Robert spit over the edge. “I never spit three thousand feet before,” he said. “Want to climb up that cliff with your rope, Tom?”
Tom shook his head. “It couldn’t be done, not even by a goat,” he said, wisely.
“As a matter of fact, you’re right,” Mills laughed. “I never even knew that cliff was here, either. This Park hasn’t been more’n half explored yet.”
From almost the very top of this peak, a long, very steep shale slope led to the “Valley Forge” meadow, and down this they descended, by the aid of the rope, sending showers of stones ahead, so that the leader was in constant danger, and wearing down the spikes and soles of their boots rapidly. They camped that night in the old spot, using their former fire pit, but there was no storm, and the next day they had an uneventful passage back down Mineral Creek, up to Swift Current by the trail Joe had first climbed in the rain, and so on back to Many Glacier—a long trip of twenty-four miles, but to Joe, who by this was as hard as nails, not very tiresome. At Many Glacier the boys bid the two men and Robert good-bye, and as darkness was gathering, once more cooked their supper in Camp Kent, which by now was like home to them.
“Well,” said Tom, “that was some trip, old wifey—let’s see, we were six days out, and we didn’t meet a soul after we left the road till we got back to Granite Park, except the ranger up under Cleveland. The real wilderness stuff, eh?”
“You bet!” said Joe. “And eighteen dollars more for me and ma.”
“You’re getting terribly practical,” Tom laughed.
“I’m getting self-supporting,” Joe replied. “No more grafting off you.”
“You’re getting well,” Tom cried. “That’s the real thing. Gee, you’re harder’n I am now! You never seem to get tired.”
“Bet I can hit the little old cot, though,” Joe laughed, as he began to make up the beds in the tent.
It was now September, and already a rain in the valleys meant fresh snow on the peaks and high passes. The hotel was still full, however, and Tom was busy at the tepees, while Joe had steady work as a camp cook, once on a fishing trip, when, in three days, he cooked so many trout he said he should be ashamed ever to look a fish in the face again, and sick if he ate one.
“I didn’t think it was possible to get fed up on trout,” he declared.
“Wait till next April, and you’ll be out whipping up Roaring Brook, all right, all right,” Tom laughed.
Of course school had begun back in Southmead, but Tom did not feel like quitting his job before the season was over, and, besides, after long talks together, and consultations with the Ranger, and letters home to their parents and Mr. Rogers, the boys had decided to stay on with Mills, in his cabin (paying for their own food, of course, which would be a very small item), until Christmas. It would mean that they’d lose the whole school term instead of a month, but, in return, Joe would have that much more outdoor life, they could do a lot of reading evenings, and, above all, they could learn from Mills some of the duties of a forest ranger in winter, and learn how to handle themselves in the mountains and big woods after all trails were closed, all tourists departed, and the Park had gone back to its primitive wildness.
Mr. Rogers agreed with them, and evidently persuaded their parents. “After all,” he wrote, “you’ll really be taking a term in practical field forestry, and Joe can never hope to get a position as a forester if he hasn’t fully recovered his health. The government won’t take a sick man on the job. Learn all you can, especially how to take care of yourselves.”
So the boys sent home for their very warmest winter clothes, mittens, pull down hats, ski boots and skis and some school books and stories to read evenings. Mills said he could get them real Indian snow-shoes in the Park, and elk skin sleeping-bags. He was even more delighted at the prospect of having them than they were at staying. It meant he would have company till nearly Christmas, and the scouts knew how lonely he usually was in the winter, because that was one thing he had never talked about.
The tepee camp closed about mid-September, when it got too cold for many hikers to come over the high passes, and the next two weeks Tom worked as a regular guide, with a license badge from the Park superintendent. Joe also had a couple of jobs with camping parties, but he had had his badge from the start. All the hotels and chalets closed on October first, and then the boys moved into the Ranger’s cabin.
They were glad to move, too. Already winter had begun to come, up on the Divide. The snow that fell did not melt, and the line of it was creeping down the bare, rocky slopes of Gould. The nights were cold, and water froze in a kettle, and ice formed on the edge of the lake on a still night. Before the last bus had departed, all three made a trip out to Glacier Park station and laid in supplies for the winter.
“The next trip we make may be on snow-shoes,” the Ranger said. “That’s fifty miles afoot, packing your sleeping-bag on your back.”
The horses presently were sent down to the prairie to winter, and Joe got some of the hens from the hotel, which otherwise would have been killed or taken away, and installed them in the stable.
“We’ll have fresh eggs for a while, anyhow,” he declared.
“What you going to feed ’em with?” the Ranger asked.
“I got two barrels of feed,” said Joe, “and our table scraps. When the feed gives out, we’ll live on fricasseed chicken. Anyhow, I’ll keep one good one alive till Thanksgiving, and we’ll have some fresh meat that day.”
In the weeks that followed, Tom and Joe lived a hardy, active life afoot, sometimes going with the Ranger up the high trails to inspect where the early snows first slid, so that he could get a line on the spots in which the most danger to the trails lay.
“My idea is,” he said, “that in some places where we have trouble, making us a lot of work in the spring, the government could plant Arctic willow or limber pines, to hold the snow from sliding, and save a lot of money. I’m going to study snowslides this winter, and make a report.”
Sometimes, too, the scouts went hunting with him, not for sheep or goats or deer, of course, but for the animals which prey on the sheep, goats, deer, etc. The worst pest, perhaps, is the coyote, which is a sort of cowardly fox-wolf, and as the snow gradually pushed down the slopes and drove many animals with it, the coyotes grew more numerous around the cabin, so the boys could hear them barking at night. Now all the tourists were gone, Mills gave each boy a gun, making them his assistants, and especially on moonlight nights, when they heard the coyotes barking, they would go out where some bait had been placed and shoot two or three.
“Every one you bag saves the life of a dozen ptarmigan hens, and probably a lot of lambs and fawns,” said Mills.
It wasn’t long before the side of the barn was covered with coyote skins.
“But what you really want is a lion’s skin,” said Mills.
“What I want is a silver tip skin,” said Tom. “I want a coat like yours.”
“Nothing doing,” Mills laughed. “Mr. Silver Tip is protected now.”
