks carry antlers in the velvet, they frequent
+the inaccessibilities of the highest rocky peaks, so
+their tender horns may not be torn in the brush, but
+nevertheless so that the advantage of a lofty viewpoint
+may compensate for the loss of cover.  Later you
+will find them in the open slopes of a lower altitude,
+fully exposed to the sun, that there the heat may
+harden the antlers.  Later still, the heads in fine
+condition and tough to withstand scratches, they plunge
+into the dense thickets.  But in the mean time the
+fertile does have sought a lower country with patches of
+small brush interspersed with open passages.  There
+they can feed with their fawns, completely concealed,
+but able, by merely raising the head, to survey the
+entire landscape for the threatening of danger.  The
+barren does, on the other hand, you will find through
+the timber and brush, for they are careless of all
+responsibilities either to offspring or headgear.  These
+are but a few of the considerations you will take into
+account, a very few of the many which lend the
+deer countries strange thrills of delight over new
+knowledge gained, over crafty expedients invented
+or well utilized, over the satisfactory matching of
+your reason, your instinct, your subtlety and skill
+against the reason, instinct, subtlety, and skill of one
+of the wariest of large wild animals.
+
+Perversely enough the times when you did NOT see
+deer are more apt to remain vivid in your memory
+than the times when you did.  I can still see distinctly
+sundry wide jump-marks where the animal I was
+tracking had evidently caught sight of me and lit out
+before I came up to him.  Equally, sundry little thin
+disappearing clouds of dust; cracklings of brush,
+growing ever more distant; the tops of bushes waving
+to the steady passage of something remaining persistently
+concealed,--these are the chief ingredients often 
+repeated which make up deer-stalking memory.  When I 
+think of seeing deer, these things automatically rise.
+
+A few of the deer actually seen do, however, stand
+out clearly from the many.  When I was a very small
+boy possessed of a 32-20 rifle and large ambitions,
+I followed the advantage my father's footsteps made
+me in the deep snow of an unused logging-road. 
+His attention was focused on some very interesting
+fresh tracks.  I, being a small boy, cared not at all
+for tracks, and so saw a big doe emerge from the
+bushes not ten yards away, lope leisurely across the
+road, and disappear, wagging earnestly her tail. 
+When I had recovered my breath I vehemently
+demanded the sense of fooling with tracks when there
+were real live deer to be had.  My father examined me.
+
+"Well, why didn't you shoot her?" he inquired dryly.
+
+I hadn't thought of that.
+
+In the spring of 1900 I was at the head of the
+Piant River waiting for the log-drive to start.  One
+morning, happening to walk over a slashing of many
+years before in which had grown a strong thicket of
+white popples, I jumped a band of nine deer.  I shall
+never forget the bewildering impression made by the
+glancing, dodging, bouncing white of those nine
+snowy tails and rumps.
+
+But most wonderful of all was a great buck, of I
+should be afraid to say how many points, that stood
+silhouetted on the extreme end of a ridge high above
+our camp.  The time was just after twilight, and as
+we watched, the sky lightened behind him in prophecy
+of the moon.
+
+
+
+ON TENDERFEET
+
+XI
+
+ON TENDERFEET
+
+The tenderfoot is a queer beast.  He makes
+more trouble than ants at a picnic, more work
+than a trespassing goat; he never sees anything,
+knows where anything is, remembers accurately your
+instructions, follows them if remembered, or is able to
+handle without awkwardness his large and pathetic
+hands and feet; he is always lost, always falling off
+or into things, always in difficulties; his articles of
+necessity are constantly being burned up or washed
+away or mislaid; he looks at you beamingly through
+great innocent eyes in the most chuckle-headed of
+manners; he exasperates you to within an inch of
+explosion,--and yet you love him.
+
+I am referring now to the real tenderfoot, the fellow
+who cannot learn, who is incapable ever of adjusting
+himself to the demands of the wild life.  Sometimes
+a man is merely green, inexperienced.  But give him
+a chance and he soon picks up the game.  That is
+your greenhorn, not your tenderfoot.  Down near
+Monache meadows we came across an individual leading
+an old pack-mare up the trail.  The first thing, he
+asked us to tell him where he was.  We did so.  Then
+we noticed that he carried his gun muzzle-up in his
+hip-pocket, which seemed to be a nice way to shoot
+a hole in your hand, but a poor way to make your
+weapon accessible.  He unpacked near us, and promptly 
+turned the mare into a bog-hole because it looked 
+green.  Then he stood around the rest of the evening 
+and talked deprecating talk of a garrulous nature.
+
+"Which way did you come?" asked Wes.
+
+The stranger gave us a hazy account of misnamed
+canons, by which we gathered that he had come
+directly over the rough divide below us.
+
+"But if you wanted to get to Monache, why
+didn't you go around to the eastward through that
+pass, there, and save yourself all the climb?  It must
+have been pretty rough through there."
+
+"Yes, perhaps so," he hesitated.  "Still--I got
+lots of time--I can take all summer, if I want to--
+and I'd rather stick to a straight line--then you
+know where you ARE--if you get off the straight
+line, you're likely to get lost, you know."
+
+We knew well enough what ailed him, of course. 
+He was a tenderfoot, of the sort that always, to its
+dying day, unhobbles its horses before putting their
+halters on.  Yet that man for thirty-two years had
+lived almost constantly in the wild countries.  He
+had traveled more miles with a pack-train than we
+shall ever dream of traveling, and hardly could we
+mention a famous camp of the last quarter century
+that he had not blundered into.  Moreover he proved
+by the indirections of his misinformation that he had
+really been there and was not making ghost stories
+in order to impress us.  Yet if the Lord spares him
+thirty-two years more, at the end of that time he will
+probably still be carrying his gun upside down, turning
+his horse into a bog-hole, and blundering through
+the country by main strength and awkwardness.  He
+was a beautiful type of the tenderfoot.
+
+The redeeming point of the tenderfoot is his
+humbleness of spirit and his extreme good nature. 
+He exasperates you with his fool performances to
+the point of dancing cursing wild crying rage, and
+then accepts your--well, reproofs--so meekly that you 
+come off the boil as though some one had removed you 
+from the fire, and you feel like a low-browed thug.
+
+Suppose your particular tenderfoot to be named
+Algernon.  Suppose him to have packed his horse
+loosely--they always do--so that the pack has
+slipped, the horse has bucked over three square miles
+of assorted mountains, and the rest of the train is
+scattered over identically that area.  You have run
+your saddle-horse to a lather heading the outfit.  You
+have sworn and dodged and scrambled and yelled,
+even fired your six-shooter, to turn them and bunch
+them.  In the mean time Algernon has either sat his
+horse like a park policeman in his leisure hours,
+or has ambled directly into your path of pursuit on
+an average of five times a minute.  Then the trouble
+dies from the landscape and the baby bewilderment
+from his eyes.  You slip from your winded horse and
+address Algernon with elaborate courtesy.
+
+"My dear fellow," you remark, "did you not see
+that the thing for you to do was to head them down
+by the bottom of that little gulch there?  Don't you
+really think ANYBODY would have seen it?  What in
+hades do you think I wanted to run my horse all
+through those boulders for?  Do you think I want
+to get him lame 'way up here in the hills?  I don't
+mind telling a man a thing once, but to tell it to
+him fifty-eight times and then have it do no good--
+Have you the faintest recollection of my instructing
+you to turn the bight OVER instead of UNDER when you
+throw that pack-hitch?  If you'd remember that, we
+shouldn't have had all this trouble."
+
+"You didn't tell me to head them by the little
+gulch," babbles Algernon.
+
+This is just the utterly fool reply that upsets your
+artificial and elaborate courtesy.  You probably foam
+at the mouth, and dance on your hat, and shriek wild
+imploring imprecations to the astonished hills.  This
+is not because you have an unfortunate disposition,
+but because Algernon has been doing precisely the
+same thing for two months.
+
+"Listen to him!" you howl.  "Didn't tell him! 
+Why you gangle-legged bug-eyed soft-handed pop-
+eared tenderfoot, you! there are some things you
+never THINK of telling a man.  I never told you to
+open your mouth to spit, either.  If you had a hired
+man at five dollars a year who was so all-around
+hopelessly thick-headed and incompetent as you are,
+you'd fire him to-morrow morning."
+
+Then Algernon looks truly sorry, and doesn't
+answer back as he ought to in order to give occasion
+for the relief of a really soul-satisfying scrap, and
+utters the soft answer humbly.  So your wrath is
+turned and there remain only the dregs which taste
+like some of Algernon's cooking.
+
+It is rather good fun to relieve the bitterness of
+the heart.  Let me tell you a few more tales of the
+tenderfoot, premising always that I love him, and
+when at home seek him out to smoke pipes at his
+fireside, to yarn over the trail, to wonder how much
+rancor he cherishes against the maniacs who declaimed
+against him, and by way of compensation to build up
+in the mind of his sweetheart, his wife, or his mother
+a fearful and wonderful reputation for him as the
+Terror of the Trail.  These tales are selected from
+many, mere samples of a varied experience.  They
+occurred here, there, and everywhere, and at various
+times.  Let no one try to lay them at the door of our 
+Tenderfoot merely because such is his title in this 
+narrative.  We called him that by way of distinction.
+
+Once upon a time some of us were engaged in  
+climbing a mountain rising some five thousand feet
+above our starting-place.  As we toiled along, one of
+the pack-horses became impatient and pushed ahead. 
+We did not mind that, especially, as long as she
+stayed in sight, but in a little while the trail was
+closed in by brush and timber.
+
+"Algernon," said we, "just push on and get ahead
+of that mare, will you?"
+
+Algernon disappeared.  We continued to climb.  The trail 
+was steep and rather bad.  The labor was strenuous, and 
+we checked off each thousand feet with thankfulness.  As 
+we saw nothing further of Algernon, we naturally 
+concluded he had headed the mare and was continuing on 
+the trail.  Then through a little opening we saw him 
+riding cheerfully along without a care to occupy his 
+mind.  Just for luck we hailed him.
+
+"Hi there, Algernon!  Did you find her?"
+
+"Haven't seen her yet."
+
+"Well, you'd better push on a little faster.  She
+may leave the trail at the summit."
+
+Then one of us, endowed by heaven with a keen intuitive 
+instinct for tenderfeet,--no one could have a knowledge 
+of them, they are too unexpected,--had an inspiration.
+
+"I suppose there are tracks on the trail ahead of
+you?" he called.
+
+We stared at each other, then at the trail.  Only
+one horse had preceded us,--that of the tenderfoot. 
+But of course Algernon was nevertheless due for his
+chuckle-headed reply.
+
+"I haven't looked," said he.
+
+That raised the storm conventional to such an occasion.
+
+"What in the name of seventeen little dicky-birds
+did you think you were up to!" we howled.  "Were
+you going to ride ahead until dark in the childlike
+faith that that mare might show up somewhere?  Here's 
+a nice state of affairs.  The trail is all tracked up 
+now with our horses, and heaven knows whether she's 
+left tracks where she turned off.  It may be rocky there."
+
+We tied the animals savagely, and started back on
+foot.  It would be criminal to ask our saddle-horses
+to repeat that climb.  Algernon we ordered to stay
+with them.
+
+"And don't stir from them no matter what happens, 
+or you'll get lost," we commanded out of the
+wisdom of long experience.
+
+We climbed down the four thousand odd feet,
+and then back again, leading the mare.  She had
+turned off not forty rods from where Algernon had
+taken up her pursuit.
+
+Your Algernon never does get down to little
+details like tracks--his scheme of life is much too
+magnificent.  To be sure he would not know fresh
+tracks from old if he should see them; so it is
+probably quite as well.  In the morning he goes out after
+the horses.  The bunch he finds easily enough, but
+one is missing.  What would you do about it?  You
+would naturally walk in a circle around the bunch
+until you crossed the track of the truant leading
+away from it, wouldn't you?  If you made a wide
+enough circle you would inevitably cross that track,
+wouldn't you? provided the horse started out with
+the bunch in the first place.  Then you would follow
+the track, catch the horse, and bring him back.  Is
+this Algernon's procedure?  Not any.  "Ha!" says
+he, "old Brownie is missing.  I will hunt him up." 
+Then he maunders off into the scenery, trusting to
+high heaven that he is going to blunder against
+Brownie as a prominent feature of the landscape. 
+After a couple of hours you probably saddle up
+Brownie and go out to find the tenderfoot.
+
+He has a horrifying facility in losing himself. 
+Nothing is more cheering than to arise from a hard-
+earned couch of ease for the purpose of trailing an
+Algernon or so through the gathering dusk to the
+spot where he has managed to find something--a very 
+real despair of ever getting back to food and warmth.  
+Nothing is more irritating then than his gratitude.
+
+I traveled once in the Black Hills with such a
+tenderfoot.  We were off from the base of supplies
+for a ten days' trip with only a saddle-horse apiece. 
+This was near first principles, as our total provisions
+consisted of two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and
+sugar.  Among other things we climbed Mt. Harney. 
+The trail, after we left the horses, was as plain as a
+strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another
+that tenderfoot managed to get off it.  I hunted him
+up.  We gained the top, watched the sunset, and
+started down.  The tenderfoot, I thought, was fairly
+at my coat-tails, but when I turned to speak to him
+he had gone; he must have turned off at one of the
+numerous little openings in the brush.  I sat down
+to wait.  By and by, away down the west slope of
+the mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint,
+despairing yell.  I, also, shot and yelled.  After various
+signals of the sort, it became evident that the
+tenderfoot was approaching.  In a moment he tore by
+at full speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his six-shooter
+popping at every jump.  He passed within six feet
+of me, and never saw me.  Subsequently I left him
+on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions.
+
+"There's the mountain range.  You simply keep
+that to your left and ride eight hours.  Then you'll
+see Rapid City.  You simply CAN'T get lost.  Those
+hills stick out like a sore thumb."
+
+Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having
+wandered off somewhere to the east.  How he had
+done it I can never guess.  That is his secret.
+
+The tenderfoot is always in hard luck.  Apparently,
+too, by all tests of analysis it is nothing but
+luck, pure chance, misfortune.  And yet the very
+persistence of it in his case, where another escapes,
+perhaps indicates that much of what we call good luck 
+is in reality unconscious skill in the arrangement 
+of those elements which go to make up events.  A 
+persistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes to be 
+pitied, but more often to be booted.  That philosophy 
+will be cryingly unjust about once in ten.
+
+But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human. 
+Ordinarily that doesn't occur to you.  He is a
+malevolent engine of destruction--quite as impersonal
+as heat or cold or lack of water.  He is an unfortunate
+article of personal belonging requiring much looking 
+after to keep in order.  He is a credulous and 
+convenient response to practical jokes, huge tales,
+misinformation.  He is a laudable object of attrition 
+for the development of your character.  But somehow, 
+in the woods, he is not as other men, and so you do 
+not come to feel yourself in close human relations to him.
+
+But Algernon is real, nevertheless.  He has
+feelings, even if you do not respect them.  He has his
+little enjoyments, even though he does rarely contemplate
+anything but the horn of his saddle.
+
+"Algernon," you cry, "for heaven's sake stick
+that saddle of yours in a glass case and glut yourself
+with the sight of its ravishing beauties next WINTER. 
+For the present do gaze on the mountains.  That's
+what you came for."
+
+No use.
+
+He has, doubtless, a full range of all the appreciative
+emotions, though from his actions you'd never suspect 
+it.  Most human of all, he possesses his little vanities.
+
+Algernon always overdoes the equipment question. 
+If it is bird-shooting, he accumulates leggings and
+canvas caps and belts and dog-whistles and things
+until he looks like a picture from a department-store
+catalogue.  In the cow country he wears Stetson hats,
+snake bands, red handkerchiefs, six-shooters, chaps,
+and huge spurs that do not match his face.  If it is
+yachting, he has a chronometer with a gong in the
+cabin of a five-ton sailboat, possesses a nickle-plated
+machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a
+brass-bound yachting-cap and all the regalia.  This
+is merely amusing.  But I never could understand
+his insane desire to get sunburned.  A man will get
+sunburned fast enough; he could not help it if he
+would.  Algernon usually starts out from town without 
+a hat.  Then he dares not take off his sweater
+for a week lest it carry away his entire face.  I have
+seen men with deep sores on their shoulders caused
+by nothing but excessive burning in the sun.  This,
+too, is merely amusing.  It means quite simply that
+Algernon realizes his inner deficiencies and wants to
+make up for them by the outward seeming.  Be kind
+to him, for he has been raised a pet.
+
+The tenderfoot is lovable--mysterious in how he
+does it--and awfully unexpected.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE CANON
+
+One day we tied our horses to three bushes, and walked 
+on foot two hundred yards.  Then we looked down.
+
+It was nearly four thousand feet down.  Do you
+realize how far that is?  There was a river meandering
+through olive-colored forests.  It was so distant
+that it was light green and as narrow as a piece of
+tape.  Here and there were rapids, but so remote that
+we could not distinguish the motion of them, only
+the color.  The white resembled tiny dabs of cotton
+wool stuck on the tape.  It turned and twisted,
+following the turns and twists of the canon.  Somehow
+the level at the bottom resembled less forests and
+meadows than a heavy and sluggish fluid like
+molasses flowing between the canon walls.  It emerged
+from the bend of a sheer cliff ten miles to eastward:
+it disappeared placidly around the bend of another
+sheer cliff an equal distance to the westward.
+
+The time was afternoon.  As we watched, the
+shadow of the canon wall darkened the valley. 
+Whereupon we looked up.
+
+Now the upper air, of which we were dwellers for
+the moment, was peopled by giants and clear 
+atmosphere and glittering sunlight, flashing like silver
+and steel and precious stones from the granite domes,
+peaks, minarets, and palisades of the High Sierras. 
+Solid as they were in reality, in the crispness of this
+mountain air, under the tangible blue of this mountain
+sky, they seemed to poise light as so many balloons. 
+Some of them rose sheer, with hardly a fissure;  some 
+had flung across their shoulders long trailing pine 
+draperies, fine as fur; others matched mantles of the 
+whitest white against the bluest blue of the sky.  
+Towards the lower country were more pines rising in 
+ridges, like the fur of an animal that has been alarmed.
+
+We dangled our feet over the edge and talked about it.  
+Wes pointed to the upper end where the sluggish lava-like 
+flow of the canon-bed first came into view.
+
+"That's where we'll camp," said he.
