HEN the West moves, it moves quickly. The map of Oregon had long shown a huge area without the line of a single railroad crossing it. This railless land was Central Oregon, the largest territory in the United States without transportation. Then, almost over night, the map was changed.

Normal men, if they are reasonably good, hope to go to Heaven. Westerners, if they are off the beaten track, hope for a railroad; and if they have one road they hope for another! You who dwell in the little land of suburban trains and commutation tickets have no conception of the vital significance of rail transportation in the Land of Many Miles.

In Central Oregon the railroad question was one of life and death. The country had progressed so far without them, and could go no farther. Farm products not qualified to find a market on their own feet were next to worthless, timber could not be milled, irrigation development was at a standstill. The people had seen so many survey stakes planted and grow and rot and produce nothing, and had been fed upon so many railroad rumors, that there was no faith in them.

"I think it's a railroad!" gasped the telephone operator as she called me to the booth. Her eyes were bright. It was as if a Frenchman had said, "Berlin is taken!"

But I, a skeptic hardened by many shattered hopes, smiled incredulously. Nevertheless, I took the receiver with a tremor born of undying optimism—the optimism of the railless land.

"It's long distance," whispered the operator, torn between a sense of duty and a desire to eavesdrop.

"Hello!"

The only answer was a grinding buzz; a mile or two of Shaniko line was down—it usually was.

Then Prineville cut in and The Dalles said something cross and a faint inquiry came from Portland, far away. Yes, I was waiting.

"Hello, Putnam?" The speaker was the managing editor of a Portland newspaper. "Gangs have broken loose in the Deschutes Canyon," said he. "One of 'em is Harriman, we know, but the others are playing dark. Think it's Hill starting for California. You go—" then the buzz became too bad.

Finally The Dalles repeated the instructions. I was to go down the Canyon of the Deschutes and find out all about it. The head and nearest end of the Canyon was fifty miles away, and the Canyon itself was one hundred miles long. Glory be! But it was a railroad, and before I started the town was in the first throes of apoplectic celebration.

I went to Shaniko by auto, and thence by train to Grass Valley, midway to the Columbia. From Grass Valley a team took me westward to the rim of the Canyon of the Deschutes. There were fresh survey stakes and a gang of engineers working with their instruments on a hillside. Very obliging, were those engineers; they would tell me anything; they were building a railroad; it was headed for Mexico City and they themselves were the owners! Below was a new-made camp, where Austrians labored on a right of way that had come to life almost over night. This was a Harriman camp; orders were, apparently, to get a strangle hold on the best line up the narrow Canyon—to crowd the other fellows out. But the mystery surrounding those "other fellows" clung close. From water boy to transit man they knew nothing, except that they were working for a famous contracting firm and that they emphatically were not in the employ of Hill interests.

This, which was no news at all, I 'phoned to Portland, and then set about visiting the suddenly awakened Canyon.

It is the only entrance from the north to the plateaus of Central Oregon, a deep gorge cut by the river through the heart of the hills. So one fine morning in July, 1909, after a generation of apathy, suddenly the two great systems, whose tracks follow opposite banks of the Columbia, threw their forces into the field, attempting to secure control of this strategic gateway. Altogether, it was a very picturesque duel; the quick move was characteristic of the country, and the very unexpectedness of it somehow was half-expected. And in the end, after all the strategy and bluff and blocking tactics with shovels and with law briefs, the duel was a draw, and to-day each railroad follows the waters of the Deschutes.

During my observation of this picturesque battle of the Canyon, I walked its length twice, and saw amusing incidents in plenty.

At one point the Hill forces established a camp reached only by a trail winding down from above, its only access through a ranch. Forthwith the Harriman people bought that ranch, and "No trespassing" signs, backed by armed sons of Italy, cut off the communications of the enemy below. At a vantage point close to the water both surveys followed the same hillside, which offered the only practical passageway. One set of grade stakes overlapped the other, a few feet higher up. The Italian army, working furiously all one Sabbath morning, "dug themselves in" on the grade their engineers had established in most approved military style. But while they worked the Austrians came—these literally were the nationalities engaged in this "Battle of the Hillsides," unrecorded by history!—and hewed a grade a few feet above the first, the meanwhile demolishing it. That angered Italy, whose forces executed a flank movement and started digging still another grade above the hostiles, inadvertently dislodging bowlders which rolled down upon the rival workers below. Then a fresh flanking movement, and more bowlders and nearly a riot! And so it went, until the top was reached, and there being no more hillside to maneuver upon, and no inclination to start over again, the two groups called quits and spent the balance of the day playing seven-up, leaving settlement of their burlesque to courts of law. And there were times when "coyote holes"—which are tunnels of dynamite—exploding on one side of the river, somehow sent shattered rock and pebbles in a dangerous deluge upon the tents across the stream.