“Well, then, bring on your lion!” Spider replied.
“We’ll get one yet,” Mills answered.
Until the snow got well down toward the valleys, Tom and Joe used to go off for a day at a time, also, with the rope, climbing up cliffs for practice and still oftener, with their cameras, seeking out the upland slopes where the wind kept the snow blown off, and lying in wait for sheep, to photograph them. The sheep, they found, came to such places to feed. But it was cold work waiting, so they finally hit on the idea of packing up their sleeping-bags on their backs, and lying in them, under the shelter of some rock or timber-line pine. In this way, they got several photographs at close range.
They got something else, too; they got a real idea of why the trees at timber-line are only a few feet high. It was mid-November when they had gone up a shoulder of Mount Wilbur, early in the morning, to a bare upland pasture where they believed that sheep would come to feed. The sun was shining when they left, and there was no snow to speak of down in the valley. But they took snow-shoes, to keep their feet dry up above, and their sleeping-bags.
Before they reached the pasture, however, which was at the extreme upper edge of timber-line, the sun was overcast, and the wind was rising to a gale. They kept on, in spite of it, and picking out the lee side of a rock, where a tree grew about three feet tall, till it got above the rock and then turned at a right angle and trailed out parallel to the ground, they got into their bags to wait. No sheep came that morning, but as the wind rose and shrieked and howled, and snow began to fall, they were too interested to go back down.
If they raised their faces the least bit above this rock, smash! came the gale to hit them, and the snow particles cut like ice, while in the wind they felt little stinging particles of rock dust that actually hurt when they hit you.
“I don’t blame this tree for not growing any higher!” Joe exclaimed. “It’s like us—just cuddles down behind the rock.”
“Sure,” said Tom. “If a branch does grow up over in summer, a wind like this the next winter just cuts it off like pruning shears.”
The scouts were now beginning to get covered with snow, and in spite of the fascination of lying up here with the storm howling over them and feeling why it is the trees at timber-line grow only a few feet, or even in some cases a few inches, tall in a hundred years, they realized it was time to be getting down.
The instant they stood up, and got the full force of the gale, they were almost knocked off their feet. The snow was coming fast now, and it was all they could do to keep their footing over the treacherous rocks. They had no rope, as they had not supposed they would need it, but when Joe was suddenly bowled over, and went nearly fifty feet down a long drift before he could dig in his heels and stop, it began to look grave.
As soon as they got off the partially bare shoulder, into a trifle less windy reach, they put on their snow-shoes, and fought along toward the Swift Current trail, almost blindly in a brief time, for the snow was increasing till it shrouded them like a cloud.
“Say, I’m getting nervous!” Joe cried. “We ought to be at that trail by now.”
“Shut up,” Tom said. “If you get a funk, it lets down your vitality, and then you’ll get cold and freeze your ears or feet or something. We can’t miss it; we got the pitch of the slope to go by.”
“That’s so,” Joe answered. And as he realized that the slope would guide them, so they couldn’t go in a circle, he suddenly felt warmer. He realized how important it is to keep your head.
Once on the Swift Current trail, which, though snow covered, showed plainly, they descended rapidly on their snow-shoes, which gripped well. There was not yet snow enough here to start a slide, but they weren’t sure there might not be, and they kept an anxious eye above them all the way down. Once in the woods at the bottom, they hurried on to the cabin, not even stopping to make tea.
“Say, you poor boobs,” Mills exclaimed, “I was just coming after you. Why don’t you pick a wild, windy, stormy day to go climbing Wilbur? What are you trying to do, commit suicide?”
“No,” said Tom, “to see why the timber-line trees are so dwarfed.”
“Yes, and we found out,” Joe added.
That storm lasted two days, and it brought the snow to the valley, laid at least sixteen inches of it on the level in the woods, and swept it across Lake McDermott against the hotel, till the drift reached the top of the first story. As soon as it stopped, the scouts and Mills were out on their snow-shoes, tracking through the woods.
“I want to find out where the deer yards are going to be this winter,” the Ranger said. “We’ll want to know, so we can keep an eye on them, for lions or wolves, and protect the herds if we can.”
“What’s a deer yard?” the boys asked.
“Big game, especially in winter, don’t travel very much,” the Ranger answered. “They pick out some place where the feeding is good, and learn to know it well, not only where to get food, but where to turn quick and hide from enemies. When winter and deep snow come, they begin packing down the snow with their hoofs in a sort of yard—moose, deer, and sometimes even sheep do this—and as the snow grows deeper, their packing raises them higher and higher up, so they can feed on taller and taller bushes, and even finally get up to the limbs of trees.”
Mills decided that the protected southwestern slopes of the mountain along which the trail winds to Iceberg Lake was a likely field, so the party split up, and each one went his own way through the woods and across the open parks, looking for tracks, and following any that he discovered. They were to meet at one o’clock on the shore of the lake.
Joe was soon out of sight and sound of the others, and as he was lowest down, close to the brook at the bottom of the cañon, he was also in the thickest woods, where the fir-trees, covered with snow like Christmas cards, shook their “frosty pepper” into his nose as he pushed through. The brook was partially frozen, and he often found it easiest to walk on the snowy edge. Presently he came on deer tracks leading into the open water, and not emerging. The deer had walked up-stream, in the water, evidently—several of them, and recently. He hurried on, beside the brook, and suddenly, rounding a little cover of pines, came full on a herd of five, walking in the water. He had not heard them, because of the gurgle of the brook, nor they him. He stopped dead in his tracks and watched them a second, before they got his scent, or in some other way detected him, and turned to look. He did not quite know what to do, but the deer quickly decided. They stepped out of the brook and into the woods, as if to let him pass. He went on, and looked back. The deer had walked into the brook again, and were slowly coming on, browsing on overhanging shrubs as they came.
So Joe moved some distance from the bank, and then followed them. After half a mile, they left the stream and entered a thick, small wood where, just outside, was long, dried grass under the snow. He saw that they had been here before, pawing away the snow to eat this hay. He followed into the wood, stampeding them out on the farther side, and found already the signs that they had begun to stamp down paths through their “yard.” Walking around the grove, he looked for tracks of coyotes or lions, but there was nothing but the track of a snow-shoe rabbit. The deer, so far, were safe. Indeed, they even now stood about three hundred yards away, watching him with alert curiosity, their heads raised, a pretty picture over the white snow.
