CHAPTER XI--To Gunsight Lake, and Joe Falls Into a Crevasse on

Blackfeet Glacier

The Ranger was the first up in the morning. He gave Joe a shake by the shoulder, and Joe half opened one sleepy eye and said, "Aw, ma, it ain't time to get up yet."

Then he heard Mills chuckle, and he realized where he was. He looked at his watch, and saw that it was almost six. Outside, it was broad daylight, and the sun was flooding up the lake.

Joe sat up and threw back the blankets. "Golly, I'm sore and stiff," he said, rubbing himself. "Been sleeping on a cot, and I'm soft, I guess."

"You also did twenty-two miles yesterday," Mills remarked. "Well, I haven't told 'em yet, but we're going to do only seven to-day, and then have a side trip for the young folks. Guess Mother Jones will want to stay in camp and help you get supper."

"She'd better try!" cried Joe, springing up at the word "supper," for it reminded him that it was his job to get breakfast. He had a quick wash in the brook which ran past the camp, and set about making some biscuit, bacon and eggs, coffee and flapjacks. His fire was going merrily, and in its heat he had begun to get warm (for the night chill was still in the air, and you could almost see your breath), when he saw Congressman Elkins poking a sleepy face out of the men's tent flap, with his hair all tousled, and his body bent half double. He spied the fire, and made a hobble for it.

"Say, Joe, let me get some of that heat, will you?" he said.

"Sure," Joe laughed. "Didn't you have blankets enough?"

"I had five--ought to be enough, in the third week of July, you'd think. But I shivered all night, and every time I shivered a new branch in our wonderful bough bed found a fresh spot on my anatomy to puncture. I'm beginning to think Mrs. Jones is right about this roughing it stuff."

"No, sir, she isn't," Joe answered, as he set his batter of biscuit over the fire. "Only you have to learn how to do it, and get hardened to it a bit, too. How'd you have the blankets?"

"How'd I have 'em? Over me, of course."

"That's the trouble," said Joe. "The secret of sleeping warm is to have 'em _under_ you, too. That's where as much cold comes as from above, even in a bed. You roll yourself up in 'em to-night and see if you're not warm."

"Where'd you learn all this?" the congressman asked. "You look pretty young to be a camp cook. Live around here?"

"Oh, no, sir, I live in Massachusetts. I learned how to camp as a Boy Scout. My chum--another scout--and I came out here this summer, because I was--I wasn't very well. He's got a job at Many Glacier tepee camp, and I'm getting so well now Mr. Mills got me to go as cook, 'cause I'd made coffee and things for him and he knew I could cook."

"I suppose you learned cooking as a scout, too, eh?"

"Yes, sir," Joe answered, pouring out the ground coffee into the pot. "I worked to get a merit badge in cooking. You see, I could help mother with it, too, when she was sick, or anything."

"Well, I'm beginning to have a better opinion of the Boy Scouts every minute," the man laughed, sniffing the food and warming his hands by the blaze. "I thought it was just a kind of fad."

"Oh, no, sir!" Joe cried. "Why, all our little scouts, after a year, are lots better boys, and everybody says it's been a fine thing for the town!"

"Here, daddy, you stop bribing the cook to give you breakfast in advance!" a laughing voice interrupted them. Joe turned, and saw Lucy Elkins coming from her tent. Her hair was down her back, in brown waves, so that she looked almost like a little girl, and she was smiling and bright and gay as the morning sun.

"I suppose _you_ slept well," her father said, "weren't cold and no pine boughs in your ribs."

"I don't know," she answered. "I slept so hard I can't tell whether I was cold or not. But I know I'm hungry. Why don't you wake everybody up, Joe, and let's get to business."

She went off up the brook with her tooth-brush and towel, and the Ranger, taking a pan, beat reveille on it with two sticks. Other sleepy heads emerged, Mrs. Jones last of all, looking very cross and shivery. By the time they had all got fully dressed and washed, and the girls had braided their hair (letting the braids hang down their backs), the two guides appeared. They had spent the night just down the lake at the Sun Camp chalets, with other guides, friends of theirs.

Joe set his eggs to cooking last of all, got the dishes ready, poured the coffee, and then gave the now familiar yell,

"Come and get it!"

That is a call in Glacier Park no one has to hear a second time. Even Mrs. Jones perked up, and stopped complaining about how cold she was, and how she hated to clean her teeth in ice water, and how she missed her morning bath, and silenced her own tongue with a bite of bacon that was more nourishing than ladylike in size. The breakfast disappeared in double quick time, and Val went up the hill for the horses, while Mills and Dick began to strike the tents and arrange the packs, and Joe cleaned his dishes and packed his provisions.