The struggle for transportation supremacy was bitter enough, and comic, too, in spots. But the stage set for its acting was superb beyond compare.

Not without reason, the defile of the Deschutes has been called the "Grand Canyon of the Northwest." For a full one hundred miles the river races at the bottom of a steep-walled canyon, its sides here and there pinching in to the water's very edge, and often enough with sheer cliffs towering mightily, their bases lapped by the white foam of rapids. Great rounded hills, green in spring, brown in summer, and white under the snows of winter, climb into the sky a thousand feet and more on either hand. Their sides are ribbed with countless cattle trails, like the even ripples of the wind and tide on a sandy beach. Strange contorted rock formations thrust forth from the lofty slopes, and occasional clutters of talus slides spill down into the water. Rich hues of red and brown warm the somber walls, where prehistoric fires burned the clay or rock, or minerals painted it. White-watered, crystal springs are born miraculously in the midst of apparent drought, offering arctic cold nectar the year around. The river winds sinuously, doubling back upon itself interminably, seeking first one, and then another, point of the compass, a veritable despair for railroad builders whose companion word for "results" must be "economy." Despite the stifling oppressiveness of that canyon bake-oven in July, with breezes few and far between and rattlesnakes omnipresent, the ever-changing grandeur was enough to repay for near-sunstroke and foot weariness.

However, enjoyment of the scenery was not my mission. I was supposed to discover, authentically, who was backing that other road—where the millions were coming from. If it was Hill, it meant much to Oregon, for as yet the "Empire Builder" had never truly invaded the state, and if now he planned a great new line to California the railroad map of the West would indeed be disrupted. But at the end of ten days I knew no more than on the first.

At the farmhouse where they took me in to dinner mine host was highly elated, for the survey crossed the corner of his southern "forty" and he saw visions of a fat right-of-way payment and of a railway station. Later—his optimism was characteristic—surely a city would spring up, with corner lots priced fabulously. "Then," said he to Mandy, "we'll go to Yerrup." It was, of course, long before Yerrup became a shambles.

The old man was reminding me of the growth of Spokane—that universal example of the West!—which expanded from nothing to more than one hundred thousand in thirty years, when Mandy interrupted the universal pastime of counting your lots before they are sold by producing a soiled printed form.

"Can you tell me if this has any value now?" she asked.

It was a voucher of the Great Northern Railroad.

"Where did you get it?"

She narrated how a crew had laid out the preliminary survey, now followed by the mysterious workers, coming through there secretly the previous autumn.

"They told us they was surveyin' water power," said she. "The papers never said nothing about it, and neither did we. They bought buttermilk here, an' when the Ol' Man cashed in the slips he forgot this one. Wonder if it's too late to get it paid?"

I told her it wasn't. In fact, I bought it myself, paying face value. It was $1.40.

Then I made tracks for the 'phone, eighteen miles away. Here, at last, was positive evidence that the Great Northern, the Hill system, was the power behind the new line. Six months ago while Oregon slept, they had made the secret survey upon which they were now constructing. A very pretty scoop, as western newspapering goes! I offered my driver an extra dollar for haste's sake.

The managing editor listened while I outlined my beat over the wire. His silence seemed the least bit sad.

"Dandy story," said he. "If we'd had it yesterday it would have been fine. But—" There was no need for him to go further; I knew the worst.

An afternoon paper had wrecked my yarn. The emissary of the Hills, who had traveled secretly and under an assumed name all through the Interior determining whether or not the new line should be undertaken, had that morning told his story. The Hills were in the open as the backers of the Oregon Trunk. By a matter of hours a precious scoop was ancient history!

