Part 5

“We are doing the four days’ tour,” is the common explanation which visitors gave us. Or, “We are making the triangular trip.”

One’s eyes naturally rest on the ladies, who are nearly all in seeming male attire, and some of this attire fits and some does not; some of it suggests homes where men are rare and breeches have to be imported. But they all look pretty well in this simplicity. Girls in mauve and violet jumpers, shiny leather belts, and leg-o’-mutton breeches sit with us at supper and explain that to-day was their first day on a horse--and they know it. “Are you tired?” say I. “You can tell the world,” is the reply. Near us stands a girl in tan riding costume, violet stockings, white shoes, and bobbed brown hair in a hair net. She is talking to two well-built youths, standing with their legs apart, and the girl, imitating their styles, droops forward to them as they chaff one another. She will not stray far. The same may be said of a well-fed lady of sixty, pampered and neurotic, but sitting in a riding jacket and very baggy breeches and nervously smelling at an ammonia bottle. Grandma in trousers is rather portentous.

But how describe the charm of the little boy and girl, children of twelve and thirteen, accoutred also for the horse and sitting on their steeds with the grace of Indians. The old and middle-aged are stiff and only the children look as if they could never get tired. In any case, all is good humour and jollity. Mme. Censure is not here. There are people with crumpled faces and there are people made of dimples and curves--but happiness holds all.

* * * * *

WE did not see very much of the tourist life. There is not much of it up here. There ought probably to be more. While Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are visited by hundreds of thousands of Americans, Glacier is left unused. We do not want its canyons also to be filled up to the top with cans, but no one would grudge a few more people in a wilderness where you can travel weeks without meeting a soul--a few more sharers in the loveliness of the Northern Rockies.

A number of camps have been made with log-cabins and canvas tents, and there are two large hotels on the fringe of the wilderness. But an especial charm lies in the fact that the people in charge of the camps and the little inns called “chalets” are mostly university students and college girls of the institutions of Minnesota and Montana, and they do the needful work on the self-help principle of earning a little money in their holidays to pay their way during term. There is nothing of the low commercial spirit, no one hanging around for a tip, no one with any interest to treat you shabbily, but instead the natural good manners of unspoiled people. You see the choleric “colonel” trying to get more than his share of attention and service, but he doesn’t effect anything, and you may see the millionaire cheerfully and shrewdly recognising the fact that he must take his turn after his stenographer and perhaps after a couple of ragged old tramps like ourselves.

* * * * *

VACHEL is devoted to the universities and high schools of America and the life they represent. He has almost completely changed his constituency from the “ladies’ club” and the heavy society of Mr. and Mrs. Leo Hunter and is now a poetic voice of young germinal America. He has “covered the map” of the United States singing his songs to college youths. And in return college youth recognises him quickly. He is a natural favourite among those who run the “chalets.” And they all wanted him to “sing” to them.

Not that the visitors do not also make friends with us and we with them. Such coats of sunshine as we have make ordinary sunburn pale and give us much glamour. Souvenir huntresses grab us from a “big ballyhoo” Western town. Likewise, a girl from Chicago, pronounced in three facial contortions. And when we set off to vagabondise for some days we were followed by a beautiful creature who wished for a minute to come with us to the world’s end.

_The tramps have gone to sleep Nearer to the skies; Oh ladies, sweet ladies, Do stop rolling your eyes. The tramps have gone away To seek their paradise; Oh ladies, sweet ladies, Do stop rolling your eyes. The tramps have taken with them The best of apple pies, They’re not prepared to-day To take on extra ties. So ladies, sweet ladies, Do stop rolling your eyes._

XVI. VISITED BY BEARS

I RETAIN very cheerily in mind from Russia the memory of the typical Russian saint who lived in the woods and was so holy that the bears approached without malice and took what the saint could spare of the store of crusts on which he lived. The unfortunate Tsarina when she desired so religiously a male heir, went to the shrine of Seraphim in the “empty place” of Arzamas to pray for one. And the most famous thing about St. Seraphim was his love of the bears. He is nearly always depicted in popular oleographs feeding the bears with bread, and in Russian ikons the bear is the national emblem of the primitive nature of Russia and the saint is the emblem of Christ.

On the other hand, I remember also my good old friend Alexander Beekof, a hunter of bears who had himself snapshotted facing in the snowy forest the upstanding, snarling, dangerous beast which presently he was to lay low. And since we are thinking of bears, I call to mind how I saw last winter little baby bears, dressed up in ribbons and fed with milk from a pap-bottle, hawked for sale by refugee Russians from street to street in Constantinople--pets to put in the nursery with your children, astonishing little rompers and ideal players of hide and seek. I have wondered about the bear as we wonder now about the Russian as to just what sort of an animal he is. Is he only a wild beast when treated like a wild beast, but otherwise tame in the presence of saints and children? Or is he a wild beast all the while?