At half-past eight, the party was in the saddle again, Mills at the head, and started up the trail, along the lake shore, toward the gleaming white field of Blackfeet Glacier and the red, snow-spangled cone of Mount Jackson.

"Where are we bound to-day?" some one asked.

"Only seven miles, to Gunsight Lake," the Ranger answered. "I thought maybe you'd like an easy stage to-day, and this afternoon those that wanted to could go up on the glacier."

"The man is almost intelligent!" Mrs. Jones exclaimed. "Only seven miles--that sounds more reasonable to me."

They were seven easy miles, too, up a streamside by an easy grade, a good deal of the way through tall timber, and past a beaver dam, the first one Joe had ever seen. It was made of small logs, twigs and grasses, all matted together, and plastered neatly and tightly with mud, and must have been a hundred feet long and perhaps three feet high, so that a considerable little pond had backed up behind it, in which, rising above the water, were the huts, which looked like larger and better built muskrat huts. Joe pulled down his horse to a slow walk as he passed, and saw the little canals the beavers had made, leading from the bed of the stream back into the willow and aspen swamp. He figured out that the chief reason the beavers build dams is so they can flood such a grove of young willows, aspens, etc., and float out the tiny logs they cut (the young shoots, with tender bark), to their houses, where they store them for winter food. Later he asked Mills, and found he was right. When the beavers can find deep water, with food trees right on the bank, they will not bother to make dams.

Joe lingered till Val yelled at him to "get a move on," hoping he might see one of the little animals at work, but the beaver works mostly at night when he has to be above water, and not one was now to be seen.

It was a short, easy trip to Gunsight Lake, and they reached the open meadow at its foot by eleven o'clock. The lake, a smallish one, lay at the bottom of a great horseshoe amphitheatre. If you will imagine the Harvard stadium two or three miles long instead of two or three hundred yards, with sides almost precipitous and three thousand feet high, and a green lake where the football gridiron is, you have a picture of Gunsight. The closed end of the horseshoe was the Divide, and that was where the Gunsight Pass lay, over which they would climb to-morrow. The north side was Fusillade Mountain, the south side was the great shoulder of Mount Jackson (the summit being invisible from this point). The meadow where they were to camp was just out at the open end, where they could see around the shoulder of Jackson to the glittering field of Blackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park, hung on the upper slopes of the Divide, to the southwest, and where, behind them, rose the huge cliffs of Citadel Mountain, which is exactly like old Fort Sumter or the old fort on Governor's Island, enlarged to the "_nth_" power. (If you don't know what "enlarged to the _nth_ power" means, it's either because you have not studied your algebra, or have not reached algebra yet.) The floor of the meadow was full of wild flowers, especially the great, tall white spikes of the Indian basket grass, and full, too, of low balsams and pines.

Close to the shore of the lake lay a big pile of lumber, old, twisted iron beds, half a cook-stove, and the like.

"What on earth happened here?" asked Mrs. Elkins.

"Avalanche," said the Ranger. "Was a chalet here--Gunsight chalet. In the winter of 1915-16 a snowslide started down Jackson, and this is what's left."

"Oh, heavens!" Mrs. Jones cried, looking up the red precipices of Jackson to the snow-fields far above, "do you suppose there'll be another one?"

"We don't often have 'em in July, marm," said Mills briefly, "but you never can tell," and he winked at Joe.

They now pitched tents near the lake, and Joe set about cooking a hot lunch, for he had plenty of time. While the water was heating, he got some boards from the pile of wreckage, and made a rough table and benches. Then he started out to gather some flowers. Lucy and Alice saw him, and came to help. The three of them, in ten minutes, found thirty different kinds of flowers, all in a space of two or three hundred feet, and made three bunches, which they stood in tin cans on the table, and then put little pine boughs around the cans "to camouflage them," as Joe said.

"I told you Joe was a poet," Lucy said to Alice. "I'll bet he'll produce a table-cloth in a minute."

"Can't do that," Joe laughed, "unless you'll climb up and get me one of those up there----" and he gestured toward the white snow-fields far up the cliffs, which did, indeed, look like huge sheets, or table-cloths, flung on the rocky ledges to dry.

As soon as the tents were pitched, and lunch was over, Mills said:

"Well, who wants to go up to Blackfeet Glacier?"

"I do!" from Bob.

"I do!" from Lucy.

"I do!" from Alice.

"I do, if I can go on horseback," from Mr. Elkins.

"Same as Elkins," from Mr. Jones.

"I want to sit still," from Mrs. Jones.

