Unexplored!

“Another idea,” Pedro broke in. “Why eat bread all the time anyway? Why not macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti and tomato paste?”

“And garlic?” teased Ace.

“Surest thing you know! And vermicelli, and noodles, and all those things. They’re all made of flour, and they’re different.”

“A little bulky,” protested Norris.

“Oh, well, for the start of the trip, then. They’re not so heavy, parked up on top of a burro’s regular pack.”

“Good!” agreed the leader of the expedition. “We may come to cattle ranches where we can get beef and mutton occasionally, though not after we get into the higher altitudes. And we can start off with a few fresh eggs, for compactness and safety broken a dozen at a time into glass jars. After that – I don’t know whether you fellows would like scrambled eggs or not, made of egg powder. Personally I don’t. Nor the famous erbswurst.”

“Aw!” drawled Ted, barely concealing his impatience. “The thing that stands by you best on a hard trip, after all, is jerky and pemmican. I think old Lester jerked some venison himself last fall, and he’s probably got it yet. And he’ll grind us some pemmican, if we get him word before he starts.”

“Gee Whiz! Those are emergency rations!” vetoed Ace.

“We’ll have to have a long distance conversation with him to-night,” said Norris. “Meantime we mustn’t forget pilot biscuit and peanut butter for a pocket lunch and shelled peanuts, of course, and rice, and tea and coffee, and sugar, and baking powder.”

“There are two things that can compactly,” conceded the Castilian boy at this point. “The best grade of canned beets and spinach are pretty solid weight. I’ll make no kick if we load on some of that until we get to the steeper grades.”

“Hey!” shouted Ace. “In all this time nobody’s mentioned bacon.”

“We took that for granted,” laughed Norris. “I’ll bet Long Lester would never start out without it, whether we told him to or not. But I’m awfully afraid we’ll use more tea than coffee. It’s bulky, and worse, it loses flavor.”

“Oh,” said Ted, “I know the answer to that. Powdered coffee isn’t one quarter so bulky, and put up in little separate tins, we keep opening them fresh, don’t you see?”

“I’ve never yet seen a powdered coffee that could compare with the real thing,” Ace complained.

“Why couldn’t Les buy the real thing and then get it powdered and sealed into little separate tins for us?”

“He could,” agreed Norris, “I suppose, – if we’re going to be as fussy as all that.” (Ace flushed.) “But with our woods’ appetites–”

“Oh, and citric acid tablets,” the Senator’s son hastened to change the subject. “For lemonade, you know.”

The discussion was cut short by Pedro’s discovery that a bear had invaded the lean-to.

The American black bear, and his California cousin whose coat has generally lightened to the cinnamon brown of the soil, is all but tame in the National Parks, where for years he has been unmolested. A friendly fellow even in the wild state, – for the most part, – he roams the Giant Forest as much a prized part of the landscape as the Big Trees themselves. He has learned to visit the garbage dump regularly every night, and it causes no sensation whatever to meet one on the trail. It was much the same about the lumber camp.

But to have him visit uninvited, and serve his own refreshments from their selected stores, was a less attractive trick. Nor did he show the slightest inclination to take alarm and vacate when the boys returned. On the contrary, he snarled and showed his teeth when they would have driven him from the maple sugar can, and even Ace felt at the moment that discretion was in order. It was not till Old Shaggy-Sides had pretty well demolished everything in sight, and then carried the ham off under his arm, that he took a reluctant departure.

This would never do. That night the unprotected edibles were hoisted just too high for a possible visitor to reach, on a rope slung over the limb of a tree. The boys still slept under the stars, for they knew enough about bears, (all but Pedro), not to be afraid. Pedro, however, got little sleep that night, though he would not have confessed to the fact for anything on earth.

“There was one bear in Sequoia Park,” remembered Ace, “who got too fresh, that way, and raided some one’s tent, and they had to send for help to get him out. When it happened half a dozen times, he was ordered shot. But he was the only one I’ve ever heard of acting that way. Now I’ll bet, if we’d inquire, we’d find this bear had been half tamed, and altogether spoiled by these lumbermen.