+
+"When?" we asked.
+
+"When we get there," he answered.
+
+For this canon lies in the heart of the mountains. 
+Those who would visit it have first to get into the
+country--a matter of over a week.  Then they have
+their choice of three probabilities of destruction.
+
+The first route comprehends two final days of
+travel at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where
+the snow lies in midsummer; where there is no feed,
+no comfort, and the way is strewn with the bones of
+horses.  This is known as the "Basin Trail."  After
+taking it, you prefer the others--until you try them.
+
+The finish of the second route is directly over the
+summit of a mountain.  You climb two thousand
+feet and then drop down five.  The ascent is heart-
+breaking but safe.  The descent is hair-raising and
+unsafe: no profanity can do justice to it.  Out of a
+pack-train of thirty mules, nine were lost in the
+course of that five thousand feet.  Legend has it that
+once many years ago certain prospectors took in a
+Chinese cook.  At first the Mongolian bewailed his
+fate loudly and fluently, but later settled to a single
+terrified moan that sounded like "tu-ne-mah! tu-ne-
+mah!"  The trail was therefore named the "Tu-ne-
+mah Trail."  It is said that "tu-ne-mah" is the very
+worst single vituperation of which the Chinese
+language is capable.
+
+The third route is called "Hell's Half Mile."  It is
+not misnamed.
+
+Thus like paradise the canon is guarded; but
+like paradise it is wondrous in delight.  For when
+you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle
+of water seen from above has become a river with
+profound darkling pools and placid stretches and
+swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish
+flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble
+forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and
+deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the
+sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves
+of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like snow,
+the flakes of cotton float down through the air. 
+Moreover there are meadows, spacious lawns, opening
+out, closing in, winding here and there through
+the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually
+waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a
+brocade.  Quaint tributary little brooks babble and
+murmur down through these trees, down through
+these lawns.  A blessed warm sun hums with the joy
+of innumerable bees.  To right hand and to left,
+in front of you and behind, rising sheer, forbidding,
+impregnable, the cliffs, mountains, and ranges hem
+you in.  Down the river ten miles you can go: then
+the gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only
+look down the tumbling fierce waters and turn back. 
+Up the river five miles you can go, then interpose
+the sheer snow-clad cliffs of the Palisades, and them,
+rising a matter of fourteen thousand feet, you may
+not cross.  You are shut in your paradise as
+completely as though surrounded by iron bars.
+
+But, too, the world is shut out.  The paradise is
+yours.  In it are trout and deer and grouse and bear
+and lazy happy days.  Your horses feed to the fatness
+of butter.  You wander at will in the ample
+though definite limits of your domain.  You lie on
+your back and examine dispassionately, with an
+interest entirely detached, the huge cliff-walls of the
+valley.  Days slip by.  Really, it needs at least an
+angel with a flaming sword to force you to move on.
+
+We turned away from our view and addressed
+ourselves to the task of finding out just when we were
+going to get there.  The first day we bobbed up and
+over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet
+elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the
+wide bowl-like amphitheatre of a basin.  The second
+day we climbed over things and finally ended in a
+small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an
+elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet.  There
+we rested-over a day, camped under a single pine-
+tree, with the quick-growing mountain grasses thick
+about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides,
+and the plunge into the canon on the other.  As
+we needed meat, we spent part of the day in finding
+a deer.  The rest of the time we watched idly for bear.
+
+Bears are great travelers.  They will often go
+twenty miles overnight, apparently for the sheer
+delight of being on the move.  Also are they exceedingly
+loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting
+to places, and they hate to go down steep hills.  You
+see, their fore legs are short.  Therefore they are
+skilled in the choice of easy routes through the
+mountains, and once having made the choice they
+stick to it until through certain narrow places on
+the route selected they have worn a trail as smooth
+as a garden-path.  The old prospectors used quite
+occasionally to pick out the horse-passes by trusting
+in general to the bear migrations, and many a
+well-traveled route of to-day is superimposed over
+the way-through picked out by old bruin long ago.
+
+Of such was our own trail.  Therefore we kept
+our rifles at hand and our eyes open for a straggler. 
+But none came, though we baited craftily with
+portions of our deer.  All we gained was a rattlesnake,
+and he seemed a bit out of place so high up in the air.
+
+Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still
+twenty-two hundred feet above our elevation.  We
+gazed on it sadly, for directly by its summit, and for
+five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of
+reputation was that trail beyond all others.  The horses,
+as we bunched them in preparation for the packing,
+took on a new interest, for it was on the cards that
+the unpacking at evening would find some missing
+from the ranks.
+
+"Lily's a goner, sure," said Wes.  "I don't know
+how she's got this far except by drunken man's luck. 
+She'll never make the Tunemah."
+
+"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Tenderfoot, 
+naming his own fool horse; "I see where I start in to walk."
+
+"Sort of a `morituri te salutamur,' " said I.
+
+We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet,
+leading our saddle-horses to save their strength. 
+Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily of
+the rarified air.  Then at the top of the world we
+paused on the brink of nothing to tighten cinches,
+while the cold wind swept by us, the snow glittered
+in a sunlight become silvery like that of early April,
+and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a
+distance inconceivably remote, as though the horizon
+had been set back for their accommodation.
+
+To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you
+will see drifted into a sharp crest across a corner of
+your yard; only this windrow was twenty feet high
+and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight
+of its age.  We climbed it and looked over directly
+into the eye of a round Alpine lake seven or eight
+hundred feet below.  It was of an intense cobalt blue,
+a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of
+water, deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant
+of Tyre.  White ice floated in it.  The savage fierce
+granite needles and knife-edges of the mountain crest
+hemmed it about.
+
+But this was temporizing, and we knew it.  The
+first drop of the trail was so steep that we could flip
+a pebble to the first level of it, and so rough in its
+water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it
+seemed that at the first step a horse must necessarily
+fall end over end.  We made it successfully, however,
+and breathed deep.  Even Lily, by a miracle of
+lucky scrambling, did not even stumble.
+
+"Now she's easy for a little ways," said Wes,
+"then we'll get busy."
+
+When we "got busy" we took our guns in our
+hands to preserve them from a fall, and started in. 
+Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more places. 
+We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a
+new trail around it.  Six times a minute we held our
+breaths and stood on tiptoe with anxiety, powerless
+to help, while the horse did his best.  At the
+especially bad places we checked them off one after
+another, congratulating ourselves on so much saved
+as each came across without accident.  When there
+were no bad places, the trail was so extraordinarily
+steep that we ahead were in constant dread of
+a horse's falling on us from behind, and our legs did
+become wearied to incipient paralysis by the constant
+stiff checking of the descent.  Moreover every
+second or so one of the big loose stones with which
+the trail was cumbered would be dislodged and come
+bouncing down among us.  We dodged and swore;
+the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of
+our legs.  The day was full of an intense nervous
+strain, an entire absorption in the precise present. 
+We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were
+by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead. 
+All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred
+and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot
+tell you much about the scenery.  The only outside
+impression we received was that the canon floor
+was slowly rising to meet us.
+
+Then strangely enough, as it seemed, we stepped
+off to level ground.
+
+Our watches said half-past three.  We had made
+five miles in a little under seven hours.
+
+Remained only the crossing of the river.  This
+was no mean task, but we accomplished it lightly,
+searching out a ford.  There were high grasses, and
+on the other side of them a grove of very tall
+cottonwoods, clean as a park.  First of all we cooked
+things; then we spread things; then we lay on our
+backs and smoked things, our hands clasped back
+of our heads.  We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer
+cliff of old Mount Tunemah, very much as a man
+would cock his eye at a tiger in a cage.
+
+Already the meat-hawks, the fluffy Canada jays,
+had found us out, and were prepared to swoop down
+boldly on whatever offered to their predatory skill. 
+We had nothing for them yet,--there were no
+remains of the lunch,--but the fire-irons were out,
+and ribs of venison were roasting slowly over the
+coals in preparation for the evening meal.  Directly
+opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were
+two huge mountain peaks, part of the wall that shut
+us in, over against us in a height we had not dared
+ascribe to the sky itself.  By and by the shadow of
+these mountains rose on the westerly wall.  It crept
+up at first slowly, extinguishing color; afterwards
+more rapidly as the sun approached the horizon. 
+The sunlight disappeared.  A moment's gray intervened,
+and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid
+on the peaks its enchantment.  Little by little that
+too faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in
+the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded
+by the glory of a dream that continued with it after
+the others.  Heretofore it had seemed to us an
+insignificant peak, apparently overtopped by many, but
+by this token we knew it to be the highest of them all.
+
+Then ensued another pause, as though to give the
+invisible scene-shifter time to accomplish his work,
+followed by a shower of evening coolness, that seemed
+to sift through the trees like a soft and gentle rain. 
+We ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a
+trifle uncertainly at the food, wondering at the
+distant mountain on which the Day had made its final
+stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy dark that
+flowed down the canon in the manner of a heavy smoke.
+
+In the notch between the two huge mountains
+blazed a star,--accurately in the notch, like the
+front sight of a rifle sighted into the marvelous
+depths of space.  Then the moon rose.
+
+First we knew of it when it touched the crest of
+our two mountains.  The night has strange effects on
+the hills.  A moment before they had menaced black
+and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the
+moon their very substance seemed to dissolve, leaving
+in the upper atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous,
+fragile, ghostly simulacrums of themselves you could
+imagine in the realms of fairy-land.  They seemed
+actually to float, to poise like cloud-shapes about to
+dissolve.  And against them were cast the inky silhouettes
+of three fir-trees in the shadow near at hand.
+
+Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out
+to us with the voices of old accustomed friends in
+another wilderness.  The winds rustled.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS
+
+As I have said, a river flows through the canon. 
+It is a very good river with some riffles that
+can be waded down to the edges of black pools
+or white chutes of water; with appropriate big trees
+fallen slantwise into it to form deep holes; and with
+hurrying smooth stretches of some breadth.  In all of
+these various places are rainbow trout.
+
+There is no use fishing until late afternoon.  The
+clear sun of the high altitudes searches out mercilessly
+the bottom of the stream, throwing its miniature
+boulders, mountains, and valleys as plainly into
+relief as the buttes of Arizona at noon.  Then the
+trout quite refuse.  Here and there, if you walk far
+enough and climb hard enough over all sorts of
+obstructions, you may discover a few spots shaded by
+big trees or rocks where you can pick up a half dozen
+fish; but it is slow work.  When, however, the
+shadow of the two huge mountains feels its way
+across the stream, then, as though a signal had been
+given, the trout begin to rise.  For an hour and a
+half there is noble sport indeed.
+
+The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course
+some places were better than others.  Near the upper
+reaches the water boiled like seltzer around the base
+of a tremendous tree.  There the pool was at least ten
+feet deep and shot with bubbles throughout the
+whole of its depth, but it was full of fish.  They rose
+eagerly to your gyrating fly,--and took it away with
+them down to subaqueous chambers and passages
+among the roots of that tree.  After which you broke
+your leader.  Royal Coachman was the best lure, and
+therefore valuable exceedingly were Royal Coachmen. 
+Whenever we lost one we lifted up our voices
+in lament, and went away from there, calling to mind
+that there were other pools, many other pools, free
+of obstruction and with fish in them.  Yet such is the
+perversity of fishermen, we were back losing more
+Royal Coachmen the very next day.  In all I managed
+to disengage just three rather small trout from
+that pool, and in return decorated their ancestral halls
+with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of many flies.
+
+Now this was foolishness.  All you had to do was
+to walk through a grove of cottonwoods, over a
+brook, through another grove of pines, down a sloping
+meadow to where one of the gigantic pine-trees
+had obligingly spanned the current.  You crossed
+that, traversed another meadow, broke through a
+thicket, slid down a steep grassy bank, and there you
+were.  A great many years before a pine-tree had
+fallen across the current.  Now its whitened skeleton
+lay there, opposing a barrier for about twenty-five
+feet out into the stream.  Most of the water turned
+aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end
+as though trying to catch up with the rest of the
+stream which had gone on without it, but some of it
+dived down under and came up on the other side. 
+There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy
+pool.  Its constant action had excavated a very deep
+hole, the debris of which had formed a bar immediately
+below.  You waded out on the bar and cast along
+the length of the pine skeleton over the pool.
+
+If you were methodical, you first shortened your
+line, and began near the bank, gradually working
+out until you were casting forty-five feet to the very
+edge of the fast current.  I know of nothing pleasanter
+for you to do.  You see, the evening shadow
+was across the river, and a beautiful grass slope at your
+back.  Over the way was a grove of trees whose birds
+were very busy because it was near their sunset, while
+towering over them were mountains, quite peaceful
+by way of contrast because THEIR sunset was still far
+distant.  The river was in a great hurry, and was talking
+to itself like a man who has been detained and
+is now at last making up time to his important
+engagement.  And from the deep black shadow beneath
+the pine skeleton, occasionally flashed white bodies
+that made concentric circles where they broke the
+surface of the water, and which fought you to a finish
+in the glory of battle.  The casting was against the
+current, so your flies could rest but the briefest possible
+moment on the surface of the stream.  That moment
+was enough.  Day after day you could catch your
+required number from an apparently inexhaustible supply.
+
+I might inform you further of the gorge downstream,
+where you lie flat on your stomach ten feet
+above the river, and with one hand cautiously
+extended over the edge cast accurately into the angle
+of the cliff.  Then when you get your strike, you tow 
+him downstream, clamber precariously to the water's 
+level--still playing your fish--and there land him,--if 
+he has accommodatingly stayed hooked.  A three-pound 
+fish will make you a lot of tribulation at this game.
+
+We lived on fish and venison, and had all we
+wanted.  The bear-trails were plenty enough, and
+the signs were comparatively fresh, but at the time
+of our visit the animals themselves had gone over
+the mountains on some sort of a picnic.  Grouse,
+too, were numerous in the popple thickets, and
+flushed much like our ruffed grouse of the East. 
+They afforded first-rate wing-shooting for Sure-Pop,
+the little shot-gun.
+
+But these things occupied, after all, only a small
+part of every day.  We had loads of time left.  Of
+course we explored the valley up and down.  That
+occupied two days.  After that we became lazy. 
+One always does in a permanent camp.  So did
+the horses.  Active--or rather restless interest in
+life seemed to die away.  Neither we nor they had
+to rustle hard for food.  They became fastidious
+in their choice, and at all times of day could be
+seen sauntering in Indian file from one part of the
+meadow to the other for the sole purpose apparently
+of cropping a half dozen indifferent mouthfuls.  The
+rest of the time they roosted under trees, one hind
+leg relaxed, their eyes half closed, their ears
+wabbling, the pictures of imbecile content.  We were
+very much the same.
+
+Of course we had our outbursts of virtue.  While
+under their influence we undertook vast works.  But 
+after their influence had died out, we found ourselves 
+with said vast works on our hands, and so came to 
+cursing ourselves and our fool spasms of industry.
+
+For instance, Wes and I decided to make buckskin
+from the hide of the latest deer.  We did not
+need the buckskin--we already had two in the
+pack.  Our ordinary procedure would have been to
+dry the hide for future treatment by a Mexican, at a
+dollar a hide, when we should have returned home. 
+But, as I said, we were afflicted by sporadic activity,
+and wanted to do something.
+
+We began with great ingenuity by constructing a
+graining-tool out of a table-knife.  We bound it with
+rawhide, and encased it with wood, and wrapped it
+with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is
+proper.  After this we hunted out a very smooth,
+barkless log, laid the hide across it, straddled it, and
+began graining.
+
+Graining is a delightful process.  You grasp the
+tool by either end, hold the square edge at a certain
+angle, and push away from you mightily.  A half-
+dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair;
+twice as many more will scrape away half as much
+of the seal-brown grain, exposing the white of the
+hide.  Then, if you want to, you can stop and establish
+in your mind a definite proportion between the
+amount thus exposed, the area remaining unexposed,
+and the muscular fatigue of these dozen and
+a half of mighty pushes.  The proportion will be
+wrong.  You have left out of account the fact that you
+are going to get almighty sick of the job; that your
+arms and upper back are going to ache shrewdly
+before you are done; and that as you go on it is going
+to be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges
+firmly enough to offer the required resistance to your
+knife.  Besides--if you get careless--you'll scrape
+too hard: hence little holes in the completed buckskin. 
+Also--if you get careless--you will probably
+leave the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of
+them means a hard transparent spot in the product. 
+Furthermore, once having started in on the job, you
+are like the little boy who caught the trolley: you
+cannot let go.  It must be finished immediately, all
+at one heat, before the hide stiffens.
+
+Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evaporated, 
+and you are thinking of fifty pleasant things
+you might just as well be doing.
+
+Next you revel in grease,--lard oil, if you have
+it; if not, then lard, or the product of boiled brains. 
+This you must rub into the skin.  You rub it in
+until you suspect that your finger-nails have worn
+away, and you glisten to the elbows like an Eskimo
+cutting blubber.
+
+By the merciful arrangement of those who
+invented buckskin, this entitles you to a rest.  You
+take it--for several days--until your conscience
+seizes you by the scruff of the neck.
+
+Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy,
+soggy, snaky, cold bundle of greasy horror to the
+bank of the creek, and there for endless hours you
+wash it.  The grease is more reluctant to enter the
+stream than you are in the early morning.  Your
+hands turn purple.  The others go by on their way
+to the trout-pools, but you are chained to the stake.
+
+By and by you straighten your back with creaks,
+and walk home like a stiff old man, carrying your
+hide rid of all superfluous oil.  Then if you are just
+learning how, your instructor examines the result.
+
+"That's all right," says he cheerfully.  "Now when
+it dries, it will be buckskin."
+
+That encourages you.  It need not.  For during
+the process of drying it must be your pastime
+constantly to pull and stretch at every square inch of
+that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres. 
+Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone.  Now
+there is nothing on earth that seems to dry slower
+than buckskin.  You wear your fingers down to the
+first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for
+future use, you carry the hide to your instructor.
+
+"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.
+
+You go back and do it some more, putting the
+entire strength of your body, soul, and religious
+convictions into the stretching of that buckskin.  It looks
+as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the
+turf on a southern slope.  Nevertheless your tyrant
+declares it will not do.
+
+"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it
+isn't dry.  Go to it!"
