CHAPTER XX

CLIMBING A GREAT MOUNTAIN

At breakfast the next morning it was decided that they should try to learn something about the great mass of ice that lay in the basin south of the camp, which supplied the water for the river that fell over the cliff.

“Now, if we’re going up there,” said Hugh, “we’ve got a long tramp over the ice, and we want to go as well fixed as we can. We ought to have one gun with us, but we must go roped and take our sticks along. We may find that the ice up there slopes sharply and is smooth, and we ought to have something to help ourselves with.”

“All right,” chimed in both boys, “you tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “the first thing is to point the ends of those walking sticks again, then shove them into the fire to harden. Next take some charcoal and break it up in your fingers and blacken your noses and cheek bones and your faces under the eyes. Each one of you ought to have a handkerchief or a rag to tie around your heads over the bridge of your nose if the sun gets very bright. That’s a good protection against snow-blindness.”

The preparations that Hugh advised were soon made, and the sun had not yet showed itself above the eastern mountains when the three set out on foot. For several hundred yards they had to climb a steep slope, and then as they went on toward the precipice, they came to a level bit of land, over which were strewn immense masses of stone, huge monoliths that made Jack think of the stories that he had read about the ruins in the old places of worship of the Druids.

Beyond this level land was a talus fallen from the cliff and then a morainal trough, up which they passed to the ice above. From this point the whole basin of the great glacier was spread out before them, and Hugh began to examine it with a view to making the ascent by the easiest and safest path.

Hugh studied the situation with the field glasses for a long time and then, passing them to Jack, asked, “What do you see, son? Which road seems to be the best?”

“Well, Hugh,” answered Jack, after he had looked over the ground, “it’s a little hard for me to say, for I don’t know much about these places. The shortest way, of course, is to cross over to the right and try to climb up the rocks there, but the snowslides and rockfalls seem to be coming down all the time, and I shouldn’t suppose that would be safe. The same thing is true about going close to the mountains on the left, and, of course, we can all see that we can’t go up in the middle. It looks to me, too, as if the ice were steeper on the right hand than it is on the left, so I should say that it was better to keep to the left, just as near the middle of the glacier as we can without getting in among crevices.”

“What do you say, Joe?” asked Hugh.

“I don’t know,” said Joe. “I guess I’ll just follow where you go, but it seems to me that Jack’s talk is good.”

“Yes,” said Hugh, “I think so, too, and I believe that’s the best way for us to go. I ain’t so much afraid of falling in those cracks in the ice as I am of being hit by one of those rocks that comes down a thousand feet or two. Even a little bit of a rock could crack a man’s head open, and if one of those big rocks ever hits him I believe it would go right through him.

“I think Jack is right and we’d better go where he has said. Now, before we start, we must tie ourselves together with this rope, and if we get to a place where the ice is any way cracked we’ll have to go pretty slowly, so that only one man can fall in at a time, and the other two can pull him out.”

They started without further delay; and now for two or three hours followed a slow plodding walk up the face of the ice. Sometimes they came to a long crevasse, which they had to go around, but at no time did they approach very near the edge of the snowfalls. Several times, however, they passed near great stones which had fallen from the mountain far out onto the ice.

At one point, when they had passed over three-fourths of the distance, they heard a low, rumbling sound behind them, and, turning, all three were in time to witness the fall of a great avalanche, which threw itself far out onto the ice.

It was afternoon when they found themselves immediately under the ridge of rocks which was their destination, and a little search showed them a place where they could get off the ice and on to the rocks, and they were soon reclining on the grassy soil crowning the slope. There they rested while Hugh smoked a pipe, and then went on. To their left, that is on the side of this ridge of rocks opposite from the one by which they had approached, lay another great mass of ice, which, however, sloped the other way, and which Hugh said must run into the Flat Head or else into the head of Cut Bank River.

The crest over which they were passing was substantially level, and before them stood the tall rounded summit of the great mountain, the top of which they hoped to reach.