"I couldn't leave Mrs. Jones all alone," from Mrs. Elkins.

"You haven't spoken, Joe," said Lucy.

Poor Joe--how he wanted to climb up and see a real glacier! But he smiled bravely and cheerfully.

"I shall have to stay and get dinner," he answered.

"Oh, that's too bad! I just _know_ you're dying to see the glacier. Mr. Mills, wouldn't we be back in time for Joe to get dinner, if he went?"

"Well, we might be, if dinner was a bit late, and you didn't have a roast turkey," the Ranger said.

"Well, I move we have late dinner, and take Joe along. All in favor, say aye."

Bob and Alice yelled "Aye!" and Mr. Elkins said, "Jones and I are paired, so it's a vote."

Joe tried to say some word of thanks to Lucy, but he couldn't manage it. Besides, he had no time, for Mrs. Jones broke in:

"Well, I'd like to know if you expect Mrs. Elkins and me to stay here all alone?"

"You might be getting the dinner, Martha," her husband grinned.

"Val will stay in camp," Mills said. "He's fed up on glaciers, anyhow, ain't you, Val?"

The young cowboy nodded. "You can have 'em all," he said, "and welcome."

So Joe found himself in the small party headed for Blackfeet Glacier, as soon as he had put his stew to simmer over a small fire, which Val promised to keep going. Mills took three of the strongest ropes from the packs, and they set off up the steep, rough trail climbing the shoulder of Jackson. They soon had a superb view below them, first of the meadow, with their own tents like white dots in it, and then back down the canyon to St. Mary Lake, and the great pink and gray pyramid of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But it was not long before every one stopped looking at the view, and paid entire attention to the trail. This was a side trail, not one of the regular tourist highways, and it was not built for comfort. It was tremendously steep, and very rough, more like a flight of high, irregular stone steps than a path.

"Oh, I think this is terrible on the poor horses!" Lucy said, as her horse scrambled up a rock, and she had to cling to his mane to stick on the saddle.

"Get out and walk, then," Mills called back. "Grab hold of your horse's tail, and let him pull you up."

"Say, what you giving us?" said Bob. "Think I want to go down the hill again backwards?"

Mills laughed. "Think these horses are mules?" he answered. "See, this is the way."

He got off his horse, grabbed it by the tail, and to everybody's surprised amusement, the horse started up, with the Ranger scrambling behind him, half climbing, half being pulled along.

Every one else got off, too, and in single file, each person clinging to his horse's tail, they began the ascent again. The horses, being considerably longer legged than men, climbed faster up the high steps than a man could do alone, but with the horse's tail to hang on to, you could manage to keep up. Everybody laughed at first, yelling at one another, but in three minutes the yells had ceased, and in five, the laughter. No one had any breath left for that. If Joe had thought, he probably would have been frightened, for he was certainly disobeying the doctor, but he was having too good a time to remember doctors, and as even the lack of breath did not make him cough, he had nothing to remind him. Panting, covered with perspiration, the two congressmen were about ready to quit. They presently reached a more level place, a high upland meadow covered with flowers, and mounting again rode up and across this, and came at last near the lower edge of a great snow-field, which stretched away southward for three miles, broken here and there by peninsulas and islands of rock, and stretched upward clear to the summit of the Divide over their heads, at an angle of about forty-five degrees at first, but much steeper near the top.

"The biggest glacier in the Park," said Mills.

"Where?" said Mr. Elkins. "All I see is snow."

"I know it--too bad, but we had so much snow last winter it's not melted off yet. But take my word for it, that's all ice underneath."

"Hooray, let's climb out on it!" Bob shouted.

"Not for me--I've climbed enough to-day," his father said, still puffing.

It ended with the two congressmen resting in the meadow, while Mills, Dick the guide, Joe, the girls, and Bob, climbed up some way over the rocks without any trail, and reached at length a place where the vast snow-field seemed to be sliding down past them, like a huge, silent river. Of course, it did not move, but it gave that illusion.

"What a place to ski!" said Joe.

"Wow!" yelled Bob, "you bet! You'd get some jump at the bottom, too."

Mills grinned. "About as far as whichever place you're going to when you die," he said, as he began to uncoil his three ropes, fastening them together.

"What's the big idea?" asked Bob. "That snow's soft; you wouldn't slip in that."

And, to prove it, he started down the rocks, and out on to the snow-covered glacier.

Mills suddenly spoke with a sharp note Joe had never heard him use.

"Come back here!" he said.

Bob came.

"Now, Joe," he said, "you go first on the rope, because you've got spikes in your shoes. We've got to look out for crevasses. Sound your footing when it looks suspicious. We'd need Alpine stocks to go far."