That man built much of the Panama Canal. He is one of the world's best-known construction engineers and railroaders. But I shall never forgive his tell-tale interview—it was premature. And some day I shall present for payment that voucher for $1.40, mentioning also the dollar I gave the driver, to John F. Stevens.

CHAPTER VI

He is a young man; at least, his eyes are young. His "woman" is with him and their three kiddies, the tiniest asleep in her mother's lap, with the dust caked about her wet baby chin. The man wears overalls, the woman calico that was gaudy once before the sun bleached it colorless, and the children nameless garments of uncertain ancestry. The wife seems very tired—as weary as the weary horses. Behind them is piled their household: bedding, a tin stove, chairs, a cream separator, a baby's go-cart, kitchen utensils, a plow and barbed wire, some carpet; beneath the wagon body swings a pail and lantern, and water barrel and axe are lashed at one side.

We direct them to Millican's.

"Homesteading?" we inquire.

"Not exactly. That is, we're just lookin'."

There are hundreds like these all over the West, "just lookin'," with their tired wives, their babies, their poverty, and their vague hopefulness. They chase rainbows from Bisbee to Prince Rupert. Some of them settle, some of them succeed. But most of them are discontented wherever Fortune places them, and forever move forward toward some new-rumored El Dorado just over the hill.

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.

That, of course, is rather picturesque, and, taken all in all, your average wanderer of the wagon road merits little heroics. His aspirations are apt to be earthy, and too often he seeks nothing loftier than a soft snap. In the final analysis some of our western gypsies desire nothing more ardently than a rest.

The wanderer is the shiftless land seeker, and is to be distinguished from the sincere home seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his family and his penates, and who finds vacant government land and proceeds to "take it up." The best of all the free acres went years ago, along with the free timber and the other compensations for pioneering, but here and there remote areas worth having still remain. About the last of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in Central Oregon when the railroads opened the doors of immigration a few years ago.

Before the railroads came I went from Bend southeasterly through what is now well called the "homestead country," and in all the one hundred and fifty miles traversed we saw three human habitations: the stockman's, George Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and the sheepman's, Bill Brown. The rest of it was sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band of "fuzz-tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few cattle nipping the bunch grass. My companions were a locator and a man who took up one of the first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton Valley, one hundred and thirty miles from a railroad.

To-day there are schools out there, homes, fences, and plowed fields. Some of it is very good land, and the modern pioneers are prospering. Some of it is not so good, and there have been failures and disappointments as in all the homestead districts of all the West, past and present. For there is truth in the old saying that for the most part the first crop of homesteaders fails, and the success of the late comers is built upon the broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may be, the battle against the odds set up by a none too bountiful nature is often enough pitiful, and occasionally heroic.

Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low hills, a mile distant, are fringed with olive-green juniper trees; all the rest is gray, except the ever blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope in the hearts of the home makers—God smiles there. In the midst of the drab waste is a speck of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells the story of the long road to the nearest well—no road, but a trail, for this is well off the beaten path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are yet to come. The tent is the very outpost of settlement, a mute testimonial of the insistent desire to possess land of one's very own.

Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman appears. Yes, it is forty miles to Brookings' halfway house, as we had guessed.

"And to Bend?" We ask what we already know, perhaps because the woman—a girlish woman—so evidently would prolong the interruption to her solitude.

"About one hundred and twenty—a long way!" She smiles, adding, simply, "John's there."

Small wonder she clutches at us! John has been gone a fortnight, and for two days she has not even seen the Swansons, her "neighbors" over the hill, three miles away. Like a ship in the night, we all but passed her—passed with never a greeting for which her heart hungered, never a word from the "outside" to break the hard monotony. She is utterly alone, except for the rabbits and the smiling sky. Her husband is wage earning. And she sticks by their three hundred and twenty acres and does what she can with a mattock and a grubbing hoe. They have a well started, and some fence posts in the ground. Some day, she says, they will make a home of it.

"We always dreamed of having a home," she explains a bit dreamily. "But it never seemed to come any closer on John's wages. So when we read of getting this land for nothing it seemed best to make the try. But of course it isn't 'free' at all—we've discovered that. And oh! it costs so much!"

We commiserate. We would help, and vaguely seek some means.