This problem we evidently went to the Rocky Mountains to solve. For there we met the bears, and even if we may not have the haloes of the saints we hope to find a place among the children.

* * * * *

NOT that we were entirely ready for the overtures of Brother Bear, and it is true that we frightened some bears away, but later we got on good terms. I saw the first bear on “Going-to-the-Sun” Mountain. No one, of course, is allowed to shoot bears in Glacier National Park, though it is not many years since hunters hunted them there with Indians and with dogs, and one may read of the bear-hunting adventures of Emerson Hough and others. Now without dogs or guns the bear has been won over and he has ceased to fear mankind.

It was a beautiful morning and Vachel had been sitting in Baring Creek, letting Balchis, as he called the waterfall, flow over him, and he was now lying in a blanket on the ferns and meditating when I heard an unwonted stump, stump, crash, in the undergrowth.

“Is it a man?” I asked.

Crash, stump, stump, it went again, and peering through the trees I saw a black bear coming towards us, glossy and shaggy. I called Vachel, but at that the bear stopped short, raised his intent, listening ears and then made away from us in another direction. We saw no more of him.

After that I recognised the sound of the bear’s feet in the forest, quite a characteristic sound, and we knew there were many bears. But the next occasion of a personal encounter was some weeks later near Heaven’s Peak. Vachel had got himself an extra long wisp of old canvas from a ruined tent. We slept by a large fire, and when the fire went out a bear came to us. Vachel and I were lying close to one another and both had our blankets over our faces, for it was cold. Vachel, as he told me afterwards, was awakened by something and lay listening to my breathing. He thought to himself, “Stephen is certainly making a terrible racket; he must have a cold”; and then he thought again lazily and unsuspectingly, “Stephen surely must have caught a cold to be snuffing and snorting in that way.” Then he thought again, “He seems to be moving about, I wonder what he’s doing.”

* * * * *

THEN Vachel put his head out of his blanket and what should he see standing beside us but a big black bear. As for me, I was sleeping like a babe, and the bear apparently had been snuffing at me to see whether I were live meat or dead meat. Vachel gave one terrific shout. “THE SON OF A GUN,” said he, and I wakened up.

“Wake up, Stephen; it’s a bear,” said he. At this Brother Bear walked across from my side, where I had a pile of boiled eggs, which he had scattered, and leisurely began to knock our tin cans about on the other side and try and find the ham which we had bought the day before. In a most unsaintly way we drove him off. We forgot the example of St. Seraphim, and Brother Bear was fain to depart. I repented too late and followed the old scallywag up the moon-bathed forest glade quite a way. But he would not be called by his pet name after the abuse we had hurled at him and went away and away till he was lost in the moon-beams. “He was smelling you to find out whether you were good to eat,” said Vachel, laughing. “He wouldn’t begin on you unless he were sure you were carrion.” “Curious,” said I, “isn’t it; we used as children to look at pictures of bears smelling men who were shamming dead in order to escape being eaten by them. In children’s books, the bear won’t eat carrion. Out here in the Rockies you can’t keep them out of the garbage cans of the camps at night.”

On another occasion, however, when three bears came trundling down after our supper was over, I approached one with some bread, which he very gently took from my fingers, and I scratched his nose and put myself on speaking terms.

“Curious,” said I to Vachel, “is it not? These are the same bears which used to figure so largely in adventure stories of the Rocky Mountains. It follows they are ready to be good citizens of the forest if treated ‘good.’”

You’d have had a different experience had they been grizzlies, we were told later.

Maybe. But St. Seraphim himself did not tackle grizzlies.

_So we’ve met the bear: The bear has snuffed at us And wondered what we were. Humans with a forest smell to us, No doubt quite game; Sleeping out too, very quietly. Good to eat no doubt, Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite? Would they mind? I’ve bitten most of the animals in the wood Except them-- In my time._

XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE

THE wind blew all night long, a wind that seemed to be cleaning up and burnishing all the spaces between the stars. The rock wall against which I leaned my back kept stealing away the warmth from my blanket. Vachel slept off the level on the ferns, at a forty-five degree tilt downward. We both looked out to the mountains and the stars, and it was an epical summer night on the Rockies.

The mountains were compact and black and clear, and a dim light behind them glorified each. A young moon arose and poised herself above us, and only slowly and very unobtrusively crept across the sky. It was a night of persistent gale but of a steadfast starry universe. It seemed to call for rain, but there never came a cloud, only the metallic interstellar spaces grew lustrous and more lustrous, and the mountains more and more romantic. Our eyes were religiously and adoringly spellbound. Our hands--our feet--that is a different tale.

