CHAPTER XXI--The Climb Up the Tower of Chief Mountain, the Indian

Relic on the Summit and An Eagle's Nest

How Mills managed to wake up just at the time he wanted to, without any alarm clock, the scouts never were able to fathom, but he always could. He was awake and shaking them at four-thirty the next day. Joe was up on the instant, and putting on his outer clothes, but Tom groaned when he tried to move, and fell back into his blankets with an "Ouch!"

"Your sick friend strikes me as better than you are," Mills taunted him.

"Why wouldn't he be? He's been weeks in the saddle now," Tom retorted, stung into sitting up. "I'll be all right by to-morrow--you see if I'm not."

"Well, I'm sorry you're too lame to climb Chief to-day," Mills said, with a wink at Joe.

That brought Tom out of his blankets entirely, and on to his feet. "Too lame, your grandmother!" he cried. "I'd like to see you get my rope without me!"

"Oh, it's been climbed without a rope, many a time," Mills laughed.

Tom was up now, and thoroughly awake, and began to see the joke. He grinned rather sheepishly, and went out of the tent with his towel. Meanwhile, Joe beat reveille on a frying-pan, and lit his fire.

By six o'clock breakfast was eaten, the horses packed again, and the party on its way. They went up the trail but a short distance, and then turned sharp to the north, and began at once to climb the long spine which connects Chief Mountain with the main range to the west. It was a little over a mile to the summit of this spine, rising from 6,000 feet to 7,400. A horse does not trot up such a grade, but neither does he have to climb like a goat. In an hour, they were at the summit, and could look at last not only eastward, along the ridge, to the limestone tower of Chief which was their goal, but down the slope on the north side to the valley of the Belly River, and across it to the eastern shoulders of Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, 10,438 feet.

Here, in the open, grassy ridges at timber-line, the horses were unsaddled and unpacked, so if they lay down to roll, they could do no damage, and the party, with Tom's rope and the cameras, set out along the ridge due east toward the towering cliff of Chief, which looked like a huge castle battlement, or watch-tower. It was not over a two-mile walk to the shale pile at the base of the summit precipice, by an easy grade, though the going was sometimes rough. The topographical map Joe carried showed that they rose from 7,400 feet to over 8,000, at the top of the shale pile, and as the mountain is 9,056 feet high, that left about a thousand feet of cliff for the final ascent.

At the top of the shale they paused, while Mills and Tom consulted. This great limestone rock was not such a hard proposition as parts of the Iceberg Lake cliff, and after a careful survey of the ground, they decided the best way to handle six people on the rope was to send a leader up with the end, to anchor where he could find strong anchorage, and then let the rest use it as a rail, rather than fastening it around each person's waist.

Tom went in number one position, with the Ranger as number two, and Joe was stationed at the bottom, to brace and throw a loop around anybody who might, by chance, slip. In many places, Mills played Tom out nearly the whole length of the rope, where the incline was sufficiently off the perpendicular, and the rest had almost a hundred feet of rope rail to climb by. In only a few places was there real vertical climbing, and those as the summit was neared. Before noon they were all over the last pitch, on the summit.

Robert Crimmins ran to the outer edge of this summit at once, and looked out over the vast green prairie, stretching mile on endless mile to the east, like waves of the sea, and shouted.

"Father, come here!" he called. "Say, this is just like riding on the bowsprit of a tremendous ship!"

Everybody hurried over, to feel the same sensation, all except Joe. "I tell you what it feels like to me," he said. "It feels as if I was on the front edge of the earth crust when it rode up and over the other edge. This must be the very end of the overthrust."

"That's so," Mr. Crimmins agreed. "I've been reading up on this geological formation. This cliff under us--it must be three thousand feet down to the shale slide--was the front edge of the overthrust. You can see that. The Belly River has carved away one side, Kennedy Creek the other, but this old lump of limestone has resisted all the bombardments of frost and water, glacier and storm, and the weather has carved it into a watch-tower of the prairies, an outpost sentinel of the Great Divide."

["Some speech!" Tom whispered to Joe.]