+
+But at this point your outraged soul arches its back
+and bucks.  You sneak off and roll up that piece of
+buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja.  You KNOW
+it is dry.  Then with a deep sigh of relief you come
+out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of
+the camp.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one chump 
+enough to do that for a dollar a hide?" you inquire.
+
+"Sure," say they.
+
+"Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his
+dates," you conclude.
+
+About a week later one of your companions drags out of 
+the alforja something crumpled that resembles in general
+appearance and texture a rusted five-gallon coal-oil 
+can that has been in a wreck.  It is only imperceptibly 
+less stiff and angular and cast-iron than rawhide.
+
+"What is this?" the discoverer inquires.
+
+Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place
+before recognition brings inevitable--and sickening
+--chaff.  For you know it at a glance.  It is your
+buckskin.
+
+Along about the middle of that century an old
+prospector with four burros descended the Basin
+Trail and went into camp just below us.  Towards
+evening he sauntered in.
+
+I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you
+just as he came down through the fire-lit trees.  He
+was about six feet tall, very leanly built, with a
+weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was
+superimposed a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-
+brows.  These had originally been brown, but the
+sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable
+contrast to his complexion.  Eyes keen as sunlight
+twinkled far down beneath the shadows of the brows
+and a floppy old sombrero hat.  The usual flannel
+shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter
+completed the outfit.  He might have been forty, but 
+was probably nearer sixty years of age.
+
+"Howdy, boys," said he, and dropped to the
+fireside, where he promptly annexed a coal for his pipe.
+
+We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell
+to him and Wes.  It was commonplace talk enough
+from one point of view: taken in essence it was
+merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized
+man as to another's itinerary--"Did you visit Florence?
+Berlin? St. Petersburg?"--and then the
+comparing of impressions.  Only here again that old
+familiar magic of unfamiliar names threw its glamour
+over the terse sentences.
+
+"Over beyond the Piute Monument," the old
+prospector explained, "down through the Inyo
+Range, a leetle north of Death Valley--"
+
+"Back in seventy-eight when I was up in Bay
+Horse Canon over by Lost River--"
+
+"Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains? 
+--North of th' Telescope Range?"--
+
+That was all there was to it, with long pauses for
+drawing at the pipes.  Yet somehow in the aggregate
+that catalogue of names gradually established in the
+minds of us two who listened an impression of long
+years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the
+face of the earth.  The old man had wintered here,
+summered a thousand miles away, made his strike
+at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully
+tried for a repetition of his luck at the other. 
+I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though
+always of course in the background, was ever near
+enough his hope to be considered a motive for
+action.  Rather was it a dream, remote, something to
+be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the mediaeval
+Christian's idea of heaven.  His interest was 
+in the search.  For that one could see in him a real
+enthusiasm.  He had his smattering of theory, his
+very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions,
+like all prospectors.  So long as he could keep in
+grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life
+he loved, he was happy.
+
+Perhaps one of the chief elements of this remarkable
+interest in the game rather than the prizes of it
+was his desire to vindicate his guesses or his conclusions. 
+He liked to predict to himself the outcome of
+his solitary operations, and then to prove that
+prediction through laborious days.  His life was a
+gigantic game of solitaire.  In fact, he mentioned a
+dozen of his claims many years apart which he had
+developed to a certain point,--"so I could see what
+they was,"--and then abandoned in favor of fresher
+discoveries.  He cherished the illusion that these were
+properties to whose completion some day he would
+return.  But we knew better; he had carried them to
+the point where the result was no longer in doubt
+and then, like one who has no interest in playing on
+in an evidently prescribed order, had laid his cards
+on the table to begin a new game.
+
+This man was skilled in his profession; he had
+pursued it for thirty odd years; he was frugal and
+industrious; undoubtedly of his long series of
+discoveries a fair percentage were valuable and are
+producing-properties to-day.  Yet he confessed his bank
+balance to be less than five hundred dollars.  Why
+was this?  Simply and solely because he did not care. 
+At heart it was entirely immaterial to him whether
+he ever owned a dollar above his expenses.  When
+he sold his claims, he let them go easily, loath to
+bother himself with business details, eager to get
+away from the fuss and nuisance.  The few hundred
+dollars he received he probably sunk in unproductive
+mining work, or was fleeced out of in the towns. 
+Then joyfully he turned back to his beloved mountains
+and the life of his slow deep delight and his
+pecking away before the open doors of fortune.  By
+and by he would build himself a little cabin down
+in the lower pine mountains, where he would grow
+a white beard, putter with occult wilderness crafts,
+and smoke long contemplative hours in the sun before
+his door.  For tourists he would braid rawhide
+reins and quirts, or make buckskin.  The jays and
+woodpeckers and Douglas squirrels would become
+fond of him.  So he would be gathered to his fathers,
+a gentle old man whose life had been spent harmlessly
+in the open.  He had had his ideal to which
+blindly he reached; he had in his indirect way
+contributed the fruits of his labor to mankind; his
+recompenses he had chosen according to his desires. 
+When you consider these things, you perforce have
+to revise your first notion of him as a useless sort of
+old ruffian.  As you come to know him better, you
+must love him for the kindliness, the simple honesty,
+the modesty, and charity that he seems to draw from
+his mountain environment.  There are hundreds of
+him buried in the great canons of the West.
+
+Our prospector was a little uncertain as to his
+plans.  Along toward autumn he intended to land at
+some reputed placers near Dinkey Creek.  There
+might be something in that district.  He thought he
+would take a look.  In the mean time he was just
+poking up through the country--he and his jackasses. 
+Good way to spend the summer.  Perhaps he might run 
+across something 'most anywhere; up near the top of 
+that mountain opposite looked mineralized.  Didn't 
+know but what he'd take a look at her to-morrow.
+
+He camped near us during three days.  I never
+saw a more modest, self-effacing man.  He seemed
+genuinely, childishly, almost helplessly interested in
+our fly-fishing, shooting, our bear-skins, and our
+travels.  You would have thought from his demeanor
+--which was sincere and not in the least ironical--
+that he had never seen or heard anything quite like
+that before, and was struck with wonder at it.  Yet
+he had cast flies before we were born, and shot even
+earlier than he had cast a fly, and was a very
+Ishmael for travel.  Rarely could you get an account of
+his own experiences, and then only in illustration
+of something else.
+
+"If you-all likes bear-hunting," said he, "you
+ought to get up in eastern Oregon.  I summered
+there once.  The only trouble is, the brush is thick
+as hair.  You 'most always have to bait them, or
+wait for them to come and drink.  The brush is so
+small you ain't got much chance.  I run onto a she-
+bear and cubs that way once.  Didn't have nothin'
+but my six-shooter, and I met her within six foot."
+
+He stopped with an air of finality.
+
+"Well, what did you do?" we asked.
+
+"Me?" he inquired, surprised.  "Oh, I just leaked
+out of th' landscape."
+
+He prospected the mountain opposite, loafed with
+us a little, and then decided that he must be going. 
+About eight o'clock in the morning he passed us,
+hazing his burros, his tall, lean figure elastic in
+defiance of years.
+
+"So long, boys," he called; "good luck!"
+
+"So long," we responded heartily.  "Be good to
+yourself."
+
+He plunged into the river without hesitation, emerged 
+dripping on the other side, and disappeared in the 
+brush.  From time to time during the rest of the morning 
+we heard the intermittent tinkling of his bell-animal 
+rising higher and higher above us on the trail.
+
+In the person of this man we gained our first 
+connection, so to speak, with the Golden Trout.  He had 
+caught some of them, and could tell us of their habits.
+
+Few fishermen west of the Rockies have not heard
+of the Golden Trout, though, equally, few have
+much definite information concerning it.  Such information
+usually runs about as follows:
+
+It is a medium size fish of the true trout family,
+resembling a rainbow except that it is of a rich
+golden color.  The peculiarity that makes its capture
+a dream to be dreamed of is that it swims in but one
+little stream of all the round globe.  If you would
+catch a Golden Trout, you must climb up under the
+very base of the end of the High Sierras.  There is
+born a stream that flows down from an elevation of
+about ten thousand feet to about eight thousand
+before it takes a long plunge into a branch of the Kern
+River.  Over the twenty miles of its course you can
+cast your fly for Golden Trout; but what is the nature
+of that stream, that fish, or the method of its
+capture, few can tell you with any pretense of accuracy.
+
+To be sure, there are legends.  One, particularly
+striking, claims that the Golden Trout occurs in one
+other stream--situated in Central Asia!--and that
+the fish is therefore a remnant of some pre-glacial
+period, like Sequoia trees, a sort of grand-daddy of
+all trout, as it were.  This is but a sample of what
+you will hear discussed.
+
+Of course from the very start we had had our eye
+on the Golden Trout, and intended sooner or later
+to work our way to his habitat.  Our prospector had
+just come from there.
+
+"It's about four weeks south, the way you and
+me travels," said he.  "You don't want to try
+Harrison's Pass; it's chock full of tribulation.  Go
+around by way of the Giant Forest.  She's pretty
+good there, too, some sizable timber.  Then over by
+Redwood Meadows, and Timber Gap, by Mineral
+King, and over through Farewell Gap.  You turn
+east there, on a new trail.  She's steeper than straight-
+up-an'-down, but shorter than the other.  When you
+get down in the canon of Kern River,--say, she's a
+fine canon, too,--you want to go downstream about
+two mile to where there's a sort of natural over-
+flowed lake full of stubs stickin' up.  You'll get
+some awful big rainbows in there.  Then your best
+way is to go right up Whitney Creek Trail to a big
+high meadows mighty nigh to timber-line.  That's
+where I camped.  They's lots of them little yaller
+fish there.  Oh, they bite well enough.  You'll catch
+'em.  They's a little shy."
+
+So in that guise--as the desire for new and distant
+things--did our angel with the flaming sword
+finally come to us.
+
+We caught reluctant horses reluctantly.  All the
+first day was to be a climb.  We knew it; and I
+suspect that they knew it too.  Then we packed
+and addressed ourselves to the task offered us by
+the Basin Trail.
+
+
+
+ON CAMP COOKERY
+
+XIV
+
+ON CAMP COOKERY
+
+One morning I awoke a little before the others,
+and lay on my back staring up through the
+trees.  It was not my day to cook.  We were camped
+at the time only about sixty-five hundred feet high,
+and the weather was warm.  Every sort of green thing
+grew very lush all about us, but our own little space
+was held dry and clear for us by the needles of two
+enormous red cedars some four feet in diameter.  A
+variety of thoughts sifted through my mind as it
+followed lazily the shimmering filaments of loose spider-
+web streaming through space.  The last thought stuck. 
+It was that that day was a holiday.  Therefore I un-
+limbered my six-shooter, and turned her loose, each
+shot being accompanied by a meritorious yell.
+
+The outfit boiled out of its blankets.  I explained
+the situation, and after they had had some breakfast
+they agreed with me that a celebration was in order. 
+Unanimously we decided to make it gastronomic.
+
+"We will ride till we get to good feed," we
+concluded, "and then we'll cook all the afternoon. 
+And nobody must eat anything until the whole business
+is prepared and served."
+
+It was agreed.  We rode until we were very
+hungry, which was eleven o'clock.  Then we rode
+some more.  By and by we came to a log cabin in a
+wide fair lawn below a high mountain with a ducal
+coronet on its top, and around that cabin was a fence,
+and inside the fence a man chopping wood.  Him we
+hailed.  He came to the fence and grinned at us from
+the elevation of high-heeled boots.  By this token we
+knew him for a cow-puncher.
+
+"How are you?" said we.
+
+"Howdy, boys," he roared.  Roared is the accurate
+expression.  He was not a large man, and his hair
+was sandy, and his eye mild blue.  But undoubtedly
+his kinsmen were dumb and he had as birthright the
+voice for the entire family.  It had been subsequently
+developed in the shouting after the wild cattle of the
+hills.  Now his ordinary conversational tone was that
+of the announcer at a circus.  But his heart was good. 
+
+"Can we camp here?" we inquired.
+
+"Sure thing," he bellowed.  "Turn your horses
+into the meadow.  Camp right here."
+
+But with the vision of a rounded wooded knoll a
+few hundred yards distant we said we'd just get out
+of his way a little.  We crossed a creek, mounted an
+easy slope to the top of the knoll, and were delighted
+to observe just below its summit the peculiar fresh
+green hump which indicates a spring.  The Tenderfoot,
+however, knew nothing of springs, for shortly
+he trudged a weary way back to the creek, and so
+returned bearing kettles of water.  This performance
+hugely astonished the cowboy, who subsequently
+wanted to know if a "critter had died in the spring."
+
+Wes departed to borrow a big Dutch oven of the
+man and to invite him to come across when we raised
+the long yell.  Then we began operations.
+
+Now camp cooks are of two sorts.  Anybody can
+with a little practice fry bacon, steak, or flapjacks, and
+boil coffee.  The reduction of the raw material to its
+most obvious cooked result is within the reach of all
+but the most hopeless tenderfoot who never knows
+the salt-sack from the sugar-sack.  But your true artist
+at the business is he who can from six ingredients, by
+permutation, combination, and the genius that is in
+him turn out a full score of dishes.  For simple
+example:  GIVEN, rice, oatmeal, and raisins.  Your expert
+accomplishes the following:
+
+ITEM--Boiled rice.
+
+ITEM--Boiled oatmeal.
+
+ITEM--Rice boiled until soft, then stiffened by the
+addition of quarter as much oatmeal.
+
+ITEM--Oatmeal in which is boiled almost to the
+dissolving point a third as much rice.
+
+These latter two dishes taste entirely unlike each
+other or their separate ingredients.  They are moreover
+great in nutrition.
+
+ITEM--Boiled rice and raisins.
+
+ITEM--Dish number three with raisins.
+
+ITEM--Rice boiled with raisins, sugar sprinkled on
+top, and then baked.
+
+ITEM--Ditto with dish number three.
+
+All these are good--and different.
+
+Some people like to cook and have a natural knack for 
+it.  Others hate it.  If you are one of the former,
+select a propitious moment to suggest that you will
+cook, if the rest will wash the dishes and supply the
+wood and water.  Thus you will get first crack at the
+fire in the chill of morning; and at night you can squat 
+on your heels doing light labor while the others rustle.
+
+In a mountain trip small stout bags for the
+provisions are necessary.  They should be big enough to
+contain, say, five pounds of corn-meal, and should tie
+firmly at the top.  It will be absolutely labor lost for
+you to mark them on the outside, as the outside soon
+will become uniform in color with your marking. 
+Tags might do, if occasionally renewed.  But if you
+have the instinct, you will soon come to recognize
+the appearance of the different bags as you recognize
+the features of your family.  They should contain
+small quantities for immediate use of the provisions
+the main stock of which is carried on another pack-
+animal.  One tin plate apiece and "one to grow on";
+the same of tin cups; half a dozen spoons; four
+knives and forks; a big spoon; two frying-pans; a
+broiler; a coffee-pot; a Dutch oven; and three light
+sheet-iron pails to nest in one another was what we
+carried on this trip.  You see, we had horses.  Of course
+in the woods that outfit would be materially reduced.
+
+For the same reason, since we had our carrying
+done for us, we took along two flat iron bars about
+twenty-four inches in length.  These, laid across two
+stones between which the fire had been built, we
+used to support our cooking-utensils stove-wise.  I
+should never carry a stove.  This arrangement is
+quite as effective, and possesses the added advantage
+that wood does not have to be cut for it of any
+definite length.  Again, in the woods these iron bars
+would be a senseless burden.  But early you will
+learn that while it is foolish to carry a single ounce
+more than will pay in comfort or convenience for its
+own transportation, it is equally foolish to refuse the
+comforts or conveniences that modified circumstance
+will permit you.  To carry only a forest equipment
+with pack-animals would be as silly as to carry only
+a pack-animal outfit on a Pullman car.  Only look
+out that you do not reverse it.
+
+Even if you do not intend to wash dishes, bring
+along some "Gold Dust."  It is much simpler in
+getting at odd corners of obstinate kettles than any
+soap.  All you have to do is to boil some of it in
+that kettle, and the utensil is tamed at once.
+
+That's about all you, as expert cook, are going to
+need in the way of equipment.  Now as to your fire.
+
+There are a number of ways of building a cooking
+fire, but they share one first requisite: it should
+be small.  A blaze will burn everything, including
+your hands and your temper.  Two logs laid side by
+side and slanted towards each other so that small
+things can go on the narrow end and big things on
+the wide end; flat rocks arranged in the same manner;
+a narrow trench in which the fire is built; and
+the flat irons just described--these are the best-
+known methods.  Use dry wood.  Arrange to do your 
+boiling first--in the flame; and your frying and 
+broiling last--after the flames have died to coals.
+
+So much in general.  You must remember that
+open-air cooking is in many things quite different
+from indoor cooking.  You have different utensils,
+are exposed to varying temperatures, are limited in
+resources, and pursued by a necessity of haste.  Pre-
+conceived notions must go by the board.  You are
+after results; and if you get them, do not mind the
+feminines of your household lifting the hands of
+horror over the unorthodox means.  Mighty few women
+I have ever seen were good camp-fire cooks; not
+because camp-fire cookery is especially difficult, but
+because they are temperamentally incapable of ridding
+themselves of the notion that certain things
+should be done in a certain way, and because if an
+ingredient lacks, they cannot bring themselves to
+substitute an approximation.  They would rather
+abandon the dish than do violence to the sacred art.
+
+Most camp-cookery advice is quite useless for the
+same reason.  I have seen many a recipe begin with
+the words:  "Take the yolks of four eggs, half a
+cup of butter, and a cup of fresh milk--"  As if
+any one really camping in the wilderness ever had
+eggs, butter, and milk!
+
+Now here is something I cooked for this particular
+celebration.  Every woman to whom I have ever described 
+it has informed me vehemently that it is not cake, 
+and must be "horrid."  Perhaps it is not cake, but 
+it looks yellow and light, and tastes like cake.
+
+First I took two cups of flour, and a half cup of
+corn-meal to make it look yellow.  In this I mixed
+a lot of baking-powder,--about twice what one
+should use for bread,--and topped off with a cup of
+sugar.  The whole I mixed with water into a light
+dough.  Into the dough went raisins that had previously
+been boiled to swell them up.  Thus was the
+cake mixed.  Now I poured half the dough into the
+Dutch oven, sprinkled it with a good layer of sugar,
+cinnamon, and unboiled raisins; poured in the rest
+of the dough; repeated the layer of sugar, cinnamon,
+and raisins; and baked in the Dutch oven.  It
+was gorgeous, and we ate it at one fell swoop.
