Part 2

The rangers keep going all winter. There is much to be done. In the summer it is forest fires and outlaws. In the winter there are no forest fires, but there are poachers after mountain sheep and goats, opium smugglers, bad men from over the Canadian border. Now and then a ranger freezes to death. All summer these intrepid men on their sturdy horses go about armed with revolvers. But in the fall--snow begins early in September, sometimes even in August--they take to snowshoes. With a carbine strung to his shoulders, matches in a waterproof case, snowshoes and a package of food in his pocket, the Glacier Park ranger covers unnumbered miles, patrolling the wildest and most storm-ridden country in America. He travels alone. The imprint of a strange snowshoe on the trail rouses his suspicion. Single-handed he follows the marks in the snow. A blizzard comes. He makes a wikiup of branches, lights a small fire, and plays solitaire until the weather clears. The prey he is stalking cannot advance either. Then one day the snow ceases; the sun comes out. Over the frozen crust his snowshoes slide down great slopes with express speed. Generally he takes his man in. Sometimes the outlaw gets the drop on the ranger first and gets away.

During the winter of 1913 one of these rangers was frozen to death. He was caught in a blizzard, and he knew what was coming. When at last he sat down beside the trail to wait for death he placed his snowshoes points upward in the snow beside him. He sat there, and the snow came down and covered him. They found him the next day by the points of his snowshoes.

The snow melts in the summer on the meadows and in the groves. But the peaks are still covered, and here and there the trail leads through a snow-field. The horses venture out on it gingerly. The hot sun that blisters the face seems to make no impression on these glacier-like patches, snow on top and ice beneath. Flowers grow at their very borders. Striped squirrels and whistling marmots, much like Eastern woodchucks, run about, quite fearless, or sit up and watch the passing of the line of horses and riders, so close that they can almost be touched.

Great spaces; cool, shadowy depths in which lie blue lakes; mountain-sides threaded with white, where, from some hidden lake or glacier far above, the overflow falls a thousand feet or more, and over all the great silence of the Rockies! Nerves that have been tightened for years slowly relax. There is not much talking. The horses move along slowly. The sun beats down. Some one, shading his eyes with his hand, proclaims a mountain sheep or goat on a crag overhead. The word passes back along the line. Also a thrill. Then some wretched electrical engineer or college youth or skeptical lawyer produces a pair of field-glasses and announces it to be a patch of snow.

Here and there we saw "tourist goats," rocks so shaped and situated as to defy the strongest glass. The guides pointed them out and listened with silent enjoyment to the resulting acclamation. After that discovery, we adopted a safe rule: nothing was a goat that did not move. Long hours we spent while our horses wandered on with loose reins, our heads lifted to that line, just above the timber, which is Goatland. And the cry "A goat!" and the glasses, and skepticism--often undeserved.

The first night out of doors I did not sleep. I had not counted on the frosty nights, and I was cold. The next day I secured from a more provident member of the party woolen pajamas. Clad in those, and covered with all the extra portions of my wardrobe, I was more comfortable. But it takes woolen clothing and bed socks to keep out the chill of those mountain nights.

One rises early with Howard Eaton's party. No matter how late the story-tellers have held the crowd the night before around the camp-fire, somewhere about five o'clock, Howard--he is either Howard or Uncle Howard to everybody--comes calling among the silent tepees.

"Time to get up!" he calls. "Five o'clock and a fine morning. Up with you!"

And everybody gets up. There are basins about. Each one clutches his cake of soap and his towel, and fills his basin from whatever lake or stream is at hand. There is plenty of water in Glacier Park, and the camps are generally beside a lake. The water is cold. It ought to be, being glacier water, cold and blue. The air is none too warm. A few brave spirits seek isolation and a plunge bath. The majority are cowards.

Now and then a luxurious soul worried the cook for hot water. They tell of a fastidious lady who carried a small tin pail of water to the cook tent and addressed the cook nervously as he beat the morning flapjacks with a savage hand.

"Do you think," she inquired nervously, "if--if I put this water on your stove, it will heat?"

He turned and eyed her.

"You see it's like this, lady," he said. "My father was a poor man and couldn't give me no education. Damned if I know. What do you think?"

Before one is fairly dressed, with extra garments thrust into the canvas war-sack or duffle-bag which is each person's allowance for luggage, the tents are being taken down and folded. The cook comes to the end of the big tent.

"Come and get it!" he yells through hollowed hands.

"Come and get it!" is repeated down the line of tepees. That is the food call of an Eaton camp. Believe me, it has the butler's "Dinner is served, madame," beaten forty ways for Sunday. There is no second call. You go or you don't go. The long tables under the open end of the cook tent are laden with bacon, ham, fried eggs, flapjacks, round tins of butter, enameled cups of hot coffee, condensed milk, sometimes fried fish. For the cook can catch trout where the most elaborately outfitted Eastern angler fails.

