Joe was gone five days, coming back over Gunsight and Piegan Pass, the reverse of the route he had taken on his first trip. But this time, he was getting so at home in the saddle that he could manage the packhorses without worrying, could throw a diamond hitch as well as the next man, and cook for a crowd without having too much left over, or not enough prepared—not that there is ever much danger of having anything left over in the Rocky Mountains! Everybody eats while there’s food in sight. But Tom was pretty lonely without him, especially as the Ranger was away, too, for the first three days.
But on the fourth day Big Bertha called Tom up to the chalet office, and told him something that made him very happy, though it didn’t seem to please Big Bertha at all.
“Tom,” said he, “I’ve got to fire you.”
(This isn’t what made Tom happy. It made his heart drop into his boots for a second, before he realized that the man was trying to get a rise out of him.)
“Yes,” the manager went on, “there’s a party of men from Washington at the hotel. They came over Piegan, and they’ve been up to Iceberg Lake to-day, and now they want to climb Chief Mountain. Somebody’s told ’em about it, and nothing for it but they must go up there. There’s no cook for ’em till Joe gets back, and the Saddle Company is short on guides anyhow, and hasn’t anybody who knows Chief Mountain. Mills says he’ll lead the party, if he can have you and your rope. He won’t go otherwise. Now, that puts me in a hole, because I’ll have to go short handed and send one of my boys down to look after the tepees. But these Washington guys are big bugs of some sort, and I suppose we gotter please ’em. So day after to-morrow you start, if Joe gets back.”
“Hooray!” Tom shouted. “Old Joey and I’ll be on a trip together!”
“Yes, and what about me? You don’t seem sorry for me at all,” said Big Bertha.
“I’m not,” Tom laughed. “I’ll cut up enough wood to-morrow for a week, and clean the stove, and fix everything up. Guess you can worry along.”
“You are a heartless, ungrateful creature,” said Big Bertha, in his funny, high voice. But Tom knew that he was really glad to give him this chance to see Chief Mountain.
The next day Mills and Tom got together and made all the arrangements for the trip, for they knew Joe would not get in till late, over the twenty-two mile Piegan trail. It was to be a long expedition—probably a week—and needed considerable planning, for they were going north, where there were no chalets, no stores nor camps, and they had to carry everything. Fortunately, there were only three men in the party, so Mills, Joe and Tom were the only guides necessary. But it meant tents, provisions, blankets, and that meant packhorses—good ones, too, which were hard to pick, for the season was late, and the horses were all getting thin and tired.
Joe came in late, as they expected, and though he, too, was tired after the long ride over Piegan, he gave a whoop of joy at Tom’s announcement. Tom made him sit down, however, and got the supper himself.
“And you’re going to bed early,” he added. “This is the real thing ahead of us now—Chief Mountain, maybe the Belly River Cañon, and Mills says maybe Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, if the weather is good. He says, though, it’s getting time for a storm again. Anyhow, we’ll see old Cleveland. Gee—it’ll be great to be on a rope again!”
“You talk as if you’d climbed the Matterhorn all your life,” Joe laughed.
The next morning at six o’clock the Ranger and the two boys were at the hotel, and beginning to pack the horses. For this trip they took but two tents, one for the three men, one for themselves. Enough food was the main requirement. They got everything, including blankets, on four horses, saving a fifth horse for the dunnage bags, which the men speedily brought out.
Of course, Joe and Tom looked at these men carefully. When you are going to be on the trail and in camp with people for a whole week, you are pretty interested to know what sort of folks they are, and whether you are going to like them. One of these three was young, not over twenty-two or twenty-three, the son of the oldest man in the party. The father, whom Mills addressed as Mr. Crimmins, had gray hair, but he looked hardy and strong, with a quick, sharp way of talking and quick motions. He and his friend, Mr. Taylor, a man of about forty, were both connected with the State Department at Washington, Mills said. The young man, Robert Crimmins, was just out of college.
“They look good to me,” Joe whispered to Tom.
“I ain’t saying a word,” Tom answered. “Not after Doc Kent. Wait and see.”
The fifth horse was now packed, and the expedition started.
But instead of turning up any of the trails toward the range, Mills led the way straight down the automobile road, toward the prairie. It seemed funny to Joe to be setting off on a trip in this direction, right away from the high places, but the horses liked it. They liked the comparatively smooth going, gently down-hill, and swung along at an easy trot.