+
+While we are about it, we may as well work backwards
+on this particular orgy by describing the rest of our 
+dessert.  In addition to the cake and some stewed 
+apricots, I, as cook of the day, constructed also a pudding.
+
+The basis was flour--two cups of it.  Into this I
+dumped a handful of raisins, a tablespoonful of baking-
+powder, two of sugar, and about a pound of fat
+salt pork cut into little cubes.  This I mixed up into
+a mess by means of a cup or so of water and a
+quantity of larrupy-dope.[3]  Then I dipped a flour-
+sack in hot water, wrung it out, sprinkled it with
+dry flour, and half filled it with my pudding
+mixture.  The whole outfit I boiled for two hours in a
+kettle.  It, too, was good to the palate, and was even
+better sliced and fried the following morning.
+
+
+[3] Camp-lingo for any kind of syrup.
+
+
+This brings us to the suspension of kettles.  There
+are two ways.  If you are in a hurry, cut a springy
+pole, sharpen one end, and stick it perpendicular in
+the ground.  Bend it down towards your fire.  Hang
+your kettle on the end of it.  If you have jabbed it
+far enough into the ground in the first place, it will
+balance nicely by its own spring and the elasticity
+of the turf.  The other method is to plant two forked
+sticks on either side your fire over which a strong
+cross-piece is laid.  The kettles are hung on hooks
+cut from forked branches.  The forked branches are
+attached to the cross-piece by means of thongs or withes.
+
+On this occasion we had deer, grouse, and ducks
+in the larder.  The best way to treat them is as
+follows.  You may be sure we adopted the best way.
+
+When your deer is fresh, you will enjoy greatly a
+dish of liver and bacon.  Only the liver you will
+discover to be a great deal tenderer and more delicate
+than any calf's liver you ever ate.  There is this
+difference: a deer's liver should be parboiled in order
+to get rid of a green bitter scum that will rise to the
+surface and which you must skim off.
+
+Next in order is the "back strap" and tenderloin,
+which is always tender, even when fresh.  The hams
+should be kept at least five days.  Deer-steak, to my
+notion, is best broiled, though occasionally it is
+pleasant by way of variety to fry it.  In that case a brown
+gravy is made by thoroughly heating flour in the
+grease, and then stirring in water.  Deer-steak threaded
+on switches and "barbecued" over the coals is delicious. 
+The outside will be a little blackened, but all
+the juices will be retained.  To enjoy this to the
+utmost you should take it in your fingers and GNAW. 
+The only permissible implement is your hunting-
+knife.  Do not forget to peel and char slightly the
+switches on which you thread the meat, otherwise
+they will impart their fresh-wood taste.
+
+By this time the ribs are in condition.  Cut little
+slits between them, and through the slits thread in and
+out long strips of bacon.  Cut other little gashes, and
+fill these gashes with onions chopped very fine. 
+Suspend the ribs across two stones between which
+you have allowed a fire to die down to coals.
+
+There remain now the hams, shoulders, and heart. 
+The two former furnish steaks.  The latter you will
+make into a "bouillon."  Here inserts itself quite
+naturally the philosophy of boiling meat.  It may be
+stated in a paragraph.
+
+If you want boiled meat, put it in hot water.  That
+sets the juices.  If you want soup, put it in cold water
+and bring to a boil.  That sets free the juices. 
+Remember this.
+
+Now you start your bouillon cold.  Into a kettle
+of water put your deer hearts, or your fish, a chunk
+of pork, and some salt.  Bring to a boil.  Next drop
+in quartered potatoes, several small whole onions, a
+half cupful of rice, a can of tomatoes--if you have
+any.  Boil slowly for an hour or so--until things
+pierce easily under the fork.  Add several chunks of
+bread and a little flour for thickening.  Boil down to
+about a chowder consistency, and serve hot.  It is all
+you will need for that meal; and you will eat of it
+until there is no more.
+
+I am supposing throughout that you know enough
+to use salt and pepper when needed.
+
+So much for your deer.  The grouse you can split
+and fry, in which case the brown gravy described
+for the fried deer-steak is just the thing.  Or you can
+boil him.  If you do that, put him into hot water,
+boil slowly, skim frequently, and add dumplings
+mixed of flour, baking-powder, and a little lard.  Or
+you can roast him in your Dutch oven with your ducks.
+
+Perhaps it might be well here to explain the Dutch
+oven.  It is a heavy iron kettle with little legs and
+an iron cover.  The theory of it is that coals go among
+the little legs and on top of the iron cover.  This heats
+the inside, and so cooking results.  That, you will
+observe, is the theory.
+
+In practice you will have to remember a good
+many things.  In the first place, while other affairs are
+preparing, lay the cover on the fire to heat it through;
+but not on too hot a place nor too long, lest it warp
+and so fit loosely.  Also the oven itself is to be heated
+through, and well greased.  Your first baking will
+undoubtedly be burned on the bottom.  It is almost
+impossible without many trials to understand just how
+little heat suffices underneath.  Sometimes it seems
+that the warmed earth where the fire has been is
+enough.  And on top you do not want a bonfire.  A
+nice even heat, and patience, are the proper ingredients. 
+Nor drop into the error of letting your bread
+chill, and so fall to unpalatable heaviness.  Probably
+for some time you will alternate between the extremes
+of heavy crusts with doughy insides, and white
+weighty boiler-plate with no distinguishable crusts at
+all.  Above all, do not lift the lid too often for the
+sake of taking a look.  Have faith.
+
+There are other ways of baking bread.  In the North
+Country forests, where you carry everything on your
+back, you will do it in the frying-pan.  The mixture
+should be a rather thick batter or a rather thin dough. 
+It is turned into the frying-pan and baked first on one
+side, then on the other, the pan being propped on
+edge facing the fire.  The whole secret of success is
+first to set your pan horizontal and about three feet
+from the fire in order that the mixture may be
+thoroughly warmed--not heated--before the pan is
+propped on edge.  Still another way of baking is in
+a reflector oven of tin.  This is highly satisfactory,
+provided the oven is built on the scientific angles to
+throw the heat evenly on all parts of the bread-pan
+and equally on top and bottom.  It is not so easy as
+you might imagine to get a good one made.  These
+reflectors are all right for a permanent camp, but too
+fragile for transportation on pack-animals.
+
+As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by
+way of change.  It is really very good,--just salt,
+water, flour, and a very little sugar.  For those who
+like their bread "all crust," it is especially toothsome. 
+The usual camp bread that I have found the most
+successful has been in the proportion of two cups of
+flour to a teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and three
+of baking-powder.  Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on
+top is sometimes pleasant.  Test by thrusting a splinter
+into the loaf.  If dough adheres to the wood, the
+bread is not done.  Biscuits are made by using twice
+as much baking-powder and about two tablespoonfuls
+of lard for shortening.  They bake much more quickly
+than the bread.  Johnny-cake you mix of corn-meal
+three cups, flour one cup, sugar four spoonfuls, salt
+one spoonful, baking-powder four spoonfuls, and lard
+twice as much as for biscuits.  It also is good, very
+good.
+
+The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable,
+and extremely indigestible when made of flour, as is
+ordinarily done.  However, the self-raising buckwheat
+flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is likewise
+good for your insides.  The batter is rather thin, is
+poured into the piping hot greased pan, "flipped"
+when brown on one side, and eaten with larrupy-dope
+or brown gravy.
+
+When you come to consider potatoes and beans
+and onions and such matters, remember one thing:
+that in the higher altitudes water boils at a low
+temperature, and that therefore you must not expect your
+boiled food to cook very rapidly.  In fact, you'd
+better leave beans at home.  We did.  Potatoes you can
+sometimes tease along by quartering them.
+
+Rolled oats are better than oatmeal.  Put them in
+plenty of water and boil down to the desired consistency. 
+In lack of cream you will probably want it rather soft.
+
+Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let
+boil for about two minutes, and immediately set off. 
+Settle by letting a half cup of cold water flow slowly
+into the pot from the height of a foot or so.  If your
+utensils are clean, you will surely have good coffee
+by this simple method.  Of course you will never
+boil your tea.
+
+The sun was nearly down when we raised our long 
+yell.  The cow-puncher promptly responded.  We ate.  
+Then we smoked.  Then we basely left all our dishes 
+until the morrow, and followed our cow-puncher to 
+his log cabin, where we were to spend the evening.
+
+By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped
+down from the mountains.  We built a fire in a huge
+stone fireplace and sat around in the flickering light
+telling ghost-stories to one another.  The place was
+rudely furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and
+chairs hewn by the axe.  Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers,
+branding-irons in turn caught the light and vanished
+in the shadow.  The skin of a bear looked at us from
+hollow eye-sockets in which there were no eyes.  We
+talked of the Long Trail.  Outside the wind, rising,
+howled through the shakes of the roof.
+
+
+ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
+
+XV
+
+ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
+
+The winds were indeed abroad that night.  They
+rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves,
+they puffed down our chimney, scattering the ashes
+and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though
+a shell had burst.  When we opened the door and
+stepped out, after our good-nights had been said, it
+caught at our hats and garments as though it had
+been lying in wait for us.
+
+To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very
+dark.  There would be a moon later, but at present
+even the stars seemed only so many pinpoints of
+dull metal, lustreless, without illumination.  We felt
+our way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses,
+the uncertainty of stones.
+
+At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath
+the rating of the storm.  Its embers glowed sullen
+and red, alternately glaring with a half-formed resolution
+to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation.  Once
+a feeble flame sprang up for an instant, but was
+immediately pounced on and beaten flat as though by
+a vigilant antagonist.
+
+We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets. 
+Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine 
+trunk.  In its shelter we respread our bedding, and
+there, standing, dressed for the night.  The power of
+the wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for
+spoil.  A towel, shaken by accident from the interior
+of a sweater, departed white-winged, like a bird, into
+the outer blackness.  We found it next day caught
+in the bushes several hundred yards distant.  Our
+voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips
+and hurled lavishly into space.  The very breath of
+our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced
+the elements, we breathed in gasps, with difficulty.
+
+Then we dropped down into our blankets.
+
+At once the prostrate tree-trunk gave us its
+protection.  We lay in a little back-wash of the racing
+winds, still as a night in June.  Over us roared the
+battle.  We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches;
+as though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant
+we should enter a zone of danger.  So we lay quietly
+on our backs and stared at the heavens.
+
+The first impression thence given was of stars
+sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the
+turbulence of what until this instant had seemed to fill
+the universe.  They were as always, just as we should
+see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads 
+chirped clearly audible at half a mile.  The importance 
+of the tempest shrank.  Then below them next we 
+noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.
+
+Immediately it was as though the storm were an
+hallucination; something not objective; something
+real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it. 
+It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days
+when nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant
+sun, shines with superlative brilliancy.  Emotions
+of a power to shake the foundations of life
+seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow
+symbols.  For after all, we were contented at heart
+and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer
+gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience
+we did not at the moment prove.  Our nerves
+responded to it automatically.  We became excited,
+keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our
+backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls.
+
+It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses
+that perforce automatically our experience had to
+conclude it psychical.  We were in air absolutely
+still.  Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and
+turned and bent and struck back, evidently in the
+power of a mighty force.  Across the calm heavens
+the murk of flying atmosphere--I have always maintained
+that if you looked closely enough you could
+SEE the wind--the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris
+fleeing high in the air;--these faintly hinted at intense
+movement rushing down through space.  A roar of
+sound filled the hollow of the sky.  Occasionally it
+intermitted, falling abruptly in volume like the
+mysterious rare hushings of a rapid stream.  Then the
+familiar noises of a summer night became audible
+for the briefest instant,--a horse sneezed, an owl
+hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind. 
+And with a howl the legions of good and evil took
+up their warring.  It was too real, and yet it was not
+reconcilable with the calm of our resting-places.
+
+For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an
+inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not
+fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave
+on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or
+despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience
+direct from the sources of life.  And then
+abruptly we were exhausted, as we should have been
+by too great emotion.  We fell asleep.  The morning
+dawned still and clear, and garnished and set in
+order as though such things had never been.  Only
+our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in the
+direction the mighty elements had departed.
+
+
+
+THE VALLEY
+
+XVI
+
+THE VALLEY
+
+Once upon a time I happened to be staying in
+a hotel room which had originally been part
+of a suite, but which was then cut off from the others
+by only a thin door through which sounds carried
+clearly.  It was about eleven o'clock in the evening. 
+The occupants of that next room came home.  I
+heard the door open and close.  Then the bed
+shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it. 
+There breathed across the silence a deep restful sigh.
+
+"Mary," said a man's voice, "I'm mighty sorry I
+didn't join that Association for Artificial Vacations. 
+They guarantee to get you just as tired and just as
+mad in two days as you could by yourself in two weeks."
+
+We thought of that one morning as we descended
+the Glacier Point Trail in Yosemite.
+
+The contrast we need not have made so sharp. 
+We might have taken the regular wagon-road by
+way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to the
+trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization
+within an hundred yards of the brink.  It, the
+sign, was tourists.  They were male and female, as
+the Lord had made them, but they had improved on
+that idea since.  The women were freckled, hatted
+with alpines, in which edelweiss--artificial, I think
+--flowered in abundance; they sported severely
+plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and
+unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing
+pounds.  The men had on hats just off the sunbonnet
+effect, pleated Norfolk jackets, bloomers ditto ditto to
+the women, stockings whose tops rolled over innumerable
+times to help out the size of that which they
+should have contained, and also enormous square
+boots.  The female children they put in skin-tight
+blue overalls.  The male children they dressed in
+bloomers.  Why this should be I cannot tell you.  All
+carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to
+resemble the pictures of alpenstocks.
+
+They looked business-like, trod with an assured
+air of veterans and a seeming of experience more
+extended than it was possible to pack into any one
+human life.  We stared at them, our eyes bulging
+out.  They painfully and evidently concealed a
+curiosity as to our pack-train.  We wished them good-day,
+in order to see to what language heaven had fitted
+their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment.  They
+inquired the way to something or other--I think
+Sentinel Dome.  We had just arrived, so we did not
+know, but in order to show a friendly spirit we
+blandly pointed out A way.  It may have led to Sentinel
+Dome for all I know.  They departed uttering
+thanks in human speech.
+
+Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently
+staying at the Glacier Point, and so was fresh.  But
+in the course of that morning we descended straight
+down a drop of, is it four thousand feet?  The trail
+was steep and long and without water.  During the
+descent we passed first and last probably twoscore
+of tourists, all on foot.  A good half of them were
+delicate women,--young, middle-aged, a few gray-
+haired and evidently upwards of sixty.  There were
+also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of
+condition.  Probably nine out of ten, counting in the
+entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at
+home where grow street-cars and hansoms, to even
+the mildest sort of exercise.  They had come into the
+Valley, whose floor is over four thousand feet up,
+without the slightest physical preparation for the
+altitude.  They had submitted to the fatigue of a long
+and dusty stage journey.  And then they had merrily
+whooped it up at a gait which would have appalled
+seasoned old stagers like ourselves.  Those blessed
+lunatics seemed positively unhappy unless they
+climbed up to some new point of view every day. 
+I have never seen such a universally tired out,
+frazzled, vitally exhausted, white-faced, nervous
+community in my life as I did during our four days'
+stay in the Valley.  Then probably they go away,
+and take a month to get over it, and have queer
+residual impressions of the trip.  I should like to know
+what those impressions really are.
+
+Not but that Nature has done everything in her
+power to oblige them.  The things I am about to say
+are heresy, but I hold them true.
+
+Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying
+to me as some of the other big box canons, like
+those of the Tehipite, the Kings in its branches, or
+the Kaweah.  I will admit that its waterfalls are
+better.  Otherwise it possesses no features which are
+not to be seen in its sister valleys.  And there is
+this difference.  In Yosemite everything is jumbled
+together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist
+with a linen duster and but three days' time at his
+disposal.  He can turn from the cliff-headland to the
+dome, from the dome to the half dome, to the glacier
+formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it,
+with hardly the necessity of stirring his feet.  Nature
+has put samples of all her works here within reach
+of his cataloguing vision.  Everything is crowded in
+together, like a row of houses in forty-foot lots.  The
+mere things themselves are here in profusion and
+wonder, but the appropriate spacing, the approach,
+the surrounding of subordinate detail which should
+lead in artistic gradation to the supreme feature--
+these things, which are a real and essential part of
+esthetic effect, are lacking utterly for want of room. 
+The place is not natural scenery; it is a junk-shop, a
+storehouse, a sample-room wherein the elements of
+natural scenery are to be viewed.  It is not an arrangement
+of effects in accordance with the usual laws of
+landscape, but an abnormality, a freak of Nature.
+
+All these things are to be found elsewhere.  There
+are cliffs which to the naked eye are as grand as El
+Capitan; domes, half domes, peaks as noble as any
+to be seen in the Valley; sheer drops as breath-taking
+as that from Glacier Point.  But in other places
+each of these is led up to appropriately, and stands
+the central and satisfying feature to which all other
+things look.  Then you journey on from your cliff, or
+whatever it happens to be, until, at just the right
+distance, so that it gains from the presence of its
+neighbor without losing from its proximity, a dome or a
+pinnacle takes to itself the right of prominence.  I
+concede the waterfalls; but in other respects I prefer
+the sister valleys.
+
+That is not to say that one should not visit
+Yosemite; nor that one will be disappointed.  It is grand
+beyond any possible human belief; and no one, even
+a nerve-frazzled tourist, can gaze on it without the
+strongest emotion.  Only it is not so intimately satisfying
+as it should be.  It is a show.  You do not take
+it into your heart.  "Whew!" you cry.  "Isn't that
+a wonder!" then after a moment, "Looks just like
+the photographs.  Up to sample.  Now let's go."
+
+As we descended the trail, we and the tourists
+aroused in each other a mutual interest.  One husband
+was trying to encourage his young and handsome wife
+to go on.  She was beautifully dressed for the part
+in a marvelous, becoming costume of whipcord--
+short skirt, high laced elkskin boots and the rest of it;
+but in all her magnificence she had sat down on the
+ground, her back to the cliff, her legs across the trail,
+and was so tired out that she could hardly muster
+interest enough to pull them in out of the way of
+our horses' hoofs.  The man inquired anxiously of
+us how far it was to the top.  Now it was a long
+distance to the top, but a longer to the bottom, so we
+lied a lie that I am sure was immediately forgiven
+us, and told them it was only a short climb.  I should
+have offered them the use of Bullet, but Bullet had
+come far enough, and this was only one of a dozen
+such cases.  In marked contrast was a jolly white-
+haired clergyman of the bishop type who climbed
+vigorously and hailed us with a shout.