He carefully took note of the spot, and hurried on to report. Tom and the Ranger reached the lake about the time he did. The Ranger had found a yard, also, and Tom had found a mink track, and seen a snow-shoe rabbit, in his white winter dress.
They built a fire on the snow, beside the white snow-field which was the lake (the water was now frozen solid), and as they made their tea, they watched a herd of goats low down on the cliff that Tom had climbed, evidently quite content up there, on the ledges too steep for snow to cling, and finding something to eat.
“It must be dry picking,” Tom declared. “Why, there was little enough in summer.”
“And no tin cans,” Joe laughed. “You might have left ’em a few tin cans, Tom, when you climbed the wall.”
“Never thought of it,” Tom answered, “and now it’s too slippery.”
From then on it became the scouts’ almost daily task—or, rather, pleasure—to visit the deer yards to see how the herds were getting on. There were five deer in one yard, and eleven in the other, and before long they got so used to the boys that if they happened to be “at home,” as Joe put it, they would hardly go a hundred yards away while the scouts inspected their methods of feeding, looked for enemy tracks, and sometimes left bundles of hay on the tramped snow—hay which Joe had discovered he could dig out in a sheltered spot near the chalets. It wasn’t much, but it served to make the deer tamer.
Often, now, the scouts came on their skis, for two more storms had put three feet of snow on the ground, and it elevated them above the underbrush. The run home was thrilling, with long, fast slides down open parks and hard, Telemark stems at the bottom to keep from crashing into trees or rocks. But they couldn’t get the Ranger on skis.
“No, sir!” he said. “You boys know how, and can keep from breaking your necks. But I’m too old to learn.”
It was the day after Thanksgiving, when Joe, true to his word, had killed a hen and cooked the nearest thing he could to a real New England Thanksgiving dinner, that he and Tom, visiting the first of their yards early in the morning, came upon a tragedy.
There were no deer in sight as they approached, and on entering the packed path under the trees they heard no sounds. Pushing on, they came suddenly upon all five beautiful creatures, lying dead on the snow! There was blood on the snow, too, and one or two bodies had been somewhat eaten. But three of them had merely been killed wantonly, and not eaten at all.
The boys were furious. They cocked their rifles, and began a rapid, angry search for tracks. Yes—there they were—big, catlike paw tracks! The lion had crouched in the evergreens, sneaked up in the night when the herd were huddled close for mutual warmth, and laid them all low!
They circled the grove till they found the tracks leading away, and followed them as fast as they could. But, being on skis, they were soon baffled, as the lion had made at once for the steep, rocky cliffs. So they rushed to the other yard. Here the herd had not been disturbed. They were all browsing on a new path they had packed among some willows.
“Come,” Joe cried. “Back to see Mills and find out what to do! The old lion may get the other herd to-night.”
That night there was a moon, and the Ranger and the boys, clad in all their thickest clothes, with four pairs of woollen socks in their big, easy moccasins, with sweaters, fur coats, fleece-lined mittens and bearskin helmets, advanced on snow-shoes up the valley.
“The lion may come back to the carcases, or wolves may scent ’em and come,” Mills said, “or he may attack the other herd. Then, again, he may do nothing, and we’ll have to watch every night for a week. You two take the dead herd, and I’ll watch the other. Approach it up wind—don’t get on the windward side at all, and if you can find a good rest in a tree, get up in that, with a clear view of the opening. Let the lion get in close before you fire, and let him have it in the heart and head. There ought to be light enough to-night. Better have your guns in rest, pointed at the carcases, so you won’t have to make any noise lifting ’em.”
The Ranger and the scouts now separated, and Joe and Tom, making a wide circle to get sharp to leeward of the yard, moved silently over the deep snow, in the cold, clear, almost Arctic moonlight, with the great peaks of the Divide rising up like silvery ghosts far overhead. There was no noise in all the world, and no living thing except themselves, except once when a startled snow-shoe rabbit leaped across an opening, white as the snow he was half wallowing in.
“Say, this is spooky!” Joe whispered.
“You bet,” Tom whispered back. “The little old electric lights in Southmead Main Street are some way off!”
They drew near the wood where the yard was, and crept stealthily into the dark shadows of the pines. The dead deer lay in a tiny opening, five black objects on the moonlit snow. The boys, still keeping down wind, each picked out a tree, and with their rifles carefully locked, climbed up through the scratching, snowy branches till they could work into some kind of a seat, and get their guns pointed out, with an opening along the barrel to sight.
“Say, I hope the old lion don’t take too long,” Tom whispered. “My seat’s about two inches wide, and sharp on top.”
“Gosh, I’d sit on a needle all night to save those other deer,” Joe answered. “But don’t talk. He may be coming any minute.”
In cold and silence, they waited. There wasn’t a sound, except now and then a muffled groan or creak of a tree limb, as one or the other of the boys had to shift his position. It grew later and later. Joe’s eyes ached with watching the five black objects on the snow, and the patch of white moonlight around them. They ached, and would close. He was bitterly cold, too. He did not know whether he would be able to pull the trigger if the lion came, or pry his lids wide enough apart to see the sights. Every time he tried to sight the gun now, it was just a blur of shining blackness. And he knew Tom must be feeling the same way. Mills certainly had not fired at anything—they could have heard a rifle shot for ten miles in that deadly still Arctic hush.
Then, so suddenly it almost made him fall off his branch, something dark and long and lean came sneaking into the patch of moonlight. It was the lion, its paws sinking down, its body crouched over them, till it seemed to creep like a snake. In this ghostly light, it looked about ten feet long, and Joe suddenly felt hot blood go through his half-frozen veins.
The lion gave a low, angry snarl, and stopped dead about three feet from the body of a deer, raising its head a little. Evidently it had heard Joe or Tom moving his rifle barrel to sight. But he had no time to retreat. Almost as one shot, the two guns blazed, with two flashes of red out of the evergreens, and a report that seemed to shatter the cold night silence.