Down the road they went, mile after mile, until they emerged from the lower end of the Swift Current Valley, out into the rolling prairies, with the whole range behind them. Then, as the road swung up over a knoll, Mills paused and pointed north.
Everybody looked. About twelve miles to the northwest, thrust out eastward far from the Divide and with the wall which rose out of the prairie growing steeper and steeper till the last two thousand feet were sheer precipice, stood a magnificent tower of a mountain, shining whitish in the sun as if it were composed of limestone. At the back, it seemed connected by a spine with the range behind, but to the prairie it presented an unbroken front, like some great Gibraltar of a tower, with the prairie grass and forest beating like surf at its feet. All alone it seemed to stand, like a sentinel of the range behind, a lone outpost.
“Is that what we’ve got to climb?” the three men exclaimed, in one breath.
“Well, we won’t take you up the east wall,” Mills laughed.
“Oh, couldn’t we get up it?” Tom cried.
Mills looked at him, and grinned again. “About to-night you won’t feel like climbing anything,” he said. “Remember, you’re not saddle-broke, the way Joe is.”
They now turned north, away from the motor road, ate some lunch under the shade of an aspen and willow thicket, amid the Persian carpet of prairie wild flowers, and then all the afternoon pushed on toward the great limestone tower, with the whole pile of the Rocky Mountain chain beside them for company. Late in the day they reached a rushing stream, which came down from a cañon just south of the big mountain. This was the north fork of Kennedy Creek, and they turned up it by a trail, the lowering cliffs of Chief now rearing up almost over their heads, and went into the mouth of the valley, and up till the main tower of Chief was east of them, and they were under the south wall of the spine which connected the peak with the main range behind. Here they made camp, in a little meadow beside the stream, with pine woods all about, and while Tom and the Ranger pitched the tents, with Robert Crimmins giving enthusiastic help, Joe built his fire pit and began to get supper. The two older men, who were pretty sore after the thirty mile ride, hobbled about snipping some boughs for their beds.
It was a good supper Joe gave them, however, and the camp was in as delightful a post as a man could ask, and around the big fire, when the food had all been eaten, the whole party sat or lay on the grass, in the fine democracy of the open trail, the assistant Secretaries of State beside the boy scouts from Southmead, and the jokes and stories went around.
But Mills “sounded taps,” as he called his bedtime order, very early, as he planned a six o’clock getaway in the morning, and that meant getting up at half-past four. The next day they were to climb Chief. The Ranger looked long at the stars before he came into the tent he and the scouts were using.
“Boys, a good day to-morrow,” he said, “but it looks like a storm after that.”
“Well, let her rip, after to-morrow,” Tom answered. “To-morrow, though, I’m goin’ up old Chief, even if I have to climb with nothing but my hands, and I feel now’s if I would have to!”
“Poor old tenderfoot!” Joe laughed.
“Gee, it isn’t my foot,” said Tom, so comically that Joe and the Ranger roared with mirth, as they rolled up in their blankets.
How Mills managed to wake up just at the time he wanted to, without any alarm clock, the scouts never were able to fathom, but he always could. He was awake and shaking them at four-thirty the next day. Joe was up on the instant, and putting on his outer clothes, but Tom groaned when he tried to move, and fell back into his blankets with an “Ouch!”
“Your sick friend strikes me as better than you are,” Mills taunted him.
“Why wouldn’t he be? He’s been weeks in the saddle now,” Tom retorted, stung into sitting up. “I’ll be all right by to-morrow—you see if I’m not.”
“Well, I’m sorry you’re too lame to climb Chief to-day,” Mills said, with a wink at Joe.
That brought Tom out of his blankets entirely, and on to his feet. “Too lame, your grandmother!” he cried. “I’d like to see you get my rope without me!”
“Oh, it’s been climbed without a rope, many a time,” Mills laughed.
Tom was up now, and thoroughly awake, and began to see the joke. He grinned rather sheepishly, and went out of the tent with his towel. Meanwhile, Joe beat reveille on a frying-pan, and lit his fire.