Help? Yes, gladly she will accept it, says the little woman—but not for herself. "Good gracious, why should I need it?" Nor have we the heart to offer reasons. But if we have a mind to be helpful, she continues, there is a case over in eighteen-eleven—she names the section and township—where charity could afford a smile. She tells us, then, of a half-sick woman with three infants, left on the homestead while the husband goes to town. There, instead of work, he gets drink, and fails to reappear with provisions. But the woman will not give up the scrap of land she has set her heart on, and doggedly remains. When the neighbors find her, she and the children have existed for five days solely on boiled wheat. "And we needed it so for seeding," is her lament.

Our hostess of the desert stands by the ruts, waving to us through the dust of our wake, the embodiment of the spirit of pioneering, which burns to-day as brightly as ever in the past, could we but search it out and recognize it.

Such as she are home makers. However, the free lands are overridden with gamblers in values, with incompetents, with triflers. They are the chaff which will scatter before the winds of adversity. The others will succeed, just as they have succeeded elsewhere on the forefronts of civilization; the pity of it is that their lot may not be made easier, surer.

Returning from that trip I read a chapter in a book, newly published, dealing with this selfsame land. Concerning the homesteader I found these words:

I have seen many sorts of desperation, but none like that of the men who attempt to make a home out of three hundred and twenty acres of High Desert sage.... A man ploughing the sage—his woman keeping the shack—a patch of dust against the dust, a shadow within a shadow—sage and sand and space!

The author is a New Englander, who had seen Oregon with scholastic eyes. The harsh frontier had no poetry, no hope, for him—only hopelessness. But the woman in the tent, the Swansons over the hill, and the hundreds of other Swansons scattering now, and for many years gone by, over the lands of the setting sun, know better, though their grammar be inferior and their enthusiasm subconscious. Men saw and spoke as did the New Englander when Minnesota was being wrested from the wilderness, when people were dubbed insane for trying conclusions with the Palouse country, when the Dakotas were considered agricultural nightmares. In the taming of new empires unbridled optimism is no more prevalent than blinded pessimism.

Closer to home I know another woman, a farmer, too. Hers is an irrigated ranch, and she works with her shovel among the ditches as sturdily as the hired man. Poor she is in wealth, as it is reckoned, and her husband poorer still in health, for he was rescued from a desk in the nick of time. He is fast mending now, and confesses to a rare pleasure in making two blades of grass grow where none at all grew in the unwatered sands. And in truth, simply watching the accomplishments of irrigation is tonic enough to revive the faint. First, parched lands of sage; the grub hoe and the mattock clear the way, and then the plow. Next, water, in a master ditch and countless, man-made rivulets between the furrows. Finally—presto! the magic of a single season does it—green fields of clover and alfalfa smile in the sun!

But Heaven forbid that this should smack of "boosting"! (There, by the way, you have the most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.) It is not so intended, for the literature of professional optimism is legion, and needs no reinforcement. The Oregon country is no more wedded to success than many another, nor is it a land where woman can wrestle with man's problems more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of these pages mean simply that beneath the dull surface may be found, ever and anon, a glow of something stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run.

The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a playland, is a mighty interesting workaday land, too, and numberless are the modern tragedies and comedies of its varied peoples at their varied tasks. Rules and precedents are few and far between; it is each for himself in his own way. The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands, the Basque to his sheep herding; the man from Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never before saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut Yankee, with an unconscionable instinct for wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the college man with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may be, becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Medford. Somehow, some place, there is room for each and every one, and the big Westland smiles and receives them all, the strong to prosper and the weak to fail, according to the inexorable way of life.

Some come for wealth and some for health—a vast army for the latter, were the truth always known. The highness and the dryness of the hinterland draw many to it in their battle against the White Plague, and while victory often comes, there comes, too, defeat.

An empty shack I know could tell such a tale—the tragedy of a good fight lost. They were consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor gave the old, old edict: the only chance was to get away from the damp, to live out of doors in a higher, sunnier climate. The boy—he was scarcely more than that—bade farewell to his sweetheart and came over the mountains, where he found land and built the shack that was to be their home and their haven—where they were to become sun-browned and robust. The self-evident conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The girl, who smilingly sent her lover eastward, dreaming of the happiness so nearly theirs, was distanced in her race for the sunny goal by Death. To-day the shack stands vacant.