The dark form of the lion gave a leap into the air, and landed kicking in the snow.
At the same instant two figures literally fell out of the trees, and rushed toward it, going in up to their waists, for neither waited to put on his snow-shoes again.
Tom was the first near it.
“Look out!” Joe yelled. “He’s not dead! He may come at you!”
But Tom had his gun up, and at pointblank range, with his sights in full moonlight, he deliberately took aim, and fired again, at the lion’s heart.
The body gave a last kick, and fell on its side, stone dead, its blood slowly running out on the snow.
“He’ll never kill any more deer!” Tom cried.
They turned the lion over, and examined it. One bullet had hit him in the front leg, one in the jaw, shattering it, and entering its throat. But which shot was whose, nobody could say.
“I guess it was yours that got his head,” Tom declared, “’cause I was so sleepy I couldn’t see to sight.”
“My hands were so cold, I almost couldn’t pull the trigger, so it must have been yours,” Joe answered.
“After you, my dear Alphonse,” Tom laughed. “Anyhow, we both hit him, and that’s some shooting at a hundred feet, in the middle of the night, even if it is moonlight. We better get our snow-shoes on, and drag him home. Wonder if Mr. Mills will come, or stick it out at the other yard?”
“I bet he comes,” said Joe. “He must have heard us fire.”
They made an improvised sledge of a big, broken pine bough, to keep the body up on top of the snow, and were tying it on to this with their handkerchiefs knotted around the feet, when they heard a far call.
“He’s coming!” said Joe, and making his hands into a trumpet, he answered the call.
They had the body out of the yard, and were crossing an open park with it, tugging hard, when the Ranger’s halloo sounded much nearer, and shortly after he appeared in the moonlight, coming fast.
“You got him, eh?” he said. “That’s good work. I heard your two shots, and then one more. That was to finish him at close range, I bet.”
“You win,” said the boys. “Gee, but he’s heavy to drag.”
“That’s a bum sled,” the Ranger laughed. “Either of you got your axe on?”
“No, we haven’t,” the boys said.
“I’ll find a fallen pole, then. Drag him along to the next stand.”
The Ranger went ahead, and found a small fallen tree from which he broke the dead branches and made a pole. Slipping this between the lion’s paws (which were knotted together with handkerchiefs) he picked up one end and Tom the other, the lion hanging down between them. Joe took the rifles, and they started home.
The moon was setting behind the Divide and the world growing dark under the frosty stars as they neared the cabin. Once inside, the boys got a rule, and ran back to measure their prey. He was exactly eight feet long, with three feet more of tail, and by lantern light they could see his yellowish-brown color, his gray face and dirty white belly. He looked like some gigantic, elongated house cat.
“Is that what used to be all over the country, and was called a panther?” Joe asked.
“I suppose it is,” the Ranger said. “Probably this type that lives in the Rocky Mountains looks a bit different, but it’s the same breed o’ cat. You don’t have panthers out East any more, do you?”
“No, they say one hasn’t been seen in Massachusetts for fifty years or more,” Tom answered. “Don’t know that I’m sorry. I like the deer too well.”
“Speaking of deer, to-morrow we’ll go up and rescue the good carcases he didn’t eat, and have some fresh meat,” said Mills. “Now to bed. Do you know it’s two o’clock?”
“’Most time to get up!” the boys laughed, as they cleaned their rifle barrels and made ready for bunk.
The next morning Mills was up at the usual time, but he let the boys sleep, and it was the sound of the breakfast dishes that woke Joe, who was usually first up to do the cooking and get the stove red hot. Joe himself slept in a separate little room partitioned off at the back, so he could have his window wide open without freezing out the whole cabin. He got up now and hurried out, still sleepy.
“I had a funny dream last night,” he said. “I dreamed we were bringing the lion home on the sledge Peary took to the North Pole.”
“Not a bad idea!” the Ranger exclaimed. “We might make a sledge to get the deer meat home on. Suppose we do that to-day, and to-night we’ll take turns guarding the yard from possible wolves.”
In the Ranger’s cabin was a kit of tools, and outside was plenty of wood. A sled like Peary’s, however, was impractical in the soft snow, and, moreover, they soon found that without small hard woods to work with it would be impossible to build any kind of an enduring sledge.
“Why don’t we make a toboggan?” said Tom.
“You need hard wood for that, too, to curl the end—and it takes time to steam the wood and get it bent, anyhow,” Mills replied.
“Wait—I have it!” Joe cried. “You folks be getting three or four strips of board ten feet long planed down thin, with the under side smooth. I’ll come back presently.”
He put on his skis and vanished down the trail, with a shovel over his shoulder.
While he was gone Tom and the Ranger took two boards left over from the stable, each about six inches wide, and made another by hand-hewing it from a fallen log close to the cabin. Before this was done, Joe had returned, bearing triumphantly a twenty-five pound butter box.
“I saw it behind the hotel, on the trash pile, when I got the hens,” he said. “I went down there and dug where I thought it was. Had to make three holes and a tunnel before I got it—but it’s hard wood, and all curled.”
When the third board was hewn out, and all three planed smooth and thin, they were laid side by side and connected with light crosspieces. Then the bottom was removed from the big butter box, the side drum severed, and one end securely fastened under the front end of the toboggan bottom. Thus the butter box curled up and around like the front of a real toboggan. The loose end was secured with thongs, and rings were put on either side of the boards, to run ropes through to hold on a load. Finally, a rope to pull it by was made fast.
“There!” Tom said. “That’s a regular toboggan, and she’ll ride on top of the softest snow.”
“I wonder if she’ll buck when we throw a diamond hitch?” Joe laughed.
As soon as supper was over, Joe went alone, with his rifle, up to the yard, and watched over the dead deer till eleven o’clock, when Tom relieved him. Tom watched till three, and then the Ranger guarded till daylight.