By six o’clock breakfast was eaten, the horses packed again, and the party on its way. They went up the trail but a short distance, and then turned sharp to the north, and began at once to climb the long spine which connects Chief Mountain with the main range to the west. It was a little over a mile to the summit of this spine, rising from 6,000 feet to 7,400. A horse does not trot up such a grade, but neither does he have to climb like a goat. In an hour, they were at the summit, and could look at last not only eastward, along the ridge, to the limestone tower of Chief which was their goal, but down the slope on the north side to the valley of the Belly River, and across it to the eastern shoulders of Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, 10,438 feet.
Here, in the open, grassy ridges at timber-line, the horses were unsaddled and unpacked, so if they lay down to roll, they could do no damage, and the party, with Tom’s rope and the cameras, set out along the ridge due east toward the towering cliff of Chief, which looked like a huge castle battlement, or watch-tower. It was not over a two-mile walk to the shale pile at the base of the summit precipice, by an easy grade, though the going was sometimes rough. The topographical map Joe carried showed that they rose from 7,400 feet to over 8,000, at the top of the shale pile, and as the mountain is 9,056 feet high, that left about a thousand feet of cliff for the final ascent.
At the top of the shale they paused, while Mills and Tom consulted. This great limestone rock was not such a hard proposition as parts of the Iceberg Lake cliff, and after a careful survey of the ground, they decided the best way to handle six people on the rope was to send a leader up with the end, to anchor where he could find strong anchorage, and then let the rest use it as a rail, rather than fastening it around each person’s waist.
Tom went in number one position, with the Ranger as number two, and Joe was stationed at the bottom, to brace and throw a loop around anybody who might, by chance, slip. In many places, Mills played Tom out nearly the whole length of the rope, where the incline was sufficiently off the perpendicular, and the rest had almost a hundred feet of rope rail to climb by. In only a few places was there real vertical climbing, and those as the summit was neared. Before noon they were all over the last pitch, on the summit.
Robert Crimmins ran to the outer edge of this summit at once, and looked out over the vast green prairie, stretching mile on endless mile to the east, like waves of the sea, and shouted.
“Father, come here!” he called. “Say, this is just like riding on the bowsprit of a tremendous ship!”
Everybody hurried over, to feel the same sensation, all except Joe. “I tell you what it feels like to me,” he said. “It feels as if I was on the front edge of the earth crust when it rode up and over the other edge. This must be the very end of the overthrust.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Crimmins agreed. “I’ve been reading up on this geological formation. This cliff under us—it must be three thousand feet down to the shale slide—was the front edge of the overthrust. You can see that. The Belly River has carved away one side, Kennedy Creek the other, but this old lump of limestone has resisted all the bombardments of frost and water, glacier and storm, and the weather has carved it into a watch-tower of the prairies, an outpost sentinel of the Great Divide.”
[“Some speech!” Tom whispered to Joe.]
But Joe did not laugh. He felt exactly what Mr. Crimmins meant, and it was very thrilling. It seemed as if he could see exactly what happened myriads of years ago when the earth cracked, and one edge of the great crust was shoved forward on to the prairie, and as if he could see what had happened since, to carve the crust into peaks and valleys.
Mills, meanwhile, had been walking about. Now he called to them, and they all went over where he stood, and saw him pointing to the bleached skull of a large animal on the ground.
“What’s that?” the men asked.
“Buffalo,” he answered.
“How on earth did it get up here?” said Mr. Crimmins. “There are only three things, without wings, which can climb this cliff, surely,—goats, mountain sheep, and men. You needn’t try to tell me a buffalo could climb up here!”
“Shan’t try,” the Ranger answered. “A Blackfoot brought that up.”
“What for?” Joe asked.
“To use for a pillow while he was getting his medicine. You know, when an Indian boy gets about the age of you scouts, he has to take a sweat bath (made by putting hot stones in a closed lodge and pouring water on ’em) to purify himself, and then he goes off to some wild, lonely place and just waits there, naked, without any food, till he has a vision. This vision tells him what his special ‘medicine’ is to be, which will bring him good luck. Old Yellow Wolf told me we’d find the skull up here. He knew the brave that brought it up for a pillow. He said the young Indian stayed four days on the summit before he got his ‘medicine.’”
“Say, if I stayed up here four days, naked, I’d need some medicine when I got down!” young Crimmins laughed. “Let’s take the skull for a souvenir.”
