By Enos A. Mills

THE SPELL OF THE ROCKIES. Illustrated.
WILD LIFE ON THE ROCKIES. Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York

The Spell of the Rockies

THE HOME OF THE WHIRLWIND ([p. 78])

The Spell
of the Rockies
By
Enos A. Mills

With Illustrations from Photographs
by the Author

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1911

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY ENOS A. MILLS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1911

To
B. W.

Preface

Although I have been alone by a camp-fire in every State and Territory in the Union, with the exception of Rhode Island, the matter in this book is drawn almost entirely from my experiences in the Rocky Mountain region.

Some of the chapters have already appeared in magazines, and I am indebted to The Curtis Publishing Company, Doubleday, Page and Company, "Suburban Life," and "Recreation" for allowing me to reprint the papers which they have published. "Country Life in America" published "Racing an Avalanche," "Alone with a Landslide," and "A Rainy Day at the Stream's Source,"—the two last under the titles of "Alone with a Crumbling Mountain" and "At the Stream's Source." The "Saturday Evening Post" published "Little Conservationists," "Mountain-Top Weather," "The Forest Fire," "Insects in the Forest," "Doctor Woodpecker," and "The Fate of a Tree Seed." "Suburban Life" published "Rob of the Rockies" and "Little Boy Grizzly"; and "Recreation" "Harvest Time with Beavers."

E. A. M.

Contents

Illustrations

Racing an Avalanche

Racing an Avalanche

I had gone into the San Juan Mountains during the first week in March to learn something of the laws which govern snow slides, to get a fuller idea of their power and destructiveness, and also with the hope of seeing them in wild, magnificent action. Everywhere, except on wind-swept points, the winter's snows lay deep. Conditions for slide movement were so favorable it seemed probable that, during the next few days at least, one would "run" or chute down every gulch that led from the summit. I climbed on skees well to the top of the range. By waiting on spurs and ridges I saw several thrilling exhibitions.

It was an exciting experience, but at the close of one great day the clear weather that had prevailed came to an end. From the table-like summit I watched hundreds of splendid clouds slowly advance, take their places, mass, and form fluffy seas in valley and cañons just below my level. They submerged the low places in the plateau, and torn, silver-gray masses of mists surrounded crags and headlands. The sunset promised to be wonderful, but suddenly the mists came surging past my feet and threatened to shut out the view. Hurriedly climbing a promontory, I watched from it a many-colored sunset change and fade over mist-wreathed spires, and swelling, peak-torn seas. But the cloud-masses were rising, and suddenly points and peaks began to settle out of sight; then a dash of frosty mists, and my promontory sank into the sea. The light vanished from the heights, and I was caught in dense, frosty clouds and winter snows without a star.

I had left my skees at the foot of the promontory, and had climbed up by fingers and toes over the rocks without great difficulty. But on starting to return I could see only a few inches into the frosty, sheep's-wool clouds, and quickly found that trying to get down would be a perilous pastime. The side of the promontory stood over the steep walls of the plateau, and, not caring to be tumbled overboard by a slip, I concluded that sunrise from this point would probably be worth while.

It was not bitter cold, and I was comfortably dressed; however, it was necessary to do much dancing and arm-swinging to keep warm. Snow began to fall just after the clouds closed in, and it fell rapidly without a pause until near morning. Early in the evening I began a mental review of a number of subjects, mingling with these, from time to time, vigorous practice of gymnastics or calisthenics to help pass the night and to aid in keeping warm. The first subject I thought through was Arctic exploration; then I recalled all that my mind had retained of countless stories of mountain-climbing experiences; the contents of Tyndall's "Hours of Exercise in the Alps" was most clearly recalled. I was enjoying the poetry of Burns, when broken clouds and a glowing eastern sky claimed all attention until it was light enough to get off the promontory.

Planning to go down the west side, I crossed the table-like top, found, after many trials, a break in the enormous snow-cornice, and started down the steep slope. It was a dangerous descent, for the rock was steep and smooth as a wall, and was overladen with snow which might slip at any moment. I descended slowly and with great caution, so as not to start the snow, as well as to guard against slipping and losing control of myself. It was like descending a mile of steep, snow-covered barn roof,—nothing to lay hold of and omnipresent opportunity for slipping. A short distance below the summit the clouds again were around me and I could see only a short distance. I went sideways, with my long skees, which I had now regained, at right angles to the slope; slowly, a few inches at a time, I eased myself down, planting one skee firmly before I moved the other.