But before daylight Joe was up, cooked some breakfast, roused Tom, and taking food for Mills and pulling the toboggan, they hurried over the snow, now well packed into a trail by their frequent trips to the yard. All that morning they worked skinning the deer, to save the valuable hides for moccasins, thongs, and similar uses, and quartering the carcases which the lion had not molested after killing them. The meat, of course, was frozen now, and would keep indefinitely. It was a great load of skins and meat they finally packed upon the toboggan, piled high and fastened securely on, but a very dirty, bloody, tired lot of people to drag it home, and they were glad enough that the yard was above the cabin, not below it.
But that night, after they were washed, they sat down to a fresh venison steak, and forgot their weariness, as only men can who have lived largely on canned goods for many weeks.
“M-m, m-m!” said Tom. “This is good! Somehow I ain’t so mad at that old lion as I was!”
“What did you kill him for, then?” Mills laughed. “You might have had eleven other deer to eat if you’d let him go.”
“Kind o’ mixed, isn’t it?” Tom confessed. “I sure would kill him every time—but I’d rather eat the deer than leave ’em for the wolves, just the same.”
“If you want something good to eat, get one of your lion friends to kill a sheep for you, and bring us some mutton,” said the Ranger. “I haven’t had a piece of mutton for ten years, I guess. Before this was a Park, and we used to hunt here, my! the feasts I’ve had!”
“Well, I could stand tinned beef all my life, to see the sheep alive,” Joe declared. “I’m glad it’s a Park now.”
The next day the hides were spread to cure, and the meat was all cleaned and hung, and the three then overhauled their equipment and packed up to make a start the next day for Glacier Park station. No mail had come to anybody since October, they had been able to send no letters to their parents, and the Ranger had not even been able to report to the Park superintendent, or the boys to send telegrams since the storm before Thanksgiving, because the telephone wire between Many Glacier Hotel and the railroad had been broken. As a rule, Mills used this wire in winter. One of the objects of their trip was to see about this break.
The trip out to the railroad, which was about fifty-five miles by automobile road, could now be reduced to about forty-five, because they could cut cross lots, over the deep snow, shaving the end of Flat Top Mountain (not the Flat Top of the Valley Forge camp, but another on the eastern edge of the overthrust), and by good hiking reach Glacier Park station in two days. They planned to take the toboggan, loading on it their provisions, sleeping-bags, a small tent, axes, and the scouts’ snow-shoes. The boys planned to wear skis for a good part of the trip, and to put Mills on the toboggan on the down grades, thus saving time. He laughed at the idea, but as the shoes were light made no objection.
That night was clear and cold, and the next day promised to be fair. Joe and Tom sat up late, getting letters ready to send home, and Joe spent an hour on a letter to Lucy Elkins, telling her about his life in the Park, and promising to send snow pictures as soon as he could get them developed. But they were up long before the sun in the morning, and set off by starlight, all three on the ropes of the toboggan, down the trail.
When they came to the first long, snowy slope, Mills said, “Let me see one of you go down it on your skis.”
Tom dropped the rope, and ran, gaining speed as he went, the snow flying out from under the prow of his skis, and a moment later was waving his hand from the bottom.
“Saves time, all right,” the Ranger agreed, “but what’s to become of me?”
“Get on the back of the toboggan, let one foot hang out and steer with it, and come along,” Joe laughed. “It’s easy.”
“I never steered one of the blamed things,” said Mills.
“Here, you sit on top of the bags, and hold my skis. I’ll show you.”
Joe took his skis off, put Mills on the front, and pushed the toboggan over. A cloud of snow rose over the curl of the butter box prow, powdering the Ranger in the face, and they flew down the hill in Tom’s tracks, and stopped at his side.
“Well, I’ll be darned—here we be!” was all Mills said, as he brushed off the snow.
“Tom, I believe there’s something we can teach Mr. Mills!” Joe laughed. “I believe he was afraid of a toboggan!”
Mills’ blue eyes twinkled a little.
“By gosh, I’ll go down the next one on your skis, just for that!”
They pushed on steadily down the Swift Current Valley, taking the easiest way over the frozen lake, into the sunrise, and then, at the valley’s mouth, swinging south and cutting across toward the end of Flat Top. Mills did put on Joe’s skis at the next favorable slope—and the scouts had to dig him out of the snow half-way down!
“Take your old skis,” he spluttered, grabbing for his snow-shoes again. “I’ll stick to what I’m used to—and the toboggan. I don’t have to balance the toboggan.”
After that, he steered the toboggan down the hills, while the scouts ran on skis.
For the up grades, the boys put on their snow-shoes, also, because even on a gentle slope you back-slide with skis if you are pulling a load. They reached the ridge over Lower St. Mary Lake at noon, ate lunch, lowered the toboggan down the slope to the lake, and then ran on the white, level snow surface above the ice inshore, due south, till at evening they had passed St. Mary Chalets at the foot of Upper St. Mary Lake, and went on into a stand of thick woods, where they decided to camp.
The tent was pitched in the most sheltered spot, on packed snow, facing a rock, and on logs laid across the snow packed in front of the rock they built a roaring fire. With the heat of this fire, Joe was able to cook supper without his mittens on, though he could not go far away from it without them. When supper was over, they built the fire up afresh, laid in a big supply of wood, and crawling into their sleeping-bags, under the shelter of the tent, itself sheltered by the evergreens, with the flap facing the fire left wide open and the rock reflecting the heat in to them, they were surprisingly warm, when you consider that they were sleeping on snow, with the mercury in the thermometer outside playing tag somewhere below the zero mark—or it would have been, if there had been a thermometer outside.
It was “anybody’s job,” if he woke up, to crawl out and throw more wood on the fire, and Joe twice did this. Both times, however, must have been long before morning, because when he finally woke up there was a faint hint of dawn in the sky, and the fire was practically out—only the logs they had placed on the snow for a fire base were smouldering.
He crawled out again, and built a new fire. Then he took a kettle and went to see if he could find any brook open, it was such a slow job melting snow. When he got back, the others were up, stretching and warming themselves by the blaze. The coffee certainly tasted good that morning! And how fragrantly the hot bacon sizzled and spluttered in the pan!
They made the second stage of their journey chiefly over the prairie, more or less following the motor road, but cutting off all the corners they could to reduce mileage, and getting dozens of wonderful ski runs over the treeless slopes, while Mills, who by now had become quite an expert steering the toboggan, came on behind.