“Oh, no!” Joe cried, forgetting that he was only a cook and guide for the party. “That would be—be desecration! Let it stay here, where the Indian left it!”
Mr. Crimmins looked at him sharply but kindly. “Joe is right,” he said. “Let it stay here as a record of a race too fast vanishing. I like to think of that naked Indian boy, all alone, climbing this great rock tower and for four whole days sitting up here far above the world, waiting for a vision from his gods. You wouldn’t catch one of our American boys doing anything like that. Yet we think we are vastly superior to the Indians!”
“But his vision, after all, probably came because he was dizzy for lack of food, and it was a superstition that it could furnish him a ‘medicine’ to bring good luck,” Mr. Taylor said.
“Superstition or not,” the other replied, “it represented the instinct to go out alone, and meditate on solemn things. Didn’t it, Joe?”
“Yes, sir!” Joe answered, his own heart full of enthusiasm for this picture of the lone, naked Indian on top of the watch-tower of the prairies.
But Tom and Robert Crimmins, who had less imagination, had wandered away to an edge of the cliff, to toss stones over into the depths below, and suddenly the rest heard them shouting, and ran to the edge.
One of the stones they had thrown over had landed on a ledge some seventy-five feet below, and scared off a golden eagle, which was now sailing away from the cliff face with tremendous beats of his huge wings, each beat taking him up, it seemed, fifty feet, till soon he was soaring in circles out over the prairie, and sweeping back, with wings at rest, far overhead, evidently alarmed but intent on finding out what had disturbed him.
Crawling to the edge, and looking over, the party could see a big nest on the ledge below, with white things in it, and beside it, like bones.
“I’m going to have a photograph of that!” Tom cried. “Gee, I wish there were some little eagles in it!”
“You might be sorry if there were,” Mills answered briefly, as Tom fastened the rope under his arms. “I’m not even sure of the bird now the young are out. Here, take my revolver, and if it comes at you, let him have it.”
Tom put his camera in one pocket, the automatic in the other, and the men above lowered him over the edge, where he swung almost free, and had to kick the cliffside with his feet to keep himself from spinning and keep his face outward. The eagle still circled above, now and then swooping nearer till they could hear the wing beats, but it was evidently afraid to attack. Tom finally reached the ledge, landing, in fact, with both feet in the nest. It was a huge affair of sticks, lined with dry prairie grass, almost as high as his shoulders, and four feet across. He climbed out, watching the eagle with one eye, and took a couple of snapshots of it, then picked up some of the bones and examined them, grasped the rope just above his face, to ease the strain under his arms, and gave the signal to those above.
As he began to rise from the nest, the eagle swooped ever nearer, now lower than the men on the summit, so they could see its vast wing spread, its brown back and rusty colored head and neck.
Tom let go of the rope with his hands, and got the pistol out of his pocket. To tell the truth, he was beginning to get uncomfortable. As the eagle swooped within fifty feet of him, and he could see its glinting eyes, he lifted the gun and fired. Naturally, you cannot shoot a rapidly moving object with a pistol, while you yourself are dangling and spinning on the end of a rope, with any great precision of aim. He did not hit the bird, but he frightened it. With an incredibly quick change of tack, it tilted up on one wing, soared outward and upward, two hundred feet overhead, and far out from the cliff. The men hauled Tom back over the edge.
“Well, I got my picture!” Tom exclaimed. “Say, but that’s a whale of a nest! And side of it is a little skeleton, either of a kid or a baby lamb, and lots of small bones like rabbits and birds, and a fresh, half eaten ground squirrel. That’s what the old eagle was eating when we disturbed him, I guess. Gee, it’s a regular bone yard down there. Don’t smell very good, either. I don’t think I care for eagles much.”
“I didn’t care for that one, when he was coming at you!” Joe said, his face still white.
“I didn’t myself,” Tom admitted. “Wish I’d had the nerve to photograph the old birdie instead of shooting at him.”
“They don’t like to have their pictures taken,” said Mills, with a short laugh.
After this excitement, the descent of the mountain began. Half-way down, Joe left the rope, at a wide ledge, and went some distance along it, to one side, to get a photograph of the whole party on the cliffside. After he had snapped it, he kept on along the ledge a way, just to see where it went to. After a hundred feet, it turned a sharp corner, and as Joe rounded this turn, he suddenly was face to face with a big old ram! He was quite as astonished as the sheep, but he instinctively pointed his camera and snapped the bulb, just as the ram lowered its head as if to butt.
