Part 10 (1/2)

He trotted ahead, and Joe saw with admiration that his shoulders hardly bobbed up and down at all. He did his best to imitate him, and after a while felt as if he were getting on to the hang of it. But they couldn't trot far, because the packhorse was following them, all by himself, and if he trotted it shook up his pack too much. So they pulled down to a walk, and climbed the trail, first the Ranger, then Joe, then the patient packhorse, through woods at first, and across a roaring, racing little green river, which foamed up against the horses' legs and made Joe hold up his feet under him to keep them dry.

”I'm going over Swift Current Pa.s.s,” the Ranger said, ”and on up the Mineral Creek Canon on the other side, and then down into the Little Kootenai River country, to open the trail a bit. You can come with me to the top of the pa.s.s, and pick up some party to bring you back.”

”I wish I could come all the way!” Joe exclaimed.

Mills laughed another of his silent laughs. ”You're ambitious for a sick boy and a tenderfoot,” he said. ”You'll be sore enough, with fourteen miles, to-night.”

They were getting out of high timber now, into stunted limber pines, which were covered all over with bright reddish-pink cone buds, like flowers, and everywhere in the gra.s.s and trees around them Joe saw more beautiful wild flowers, and more kinds of wild flowers, than he had ever seen in his life before. It was like riding through a garden, with tremendous red mountain precipices for walls. Beside the trail was the Swift Current River, every now and then widening out into a lovely little green lake, and directly ahead of them, at the head of the canon, rose an almost perpendicular wall of rock for two thousand feet, to a lofty shelf, on which Swift Current Glacier, snow-covered now, hung like a gigantic white napkin. To the right was the Egyptian pyramid of Mount Wilbur. From the glacier, down over the precipice, were falling half a dozen white streams of waterfalls, like great silver ribbons. As they got nearer and nearer to this head wall, and it seemed to rise higher and higher over them, while the walls on each side of them, the one across the canon bright red, also grew higher and higher, Joe began to get nervous.

”Say,” he finally asked, ”are we going to _climb_ that?”

Mills looked back at him with a grin.

”Sure,” he said.

”Well, I don't see how,” Joe answered. ”I'm no goat.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Switchback Trail up Swift Current Pa.s.s]

Mills laughed again, but said no more. Instead, he plodded steadily on, till the great cliff wall seemed about to hit them in the face, and Joe could hear the thunder of the white waterfalls as they leaped and plunged down from the melting glacier two thousand feet over his head.

Just as he had decided the Ranger was playing a joke on him, for surely n.o.body could get up those walls, the trail turned sharp to the right, and began to go up.

Then Joe learned what a Rocky Mountain switchback is.

A switchback trail can be put up almost any slope that is not actually perpendicular, and the slope they were climbing now was not quite that, though to Joe it seemed pretty near it. The trail was about four or five feet wide, and was dug right out of the side of the hill. It went up at an angle of about twenty degrees, for perhaps two hundred feet to the right, then it swung sharp left on a steep hairpin turn and ran another two hundred or three hundred feet, took another sharp hairpin turn, and so on up, and up. When Joe had made one of these turns, he could look right down on the top of the blankets on the packhorse below him.

”Say,” he called up to the Ranger, ”what happens to you if your horse falls off here?”

”Your horse never falls off,” Mills answered. ”If he did, you'd probably take to harp playing. But he won't.”

They climbed up these switchbacks for two thousand feet or so, and then worked around a shoulder of the mountain so that they couldn't see the glacier any more, but looking back down the canon Joe could see a great, narrow hole, with the green lakes like a string of jewels at the bottom, and at the far end, as blue and level as the ocean, the vast prairie.

”The prairie looks just like the ocean,” he said.

”Does it?” said the Ranger. ”I never saw the ocean. Must be fine.”

In a minute or two they reached the first snow-field. Joe did not want to appear too green and excited, but he was almost trembling with excitement, just the same. He had reached the level of summer snow! He was above timber-line, or almost above, and here in a great northern hollow was a vast drift, four hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep in the middle, which Mills said would not melt all summer! Little streams of water were gus.h.i.+ng out from the lower side, and the snow was very soft and coa.r.s.e, like rock salt. The trail went right across it, the horses picking their way carefully over the treacherous footing. They climbed but a little way more, and they were on the top of the pa.s.s.

When you think of a mountain pa.s.s, probably, you think of a deep valley or canon between the hills, but a pa.s.s is not like that at all in the high Rockies. In order to get over the Continental Divide (which the Indians called ”the backbone of the world”), you have to climb, and the pa.s.s is simply a point on this spine which is not quite so high as other points, and can be reached, moreover, from the base. Joe found himself in a little meadow which was full of stunted pine trees, the last of the timber, with snowdrifts, and with bright gold dog-tooth violets, some of them coming right up and blossoming through two inches of snow. On either side of him, the Divide rose up perhaps another five hundred or a thousand feet, in pyramids of naked rock. Ahead, to the west, he could see a great hole, where the Divide dropped down on the other side, and ten miles away across this hole a wonderful sharp-peaked mountain all covered with snow, and looking like the pictures of the Alps in his old geography.

”What's that mountain?” he asked.

”Heaven's Peak,” said the Ranger. ”Good name for it, eh?”

”It sure is!” said Joe.

Mills stopped the horses in a little gra.s.sy glade, sheltered from the wind by a group of stunted pines, and unslung the packs.

”You're going to make me some more of that coffee,” he laughed, opening one of his dunnage bags.