The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter VIII

Sowee House — Loolowcan
I had not long, that noon of August, from the top of La Tête, to study Tacoma, scene of Hamitchou’s wild legend. Humanity forbade dalliance. While I fed my soul with sublimity, Klale and his comrades were wretched with starvation. But the summit of the pass is near. A few struggles more, Klale the plucky, and thy empty sides shall echo, less drum-like. Up stoutly, my steeds; up a steep but little less than perpendicular, paw over those last trunks of the barricades in our trail, and ye have won!

So it was. The angle of our ascent suddenly broke down from ninety to fifteen, then to nothing. We had reached the plateau. Here were the first prairies. Nibble in these, my nags, for a few refreshing moments, and then on to superlative dinners in lovelier spots just beyond.

Let no one, exaggerating the joys of campaigning, with Horace’s “Militia potior est,” deem that there is no compensating pang among them. Is it a pleasant thing, O traveller only in dreams, envier of the voyager in reality, to urge tired, reluctant, and unfed mustangs up a mountain pass, even for their own good? In such a case a man, the humanest and gentlest, must adopt the manners of a brute. He must ply the whip, and that cruelly; otherwise, no go. At first, as he smites, he winces, for he has struck his own sensibilities; by and by he hardens himself, and thrashes without a tremor. When the cortege arrives at an edible prairie, gastronomic satisfaction will put Lethean freshness in the battered hide of every horse.

We presently turned just aside from the trail into an episode of beautiful prairie, one of a succession along the plateau at the crest of the range. At this height of about five thousand feet, the snows remain until June. In this fair, oval, forest-circled prairie of my nooning, the grass was long and succulent, as if it grew in the bed of a drained lake. The horses, undressed, were allowed to plunge and wallow in the deep herbage. Only horse heads soon could be seen, moving about like their brother hippopotami, swimming in sedges.

To me it was luxury enough not to be a whip for a time. Over and above this, I had the charm of a quiet nooning on a bank of emerald turf, by a spring, at the edge of a clump of evergreens. I took my luncheon of cold salt pork and doughy biscuit by a well of brightest water. I called in no proxy of tin cup to aid me in saluting this sparkling creature, but stooped and kissed the spring. When I had rendered my first homage thus to the goddess of the fountain, Ægle herself, perhaps, fairest of Naiads, I drank thirstily of the medium in which she dwelt. A bubbling dash of water leaped up and splashed my visage as I withdrew. Why so, sweet fountain, which I may name Hippocrene, since hoofs of Klale have caused me thy discovery? Is this a rebuff? If there ever was lover who little merited such treatment it is I. “Not so, appreciative stranger,” came up in other bubbling gushes the responsive voice of Nature through sweet vibrations of the melodious fount. “Never a Nymph of mine will thrust thee back. This sudden leap of water was a movement of sympathy, and a gentle emotion of hospitality. The Naiad there was offering thee her treasure liberally, and saying that, drink as thou wilt, I, her mother Nature, have commanded my winds and sun to distil thee fresh supplies, and my craggy crevices are filtering it in the store-houses, that it may be offered to every welcome guest, pure and cool as airs of dawn. Stoop down,” continued the voice, “thirsty wayfarer, and kiss again my daughter of the fountain, nor be abashed if she meets thee half-way. She knows that a true lover will never scorn his love’s delicate advances.”

In response to such invitation, and the more for my thirsty slices of pork, I lapped the aerated tipple in its goblet, whose stem reaches deep into the bubble laboratories. I lapped, — an excellent test of pluck in the days of Gideon son of Barak; — and why? For many reasons, but among them for this; — he who lying prone can with stout muscular gullet swallow water, will be also able to swallow back into position his heart, when in moments of tremor it leaps into his throat.