Joe flattened himself against the wall, not wishing to be knocked off fifty feet to the slope below. But the sheep decided not to butt. Instead, he turned tail, dashed a few feet back on the ledge, and went over head first. Joe ran to the spot in time to see him land on a little shelf twenty feet lower down, bounce off that to a ledge still lower, and then trot around an easy slope and disappear from sight. Not having had time to roll his film, he couldn’t take another picture. But he returned to the party in triumph. Tom might have a picture of an eagle’s nest, but now he had one of a live bighorn! The fact that his camera was focused for a hundred feet, as he had just taken the party on the rope when he met the sheep, and so his close-up of the old ram would be somewhat blurry, did not occur to him till long after, when the film was developed.
After a quick lunch, mainly of Charlie Chaplin sandwiches, the horses were packed again, and they descended the north slope of the ridge, by an easy grade, getting rapidly into timber, and after five miles or so reached the valley of the Belly River, turned up that, and presently made camp at the mouth of the Glenns Lakes, two long, narrow, green lakes reaching in toward the Divide, with the towering walls of Cleveland, which they had seen clearly from Chief, rising right out of these lakes, but now, they saw to their sorrow, going up into clouds.
“I thought so,” Mills said. “Bad weather. It don’t look to me as if we could tackle Cleveland to-morrow. I wanted to try him from this side, too—go up on that long shoulder that comes down south, and then east, toward us. We could get up on that and make a base camp. Well, we’ll camp here to-night, and if he’s still under to-morrow, we can go over Ahern Pass to Flat Top, and then try him from the west side. That’s the side they usually go up, anyhow.”
So they pitched their tents in a meadow by the Belly River, with the clouds gradually shredding out overhead till they finally wrapped the tower of Chief, and hid it from sight, and the cold grew uncomfortable, so that everybody save Joe set about chopping a big supply of wood. Night came early under the cloud mantle, and with no glimpse of the stars, or the tops of those great walls towering up overhead, it was a lonely spot. As Joe was dropping to sleep he heard a coyote barking somewhere out near the horses, a weird, sad sound, like the coughing laugh of an idiot. He shivered at the sound still more, and tried to roll his blanket tighter.
“But you’ve got to get used to it, old scout, if you are going to be a forest ranger,” he told himself.
Certainly it did not trouble Mills, who was already sound asleep.
The next day the mountains were still under. It wasn’t raining, but the clouds were a dark, gun metal color, and seemed to rest like heavy smoke on the rocks overhead.
“Nothing doing,” said Mills. “They may be over for two days yet, and it will surely rain. We’ll keep the trail over Ahern Pass, and make Flat Top to-day. All out!”
And it was a strange day that followed. The trail was none too good, with much fallen timber to drive the packhorses around for the first two or three miles, and it very soon got up into a wild, desolate, narrow cañon under the southern wall of Mount Merritt, with the water of Lake Elizabeth beside the path, looking in this gray light under the lowering clouds a sort of dead, chalky green. Beyond Lake Elizabeth the cañon grew steeper and narrower, the cliffs of Mount Merritt went sheer up into the clouds, and on the other side of the valley rose the equally steep walls that were the reverse side of the Iceberg Lake cliffs Tom had scaled. But the tops both of Merritt and these cliffs were hidden in cloud, that swirled and raised and lowered as the upper wind currents hit it. When they reached Lake Helen, at the head of the cañon, where the trail began to switchback up the wall of the Divide, they could see, just under the clouds, poised, it seemed, almost over their heads, no less than four glaciers, one of them apparently hanging on a shelf and ready to fall off at any moment. In fact, a huge cake as big as a house did fall off, and crashed down with a great roar to the rocks below, even as they watched.
“The mountain gnomes are bombarding us!” Mr. Crimmins laughed.
They went steadily and steeply up, on the switchbacks, and reached the top of the Divide at noon. But half an hour before they got to the Divide they were in the clouds, in a thick, damp, chilling fog, that was not rain and yet covered their clothes with drops of moisture, made their hands wet and cold, and of course obscured every vestige of a view.