“We were driving through Yellowstone last summer when one of those half tame bears came out to beg. We stopped the machine and I fed him some candy. Then we parked, and went up to the hotel for dinner. When we came back, we found he had mighty near clawed the back seat to pieces, – and why do you suppose? – To get at a side of bacon we had stowed away in there.”

“Did he find it?”

“We never did.”

“That reminds me of something I heard,” laughed Norris. “Some friends of mine in Sequoia left their lunch boxes in the machine while they went to climb Moro Rock. When they came back they found a cub calmly sitting up there behind the wheel, eating one lunch after another.”

Pedro was in for moving their headquarters to a great hollow Big Tree, the cavity in which was as large as a good sized room, with a Gothic sort of opening they could have made a door for. But the very next morning the old prospector arrived with the train of pack-burros, and they were off.

“How do you explain the Sequoias, Mr. Norris? Will we find more of them?” asked Pedro, with a last wistful backward glance.

“The Big Trees are by no means confined to Sequoia National Park and other well known groves,” said the Survey man. “The Sequoia gigantea is to be found in scattered groves for a distance of 250 miles or more, up and down the West slope of the Sierras, at altitudes just lower than that of the belt of silver firs, – that is, anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. And in fact, south of Kings’ River, the Sequoias stretch in an almost unbroken forest for seventy miles. Nor are they all of the proportions so often cited, where a man standing at their base looks like a fly on the wall by comparison with these prehistoric giants. Nor did they all get their start in life 4,000 years ago. There are young trees in plenty, saplings and seedlings, who will doubtless reach the patriarchal stage some 4,000 years hence. On what kind of earth will they look then? On what stage in the evolution of civilization? Will another ice age have re-carved these mountains? And how will man have learned to protect himself from the added severity of those winters?”

“It certainly gives one something to think about,” mused Pedro. “It is only in these younger specimens that you can see what a graceful tree it is!” He glanced from a feathery Big Tree youngster of perhaps 500 summers, with its slender branches drooping in blue-green plumes toward the base, with purple-barked limbs out-thrust on the horizontal half way up, and at the top reaching ardently heavenward. Near it stood a parent tree of perhaps middle age, born around the time of Christ, whose crown was still firmly rounded with the densely massed foliage, now yellow-brown, and the bark red-brown.

The millions of two inch cones, surprisingly tiny for such a tree, hang heavy with seeds, – they counted 300 in a single green cone.

“With such millions of seeds,” puzzled Pedro, “I should think the trees would grow so thick that there would be no walking between them.”

“No,” said Norris. “In the first place, remember that not one seed in a million escapes these busy Douglas squirrels and the big woodcocks that you hear drumming everywhere. Then even the millionth seed has to risk forest fires and snow-slides, lumbermen and lightning. But I’ll tell you something funny about them. You’d naturally think, from the number of streams in these forests, that they required a lot of moisture. Well, they don’t. Further South they grow and flourish on perfectly dry ground. But their roots retain so much rain and snow water that their tendency is to make streams. The dense crown helps too, by preventing evaporation. You’ll find Sequoias flourishing in a mere rift in a granite precipice. But wherever you find a dense growth, as you do here, there you will find their roots giving out the seepage that feeds a million streamlets, and these in turn feed the great rivers.

“You see these trees must be able to survive drouth or they could not have survived the changes of so many thousand years. Why, these Sequoias might have formed one continuous forest from the American River on South, if it had not been for the glaciers that swept down the great basins of the San Joaquin and Kings’ River, the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus.”

“But why didn’t the glaciers clean them off the basins of the Kaweah and the Tule Rivers, too?”

“Ah! There the giant rock spurs of the canyons of the King and the Kern protected the Tule and the Kaweah, by shunting the ice off to right and left.”

“There’s one thing more I’d like to know,” said Pedro. “Where will we find the nut pines that have the pine nuts? Aren’t they delicious?”

“There are several kinds,” said Norris. “There is a queer little one with cones growing like burrs on the trunk as well as on the limbs, but that is only found on burnt ground. Another, that forms a dietary staple with the Indians of Nevada, is to be found only on the East slope of the Sierra, and the little nut pine that our California Indians harvest is away down in the foot-hills among the white oaks and manzanitas, so I’m afraid whatever else we come across on this trip, we won’t want to count on pine nuts.”