He fastened one end under Joe's arms.

"You next, Dick, to brace if Joe goes under. Then the rest of you, and I'll be the rear anchor."

He made the rope fast around Dick, twenty feet behind Joe, then told Bob and the girls to hold it fast at equal intervals, and fastened the rear end around his own waist

"Now, Joe, let her go," he said.

Joe went down the rocks, and out on the great snow-field, tilted like the roof of a house. It was soft, as Bob had said, but not like ordinary soft snow. It was more like walking in cold, wet, rock salt, and the footing was anything but sure. Joe went cautiously, slowly climbing upward and outward at the same time, and as he looked below him, down that smooth, glistening, white slope, and realized that if he once got started sliding he would probably go half a mile and shoot off the lower edge into space, he felt his heart, for a minute, go down somewhere into his boots. So he looked up, instead of downward, and felt better.

Everything went well for some hundreds of yards, and the whole party, on their rope, were well out on the great snow-field, when Joe saw just ahead of him a very slight depression in the snow. Bracing with his right foot, he put his left forward, and hit this depression smartly. It caved in! He tried to spring back, yelling to Dick to brace, but his right foot, with nothing but snow for the spikes to hold in, slipped, and he felt himself going down. He had no time to think, only just a terrible flash in his brain of accidents he had read about to Alpine climbers, before the rope caught him under the armpits with a cruel yank; he hung for a minute surrounded by the wet, cold snow which was falling down his neck, and then he felt himself being tugged up again by Dick.

Mills had come up, bringing the rope around Bob and the girls in a loop, by the time Dick had him out.

"Hurt?" he asked.

Joe was poking snow out of his neck, and loosening the grip of the rope under his arms.

"I--I guess not!" he panted. "Gee, that gave me some surprise, though. I thought something was coming, and tested it with one foot, but the other slipped."

"We ought to have ice axes," Mills said. "The snow's getting too thin. Back's the word."

Joe looked around at the rest of the party, and saw that Lucy and Alice had turned deadly pale, and even Bob was looking sober.

"Are you sure you aren't hurt, Joe?" Lucy asked.

"I'll get dinner, O.K.," Joe answered.

Meanwhile Mills had approached the hole where Joe went under, and called the rest to come and look, one by one, while he and Dick braced the rope.

Joe looked, too. His fall had collapsed a snow bridge over a crevasse, and through the hole, which was six feet wide or more, they could see down through a layer of snow into what looked like a bottomless slit between walls of dirty green ice. A cold, damp, chilling breath came up from the hole, and far below they could hear water running.

"Now you get the big idea, Bob, eh?" said Mills. "See why we had the rope?"

"Yes, and I bet old cookie's glad it was a strong one," Bob replied. "Say, I wish it had been me'd been ahead!"

"Oh, do you?" the Ranger laughed. "Want to be lowered down?"

"Oh, no--Mr. Mills!" Alice cried.

"Cheer up, he wouldn't let me," Mills grinned. "Besides, he's too fat and heavy to pull up again."

"If a feller fell down there, and they didn't get him up, and he froze into the ice, would he come out some time at the bottom of the glacier?" Bob asked.

"I guess he would," said Mills, "but his widow might get tired waiting and marry again."

"Mr. Mills, you're perfectly awful" said Lucy, with a shudder. "Take us back from this horrid place."

They went back carefully in their own tracks, and rejoined the congressmen, who, it seemed, had climbed where they could watch, and had seen the whole thing from a distance. There was much excited talk about Joe's experience all the way down (on the down trip they led their horses over the steep part, needing no help on the descent), and Joe, sore as he was under the arms and rather shaky from the shock, began to feel like quite a hero. In fact, by the time they reached the level meadows at camp, it did not seem terrible at all, and every one had begun to enjoy it.

"Except me," said Lucy. "I shall dream all night of the way poor Joe's head went suddenly out of sight, and I saw Dick bracing on that rope and wondered if it would hold!"

"The moral is," said her father, "have a good rope."

"I should say the moral was, don't climb in foolish places," Mrs. Jones declared, for the two women had of course been told the story at once.

"Gee, ma," Bob declared, "if everybody was like you, we wouldn't know there were any Rocky Mountains. Somebody's got to take a chance!"

Mills had said nothing. Now he spoke, in his brief, quiet way.

"It was a sound rope. Nobody took a chance," he said. "We don't let 'em in the Park."

There did not seem to be any reply to this. The girls went into their tent to rest, Joe changed his wet boots--which were soaked with the snow--and his wet shirt, and set busily about getting dinner. After all, he was the cook, and there was no further time for being a hero.