When I had lapped plenteously, I lay and let the breeze-shaken shadows smooth me into smiling mood, while my sympathies overflowed to enjoy with my horses their dinner. They fed like school-boys home for Thanksgiving, in haste lost the present banquet, too good to be true, prove Barmecide. A feast of colossal grasses placed itself at the lips of the breakfastless stud. They champed as their nature was; — Klale like a hungry gentleman, — Gubbins like a hungry clodhopper, — Antipodes like a lubberly oaf. They were laying in, according to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s rule, supply at this meal for five days; without such power, neither man nor horse is fit to tramp the Northwest.

I lay on the beautiful verdant bank plucking now dextrously and now sinistrously of strawberries, that summer, climbing late to these snowy heights, had just ripened. Medical men command us to swallow twice a day one bitter pill confectioned of all disgust. Nature doses us, by no means against our will, with many sweet boluses of delight, berries compacted of acidulated, sugary spiciness. Nature, tenderest of leeches, — no bolus of hers is pleasanter medicament than her ruddy strawberries. She shaped them like Minie-balls, that they might traverse unerringly to the cell of most dulcet digestion. Over their glistening surface she peppered little golden dots to act as obstacles lest they should glide too fleetly over the surfaces of taste, and also to gently rasp them into keener sensitiveness. Mongers of pestled poisons may punch their pills in malodorous mortars, roll them in floury palms, pack them in pink boxes, and send them forth to distress a world of patients: — but Nature, who if she even feels one’s pulse does it by a gentle pressure of atmosphere, — Nature, knowing that her children in their travels always need lively tonics, tells wind, sun, and dew, servitors of hers, clean and fine of touch, to manipulate gay strawberries, and dispose them attractively on fair green terraces, shaded at parching noon. Of these lovely fabrics of pithy, pulpiness, no limit to the dose, if the invalid does as Nature intended, and plucks for himself, with fingers rosy and fragrant. I plucked of them, as far as I could reach on either side of me, and then lay drowsily reposing on my couch at the summit of the Cascade Pass, under the shade of a fir, which, outstanding from the forest, had changed its columnar structure into a pyramidal, and had branches all along its stalwart trunk, instead of a mere tuft at the top.

In this shade I should have known the tree which gave it, without looking-up, — not because the sharp little spicular leaves of the fir, miniatures of that sword Rome used to open the world, its oyster, would drop and plunge themselves into my eyes, or would insert their blades down my back and scarify, — but because there is an influence and sentiment in umbrages, and under every tree its own atmosphere. Elms refine and have a graceful elegiac effect upon those they shelter. Oaks drop robustness. Mimosas will presently make a sensitive-plant of him who hangs his hammock beneath their shade. Cocoa-palms will infect him with such tropical indolence, that he will not stir until frowzy monkeys climb the tree and pelt him away to the next one. The shade of pine-trees, as any one can prove by a journey in Maine, makes those who undergo it wiry, keen, trenchant, inexhaustible, and tough.

When I had felt the influence of my fir shelter, on the edge of the wayside prairie, long enough, I became of course keen as a blade. I sprang up and called to Loolowcan, in a resinous voice, “Mamook chaco cuitan; make come horse.”

Loolowcan, in more genial mood than I had known him, drove the trio out from the long grass. They came forth not without backward hankerings, but far happier quadrupeds than when they climbed the pass at noon. It was a pleasure now to compress with the knees Klale, transformed from an empty barrel with protuberant hoops, into a full and elastic cylinder, smooth as the boiler of a locomotive.

“Loolowcan, my lad, my experienced guide, cur nesika moosum; where sleep we?” said I.

“''Copa Sowee house, — kicuali. Sowee, olyman tyee, — memloose. Sia-a-a-h mitlite''; — At Sowee’s camp — below. Sowee, oldman chief, — dead. It is far, far away,” replied the son of Owhhigh.

Far is near, distance is annihilated this brilliant day of summer, for us recreated with Hippocrene, strawberries, shade of fir and tall snow-fed grass. Down the mountain range seems nothing after our long laborious up “the half is more than the whole.” “Lead on, Loolowcan, intelligent brave, toward the residence of the late Sowee.”