+
+The horses were decidedly unaccustomed to any
+such sights, and we sometimes had our hands full
+getting them by on the narrow way.  The trail was
+safe enough, but it did have an edge, and that edge
+jumped pretty straight off.  It was interesting to
+observe how the tourists acted.  Some of them were
+perfect fools, and we had more trouble with them
+than we did with the horses.  They could not seem
+to get the notion into their heads that all we wanted
+them to do was to get on the inside and stand still. 
+About half of them were terrified to death, so that
+at the crucial moment, just as a horse was passing
+them, they had little fluttering panics that called the
+beast's attention.  Most of the remainder tried to be
+bold and help.  They reached out the hand of 
+assistance toward the halter rope; the astonished animal
+promptly snorted, tried to turn around, cannoned
+against the next in line.  Then there was a mix-up. 
+Two tall clean-cut well-bred looking girls of our slim
+patrician type offered us material assistance.  They
+seemed to understand horses, and got out of the way
+in the proper manner, did just the right thing, and
+made sensible suggestions.  I offer them my homage.
+
+They spoke to us as though they had penetrated
+the disguise of long travel, and could see we were
+not necessarily members of Burt Alvord's gang. 
+This phase too of our descent became increasingly
+interesting to us, a species of gauge by which we
+measured the perceptions of those we encountered. 
+Most did not speak to us at all.  Others responded
+to our greetings with a reserve in which was more
+than a tinge of distrust.  Still others patronized us. 
+A very few overlooked our faded flannel shirts, our
+soiled trousers, our floppy old hats with their
+rattlesnake bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to
+respond to us heartily.  Them in return we generally
+perceived to belong to our totem.
+
+We found the floor of the Valley well sprinkled
+with campers.  They had pitched all kinds of tents;
+built all kinds of fancy permanent conveniences;
+erected all kinds of banners and signs advertising
+their identity, and were generally having a nice, easy,
+healthful, jolly kind of a time up there in the
+mountains.  Their outfits they had either brought in with
+their own wagons, or had had freighted.  The store
+near the bend of the Merced supplied all their needs. 
+It was truly a pleasant sight to see so many people
+enjoying themselves, for they were mostly those in
+moderate circumstances to whom a trip on tourist
+lines would be impossible.  We saw bakers' and
+grocers' and butchers' wagons that had been pressed
+into service.  A man, his wife, and little baby had
+come in an ordinary buggy, the one horse of which,
+led by the man, carried the woman and baby to the
+various points of interest.
+
+We reported to the official in charge, were allotted
+a camping and grazing place, and proceeded to make
+ourselves at home.
+
+During the next two days we rode comfortably
+here and there and looked at things.  The things
+could not be spoiled, but their effect was very
+materially marred by the swarms of tourists.  Sometimes
+they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes
+in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so
+far to see; sometimes they were detestable and left
+their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant
+names where nobody could ever have any object in
+reading them; sometimes they were pathetic and
+helpless and had to have assistance; sometimes
+they were amusing; hardly ever did they seem
+entirely human.  I wonder what there is about the
+traveling public that seems so to set it apart, to make
+of it at least a sub-species of mankind?
+
+Among other things, we were vastly interested in
+the guides.  They were typical of this sort of thing. 
+Each morning one of these men took a pleasantly
+awe-stricken band of tourists out, led them around in
+the brush awhile, and brought them back in time for
+lunch.  They wore broad hats and leather bands
+and exotic raiment and fierce expressions, and looked
+dark and mysterious and extra-competent over the
+most trivial of difficulties.
+
+Nothing could be more instructive than to see two
+or three of these imitation bad men starting out in
+the morning to "guide" a flock, say to Nevada Falls. 
+The tourists, being about to mount, have outdone
+themselves in weird and awesome clothes--especially
+the women.  Nine out of ten wear their stirrups
+too short, so their knees are hunched up.  One guide
+rides at the head--great deal of silver spur, clanking
+chain, and the rest of it.  Another rides in the rear. 
+The third rides up and down the line, very gruff,
+very preoccupied, very careworn over the dangers
+of the way.  The cavalcade moves.  It proceeds for
+about a mile.  There arise sudden cries, great but
+subdued excitement.  The leader stops, raising a
+commanding hand.  Guide number three gallops up. 
+There is a consultation.  The cinch-strap of the brindle
+shave-tail is taken up two inches.  A catastrophe
+has been averted.  The noble three look volumes of
+relief.  The cavalcade moves again.
+
+Now the trail rises.  It is a nice, safe, easy trail. 
+But to the tourists it is made terrible.  The noble
+three see to that.  They pass more dangers by the
+exercise of superhuman skill than you or I could
+discover in a summer's close search.  The joke of the
+matter is that those forty-odd saddle-animals have
+been over that trail so many times that one would
+have difficulty in heading them off from it once they
+got started.
+
+Very much the same criticism would hold as to
+the popular notion of the Yosemite stage-drivers. 
+They drive well, and seem efficient men.  But their
+wonderful reputation would have to be upheld on
+rougher roads than those into the Valley.  The tourist
+is, of course, encouraged to believe that he is doing
+the hair-breadth escape; but in reality, as mountain
+travel goes, the Yosemite stage-road is very mild.
+
+This that I have been saying is not by way of
+depreciation.  But it seems to me that the Valley is
+wonderful enough to stand by itself in men's appreciation
+without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism
+in regard to imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of
+playing wilderness where no wilderness exists.
+
+As we went out, this time by the Chinquapin
+wagon-road, we met one stage-load after another of
+tourists coming in.  They had not yet donned the
+outlandish attire they believe proper to the occasion,
+and so showed for what they were,--prosperous,
+well-bred, well-dressed travelers.  In contrast to their
+smartness, the brilliancy of new-painted stages, the
+dash of the horses maintained by the Yosemite Stage
+Company, our own dusty travel-worn outfit of mountain
+ponies, our own rough clothes patched and
+faded, our sheath-knives and firearms seemed out of
+place and curious, as though a knight in medieval
+armor were to ride down Broadway.
+
+I do not know how many stages there were.  We
+turned our pack-horses out for them all, dashing back
+and forth along the line, coercing the diabolical
+Dinkey.  The road was too smooth.  There were no
+obstructions to surmount; no dangers to avert; no
+difficulties to avoid.  We could not get into trouble,
+but proceeded as on a county turnpike.  Too tame,
+too civilized, too representative of the tourist
+element, it ended by getting on our nerves.  The
+wilderness seemed to have left us forever.  Never would
+we get back to our own again.  After a long time
+Wes, leading, turned into our old trail branching off
+to the high country.  Hardly had we traveled a half
+mile before we heard from the advance guard a crash
+and a shout.
+
+"What is it, Wes?" we yelled.
+
+In a moment the reply came,--
+
+"Lily's fallen down again,--thank God!"
+
+We understood what he meant.  By this we knew
+that the tourist zone was crossed, that we had left
+the show country, and were once more in the open.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE MAIN CREST
+
+The traveler in the High Sierras generally keeps
+to the west of the main crest.  Sometimes he
+approaches fairly to the foot of the last slope;
+sometimes he angles away and away even down to what
+finally seems to him a lower country,--to the pine
+mountains of only five or six thousand feet.  But
+always to the left or right of him, according to whether
+he travels south or north, runs the rampart of the
+system, sometimes glittering with snow, sometimes
+formidable and rugged with splinters and spires of
+granite.  He crosses spurs and tributary ranges as high,
+as rugged, as snow-clad as these.  They do not quite
+satisfy him.  Over beyond he thinks he ought to see
+something great,--some wide outlook, some space
+bluer than his trail can offer him.  One day or
+another he clamps his decision, and so turns aside for
+the simple and only purpose of standing on the top
+of the world.
+
+We were bitten by that idea while crossing the
+Granite Basin.  The latter is some ten thousand feet
+in the air, a cup of rock five or six miles across,
+surrounded by mountains much higher than itself.  That
+would have been sufficient for most moods, but, 
+resting on the edge of a pass ten thousand six hundred
+feet high, we concluded that we surely would have
+to look over into Nevada.
+
+We got out the map.  It became evident, after a
+little study, that by descending six thousand feet into
+a box canon, proceeding in it a few miles, and
+promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily
+up the long narrow course of another box canon for
+about a day and a half's journey, and then climbing
+out of that to a high ridge country with little flat
+valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow
+eleven thousand feet up.  There we could camp. 
+The mountain opposite was thirteen thousand three
+hundred and twenty feet, so the climb from the
+lake became merely a matter of computation.  This,
+we figured, would take us just a week, which may
+seem a considerable time to sacrifice to the gratification
+of a whim.  But such a glorious whim!
+
+We descended the great box canon, and scaled its
+upper end, following near the voices of a cascade. 
+Cliffs thousands of feet high hemmed us in.  At the
+very top of them strange crags leaned out looking
+down on us in the abyss.  From a projection a colossal
+sphinx gazed solemnly across at a dome as smooth
+and symmetrical as, but vastly larger than, St. Peter's
+at Rome.
+
+The trail labored up to the brink of the cascade. 
+At once we entered a long narrow aisle between regular
+palisaded cliffs.
+
+The formation was exceedingly regular.  At the
+top the precipice fell sheer for a thousand feet or so;
+then the steep slant of the debris, like buttresses,
+down almost to the bed of the river.  The lower parts
+of the buttresses were clothed with heavy chaparral,
+which, nearer moisture, developed into cottonwoods,
+alders, tangled vines, flowers, rank grasses.  And away
+on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the sky,
+were pines, belittled by distance, solemn and aloof,
+like Indian warriors wrapped in their blankets watching
+from an eminence the passage of a hostile force.
+
+We caught rainbow trout in the dashing white
+torrent of the river.  We followed the trail through
+delicious thickets redolent with perfume; over the
+roughest granite slides, along still dark aisles of forest
+groves, between the clefts of boulders so monstrous
+as almost to seem an insult to the credulity.  Among
+the chaparral, on the slope of the buttress across the
+river, we made out a bear feeding.  Wes and I sat
+ten minutes waiting for him to show sufficiently
+for a chance.  Then we took a shot at about four
+hundred yards, and hit him somewhere so he angled
+down the hill furiously.  We left the Tenderfoot to
+watch that he did not come out of the big thicket of
+the river bottom where last we had seen him, while
+we scrambled upstream nearly a mile looking for a
+way across.  Then we trailed him by the blood, each
+step one of suspense, until we fairly had to crawl in
+after him; and shot him five times more, three in the
+head, before he gave up not six feet from us; and
+shouted gloriously and skinned that bear.  But the
+meat was badly bloodshot, for there were three bullets
+in the head, two in the chest and shoulders, one
+through the paunch, and one in the hind quarters.
+
+Since we were much in want of meat, this grieved
+us.  But that noon while we ate, the horses ran down
+toward us, and wheeled, as though in cavalry formation,
+looking toward the hill and snorting.  So I put
+down my tin plate gently, and took up my rifle, and
+without rising shot that bear through the back of the
+neck.  We took his skin, and also his hind quarters,
+and went on.
+
+By the third day from Granite Basin we reached
+the end of the long narrow canon with the high cliffs
+and the dark pine-trees and the very blue sky. 
+Therefore we turned sharp to the left and climbed
+laboriously until we had come up into the land of
+big boulders, strange spare twisted little trees, and
+the singing of the great wind.
+
+The country here was mainly of granite.  It out-
+cropped in dikes, it slid down the slopes in aprons,
+it strewed the prospect in boulders and blocks, it
+seamed the hollows with knife-ridges.  Soil gave the
+impression of having been laid on top; you divined
+the granite beneath it, and not so very far beneath it,
+either.  A fine hair-grass grew close to this soil, as
+though to produce as many blades as possible in the
+limited area.
+
+But strangest of all were the little thick twisted
+trees with the rich shaded umber color of their trunks. 
+They occurred rarely, but still in sufficient regularity
+to lend the impression of a scattered grove-
+cohesiveness.  Their limbs were sturdy and reaching
+fantastically.  On each trunk the colors ran in streaks,
+patches, and gradations from a sulphur yellow,
+through browns and red-orange, to a rich red-umber. 
+They were like the earth-dwarfs of German legend,
+come out to view the roof of their workshop in the
+interior of the hill; or, more subtly, like some of the
+more fantastic engravings of Gustave Dore.
+
+We camped that night at a lake whose banks
+were pebbled in the manner of an artificial pond, and
+whose setting was a thin meadow of the fine hair-
+grass, for the grazing of which the horses had to bare
+their teeth.  All about, the granite mountains rose. 
+The timber-line, even of the rare shrub-like gnome-
+trees, ceased here.  Above us was nothing whatever
+but granite rock, snow, and the sky.
+
+It was just before dusk, and in the lake the fish
+were jumping eagerly.  They took the fly well, and
+before the fire was alight we had caught three for
+supper.  When I say we caught but three, you will
+understand that they were of good size.  Firewood
+was scarce, but we dragged in enough by means of
+Old Slob and a riata to build us a good fire.  And
+we needed it, for the cold descended on us with the
+sharpness and vigor of eleven thousand feet.
+
+For such an altitude the spot was ideal.  The lake
+just below us was full of fish.  A little stream ran
+from it by our very elbows.  The slight elevation was
+level, and covered with enough soil to offer a fairly
+good substructure for our beds.  The flat in which
+was the lake reached on up narrower and narrower to
+the foot of the last slope, furnishing for the horses an
+admirable natural corral about a mile long.  And the
+view was magnificent.
+
+First of all there were the mountains above us,
+towering grandly serene against the sky of morning;
+then all about us the tumultuous slabs and boulders
+and blocks of granite among which dare-devil and
+hardy little trees clung to a footing as though in
+defiance of some great force exerted against them; then
+below us a sheer drop, into which our brook plunged,
+with its suggestion of depths; and finally beyond those 
+depths the giant peaks of the highest Sierras rising 
+lofty as the sky, shrouded in a calm and stately peace.
+
+Next day the Tenderfoot and I climbed to the
+top.  Wes decided at the last minute that he hadn't
+lost any mountains, and would prefer to fish.
+
+The ascent was accompanied by much breathlessness
+and a heavy pounding of our hearts, so that we
+were forced to stop every twenty feet to recover our
+physical balance.  Each step upward dragged at our
+feet like a leaden weight.  Yet once we were on the
+level, or once we ceased our very real exertions for a
+second or so, the difficulty left us, and we breathed
+as easily as in the lower altitudes.
+
+The air itself was of a quality impossible to
+describe to you unless you have traveled in the high
+countries.  I know it is trite to say that it had the
+exhilaration of wine, yet I can find no better simile. 
+We shouted and whooped and breathed deep and
+wanted to do things.
+
+The immediate surroundings of that mountain
+peak were absolutely barren and absolutely still. 
+How it was accomplished so high up I do not know,
+but the entire structure on which we moved--I cannot
+say walked--was composed of huge granite
+slabs.  Sometimes these were laid side by side like
+exaggerated paving flags; but oftener they were up-
+ended, piled in a confusion over which we had
+precariously to scramble.  And the silence.  It was so
+still that the very ringing in our ears came to a
+prominence absurd and almost terrifying.  The wind
+swept by noiseless, because it had nothing movable to
+startle into noise.  The solid eternal granite lay heavy
+in its statics across the possibility of even a whisper. 
+The blue vault of heaven seemed emptied of sound.
+
+But the wind did stream by unceasingly, weird
+in the unaccustomedness of its silence.  And the sky
+was blue as a turquoise, and the sun burned fiercely,
+and the air was cold as the water of a mountain spring.
+
+We stretched ourselves behind a slab of granite,
+and ate the luncheon we had brought, cold venison
+steak and bread.  By and by a marvelous thing
+happened.  A flash of wings sparkled in the air, a brave
+little voice challenged us cheerily, a pert tiny rock-
+wren flirted his tail and darted his wings and wanted
+to know what we were thinking of anyway to enter
+his especial territory.  And shortly from nowhere
+appeared two Canada Jays, silent as the wind itself,
+hoping for a share in our meal.  Then the Tenderfoot
+discovered in a niche some strange, hardy alpine
+flowers.  So we established a connection, through these
+wondrous brave children of the great mother, with
+the world of living things.
+
+After we had eaten, which was the very first thing
+we did, we walked to the edge of the main crest and
+looked over.  That edge went straight down.  I do
+not know how far, except that even in contemplation
+we entirely lost our breaths, before we had fallen half
+way to the bottom.  Then intervened a ledge, and in
+the ledge was a round glacier lake of the very deepest
+and richest ultramarine you can find among your
+paint-tubes, and on the lake floated cakes of
+dazzling white ice.  That was enough for the moment.
+
+Next we leaped at one bound direct down to some
+brown hazy liquid shot with the tenderest filaments
+of white.  After analysis we discovered the hazy
+brown liquid to be the earth of the plains, and the
+filaments of white to be roads.  Thus instructed we
+made out specks which were towns.  That was all. 
+
+The rest was too insignificant to classify without the
+aid of a microscope.
+
+And afterwards, across those plains, oh, many,
+many leagues, were the Inyo and Panamit mountains,
+and beyond them Nevada and Arizona, and
+blue mountains, and bluer, and still bluer rising,
+rising, rising higher and higher until at the level of the
+eye they blended with the heavens and were lost
+somewhere away out beyond the edge of the world.
+
+We said nothing, but looked for a long time. 