The horses come in with a thudding of hoofs and are rounded up by the men into the rope corral. Watched by night herders, they have been grazing quietly all night in mountain valleys. There is not much grass for them. By the end of the three hundred-mile trip they are a little thin, although in good condition. It is the hope of the Superintendent of the Park and of others interested that the Government will soon realize the necessity for planting some of the fertile valleys and meadows with grass. There are certain grasses that will naturalize themselves there--for instance, clover, blue-joint, and timothy. Beyond the first planting they would need nothing further. And, since much of the beauty of this park will always be inaccessible by motor, it can never be properly opened up until horses can get sufficient grazing.

Sometimes, at night, our horses ranged far for food,--eight miles,--even more. Again and again I have watched my own horse nosing carefully along a green bank and finding nothing at all, not a blade of grass it could eat.

With the second day came a new sense of physical well-being, and this in spite of a sunburn that had swollen my face like a toothache. Already telephones and invitations to dinner and tailor's fittings and face powder belonged to the forgotten past. I carried over my saddle and placed it beside my horse, and a kindly and patronizing member of Howard Eaton's staff put it on and cinched it for me. I never learned how to put the thing on, but I did learn, after a day or two, to take it off, as well as the bridle and the red hackamore, and then to stand clear while my buckskin pony lay down and rolled in the grass to ease his weary back. All the horses rolled, stiff-legged. If the saddle did not come off in time, they rolled anyhow, much to the detriment of cameras, field-glasses, and various impedimenta strapped thereon.

IV

ALL IN THE GAME

Day after day we progressed. There were bright days and days when we rode through a steady mist of rain. Always it was worth while. What matters a little rain when there is a yellow slicker to put on and no one to care how one looks? Once, riding down a mountain-side, water pouring over the rim of my old felt hat and pattering merrily on my slicker, I looked to one side to see a great grizzly raise himself from behind a tree-trunk, and, standing upright, watch impassively as my horse and I proceeded. I watched him as far as I could see him. We were mutually interested. The party had gone on ahead. For a long time afterward I heard the crackling of small twigs in the heavy woods beside the trail. But I never saw him again.

It is strange to remember how little animal life, after all, there seemed to be. There was plenty, of course. But our party was large. We had no chance to creep up silently on the wild life of the park. The vegetation was so luxuriant in the valleys. Beyond an occasional bear, once or twice the screaming of a mountain lion, and the gophers and marmots, we saw nothing. There were not many birds. We never saw a snake. It was too high.

One day, riding along a narrow trail on a mountain-side, the horse in front of mine stampeded, and for a moment it looked like serious trouble. For a stampeding horse on a two-foot trail is a dangerous thing. It developed that there was a wasp's nest there, and the horse had been stung. We all got by finally by lashing our horses and running past at a canter.

Another time, working slowly up a mountain-side, I told the chief ranger of the park of having seen many Western horses at the front in France.

"Do you remember any of the brands?" he asked.

I did. A Diamond-Z, a flank brand on a black horse at Ypres.

"That's curious," he commented. "That man just ahead of us has shipped a carload of Montana horses to the front, and I believe that is his brand."

We called to the man ahead, and he halted. Up we rode and demanded his brand. It was the Diamond-Z. To be quite certain, he showed it to me registered in his notebook.

So there, where we could see out over what seemed unlimited space, where the earth appeared a vast thing, we decided that, after all, it was a small place. The Rocky Mountains and Ypres!

Having risen at five, by eleven o'clock thoughts of luncheon were always obtrusive. People began stealthily to consult watches and look ahead for a shady place to stop. By half-past eleven we were generally dismounted in some grove and the pack-train was coming up with its clattering pans, its coffee-pot, its cold boiled ham.

Howard Eaton always made the coffee. It was good coffee. Apparently nobody ever thought of tea. In the out-doors it is coffee--strong coffee, as hot as possible--that one craves.

There was one young woman in the party to whom things were always happening--not by her own fault. If there was a platter of meat to be dropped, it fell in her lap. And so I remember that one day, the coffee having been made at a luncheon stop, the handle came off the coffee-pot and this same young woman had an uncomfortable baptism.

But it was all in the game. Hot coffee, marmalade, bread and butter, cheese, sardines, and the best ham in the world--that was luncheon. Often there was a waterfall near, where for the mere holding out of a cup there was ice water to drink. The horses were not unsaddled at these noonday stops, but, having climbed hard all morning, they were glad to stand in the shade and rest.

