Part 11 (1/2)

Little clouds of rock-dust rose above the bear, in front of him, behind him, and below him. He stopped, mildly astonished, and looked around.

More noise, more bucking on the trail, more dust. The bear walked on a trifle faster.

It had been arranged that the first bear was to be left for the juniors.

So the packers and the rest of the party watched and advised.

But, as I have related elsewhere in this narrative, there were no casualties. The bear, as far as I know, is living to-day, an honored member of his community, and still telling how he survived the great war. At last he disappeared into a cave, and we went on without so much as a single skin to decorate a college room.

We went on.

What odds and ends of knowledge we picked up on those long days in the saddle! That if lightning strikes a pine even lightly, it kills, but that a fir will ordinarily survive; that mountain miles are measured air-line, so that twenty-five miles may really be forty, and that, even then, they are calculated on the level, so that one is credited with only the base of the triangle while he is laboriously climbing up its hypotenuse. I am personally acquainted with the hypotenuses of a good many mountains, and there is no use trying to pretend that they are bases. They are not.

Then we learned that the purpose of the National Forests is not to preserve timber but to conserve it. The idea is to sell and reseed.

About twenty-five per cent of the timber we saw was yellow pine. But most of the timber we saw on the east side of the Cascades will be safe for some time. I wouldn't undertake to carry out, from most of that region, enough pine-needles to make a sofa-cus.h.i.+on. It is quite enough to get oneself out.

Up to now it had been hard going, but not impossible. Now we were to do the impossible.

It is a curious thing about mountains, but they have a hideous tendency to fall down. Whole cliff-faces, a mile or so high, are suddenly seized with a wandering disposition. Leaving the old folks at home and sliding down into the valleys, they come awful croppers and sustain about eleven million compound comminuted fractures.

These family breaks are known as rock-slides.

Now to travel twenty feet over a rock-slide is to twist an ankle, bruise a s.h.i.+n-bone, utterly discourage a horse, and sour the most amiable disposition.

There is no flat side to these wandering rocks. With the diabolical ingenuity that nature can show when she goes wrong, they lie edge up. Do you remember the little mermaid who wished to lose her tail and gain legs so she could follow the prince? And how her penalty was that every step was like walking on the edges of swords? That is a mountain rock-slide, but I do not recall that the little mermaid had to drag a frightened and slipping horse, which stepped on her now and then. Or wear riding-boots. Or stop every now and then to be photographed, and try to persuade her horse to stop also. Or keep looking up to see if another family jar threatened. Or look around to see if any of the party or the pack was rolling down over the spareribs of that ghastly skeleton. No; the little mermaid's problem was a simple and uncomplicated one.

We were climbing, too. Only one thing kept us going. The narrow valley twisted, and around each cliff-face we expected the end--either death or solid ground. But not so, or, at least, not for some hours.

Riding-boots peeled like a sunburnt face; stones dislodged and rolled down; the sun beat down in early September fury, and still we went on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY A. J. BAKER, KALISPELL, MONT.

_Where the rock-slides start_ (_Glacier National Park_)]

Only three miles it was, but it was as bad a three miles as I have ever covered. Then--the naturalist turned and smiled.

”Now we are all right,” he said. ”_We start to climb soon!_”

XV

DOUBTFUL LAKE

Of all the mountain-climbing I have ever done the switchback up to Doubtful Lake is the worst. We were hours doing it. There were places when it seemed no horse could possibly make the climb. Back and forth, up and up, along that narrow rock-filled trail, which was lost here in a snow-bank, there in a jungle of evergreen that hung out from the mountain-side, we were obliged to go. There was no going back. We could not have turned a horse around, nor could we have reversed the pack-outfit without losing some of the horses.

As a matter of fact, we dropped two horses on that switchback. With infinite labor the packers got them back to the trail, rolling, tumbling, and roping them down to the ledge below, and there salvaging them. It was heart-breaking, nerve-racking work. Near the top was an ice-patch across a brawling waterfall. To slip on that ice-patch meant a drop of incredible distance. From broken places in the crust it was possible to see the stream below. Yet over the ice it was necessary to take ourselves and the pack.

”Absolutely no riding here,” was the order, given in strained tones. For everybody's nerves were on edge.

Somehow or other, we got over. I can still see one little pack-pony wandering away from the others and traveling across that tiny ice-field on the very brink of death at the top of the precipice. The sun had softened the snow so that I fell flat into it. And there was a dreadful moment when I thought I was going to slide.

Even when I was safely over, my anxieties were just beginning. For the Head and the Juniors were not yet over. And there was no s.p.a.ce to stop and see them come. It was necessary to move on up the switchback, that the next horse behind might scramble up. Buddy went gallantly on, leaping, slipping, his flanks heaving, his nostrils dilated. Then, at last, the familiar call,--