Unexplored!

“I’m shore glad of that,” the old man heaved a sigh of relief. “I’d shore hate to ’ve met up with one of them fellows.”

“And next time I want to cast aspersions on any one’s intelligence,” shouted Pedro, “I’m going to call him a – what was it?”

“Triceratops,” said Norris. “Some dinosaurs, – in fact, most of them, – lived in the swamps, and had long, snakelike necks and flat, apparently earless heads, and long tails. But Triceratops had a three-horned face, one horn over each eye to protect it in battle and one over the nose. Of course he was the largest animal of his time, but he probably fought rival swains for his lady love. We have a pair of Triceratops horns in the National Museum. One is broken, and it must have been broken during life, for the stump is healed over. There were many other kinds of dinosaurs. If we come to any fossil remains, I’ll tell you more about them. But,” (stifling a yawn), “I guess you fellows have had about all you can stand for to-night.”

The boys protested to the contrary, but Norris promised the rest of the story their next evening together around a bon-fire.

In the middle of the night the boys were awakened by a terrific racket. Long Lester was yelling for all he was worth. Every one started wide awake, and Norris threw a handful of browse on the fire to light the scene. Then the old man managed to articulate: “Gosh A’mighty! – I sure thought the Dinosaurs were arter me!”

“You’ve been dreaming,” Norris laughed, while the boys fairly rolled over one another in their enjoyment.

Ace and Ted now made two flights daily in search of the Mexicans, or the smoke of their cook-fire.

Next day they came to a canyon that filled the Geological Survey man with profound enthusiasm, for, he said, it illustrated both the last glacial period and the last period of volcanic mountain building. First they noted that the little mountain stream had worn its torrential way through the basalt or volcanic rock in a narrow canyon perhaps 200 feet deep. A flow of molten basalt, accompanied by cinders, had been erupted from the 8,000 foot peak at the upper end of the canyon, and had flowed down in a layer 200 feet thick when it hardened. It had flowed, – as the underlying rock still showed in places, – over a lateral moraine or rock débris left by a glacier as it flowed down that way. And from the weathered condition of this rock débris, Norris said, it must have been a glacier, not of the last ice age, but of the one preceding, – for of the four glacier periods generally recognized by geologists to-day, evidences of the last two can be seen in the Sierras.

What made this little canyon even more of a find, (from the point of view of what he wanted to show the boys), was that on top of the volcanic rock lay the deposit from another glacier, one that flowed in the last ice age, as the condition of the rock débris plainly showed the expert.

The boys tucked a few rock specimens into their packs and launched an avalanche of questions. But he made them wait till they had established all snug for the night beside a stretch of rapids, where they could look forward to catching trout for breakfast. Then, lighting his pipe, and stretching his feet to the bon-fire, – for the night wind swept cool upon them, – Norris began with Ted’s question as to glaciers and volcanoes.

“During the times I spoke of last night, when the earth crust is breaking, the molten rock and gases and water vapor in the interior of the planet rise in the hearts of the mountain ranges, and often break through as active volcanoes, pouring their lava and ash over the underlying granite, and building it still higher.

“These heightened mountain ranges bring about the glacial climates. For the snows on their cold peaks do not melt when summer comes, and consequently they accumulate, and accumulate, till their own weight presses them down as hard as ice, – that is, makes glaciers of them. I am going to be on the look-out for a glacier, for you will have a good chance to see them in this region. At the same time, during these glacial periods, the astronomer could explain how it is that the temperature is from ten to twenty degrees colder in both winter and summer than it is now, so that helps the ice to accumulate. Then the glacier, flowing slowly, slowly, (a river of ice), down the mountainsides, carries with it quantities of the underlying rocks, till it reaches a lower level where the ice melts and it becomes a river and carries those rocks and soil to the sea. That way, the mountains are gradually worn down to sea level and the whole cycle is ready to start over again.”

“I see,” said the ranch boy. “How long ago did you say the last glacier period came?”

“Probably not since the time of the first men, – perhaps 30,000 years ago.”

“And those glacial deposits you showed us to-day are 30,000 years old?” the boy breathed.