A SNOW-SLIDE REGION
Near Telluride, Colorado

At last I reached a point where the wall was sufficiently tilted to be called a slope, though it was still too steep for safe coasting. The clouds lifted and were floating away, while the sun made the mountains of snow still whiter. I paused to look back and up, to where the wall ended in the blue sky, and could not understand how I had come safely down, even with the long tacks I had made, which showed clearly up to the snow-corniced, mist-shrouded crags at the summit. I had come down the side of a precipitous amphitheatre which rose a thousand feet or more above me. A short distance down the mountain, the slopes of this amphitheatre concentrated in a narrow gulch that extended two miles or more. Altogether it was like being in an enormous frying-pan lying face up. I was in the pan just above the place where the gulch handle joined.

It was a bad place to get out of, and thousands of tons of snow clinging to the steeps and sagging from corniced crests ready to slip, plunge down, and sweep the very spot on which I stood, showed most impressively that it was a perilous place to be in.

As I stood gazing upward and wondering how the snow ever could have held while I came down this cloud over the crest in an inverted cascade.

All this showed for a few seconds until the snowy spray began to separate and vanish in the air. The snow-cloud settled downward and began to roll forward. Then monsters of massed snow appeared beneath the front of the cloud and plunged down the slopes. Wildly, grandly they dragged the entire snow-cloud in their wake. At the same instant the remainder of the snow-cornice was suddenly enveloped in another explosive snow-cloud effect.

A general slide had started. I whirled to escape, pointed my skees down the slope,—and went. In less than half a minute a tremendous snow avalanche, one hundred or perhaps two hundred feet deep and five or six hundred feet long, thundered over the spot where I had stood.

There was no chance to dodge, no time to climb out of the way. The only hope of escape lay in outrunning the magnificent monster. It came crashing and thundering after me as swift as a gale and more all-sweeping and destructive than an earthquake tidal wave.

I made a desperate start. Friction almost ceases to be a factor with skees on a snowy steep, and in less than a hundred yards I was going like the wind. For the first quarter of a mile, to the upper end of the gulch, was smooth coasting, and down this I shot, with the avalanche, comet-tailed with snow-dust, in close pursuit. A race for life was on.

The gulch down which I must go began with a rocky gorge and continued downward, an enormous U-shaped depression between high mountain-ridges. Here and there it expanded and then contracted, and it was broken with granite crags and ribs. It was piled and bristled with ten thousand fire-killed trees. To coast through all these snow-clad obstructions at breakneck speed would be taking the maximum number of life-and-death chances in the minimum amount of time. The worst of it all was that I had never been through the place. And bad enough, too, was the fact that a ridge thrust in from the left and completely hid the beginning of the gulch.

As I shot across the lower point of the ridge, about to plunge blindly into the gorge, I thought of the possibility of becoming entangled in the hedge-like thickets of dwarfed, gnarled timber-line trees. I also realized that I might dash against a cliff or plunge into a deep cañon. Of course I might strike an open way, but certain it was that I could not stop, nor see the beginning of the gorge, nor tell what I should strike when I shot over the ridge.

It was a second of most intense concern as I cleared the ridge blindly to go into what lay below and beyond. It was like leaping into the dark, and with the leap turning on the all-revealing light. As I cleared the ridge, there was just time to pull myself together for a forty-odd-foot leap across one arm of the horseshoe-shaped end of the gorge. In all my wild mountainside coasts on skees, never have I sped as swiftly as when I made this mad flight. As I shot through the air, I had a glimpse down into the pointed, snow-laden tops of a few tall fir trees that were firmly rooted among the rocks in the bottom of the gorge. Luckily I cleared the gorge and landed in a good place; but so narrowly did I miss the corner of a cliff that my shadow collided with it.