“What interests me more,” said Ted, “is whether we are going to come across any gold or not.”

“Now you’re talking!” the old prospector suddenly spoke up.

Ted’s eyes shone.

Ace had an experience about this time that flavored his nightmares for some time to come. Following a lumber chute, one of these three board affairs, up the side of a particularly steep slope one day, where at the time of the spring floods the yellow pine logs had been sent down to the river, he thought to try a little target shooting with Long Lester’s rifle. But at the first shot a bunch of range cattle, – of whose presence he had not known, – began crowding curiously near. He fired again, and a cow with a calf took alarm and started to charge him, but was driven back with a few clods and a flourished stick.

He fired again. This time, quite by accident, his bullet hit an old bull squarely on the horn. The shock at first stunned the animal, and he fell forward on his knees. Recovering in an instant, however, the enraged animal made for Ace.

The Senator’s son had that day worn his heavy leather chaps. He had found them burdensome enough on his slow climb upward. They now impeded him till he could not have outrun the animal had he tried, nor was there any tree handy between him and it.

Then a wild thought struck him. The log slide! – It was mighty risky, but then, so was the bull. Leaping aboard a log that still lay at the head of the slide, he pulled the lever and sent it shooting to the stream below, and the fallen pine needles flew out in a cloud before him, as the log hurled down the grade. His heavy leather chaps really helped him balance now, and his hob-nails helped him cling.

The log came to a stand-still before it reached the river, – but Ace did not. And the bull was hopelessly out-distanced.

CHAPTER III

LIVING OFF THE WILDERNESS

On every side stretched a sea of peaks. They might have been in mid-ocean, stranded on a desert island, had they not been on a mountain-top instead.

For one glorious fortnight they had camped beside white cascading rivers, and along the singing streams that fed them, following their windings through flower perfumed forests and on up into the granite country where glacier lakes lay cupped between the peaks to unfathomable cobalt depths. They had seen deer by the dozen feeding in the brush of the lower country, – graceful, big-eyed creatures who allowed them to approach to within a stone’s throw before they went bounding to cover. They had thrown crumbs to the grouse and quail that came hesitatingly to inspect their camp site, protected at this season by the game laws and so unaccustomed to human kind that they were all but tame. They had crossed and recrossed rivers not too deep to ford, and rivers not too swift to swim. They had scaled cliffs where nothing on hooves save a burro – or a Rocky Mountain goat – could have followed after.

But always the shaggy gray donkeys had kept at their heels like dogs, – save when they got temperamental or went on strike, – waggling their long ears in a steady rhythm, exactly as if these appendages had been on ball bearings. The burros, five in number, had each his individuality. There was Pepper, the old prospector’s own comrade of many a mountain trail, who, knowing his superior knowledge of the ways of slide rock and precipices, insisted always on being in the lead. This preference on his part he enforced with a pair of the swiftest heels the boys had ever seen. There was old Lazybones, as Pedro had named the one who, presenting the greatest girth, had to carry the largest pack. There was Trilby, of the dainty hooves, who never made a misstep. He – for the cognomen had been somewhat misplaced – was entrusted with the things they valued most, their personal kit and the trout rods. The Bird was the one who did the most singing, – though they all joined in on the chorus when they thought it was time for the table scraps to be apportioned. And finally there was Mephistopheles, whose disposition may have been soured under some previous ownership, – since the blame must be placed somewhere. Ace had added him to Long Lester’s four when a lumberman had offered him for fifteen dollars. The name came afterwards. But though he sometimes held up operations on the trail, he was big enough to carry 150 pounds of “grub,” and that meant a lot of good eating.

Despite their hee-hawing, however, the diminutive pack animals did a deal of talking with their ears. When startled, these prominent members were laid forward to catch the sound. When displeased, the long ears were flattened along the backs of their necks. If browse was good, they remained in the home meadow, – after first circling it to make sure there was no foe in ambush. If not, they wandered till they found good feed, – and one night they wandered so many miles, hobbled as they were, that it took all of the next forenoon to find them and bring them back to camp.