Their hearts were pure, Their hands were horribly red,

as Balzac said of two young ladies of France.

Vachel, who had tied the tassels of his old steamer rug together and made a sleeping-bag, was meditative of Peary and Shackleton and their companions, and though he had procured an extra flannel shirt and had tied himself up in all he possessed, he still could not find the temperature at which corn ripens in central Illinois. We heard the waters of the creek pouring down below, we heard movements among the trees, and the idea of a bear coming to us was not unsuggested. Vachel picked up his steamer rug and came across to my rock and laid him down nearer to me. We slept then till dawn, slept with one eye open and one shut; one ear alert, the other muffled.

* * * * *

THE lovely light of the east flooded upward and over us from Lake St. Mary, bathing our mountain-side in a peach blossom glamour; small birds winged it through the wedge of air ’twixt mountain and mountain. The creek poured more loudly into our consciousness, and the sharp points of our rocky bed jibbed upward towards our bones. Then it was morning. Then it was coffee time.

I shall never forget the poet as he looked in the dawn, with his red handkerchief tied over his old felt hat and under his chin, and the concentration of his gaze as he plodded about in three pairs of socks and half-laced boots seeking extra twigs to make that fire burn. He looked like a true dwarf or old man of the woods from a page of a fairy-book, but not really visible to human eyes.

And it was an unpractical fairy who expected damp wood and large wood to burn as easily as dry withered pine. It sometimes took a long while to set our pot a-boilin’. Once, however, that had been achieved, great was our reward. We had our coffee, “Lindsay’s stone coffee,” as we named it, better than any other coffee in the United States.

* * * * *

“STEPHEN,” said Vachel quietly to me one day, “you must let them know just how this coffee is made. I’m not one of those selfish people who keep such secrets to themselves. The ladies especially will like to have our secret.”

The first point is that you take a stone which has never seen either sunset or sunrise, a stone lying at the feet of trees not less than 100 feet high. It must have lain there not less than 4000 years and listened to the music of a waterfall. That is the important point. Any decent coffee beans ground in any kind of clean grinder will do. A pot that has seen more than one continent is preferred.

You then cut a square piece of white mosquito net sufficient to hold the coffee and the stone. Tie up carefully like a plum-pudding, but leave seven or eight inches of string attached to it so that you can pull the coffee sack up and down in the pot at will. Vachel in this matter of coffee is a complete immersionist. The coffee must go right under.

It is prepared, moreover, in silence and without fear of flame and smoke. The pot stands on a funeral pyre, and is allowed to lift its lid several times before a hand swathed up in a towel darts in to rescue it.

We pour it out into our tin cups. It is black, it is good, it has a kick like a mule; it searches the vitals and chases out the damps; it comforts the spine and gives tone to the heart. And the poet, silent hitherto, sits holding his large cup before him. Then he takes a sip and looks at me.

“Thadd touches the spadd,” says he at last in a deep gastronomical gestatory voice which seems to lend expression to his ears and shoulders. “Thadd touches the spadd,” says he in happy relief.

_Coffee should be made with love; That’s the first ingredient. It’s all very well about the stone, Say I, but it needs a heart as well. The coffee knows if you really care, And will do its best if you lend it encouragement. You can flatter the coffee whilst it is in the pot, And it will rise to your persuasion. But the commonest cause of coffee being just indifferent Is your indifference towards the coffee._

XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD

AFTER an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them--his pet hobby for a number of days.

One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the Treaty of Versailles.

“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it,” said I.

“Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers,” said he. Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been leaving original poems in the valleys.

We set off from Sun Mountain for the high walls of the Canadian line. Vachel was in no passion for climbing, and confessed that if he were a woman, he would, at this point in our adventure, “lie down on the floor and scream.” So our progress was slow and punctuated by long waits. We went through tree thickets and breast-high flowers and through tearing thorns, and we came to many red-rock promontories. Rocks grew up out of the jungle and topped the highest trees, and we climbed them and looked out from their smooth, wind-swept summits and listened to the bears, and Vachel, with paper and pencil, drew maps and put Czecho-Slovakia in the scheme of things, and asked the God who made the world where Turkestan might be.

* * * * *

AT length, at noon, we came unto a mighty cliff, an end of the world, rosy red and flamingly joyful, but very final. The poet was a quarter of a mile behind me, and I watched him patiently grubbing his way through the exuberant green, trackless jungle, hit in the face by branches, choked up to the fork of his legs by the weeds. And when he came to the end of the world he asked no questions but just sat down and began drawing a map. “Where,” asked he, “is Seven Rivers Land and the Desert of Pamir?”