There was no time to bid farewell to fears when the slide started, nor to entertain them while running away from it. Instinct put me to flight; the situation set my wits working at their best, and, once started, I could neither stop nor look back; and so thick and fast did obstructions and dangers rise before me that only dimly and incidentally did I think of the oncoming danger behind.

I came down on the farther side of the gorge, to glance forward like an arrow. There was only an instant to shape my course and direct my flight across the second arm of the gorge, over which I leaped from a high place, sailing far above the snow-mantled trees and boulders in the bottom. My senses were keenly alert, and I remember noticing the shadows of the fir trees on the white snow and hearing while still in the air the brave, cheery notes of a chickadee; then the snowslide on my trail, less than an eighth of a mile behind, plunged into the gorge with a thundering crash. I came back to the snow on the lower side, and went skimming down the slope with the slide only a few seconds behind.

Fortunately most of the fallen masses of trees were buried, though a few broken limbs peeped through the snow to snag or trip me. How I ever dodged my way through the thickly standing tree growths is one feature of the experience that was too swift for recollection. Numerous factors presented themselves which should have done much to dispel mental procrastination and develop decision. There were scores of progressive propositions to decide within a few seconds; should I dodge that tree on the left side and duck under low limbs just beyond, or dodge to the right and scrape that pike of rocks? These, with my speed, required instant decision and action.

With almost uncontrollable rapidity I shot out into a small, nearly level glacier meadow, and had a brief rest from swift decisions and oncoming dangers. How relieved my weary brain felt, with nothing to decide about dodging! As though starved for thought material, I wondered if there were willows buried beneath the snow. Sharp pains in my left hand compelled attention, and showed my left arm drawn tightly against my breast, with fingers and thumb spread to the fullest, and all their muscles tense.

The lower edge of the meadow was almost blockaded with a dense growth of fire-killed trees. Fortunately the easy slope here had so checked my speed that I was able to dodge safely through, but the heavy slide swept across the meadow after me with undiminished speed, and came crashing into the dead trees so close to me that broken limbs were flung flying past as I shot down off a steep moraine less than one hundred feet ahead.

All the way down I had hoped to find a side cañon into which I might dodge. I was going too rapidly to enter the one I had seen. As I coasted the moraine it flashed through my mind that I had once heard a prospector say it was only a quarter of a mile from Aspen Gulch up to the meadows. Aspen Gulch came in on the right, as the now slightly widening track seemed to indicate.

At the bottom of the moraine I was forced between two trees that stood close together, and a broken limb of one pierced my open coat just beneath the left armhole, and slit the coat to the bottom. My momentum and the resistance of the strong material gave me such a shock that I was flung off my balance, and my left skee smashed against a tree. Two feet of the heel was broken off and the remainder split. I managed to avoid falling, but had to check my speed with my staff for fear of a worse accident.

Battling breakers with a broken oar or racing with a broken skee are struggles of short duration. The slide did not slow down, and so closely did it crowd me that, through the crashing of trees as it struck them down, I could hear the rocks and splintered timbers in its mass grinding together and thudding against obstructions over which it swept. These sounds, and flying, broken limbs cried to me "Faster!" and as I started to descend another steep moraine, I threw away my staff and "let go." I simply flashed down the slope, dodged and rounded a cliff, turned awkwardly into Aspen Gulch, and tumbled heels over head—into safety.

Then I picked myself up, to see the slide go by within twenty feet, with great broken trees sticking out of its side, and a snow-cloud dragging above.

Little Conservationists

Little Conservationists

Twenty-four years ago, while studying glaciation on the slope of Long's Peak, I came upon a cluster of eight beaver houses. These crude, conical mud huts were in a forest pond far up on the mountainside. In this colony of our first engineers were so many things of interest that the fascinating study of the dead Ice King's ruins and records was indefinitely given up in order to observe Citizen Beaver's works and ways.

The industrious beaver builds a permanent home, keeps it clean and in repair, and beside it stores food supplies for winter. He takes thought for the morrow. These and other commendable characteristics give him a place of honor among the horde of homeless, hand-to-mouth folk of the wild. His picturesque works add a charm to nature and are helpful to mankind. His dams and ponds have saved vast areas of soil, have checked many a flood, and helped to equalize stream-flow.