“Well,” said the Ranger, “here we are on the backbone of the world. Over there is Heaven’s Peak. Just to the left, only a mile away, Tom, is the top of the Iceberg Lake head wall. If it was clear, you could take Joe over and show him where you climbed. But I guess as it is we’ll get down as fast as we can, and not even wait for lunch.”
“Anything to get out of this,” the men said, blowing on their wet, numb fingers.
So they dropped down on the west side of the Divide, getting out of the cloud below timber-line, and stopped while Joe made hot coffee. Then they pushed on down still farther, picked up a better trail in the deep woods in a cañon beside a stream—Mineral Creek Cañon; and turning sharp north, began slowly and gradually to climb again. It was the kind of a day when nobody does much talking, and even the horses seemed to plug dejectedly along. After two or three miles, however, they began to go up more rapidly, out of deep timber, into a region of meadows and low balsams. Joe was the first to smell the balsams, and sniffed eagerly.
“I’m going to have a real bed to-night,” he called to Mills, “if you don’t look. I know it’s against the rules to cut bough beds in the Park.”
“I won’t look, if you won’t tell,” Mills called back. “We have to make that rule to protect the trees, but way up here in the wilds Uncle Sam won’t miss a few twigs, I guess.”
They were now nearly under the clouds again. To their right a steep débris pile rose, and ended in a jagged cliff wall, which disappeared in the vapor. To the left was a wooded slope, and ahead the trail climbed sharply to a ridge which could barely be seen under the clouds.
“We’re almost at the north end of Flat Top Mountain,” the Ranger said. “That cliff to the right is the Divide, and dead ahead that ridge you see is the Divide turning sharp left and running across to the western range. From here on into Canada the western range is the watershed. We could climb to the top of that ridge—only half a mile, and camp on the Divide, if you want to.”
“And spend the night in the cloud? Excuse me!” Mr. Crimmins said. “This is bad enough.”
“All right—all off,” the Ranger answered.
He called to Joe and Tom, and the three of them pitched the two tents in a sheltered spot, in the centre of a grove of balsams about twenty feet tall.
“And peg ’em down hard,” he said. “Anything may come out of those clouds to-night. Now, Tom, get a good big supply of wood, and stack it up dry, under a pack cover, while I turn out the horses.”
While Joe was getting supper, the three tourists gathered balsam boughs for beds, following Mills’ orders to take only a few twigs from any one tree.
“It’s against the rules,” he said, “but we may need to sleep as warm as we can to-night.”
“I believe you,” Robert Crimmins replied, blowing on his numb fingers.
Tom, meanwhile, combed the region all around for dead wood. The supply was none too large, for they were perilously close to timber-line; and under the cloud darkness was coming on early, to make the job harder. But he finally found a large dead tree, down in a sheltered hollow by the stream, and got four or five good logs out of that, and a lot of smaller stuff. The two tents were pitched facing each other, with a camp-fire and Joe’s fire pit between, and with the surrounding evergreens for a windbreak and the tent flaps open to catch the heat, they were pretty comfortable that evening, though every one wore his sweater, and Joe and Tom, who had brought their mackinaws, were glad enough to put them on, too.
Nobody undressed that night at all, except to take off his boots and put on an extra pair of socks instead. The wind was rising steadily, the tents shook, the evergreens over them sighed and whistled, and Joe lay awake for the first time since he had been in the Park, with a curious feeling that something was going to happen.
He got to sleep at last, but he woke up presently—it seemed to him that he woke up immediately—and peering through the tent flap saw no sign of a fire. At least, he thought, the embers ought still to be glowing. He slipped out of his blankets as softly as he could, climbed over Mills, who was sleeping nearest the entrance, and started to unbuckle the flap. As he did so, a gust of wind hit the tent, half lifting it off its pole, and blew the flap wildly in. As it blew in, something soft and cold and stinging hit Joe’s face. Snow! He stuck out his head for an instant, and all he could see was a kind of swirling, waving, hissing white darkness. It was bitter cold, too, and the fire was out. Dimly he could see the outline of the other tent, and the roof of it was white with drift. No use trying to build up the fire in that! He fought the wind to close the flap again.
But the swirl of the snow in his face had waked the Ranger.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“A blizzard,” Joe replied, as another gust of wind strained the canvas and rattled the guy ropes.
“I thought something would come out of this,” said Mills. “Hang it, we ought to have camped lower down. I’d rather be drowned than frozen.”
