The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter IX

Via Mala
I was now to enter the world east of the Cascades, emerging from the dense forest of the mountain-side. Pacific winds sailing inland leave most of their moisture on the western slopes of the range. Few of the cloudy battalions that sweep across the sea, and come, not like an invading horde of ravagers, but like an army of generous allies, — few of these pass over the ramparts, and pour their wealth into the landward valleys. The giant trees, fattened in their cells by plenteous draughts of water, are no longer found. The land is arid. Slopes and levels of ancient volcanic rock are no longer fertilized by the secular deposit of forests, showering down year by year upon the earth liberal interest for the capital it has lent.

Through this drier and airier region we now hastened. An arrowy river, clear and cold, became our companion. Where it might, the trail followed the Nachchese valley, — a rough rift often, and hardly meriting the gentle name of valley. Precipices, stiff, uncrumbling precipices, are to be found there, if any one is ambitious to batter his brains. Cleft front on the right bank answers to cleft front on the left, fronts cloven when the earth’s crust, cooling hereabouts, snapped, and the monsters of the period heard the rumble and roar of the earthquake, their crack of doom. Sombre basalt walls in the fugitive river, great, gloomy, purple heights, sheer and desperate as suicide, rise six hundred feet above the water. Above these downright mural breaks rise vast dangerous curves of mountain-side, thousands of feet on high, just at such angle that slide or no slide becomes a question. A traveller, not desponding, but only cautious, hesitates to wake Echo, lest that sweet nymph, stirring with the tremors of awakening, should set air vibrating out of its condition of quiet pressure, and the enormous mountain, seizing this instant of relief, should send down some cubic miles in an avalanche to crush the traveller.

A very desolate valley, and a harsh defile at best for a trail to pursue. At best the way might wind among debris, or pass over hard plates of sheeny, igneous rock, or plunge into the chill river, or follow a belt of sand, or struggle in swampy thickets, — this at best it did. But when worst came, when the precipices neared each other, narrowing the cañon pathless, and there were deep, still, sunless pools, brimming up to the giant walls of the basin, then the trail must desert the river, and climb many hundreds of feet above. I must compel my horses, with no warranty against a stumble or a fall, along overhanging verges, where one slip, or even one ungraceful change of foot, would topple the stumbler and his burden down to be hashed against jutting points, and tossed fragmentary, food for fishes, in the lucid pool below. For there were salmon there, still working up stream, seeking the purest and safest spots for their future families.

Now all of this was hard work, some of it dangerous. It was well that in the paddock of Sowee, my horses had filled themselves with elastic grass, parent of activity and courage. Caudal, though bearing no burden but himself, was often tempted to despair. Society, example, and electric shocks of friendly castigation aroused him. We rode hard along this wild gorge, down these dreary vistas, up and down these vast barren bulks of mountain. Forlorn yellow pines, starveling children of adversity, gnarled and scrubby, began to appear, shabby substitutes for the prosperous firs and cedars behind. But any gracefulness of vegetation, any feeling of adornment, would be out of place among those big, unrefined grandeurs. Beauty and grace, and all conceivable delicacy of form and color, light and shade, belong to the highest sublimities of Nature. Tacoma is as lovely with all the minor charms, as it is divinely majestic by the possession of the greater, and power of combining and harmonizing the less. But there is a lower kind of sublimity, where the predominant effect is one merely of power, bigness, the gigantesque and cyclopean, rude force acting disorderly, and producing a hurly-burly almost grotesque. Perhaps sublimity is too noble a word to apply to these results of ill-regulated frenzy; they are grand as war, not noble as peace. Such qualities of Nature have an educational value, as legends of giants may prepare a child to comprehend histories of heroes. The volcanic turbulence of the region I was now traversing might fitly train the mind to perceive the want of scenes as vast and calmer; — Salvator Rosa is not without significance among the teachers of Art.