A friend, who knew the girl and the story, and loves the land she hoped to see, wrote this to hearten her when the doctors realized that the home upon whose threshold she wavered was far, far distant from the one her lover fashioned "over the eastern mountains":

Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know,
Into the air of uplands,
Into the sun, you go.

Warm is a day in the upland;
Warm is the valley, and bright;
Glittering stars are shining
Over the valley at night.

Here in the western lowland
Patiently I remain,
Under the clouds, in darkness,
Under the dismal rain.

Patient I wait, well knowing
The joy that is to be:
Into the east you're going
To build a home for me.

Rather would I go with you,
But, staying, I smile and sing,
For winter is almost over,
And soon will come the spring.

Then to the home you have made me,
Singing, still singing, I'll go
Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know.

CHAPTER VII

All of us read with envy of the "big trips," the splendid outings to the ends of the earth, made by scientists and sportsmen, and those who are neither but possess the instincts, income, and the inclination. Simply because we cannot follow such examples is no reason to suppose they appeal to us less than to the fortunate adventurer de luxe for whom African expeditioning, Labrador or Alaskan game trails, mountain scaling in Peru, or hunting along the Amazon are matters of every-year routine. Some day, we, too, hope for such mighty vacationing—when our ship comes in, or the baby gets big enough to be left behind, or the boss lengthens our vacation, as the case may be. But for the present there is a "when" or an "if" not to be ignored.

So we content ourselves with lesser adventures in contentment, which after all, for solid pleasureable happiness, are perhaps the best. And we who live in the Pacific Playland find mountain, forest and river, fish and game, to our hearts' content; with a modicum of enterprise it is no trick at all to devise trips worth taking, whether viewed from the standpoint of woodsman, mountaineer, hunter, or fisher, and all within a hundred miles of home.

Therein, indeed, lies the answer to this query, which a transplanted Easterner hears ever and anon:

Why do you live in the West?

For when it comes right down to the truly important things of life, like fly-fishing, mountaineering, and canoeing, the Pacific Coast is a region of unsurpassed satisfaction. Out-of-doors is always on tap, and when the hackneyed call of the red gods comes, it is easily answered.

Adventures in contentment truly—the utter content of simplicity and isolation. Also, ventures in optimism, for where the trails wind mountainward there is just one place for the pessimist, and that is at home.

The infallible Mr. Webster defines success as "the prosperous termination of an enterprise." Mr. Webster is wrong, however, when it comes to camping, as my friend Mac and I recently demonstrated beyond possibility of argument. The prime object of the trip in question was game. We were out ten days and returned with no game; the venison we counted ours still roams the hills, and the grouse are sunning themselves—except the half-dozen the puppies ate! It came about in this wise. We started in sunshine and forthwith encountered the business end of a storm, comprised, in about equal parts, of blizzard, tropical downpour, and tornado. It continued for four days, soaked and half-froze us, and swept the highlands clean of game, in preference for sheltered valleys, far away and inaccessible to us. We hunted persistently, however, and walked countless miles. Incidentally, we lost our horses, and spent one strenuous day tracking them. Finally Fortune relented a trifle and we bagged a half-dozen grouse, which we treasured and bore homeward for our family tables. But a persistently unkind fate elected that we sleep beside a forest ranger's cabin where also reposed a litter of spaniel puppies, who forced an entrance to our packs in the night and devoured every vestige of grouse except a few of the less nutritious feathers.

Assuredly that enterprise had no prosperous termination; yet, somehow, in the illogical way of the woods it seemed to us a success—we had enjoyed it so!

After all, camping is a queer game, totally inexplicable to the uninitiated. As with some kinds of sinning, the more you do the more you desire. Assuredly it is a madness—a species of midsummer madness, in whose throes the sufferer renounces most of the comforts of civilization, assuming instead all the discomforts of the wilderness. These campers are lovers of the Open, and like lovers the world over, there is no reason in them. In the wooing season they hie in pursuit of their beckoning mistress, who permits closest approach, seemingly, where the trails are the least trodden, the timber the tallest, and the mountains the mightiest.