But Joe did not laugh. He felt exactly what Mr. Crimmins meant, and it was very thrilling. It seemed as if he could see exactly what happened myriads of years ago when the earth cracked, and one edge of the great crust was shoved forward on to the prairie, and as if he could see what had happened since, to carve the crust into peaks and valleys.

Mills, meanwhile, had been walking about. Now he called to them, and they all went over where he stood, and saw him pointing to the bleached skull of a large animal on the ground.

"What's that?" the men asked.

"Buffalo," he answered.

"How on earth did it get up here?" said Mr. Crimmins. "There are only three things, without wings, which can climb this cliff, surely,--goats, mountain sheep, and men. You needn't try to tell me a buffalo could climb up here!"

"Shan't try," the Ranger answered. "A Blackfoot brought that up."

"What for?" Joe asked.

"To use for a pillow while he was getting his medicine. You know, when an Indian boy gets about the age of you scouts, he has to take a sweat bath (made by putting hot stones in a closed lodge and pouring water on 'em) to purify himself, and then he goes off to some wild, lonely place and just waits there, naked, without any food, till he has a vision. This vision tells him what his special 'medicine' is to be, which will bring him good luck. Old Yellow Wolf told me we'd find the skull up here. He knew the brave that brought it up for a pillow. He said the young Indian stayed four days on the summit before he got his 'medicine.'"

"Say, if I stayed up here four days, naked, I'd need some medicine when I got down!" young Crimmins laughed. "Let's take the skull for a souvenir."

"Oh, no!" Joe cried, forgetting that he was only a cook and guide for the party. "That would be--be desecration! Let it stay here, where the Indian left it!"

Mr. Crimmins looked at him sharply but kindly. "Joe is right," he said. "Let it stay here as a record of a race too fast vanishing. I like to think of that naked Indian boy, all alone, climbing this great rock tower and for four whole days sitting up here far above the world, waiting for a vision from his gods. You wouldn't catch one of our American boys doing anything like that. Yet we think we are vastly superior to the Indians!"

"But his vision, after all, probably came because he was dizzy for lack of food, and it was a superstition that it could furnish him a 'medicine' to bring good luck," Mr. Taylor said.

"Superstition or not," the other replied, "it represented the instinct to go out alone, and meditate on solemn things. Didn't it, Joe?"

"Yes, sir!" Joe answered, his own heart full of enthusiasm for this picture of the lone, naked Indian on top of the watch-tower of the prairies.

But Tom and Robert Crimmins, who had less imagination, had wandered away to an edge of the cliff, to toss stones over into the depths below, and suddenly the rest heard them shouting, and ran to the edge.

One of the stones they had thrown over had landed on a ledge some seventy-five feet below, and scared off a golden eagle, which was now sailing away from the cliff face with tremendous beats of his huge wings, each beat taking him up, it seemed, fifty feet, till soon he was soaring in circles out over the prairie, and sweeping back, with wings at rest, far overhead, evidently alarmed but intent on finding out what had disturbed him.

Crawling to the edge, and looking over, the party could see a big nest on the ledge below, with white things in it, and beside it, like bones.

"I'm going to have a photograph of that!" Tom cried. "Gee, I wish there were some little eagles in it!"

"You might be sorry if there were," Mills answered briefly, as Tom fastened the rope under his arms. "I'm not even sure of the bird now the young are out. Here, take my revolver, and if it comes at you, let him have it."

Tom put his camera in one pocket, the automatic in the other, and the men above lowered him over the edge, where he swung almost free, and had to kick the cliffside with his feet to keep himself from spinning and keep his face outward. The eagle still circled above, now and then swooping nearer till they could hear the wing beats, but it was evidently afraid to attack. Tom finally reached the ledge, landing, in fact, with both feet in the nest. It was a huge affair of sticks, lined with dry prairie grass, almost as high as his shoulders, and four feet across. He climbed out, watching the eagle with one eye, and took a couple of snapshots of it, then picked up some of the bones and examined them, grasped the rope just above his face, to ease the strain under his arms, and gave the signal to those above.