+Then we turned inland to the wonderful great titans
+of mountains clear-cut in the crystalline air.  Never
+was such air.  Crystalline is the only word which will
+describe it, for almost it seemed that it would ring
+clearly when struck, so sparkling and delicate and
+fragile was it.  The crags and fissures across the
+way--two miles across the way--were revealed
+through it as through some medium whose transparence
+was absolute.  They challenged the eye, stereoscopic
+in their relief.  Were it not for the belittling
+effects of the distance, we felt that we might count
+the frost seams or the glacial scorings on every granite
+apron.  Far below we saw the irregular outline
+of our lake.  It looked like a pond a few hundred
+feet down.  Then we made out a pin-point of white
+moving leisurely near its border.  After a while we
+realized that the pin-point of white was one of
+our pack-horses, and immediately the flat little scene
+shot backwards as though moved from behind and
+acknowledged its due number of miles.  The miniature
+crags at its back became gigantic; the peaks
+beyond grew thousands of feet in the establishment
+of a proportion which the lack of "atmosphere" had
+denied.  We never succeeded in getting adequate
+photographs.  As well take pictures of any eroded
+little arroyo or granite canon.  Relative sizes do not
+exist, unless pointed out.
+
+"See that speck there?" we explain.  "That's a
+big pine-tree.  So by that you can see how tremendous
+those cliffs really are."
+
+And our guest looks incredulously at the speck.
+
+There was snow, of course, lying cold in the hot
+sun.  This phenomenon always impresses a man when
+first he sees it.  Often I have ridden with my sleeves
+rolled up and the front of my shirt open, over drifts
+whose edges, even, dripped no water.  The direct
+rays seem to have absolutely no effect.  A scientific
+explanation I have never heard expressed; but I
+suppose the cold nights freeze the drifts and pack
+them so hard that the short noon heat cannot penetrate
+their density.  I may be quite wrong as to my
+reason, but I am entirely correct as to my fact.
+
+Another curious thing is that we met our mosquitoes
+only rarely below the snow-line.  The camping
+in the Sierras is ideal for lack of these pests.  They
+never bite hard nor stay long even when found.  But
+just as sure as we approached snow, then we renewed
+acquaintance with our old friends of the north woods. 
+
+It is analogous to the fact that the farther north you
+go into the fur countries, the more abundant they become.
+
+By and by it was time to descend.  The camp lay
+directly below us.  We decided to go to it straight,
+and so stepped off on an impossibly steep slope
+covered, not with the great boulders and granite blocks,
+but with a fine loose shale.  At every stride we
+stepped ten feet and slid five.  It was gloriously near
+to flying.  Leaning far back, our arms spread wide to
+keep our balance, spying alertly far ahead as to where
+we were going to land, utterly unable to check until
+we encountered a half-buried ledge of some sort, and
+shouting wildly at every plunge, we fairly shot
+downhill.  The floor of our valley rose to us as the earth
+to a descending balloon.  In three quarters of an hour
+we had reached the first flat.
+
+There we halted to puzzle over the trail of a mountain
+lion clearly printed on the soft ground.  What
+had the great cat been doing away up there above
+the hunting country, above cover, above everything
+that would appeal to a well-regulated cat of any size
+whatsoever?  We theorized at length, but gave it
+up finally, and went on.  Then a familiar perfume
+rose to our nostrils.  We plucked curiously at a bed
+of catnip and wondered whether the animal had
+journeyed so far to enjoy what is always such a treat to
+her domestic sisters.
+
+It was nearly dark when we reached camp.  We
+found Wes contentedly scraping away at the bearskins.
+
+"Hello," said he, looking up with a grin.  "Hello,
+you dam fools!  I'VE been having a good time.  I've
+been fishing."
+
+
+
+THE GIANT FOREST
+
+XVIII
+
+THE GIANT FOREST
+
+Every one is familiar, at least by reputation and
+photograph, with the Big Trees of California. 
+All have seen pictures of stage-coaches driving in
+passageways cut through the bodies of the trunks;
+of troops of cavalry ridden on the prostrate trees.  No
+one but has heard of the dancing-floor or the dinner-
+table cut from a single cross-section; and probably
+few but have seen some of the fibrous bark of
+unbelievable thickness.  The Mariposa, Calaveras, and
+Santa Cruz groves have become household names.
+
+The public at large, I imagine, meaning by that
+you and me and our neighbors, harbor an idea that
+the Big Tree occurs only as a remnant, in scattered
+little groves carefully fenced and piously visited by
+the tourist.  What would we have said to the information
+that in the very heart of the Sierras there grows
+a thriving forest of these great trees; that it takes
+over a day to ride throughout that forest; and that
+it comprises probably over five thousand specimens?
+
+Yet such is the case.  On the ridges and high
+plateaus north of the Kaweah River is the forest I
+describe; and of that forest the trees grow from fifteen
+to twenty-six feet in diameter.  Do you know what
+that means?  Get up from your chair and pace off
+the room you are in.  If it is a very big room, its
+longest dimension would just about contain one of the
+bigger trunks.  Try to imagine a tree like that.
+
+It must be a columnar tree straight and true as the
+supports of a Greek facade.  The least deviation from
+the perpendicular of such a mass would cause it to
+fall.  The limbs are sturdy like the arms of Hercules,
+and grow out from the main trunk direct instead of
+dividing and leading that main trunk to themselves,
+as is the case with other trees.  The column rises with
+a true taper to its full height; then is finished with
+the conical effect of the top of a monument. 
+Strangely enough the frond is exceedingly fine, and
+the cones small.
+
+When first you catch sight of a Sequoia, it does
+not impress you particularly except as a very fine
+tree.  Its proportions are so perfect that its effect is
+rather to belittle its neighbors than to show in its true
+magnitude.  Then, gradually, as your experience
+takes cognizance of surroundings,--the size of a
+sugar-pine, of a boulder, of a stream flowing near,--
+the giant swells and swells before your very vision
+until he seems at the last even greater than the mere
+statistics of his inches had led you to believe.  And
+after that first surprise over finding the Sequoia
+something not monstrous but beautiful in proportion has
+given place to the full realization of what you are
+beholding, you will always wonder why no one who
+has seen has ever given any one who has not seen an
+adequate idea of these magnificent old trees.
+
+Perhaps the most insistent note, besides that of
+mere size and dignity, is of absolute stillness.  These
+trees do not sway to the wind, their trunks are
+constructed to stand solid.  Their branches do not bend
+and murmur, for they too are rigid in fiber.  Their
+fine thread-like needles may catch the breeze's whisper,
+may draw together and apart for the exchange
+of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if
+so, you and I are too far below to distinguish it. 
+All about, the other forest growths may be rustling
+and bowing and singing with the voices of the air;
+the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. 
+It is as though he dreamed, too wrapt in still great
+thoughts of his youth, when the earth itself was
+young, to share the worldlier joys of his neighbor, to
+be aware of them, even himself to breathe deeply. 
+You feel in the presence of these trees as you would
+feel in the presence of a kindly and benignant sage,
+too occupied with larger things to enter fully into
+your little affairs, but well disposed in the wisdom
+of clear spiritual insight.
+
+This combination of dignity, immobility, and a
+certain serene detachment has on me very much the
+same effect as does a mountain against the sky.  It is
+quite unlike the impression made by any other tree,
+however large, and is lovable.
+
+We entered the Giant Forest by a trail that
+climbed.  Always we entered desirable places by
+trails that climbed or dropped.  Our access to
+paradise was never easy.  About halfway up we met five
+pack-mules and two men coming down.  For some
+reason, unknown, I suspect, even to the god of
+chance, our animals behaved themselves and walked
+straight ahead in a beautiful dignity, while those
+weak-minded mules scattered and bucked and scraped
+under trees and dragged back on their halters when
+caught.  The two men cast on us malevolent glances
+as often as they were able, but spent most of their
+time swearing and running about.  We helped them
+once or twice by heading off, but were too thankfully
+engaged in treading lightly over our own phenomenal
+peace to pay much attention.  Long after
+we had gone on, we caught bursts of rumpus ascending
+from below.  Shortly we came to a comparatively
+level country, and a little meadow, and a rough sign
+which read
+
+
+"Feed 20C a night."
+
+
+Just beyond this extortion was the Giant Forest.
+
+We entered it toward the close of the afternoon,
+and rode on after our wonted time looking for feed
+at less than twenty cents a night.  The great trunks,
+fluted like marble columns, blackened against the
+western sky.  As they grew huger, we seemed to
+shrink, until we moved fearful as prehistoric man
+must have moved among the forces over which he
+had no control.  We discovered our feed in a narrow
+"stringer" a few miles on.  That night, we, pigmies,
+slept in the setting before which should have stridden
+the colossi of another age.  Perhaps eventually, in
+spite of its magnificence and wonder, we were a little
+glad to leave the Giant Forest.  It held us too rigidly
+to a spiritual standard of which our normal lives were
+incapable; it insisted on a loftiness of soul, a dignity,
+an aloofness from the ordinary affairs of life, the
+ordinary occupations of thought hardly compatible with
+the powers of any creature less noble, less aged, less
+wise in the passing of centuries than itself.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+ON COWBOYS
+
+Your cowboy is a species variously subdivided. 
+If you happen to be traveled as to the wild
+countries, you will be able to recognize whence
+your chance acquaintance hails by the kind of saddle
+he rides, and the rigging of it; by the kind of rope
+he throws, and the method of the throwing; by the
+shape of hat he wears; by his twist of speech; even
+by the very manner of his riding.  Your California
+"vaquero" from the Coast Ranges is as unlike as
+possible to your Texas cowman, and both differ from
+the Wyoming or South Dakota article.  I should be
+puzzled to define exactly the habitat of the "typical"
+cowboy.  No matter where you go, you will find
+your individual acquaintance varying from the type
+in respect to some of the minor details.
+
+Certain characteristics run through the whole tribe,
+however.  Of these some are so well known or have
+been so adequately done elsewhere that it hardly
+seems wise to elaborate on them here.  Let us assume
+that you and I know what sort of human beings cowboys
+are,--with all their taciturnity, their surface
+gravity, their keen sense of humor, their courage,
+their kindness, their freedom, their lawlessness, their
+foulness of mouth, and their supreme skill in the
+handling of horses and cattle.  I shall try to tell you
+nothing of all that.
+
+If one thinks down doggedly to the last analysis,
+he will find that the basic reason for the differences
+between a cowboy and other men rests finally on
+an individual liberty, a freedom from restraint either
+of society or convention, a lawlessness, an accepting
+of his own standard alone.  He is absolutely self-
+poised and sufficient; and that self-poise and that
+sufficiency he takes pains to assure first of all.  After
+their assurance he is willing to enter into human
+relations.  His attitude toward everything in life is, not
+suspicious, but watchful.  He is "gathered together,"
+his elbows at his side.
+
+This evidences itself most strikingly in his terseness
+of speech.  A man dependent on himself naturally
+does not give himself away to the first comer. 
+He is more interested in finding out what the other
+fellow is than in exploiting his own importance.  A
+man who does much promiscuous talking he is likely
+to despise, arguing that man incautious, hence weak.
+
+Yet when he does talk, he talks to the point and
+with a vivid and direct picturesqueness of phrase
+which is as refreshing as it is unexpected.  The
+delightful remodeling of the English language in Mr.
+Alfred Lewis's "Wolfville" is exaggerated only in
+quantity, not in quality.  No cowboy talks habitually
+in quite as original a manner as Mr. Lewis's Old
+Cattleman; but I have no doubt that in time he
+would be heard to say all the good things in that
+volume.  I myself have note-books full of just such
+gorgeous language, some of the best of which I have
+used elsewhere, and so will not repeat here.[4]
+
+
+[4] See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail; 
+and TheRawhide.
+
+
+This vividness manifests itself quite as often in the
+selection of the apt word as in the construction of
+elaborate phrases with a half-humorous intention.  A
+cowboy once told me of the arrival of a tramp by
+saying, "He SIFTED into camp."  Could any verb be
+more expressive?  Does not it convey exactly the
+lazy, careless, out-at-heels shuffling gait of the hobo? 
+Another in the course of description told of a saloon
+scene, "They all BELLIED UP TO the bar."  Again, a
+range cook, objecting to purposeless idling about his
+fire, shouted:  "If you fellows come MOPING around
+here any more, I'LL SURE MAKE YOU HARD TO CATCH!" 
+"Fish in that pond, son?  Why, there's some fish
+in there big enough to rope," another advised me. 
+"I quit shoveling," one explained the story of his
+life, "because I couldn't see nothing ahead of
+shoveling but dirt."  The same man described ploughing
+as, "Looking at a mule's tail all day."  And one of
+the most succinct epitomes of the motifs of fiction
+was offered by an old fellow who looked over my
+shoulder as I was reading a novel.  "Well, son," said
+he, "what they doing now, KISSING OR KILLING?"
+
+Nor are the complete phrases behind in aptness.  I
+have space for only a few examples, but they will
+illustrate what I mean.  Speaking of a companion
+who was "putting on too much dog," I was informed,
+"He walks like a man with a new suit of WOODEN
+UNDERWEAR!"  Or again, in answer to my inquiry as to a
+mutual acquaintance, "Jim?  Oh, poor old Jim!  For
+the last week or so he's been nothing but an
+insignificant atom of humanity hitched to a boil."
+
+But to observe the riot of imagination turned loose
+with the bridle off, you must assist at a burst of anger
+on the part of one of these men.  It is mostly
+unprintable, but you will get an entirely new idea of
+what profanity means.  Also you will come to the
+conclusion that you, with your trifling DAMNS, and
+the like, have been a very good boy indeed.  The
+remotest, most obscure, and unheard of conceptions
+are dragged forth from earth, heaven, and hell, and
+linked together in a sequence so original, so gaudy,
+and so utterly blasphemous, that you gasp and are
+stricken with the most devoted admiration.  It is genius.
+
+Of course I can give you no idea here of what
+these truly magnificent oaths are like.  It is a pity,
+for it would liberalize your education.  Occasionally,
+like a trickle of clear water into an alkali torrent, a
+straight English sentence will drop into the flood.  It
+is refreshing by contrast, but weak.
+
+"If your brains were all made of dynamite, you
+couldn't blow the top of your head off."
+
+"I wouldn't speak to him if I met him in hell
+carrying a lump of ice in his hand."
+
+"That little horse'll throw you so high the black-
+birds will build nests in your hair before you come
+down."
+
+These are ingenious and amusing, but need the
+blazing settings from which I have ravished them to
+give them their due force.
+
+In Arizona a number of us were sitting around
+the feeble camp-fire the desert scarcity of fuel
+permits, smoking our pipes.  We were all contemplative
+and comfortably silent with the exception of one
+very youthful person who had a lot to say.  It was
+mainly about himself.  After he had bragged awhile
+without molestation, one of the older cow-punchers
+grew very tired of it.  He removed his pipe deliberately,
+and spat in the fire.
+
+"Say, son," he drawled, "if you want to say
+something big, why don't you say `elephant'?"
+
+The young fellow subsided.  We went on smoking
+our pipes.
+
+Down near the Chiracahua Range in southeastern
+Arizona, there is a butte, and halfway up that butte
+is a cave, and in front of that cave is a ramshackle
+porch-roof or shed.  This latter makes the cave into
+a dwelling-house.  It is inhabited by an old "alkali"
+and half a dozen bear dogs.  I sat with the old fellow
+one day for nearly an hour.  It was a sociable visit,
+but economical of the English language.  He made
+one remark, outside our initial greeting.  It was
+enough, for in terseness, accuracy, and compression,
+I have never heard a better or more comprehensive
+description of the arid countries.
+
+"Son," said he, "in this country thar is more cows
+and less butter, more rivers and less water, and you
+kin see farther and see less than in any other country
+in the world."
+
+Now this peculiar directness of phrase means but
+one thing,--freedom from the influence of convention. 
+The cowboy respects neither the dictionary nor
+usage.  He employs his words in the manner that
+best suits him, and arranges them in the sequence
+that best expresses his idea, untrammeled by tradition. 
+It is a phase of the same lawlessness, the same
+reliance on self, that makes for his taciturnity and
+watchfulness.
+
+In essence, his dress is an adaptation to the
+necessities of his calling; as a matter of fact, it is an
+elaboration on that.  The broad heavy felt hat he
+has found by experience to be more effective in turning
+heat than a lighter straw; he further runs to
+variety in the shape of the crown and in the nature
+of the band.  He wears a silk handkerchief about his
+neck to turn the sun and keep out the dust, but
+indulges in astonishing gaudiness of color.  His gauntlets
+save his hands from the rope; he adds a fringe
+and a silver star.  The heavy wide "chaps" of leather
+about his legs are necessary to him when he is riding
+fast through brush; he indulges in such frivolities
+as stamped leather, angora hair, and the like.  High
+heels to his boots prevent his foot from slipping
+through his wide stirrup, and are useful to dig into
+the ground when he is roping in the corral.  Even
+his six-shooter is more a tool of his trade than a
+weapon of defense.  With it he frightens cattle from
+the heavy brush; he slaughters old or diseased steers;
+he "turns the herd" in a stampede or when rounding
+it in; and especially is it handy and loose to his
+hip in case his horse should fall and commence to
+drag him.
+
+So the details of his appearance spring from the
+practical, but in the wearing of them and the using
+of them he shows again that fine disregard for the
+way other people do it or think it.
+
+Now in civilization you and I entertain a double
+respect for firearms and the law.  Firearms are
+dangerous, and it is against the law to use them
+promiscuously.  If we shoot them off in unexpected places,
+we first of all alarm unduly our families and neighbors,
+and in due course attract the notice of the police. 
+By the time we are grown up we look on shooting
+a revolver as something to be accomplished after
+an especial trip for the purpose.
+
+But to the cowboy shooting a gun is merely what
+lighting a match would be to us.  We take reasonable
+care not to scratch that match on the wall nor to
+throw it where it will do harm.  Likewise the 
+cowboy takes reasonable care that his bullets do not land
+in some one's anatomy nor in too expensive bric-a-
+brac.  Otherwise any time or place will do.
+
+The picture comes to me of a bunk-house on an
+Arizona range.  The time was evening.  A half-dozen
+cowboys were sprawled out on the beds smoking,
+and three more were playing poker with the Chinese
+cook.  A misguided rat darted out from under one
+of the beds and made for the empty fireplace.  He
+finished his journey in smoke.  Then the four who
+had shot slipped their guns back into their holsters
+and resumed their cigarettes and drawling low-toned
+conversation.
+
+On another occasion I stopped for noon at the
+Circle I ranch.  While waiting for dinner, I lay on
+my back in the bunk-room and counted three hundred
+and sixty-two bullet-holes in the ceiling.  They
+came to be there because the festive cowboys used to
+while away the time while lying as I was lying, waiting
+for supper, in shooting the flies that crawled about
+the plaster.
+
+This beautiful familiarity with the pistol as a parlor
+toy accounts in great part for a cowboy's propensity
+to "shoot up the town" and his indignation
+when arrested therefor.