More fair prairies linked themselves along the trail. From these alpine pastures the future will draw butter and cheese, pasturing migratory cattle there, when summer dries the scanty grass upon the macadamized prairies of Whulge. It is well to remind ourselves sometimes that the world is not wholly squatted over. The plateau soon began to ebb toward the downward slope. Descent was like ascent, a way shaggy and abrupt. Again the Boston hooihut intruded. My friends the woodsmen had constructed an elaborate inclined plane of very knobby corduroy down the steepest steep. Klale sniffed at this novel road, and turned up his nose at it. He was competent to protect that feature against all the perils of stumble and fall on trails he had been educated to travel, but dreaded grinding it on the rough bark of this unaccustomed highway. Slow-footed oxen, leaning inward and sustaining each other, like two roysterers unsteady after wassail, might clumsily toil up such a road as this, hauling up stout, white-cotton-roofed wagons, filled with the babies and Lares of emigrants; but quick-footed ponies, descending and carrying light loads of a wild Indian and an untamed blanketeer, chose rather to whisk along the aboriginal paths.

As we came to the irregular terraces after the first pitch, and scampered on gayly, I by and by heard a welcome whiz, and a dusky grouse (Tetrao obscurus) lifted himself out of the trail into the lower branches of a giant fir. I had lugged my double-barrel thus far, a futile burden, unless when it served a minatory purpose among the drunken Klalams. Now it became an animated machine, and uttered a sharp exclamation of relief after long patient silence. Down came tetrao,— down he came with satisfactory thud, signifying pounds of something not pork for supper. We bagged him joyously and dashed on.

“Kopet,” whispered Loolowcan turning, with a hushing gesture, “hin kullakullie nika nanitch; — halt, plenty birds I see.” He was so eager that from under his low brows and unkempt hair his dusky eyes glared like the eyes of wild beast, studying his prey from a shadowy lair.

Dismounting, I stole forward with assassin intent, and birds, grouse, five noble ones I saw, engaged in fattening their bodies for human solace and support. I sent a shot among them. There was a flutter among the choir, — one fluttered not. At the sound of my right barrel one bird fell without rising; another rose and fell at a hint from the sinister tube. The surviving trio were distracted by mortal terror. They flew no farther than a dwarf tree hard by. I drew my revolver, thinking that there might not be time to load, and fired in a hurry at the lowermost.

“Hyas tamanoüs!” whispered Loolowcan, when no bird fell or flew, — “big magic,” it seemed to the superstitious youth. Often when sportsmen miss, they claim that their gun is bewitched, and avail themselves of the sure silver bullet.

A second ball, passing with keener aim through the barrel, attained its mark. Grouse third shook off his mortal remains, and sped to heaven. The two others, contrary to rule, for I had shot the lower, fled, cowardly carrying their beavy bodies to die of cold, starvation, or old age. “The good die first,” — ay, Wordsworth! among birds this is verity; for the good are the fat, who, because of their avoirdupois, lag in flight, or alight upon lower branches and are easiest shot.

Loolowcan bagged my three trophies and added them to the first. Henceforth the thought of a grouse supper became a fixed idea with me. I dwelt upon it with even a morbid appetite. I rehearsed, in prophetic mood, the scene of plucking, the scene of roasting, that happy festal scene of eating. So immersed did I become in gastronomic revery, that I did not mind my lookout, as I dashed after Loolowcan, fearless and agile cavalier. A thrust awoke me to a sense of passing objects, a very fierce, lance-like thrust, full at my life. A wrecking snag of harsh dead wood, that projected up in the trail, struck me, and tore me half off my horse, leaving me jerked, scratched, disjointed, and shuddering. Pachydermatous leggins of buckskin, at cost of their own unity, had saved me from impalement. Some such warning is always preparing for the careless.

I soon had an opportunity to propitiate Nemesis by a humane action. A monstrous trunk lay across the trail. Loolowcan, reckless steeplechaser, put his horse at it, full speed. Gubbins, instead of going over neatly, or scrambling over cat-like, reared rampant and shied back, volte face. I rode forward to see what fresh interference of Tamanoüs was here, — nothing tamanoüs but an unexpected sorry object of a horse. A wretched castaway, probably abandoned by the exploring party, or astray from them, essaying to leap the tree, had fallen back beneath the trunk and branches, and lay there entangled and perfectly helpless. We struggled to release him. In vain. At last a thought struck me. We seized the poor beast by his tail, fortunately a tenacious member, and, heaving vigorously, towed him out of prison.