When they had come to the end of the ridge, it was a short climb down to the ice, and passing over this for a short distance, they came to more rocks and, surmounting these, found themselves at the edge of a dome-shaped snow bank, which seemed to stretch away by a gentle slope to the very top of the mountains. To the north was the slope they had to cross, and immediately below the edge of this a tremendous drop of perhaps a thousand feet to another ice field below.

“Here’s a bad place,” said Hugh; “if this snow is real hard there’s a chance that some one of us may slip. We must go across slowly. Come to the edge and then we will go forward, one at a time, always keeping the rope tight between us, the two men that are standing still anchoring themselves solidly by means of their sticks. If one of us should slip he’ll need all the help the other two can give him.”

Hugh put his gun down on the rocks and said, “I reckon I’ll leave that here till I come back. I may want both my hands crossing this snow.”

When they started they proceeded with great caution, following Hugh’s instructions. Occasionally the snow was so hard that it was impossible for them to dig their feet into it, and it was even difficult for them to punch their sticks down into it. Each one as he advanced went slowly and carefully, while the other two stood still to support him in case anything happened.

If the traverse was slow, it was steady and safe; and before very long the three found themselves clambering over the broken rock near the top of the mountain. At the moment, they had little thought for the wonderful view, since the minds of all were turned toward the summit which lay before them, and now only a few steps distant.

A moment later and the peak was gained, and the three threw themselves down in a sheltered place among the great rocks that formed the mountain crest, where the view was entrancing in its extent and grandeur.

In all directions, as far as they could see, mountains lay beyond mountains. Far away to the north were two which seemed higher than any of those nearer at hand. The whole circle of the horizon could be seen except that, to the north, the view was interrupted by the tall mountain close to them, which equaled in height the one on which they were sitting, and behind them to the south was another peak equally high. Away to the westward the eye traveled without interruption over lower rocky peaks and great stretches of forest, until it met other mountain ranges running north and south, so far away that only their dim outlines could be seen. To the north there was no such low country as to the west, for peaks and ridges thrust their sharp points up toward the sky, and one gained the impression of a world set on edge. Although they could not see them, they knew that between the ridges and beyond each peak lay some narrow valley or canyon, and that only by following such water courses could the country be traversed.

Immediately before and below them lay the great ice that they had just passed over, and behind or to the south, that other extensive ice field, which Hugh now said flowed into a tributary of the Flat Head River, and which, years before, had been named after a man who crossed the mountains through the Cut Bank Pass, the Pumpelly Glacier.

“I tell you, Hugh,” said Jack, “this is a wonderful place up here. It beats anything I ever saw. I can’t help wondering how these mountains got tipped up in this way, and what the force was that changed them from level or rolling ground to these sharp peaks and ridges.”

“Well, son,” replied Hugh, “you can’t prove it by me, but I expect that most of these valleys, if not all of them, were cut out by the ice, just as we see below us this valley here being cut out.”

“I suppose that is so,” Jack replied, “but it doesn’t seem quite possible to me.”

“Well,” answered Hugh, “you must remember that if our understanding about these glaciers is correct, they may have been working for thousands of years, and if they only ground away six inches or a foot of the rock under them in each year, a thousand years or so would make a mighty deep valley. And besides that, I reckon that in those ancient times these glaciers were a heap bigger and heavier than they are now, and maybe they moved a lot faster, and in that case they’d work a lot faster, wouldn’t they?”

“I suppose they would,” agreed Jack. “But it’s mighty hard to realize such things. You see we human beings are such little bits of things, and we live so short a time, that it’s mighty difficult to comprehend the forces of nature that never stop working.”

“You bet your life it is,” said Hugh. “It’s only within a few years, since I began to talk to people who understood something about these things, that I began to look back a little. In my young days, so long as I had my blankets and a few charges of ammunition I never thought much about what was behind me or what was ahead. Of course, I always looked out for myself as well as I could, but I never thought very much about the world and the things that are going and have gone on in it. But of late years it’s different, and when a man does think about those things it kind o’ takes his breath away once in a while.”