Sometimes we lunched on a ledge where all the kingdoms of the earth seemed spread out before us. We sprawled on rocks, on green banks, and relaxed muscles that were weary with much climbing. There was much talk of a desultory sort. We settled many problems, but without rancor. The war was far away. Here were peace and a great contentment, food and a grassy bank, and overhead the trail called us to new vistas, new effort.

One young man was the party poet. He hit us all off sooner or later. I have the ode he wrote to me, but modesty forbids that I give it.

The poet having pocketed his pad and pencil, and the amateur photographers having put up their cameras, the order to start was given. The dishes were piled back in the crates and strapped to the pack-horses. The ruin of the ham was wrapped up and tied on somewhere. Dark glasses were adjusted against the glare, and we were off.

Sometimes our destination towered directly overhead, up a switchback of a trail where it was necessary to divide the party into groups, so that no stone dislodged by a horse need fall on some one below. Always at the head, riding calmly, with keen blue eyes, that are like the eyes of aviators and sailors in that they seem to look through long distances, was Howard Eaton. Every step of the trail he tested first, he and his big horse. And I dare say many a time he drew a breath of relief when the last timid woman had reached a summit or descended a slope or forded a river, and nothing untoward had happened.

There were days when we reached our camping-places by mid-afternoon. Then the anglers got their rods and started out for trout. There were baths to be taken in sunny pools that looked warm and were icy cold. There were rents in riding-clothes to be mended; even--whisper it--a little laundry work to be done now and then by women, some of them accustomed to the ministrations of a lady's maid at home. And there was supper and the camp-fire. Charley Russell, the cowboy artist, was the camp-fire star. To repeat one of his stories would be desecration. No one but Charley Russell himself, speaking through his nose, with his magnificent head outlined against the firelight, will ever be able to tell one of his stories.

There were other good story-tellers in the party. And Howard Eaton himself could match them all. A hundred miles from a railroad, we gathered around that camp-fire in the evening in a great circle. There were, you will remember, forty-two of us--no mean gathering. The pine and balsam crackled and burned, and overhead, often rising in straight walls around us for thousands of feet, were the snow-capped peaks of the Continental Divide. Little by little the circle would grow smaller until at last only a dozen choice spirits remained for a midnight debauch of anecdote.

I have said that the horses ranged wide at night. Occasionally they stayed about the camp. There was one big horse that was belled at night. Now and then toward dawn he brought his ungainly body, his tinkling bell, and his satellites, the other horses, into the quiet streets of tepee town. More than once I have seen an irate female, clad in pajamas and slippers, with flying braids, shooing the horses away from her tent in the gray, cold dawn, and flinging after them things for which she vainly searched the next morning.

V

"RUNNING WATER AND STILL POOLS"

Holidays are rare with me. So, on those occasional days when the party rested, I was up and away. I happen to like to fish. The same instinct which sent me as a child on my grandaunt's farm, armed with a carefully bent pin, an old cigar box full of worms, and a piece of twine, to sit for hours over a puddle in a meadow and fish for minnows; the same ambition which took me on flying feet up the hillside to deposit my prey, still wriggling, in a water barrel, where for days I offered it food in the shape of broken crackers, and wept to find eventually its little silver belly upturned to the morning sky--that joy of running water and still pools and fish is still mine.

I cannot cast for trout. I do it, but my technique sets the boat to rocking and fishermen to grinding their teeth.

But I had taken West with me a fly book and a trout rod, and I meant to use them. Now and then, riding along the trail, we met people who drew aside to let us pass, and who held up such trout as I had never dreamed of. Or, standing below a waterfall, would be a silent fisherman too engrossed to more than glance at our procession as it wound along.

But repeated early attempts brought me not a single strike. Once in my ardor I fell into an extremely cold lake and had to be dried out for hours. I grew caustic about the trout. Then somebody, with the interests of the park at stake, said that he would make up a party and see that I caught some trout. He would see that I caught something, he said, if he had to crawl into the lake and bite my hook himself.

So we went to Red Eagle Lake. There are trout in that lake; there are cutthroat trout weighing four pounds. I sat in a boat with a man who drew one in. I saw two college boys in their undergarments standing up to the waist in ice water and getting more large trout than I knew were in the world. I ate trout that other people caught. But they were bitter in my mouth.

I threatened to write up Glacier Park as being a fishing failure. The result was calamitous. Earnest-eyed fishermen spent hours in rowing me about. They imperiled my life, taking me into riffles; they made me brave pneumonia and influenza and divers other troubles in the determination that I should catch a mammoth fish. And nothing happened--nothing whatever. Once a man in the boat hooked a big one and it ran under the boat. I caught the line and jerked the fish into the boat. That was the nearest I came to catching a large cutthroat trout at Red Eagle Lake. Later on--but I haven't come to that yet.

