Chapter 2
The parade moves on. All at once you notice that the person immediately ahead of you has apparently ridden right over the wall of the canyon. A moment ago his arched back loomed before you; now he is utterly gone. It is at this point that some tourists tender their resignations--to take effect immediately. To the credit of the sex, be it said, the statistics show that fewer women quit here than men. But nearly always there is some man who remembers where he left his umbrella or something, and he goes back after it and forgets to return.
In our crowd there was one person who left us here. He was a circular person; about forty per cent of him, I should say, rhymed with jelly. He climbed right down off his mule. He said:
"I'm not scared myself, you understand, but I've just recalled that my wife is a nervous woman. She'd have a fit if she knew I was taking this trip! I love my wife, and for her sake I will not go down this canyon, dearly as I would love to." And with that he headed for the hotel. I wanted to go with him. I wanted to go along with him and comfort him and help him have his chill, and if necessary send a telegram for him to his wife--she was in Pittsburgh--telling her that all was well. But I did not. I kept on. I have been trying to figure out ever since whether this showed courage on my part, or cowardice.
Over the ridge and down the steep declivity beyond goes your mule, slipping a little. He is reared back until his rump almost brushes the trail; he grunts mild protests at every lurching step and grips his shoecalks into the half-frozen path. You reflect that thousands of persons have already done this thing; that thousands of others--men, women and children--are going to do it, and that no serious accident has yet occurred--which is some comfort, but not much. The thought comes to you that, after all, it is a very bright and beautiful world you are leaving behind. You turn your head to give it a long, lingering farewell, and you try to put your mind on something cheerful--such as your life insurance. Then something happens.
The trail, that has been slanting at a downward angle which is a trifle steeper than a ship's ladder, but not quite so steep perhaps as a board fence, takes an abrupt turn to the right. You duck your head and go through a little tunnel in the rock, patterned on the same general design of the needle's eye that is going to give so many of our prominent captains of industry trouble in the hereafter. And as you emerge on the lower side you forget all about your life-insurance papers and freeze to your pommel with both hands, and cram your poor cold feet into the stirrups--even in warm weather they'll be good and cold--and all your vital organs come up in your throat, where you can taste them. If anybody had shot me through the middle just about then he would have inflicted only a flesh wound.
You have come out on a place where the trail clings to the sheer side of the dizziest, deepest chasm in the known world. One of your legs is scraping against the everlasting granite; the other is dangling over half a mile of fresh mountain air. The mule's off hind hoof grates and grinds on the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone that flops over the verge. You try to look down and see where it is going and find you haven't the nerve to do it--but you can hear it falling from one narrow ledge to another, picking up other boulders as it goes until there must be a fair-sized little avalanche of them cascading down. The sound of their roaring, racketing passage grows fainter and fainter, then dies almost out, and then there rises up to you from those unutterable depths a dull, thuddy little sound--those stones have reached the cellar! Then to you there comes the pleasing reflection that if your mule slipped and you fell off and were dashed to fragments, they would not be large, mussy, irregular fragments, but little teeny-weeny fragments, such as would not bring the blush of modesty to the cheek of the most fastidious.
Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion and politics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He may slide a little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with malice aforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders of the trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he is interested in you. A tourist on the canyon's rim a simple tourist is to him and nothing more; but he has no intention of getting himself hurt. Instinct has taught that mule it would be to him a highly painful experience to fall a couple of thousand feet or so and light on a pile of rocks; and therefore, through motives that are purely selfish, he studiously refrains from so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him," and so on, I judge he had reference to a mule on a narrow trail.
My mule had one very disconcerting way about him--or, rather, about her, for she was of the gentler sex. When she came to a particularly scary spot, which was every minute or so, she would stop dead still. I concurred in that part of it heartily. But then she would face outward and crane her neck over the fathomless void of that bottomless pit, and for a space of moments would gaze steadily downward, with a despondent droop of her fiddle-shaped head and a suicidal gleam in her mournful eyes. It worried me no little; and if I had known, at the time, that she had a German name it would have worried me even more, I guess. But either the time was not ripe for the rash act or else she abhorred the thought of being found dead in the company of a mere tourist, so she did not leap off into space, but restrained herself; and I was very grateful to her for it. It made a bond of sympathy between us.
On you go, winding on down past the red limestone and the yellow limestone and the blue sandstone, which is green generally; past huge bat caves and the big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves of Nature's making; past stratified millions of crumbling seashells that tell to geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean that once on a time, when the world was young and callow, filled this hole brim full; and presently, when you have begun to piece together the tattered fringes of your nerves, you realize that the canyon is even more wonderful when viewed from within than it is when viewed from without. Also, you begin to notice now that it is most extensively autographed.
