The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter VI

“Boston Tilicum”
Night was now coming, — twilight, dearest and tenderest of all the beautiful changes of circling day was upon us. But twilight, the period of repose, and night, of restful slumbers, are not welcome to campaigners, unless a camp, with water, fodder, and fuel, the three requisites of a camp, are provided. We saw our day waning without having revealed to us a spot where these three were coincident. Fuel, indeed, there was anywhere without stint, and water might be found without much searching. But in this primeval wood there were no beds of verdant herbage where Klale and his companions might solace themselves for clambering and plunging and leaping all day. Verdancy enough there was under foot, but it was the green velvet of earthy moss. In some dusty, pebbly openings where the river overflows in spring, the horses had had a noon nibble at spears of grass, juiceless, scanty, and unattractive. My trio of hungry horses flagged sadly.

It was darkening fast when we reached an open spot where Loolowcan had hoped to find grass. Arid starvation alone was visible. Even such wiry attempts at verdure as the stagnant blood of this petty desert had been able to force up through its harsh pores were long ago shaved away by drought. The last nibbles had been taken to-day by the sorry steeds of the exploring party.

There was nothing for it but to go on. Whither? To the next crossing of the river, where the horses might make what they could out of water, and entertain themselves with browsing at alder and maple.

We hurried on, for it was now dark. The Boston hooihut suddenly came charging out of the gloaming, and crossed the trail. Misunderstanding the advice of my taciturn and monosyllabic guide, I left the Indian way, and followed the white man’s. Presently it ended, but the trees were blazed where it should pass. Blazes were but faint signals of guidance by twilight. Dimmer grew the woods. Stars were visible overhead, and the black circles of the forest shut off the last gleams of the west. Every obstacle of fallen tree, bramble, and quagmire now loomed large and formidable. And then in the darkness, now fully possessor of the woods, the blazes suddenly disappeared, went out, and ceased, like a deluding will-o’-the-wisp. Here was a crisis. Had the hooihut actually given out here in an invisible blaze, high up a stump? Road that dared so much and did so much, were its energies effete, its purpose broken down? And the pioneers, had they shrunk away from leadership of civilization, and slunk homeward?

However that might be, we were at present lost. Ride thou on, Loolowcan, and see if Somewhere is hereabouts; we cannot make a night of it in Nowhere.

Loolowcan dashed Gubbins at darkness; it opened and closed upon him. For a moment I could hear him crashing through the wood; then there was silence. I was quite alone.

Prying into silence for sight or sound, I discerned a rumble, as if of water over a pebbly path. I fastened Klale and Antipodes, as beacons of return, and, laying bold of the pleasant noise of flowing, went with it. Somewhere was actually in my near neighborhood. Sound guided me to sight. Suddenly behind the fir-trunks I caught the gleam of fire. At the same moment, Loolowcan, cautiously stealing back, encountered me.

“Hin pasaiooks copa pire, nika nanitch-pose wake siks; many blanketeers, by a fire, I behold,” he whispered, “perhaps not friends.”

“Conoway pasaiooks siks copa pasaiooks; all blanketeers friends to blanketeers,” I boldly asseverated without regard to history; “wake quash, — ocook Boston tilicum, mamook hooihut; fear not, — these are Boston folk, road-makers.”

I led the way confidently toward their beaconfire. Friends or not, the pasaiooks were better company than black tree-trunks. The flame, at first but a cloudy glimmer, then a flicker, now gave broad and welcome light. It could not conquer darkness with its bold illumination, for darkness is large and strong; but it showed a path out of it. As we worked our way slowly forward, the great trees closed dimly after us, — giants attending out of their domain intruders very willing to be thus sped into realms of better omen.

Beating through a flagellant thicket, we emerged upon the bank of my rumbling stream. Across it a great camp-fire blazed. A belt of reflected crimson lay upon the clear water. Every ripple and breaker of the hostile element tore at this shadow of light, riving it into rags and streamers, and drowning them away down the dell. Still the shattered girdle was there undestroyed, lashing every coming gush of waves, and smiting the stream as if to open a pathway for us, newcomers forth from the darksome wood.