As he began to rise from the nest, the eagle swooped ever nearer, now lower than the men on the summit, so they could see its vast wing spread, its brown back and rusty colored head and neck.

Tom let go of the rope with his hands, and got the pistol out of his pocket. To tell the truth, he was beginning to get uncomfortable. As the eagle swooped within fifty feet of him, and he could see its glinting eyes, he lifted the gun and fired. Naturally, you cannot shoot a rapidly moving object with a pistol, while you yourself are dangling and spinning on the end of a rope, with any great precision of aim. He did not hit the bird, but he frightened it. With an incredibly quick change of tack, it tilted up on one wing, soared outward and upward, two hundred feet overhead, and far out from the cliff. The men hauled Tom back over the edge.

"Well, I got my picture!" Tom exclaimed. "Say, but that's a whale of a nest! And side of it is a little skeleton, either of a kid or a baby lamb, and lots of small bones like rabbits and birds, and a fresh, half eaten ground squirrel. That's what the old eagle was eating when we disturbed him, I guess. Gee, it's a regular bone yard down there. Don't smell very good, either. I don't think I care for eagles much."

"I didn't care for that one, when he was coming at you!" Joe said, his face still white.

"I didn't myself," Tom admitted. "Wish I'd had the nerve to photograph the old birdie instead of shooting at him."

"They don't like to have their pictures taken," said Mills, with a short laugh.

After this excitement, the descent of the mountain began. Half-way down, Joe left the rope, at a wide ledge, and went some distance along it, to one side, to get a photograph of the whole party on the cliffside. After he had snapped it, he kept on along the ledge a way, just to see where it went to. After a hundred feet, it turned a sharp corner, and as Joe rounded this turn, he suddenly was face to face with a big old ram! He was quite as astonished as the sheep, but he instinctively pointed his camera and snapped the bulb, just as the ram lowered its head as if to butt.

Joe flattened himself against the wall, not wishing to be knocked off fifty feet to the slope below. But the sheep decided not to butt. Instead, he turned tail, dashed a few feet back on the ledge, and went over head first. Joe ran to the spot in time to see him land on a little shelf twenty feet lower down, bounce off that to a ledge still lower, and then trot around an easy slope and disappear from sight. Not having had time to roll his film, he couldn't take another picture. But he returned to the party in triumph. Tom might have a picture of an eagle's nest, but now he had one of a live bighorn! The fact that his camera was focused for a hundred feet, as he had just taken the party on the rope when he met the sheep, and so his close-up of the old ram would be somewhat blurry, did not occur to him till long after, when the film was developed.

After a quick lunch, mainly of Charlie Chaplin sandwiches, the horses were packed again, and they descended the north slope of the ridge, by an easy grade, getting rapidly into timber, and after five miles or so reached the valley of the Belly River, turned up that, and presently made camp at the mouth of the Glenns Lakes, two long, narrow, green lakes reaching in toward the Divide, with the towering walls of Cleveland, which they had seen clearly from Chief, rising right out of these lakes, but now, they saw to their sorrow, going up into clouds.

"I thought so," Mills said. "Bad weather. It don't look to me as if we could tackle Cleveland to-morrow. I wanted to try him from this side, too--go up on that long shoulder that comes down south, and then east, toward us. We could get up on that and make a base camp. Well, we'll camp here to-night, and if he's still under to-morrow, we can go over Ahern Pass to Flat Top, and then try him from the west side. That's the side they usually go up, anyhow."

So they pitched their tents in a meadow by the Belly River, with the clouds gradually shredding out overhead till they finally wrapped the tower of Chief, and hid it from sight, and the cold grew uncomfortable, so that everybody save Joe set about chopping a big supply of wood. Night came early under the cloud mantle, and with no glimpse of the stars, or the tops of those great walls towering up overhead, it was a lonely spot. As Joe was dropping to sleep he heard a coyote barking somewhere out near the horses, a weird, sad sound, like the coughing laugh of an idiot. He shivered at the sound still more, and tried to roll his blanket tighter.

"But you've got to get used to it, old scout, if you are going to be a forest ranger," he told himself.

Certainly it did not trouble Mills, who was already sound asleep.