“Yes, and the deposits from the glacial period before that are older still, – a souvenir from the age of reptile dominance.”

“Then when did the other ice ages come? Did you say there were five?”

“I did, but only four great ones. There were two away back in the age of invertebrates.”

“Then has the climate been the same since the last ice age?”

“Not at all. The change is gradual, and geologists naturally conclude that some time we will have another ice age. We’ll hope man has found a better way to keep warm by that time. Our climate, with all its ups and downs, is little by little, through the centuries, growing colder!”

“And how do you know about all these ups and downs of climate?” challenged Long Lester.

“Why, for one thing, – we don’t have to read it all from the rocks, – there is a plain story in the rings of growth in the Big Trees. Don’t you remember those cut stumps, and the thousands of rings we counted, one for a year? And some were wider than others, because in those years there had been more rainfall.”

“Well, I never!” was all the old prospector could articulate, as all hands once more called it a day.

Next day Ace searched in concentric circles, but without finding a trace of Mexicans, or, indeed, of any one.

The next night found the little party encamped an eight hours’ hike up the side of another glacial polished slope. The trail, – that is to say the way they picked to go, – led first to the upper end of the canyon and over the rocks that bordered a green-white water-fall. The wind blowing the spray in first one direction and then another, they got well wetted, though the clear California sunshine soon dried them again. But the most curious part of their climb past the falls was the rainbow that persisted in following them till they seemed to be at the hub of a huge semicircle of opalescent tints.

Above, (perhaps eight hundred feet higher than their camp at the hot spring), they came to where the river slid green and transparent over granite slopes just bordered by a fringe of pine. The water ran deep and swift, though, and as Ted stooped to drink, he found that, rhythmically, a larger swell, (call it a wave), would slap him in the face, till once, blinded by the unexpected onslaught, he all but lost his balance. It would have been inevitable, had he done so, that he should almost instantly go hurtling over that eight hundred foot drop, whose waters roared till the boys had to shout at each other to be heard even a few paces away. But the water was deliciously icy, from its fountain-head in the glacier above.

Wide slopes just steep enough to make climbing demand considerable sure-footedness widened this hanging valley on either side, with no greenery save the picturesque bits that grew along the weathered cracks. Beyond this, the canyon walls continued to rise abruptly.

Trailing along beside the river till it had widened out and quieted its song, they found one of the typically open, parklike, forests of silver firs, jeweled with occasional emerald meadows fragrant with purple lupin and gay with crimson columbine and golden buttercups. Under foot were white violets and wee, monkey-faced mimulus, with occasionally a rare scarlet monkey-flower.

They passed one of the tributaries of the river, crossed it on a log, and paused to drink deep of its sweet fluid. They found a huge fallen log with a mushroom growth that Pedro pronounced edible and which they found not unlike cooked crab meat. They crossed other brooklets, paused at noon to eat a dry lunch, and to their amazement spied a doe and her half-grown fawn in the edge of the clearing watching them wistfully as they threw their scraps away. Pedro, approaching softly, and casting peace offerings before him, was able to approach to within several paces of the mother, though her young hopeful was less trustful. Having probably never seen a biped before, both animals were consumed with curiosity and comparatively unafraid. The old prospector suggested with a wink that a little “wild mutton” would not go amiss, the game laws being adaptable to the needs of those in extremity, but Norris reminded him that they were no longer in extremity, and the boys voted unanimously not to betray the trust of this wild mother.

Now came a stiff climb around a rocky shoulder of the mountain, and along the cracks of the smooth rock slopes, as once more they traversed the path of an ancient glacier. The opening here between the two folds of mountains again disclosed their river, now smaller, but if anything even noisier, by reason of its race over a series of cascades. They had left the silver fir belt and were in the region of dwarfed mountain pines. They estimated that they must be about 8,000 feet high.

Ace joined them with still no news of the fugitive fire setters. It was mysterious.