There are many delightful methods of taking such pilgrimages, but none more alluring than a-horseback, with all one's worldly goods lashed to the back of a pack-horse, so that freedom of movement is limited only by one's will and one's woodcraft.

Typical of western mountain lakes is Cultas, which nestles on the eastern flanks of the Cascades not far from the summit. A wooded mountain of its own name rises from its southern rim, and elsewhere it is bordered by sandy strands as white as Cape Cod beaches, by stretches of marsh and meadow and by higher banks studded with giant pines, whose trunks nature painted golden copper and the sun burnishes each day. There we cast adrift from civilization; the trail ended and our riding horses took to the water at the lakeside, knee-deep wading over round, slippery rocks being preferable to battling through the thickets of lodgepole pine which cluttered the bank.

A lake of trout and sky-blue water is Cultas, where the leisurely may pitch permanent camp to their hearts' content, and revel in the luxuries of perfect outdoor loafing, tempered to suit the taste with fly-casting excursions 'round on rafts, and hunting tramps through the timber, where one need go no great way to spy the tracks of deer and occasional bear, or surprise grouse perched fatally low. Further westerly, though, the grouse-shooting is better, and an average rifle-shot can bag a plenty of the big fat birds in September. Poor grouse! "The good die first," said Wordsworth, and so with birds; for the good are the fat, who, through an excess of avoirdupois, lag in flight and alight on lower branches and are easiest shot.

From Cultas there was no trail other than such a one as mother sense advised and the compass indicated was properly directioned. Our objective point was the north and south trail reputed to follow the summit of the Cascade Range, up whose eastern flanks we were laboring. Finally we found it, though of trail worthy of the name there was none; a scattered line of aged blazes alone indicated where the trail itself once had been. With some floundering over down logs, many a false start and mistaken way, and a deal of patient diligence, we contrived to hold to the blazes, winding beneath a fairy forest of giant fir, tamarack, spruce, and pine, here and there skirting a veritable gem of a sky-blue lake set like a sapphire in an emerald mount, and occasionally tracking across a gay little mountain meadow, until at last we hunted out tiny Link Lake, where we camped beneath trees whose trunks were streaked with age wrinkles long before Astor pioneered his way down the Columbia.

And so it went for several days; there were miles of pleasant trails, each mile unlike its predecessor and each holding in store some of those always expected unforeseen surprises which make trails, fly-fishing, and (reportedly) matrimony, so fascinating. There were camp places by lake, stream, and meadow, each and every one delightful, all entirely attractive either by the glow of the camp-fire or viewed in the dawn light as one peered out from the frosted rim of the sleeping-bag—frosted without, but deliciously warm within. Trails and camps, indeed, so satisfying that any one of them might merit weeks of visitation, instead of hurried hours.

A word concerning trails, here—offered with the diffidence of an ardent amateur! Primarily, I suppose, trails are made to be followed; that, at least, seems the logical excuse for their existence. Yet my advice is to lose them as speedily as possible—temporarily, at least. So long as there is grass and water (there is always fuel, and your food is with you) no harm can befall, and assuredly losing the trail, or letting it lose you, is an admirable way to drop formality and get on an intimate footing with the country traversed. One method is like rushing along the highways of a strange land in an auto; the other approximates a leisurely following of the byways on your own two feet. The comparison is overdone, no doubt, but it has the virtue of fundamental truth.

People who "never lose the trail" and always proceed on schedule are to be regarded with suspicion and pity; suspicion because they probably prevaricate, and pity because they don't know what they miss! A schedule should be left behind, in the world of business appointments, time-tables, and other regrettable impedimenta of civilization. So long as you know when mealtime comes, to plan further is folly.

Maps, also, are not to be taken over-seriously, or followed too religiously. Despite their neat lines, and scale of miles and inherent air of authority, they are deceivers ever, and apt to prove hollow delusions and snares when given the acid test of implicit confidence. Sometimes only annoyance results, but occasionally the outcome of misplaced trust is serious.

Every one who has been above the snow line, under his or her own power, so to speak, understands that there is no satisfaction quite like that of getting to the top of a mountain. The most leisurely and unambitious mortal, once he finds the 500-foot contour lines slipping away behind him, acquires something of the true mountaineering itch. We inherited that itch from previous attacks of the mountain malady. So standing knee-deep in the rank grass of the Sparks Lake prairies, and seeing the snow fields crowding down close to us, seemingly just behind the timber which fringed our meadow camping place, we realized full well that to-morrow's work held for us some five thousand feet of climb.