He tottered forlornly to his feet, looking about him like one risen from the dead. “How now, Caudal?” said I, baptizing him by the name of the part that saved his life; “canst thou follow toward fodder?” He debated the question with himself awhile. Solitary confinement of indefinite length, in a cramped posture, had given the poor skeleton time to consider that safety from starvation is worth one effort more. He found that there was still a modicum of life and its energy within his baggy hide. My horses seemed to impart to him some of their electricity, and he staggered on droopingly. Lucky Caudal, if life is worth having, that on that day, of all days, I should have arrived to rescue him. Strange deliverances for body and soul come to the dying. Fate sends unlooked-for succor, when horses or men despair.

Luckily for Caudal, the weak-kneed and utterly dejected, Sowee’s prairie was near, — near was the prairie of Sowee, mighty hunter of deer and elk, terror of bears. There at weird night Sowee’s ghost was often seen to stalk. Dyspeptics from feather-beds behold ghosts, and are terrified, but nightwalkers are but bugbears to men who have ridden from dawn to dusk of a long summer’s day over an Indian trail in the mountains. I felt no fear that any incubus in the shape of a brassy-hued Indian chief would sit upon my breast that night, and murder wholesome sleep.

Nightfall was tumbling down from the zenith before we reached camp. The sweet glimmers of twilight were ousted from the forest, Sternly as mercy is thrust from a darkening heart. Night is really only beautiful so far as it is not night, — that is, for its stars, which are sources of resolute daylight in other spheres, and for its moon, which is daylight’s memory, realized, softened, and refined.

Night, however, had not drawn the pall of brief death over the world so thick but that I could see enough to respect the taste of the late Sowee. When he voted himself this farm, and became seized of it in the days of unwritten agrarian laws, and before patents were in vogue, he proved his intelligent right to suffrage and seizure. Here in admirable quality were the three first requisites of a home in the wilderness, water, wood, and grass. A musical rustle, as we galloped through, proved the long grass. All around was the unshorn forest. There were columnar firs making the Sowee house a hypæthral temple on a grand scale.

There had been here a lodge. A few saplings of its framework still stood, but Sowee had moved elsewhere not long ago. Wake siah memloose, — not long dead was the builder, and viator might camp here unquestioned.

Caudal had followed us in inane, irresponsible way. Patient now he stood, apparently waiting for farther commands from his preservers. We unpacked and unsaddled the other animals, They knew their business, namely, to bolt instantly for their pasture. Then a busy uproar of nipping and crunching was heard. Poor Caudal could not take the hint. We were obliged to drive that bony estray with blows out to the supper-field, where he stood aghast at the appetites of his new comrades. Repose and good example, however, soon had their effect, and eight equine jaws instead of six made play in the herbage.

“Alki mika mamook pire, pe nesika klatawah copa klap tsuk; now light thou a fire, and we will go to find water,” said Loolowcan. I struck fire, — fire smote tinder, — tinder sent the flame on, until a pyre from the world’s free wood-pile was kindled. This boon of fire, — what wonder that men devised a Prometheus greatest of demigods as its discoverer? Mortals, shrinking from the responsibility of a high destiny and dreading to know how divine the Divine would have them, always imagine an avatar of some one not lower than a half-god when a gift of great price comes to the world. And fire is a very priceless and beautiful boon, not, as most know it, in imprisonment, barred with iron, or in sooty chimneys, or in mad revolt of conflagration, — but as it grows in a flashing pyramid out in camp in the free woods, with eager air hurrying in on every side to feed its glory. In the gloom I strike metal of steel against metallic flint. From this union a child is born. I receive the young spark tenderly in warm “tipsoo,” in a soft woolly nest of bark or grass tinder. Swaddled in this he thrives. He smiles; he chuckles; he laughs; he dances about, does my agile nursling. He will soon wear out his first infantile garb, so I cover him up in shelter. I feed him with digestible viands, according to his years. I give him presently stouter fare, and offer exhilarating morsels of fatness. All these the hearty youth assimilates, and grows healthily. And now I educate him to manliness, training him on great joints, shoulders, and marrowy portions. He becomes erelong a power and a friend able to requite me generously for my care. He aids me in preparing my feast, and we feast together. Afterward we talk, — Flame and I, — we think together strong and passionate thoughts of purpose and achievement. These emotions of manhood die away, and we share pensive memories of happiness missed, or disdained, or feebly grasped and torn away; regrets cover these like embers, and slowly over dead fieriness comes a robe of ashy gray.