It being Ted’s and Pedro’s turn to make camp that night, they dropped the packs under a gnarled old juniper whose trunk had been split by lightning into seven splinters that curved out over a little hollow, making an ideal shelter, with its fubsy foliage, its storm-twisted limbs making natural seats, and a flat-topped rock a table. They had to carry pine boughs some distance for their beds, as they did wood and water. Then they sallied forth for a string of fish.

All this gave Ace, Norris and Long Lester time to climb the short remaining distance to the top of the ridge, where they could gaze across at snow-capped peaks on which the alpine glow of approaching sunset had spread a luscious rose.

While they were reclining in quiet enjoyment around the supper fire, – the last flutter of the breeze fanning their faces, – a tawny, catlike form suddenly came tip-toeing out from behind an edge of rock. It was an animal possibly a hundred pounds in weight, – the California mountain lion is not a heavy animal, – and for all its wide, heavy looking feet it trod with lithe grace. (Those paws, so well adapted to travel over deep snow, would enable it to seek its prey when white winter shut down over all its hunting grounds.)

Now it was to all of them a rare treat to see a lion so close to. Of all the denizens of the wild, none are so shy of human kind, in regions where they are hunted, – none so thoroughly nocturnal. The three men fairly held their breaths to watch.

First the animal leapt to a branch of a wind-beaten tree and crouched along its limb, lying so still that, had they not seen it move, they might have glanced squarely in that direction and never noticed. And there it lay, sharpening its claws, cat fashion.

Suddenly it began narrowing its yellow eyes at what must have been a movement behind the rock whence it had emerged. Gathering its feet for a spring, it laid its ears back, and the great muscles rippling beneath its skin, leapt at a second lion whose head could now be seen peering around the rock. But did they fight? Not a bit of it! With hiss and arching back, and all claws out like the picture of a witch cat, the young cougar challenged his playfellow, then retreated as the other would have given him a swipe of his paw. Back to his tree he raced, the other after him. But no sooner had he reached the vantage point of his horizontal branch than he turned and chased the other back. This play was repeated several times, while the three men watched to the windward, silent and motionless, and hence unseen by the near-sighted animals.

A small rock had been loosened by their scramble, and as it went rolling over the granite slope, the first cat pounced after it playfully, finally catching the rolling stone and leaping about it as a cat does a mouse. Then he retired to his tree.

Norris, reflecting that the near presence of two such animals would stampede the burros, picked up a stone and threw it at the lion, intending, not to hit it, but to chase it away. To the surprise of the onlookers, the huge cat pounced on the stone as playfully as before. Ace now hurled a small rock so that it just escaped the tawny flank, but again she pounced, as playful as a kitten, at each missile, and it was not till the three men rose and shouted that the lion took alarm and raced away.

“I declare!” exclaimed Pedro, when he heard about it, “I’d never have believed it!”

“I was out in Devil’s Gulch one day,” remarked Long Lester, “with a coupla dogs. It’s all granite, – hard for the dogs to get a scent, but there’s lots of lions there, in among the rocks. Finally, though, they got one into a little Digger Pine. I took a shot at her, and out she tumbled.”

“Dead?” asked Norris.

“Yes. The dogs found her den, and dragged out three cubs.”

“How large?”

“About the size of house cats, that’s all.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, I put ’em into my shirt and tuk ’em home. I sold ’em afterwards to a circus man.”

“Well, do lions always act the way this one did to-night?”

“I heard tell of a boy that was out with an old three dollar Winchester 22, and a dog that had lost a leg in a bear trap. Pretty soon he barked ‘treed.’ He had a lion up in a scrub oak. It came down fighting, so the boy had to circle around trying to find a chance to shoot. Then it jumped up into a pine tree and lay with its head over the limb looking down at him. He shot at it, but I guess it didn’t hit, for it ran again, and by jings, it finally got clean away!”

“Don’t they ever fight?” marveled Pedro.

“They’ll fight a dog if they come down wounded, but the big cats are mostly cowards.”

“But bears are not?”

“Bears? No, nothing cowardly about them. They’re more lazy’n anything else.”

CHAPTER XI

THE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES

The next morning they had a good look around before deciding which way to go. On one side pointed firs in patches on the canyon walls contrasted with the snow in the ravines. There was a brook that divided, then reunited in white strands, only to spread out into a smooth, glistening sheet, golden in the sunlight, to join the green river.