“When I get back,” he kept saying, “I’m going to learn to use those blooming things, too—but on a little hill first!”
The early twilight was deepening into night, and the northern lights were playing when they came over the final slope and saw the railroad signal lights—the first sign of other human beings than themselves they’d laid eyes on since October.
Half an hour later they were at the station, Mills was telephoning to Park headquarters at Lake McDonald, and the boys were getting their accumulated mail—letters from home, newspapers for two months past, a big box of cakes and sweet chocolate for Tom from his mother, and, for Joe, a long letter from Lucy Elkins, enclosing the pictures she had taken on their trip.
That evening they slept in beds at the house of the station agent, after they had spent the evening hearing the news from the outside world. The mass of newspapers they kept to read in the long evenings back in the cabin. Laying in some additional provisions, and carefully packing their precious papers, they started back in the morning, over their old tracks, which, except in windy places where they were drift covered, afforded now pretty easy sledding for the toboggan. They made camp again in the same spot, and were up before daylight for the last stage, Mills looking scowlingly at the sky.
“Don’t like it to-day, boys,” he said. “We’re in for a storm. Let’s beat it home, if we can.”
And that day he gave them little rest, driving on at a fast pace, with the toboggan rope straining over his shoulder. The sun went under before noon. By mid-afternoon, as they entered the Swift Current valley mouth, the peaks of the Divide were lost in a cold, gun metal cloud, and the wind was rising. They faced this wind all up the valley, with no chance now to coast—only a steady, grinding up-hill pull.
It was dark long before they got to the cabin, and the snow had begun to fall in fine, stinging flakes. They were a cold, weary lot when finally they tugged their load up the last grade to the level of the lake, passed into the trees at the tepee camp, and a few minutes later tumbled into the cold cabin, and began to pile wood into the stove.
“Well, Joe, get a hunk of that venison out, and let’s forget this day!” Mills cried. “Light up the big lamp, Tom. We’ve got kerosene enough, too. Let’s be cheerful.”
The roar of the logs in the stove, the light of the lamp, and presently the smell of food and coffee, acted like magic. They were soon laughing again, while the wind rose outside, and the trees groaned and creaked, and the snow drove with a kind of hissing patter against the windows and the roof.
“A hundred miles in four days, over four feet of snow, and pulling a toboggan—gosh, if anybody’d told me old Joe could do that last May, I’d have thought he was crazy,” said Tom.
“You couldn’t have done it yourself last May,” Joe replied.
“And,” said the Ranger, stretching out his legs and rubbing them, “by golly, I don’t want to do it again!”
“Ho,” said Tom, “I feel fine!”
But he was the first to propose bed—although it must be admitted nobody quarreled with his suggestion.
The following day the storm was still raging, and it kept it up till night, too. The drifts were piled half-way up the windows, shutting out their light, the rear door, leading to the stable, was completely barricaded by a drift, and they had to make periodic sallies with a shovel out of the front door, which opened on a veranda four feet above ground level, to keep that clear. It was too bitter cold, the wind too penetrating, to invite further expeditions. Even clearing the veranda in front of the door was a job they quarreled over, and finally had to assign at intervals of one hour, each person taking his turn while the other two peered out of the window to see if he did a thorough job.
But they had plenty of dry wood inside, and the accumulated newspapers of two months to read, so the day didn’t drag, after all.
“And,” said the Ranger, “about to-morrow, or next day, the slides will start, the real slides, this time. That’ll be something worth coming out here for. There is so much of this snow that the steep places can’t hold it all, and the first sun will send it down.”
That night, toward morning, Joe was awakened by a sound like thunder, and sat up in his sleeping-bag, astonished.
“What’s a thunder-storm doing in December?” he thought.
There was no lightning, however, and he could see outside the brilliant starlight.
“Slides!” he suddenly remembered. And as soon as it was light, he was up, getting breakfast. Breakfast over, he and Tom lost no time in getting on their snow-shoes and hurrying out, free of the woods, on the white surface of the frozen lake, with no less than eight feet of snow under them. The sun was now up over the prairie, and sending its rays up the Swift Current Valley and hitting the snow-covered peaks till they glistened rosy. And all around, from the steep walls of Gould, six miles away, to the upper precipices of the two mountains hemming in the lake over their heads, the snowslides were leaping and booming with a noise like soft thunder. It was a wonderful sight. You had no idea where or when one was going to start. A steep precipice, covered with snow, would suddenly show signs of life, the snow high up would start slipping, and as the mass descended it would grow in volume, sweeping the slope beneath it and sending up a comet’s tail of snow-dust, till it ran out with a boom and a roar upon the less steep slopes below. All around the slides were running, and the steep places seemed fairly to smoke with the comet tails of snow-dust.
“Of course,” said Mills, when he was ready to set out, “these slides now are just top snow, the latest fall sliding off the very steep places, and doing little or no harm. In spring the bad ones come, when the whole winter mass, and all the ice and rocks it has gathered up, come down. Then, once in a great while, a third kind will descend—the accumulated snow and ice and rock dust of maybe half a century or more. That kind always chooses a place where there hasn’t been a slide before, wipes out forests as it comes, and sometimes houses and people in the valleys. The slides to-day all follow regular channels. I know where there’ll probably be a good one.”
He led the way up toward the Divide, by a side tributary of the Swift Current. They climbed steadily a long way up toward the steep head wall, leaving the deep brook bed at the danger point, and working on the side slope above it. Finally they reached a point where they were almost under the steep wall, and separated from the brook channel by a mass of rock. Here they waited. They had not long to wait. Suddenly, without any warning, the snow almost above them started slipping, and in a few seconds was coming down the brook bed at a tremendous rate, pushing all the last snowfall and some of the old ahead of it as it came. By the time it reached the point just below Mills and the two scouts, it was apparently going thirty miles an hour, with a head about forty feet high, the whole mass maybe fifty or a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, and churning, foaming, falling over and over itself with a great, booming roar and sending out a perfect gale of snow-dust.
As it rushed past, the noise was so great that no one heard a lesser roar behind him. Without any warning, a smaller slide had started just above the three observers, no doubt caused by the jar and shock of the first, and suddenly the snow boiled up under their feet, they were launched downward on this second slide, and found themselves on the tail end of the big one.