Fire in the forest is light, heat, and cheer. When ours was nurtured to the self-sustaining point, we searched to find where the sage Sowee kept his potables. Carefully covered up in sedges was a slender supply of water, worth concealing from vulgar dabblers. Its diamond drops were hidden away so thoroughly that we must mine for them by torchlight. I held a flaring torch, while Loolowcan lay in wait for the trickle, and captured it in a tin pot. How wild he looked, that youth so frowzy by daylight, as, stooping under the tall sedges, he clutched those priceless sparkles.

Upon the carte du jour at Restaurant Sowee was written Grouse. “How shall we have them?” said I, cook and convive, to Loolowcan, marmiton and convive. “One of these cocks of the mountain shall be fried, since gridiron is not,” responded I to myself, after meditation. “Two shall be spitted, and roasted; and, as Azrael may not want us before breakfast to-morrow, the fourth shall go upon the carte de dejeuner.”

“O Pork! what a creature thou art!” continued I, in monologue, cutting neat slices of that viand with my bowie-knife, and laying them fraternally, three in a bed, in the frying-pan. “Blessed be Moses! who forbade thee to the Jews, whereby we, of freer dispensations, heirs of all the ages, inherit also pigs more numerous and bacon cheaper. O Pork! what could campaigners do without thy fatness, thy leanness, thy saltness, thy portableness?”

Here Loolowcan presented me the three birds plucked featherless as Plato’s man. The two roasters we planted carefully on spits before a sultry spot of the fire. From a horizontal stick, supported on forked stakes, we suspended by a twig over each roaster an automatic baster, an inverted cone of pork, ordained to yield its spicy juices to the wooing flame, and drip bedewing on each bosom beneath. The roasters ripened deliberately, while keen and quick fire told upon the fryer, the first course of our feast. Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea, blessing Confucius for that restorative weed, as I had blessed Moses for his abstinence from porkers.

Need I say that the grouse were admirable, that everything was delicious, and the Confucian weed first chop? Even a scouse of mouldy biscuit met the approval of Loolowcan. Feasts cooked under the greenwood tree, and eaten by their cooks after a triumphant day of progress, are sweeter than the conventional banquets of languid Christendom. After we had paid our duty to the brisk fryer and the rotund roaster grouse, nothing remained but bones to propitiate Sowee, should he find short commons in Elysium, and wander back to his lodge, seeking what he might devour.

All along the journey I had been quietly probing the nature of Loolowcan, my most intimate associate thus far among the unalloyed copper-skins. Chinook jargon was indeed but a blunt probe, yet perhaps delicate enough to follow up such rough bits of conglomerate as served him for ideas. An inductive philosopher, tracing the laws of developing human thought in corpore viti of a frowzy savage, finds his work simple, — the nuggets are on the surface. Those tough pebbles known to some metaphysicians as innate ideas, can be studied in Loolowcan in their process of formation out of instincts.