The notches between two rounding, glacier-smoothed granite masses disclosed distant peaks, snow-capped, their jagged ledges thrusting through the mantling white, dazzling in the sunshine like a mirror, – now gray under a hazing sky, now dappled under a passing shower cloud.

They finally decided to wind through the gap, and Pedro, Norris and Long Lester started on with the burros, while Ace and Ted started fine-combing the map beneath them for the elusive Mexicans. Very probably, they thought, they had been hiding in some of the caves that honeycombed the region, and sooner or later they would have to reappear. Their supplies could not hold out forever.

All along the Western flank of the Sierra, (as both Norris and Long Lester were able to assure them), from the McCloud River in the North to the Kaweah, – a distance of at least 400 miles, – stretched a belt of metamorphic limestone, reaching up to as high as 7,000 feet, and it was fairly riddled with caves.

But again the day went by without success. Ace only squared his chin. Ted offered to abdicate his observer’s seat in favor of any one of the party, but Pedro and Long Lester preferred terra firma, and even Norris found more to interest him in the rocks beneath their feet.

Once a little spiral of smoke drew them to a canyon head where they found three fishermen with a pack train of seven horses, – but no Mexicans. They searched Southward along the John Muir trail, returning along the Eastern flank, – but to no purpose, so far as the fugitives were concerned.

As no one had had time to fish, they dined on tinned corned beef, which Ace, the cook for the day, made the mistake of salting. (After that he had to make tea twice.)

“One thing I’d like fer to ask you, Mr. Norris,” said Long Lester that night around the bon-fire, “is where does the salt in the ocean come from? I don’t see for the life of me, from what you’ve told us–”

“The salt was originally in the rock of the earth’s crust,” Norris explained with a pleased smile at the old man’s interest. “As this igneous rock weathered with time, the rain and the streams washed it into the ocean. Then when the sea water evaporates–”

“To make clouds, to make more rain?” Long Lester recited.

“Yes, – the salt of course remained behind, so that the oceans have been growing constantly saltier since the earth began. Yet even now sea water must be nine-tenths evaporated before the sodium begins to precipitate, as we say.”

“So there is room for a lot more.”

“Especially as the oceans are growing larger all the time.”

“But doesn’t the ocean give it back to the land when it leaves these sediments along the shore?”

“Not to any extent, speaking comparatively. But one of the interesting things about the salt in the sea is this: Chemists and geologists estimate that, for the amount of salt in the sea, enough of the original earth crust must have been weathered away to have covered the continents over 6,000 feet high. And that calculation just about fits what we believe to have happened.

“The United States Geological Survey gave out an official statement in 1912 that this country is annually being washed back into the ocean at the rate of two hundred and seventy million tons of matter dissolved in the streams and five hundred and thirteen millions of tons of matter held in suspension in the same streams. That is to say, the oceans every year receive from the surface of the United States seven hundred and eighty-three millions of tons of rock materials.

“That means that, here in this part of the country at least, one hundred and seventy-seven tons per square mile are being washed back each year.”

“Gee!” said Ted. “I should think, at that rate, that the continents would have been all washed away long ago.”

“Yes, there have been, since geological history began, at least twenty whole mountain ranges as high as the Rockies worn to sea level. Of course the oceans have periodically flooded the margins of the continents at such times, in long troughs where now stand our Appalachian and Rocky Mountain ranges, leaving their deposits.

“In the Rockies there are coarse sediments miles deep, together with limestone formed of the ground-up shells of marine animals of the earlier times. Now think of this!