Tom woke up now, and they lighted the camp lantern, to peep out into the night.
A voice, half drowned in the roar of the gale, came across from the other tent.
“Say,” it called, “what had we better do?”
“Keep in your blankets and hang onto your tent!” Mills shouted back.
“I wonder if he thinks we can call a taxi and drive to a hotel!” he added in a normal tone, that couldn’t have been heard two feet beyond the tent flap.
Nobody slept any more in either tent that night. They were too cold, and too busy bailing out snow that drifted under the tent walls, or trying to peg down the walls or stop up the gaps with the balsam beds. Finally, toward morning, there came a perfect hurricane of wind. The tent the scouts were in swayed, tugged, seemed about to leave its moorings, and in the midst of the gust the occupants heard a snapping sound outside, and a smothered yell.
Mills sprang out into the storm, and a moment later came back with Robert and the two men, all wrapped in their blankets, and powdered white by the brief crossing.
Their tent pole had snapped, and the tent had come down on top of them! There was no chance of getting it up again then, so the six people all huddled in the one tent, and waited for daylight.
“Anyhow, the more we are, the warmer we can keep,” said Robert, who was rather enjoying the adventure. “Go on, Joe, keep your knee in my back, I like it! It’s as good as a hot water bottle.”
The storm began to abate presently, and as the light brightened outside, Mills, peering out, reported that the snow had stopped falling. With the diminution of the wind, too, the cold lessened, and the noise, and nearly everybody, in spite of the cramped quarters, fell into a troubled, rather restless sleep.
What woke Joe up was the bright daylight hitting him in the eye through a crack in the tent flap.
He extricated himself from between Robert and Mr. Taylor, and pushed his way out. It was a transformed, a wonderful, a beautiful world he looked on! Evidently the sun was up over the prairie, for far down Mineral Creek Cañon he could see the top of Cannon Mountain, snow covered, pink and rosy with the light, and Heaven’s Peak, a little nearer, was like a great pyramid of gleaming rose crystal. On the ground about him, half covering his fire pit, was almost a foot of snow, which hung on the balsams, was drifted over the fallen tent, covered the rocks, and through which, here and there, rose the stems of wild flowers, their blossoms nodding above the white carpet!
He gave a shout.
“Don’t miss this!” he cried. “Gee, it’s worth a lost night’s sleep, and then some!”
Sleepy, stiff forms emerged from the tent behind him, and gazed at the sunrise over a world that was white with winter, and yet was summer. Everybody exclaimed with delight—except the Ranger.
“This will make Cleveland hopeless,” was all he said, as he began to pull the fallen tent up out of its drift.
“Well, I’m going to name this old camp Valley Forge,” Robert Crimmins laughed, as he stamped his feet and blew on his fingers, before picking a wild flower for his buttonhole!
It was a hard job digging the camp out of the snow, and only the fact that Tom had covered the wood and weighted down the canvas to hold it on gave them dry fuel to cook with. They had no snow shovels, using frying-pans and dippers to clear away the drifts from the fire pit and their packs.
“Valley Forge is the right name,” Mr. Crimmins laughed as he stamped his feet and blew on his fingers, as Robert had done.
But the sun was now up, the air was rapidly warming, and while Joe got the breakfast, Mills and Tom waded out through the snow in search of the horses. They had to go a long way, too, for the wise beasts had simply wandered down the trail into the woods, and kept on descending until they had got below the snow line into rain, where the grass was not covered and they could feed. It was almost two hours later that the Ranger and Tom came driving them back, cross, hungry, and with boots soaked by the snow and clothes soaked by the wet bushes.
So they got a late start that morning.
“We’ll go up the Little Kootenai Cañon,” said Mills, “as far as the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds, and see how the land lies for a try at the west wall of Cleveland the next day. If it isn’t promising, we can make an afternoon trip up to Waterton Lake, and then come back the next day. If it does look like a try at the big mountain, we can push up the side a way, and make a base camp.”
So they mounted, and pushed up through the soft, rapidly melting snow to the top of the ridge where the Divide crosses from the eastern to the western range, and after a short trip through the snow-filled, open meadows of Flat Top, with the little pines and balsams looking like Christmas cards, they began to drop down a more than two-thousand foot slope into the cañon of the Little Kootenai River, which flows due north, with Cleveland on the right, and Kootenai and Citadel Peaks on the left. Especially Citadel Peak was superb in its snow mantle, a great, glistening white fortress towering thousands of feet up from the cañon.
