Part 12

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 CAÑON

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 cañon. Somehow the level at the bottom resembled less forests and meadows than a heavy and sluggish fluid like molasses flowing between the cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon-bed first came into view.

"That's where we'll camp," said he.

"When?" we asked.

"When we get there," he answered.

For this cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon-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 cañon 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.