MT. MEEKER

A pile of granite boulders on the edge of the pond stood several feet above the water-level, and from the top of these the entire colony and its operations could be seen. On these I spent days observing and enjoying the autumnal activities of Beaverdom.

It was the busiest time of the year for these industrious folk. General and extensive preparations were now being made for the long winter amid the mountain snows. A harvest of scores of trees was being gathered, and work on a new house was in progress, while the old houses were receiving repairs. It was a serene autumn day when I came into the picturesque village of these primitive people. The aspens were golden, the willows rusty, the grass tanned, and the pines were purring in the easy air.

The colony-site was in a small basin amid morainal débris at an altitude of nine thousand feet above the sea-level. I at once christened it the Moraine Colony. The scene was utterly wild. Peaks of crags and snow rose steeply and high above; all around crowded a dense evergreen forest of pine and spruce. A few small swamps reposed in this forest, while here and there in it bristled several gigantic windrows of boulders. A ragged belt of aspens surrounded the several ponds and separated the pines and spruces from the fringe of water-loving willows along the shores. There were three large ponds in succession and below these a number of smaller ones. The dams that formed the large ponds were willow-grown, earthy structures about four feet in height, and all sagged down stream. The houses were grouped in the middle pond, the largest one, the dam of which was more than three hundred feet long. Three of these lake dwellings stood near the upper margin, close to where the brook poured in. The other five were clustered by the outlet, just below which a small willow-grown, boulder-dotted island lay between the divided waters of the stream.

A number of beavers were busy gnawing down aspens, while others cut the felled ones into sections, pushed and rolled the sections into the water, and then floated them to the harvest piles, one of which was being made beside each house. Some were quietly at work spreading a coat of mud on the outside of each house. This would freeze and defy the tooth and claw of the hungriest or the strongest predaceous enemy. Four beavers were leisurely lengthening and repairing a dam. A few worked singly, but most of them were in groups. All worked quietly and with apparent deliberation, but all were in motion, so that it was a busy scene. "To work like a beaver!" What a stirring exhibition of beaver industry and forethought I viewed from my boulder-pile!

At times upward of forty of them were in sight. Though there was a general coöperation, yet each one appeared to do his part without orders or direction. Time and again a group of workers completed a task and without pause silently moved off and began another. Everything appeared to go on mechanically. It produced a strange feeling to see so many workers doing so many kinds of work effectively and automatically. Again and again I listened for the superintendent's voice; constantly I watched to see the overseer move among them; but I listened and watched in vain. Yet I feel that some of the patriarchal fellows must have carried a general plan of the work, and that during its progress orders and directions that I could not comprehend were given from time to time.

The work was at its height a little before midday. Nowadays it is rare for a beaver to work in daylight. Men and guns have prevented daylight workers from leaving descendants. These not only worked but played by day. One morning for more than an hour there was a general frolic, in which the entire population appeared to take part. They raced, dived, crowded in general mix-ups, whacked the water with their tails, wrestled, and dived again. There were two or three play-centres, but the play went on without intermission, and as their position constantly changed, the merrymakers splashed water all over the main pond before they calmed down and in silence returned to work. I gave most attention to the harvesters, who felled the aspens and moved them, bodily or in sections, by land and water to the harvest piles. One tree on the shore of the pond which was felled into the water was eight inches in diameter and fifteen feet high. Without having even a limb cut off, it was floated to the nearest harvest pile. Another, about the same size, which was procured some fifty feet from the water, was cut into four sections and its branches removed; then a single beaver would take a branch in his teeth, drag it to the water, and swim with it to a harvest pile. But four beavers united to transport the largest section to the water. They pushed with fore paws, with breasts, and with hips. Plainly it was too heavy for them. They paused. "Now they will go for help," I said to myself, "and I shall find out who the boss is." But to my astonishment one of them began to gnaw the piece in two, and two more began to clear a narrow way to the water, while the fourth set himself to cutting down another aspen. Good roads and open waterways are the rule, and perhaps the necessary rule, of beaver colonies.