They could walk a log with their packs to cross a stream, or, packs removed and pullied across, they could swim it, if they were started up current and left to guide themselves. They would not slip on smooth rock ledges, they could hop up or down bowlders like so many bipeds. It was a constant marvel to Ace and Pedro what they could do. No lead ropes were necessary at all.

Long Lester was meticulous in their care. Every afternoon when the packs were removed he sponged their backs with cold water. And though the party was on its way by seven every morning, – having risen with the first light of dawn, – and though by ten they would have covered half of their average twelve miles a day, the old guide never watered them till the sun was warm, which was generally not till after the middle of the forenoon. For a wilderness trip comes to grief when any one member, man or beast, gives out, as he knew from a lifetime of experience in that rugged and unpeopled region.

They had figured on about three pounds of food per day per person, for the four weeks’ trip. That loaded each burro with a grub list of ninety pounds, and about ten pounds of personal equipment, besides the axes and aluminums and such incidentals as soap and matches. Ease of packing was secured by slipping into each of the food kyacks a case such as those in which a pair of five gallon coal oil cans come.

Their kit included neats’ foot oil, (scrupulously packed), for the wearing qualities of their footwear along those stony trails depended in large degree on keeping the leather soft. No mosquito netting was necessary in the mountains, – it was too dry and cool for the insects, – but each member of the party had a pair of buckskin gloves, six good pairs of all wool socks, – worn two at a time to pad the feet against stone-bruise, – extra shoe laces, and a pair of sneakers to rest his feet around camp. Norris carried a pocket telescope, and Long Lester a hone made of the side of a cigar box with fine emery cloth pasted on one side, coarse on the other. They saved on blankets by doubling each into three crosswise, – except the old guide, who was too tall, – and on the higher, colder elevations they found that to wear a fresh wool union suit, and socks warm from the fire, to sleep in, was as good as an extra blanket, if not better.

Everything was to be turn and turn about, – Ace had been the most insistent member of the party in not leaving Long Lester to do the lion’s share, – they were obliged, each in turn, even Norris, to learn certain fundamental rules of cookery. Long Lester got it down to this formula:

Put fresh vegetables into boiling salted water.

Put dried vegetables (peas and beans) into cold, unsalted water.

Soak dried fruit overnight.

To fry, have the pan just barely smoking.

To clean the frying pan, fill it with water and let it boil over, then hang it up to dry. Jab greasy knives into the ground, – provided it is not stony.

You can fry more trout in a pan if you cut off their heads.

As the boiling point drops one degree for every 800 foot rise, twenty hours’ steady cooking will not boil beans in the higher altitudes unless you use soft water. They may be best cooked overnight in a hole lined with coals, if put in when boiling, with the lid of the Dutch oven covered with soil.

Three aluminum pails, nested, provided dish pan and kettles for hot and cold water. Butter packed in pound tins kept fresh indefinitely in those cool heights, and salt and sugar traveled well in waterproof tent silk bags. Long Lester had figured on a minimum of a quarter of a pound each of sugar and bacon per day per person, three pounds of pepper and twenty-five of salt.

Of course the one thing each member carried right on his person was a pepper tin of matches, made waterproof with a strip of adhesive tape. For the snow fields, they also had tinted spectacles, as a precaution against snow-blindness.

Axmanship came to be the chief measure of their campcraft. Ace had wanted to bring one of the double-bitts he saw the lumbermen using, but the old guide vetoed it as more dangerous to the amateur than a butcher knife in the hands of a baby.

The light weight single-bitt was the axe he had brought for the boys, reserving a heavier one for himself. These he had had ground thin, but so that the blade would be thickest in the center and not stick fast in the log. Both axe-heads wore riveted leather sheaths.

They took turn and turn about getting in the night wood. Fortunately the boys, (Norris, too), had watched the lumbermen like lynxes, even Ted thinking to get a few points from them. They noted, for one thing, that the professional choppers struck rhythmically, landing each blow with precision on top of the other, working slowly and apparently at ease, – certainly untiringly, – and making no effort to sink the axe deeply.