“That’s so,” replied Jack. “People say that we can’t count the stars in the sky, and that we can’t understand how many miles away from the earth the sun or the moon is, and, of course, that’s true, but it’s just as hard for us to understand some of the things that are going on right under our noses, as it is to understand time or space.”

Up on this mountain peak the wind blew cool, and it was not long before they were ready to turn about and begin the descent.

“We’ll go back the way we came,” said Hugh, “and we want to go just as carefully over this snow as we did when we were coming up. Only one man must move at a time, and the others must fix themselves firmly, so as to hold him if he slips.”

The traverse back across the snow was made in safety, and before very long they found themselves on the low rocky ridge over which they must descend to return over the ice.

Before leaving it they sat down under the lee of the ridge in the warm sun, and while Hugh smoked a pipe the others looked out over the wide white field before them.

Presently Joe called out, “Look at the sheep,” and pointed in front of him.

Jack looked, and at first could see nothing, but after Joe had told him where to look, he saw half a dozen tiny dark objects moving swiftly about without order over the ice a couple of miles away. Borrowing the glasses, he looked at them, and could plainly see that they were four-legged animals running to and fro over the ice field, apparently playing with each other.

Hugh looked at them and said that they were indeed sheep, as Joe had said, but confessed that he only called them sheep because he knew that no other animals could be found in such a place.

In the soil of the rocky ridge where they were sitting Jack discovered some beautiful pink flowers, but neither Hugh nor Joe could give them a name. They grew on exceedingly short stems from little round bunches of green leaves shaped like a pincushion and with the general aspect of what Jack remembered in Eastern gardens as phlox.

He would have liked to take some of these flowers back with him to have them identified, but had no way of carrying them.

Still roped together, the three once more descended to the ice, and started toward camp.

The walking was easier now, partly because it was down hill and partly because the snow had been softened by the sun’s heat and gave them a better foothold.

Hugh advised the boys to tie their handkerchiefs over the bridge of their noses, and to pull their hats well down on their foreheads to shield their eyes as much as possible from the glare of the sun.

As they went on down the glacier, they could see that even since they had passed up in the morning new cracks had opened in the ice and some that they had gone around on the way up had lengthened. Two or three of these were so narrow that they could step across them, but Hugh still kept as far from the rocks as the broken condition of the glacier would permit.

They were walking along, the boys perhaps a little carelessly, though Hugh’s vigilance never seemed to relax, when Jack’s left foot seemed to meet with no resistance as it struck the snow, and in a moment he was in a crack or hole in the ice far above his waist. Luckily he had turned his staff as he fell, so that it reached across the crack and held him, and but little strain came on the ropes which attached him to his companions. Hugh had heard the fall and had braced himself, and a second later Joe had done the same.

It took but a moment to pull Jack out onto the hard ice, and Joe, making a detour to the left, avoided the opening into which Jack had fallen. When they were all once more together and on the hard ice, Hugh said to Jack, “Son, you’re old enough not to have done a trick like that.”

“Yes, Hugh,” replied Jack, “I know that now, and I’m sorry and ashamed. If I had followed in your tracks, I wouldn’t have given you and Joe a scare, and I wouldn’t have had one myself. Every now and then I do some stupid thing that makes it seem as if this was my first trip out West, and I didn’t know anything at all. I was thinking of something else besides the trail and looking off toward the valley, and I left your tracks and tumbled into that hole.”

“Well,” replied Hugh, “of course, you’re new to traveling around on the ice. You can’t be expected to know much about it, but you can be expected to look out for yourself as well as you know how, and to try hard not to make other people uncomfortable. I guess Joe was scared up good when he saw you go down, and I know I wasn’t a bit comfortable.”

“No,” said Jack, “I know you weren’t and I know it’s a good thing for you to talk to me in this way. Your talking doesn’t make me feel any worse than I feel already, and I hope I’ve learned a lesson, but, of course, I don’t know.”