I left him sitting down below and began climbing the giddy cliff with a tin can in my hand. For growing like wall-flowers on the rocks above were dwarf raspberry bushes all hung with tiny rosy lights--and these were fruits. I got up to them and standing on half-inch ledges and holding to twigs and weeds I picked a cupful of the hot berries all half-cooked by the sun’s rays. And when I got down again we had a wonderful repast of raspberries and sugar.

When we resumed tramping we crossed a crag-strewn valley, which was very rough on our boots. My boots were cracking; Lindsay’s were very floral. His held out a little while longer, but mine died that day. As we each carried two pairs of boots we were prepared for the emergency.

Mine had been a stout pair of pre-war boots (Americans please read “shoes”). I used them first in North Norway and Russia. I tramped in them in France. They were repaired first by a Russian at Kislovodsk in the Caucasus; repaired for the second time in Georgia by a negro cobbler. For I did Sherman’s march and walked from Atlanta to the sea in them in 1919. And they were repaired for the last time by a Frenchman in Hazebrouck last year. I had tramped in them over the battlefields of Gallipoli, and had worn them when the weather was bad in Constantinople, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, and almost every other capital of Europe.

“We must burn them,” said Vachel, “and have a special ceremony. These are no ordinary shoes (Englishmen please read ‘boots’) to be abandoned in the wilds without the meed of some melodious tear.” So we burned one on a high flaming fire with young pine-shoots for incense, and the other we threw into a rushing mountain torrent, and bade it continue its world journey to the world’s end.

* * * * *

WE lay stretched on our blankets by the pine fire that night and talked of the world. We arrived at some ideas. “You are not drawing the map merely as part of a geography lesson,” said I. “You are drawing the poetry of it.”

A poetical map of the world has never yet been drawn. “It should have ships on its oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mermaids under it, and stars over it,” said Vachel. “Imagine how Blake would have drawn it.”

First, you put in the North and South Poles, symbols of man’s love of the inaccessible and the paradox of his striving life; then Cape Horn, stormiest point in the world, cape of innumerable wrecks, of the innumerable adventures of daring sailors. Then put in the Panama Canal, symbol of utilitarianism and our modern life. Draw in the Bering Strait, which is the pre-historic link of the Old World and the New, and then the Rocky Mountains, which the red men climbed.

Then draw in a dotted line the keel track of Columbus over the ocean and put an eye upon a peak in the Darien looking downward and outward to the great Pacific. Draw the Mason and Dixon line. Draw 54° 40´--the “fifty-four forty or fight” line. Then for the old world, make the coast-line of China and then mark the Chinese Wall built to keep out the Huns, then draw the caravans of the hordes, and may arrows fly over the desert of Asia, spitting against Bokhara and Samarkand, spitting against the empire of Darius, spitting against the Scythians, the Slavs, stampeding the Goths and the North Men and ruining Rome and starting the modern world!

You must put in Athens the birthplace of the ideal, and Marathon and then Rome, the birthplace of materialism, the capital of capitals, seat of the Caesars. And then St. Helena, symbol of the doom of would-be Caesars.

Mark in the mysterious Nile, and the place where the Sphinx looks out from the sand. Mark Bethlehem and then Jerusalem----

Thus we schemed and mused and made many maps in fancy, and we took to ourselves just before the stars said good-night the title Geo. Ast.--geographical astrologers.

“I dare you to register as such,” said Vachel, “when we get out of all this and reach a hotel at last.”

_Poor old world, you’re a playground. And we are the children who romp in you now. Those maps of you are wrong Which show trade winds Instead of winds of inspiration, Where names of business-places are in bold black print And railway lines are ruled, And capitals are marked with blots And other places are invisible._

XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW

“WITE man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” cries Vachel playfully from behind me as we get out of forests and up among the naked rocks. “Wite man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” or again, “You might as well kill a man as scare him to death.”

“This is no place to bring ladies,” I ventured.

“And no place to bring a poet, either,” says Vachel. “Look here, Stephen, I make one rule. I’ll only be scared out of my wits once a day.”

The poet riveted his eyes on me, and I was a curious sight, being torn to tatters from head to foot. I had been mending my trousers with the stuff of my vest and the lining of my coat. “Stephen,” cries Vachel, “when I get tired of looking at the scenery I look at your pants.” And I employed much time when we rested sewing up the triangles and flaps on my knees with white thread drawn from our mosquito netting.

We saw now the wonderful cathedral-shaped mountain behind us, blue and white and scarred and crumpled. It lifted its clerestory with grandiosity up into the colder and rarer air. Its rivelled snow hung in great white copes; its earthquake rents and chasms yawned, and its dreadful steeps, up which no man ever climbed, drew sternly and austerely up to summits and spires and towers. Grandiose mountain! And what little flies, what microscopical insects we were upon it!

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