+
+The average cowboy is only a fair target-shot with
+the revolver.  But he is chain lightning at getting
+his gun off in a hurry.  There are exceptions to this,
+however, especially among the older men.  Some can 
+handle the Colts 45 and its heavy recoil with almost 
+uncanny accuracy.  I have seen individuals who could 
+from their saddles nip lizards darting across the road; 
+and one who was able to perforate twice before it hit 
+the ground a tomato-can tossed into the air.  The 
+cowboy is prejudiced against the double-action gun, 
+for some reason or other.  He manipulates his 
+single-action weapon fast enough, however.
+
+His sense of humor takes the same unexpected
+slants, not because his mental processes differ from
+those of other men, but because he is unshackled by
+the subtle and unnoticed nothingnesses of precedent
+which deflect our action toward the common
+uniformity of our neighbors.  It must be confessed that
+his sense of humor possesses also a certain robustness.
+
+The J. H. outfit had been engaged for ten days in
+busting broncos.  This the Chinese cook, Sang, a
+newcomer in the territory, found vastly amusing. 
+He liked to throw the ropes off the prostrate broncos,
+when all was ready; to slap them on the flanks; to
+yell shrill Chinese yells; and to dance in celestial
+delight when the terrified animal arose and scattered
+out of there.  But one day the range men drove up
+a little bunch of full-grown cattle that had been
+bought from a smaller owner.  It was necessary to
+change the brands.  Therefore a little fire was built,
+the stamp-brand put in to heat, and two of the men
+on horseback caught a cow by the horns and one
+hind leg, and promptly upset her.  The old brand
+was obliterated, the new one burnt in.  This irritated
+the cow.  Promptly the branding-men, who were of
+course afoot, climbed to the top of the corral to be
+out of the way.  At this moment, before the horsemen
+could flip loose their ropes, Sang appeared.
+
+"Hol' on!" he babbled.  "I take him off;" and
+he scrambled over the fence and approached the cow.
+
+Now cattle of any sort rush at the first object they
+see after getting to their feet.  But whereas a steer
+makes a blind run and so can be avoided, a cow
+keeps her eyes open.  Sang approached that wild-
+eyed cow, a bland smile on his countenance.
+
+A dead silence fell.  Looking about at my
+companions' faces I could not discern even in the depths
+of their eyes a single faint flicker of human interest.
+
+Sang loosened the rope from the hind leg, he
+threw it from the horns, he slapped the cow with his
+hat, and uttered the shrill Chinese yell.  So far all was
+according to programme.
+
+The cow staggered to her feet, her eyes blazing fire.  
+She took one good look, and then started for Sang.
+
+What followed occurred with all the briskness of
+a tune from a circus band.  Sang darted for the corral
+fence.  Now, three sides of the corral were railed,
+and so climbable, but the fourth was a solid adobe
+wall.  Of course Sang went for the wall.  There,
+finding his nails would not stick, he fled down the
+length of it, his queue streaming, his eyes popping,
+his talons curved toward an ideal of safety, gibbering
+strange monkey talk, pursued a scant arm's length
+behind by that infuriated cow.  Did any one help
+him?  Not any.  Every man of that crew was hanging
+weak from laughter to the horn of his saddle or
+the top of the fence.  The preternatural solemnity
+had broken to little bits.  Men came running from
+the bunk-house, only to go into spasms outside, to
+roll over and over on the ground, clutching handfuls
+of herbage in the agony of their delight.
+
+At the end of the corral was a narrow chute.  Into
+this Sang escaped as into a burrow.  The cow came
+too.  Sang, in desperation, seized a pole, but the cow
+dashed such a feeble weapon aside.  Sang caught
+sight of a little opening, too small for cows, back
+into the main corral.  He squeezed through.  The
+cow crashed through after him, smashing the boards. 
+At the crucial moment Sang tripped and fell on his
+face.  The cow missed him by so close a margin that
+for a moment we thought she had hit.  But she had
+not, and before she could turn, Sang had topped the
+fence and was halfway to the kitchen.  Tom Waters
+always maintained that he spread his Chinese sleeves
+and flew.  Shortly after a tremendous smoke arose from 
+the kitchen chimney.  Sang had gone back to cooking.
+
+Now that Mongolian was really in great danger,
+but no one of the outfit thought for a moment of
+any but the humorous aspect of the affair.  Analogously,
+in a certain small cow-town I happened to be
+transient when the postmaster shot a Mexican. 
+Nothing was done about it.  The man went right on
+being postmaster, but he had to set up the drinks
+because he had hit the Mexican in the stomach. 
+That was considered a poor place to hit a man.
+
+The entire town of Willcox knocked off work for 
+nearly a day to while away the tedium of an enforced 
+wait there on my part.  They wanted me to go fishing. 
+One man offered a team, the other a saddle-horse.  All 
+expended much eloquence in directing me accurately, so 
+that I should be sure to find exactly the spot where 
+I could hang my feet over a bank beneath which there 
+were "a plumb plenty of fish."  Somehow or other 
+they raked out miscellaneous tackle.  But they were a 
+little too eager.  I excused myself and hunted up a 
+map.  Sure enough the lake was there, but it had been 
+dry since a previous geological period.  The fish were
+undoubtedly there too, but they were fossil fish.  I 
+borrowed a pickaxe and shovel and announced myself 
+as ready to start.
+
+Outside the principal saloon in one town hung a
+gong.  When a stranger was observed to enter the
+saloon, that gong was sounded.  Then it behooved him
+to treat those who came in answer to the summons.
+
+But when it comes to a case of real hospitality
+or helpfulness, your cowboy is there every time. 
+You are welcome to food and shelter without price,
+whether he is at home or not.  Only it is etiquette to
+leave your name and thanks pinned somewhere about
+the place.  Otherwise your intrusion may be
+considered in the light of a theft, and you may be
+pursued accordingly.
+
+Contrary to general opinion, the cowboy is not
+a dangerous man to those not looking for trouble. 
+There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they
+belong to the universal genus of bully, and can be
+found among any class.  Attend to your own business,
+be cool and good-natured, and your skin is
+safe.  Then when it is really "up to you," be a man;
+you will never lack for friends.
+
+The Sierras, especially towards the south where
+the meadows are wide and numerous, are full of cattle
+in small bands.  They come up from the desert
+about the first of June, and are driven back again
+to the arid countries as soon as the autumn storms
+begin.  In the very high land they are few, and to
+be left to their own devices; but now we entered a
+new sort of country.
+
+Below Farewell Gap and the volcanic regions
+one's surroundings change entirely.  The meadows
+become high flat valleys, often miles in extent; the
+mountains--while registering big on the aneroid--
+are so little elevated above the plateaus that a few
+thousand feet is all of their apparent height; the
+passes are low, the slopes easy, the trails good, the
+rock outcrops few, the hills grown with forests to
+their very tops.  Altogether it is a country easy to
+ride through, rich in grazing, cool and green, with its
+eight thousand feet of elevation.  Consequently during
+the hot months thousands of desert cattle are pastured
+here; and with them come many of the desert men.
+
+Our first intimation of these things was in the
+volcanic region where swim the golden trout.  From the
+advantage of a hill we looked far down to a hair-grass
+meadow through which twisted tortuously a brook,
+and by the side of the brook, belittled by distance,
+was a miniature man.  We could see distinctly his
+every movement, as he approached cautiously the
+stream's edge, dropped his short line at the end of a
+stick over the bank, and then yanked bodily the fish
+from beneath.  Behind him stood his pony.  We
+could make out in the clear air the coil of his raw-
+hide "rope," the glitter of his silver bit, the metal
+points on his saddle skirts, the polish of his six-
+shooter, the gleam of his fish, all the details of his
+costume.  Yet he was fully a mile distant.  After a
+time he picked up his string of fish, mounted, and
+jogged loosely away at the cow-pony's little Spanish
+trot toward the south.  Over a week later, having
+caught golden trout and climbed Mount Whitney,
+we followed him and so came to the great central
+camp at Monache Meadows.
+
+Imagine an island-dotted lake of grass four or five
+miles long by two or three wide to which slope regular
+shores of stony soil planted with trees.  Imagine
+on the very edge of that lake an especially fine grove
+perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, beneath whose
+trees a dozen different outfits of cowboys are camped
+for the summer.  You must place a herd of ponies
+in the foreground, a pine mountain at the back, an
+unbroken ridge across ahead, cattle dotted here and
+there, thousands of ravens wheeling and croaking
+and flapping everywhere, a marvelous clear sun and
+blue sky.  The camps were mostly open, though a
+few possessed tents.  They differed from the ordinary
+in that they had racks for saddles and equipments. 
+Especially well laid out were the cooking arrangements. 
+A dozen accommodating springs supplied fresh water with 
+the conveniently regular spacing of faucets.
+
+Towards evening the men jingled in.  This summer
+camp was almost in the nature of a vacation to
+them after the hard work of the desert.  All they had
+to do was to ride about the pleasant hills examining
+that the cattle did not stray nor get into trouble.  It
+was fun for them, and they were in high spirits.
+
+Our immediate neighbors were an old man of
+seventy-two and his grandson of twenty-five.  At
+least the old man said he was seventy-two.  I should
+have guessed fifty.  He was as straight as an arrow,
+wiry, lean, clear-eyed, and had, without food, ridden
+twelve hours after some strayed cattle.  On arriving
+he threw off his saddle, turned his horse loose, and
+set about the construction of supper.  This consisted
+of boiled meat, strong tea, and an incredible number
+of flapjacks built of water, baking-powder, salt, and
+flour, warmed through--not cooked--in a frying-
+pan.  He deluged these with molasses and devoured
+three platefuls.  It would have killed an ostrich, but
+apparently did this decrepit veteran of seventy-two
+much good.
+
+After supper he talked to us most interestingly in
+the dry cowboy manner, looking at us keenly from
+under the floppy brim of his hat.  He confided to us
+that he had had to quit smoking, and it ground him
+--he'd smoked since he was five years old.
+
+"Tobacco doesn't agree with you any more?" I hazarded.
+
+"Oh, 'taint that," he replied; "only I'd ruther chew."
+
+The dark fell, and all the little camp-fires under the
+trees twinkled bravely forth.  Some of the men sang. 
+One had an accordion.  Figures, indistinct and
+formless, wandered here and there in the shadows,
+suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity of
+firelight, there to disclose themselves as visitors.  Out
+on the plain the cattle lowed, the horses nickered. 
+The red firelight flashed from the metal of suspended
+equipment, crimsoned the bronze of men's faces,
+touched with pink the high lights on their gracefully
+recumbent forms.  After a while we rolled up in our
+blankets and went to sleep, while a band of coyotes
+wailed like lost spirits from a spot where a steer had
+died.
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE GOLDEN TROUT
+
+After Farewell Gap, as has been hinted, the
+country changes utterly.  Possibly that is why
+it is named Farewell Gap.  The land is wild, weird,
+full of twisted trees, strangely colored rocks, fantastic
+formations, bleak mountains of slabs, volcanic cones,
+lava, dry powdery soil or loose shale, close-growing
+grasses, and strong winds.  You feel yourself in
+an upper world beyond the normal, where only the
+freakish cold things of nature, elsewhere crowded
+out, find a home.  Camp is under a lonely tree, none
+the less solitary from the fact that it has companions. 
+The earth beneath is characteristic of the treeless
+lands, so that these seem to have been stuck alien into
+it.  There is no shelter save behind great fortuitous
+rocks.  Huge marmots run over the boulders, like
+little bears.  The wind blows strong.  The streams run
+naked under the eye of the sun, exposing clear and
+yellow every detail of their bottoms.  In them there
+are no deep hiding-places any more than there is
+shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows
+as plainly as in an aquarium.
+
+We saw them as we rode over the hot dry shale
+among the hot and twisted little trees.  They lay
+against the bottom, transparent; they darted away
+from the jar of our horses' hoofs; they swam slowly
+against the current, delicate as liquid shadows, as
+though the clear uniform golden color of the bottom
+had clouded slightly to produce these tenuous ghostly
+forms.  We examined them curiously from the
+advantage our slightly elevated trail gave us, and knew
+them for the Golden Trout, and longed to catch some.
+
+All that day our route followed in general the
+windings of this unique home of a unique fish.  We
+crossed a solid natural bridge; we skirted fields of
+red and black lava, vivid as poppies; we gazed
+marveling on perfect volcano cones, long since extinct:
+finally we camped on a side hill under two tall
+branchless trees in about as bleak and exposed a
+position as one could imagine.  Then all three, we
+jointed our rods and went forth to find out what
+the Golden Trout was like.
+
+I soon discovered a number of things, as follows: 
+The stream at this point, near its source, is very
+narrow--I could step across it--and flows beneath
+deep banks.  The Golden Trout is shy of approach. 
+The wind blows.  Combining these items of knowledge
+I found that it was no easy matter to cast forty
+feet in a high wind so accurately as to hit a three-foot
+stream a yard below the level of the ground.  In fact,
+the proposition was distinctly sporty; I became as
+interested in it as in accurate target-shooting, so that
+at last I forgot utterly the intention of my efforts and
+failed to strike my first rise.  The second, however,
+I hooked, and in a moment had him on the grass.
+
+He was a little fellow of seven inches, but mere
+size was nothing, the color was the thing.  And that
+was indeed golden.  I can liken it to nothing more
+accurately than the twenty-dollar gold-piece, the
+same satin finish, the same pale yellow.  The fish was
+fairly molten.  It did not glitter in gaudy burnishment,
+as does our aquarium gold-fish, for example,
+but gleamed and melted and glowed as though fresh
+from the mould.  One would almost expect that on
+cutting the flesh it would be found golden through
+all its substance.  This for the basic color.  You
+must remember always that it was a true trout, without
+scales, and so the more satiny.  Furthermore,
+along either side of the belly ran two broad longitudinal
+stripes of exactly the color and burnish of the
+copper paint used on racing yachts.
+
+I thought then, and have ever since, that the
+Golden Trout, fresh from the water, is one of the
+most beautiful fish that swims.  Unfortunately it
+fades very quickly, and so specimens in alcohol
+can give no idea of it.  In fact, I doubt if you will
+ever be able to gain a very clear idea of it unless
+you take to the trail that leads up, under the end
+of which is known technically as the High Sierras.
+
+The Golden Trout lives only in this one stream,
+but occurs there in countless multitudes.  Every little
+pool, depression, or riffles has its school.  When not
+alarmed they take the fly readily.  One afternoon I
+caught an even hundred in a little over an hour.  By
+way of parenthesis it may be well to state that most
+were returned unharmed to the water.  They run
+small,--a twelve-inch fish is a monster,--but are
+of extraordinary delicacy for eating.  We three
+devoured sixty-five that first evening in camp.
+
+Now the following considerations seem to me at
+this point worthy of note.  In the first place, the
+Golden Trout occurs but in this one stream, and is
+easily caught.  At present the stream is comparatively
+inaccessible, so that the natural supply probably
+keeps even with the season's catches.  Still the
+trail is on the direct route to Mount Whitney, and
+year by year the ascent of this "top of the Republic"
+is becoming more the proper thing to do.  Every
+camping party stops for a try at the Golden Trout,
+and of course the fish-hog is a sure occasional migrant. 
+The cowboys told of two who caught six hundred
+in a day.  As the certainly increasing tide of summer
+immigration gains in volume, the Golden Trout, in
+spite of his extraordinary numbers at present, is going
+to be caught out.
+
+Therefore, it seems the manifest duty of the Fisheries
+to provide for the proper protection and distribution
+of this species, especially the distribution. 
+Hundreds of streams in the Sierras are without trout
+simply because of some natural obstruction, such as
+a waterfall too high to jump, which prevents their
+ascent of the current.  These are all well adapted to
+the planting of fish, and might just as well be stocked
+by the Golden Trout as by the customary Rainbow. 
+Care should be taken lest the two species become
+hybridized, as has occurred following certain misguided
+efforts in the South Fork of the Kern.
+
+So far as I know but one attempt has been made
+to transplant these fish.  About five or six years ago
+a man named Grant carried some in pails across to a
+small lake near at hand.  They have done well, and
+curiously enough have grown to a weight of from one
+and a half to two pounds.  This would seem to show
+that their small size in Volcano Creek results entirely
+from conditions of feed or opportunity for development,
+and that a study of proper environment might
+result in a game fish to rival the Rainbow in size and
+certainly to surpass him in curious interest.
+
+A great many well-meaning people who have
+marveled at the abundance of the Golden Trout
+in their natural habitat laugh at the idea that
+Volcano Creek will ever become "fished out."  To such
+it should be pointed out that the fish in question is
+a voracious feeder, is without shelter, and quickly
+landed.  A simple calculation will show how many
+fish a hundred moderate anglers, camping a week
+apiece, would take out in a season.  And in a short
+time there will be many more than a hundred, few
+of them moderate, coming up into the mountains to
+camp just as long as they have a good time.  All it
+needs is better trails, and better trails are under way. 
+Well-meaning people used to laugh at the idea that
+the buffalo and wild pigeons would ever disappear. 
+They are gone.
+
+
+
+ON GOING OUT
+
+XXI
+
+ON GOING OUT
+
+The last few days of your stay in the wilderness
+you will be consumedly anxious to get out. 
+It does not matter how much of a savage you are,
+how good a time you are having, or how long you
+have been away from civilization.  Nor does it mean
+especially that you are glad to leave the wilds. 
+Merely does it come about that you drift unconcernedly
+on the stream of days until you approach the
+brink of departure: then irresistibly the current
+hurries you into haste.  The last day of your week's
+vacation; the last three of your month's or your
+summer's or your year's outing,--these comprise the
+hours in which by a mighty but invisible transformation
+your mind forsakes its savagery, epitomizes
+again the courses of social evolution, regains the poise
+and cultivation of the world of men.  Before that you
+have been content; yes, and would have gone on
+being content for as long as you please until the
+approach of the limit you have set for your wandering.
+
+In effect this transformation from the state of
+savagery to the state of civilization is very abrupt. 
+When you leave the towns your clothes and mind
+are new.  Only gradually do they take on the color
+of their environment; only gradually do the subtle
+influences of the great forest steal in on your dulled
+faculties to flow over them in a tide that rises
+imperceptibly.  You glide as gently from the artificial to
+the natural life as do the forest shadows from night
+to day.  But at the other end the affair is different. 