“We all make mistakes every day,” said Hugh, “and it’s no ways likely that you’ve made your last; only, as I’ve told you before, try not to make the same mistake twice. If you do that it shows that you don’t learn anything.”

The rest of the way to camp passed without adventure, and when they reached the moraine above the cliff, they took off the ropes and scrambled down the rocks, when a short walk, and a slide by the boys down a long snow bank, brought them to the little stream by which the tent was pitched.

The sun hung low over the western mountain and all were hungry after their long walk, and they at once busied themselves getting supper.

All through the evening Jack’s heart was low. He was sorry to have made such a blunder as he had, and knew that his carelessness had disappointed Hugh. It was certainly humiliating to have done what he felt Hugh might justly call a “fool trick.”

As they sat around the fire, Hugh, who for some time had been smoking thoughtfully, said, “Well, boys, we’ve seen quite a lot of things up here on this patch of mountains, and time is passing. What do you say to turning around and going back? I’d surely like to stay up here longer, but we must remember that son here has got to get back East, and we have quite a little way to go before we strike the railroad. I reckon if we roll to-morrow morning we ought to be able to get down to the inlet by night. We can stop there for a day or two and hunt and fish a little, and then pull out for the Agency and from there go to Benton.”

“I suppose we’ve got to go before long, Hugh,” replied Jack. “I was counting up the days only the day before yesterday, and figured that we hadn’t much more time here in the mountains. I hate to go, but there’s nothing else to do, I suppose.

“It seems to me that each year I dislike more and more to go back. I’ve never had such good times as I’ve had with you. I think of them all winter when I’m back in New York; for about six months I think of the good time I had last year, and then for the other months I think of the good time I’m going to have next year. I hope we’ll have lots more of them.”

“Yes,” said Hugh, “I hope we will. I don’t know, though; I’m getting old, and I don’t think I get about quite as easily as I used to. Of course, I can ride and walk as far as I could when you first came out, but it’s sure that a time is coming when I’ll get crippled up and won’t be able to do as much as I can now. I’ve got some old hurts that sometimes bother me a whole lot now in winter, when I’m not moving around very much, and the older a man gets the more things like that trouble him.”

“Well,” said Jack, “you can still ride farther and do more than any man I ever saw, and I guess it will be a long time before you are laid up.”

The next morning Hugh roused the boys while it was still only gray dawn and sent them across the creek to bring in the horses, and by the time they returned breakfast had been cooked, the tent taken down and many of the packs made up, and an hour or two later the little train was retracing its steps toward the lower country.

As they started, Hugh said, “Of course, we could make quite a cut off in distance by going down on this side of the creek and I don’t believe we’d have much trouble, but then none of us have been over the ground. We might find some place where we couldn’t get the horses down easily, and worse than all, we might have trouble crossing the river. It’ll take us an hour or more longer perhaps to go around the way we came, but that way we know we can keep out of trouble, and that’s the way we better go.”

All day long they traveled down the river, following the trail that they had made coming up. At one point, one of the horses mired in a bog-hole and there was some difficulty in getting him out, but by pulling and urging and getting some willow brush and throwing it under him so that he could get his front feet on it, he finally managed to pull himself out without having his load taken off.

As they were passing through an open place, from which they could see the towering precipice of the great mountains across the creek, Joe remarked, “I think I see three bears.”

All stopped and looked in the direction in which he pointed, and there, sure enough, far up on the precipice above them, they saw one very large bear and two much smaller ones, industriously feeding below the ledges. They did not see the travelers, but were much too far off to be shot at. Joe asked Hugh at what he estimated the distance, and Hugh said, “Anywhere from six hundred yards to half a mile.”

Of course, Jack was strongly tempted to suggest that they should stop here and try to hunt the bears, but he knew that the prospect of getting them was small and so said nothing about it, and after watching the unconscious animals for a time, the train moved on.

The sun was only an hour or two high when they descended the point of rocks and struck into the open trail along the upper lake. Here Hugh increased the speed of his horse, and the boys, keeping the pack horses up, reached the inlet just before dark and made camp.