They reached the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds at one o’clock, and found there the ranger for that district.
“How about Cleveland?” Mills asked.
“Getting sort of tired of life?” the other ranger inquired.
“That’s what I thought,” Mills replied. “Any chance to-morrow?”
“Not much. She’ll melt on the lower slopes to-day, but the peak’ll not begin cataracting snowslides till to-morrow morning, about ten A.M. Day after you might make it.”
“No use—we can’t wait that long,” said Mr. Crimmins. “I’m sorry, but even the State Department can’t control nature.”
So, after lunch in the cabin, they left the packhorses behind, and free to travel at a good gait, trotted down the trail to Waterton Lake, a long, narrow, beautiful sheet of green water which stretched away north ten miles, into Canada, and being warm with the ride the two scouts and Robert had a swim—or, at least, they went into the water. They came out before they had swum far, their bodies stung red as boiled lobsters by the cold.
“This Park reminds me of the poem,” Robert said,
“‘Water, water everywhere, but not a place to swim.’”
Back at the Ranger’s cabin, they had a big, leisurely supper, with the Ranger as their guest, and after supper he told them tales of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds, an old mining prospector, who had first built the cabin, and when the Park became national property was made a ranger, and true to his name died in the saddle on one of the trails he had followed so long. This old trail from Waterton Lake south over Flat Top and down Mineral Creek to McDonald Creek, and so to Lake McDonald, was a regular smuggler’s route in the old days, the Ranger said, and many a horse had been driven down it in the dark, before the American rangers on one end and the Canadian Northwestern mounted police on the other put a stop to that sort of thing.
That night they slept in the cabin, and early the next day went back in their tracks—the first time they had repeated a trail—reaching “Valley Forge” camp at noon. The snow was about all melted here now, and when Mills pointed up the cliffs to the east, and said Chaney Glacier lay just on the other side, it was voted to camp here once more, and spend the afternoon on the glacier, and the peak above.
“I’ve never been up that peak,” Mills said, “but I have a hunch there’d be some view up there.”
Lunch was eaten quickly, Tom got out his rope, and they started.
It was an easy climb, and could have been made without the rope, probably, though the rope was a great help in making speed. After a long grade up a shale slide, and across a snow-field, they reached the base of a rough, jagged cliff, and by picking out upward slanting ledges on this cliff, Tom led the way rapidly upward, Mills keeping the rear of the rope anchored, while Tom anchored the upper end, thus making a rope railing on the outer edge of each ledge. In less than an hour they reached the spine of the Divide, at a col between two higher peaks. This spine was a knife blade, not over ten feet wide, and directly on the east side, with its upper edge so close you could step off on to it, lay Chaney Glacier, a vast field of snow now, with little ice showing, a mile in extent, and sloping downward till the lower end disappeared over the rim of a precipice. Out beyond this precipice, they saw the Belly River Cañon, looking straight down it, over the green waters of Glenns Lakes, to the spot where they had camped, and beyond that to the green ocean of the prairies. From here, too, they got a superb view of Cleveland, rearing up, still snow covered, a great pyramid of white.
“Want to go out on the glacier?” the Ranger asked Joe.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Joe laughed. “The rope’s strong.”
Every one did want to go out on the glacier, so Mills roped them all, keeping last place himself, and they ventured out over the apparently unbroken field of snow. But this snow was light and rapidly melting, and they had not gone far before Tom, in the lead, with a sounding staff he had cut before they left camp, detected a frail snow bridge and sent it crumbling down into the crevasse, disclosing the green ice walls. One look down this well into the ice decided the party not to venture far over the treacherous field, and they returned to the firm rocks of the Divide, and climbed on up another eight hundred feet to the top of the peak to the south.
The summit of this peak was only about the size of a big table, and to the east it fell away absolutely sheer for three thousand feet to a tiny lake far below, out of which, on the opposite side, shot up the cliff wall of Merritt. The wind was strong up here, and the peak so small that all six lay on their stomachs to peer over the precipice.
“Say, that’s a hole in the earth!” Mr. Crimmins exclaimed.