“If all that stands above sea level in the United States to-day were to be washed into the sea, as it undoubtedly will be, in time, – (but not in our time), the level of the oceans will rise, (just as the level of a half glass of water rises if you drop in a handful of sand), until – it has been estimated – everything under six hundred and fifty feet above sea level will be inundated. That means that probably half of the continent would be under water. It has been so in times past, and it will be again. In fact, in the age of reptile dominance, (the Cretaceous Period), when the earth was just beginning to be peopled with birds and flying reptiles, and the first, primitive mammals, – the Atlantic flowed straight from what is now the Gulf of Mexico, through what is now the Rocky Mountain Region, and through the Eastern part of Alaska, to the Arctic. That left one strip of land that reached along what is now the Pacific Coast, clear from the Isthmus of Panama to the Aleutian Islands and straight across to Siberia. The Northern part of the Atlantic Coast formed another land area, broken by the fresh water bodies of America and Canada and in one with a strip of land that extended across Greenland to Europe.

“It is pretty well established, in fact, that the United States has been more or less flooded by warm, shallow marine waters at least sixteen times since the age of fish dominance began. But not since the age of man!” he hastened to assure the old prospector, who was beginning to look uneasy.

“Of course these flood times brought a moist, warm climate to the land areas, and life was easy for the then existing animal forms. Then when readjustments in the earth’s crust again raised up mountain ranges and the climate became colder and drier, the struggle for existence became more intense, the process of evolution was stimulated, and new forms originated.

“We are living in one of those periods now. The organic world is being stimulated to develop even better bodies, endowed with even more alert brains.

“Life is easiest of all for the inhabitants of the ocean. That is why they have developed so little intelligence.”

“Is that why it’s such an insult to call any one a poor fish?” grinned Ted.

“An ichthyosaurus?” supplemented Ace.

“As has been said before,” Norris took up the thread of his talk, “with a drier climate and soil, comes the need of developing a faster mode of locomotion, for food no longer lies or swims everywhere about, as it did in the ocean, and in the swamps, and tropic humidity. Food and water are scarce, and it is the speediest animal that fulfills his needs. This speediness on his part means that he uses up more energy, and hence needs more food, and he needs to assimilate it faster. In other words, it means increased metabolism. This in turn means that he keeps his body at a higher temperature. He needs it too, now, with the increased cold. This results in the development of warm blood, by which the animal can maintain his body warmth regardless of winter cold. If it had not been for conditions that forced certain reptiles to develop warm-bloodedness, we would have no birds or mammals to-day, for as you doubtless know, birds and mammals both were evolved from reptiles.”

“I swan!” was all the old prospector could say.

“Yes, the first mammals developed from a reptile known as the cynodont. Many of these reptiles had long legs and could travel with the body well off the ground. Birds originated from the same reptilian stock as did the dinosaurs. First their hind-legs grew long so that they could run on them, – and you will notice at the Museum how the legs of a dinosaur are joined to the body exactly like a bird's, – then their scales gradually evolved into feathers.

“There is a lot more to it than I can tell you now, but after various ups and downs, dinosaurs became extinct and Nature tried out several kinds of warm-blooded, furry mammals, some of them herbivorous and built for speed to run away from their enemies, some of them swamp-dwelling monsters with heavy legs and small brains, who, slow of movement, relied on horns and other armor and sharp teeth for their defense.

“But there is no end to this subject. I only mean to make the point that it was geological changes that drove the fish to land, and the land animal to higher forms, till finally other geological changes drove man’s ancestors down out of the trees.” The boys, no less than the old prospector, testifying their interest in the last named operation, he continued.

“When the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas arose, man’s ancestors still lived in trees. But high mountains hold a large part of the moisture of the atmosphere in the form of snow and ice, and at the same time the decreased oceanic areas offer less surface for evaporation. Not only does that mean a drier climate, but the sun’s rays pass more freely through dry air, and the days are hotter, and the heat passing freely back through the same dry air at night, the nights are colder. Seasons are more extreme, and ice accumulates on the mountain tops and around the polar region, precursor of a glacier period. The aridity decreases the amount of forest, and the manlike tree dweller had to descend to the ground to get his living. That necessitated the development of his hind legs for speed, and that speed necessitated his assuming a wholly erect posture. That in turn freed his hands, and he, or the man descended from him, could defend himself by throwing stones at the huge beasts who then peopled the earth. The cold winters necessitated the use of the skins of beasts for clothing, and so on through the list. It was geological necessity that drove man into his higher development.