I was impatient to have a close view of a beaver cutting down a tree, and at last one came prospecting near where I was hidden. After a prolonged period of repose and possibly reflection he rose, gazed into the treetop, as though to see if it were entangled, then put his fore paws against the tree, spread his hind legs, sat back on his extended tail, and took a bite from the trunk. Everything in his actions suggested that his only intention was to devour the tree deliberately. He did most of the cutting from one side. Occasionally he pulled out a chip by leaning backward; sometimes he pried it out by tilting his head to the horizontal, forcing his lower front teeth behind it, then splitting it out by using his jaws as a lever. He was a trifle more than an hour in felling a four-inch tree; just before it fell he thudded the ground a few times with his tail and ran away.

I became deeply interested in this colony, which was situated within two miles of my cabin, and its nearness enabled me to be a frequent visitor and to follow closely its fortunes and misfortunes. About the hut-filled pond I lingered when it was covered with winter's white, when fringed with the gentian's blue, and while decked with the pond-lily's yellow glory.

Ruin befell it before my first visit ended. One morning, while watching from the boulder-pile, I noticed an occasional flake of ash dropping into the pond. Soon smoke scented the air, then came the awful and subdued roar of a forest fire. I fled, and from above the timber-line watched the storm-cloud of black smoke sweep furiously forward, bursting and closing to the terrible leaps of red and tattered flames. Before noon several thousand acres of forest were dead, all leaves and twigs were in ashes, all tree-trunks blistered and blackened.

The Moraine Colony was closely embowered in a pitchy forest. For a time the houses in the water must have been wrapped in flames of smelter heat. Could these mud houses stand this? The beavers themselves I knew would escape by sinking under the water. Next morning I went through the hot, smoky area and found every house cracked and crumbling; not one was inhabitable. Most serious of all was the total loss of the uncut food supply, when harvesting for winter had only begun.

Would these energetic people starve at home or would they try to find refuge in some other colony? Would they endeavor to find a grove that the fire had missed and there start anew? The intense heat had consumed almost every fibrous thing above the surface. The piles of garnered green aspen were charred to the water-line; all that remained of willow thickets and aspen groves were thousands of blackened pickets and points, acres of coarse charcoal stubble. It was a dreary, starving outlook for my furred friends.

I left the scene to explore the entire burned area. After wandering for hours amid ashes and charcoal, seeing here and there the seared carcass of a deer or some other wild animal, I came upon a beaver colony that had escaped the fire. It was in the midst of several acres of swampy ground that was covered with fire-resisting willows and aspens. The surrounding pine forest was not dense and the heat it produced in burning did no damage to the scattered beaver houses.

From the top of a granite crag I surveyed the green scene of life and the surrounding sweep of desolation. Here and there a sodden log smouldered in the ashen distance and supported a tower of smoke in the still air. A few miles to the east, among the scattered trees of a rocky summit, the fire was burning itself out: to the west the sun was sinking behind crags and snow; near-by, on a blackened limb, a south-bound robin chattered volubly but hopelessly.

While I was listening, thinking, and watching, a mountain lion appeared and leaped lightly upon a block of granite. He was on my right, about one hundred feet away and about an equal distance from the shore of the nearest pond. He was interested in the approach of something. With a nervous switching of his tail he peered eagerly forward over the crown of the ridge just before him, and then crouched tensely and expectantly upon his rock.

A pine tree that had escaped the fire screened the place toward which the lion looked and where something evidently was approaching. While I was trying to discover what it could be, a coyote trotted into view. Without catching sight of the near-by lion, he suddenly stopped and fixed his gaze upon the point that so interested the crouching beast. The mystery was solved when thirty or forty beavers came hurrying into view. They had come from the ruined Moraine Colony.

I thought to myself that the coyote, stuffed as he must be with the seared flesh of fire-roasted victims, would not attack them; but a lion wants a fresh kill for every meal, and so I watched the movements of the latter. He adjusted his feet a trifle and made ready to spring. The beavers were getting close; but just as I was about to shout to frighten him the coyote leaped among them and began killing.