Number One is the prize number in Loolowcan’s lottery of life. He thinks of that number; he dreams of it alone. When he lies down to sleep, he plots what he will do in the morning with his prize and his possession; when he wakes, he at once proceeds to execute his plots. Loolowcan knows that there are powers out of himself; rights out of himself he does not comprehend, or even conceive. I have thus far been very indulgent to him, and treated him republicanly, mindful of the heavy mesne profits for the occupation of a continent, and the uncounted arrears of blood-money owed by my race to his; yet I find no trace of gratitude in my analysis of his character. He seems to be composed, selfishness, five hundred parts; nil admirari coolness, five hundred parts; — a well-balanced character, and perhaps one not likely to excite enthusiasm in others. I am a steward to him; I purvey him also a horse; when we reach the Dalles, I am to pay him for his services; — but he is bound to me by no tie of comradery. He has caution more highly developed than any quadruped I have met, and will not offend me lest I should resign my stewardship, retract Gubbins, refuse payment, discharge my guide, and fight through the woods, where he sees I am no stranger, alone. He certainly merits a “teapot” for his ability in guidance. He has memory and observation unerring; not once in all our intricate journey have I found him at fault in any fact of space or time. He knows “each lane and every alley green” here, accurately as Comus knew his “wild wood.”

Moral conceptions exist only in a very limited degree for this type of his race. Of God he knows somewhat less than the theologians; that is, he is in the primary condition of uninquisitive ignorance, not in the secondary, of inquisitive muddle. He has the advantage of no elaborate system of human inventions to unlearn. He has no distinct fetichism. None of the North American Indians have, in the accurate sense of the term; their nomad life and tough struggle with instructive Nature in her roughness save them from such elaborate fetichism as may exist in more indolent climes and countries.

Loolowcan has his tamanoüs. It is Talipus, the Wolf, a “hyas skookoom tamanoüs, a very mighty demon,” he informs me. He does not worship it; that would interfere with his devotions to his real deity, Number One. It, in return, does him little service. If he met Talipus, object of his superstition, on a fair morning, he would think it a good omen; if on a sulky, morning, he might be somewhat depressed, but would not on that account turn back, as a Roman brave would have done on meeting the matinal wolf. In fact, he keeps Talipus, his tamanoüs, as a kind of ideal hobby, very much as a savage civilized man entertains a pet bulldog or a tame bear, a link between himself and the rude, dangerous forces of nature. Loolowcan has either chosen his protector according to the law of likeness, or, choosing it by chance, has become assimilated to its characteristics. A wolfish youth is the protege of Talipus, — an unfaithful, sinister, cannibal-looking son of a horse-thief. Wolfish likewise is his appetite; when he asks me for more dinner, and this without stint or decorum he does, he glares as if, grouse failing, pork and hard-tack gone, he could call to Talipus to send in a pack of wolves incarnate, and pounce with them upon me. A pleasant companion this for lamb-like me to be down beside in the den of the late Sowee. Yet I do presently, after supper and a pipe, and a little jargoning in Chinook with my Wolf, roll into my blankets, and sleep vigorously, lulled by the gratifying noise of my graminivorous horses cramming themselves with material for leagues of lope to-morrow.

No shade of Sowee came to my slumbers with warnings against the wolf in guise of a Klickatat brave. I had no ghostly incubus to shake off, but sprang up recreate in body and soul. Life is vivid when it thus awakes. To be is to do.

And to-day much is to be done. Long leagues away, beyond a gorge of difficulty, is the open rolling hill country, and again far beyond are the lodges of the people of Owhhigh. “To-day,” said Loolowcan, “we must go copa nika ilihee, to my home, to Weenas.”

Forlorn Caudal is hardly yet a frisky quadruped. Yet he is of better cheer, perhaps up to the family-nag degree of vivacity. As to the others, they have waxed fat, and kick. Klale, the Humorous, kicks playfully, elongating his legs in preparatory gymnastics. Gubbins, the average horse, kicks calmly at his saddler, merely as a protest. Antipodes, the spiteful Blunderer, kicks in a revolutionary manner, rolls under his pack-saddle, and will not budge without maltreatment. Ill-educated Antipodes views mankind only as excoriators of his back, and general flagellants. Klickatats kept him raw in flesh and temper; under me his physical condition improves; his character is not yet affected.

Before sunrise we quitted the house of Sowee.