Then followed the wildest ride any of them had ever had, or ever wanted to have.
Of course, it was only their wide western snow-shoes that saved their lives. In a second, they were on the tail of the big slide, riding on top of fifty feet of boiling, churning, racing snow, that was by this time going down-hill at close to a mile a minute. If you have ever run logs on a river, you know what a slippery job that is. But imagine the logs leaping up and down as well as rolling around, and traveling a mile a minute down-hill into the bargain, and finally casting up a deluge of powdered snow-dust into your face, and you will have some idea of the job that confronted Mills and Tom and Joe.
No one dared look at the others. No one could speak, or make himself heard six inches from his mouth if he did open it. Each of them looked at his own feet, or tried to through the blinding snow powder, and just trod snow desperately, to keep upright. To fall down meant to be churned in under the boiling mass, and probably suffocated, or crushed to death.
After about one minute that seemed like an hour, the slide had descended to less steep ground. Here it hit a little pine wood, and Joe just could see, through the flying snow, the trees go crashing down in front, and those on either side (their tops level with his feet!) bow and bend in the wind made by the rushing slide. A second later a tree came boiling up out of the snow right under his feet—or a log, rather, for all its branches were stripped off. He jumped madly to avoid it, and it missed him only by a hair’s breadth.
Beyond the wood, the slide ran out into an open park, went up the incline on the further side by its own momentum, and there spread itself out and came to rest.
Joe wiped the snow-dust from his eyes and looked to see what had become of Tom and the Ranger. He was still on his feet, but they were not. The final slump of the slide, with the tail end on which they rode telescoping over the centre, had flung them down and half buried them. For some reason Joe had been able to keep his feet. He sprang to help them up, crying, “Are you hurt?”
They both rose, dazed, and wiped their faces.
“I—I dunno!” Tom said. “I haven’t had time to find out!”
The Ranger was red with rage.
“It had no business to start there!” he exclaimed. “We ought to have been in a safe place. Teaches me a lesson—you can’t bank on slides any time o’ year. That drift above where we stood is always anchored till spring.”
“Well, I guess it’s lucky we’re alive!” Joe exclaimed. “Wow! that was some ride! I never was kept so busy in my life!”
“And I never want to be again,” Mills said. “Boys, had enough slides for to-day? Seen how they work?”
“I sure have!” both exclaimed, in one breath.
“Let’s go home. What I’d like to see now is a Chinook wind, to take some of this snow away. There’s too much of it.”
“Do Chinook winds come before spring?” Joe asked. He had heard of the dry, warm wind which comes over the ranges, from the warm Pacific current, raising the temperature sometimes sixty degrees in as many minutes, and evaporating the snow like magic.
“Sometimes,” Mills said. “And we need it now, or all the animals will starve.”
They were all too weary and even a bit shaky after that terrific ride, to do much more that day. Mills did go over to try his telephone, which he found the storm had put out of commission again, and then they sat around the cabin and talked over the two minute excitement, which had seemed, while it lasted, nearer two hours.
For supper that night Joe got out a can of lobster he found in the storeroom. He thought it would be a special treat, and it was to Mills, but Tom didn’t like lobster, and Joe himself didn’t care much for it, either, when he came to taste it. So Mills ate it all.
“Came near death this morning—might as well risk my life again to-night,” he laughed.
The Ranger spoke in jest, but in the night the boys were awakened by his groans, and they found his words were anything but a joke. He was suffering terrible pain, in his stomach evidently, and they had never seen anybody look so sick. They scrambled into clothes; Joe made up the fire and put on water to heat, while Tom got out their first aid kit, and made an emetic, which they got down the poor Ranger’s throat. The results eased his pain a little, but the boys were certainly scared.
“We got to get a doctor,” Tom cried. “We got to—a doctor or somebody who knows what to do. I got to get over Swift Current, and down to Lake McDonald, to the Park superintendent’s office. That’s all there is to it.”
“You can’t—you can’t!” Joe exclaimed. “Think of that head wall if a slide hit you! Besides, it’s thirty miles to the hotel at the head of the lake, and you don’t know the way. I do. I’ll have to go.”
“A lot I’ll let you go! No such over-exertion for you, and you just well. Besides, I know the way over the pass and down to Mineral Creek. Then I turn south, through the woods, and just follow the one trail. I couldn’t miss it, and if I did, all I’d have to do would be to take the creek bed. I can start before daylight, get to the head wall at sunrise, be over the pass and down the other side before noon, and have five hours of light to make twenty miles.”
“What if there shouldn’t be any caretaker at the hotel at the head of the lake?” said Joe.
“I’ll break in and use the ’phone, and make a fire. Anyhow, I’ll pack my sleeping-bag on my back, and get to the superintendent’s camp the next morning.”
He flew to make his preparations, putting on all his warmest clothes, with extra socks and mitts stowed in his sleeping-bag, while Joe put him up tea, bacon, matches, raisins and sweet chocolate, in the smallest possible space, got his axe and compass, and extra snow-shoe thongs in case of accident, and finally cooked him some bacon and made tea.
“I’m coming with you to the foot of the Swift Current switchbacks,” said Joe. “I got to know whether you get up to the top safe!”
“But the Ranger?”
“I can’t help him much if I stay—and I guess he’s in no more danger than you’ll be. Oh, Spider, I got to know if you get up there safe!”
Poor Joe was close to anxious tears as he spoke, and Tom grasped his hand.
“I’ll get there!” he cried.
Mills was now only half conscious, moaning on his bed, and the two boys slipped out into the starlight and pushed up the Swift Current trail. It was bitterly cold. Joe carried the pack all the way to the foot of the switchbacks, so that Tom could be as fresh as possible. Then, at the foot, as day was beginning to redden in the east and give light enough to follow the windings of the trail by, for, on this steep slope, even such a deep snow could not quite hide the cuts the trail made in the bank, the two scouts shook hands silently, and Tom started up.
“It’s Mills’ life, or mine,” he said, grimly.