Apparently about every other person who came this way remarked to himself that this canyon was practically completed and only needed his signature as collaborator to round it out--so he signed it and after that it was a finished job. Some of them brought down colored chalk and stencils, and marking pots, and paints and brushes, and cold chisels to work with, which must have been a lot of trouble, but was worth it--it does add so greatly to the beauty of the Grand Canon to find it spangled over with such names as you could hear paged in almost any dollar-a-day American-plan hotel. The guide pointed out a spot where one of these inspired authors climbed high up the face of a white cliff and, clinging there, carved out in letters a foot long his name; and it was one of those names that, inscribed upon a register, would instinctively cause any room clerk to reach for the key to an inside one, without bath. I regret to state that nothing happened to this person. He got down safe and sound; it was a great pity, too.
By the Bright Angel Trail it is three hours on a mule to the plateau, where there are green summery things growing even in midwinter, and where the temperature is almost sultry; and it is an hour or so more to the riverbed, down at the very bottom. When you finally arrive there and look up you do not see how you ever got down, for the trail has magically disappeared; and you feel morally sure you are never going to get back. If your mule were not under you pensively craning his head rearward in an effort to bite your leg off, you would almost be ready to swear the whole thing was an optical illusion, a wondrous dream. Under these circumstances it is not so strange that some travelers who have been game enough until now suddenly weaken. Their nerves capsize and the grit runs out of them like sand out of an overturned pail.
All over this part of Arizona they tell you the story of the lady from the southern part of the state--she was a school teacher and the story has become an epic--who went down Bright Angel one morning and did not get back until two o'clock the following morning; and then she came against her will in a litter borne by two tired guides, while two others walked beside her and held her hands; and she was protesting at every step that she positively could not and would not go another inch; and she was as hysterical as a treeful of chickadees; her hat was lost, and her glasses were gone, and her hair hung down her back, and altogether she was a mournful sight to see.
Likewise the natives will tell you the tale of a man who made the trip by crawling round the more sensational corners upon his hands and knees; and when he got down he took one look up to where, a sheer mile above him, the rim of the canyon showed, with the tall pine trees along its edge looking like the hairs upon a caterpillar's back, and he announced firmly that he wished he might choke if he stirred another step. Through the miraculous indulgence of a merciful providence he was down, and that was sufficient for him; he wasn't going to trifle with his luck. He would stay down until he felt good and rested, and then he would return to his home in dear old Altoona by some other route. He was very positive about it. There were two guides along, both of them patient and forbearing cowpunchers, and they argued with him. They pointed that there was only one suitable way for him to get out of the canyon, and that was the way by which he had got into it.
"The trouble with you fellows," said the man, "is that you are too dad-blamed technical. The point is that I'm here, and here I'm going to stay."
"But," they told him, "you can't stay here. You'd starve to death like that poor devil that some prospectors found in that gulch yonder--turned to dusty bones, with a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock under his head. You'd just naturally starve to death."
"There you go again," he said, "importing these trivial foreign matters into the discussion. Let us confine ourselves to the main issue, which is that I am not going back. This rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I," he said, or words to that effect.
So insisting, he sat down, putting his own firm base against the said rock, and prepared to become a permanent resident. He was a grown man and the guides were less gentle with him than they had been with the lady school teacher. They roped his arms at the elbows and hoisted him upon a mule and tied his legs together under the mule's belly, and they brought him out of there like a sack of bran--only he made more noise than any sack of bran has ever been known to make.
Coming back up out of the Grand Canon is an even more inspiring and amazing performance than going down. But by now--anyhow this was my experience, and they tell me it is the common experience--you are beginning to get used to the sensation of skirting along the raw and ragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns where, going down, your hair pushed your hat off, no longer affright you; you take them jauntily--almost debonairly. You feel that you are now an old mountain-scaler, and your soul begins to crave for a trip with a few more thrills to the square inch in it. You get your wish. You go down Hermit Trail, which its middle name is thrills; and there you make the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk.
The Hydrophobic Skunk is a creature of such surpassing accomplishments and vivid personality that I feel he is entitled to a new chapter. The Hydrophobic Skunk will be continued in our next.
_RABID AND HIS FRIENDS_
_Rabid and His Friends_
THE Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand Canon and, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a Federal office, is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody ever saw him--that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists who had seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.
I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with any extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybody gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect--nay, more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes. Joy-riders never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no--the Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besides carrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid in the most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, like one's relatives by marriage--and not mad most of the time, like the old-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad all the time--incurably, enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it.
We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Canon first of all takes the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal wound of a canyon to the very gizzard of the world.
Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked out the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinary folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side all the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loose stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than a foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which he never does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has not happened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might not even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and a thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a tremendous sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon.
As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a buckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately the road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the sunshine is a benediction.
Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop up romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by the heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.
Anon--that is to say, at the end of those ten miles--you come to the head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You ride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty fir trees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned with the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blistered vistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail, which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apaches and later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward with their stolen pony herds.
You pass above the gloomy shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a great box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock and balancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at the end of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midway between Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty, the official hermit of the Grand Canon.
Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with warped legs and mild blue eyes and a set of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect that you cannot tell at first look whether they are just coming out or just going back in. He belongs--or did belong--to the vast vanishing race of old-time gold prospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under an accommodating flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like a snuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, a breadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretch of the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds the trail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in the night; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quiet existence.
Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah, weekending in the whale, had a perfectly uproarious time; but Shorty thrives on a solitude that is too vast for imagining. He would not trade jobs with the most potted potentate alive--only sometimes in mid-summer he feels the need of a change stealing over him, and then he goes afoot out into the middle of Death Valley and spends a happy vacation of five or six weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat. He takes Toby with him.
Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like a carpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly--after the model of his master's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You have only to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttling away to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all round looking for red invaders. Not finding any he comes slowly back, crushed to the earth with disappointment. Nobody has ever been able to decide what Toby would do with the Indians if he found them; but he and Shorty are in perfect accord. They have been associated together ever since Toby was a pup and Shorty went into the hermit business, and that was ten years ago. Sitting cross-legged on a flat rock like a little gnome, with his puckered eyes squinting off at space, Shorty told us how once upon a time he came near losing Toby.
"Me and Toby," he said, "was over to Flagstaff, and that was several years ago. There was a saloon man over there owned a bulldog and he wanted that his bulldog and Toby should fight. Toby can lick mighty nigh any dog alive; but I didn't want that Toby should fight. But this here saloon man wouldn't listen. He sicked his bulldog on to Toby and in about a minute Toby was taking that bulldog all apart.
"This here saloon man he got mad then--he got awful mad. He wanted to kill Toby and he pulled out his pistol. I begged him mighty hard please not to shoot Toby--I did so! I stood in front of Toby to protect him and I begged that man not to do it. Then some other fellows made him put up his gun, and me and Toby came on away from there." His voice trailed off. "I certainly would 'a' hated to lose Toby. We set a heap of store by one another--don't we, dog?" And Toby testified that it was so--testified with wriggling body and licking tongue and dancing eyes and a madly wagging stump tail.
As we mounted and jogged away we looked back, and the pair of them--Shorty and Toby--were sitting there side by side in perfect harmony and perfect content; and I could not help wondering, in a country where we sometimes hang a man for killing a man, what would have been adequate punishment for a brute who would kill Toby and leave Shorty without his partner! In another minute, though, we had rounded a jagged sandstone shoulder and they were out of sight.
About that time Johnny, our guide, felt moved to speech, and we hearkened to his words and hungered for more, for Johnny knows the ranges of the Northwest as a city dweller knows his own little side street. In the fall of the year Johnny comes down to the Canon and serves as a guide a while; and then, when he gets so he just can't stand associating with tourists any longer, he packs his warbags and journeys back to the Northern Range and enjoys the company of cows a spell. Cows are not exactly exciting, but they don't ask fool questions.
A highly competent young person is Johnny and a cowpuncher of parts. Most of the Canon guides are cowpunchers--accomplished ones, too, and of high standing in the profession. With a touch of reverence Johnny pointed out to us Sam Scovel, the greatest bronco buster of his time, now engaged in piloting tourists.
"Can he ride?" echoed Johnny in answer to our question. "Scovel could ride an earthquake if she stood still long enough for him to mount! He rode Steamboat--not Young Steamboat, but Old Steamboat! He rode Rocking Chair, and he's the only man that ever did do that and not be called on in a couple of days to attend his own funeral."
This day he told us about one Tom, who lived up in Wyoming, where Johnny came from. It appeared that in an easier day Tom was hired by some cattle men to thin out the sheep herders who insisted upon invading the public ranges. By Johnny's account Tom did the thinning with conscientious attention to detail and gave general satisfaction for a while; but eventually he grew careless in his methods and took to killing parties who were under the protection of the game laws. Likewise his own private collection of yearlings began to increase with a rapidity which was only to be accounted for on the theory that a large number of calves were coming into the world with Tom's brand for a birthmark. So he lost popularity. Several times his funeral was privily arranged, but on each occasion was postponed owing to the failure of the corpse to be present. Finally he killed a young boy and was caught and convicted, and one morning they took him out and hanged him rather extensively.