They had also noticed that a lumberman will clear away all brush and vines within axe reach before beginning, lest the instrument catch and deliver him a cut.

They had learned, in logging up a down tree, not to notch it first on the top, then discover too late that they could not turn the thing over to get at the under side; but to stand on the log with feet as far apart as convenient, and nick it on first one side, then the other, with great nicks as wide as the log itself.

Pedro had to be shown how to chop kindling, as his first attempt resulted in a black and blue streak across his cheek where a flying chip struck him. Long Lester had to show him how to lay his branches across a log. And the old man insisted on his so doing, every time, for, he said, he knew a man who had lost an eye by failing to observe this precaution. He also barely saved the boys’ axe from being driven into the ground by the well-meaning tenderfoot and nicked on some buried stone. But when he found the Spanish boy starting to kerf a prostrate log that lay on stony ground, he expressed himself so fluently that Pedro never again, as long as he lived, forgot to place another log under the butt, or else clear the stones from the ground around it.

The boys also learned to look for the hard yellow pine, when there was any to be found, for their back-log, but for a quick fire to select fir balsam, spruce or aspen. (Of course if they couldn’t get these, they used whatever they could lay hands on.)

Pedro made the mistake, about this time, of tying a burro to a tree with two half hitches, which, when the burro tugged, were all but impossible to undo. After that he used the regular hitching tie. As the burros were always turned out at night, without even a hobble save for the leader, it became necessary to be able to lasso them in the morning if they failed to come at call. There was also the diamond hitch that had to be acquired if each was to do his share with the pack-animals, all of which occupied fascinated hours around the night-fire.

So much for the first two weeks. It was now time to circle around and start back – some other way. Ace had done the packing the day they climbed above timber line for an outlook. As Trilby had cut her foot, (or his foot, to be accurate), the boy had added her pack to that of broad-backed Mephistopheles, in whose kyacks he had – much against Long Lester’s teachings – entrusted the entire remainder of their food. Pepper carried their personal equipment, and now that half their supplies were eaten, the Bird and Lazybones carried firewood for them from the wooded slopes below, that they might luxuriate beside a night fire. So far, so good. But the peak of their night’s bivouac was flanked by higher peaks that cut off their anticipated view, and before the little party could scale these, they must descend the gorge of another leaping, singing stream that lay between.

As the pack train followed nimbly down the glacier-smoothed slope, and along a ledge where the cliff rose sheer on one side, dropping as sheer on the other, Mephistopheles gave a sudden shrill squeal, and before any one knew what it was all about, went hurtling over the edge. The boys stared speechless as the luckless animal hit the cascades below and went tumbling through the rapids and over a waterfall, till the body was whirled to the bank and caught in a crevice of the rock.

Here they were, ten days’ hike from the nearest base of supplies, and the entire remainder of their food, – they did not mourn the burro – three thousand feet below, or more likely washed a mile down stream by this time, what had not sunk to the bottom.

They might have been in mid-ocean, as Ted had remarked, – stranded on a desert island, – but for their trout rods, and one rifle. The game laws could be disregarded in their extremity. But they were days from the last deer they had sighted, and their main dependence must be on the fishing.

Ahead, the trail wound down into a grove of rich tan trunks against the green of juniper. Gray granite worn into fantastic shapes, – castles and giant tables, – dwarfed and twisted trees rooted in rock crevices, white waters roaring against the canyon wall like a storm-wind in the tree-tops, fallen trunks, patches of flaming fire-weed. This was the wilderness against which they must pit their wild-craft if they would eat.

By the time the sun slanted at five o’clock, Norris called a halt by the side of a moist green meadow where the burros would find browse, and all hands turning to and unpacking the kyacks, they hobbled the animals with a neat loop about their fore-legs. Then they cut, each of them, a good armful of browse for his bed. Long Lester strode off with his rifle in search of anything he might find for the pot, while Norris and the boys scrambled down to the river with their trout rods.

He broke trail along a narrow ledge, just such a one as the luckless burro had gone hurtling over when his pack scraped the rising wall. Almost a sheer drop, and the rapids roared in torrents of white foam. Pedro clung to every root and every rock crack for fear of growing dizzy.