No Pacific Railroad in the Nachchese Pass, that my coup d’oeil assured me. Even the Boston hooihut, with all its boldness in the forest, here could do little. Trees of a century may be felled in an hour; crags of an aeon baffle a cycle. The Boston hooihut must worm its modest way in and out the gorge, without essaying to toss down precipices into chasms. My memory and my hasty road-book alike fail me in artistic detail to make pictures of that morning’s Via Mala. My chief emotion was expressed in a sigh for release. It was one of those unkindly days of summer when sunlight seems not a smile, but a sneer. Cruel heat was reflected back from wall to wall of the pass, palpitating to and fro between baked, verdureless, purple cliff on this side, and the hot harshness of opponent purple cliff across the stream. I breathed a sirocco-like air without pabulum, without constituents of blood. I could fabricate a pale fury, an insane nervous energy, out of this unwholesome, fiery stuff, but no ardor, no joyousness, no doffing aside of troublous care. I could advance, and never flinch, because needs must; but it seemed a weary, futile toil, to spur my horse over the ugly pavements of unyielding rock, up over the crumbling brown acclivities, by perilous ways along the verge of gulfs, where I could bend to the right from my saddle, and see the river a thousand feet below. I felt in this unlifting atmosphere, unwavering except where it trembled over the heated surfaces, no elation, as I overcame crest after crest of mountain along the path, — no excitement, as Klale, the unerring, galloped me down miles of break-neck declivity, — my thundering squadron hammering with sixteen legs on the echoing crust of this furnace-cover.

Ever, “Hyack,” cried Loolowcan; “sia-a-ah mitlite Weenas; Speed,” cried the Frowzy; “far, far lieth Weenas.”

We were now, just after noon, drawing out of the chasms into a more open valley, when, as we wound through a thicket of hazels near the river, Loolowcan suddenly halted, and motioned me mysteriously.

“What now, O protégé of Talipus? Is it bear or Boston man?”

“Pasaiooks, — halo cuitan; — Blanketeer, — no horse!” said Loolowcan, with astonishment.

And there indeed was a horseless gentleman, tossing pebbles into the Nachchese, as quietly as if he were on the Hudson. What with little medicine Klickatats, exploring parties, Boston hooihuters, stray Caudals, and unhorsed loungers, the Nachchese trail was becoming quite a thoroughfare.

The stranger proved no stranger; hardly even horseless, for his mule, from a patch of grass in the thicket, presently brayed welcome to my nags. The gentleman was one of Captain McClellan’s party, come up from their camp some leagues farther down. he was waiting at this rendezvous for the Captain, who was exploring another branch of the river. To a patroller of crowded city avenues, it may not seem a significant fact that a man in a solitary trail met a man. But to me, a not unsociable being, travelling with a half-insolent, half-indifferent, jargoning savage, down a Via Mala of desolation, toward a realm of possibly unbrotherly nomads, an encounter by the wayside with a man and a brother was a fact to enjoy and an emotion to chronicle.

But human sympathy was not dinner for my horses. I must advance toward that unknown spot where, having full confidence in Nature, I believed that a table would be spread for them in the wilderness. “Nature never did deceive the heart that loved her”; for a true lover becomes a student of his mistress’s character enough not to demand impossibilities. And soon did that goddess, kindly and faithful object of my life-long devotion, verify my trust, providing not only fodder for my cavalry, but a bower for my nooning, a breeze from above to stir the dead, hot air, and a landscape appropriate to a banquet, and not like the cruel chasms I had passed.

In a patch of luxuriant wild-pea vines my horses had refreshing change of diet, befitting the change of region. No monotony of scene or action for man or beast thus far in this journey, no stagnation of mind or body from unexciting diet. For me, from the moment when my vain negotiations began with King George of the Klalams, life had been at its keenest, its readiest, its fleetest. Multitudinously besprent also with beauty like a bed of pansies had been these days of dash and charge. My finer and coarser aesthetic faculties had been so exercised that, if an uneducated traveller, I might have gone bewildered with phantasmagoria. But bewilderment comes from superficialness; type thoughts stripped of surface cloaking are compact as diamonds.

My camp for present nooning was a charming little Arcady, shady, sunny, and verdant. Two dense spruces made pleasant twanging to the newly-risen breeze. These were the violins of my festival orchestra with strings self-resinous, while down the cañon roared the growing gale, and, filling all pauses in this aerial music, the Nachchese tinkled merrily, or dashed boisterously, or rattled eagerly.

“On, on with speed!” was the lesson hinted to me by wind and water. Yet as I cooked for dinner a brace of grouse, my morning’s prey, I might have allowed myself to yield to vainglorious dalliance. The worser half of my scamper was behind me. “Try not the pass,” people had said; “you cannot put your space into your time,” said they, hinting also at dangers of solitary travel with one of the crafty. But I had taken the risk, and success was thus far with me. Let me now beware of too much confidence. Who can say what lurks in the heart of Loolowcan? He who persuades himself that his difficulties are fought through, is but at threshold of them. When he winds the horn of triumph, perhaps the sudden ogre will appear; then woe be to the knight, if he has taken the caps off his revolver.