A score of men were grouped about the fire. Several had sprung up alert at the crashing of our approach. Others reposed untroubled. Others tended viands odoriferous and fizzing. Others stirred the flame. Around, the forest rose, black as Erebus, and the men moved in the glare against the gloom like pitmen in the blackest of coal-mines.

I must not dally on the brink, half hid in the obscure thicket, lest the alert ones below should suspect an ambush, and point towards me open-mouthed rifles from their stack near at hand. I was enough out of the woods to halloo, as I did heartily. Klale sprang forward at shout and spur. Antipodes obeyed a comprehensible hint from the whip of Loolowcan. We dashed down into the crimson pathway, and across among the astonished road-makers, — astonished at the sudden alighting down from Nowhere of a pair of cavaliers, pasaiook and siwash. What meant this incursion of a strange couple? I became at once the centre of a red-flannel-shirted circle. The recumbents stood on end. The cooks let their frying-pans bubble over, while, in response to looks of expectation, I hung out my handbill, and told the society my brief and simple tale. I was not running away from any fact in my history. A harmless person, asking no favors, with plenty of pork and spongy biscuit in his bags, — only going home across the continent, if may be, and glad, gentlemen pioneers, of this unexpected pleasure.

My quality thus announced, the boss of the road-makers, without any dissenting voice, offered me the freedom of their fireside. He called for the fatted pork, that I might be entertained right republicanly. Every cook proclaimed supper ready. I followed my representative host to the windward side of the greenwood pyre, lest smoke wafting toward my eyes should compel me to disfigure the banquet with lachrymose countenance.

Fronting the coals, and basking in their embrowning beams, were certain diminutive targets, well known to me as defensive armor against darts of cruel hunger, — cakes of unleavened bread, hight flapjacks in the vernacular, confected of flour and the saline juices of fire-ripened pork, and kneaded well with drops of the living stream. Baked then in frying-pan, they stood now, each nodding forward, and resting its edge upon a planted twig, toasting crustily till crunching-time should come. And now to every man his target! Let supper assail us! No dastards with trencher are we.

In such a Platonic republic as this, a man found his place according to his powers. The cooks were no base scullions; they were brethren, whom conscious ability, sustained by universal suffrage, had endowed with the frying-pan. Each man’s target flapjack served him for platter and edible-table. Coffee, also, for beverage, the fraternal cooks set before us in infrangible tin pots, — coffee ripened in its red husk by Brazilian suns thousands of leagues away, that we, in cool Northern forests, might feel the restorative power of its concentrated sunshine, feeding vitality with fresh fuel.

But for my graminivorous steeds, gallopers all day long in rough, unflinching steeple-chase, what had nature done here in the way of provender? Alas! little or naught. This camp of plenty for me was a starvation camp for them. Water, indeed, was turned on liberally; water was flowing in full sluices from the neighbor snows of Tacoma; but more than water was their need, while they feverishly browsed on maple-leaves, to imbitter away their appetites. Only a modicum of my soaked and fungous hard-tack could be spared to each. They turned upon me melancholy, reproachful looks; they suffered, and I could only suffer sympathetically. Poor preparation this for toil ahead! But fat prairies also are ahead; have patience, empty mustangs!

My hosts were a stalwart gang. I had truly divined them from their cleavage on the hooihut. It was but play to any one of these to whittle down a cedar five feet in diameter. In the morning, this compact knot of comrades would explode into a mitraille of men wielding keen axes, and down would go the dumb, stolid files of the forest. Their talk was as muscular as their arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque: it seemed at once a comic thing to live, — a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with noses, — a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, and partake of crisped bacon and toasted doughboys in ridiculous abundance. Easy laughter infected the atmosphere. Echoes ceased to be pensive, and became jocose. A rattling humor pervaded the forest, and Green River rippled with noise of fantastic jollity. Civilization and its dilettante diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dives’s table doubles his soup, knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker in his finger-bowl. Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but candidly roar, at parallel accidents. Gawky makes a cushion of his flapjack. Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying at the fire, — a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose into the circle, and brays resonant. These are the jocular boons of life, and at these the woodsmen guffaw with lusty good-nature. Coarse and rude the jokes may be, but not nasty, like the innuendoes of pseudo-refined cockneys. If the woodsmen are guilty of uncleanly wit, it differs from the uncleanly wit of cities as the mud of a road differs from the sticky, slime of slums.