Once, in Central America, I stood upon a peak whence were visible both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Again, in western Washington, from the summit of Mt. Olympus, I have seen the silver waters of Puget Sound to the east and the Pacific Ocean westward. From the South Sister we saw no ocean—no water other than the myriad lakes nestling broadcast among the foothills. No water, but two seas—eastward a brown sea of sagebrush and grain lands, the plateau of Central Oregon, and westward the billowing sea of smoky Willamette Valley lowlands, blue and hazy and softly tinted as any soberer canvas of the color-master Turner. Two vast panoramas of land reaching to the horizon, the one bounded by the truly blue Blue Mountains that marked the whereabouts of Idaho, the other by the low cloud banks hovering over the coast hills flanking the Pacific—those we gazed down upon to the east and west, while north and south straggled the great ridge of the Cascade Range, cleaving the old Oregon country into two astonishingly dissimilar halves.

South we glimpsed the pride of California's mountains, glorious Shasta. North, a filmy white spectre, harassed by a turmoil of darker cloud, was the peak of Mt. Adams, some two hundred and fifty miles distant. Nearer—yet scarcely close at hand, for almost two hundred miles separated us—stood Hood, guardian of the Columbia, whose valley could be guessed by the shadowed depressions in the hill lands. Nearer were Jefferson, Squaw Mountain, Broken Top, and lesser peaks. As mountain views go, it was perfection—and all mountain views are perfect.

We ate our snack of lunch, drank our canteen dry, smoked our pipes, and reveled in viewing the world below us. Then, like the hackneyed army of the Duke of York, we marched right down again. Only be it noted that the descent was a marvel of rapid transit, especially where the long snow slopes were concerned. If you have done it, you know. If you haven't, suffice it to say that one sits upon a portion of one's architecture designed for general repose, and upon it slides to lower altitudes with a speed that often takes breath away and always materially dampens that afore-mentioned anatomical portion, if not one's ardor. Snow sliding, however negotiated, is exhilarating and great fun—even if the slider becomes tangled with the attraction of gravitation, completing his descent head foremost!

At dusk, we reached the camp, with tired legs and a mighty hunger. It was late—too late to attempt much in the way of an elaborate meal, even as "elaborateness" is reckoned when you have been on the trail for a fortnight. So we compromised on a "light" repast, which included, if I remember aright, such infinitesimal items as a couple of quarts of coffee, a panful of bacon, a can of peaches, a package of raisins, and sundry other lesser matters.

"To-morrow," we agreed, "we will have a feed. A real feed, worthy of the name. A feed that will go down in campers' history. A feed, in short, that will make us feel that we have been FED."

With that resolution we set to work. It was tiresome and sleepy work, to be sure, but thorough for all that. It was, indeed, as if we made our gastronomic will before ending the trip, for ere we clambered into our blankets the pride of the larder, the best of what was left in the pack-saddles, was placed in our biggest pot.

It was to be a mulligan—a mighty mulligan. In it there were venison, ham, bacon, potatoes, onions, a dash of corn, a taste of tomatoes, remnants of bannocks, some persistent beans, and a handful of rice; it was freckled with raisins and seasoned to the king's taste. Almost devoutly we laid it to rest, placing the big pot upon the fire and reinforcing the dying blaze with lasting knots. Then, with contented sighs, we dove into sleeping-bags and blankets, and forthwith passed into the land of dream-mountains, where one coasted for eons down comfortably warm snow slopes, and venison mulligan flowed in the streams instead of water.

Alas for dreams! Like the proverbial worm, the log turned—and with it the pot, bottom up. In the wee small hours the sound of sizzling ashes waked us, and we roused to discover the fragrant juices of our precious mulligan oozing into the hungry ground.

Tragedy? Truly yes; a sad, sad campers' tragedy. But what could we do? It avails nothing to cry over spilt mulligan. So once more we nestled in the blankets and drifted off into the Land of Nod, dreaming sadly of wrecked mulligan and gladly of future excursions in the wondrous, pleasant mountain land of Oregon.