Loolowcan and I were smoking our pipes of tobacco, when the tramp of hoofs was heard along the trail, and, with the late skipper of stones and a couple of soldiers, Captain McClellan rode up. In vain, through the Nachchese Cañon, had the Captain searched for a Pacific Railroad. He must search elsewhere, along Suoqualme Pass or other. Apart from a pleasant moment of reciprocal well-wishing, the chief result of this interview was, that I became disembarrassed of my treasure-trove Caudal. I seized the earliest chance of restoring this chattel to Uncle Sam, whose initials were branded upon his flank. No very available recruit to my squadron of light horse was this debilitated keterrypid, whom Good Samaritanism compelled me to humanely entreat. Besides, I had erred in his baptism; I had called him Caudal, and he naturally endeavored to take his place in the rear. If I had but thought to name him Headlong!

Rest in the shade of the spruces by the buzzing river was so sweet, after the severity of my morning’s ride, that I hesitated for myself and for my unwilling mustangs to renew the journey. To pace on an ambling mule over level greensward, like a fat papal legate travelling, in mediæval times, from refectory to refectory, — that seems as much as one would wish to do on a hot afternoon of August. I shook off such indolent thoughts, and mounted. Exertion is its own reward. The joy in the first effort over-balances the delight of sloth, and the joy in perpetual effort is clear gain. And really never an ambling palfrey, slow-footed potterer under an abbot, interfered less with his rider’s quietude than Klale, the gentle loper. We dragged ourselves from the shade and the pea-vines, and went dashing at full speed along the trail, no longer encumbered by fallen trunks and hurdles of bush and brier. Merely rough, meagre, and stony was the widening valley, and dotted over its adust soil with yellow pines, standing apart in scraggy isolation.

At five I reached Captain McClellan’s camp of two tents. He was not yet returned from prying into some other gorge, some purple cavernous defile for his railroad route. Loolowcan’s “far to Weenas” the sergeant in charge interpreted to mean still twenty-five miles. Their own main body was encamped in the Weenas valley. Twenty-five miles is a terrible supplement, my horses, after the labors of one day; but ye still seem fresh, thanks to the paddock of Sowee, and the pea-vines at noon, and to-morrow who knows but ye may be running free over the plains, while I with fresh nags go on toward the Dalles. We may not therefore accept the hospitality of the camp, but must on lustily down the broad valley this windy evening of summer.

Every appogiatura of Klale’s galloping forefeet and hind-feet seemed doubly musical to me now. I had escaped; I was clear of the stern mountains; I was out upon the great surging prairie-land. Before me all was open, bare, and vast. To the south, pine woods stretched, like helmet crests, along the tops and down to the nodding fronts of brown hills; behind, the gloomy mass of the lower Cascades rose up, anticipating sunset. Distance and dimness shut up the clefts, and made the whole background one great wall, closing avenues of return, and urging me forward upon my eastward way.

The sun had gone down behind the mountains, had paused on the tides of Whulge, had sunk in ocean. Twilight came, and the wind grew mightier, roaring after us like the voice of the storm that baffled the hunter of hiaqua. The gale lifted us up over the tremendous wide rolling bulk of grassy surges, and we swept scudding into billowy deeps below.

In the thickening dusk I discerned an object — not a tree, not a rock; but a mobile black object, scuttling away for a belt of thicket near the river.

“A bear!” I cried. “Itshoot!” echoed Loolowcan.

Nothing but grouse-shot in my double-barrel, — that I handed to the Frowzy; six leaden peppercorns in my eight-inch revolver, — that I kept. Now, Klale, it is whether Itshoot or thou wilt first touch cover. Klale leaped forward like an adult grasshopper. Bruin, hearing hoofs, lurched on like a coal-barge in a tide bobbery. I was within thirty feet of him when he struck the bushes. I fired. He felt it, and with a growl stopped and turned upon us. Klale swerved from those vicious claws, so that I merely heard and felt them rattle on my stirrup, as I fired again right into the bear’s vacant hug. Before I could check and turn my horse, Bruin had concluded the unwelcome interview. He had disappeared in the dense thicket. In vain Loolowcan and I beat about in the dusk. The ursine dodger did not profit by his chances of ambuscade to embrace one of us and that chance together. He was not to be found. Perhaps I am the slayer of a bear. One shot at thirty feet, and one across the breadth of a handkerchief, might possibly discontinue the days of such shaggy monster.