Joe watched him go up, slowly, carefully, following the trail wherever he could detect it by the contour of the snow. Two or three times his snow-shoes started a small slide of loose snow, but as he was above the starting point, it left him secure, rushing down past Joe with a whirl and shower of snow powder. But on this slope, steep as it was, the tiny trees and shrubs seemed to anchor the snow, and there were no large slides at all. After an hour, from far above him, Joe heard a faint, thin, “Hoo-oo!” and knew that Tom was beyond danger.
His heart seemed to come back into his breast again, and with a great sigh of relief he hurried back in the level sunrise light, to the cabin, to do what he could for the sufferer.
There followed for Joe a long vigil, almost helpless, with a very sick man. He gave him hot water to drink, and improvised a hot water bag with a hot stone wrapped in flannel, but he had no medicines, and could do little but watch the poor Ranger suffer, and wonder, and wonder, how Tom was getting on, until a great, dark, ugly cloud suddenly began to come over the top of the Divide, from the west, and his wonder changed to fear and then almost to terror. It looked as if the worst blizzard of all was raging already on the west side of the range, where Tom was tracking, all alone, miles from any human being, in the deep forests of the cañon!
Meanwhile, Tom had been losing no time. An hour after he had yelled to Joe from the top of the danger zone on the wall, he had gone over the pass and reached the Granite Park chalet. Here he paused a few moments for breath, and looked across the shadow-filled cañon to the great white pinnacle of Heaven’s Peak, rosy-white with the sunrise. Then he plunged down the trail, with little fear of snowslides on this side because of the trees to anchor the drifts, and in another hour reached the Lake McDonald trail at the bottom. Without any pause, he plugged steadily along through the tall, silent, lonely forest, over such deep snow that he was elevated far above the underbrush and had difficulty sometimes in spotting the trail, and kept at it till noon. Then he paused to build a fire of dead pine limbs on trodden snow and cook himself some bacon, roasting it on a stick.
It was not till this lunch was eaten that he noticed the dusking of the sun, and looking up saw a great, ugly, dark cloud coming over the range to the west.
His heart, like Joe’s back in the cabin a little later, went down somewhere into his moccasins. But, he kept telling himself, he had only a dozen or fifteen more miles to go, he was in the protection of woods, and he couldn’t get lost because the cañon walls would always show him the way. Besides, he had his sleeping-bag. He could crawl into some hollow tree with it, if the blizzard got too bad. But he must not stop if he could help it.
“Mills’ life or mine!” he kept saying. “It’s up to me to save the Ranger!”
And he shouldered his pack once more, and pressed on, with one anxious eye on the trail, one on the cloud above, which was rapidly spreading across to the eastern range and enveloping the Divide. Every second he expected to see the first white, driving sheets of the blizzard, for the cloud was racing now, the wind up there was blowing hard. Yet no snow came. In fact, Tom began to get hot. He thought it was the exertion of trying to increase his pace. But when he stopped to rest his weary shoulders a moment, he was still hot. The wind was certainly beginning to come roaring down into the trees above him now. At last it hit his face. It was a hot wind!
Then, suddenly, he realized what was coming. “The Chinook!” he cried aloud.
It was the Chinook! In half an hour, Tom was in a wringing perspiration, and his fur coat had taken its place on his pack. Under his feet a miracle was being performed. The level of the snow was steadily sinking—slowly, to be sure, here in the woods, but steadily. It was sticky on his snow-shoes, but not half so sticky as he thought it would be. The wind seemed so dry that it just soaked the snow up, instead of melting it.
On and on Tom plodded, wearily, almost exhausted now, going on sheer nerve, till close to five o’clock he got a hint of the lake. Then he picked up other snow-shoe tracks, and Robinson Crusoe could not have been more delighted at the sight of a human footprint.
“There’s somebody at the hotel!” Tom cried, again aloud.
This sight gave him a second wind, and he plugged on, with clear hints of the lake through the trees now, and what seemed like open water. But the trail kept off to the east of it, and it was getting rapidly dark when he finally came into a clearing and saw the hotel.
The hotel was dark, but near by, in a smaller house, there shone a light! Tom hurried, with his last ounce of strength, to the door, and pounded.
The door was opened, and Tom almost fell in. A strong hand caught him, and steadied him while he got off his snow-shoes, and then steadied him to a chair.
“Well, who be you, and where’d you come from?” a voice asked.
Tom could see little but the warm lamplight. The room, the face of the man, were all a blur.
“Many Glacier, over Swift Current,” he gasped. “Mills ate something last night—he’s awful sick—telephone to the superintendent—or somebody—send a doctor.”
“You mean to tell me you’ve come over Swift Current since last night, in that snow, and then through the Chinook?”
“Yes—’phone for a doctor—quick!”
“Why didn’t you ’phone from Many Glacier?”
“Wire’s on the bum—can’t you hurry and ’phone?” Tom almost wailed.
“Easy, son, easy,” the voice steadied him. “Nobody can start back now till mornin’. I want to get this right. I can hardly believe it.”
“Oh, you got to believe it!” Tom cried.
The man rose and began to work at the stove. Presently he brought Tom a big cup of hot coffee, and a plate of food, and stood by while he drank and ate.
As the hot coffee and the food began to revive him, Tom told the whole story over again, more calmly, and the caretaker listened, his eyes big.
“Well, son,” he said, “you’re all to the mustard. Now, if you’re able, we’ll go ’phone.”
He led the way, and Tom repeated his story to the Park superintendent’s office.
“Be ready to start back at daylight,” a voice said. “If the Chinook’s cleared open water enough for the launch to get up the lake, we’ll pick you up where you are. Otherwise, meet us at the fork of the east and west trail at the head of the lake an hour after sunrise—that is, if you are up to going back with us.”
His new friend now took him back into the warm, lighted room, made him undress and give himself a good rub, and then put him to bed on a couch in the corner.
“If you’re goin’ back over that trail to-morrow,” he said, “you’ll need all the sleep you can get to-night.”
“I guess you’re right,” Tom answered, as he fell wearily, helplessly, upon the soft spring, and almost immediately felt his eyelids close of their own accord. That was the last he remembered till a hand on his shoulder was shaking him,—it seemed about five minutes later.