It is a stout sensation to meet masculine, muscular men at the brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut, — men who are mates, — men to whom technical culture means naught, — men to whom myself am naught, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing, and chop; unless I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generosity and heartiness. It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the word bore, — with pioneers, who must think and act, and wrench their living from the closed hand of Nature.

Men who slash with axes in Oregon woods need not be chary of fuel. They fling together boles and branches enough to keep any man’s domestic Lares warm for a winter. And over this vast pyre flame takes its splendid pleasure with corybantic dances and roaring pæans of victory. Fire, encouraged to do its work fully, leaves no unsightly grim corses on the field. The glow of embers wastes into the pallor of thin ashes; and winds may clear the spot, drifting away and sprinkling upon brother trees faint, filmy relics of their departed brethren. While fantastic flashes were still leaping up and illumining the black circuit of forest, every man made his bed, laid down his blankets in starry bivouac, and slept like a mummy. The camp became vocal with snores; nasal with snores of various calibre was the forest. Some in triumphant tones announced that dreams of conflict and victory were theirs; some sighed in dulcet strains that told of lover dreams; some drew shrill whistles through cavernous straits; some wheezed grotesquely, and gasped piteously; and from some who lay supine, snoring up at the fretted roof of forest, sound gushed in spasms, leaked in snorts, bubbled in puffs, as steam gushes, leaks, and bubbles from yawning valves in degraded steamboats. They died away into the music of my dreams, a few moments seemed to pass, and it was day.

As the erect lily droops when the subterranean worm has taken a gnaw at its stalk, — as the dahlia desponds from blossom to tuber when September frosts nip shrewdly, — so at breakfastless morn, after supperless eve, drooped Klale, feebly drooped Gubbins, flabbily drooped Antipodes. A sorry sight! Starvation, coming on the heels of weariness, was fast reducing my stud to the condition of the ghostly estray from the exploring party. But prosperity is not many leagues away from this adversity. Have courage, my trio, if such a passion is possible to the unfed!

If horses were breakfastless, not so was their master. The road-makers had insisted that I should be their guest, partaking not only of the fire, air, earth, and water of their bivouac, but of an honorable share at their feast. Hardly had the snoring of the snorers ceased, when the frying of the fryers began. In the pearly-gray mists of dawn, purple shirts were seen busy about the kindling pile; in the golden haze of sunrise, cooks brandished pans over fierce coals raked from the red-hot jaws of flame that champed their breakfast of fir logs. Rashers, doughboys not without molasses, and coffee — a bill of fare identical with last night’s — were our morning meal; but there was absolute change of circumstance to prevent monotony. We had daylight instead of firelight, freshness instead of fatigue, and every man flaunted a motto of “Up and doing!” upon his oriflamme, instead of trailing a drooping flag, inscribed “Done up!”

And so adieu, gentlemen pioneers, and thanks for your frank, manly hospitality! Adieu, “Boston tilicum,” far better types of robust Americanism than some of those selected as its representatives by Boston of the Orient, where is too much worship of what is, and not too much uplifting of hopeful looks toward what ought to be!

As I started, the woodsmen gave me a salute. Down, to echo my shout of farewell, went a fir of fifty years’ standing. It cracked sharp, like the report of a howitzer, and crashed downward, filling the woods with shattered branches. Under cover of this first shot, I dashed at the woods. I could ride more boldly forward into savageness, knowing that the front ranks of my nation were following close behind.