When we were upon the trail again, and galloping faster under the stars, I found that I had a new comic image in my mind. I roared with jolly laughter, recalling how that uncouth creature had clumsily pawed at me, missing laceration by an inch. Had Klale swerved but a little less, there would have been tragi-comedy in this farce. In place of the buckskins torn yesterday, I wore a pair of old corduroys, with scarlet cloth leggings; Destiny thought these did not need to be farther incarnadined, nor my shins, much abused along the briery trail, to be torn by any crueller thorniness of bears’ claws. There was, however, underlying too extravagant fun, this sense of escape from no fun. Nature will not allow even her grotesque creatures to be quite scoffed at. Bears may be laughable, but they are not ridiculous. I have been contiguous to an uncaged bear in free clutching trim but this once, and I respect him too much to laugh at him to his face. With him I could laugh when he is in humorous mood, but at Bruin I laugh no more.

By the time I had thus reasoned out the lesson of my bear-fight, darkness had come. The exhilaration of night-air revived my horses. They guided themselves bravely along the narrow way, and bravely climbed the lift and sway of land surges. Yet over these massive undulations we could travel but slowly. When it might, the trail followed the terrace above the Nachchese. Often wherever the trail might choose to follow, we might not follow it in the dark. Stony arroyos would cut it in twain, or a patch of wild-sage bushes or a belt of hazels and alders send it astray. Then would Loolowcan open wide his dusky eyes, to collect every belated glimmer of twilight, and zigzag until again he found the clew of our progress. While he searched, Klale and Antipodes took large morsels of epicurean bunchgrass, in convenient tufts, a generous mouthful in each.

It grew harder and harder to find the permanent narrow wake of voyagers beforetime over the great ground-swells of this unruly oceanic scope of earth. Mariners may cut their own hooihut over the hilly deep by the stars. Terrene travellers cannot thus independently reject history; they must humble themselves to be followers where tribes have tramped before. Even such condescension may not avail when night is master. Loolowcan, though eager as I to press on, finally perforce admitted that we lost our way in the thickets and over the gravel oftener than we found it; that the horses flagged sadly, and we must stop.

It was one of those cloudless gales, when it seems as if the globe is whirring on so fast beneath the stars, that air must use its mightiest force of wing lest it be left a laggard. In moments of stillness, while the flapping of these enormous pinions ceased, and the gale went gliding on by impetus, we could hear the far-away rumble of the river. Sound is only second to sight as a guide out of darkness. The music of a stream, singing with joy that it knows its way, is pleasanter guidance than the bark of village cur, who, though he bite not because he bark, may have a brother deputed to do that rougher mouthing. Following, then, the sound, we presently came upon the source of sound, the Nachchese.

Sky and stars are a peaceful shelter over a bivouac; yet when between the would-be sleeper and that friendly roof there is a tumultuous atmosphere misbehaving itself, sleep is torn up and whirled away in tatters. We must have some bulwark against the level sweep of the gale; and must pay for getting it by losing something else. Upon the bank we could have a bed level and earthy, but wind-battered; under the bank we could be sheltered, but must be on pebbles. On pebble boulders we must make our couch, where water at higher stages had washed away all the soft packing of earth.

We left the horses to occupy the bank above, where they could sup on succulent bunch-grass, firm and juicy as well-cured hay. Much as we regretted abridging their freest liberty of repose we were obliged to hobble them lest they should go with the wind down the valley, and at morn be leagues away. If a man wishes speed, he must take precautions that speed do not fly away from him. Civilization without its appliances is weaker than barbarism.

No gastronomic facts of our camp below the Nachchese; supper was much lower than secondary to rest. We had been full sixteen difficult hours in the saddle. Nights of my life, not a few, have been wretched in feather beds for too much softness; stern hardness was to be the cause of other misery here. This night cobblestones must be my bed, a boulder pillow for my head. My couch was uneven as a rippled lake suddenly congealed. A being not molluscous, but humanly bony, and muscular over bonyness, cannot for hours beat upon pebbles unbruised. So I had a night of weary unrest. The wild rush of the river and noise of the gale ran through my turbid sleep in dreams of tramping battalions, — such as a wounded and fevered man, lying unhelped on a battle-field, might dream.

Yet let us always be just. There are things to be said in behalf of cobble-stone beds by rivers of the Northwest. I was soft to the rocks, if not they to me. I have heard of regions where one may find that he slept cheek by jowl with a cobra di capella. These are absent from the uninviting bed of cobble-stones by the Nachchese, and so are mosquitos, rattlesnakes, burglars, and the cry of fire. Negative advantages these. Consider also the positive good to a man, that, having been thoroughly toughened by hardness, he knows what the body of him is strong to be, to do, and to suffer. Furthermore, one after experience of a pummelling couch, like this, will sympathize sufficiently, and yet not morbidly, with the poor bedless. So I slept, or did not sleep, while the gale roared wildly all night, and was roaring still at dawn.