I did catch some fish at Red Eagle. I caught some Dolly Varden and rainbow trout. One of the earnest fishermen led me on foot over several miles of Rocky Mountain scenery, stopping ever and anon to show me where a large bear had just passed. The trail was fresh. Here were the stones he had turned over for ants, the old trunks he had scratched for grubs. Then we arrived at the foot of a waterfall.

What a place it was! The water poured down in clouds of spray on which the afternoon sun painted a rainbow. Tiny water ouzels bathed and played in the pools in shallow rocks. And here, in deep holes, there were trout for the catching.

The fisherman stationed me on a rock, weighted my hook, told me to drop in about forty feet of line, and stand still. They would hook themselves. They did. I caught eight in fifteen minutes. But it was not sport. It was as interesting as fishing for gold-fish in an aquarium.

I lay that night at Red Eagle in a tent on a bed built of young trees driven into the ground and filled with balsam branches. A pack-horse had carried up the blankets and pillows. It was a couch for a queen. In the forest a mountain lion screamed like a woman, and at two o'clock in the morning one of the college boys got up from the cook tent where he was sleeping, and said he thought he would go fishing!

As I look back, that was a strange gathering at the fishing-camp at Red Eagle--so very far from anything approaching civilization. There was a moving-picture man and his outfit, there were the two college men, there was the chief ranger of Glacier Park. There was a young couple from New England who were tramping through the park, carrying their tent and other things on their backs. They were very young and very enthusiastic. I suspected them of being bride and groom, although I did not know, and the most vivid recollection I have is of seeing the young woman washing their camp-dishes in the cleanest, soapiest dishwater I had seen since I left home. And there was a cook who is a business man in the winter, and who made excellent soda biscuit and talked books to me.

That night, around the camp-fire, there were more stories told. The college boys--"Pie" Way, the Yale pitcher, was one--related many marvelous tales. They said they were true. I hope so. If they were, life is even more interesting and thrilling a thing than I had believed. If they were fiction, they had me beaten at my own game.

The next day was lowering and cold. I spent the morning trying to get fish, and retired sour and disappointed when every one else succeeded and I failed. Sometime I am going back to Red Eagle Lake, and I shall take with me a tin of coral-colored salmon eggs--a trick I learned from George Locke on the Flathead River later on. And then I intend to have my photograph taken with strings of fish like bunches of bananas around me.

VI

THE CALL

As the days went on there was a subtle change in the party. Women, who had to be helped into their saddles at the beginning of the trip, swung into them easily. Waistbands were looser, eyes were clearer; we were tanned; we were calm with the large calmness of the great outdoors. And with each succeeding day the feeling of achievement grew. We were doing things and doing them without effort. To some of us the mountains had made their ancient appeal. Never again should we be clear of their call.

To those of us who felt all this inevitably in the future would come times when cities and even civilization itself would cramp.

I have traveled a great deal. The Alps have never held this lure for me. Perhaps it is because these great mountains are my own, in my own country. Cities call--I have heard them. But there is no voice in all the world so insistent to me as the wordless call of the Rockies. I shall go back. Those who go once always hope to go back. The lure of the great free spaces is in their blood.

We crossed many passes. Dawson Pass was the first difficult Rocky Mountain pass I had ever seen. There was a time when I had thought that a mountain pass was a depression. It is not. A mountain pass is a place where the impossible becomes barely possible. It is a place where wild game has, after much striving, discovered that it may get from one mountain valley to another. Along these game trails men have built new paths. Again and again we rode through long green valleys, the trail slowly rising until it had left timber far below. Then at last we confronted a great rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. Up this, by infinite windings, back and forward went the trail. At the top was the pass.

"I'm getting right tired," said Charley Russell, "of standing in a cloud up to my waist."

Each new pass brought a new vista of blue distance, of white peaks. Each presented its own problems of ascent or descent. No two were alike. Mountain-climbing is like marriage. Whatever else it may be, it is always interesting.

There was the day we went over the Cutbank Pass, with instructions to hold our horses' manes so that our saddles would not slip back. I shall never forget my joy at reaching the summit and the horror that followed when I found I was on a rocky wall about twenty feet wide which dropped a half-mile straight down on the other side to a perfectly good blue lake. There was Triple Divide. There was the Piegan Pass, where, having left the party for a time, I rode back to them on the pack-horse I have mentioned before, with my left foot dangling over eternity.

Triple Divide. The trail had just been completed, and ours was the first party after the trail-makers. I had expected to be the first woman on the top of Triple Divide. But when I arrived, panting and breathless and full of the exaltation of the moment, two girls were already there sitting on a rock. I shall not soon recover from the indignant surprise of that moment. Perhaps they never knew that they had taken the laurel wreath from my brow.

Triple Divide is really the culminating point of the continent. It is called Triple Divide because water flows from it into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Pacific Ocean, and into Hudson Bay.