+There you awake on the appointed morning in complete
+resumption of your old attitude of mind.  The
+tide of nature has slipped away from you in the night.
+
+Then you arise and do the most wonderful of your
+wilderness traveling.  On those days you look back
+fondly, of them you boast afterwards in telling what
+a rapid and enduring voyager you are.  The biggest
+day's journey I ever undertook was in just such a
+case.  We started at four in the morning through a
+forest of the early spring-time, where the trees were
+glorious overhead, but the walking ankle deep.  On
+our backs were thirty-pound burdens.  We walked
+steadily until three in the afternoon, by which time
+we had covered thirty miles and had arrived at what
+then represented civilization to us.  Of the nine who
+started, two Indians finished an hour ahead; the half
+breed, Billy, and I staggered in together, encouraging
+each other by words concerning the bottle of beer we
+were going to buy; and the five white men never
+got in at all until after nine o'clock that night. 
+Neither thirty miles, nor thirty pounds, nor ankle-
+deep slush sounds formidable when considered as
+abstract and separate propositions.
+
+In your first glimpse of the civilized peoples your
+appearance in your own eyes will undergo the same
+instantaneous and tremendous revulsion that has
+already taken place in your mental sphere.  Heretofore
+you have considered yourself as a decently well
+appointed gentleman of the woods.  Ten to one, in
+contrast to the voluntary or enforced simplicity of the
+professional woodsman you have looked on your
+little luxuries of carved leather hat-band, fancy knife
+sheath, pearl-handled six-shooter, or khaki breeches
+as giving you slightly the air of a forest exquisite. 
+But on that depot platform or in presence of that
+staring group on the steps of the Pullman, you suddenly
+discover yourself to be nothing less than a
+disgrace to your bringing up.  Nothing could be more
+evident than the flop of your hat, the faded, dusty
+appearance of your blue shirt, the beautiful black
+polish of your khakis, the grime of your knuckles, the
+three days' beard of your face.  If you are a fool, you
+worry about it.  If you are a sensible man, you do not
+mind;--and you prepare for amusing adventures.
+
+The realization of your external unworthiness,
+however, brings to your heart the desire for a hot
+bath in a porcelain tub.  You gloat over the thought;
+and when the dream comes to be a reality, you soak
+away in as voluptuous a pleasure as ever falls to the
+lot of man to enjoy.  Then you shave, and array
+yourself minutely and preciously in clean clothes
+from head to toe, building up a new respectability,
+and you leave scornfully in a heap your camping
+garments.  They have heretofore seemed clean, but
+now you would not touch them, no, not even to put
+them in the soiled-clothes basket, let your feminines
+rave as they may.  And for at least two days you
+prove an almost childish delight in mere raiment.
+
+But before you can reach this blissful stage you
+have still to order and enjoy your first civilized
+dinner.  It tastes good, not because your camp dinners
+have palled on you, but because your transformation
+demands its proper aliment.  Fortunate indeed you
+are if you step directly to a transcontinental train or
+into the streets of a modern town.  Otherwise the
+transition through the small-hotel provender is apt
+to offer too little contrast for the fullest enjoyment. 
+But aboard the dining-car or in the cafe you will
+gather to yourself such ill-assorted succulence as thick,
+juicy beefsteaks, and creamed macaroni, and sweet
+potatoes, and pie, and red wine, and real cigars and
+other things.
+
+In their acquisition your appearance will tell
+against you.  We were once watched anxiously by
+a nervous female head waiter who at last mustered
+up courage enough to inform me that guests were
+not allowed to eat without coats.  We politely pointed
+out that we possessed no such garments.  After a long
+consultation with the proprietor she told us it was all
+right for this time, but that we must not do it again. 
+At another place I had to identify myself as a 
+responsible person by showing a picture in a magazine
+bought for the purpose.
+
+The public never will know how to take you. 
+Most of it treats you as though you were a two-dollar
+a day laborer; some of the more astute are puzzled. 
+One February I walked out of the North Country on
+snowshoes and stepped directly into a Canadian
+Pacific transcontinental train.  I was clad in fur cap,
+vivid blanket coat, corded trousers, German stockings
+and moccasins; and my only baggage was the
+pair of snowshoes.  It was the season of light travel. 
+A single Englishman touring the world as the crow
+flies occupied the car.  He looked at me so askance
+that I made an opportunity of talking to him.  I
+should like to read his "Travels" to see what he
+made out of the riddle.  In similar circumstances,
+and without explanation, I had fun talking French
+and swapping boulevard reminiscences with a member
+of a Parisian theatrical troupe making a long
+jump through northern Wisconsin.  And once, at
+six of the morning, letting myself into my own
+house with a latch-key, and sitting down to read the
+paper until the family awoke, I was nearly brained
+by the butler.  He supposed me a belated burglar,
+and had armed himself with the poker.  The most
+flattering experience of the kind was voiced by a
+small urchin who plucked at his mother's sleeve: 
+"Look, mamma!" he exclaimed in guarded but
+jubilant tones, "there's a real Indian!"
+
+Our last camp of this summer was built and broken
+in the full leisure of at least a three weeks' expectation. 
+We had traveled south from the Golden Trout
+through the Toowah range.  There we had viewed
+wonders which I cannot expect you to believe in,--
+such as a spring of warm water in which you could
+bathe and from which you could reach to dip up a
+cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast
+a fly into a trout stream, on the left.  At length we
+entered a high meadow in the shape of a maltese
+cross, with pine slopes about it, and springs of water
+welling in little humps of green.  There the long
+pine-needles were extraordinarily thick and the pine-
+cones exceptionally large.  The former we scraped
+together to the depth of three feet for a bed in the
+lea of a fallen trunk; the latter we gathered in arm-
+fuls to pile on the camp-fire.  Next morning we rode
+down a mile or so through the grasses, exclaimed
+over the thousands of mountain quail buzzing from
+the creek bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well-
+known pines and about at the grateful coolness of
+our accustomed green meadows and leaves;--and
+then, as though we had crossed a threshold, we
+emerged into chaparral, dry loose shale, yucca, Spanish
+bayonet, heated air and the bleached burned-out
+furnace-like country of arid California in midsummer. 
+The trail dropped down through sage-brush, just as
+it always did in the California we had known; the
+mountains rose with the fur-like dark-olive effect of
+the coast ranges; the sun beat hot.  We had left the
+enchanted land.
+
+The trail was very steep and very long, and took
+us finally into the country of dry brown grasses, gray
+brush, waterless stony ravines, and dust.  Others had
+traveled that trail, headed the other way, and
+evidently had not liked it.  Empty bottles blazed the
+path.  Somebody had sacrificed a pack of playing-
+cards, which he had stuck on thorns from time to
+time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment
+on the discomforts of such travel.  After an apparently
+interminable interval we crossed an irrigating
+ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so
+came to one of those green flowering lush California
+villages so startlingly in contrast to their surroundings.
+
+By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled
+on horseback since four.  A variety of circumstances
+learned at the village made it imperative that both
+the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without
+the delay of a single hour.  This left Wes to bring
+the horses home, which was tough on Wes, but he
+rose nobly to the occasion.
+
+When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we 
+had acquired a team of wild broncos, a buckboard, 
+an elderly gentleman with a white goatee, two bottles of beer,
+some crackers and some cheese. With these we hoped to 
+reach the railroad shortly after midnight.
+
+The elevation was five thousand feet, the road
+dusty and hot, the country uninteresting in sage-
+brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and general dryness. 
+Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks
+in the good old fashion.  Our driver had immigrated
+from Maine the year before, and by some
+chance had drifted straight to the arid regions.  He
+was vastly disgusted.  At every particularly atrocious
+dust-hole or unlovely cactus strip he spat into space
+and remarked in tones of bottomless contempt:--
+
+"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"
+
+This was evidently intended as a quotation.
+
+Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills,
+where we got out at every rise in order to ease the
+horses, and where we hurried the old gentleman beyond 
+the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.
+
+It grew dark.  Dimly the road showed gray in the
+twilight.  We did not know how far exactly we were
+to go, but imagined that sooner or later we would
+top one of the small ridges to look across one of the
+broad plateau plains to the lights of our station. 
+You see we had forgotten, in the midst of flatness,
+that we were still over five thousand feet up.  Then
+the road felt its way between two hills;--and the
+blackness of night opened below us as well as above,
+and from some deep and tremendous abyss breathed
+the winds of space.
+
+It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two
+hours below the horizon.  Somehow the trail turned
+to the right along that tremendous cliff.  We thought
+we could make out its direction, the dimness of its
+glimmering; but equally well, after we had looked a
+moment, we could imagine it one way or another, to
+right and left.  I went ahead to investigate.  The trail
+to left proved to be the faint reflection of a clump of
+"old man" at least five hundred feet down; that to
+right was a burned patch sheer against the rise of the
+cliff.  We started on the middle way.
+
+There were turns-in where a continuance straight
+ahead would require an airship or a coroner; again
+turns-out where the direct line would telescope you
+against the state of California.  These we could make
+out by straining our eyes.  The horses plunged and
+snorted; the buckboard leaped.  Fire flashed from
+the impact of steel against rock, momentarily blinding
+us to what we should see.  Always we descended into 
+the velvet blackness of the abyss, the canon walls rising
+steadily above us shutting out even the dim illumination 
+of the stars.  From time to time our driver, desperately 
+scared, jerked out cheering bits of information.
+
+"My eyes ain't what they was.  For the Lord's
+sake keep a-lookin', boys."
+
+"That nigh hoss is deef.  There don't seem to be
+no use saying WHOA to her."
+
+"Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts.  I been
+figgerin' on tackin' on a new shoe for a week."
+
+"I never was over this road but onct, and then I
+was headed th' other way.  I was driving of a corpse."
+
+Then, after two hours of it, BING! BANG! SMASH!
+our tongue collided with a sheer black wall, no
+blacker than the atmosphere before it.  The trail here
+took a sharp V turn to the left.  We had left the face
+of the precipice and henceforward would descend the bed 
+of the canon.  Fortunately our collision had done damage 
+to nothing but our nerves, so we proceeded to do so.
+
+The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet
+above us.  They seemed to close together, like the
+sides of a tent, to leave only a narrow pale lucent
+strip of sky.  The trail was quite invisible, and even
+the sense of its existence was lost when we traversed
+groves of trees.  One of us had to run ahead of the
+horses, determining its general direction, locating the
+sharper turns.  The rest depended on the instinct of
+the horses and pure luck.
+
+It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run down 
+through the blackness, shouting aloud to guide our 
+followers, swinging to the slope, bathed to the soul 
+in mysteries of which we had no time to take cognizance.
+
+By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us
+like a star.  The smell of fresh wood smoke and stale
+damp fire came to our nostrils.  We gained the star
+and found it to be a log smouldering; and up the
+hill other stars red as blood.  So we knew that we
+had crossed the zone of an almost extinct forest fire,
+and looked on the scattered camp-fires of an army
+of destruction.
+
+The moon rose.  We knew it by touches of white
+light on peaks infinitely far above us; not at all by
+the relieving of the heavy velvet blackness in which
+we moved.  After a time, I, running ahead in my
+turn, became aware of the deep breathing of animals. 
+I stopped short and called a warning.  Immediately
+a voice answered me.
+
+"Come on, straight ahead.  They're not on the road."
+
+When within five feet I made out the huge
+freight wagons in which were lying the teamsters,
+and very dimly the big freight mules standing tethered
+to the wheels.
+
+"It's a dark night, friend, and you're out late."
+
+"A dark night," I agreed, and plunged on.  Behind
+me rattled and banged the abused buckboard,
+snorted the half-wild broncos, groaned the unrepaired
+brake, softly cursed my companions.
+
+Then at once the abrupt descent ceased.  We glided out 
+to the silvered flat, above which sailed the moon.
+
+The hour was seen to be half past one.  We had
+missed our train.  Nothing was visible of human
+habitations.  The land was frosted with the moonlight,
+enchanted by it, etherealized.  Behind us, huge
+and formidable, loomed the black mass of the range
+we had descended.  Before us, thin as smoke in the
+magic lucence that flooded the world, rose other
+mountains, very great, lofty as the sky.  We could
+not understand them.  The descent we had just
+accomplished should have landed us on a level plain
+in which lay our town.  But here we found ourselves
+in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain
+ranges through which there seemed to be no pass less
+than five or six thousand feet in height.
+
+We reined in the horses to figure it out.
+
+"I don't see how it can be," said I.  "We've
+certainly come far enough.  It would take us four
+hours at the very least to cross that range, even if
+the railroad should happen to be on the other side
+of it."
+
+"I been through here only once," repeated the
+driver,--"going the other way.--Then I drew a
+corpse."  He spat, and added as an afterthought,
+"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"
+
+We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. 
+They rose above us sheer and forbidding.  In the
+bright moonlight plainly were to be descried the
+brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the
+canons, the granites, and the everlasting snows. 
+Almost we thought to make out a thread of a waterfall
+high up where the clouds would be if the night
+had not been clear.
+
+"We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the
+Tenderfoot.
+
+"Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. 
+"It's bound to go somewhere.  We might as well
+give up the railroad and find a place to turn-in."
+
+"It can't be far," encouraged the Tenderfoot;
+"this valley can't be more than a few miles across."
+
+"Gi dap!" remarked the driver.
+
+We moved forward down the white wagon trail
+approaching the mountains.  And then we were
+witnesses of the most marvelous transformation.  For
+as we neared them, those impregnable mountains,
+as though panic-stricken by our advance, shrunk
+back, dissolved, dwindled, went to pieces.  Where
+had towered ten-thousand-foot peaks, perfect in the
+regular succession from timber to snow, now were
+little flat hills on which grew tiny bushes of sage.  A
+passage opened between them.  In a hundred yards
+we had gained the open country, leaving behind us
+the mighty but unreal necromancies of the moon.
+
+Before us gleamed red and green lights.  The mass
+of houses showed half distinguishable.  A feeble
+glimmer illuminated part of a white sign above the
+depot.  That which remained invisible was evidently
+the name of the town.  That which was revealed was
+the supplementary information which the Southern
+Pacific furnishes to its patrons.  It read:  "Elevation
+482 feet."  We were definitely out of the mountains.
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+THE LURE OF THE TRAIL
+
+The trail's call depends not at all on your
+common sense.  You know you are a fool for
+answering it; and yet you go.  The comforts of
+civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are
+not lightly to be renounced: the ease of having your
+physical labor done for you; the joy of cultivated
+minds, of theatres, of books, of participation in the
+world's progress; these you leave behind you.  And
+in exchange you enter a life where there is much long
+hard work of the hands--work that is really hard and
+long, so that no man paid to labor would consider
+it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to
+endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety; you
+voluntarily place yourself where cold, wet, hunger, thirst,
+heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts will
+wait upon you daily.  A thousand times in the course
+of a woods life even the stoutest-hearted will tell
+himself softly--very softly if he is really stout-hearted,
+so that others may not be annoyed--that if ever the
+fates permit him to extricate himself he will never
+venture again.
+
+These times come when long continuance has
+worn on the spirit.  You beat all day to windward
+against the tide toward what should be but an hour's
+sail: the sea is high and the spray cold; there are
+sunken rocks, and food there is none; chill gray
+evening draws dangerously near, and there is a
+foot of water in the bilge.  You have swallowed
+your tongue twenty times on the alkali; and the
+sun is melting hot, and the dust dry and pervasive,
+and there is no water, and for all your effort the
+relative distances seem to remain the same for days. 
+You have carried a pack until your every muscle
+is strung white-hot; the woods are breathless; the
+black flies swarm persistently and bite until your
+face is covered with blood.  You have struggled
+through clogging snow until each time you raise
+your snowshoe you feel as though some one had
+stabbed a little sharp knife into your groin; it has
+come to be night; the mercury is away below zero,
+and with aching fingers you are to prepare a camp
+which is only an anticipation of many more such
+camps in the ensuing days.  For a week it has
+rained, so that you, pushing through the dripping
+brush, are soaked and sodden and comfortless, and
+the bushes have become horrible to your shrinking
+goose-flesh.  Or you are just plain tired out, not
+from a single day's fatigue, but from the gradual
+exhaustion of a long hike.  Then in your secret soul
+you utter these sentiments:--
+
+"You are a fool.  This is not fun.  There is no real
+reason why you should do this.  If you ever get out
+of here, you will stick right home where common
+sense flourishes, my son!"
+
+Then after a time you do get out, and are thankful. 
+But in three months you will have proved in
+your own experience the following axiom--I should
+call it the widest truth the wilderness has to teach:--
+
+"In memory the pleasures of a camping trip
+strengthen with time, and the disagreeables weaken."
+
+I don't care how hard an experience you have had,
+nor how little of the pleasant has been mingled with
+it, in three months your general impression of that
+trip will be good.  You will look back on the hard
+times with a certain fondness of recollection.
+
+I remember one trip I took in the early spring
+following a long drive on the Pine River.  It rained
+steadily for six days.  We were soaked to the skin
+all the time, ate standing up in the driving downpour,
+and slept wet.  So cold was it that each morning
+our blankets were so full of frost that they crackled
+stiffly when we turned out.  Dispassionately I can
+appraise that as about the worst I ever got into.  Yet
+as an impression the Pine River trip seems to me a
+most enjoyable one.
+
+So after you have been home for a little while the
+call begins to make itself heard.  At first it is very
+gentle.  But little by little a restlessness seizes hold
+of you.  You do not know exactly what is the matter:
+you are aware merely that your customary life
+has lost savor, that you are doing things more or less
+perfunctorily, and that you are a little more irritable
+than your naturally evil disposition.
+
+And gradually it is borne in on you exactly what
+is the matter.  Then say you to yourself:--
+
+"My son, you know better.  You are no tenderfoot. 
+You have had too long an experience to admit
+of any glamour of indefiniteness about this thing. 
+No use bluffing.  You know exactly how hard you
+will have to work, and how much tribulation you are
+going to get into, and how hungry and wet and cold
+and tired and generally frazzled out you are going to
+be.  You've been there enough times so it's pretty
+clearly impressed on you.  You go into this thing
+with your eyes open.  You know what you're in for. 
+You're pretty well off right here, and you'd be a fool
+to go."
+
+"That's right," says yourself to you.  "You're dead
+right about it, old man.  Do you know where we can
+get another pack-mule?"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Mountains
+
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