In the excitement of getting off the crag I narrowly escaped breaking my neck. Once on the ground I ran for the coyote, shouting wildly to frighten him off; but he was so intent upon killing that a violent kick in the ribs first made him aware of my presence. In anger and excitement he leaped at me with ugly teeth as he fled. The lion had disappeared, and by this time the beavers in the front ranks were jumping into the pond, while the others were awkwardly speeding down the slope. The coyote had killed three. If beavers have a language, surely that night the refugees related to their hospitable neighbors some thrilling experiences.

The next morning I returned to the Moraine Colony over the route followed by the refugees. Leaving their fire-ruined homes, they had followed the stream that issued from their ponds. In places the channel was so clogged with fire wreckage that they had followed alongside the water rather than in it, as is their wont. At one place they had hurriedly taken refuge in the stream. Coyote tracks in the scattered ashes explained this. But after going a short distance they had climbed from the water and again traveled the ashy earth.

Beavers, like fish, commonly follow water routes, but in times of emergency or in moments of audacity they will journey overland. To have followed this stream down to its first tributary, then up this to where the colony in which they found refuge was situated, would have required four miles of travel. Overland it was less than a mile. After following the stream for some distance, at just the right place they turned off, left the stream, and dared the overland dangers. How did they know the situation of the colony in the willows, or that it had escaped fire, and how could they have known the shortest, best way to it?

The morning after the arrival of the refugees, work was begun on two new houses and a dam, which was about sixty feet in length and built across a grassy open. Green cuttings of willow, aspen, and alder were used in its construction. Not a single stone or a handful of mud was used. When completed it appeared like a windrow of freshly raked shrubs. It was almost straight, but sagged a trifle downstream. Though the water filtered freely through, it flooded the flat above. As the two new houses could not shelter all the refugees, it is probable that some of them were sheltered in bank tunnels, while room for others may have been found in the old houses.

That winter the colony was raided by some trappers; more than one hundred pelts were secured, and the colony was left in ruins and almost depopulated.

The Moraine Colony site was deserted for a long time. Eight years after the fire I returned to examine it. The willow growth about the ruins was almost as thrifty as when the fire came. A growth of aspen taller than one's head clung to the old shore-lines, while a close seedling growth of lodge-pole pine throve in the ashes of the old forest. One low mound, merry with blooming columbine, was the only house ruin to be seen.

The ponds were empty and every dam was broken. The stream, in rushing unobstructed through the ruins, had eroded deeply. This erosion revealed the records of ages, and showed that the old main dam had been built on the top of an older dam and a sediment-filled pond. The second dam was on top of an older one still. In the sediment of the oldest—the bottom pond—I found a spear-head, two charred logs, and the skull of a buffalo. Colonies of beaver, as well as those of men, are often found upon sites that have a tragic history. Beavers, with Omar, might say,—

"When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh but the long long while the world shall last."

The next summer, 1893, the Moraine site was resettled. During the first season the colonists put in their time repairing dams and were content to live in holes. In autumn they gathered no harvest, and no trace of them could be found after the snow; so it is likely that they had returned to winter in the colony whence they had come. But early in the next spring there were reinforced numbers of them at work establishing a permanent settlement. Three dams were repaired, and in the autumn many of the golden leaves that fell found lodgment in the fresh plaster of two new houses.

Most beaver dams are built on the installment plan,—are the result of growth. As the pond fills with sediment, and the water becomes shallower, the dam is built higher and, where conditions require it, longer; or, as is often the case, it may be raised and lengthened for the purpose of raising or backing water to the trees that are next to be harvested. The dams are made of sticks, small trees, sods, mud, stones, coal, grass, roots,—that is, combinations of these. The same may be said of the houses. For either house or dam the most convenient material is likely to be used. But this is not always the case; for the situation of the house, or what the dam may have to endure, evidently is sometimes considered, and apparently that kind of material is used that will best meet all the requirements.

Most beaver dams are so situated that they are destined earlier or later to accumulate sediment, trash, and fallen leaves, and become earthy; then they will, of course, be planted by Nature with grass, shrubby willows, and even trees. I have seen many trees with birds' nests in them standing on a beaver dam; yet the original dam had been composed almost entirely of sticks or stones.

Why do beavers want or need ponds? They have very heavy bodies and extremely short legs. On land they are slow and awkward and in the greatest danger from their enemies,—wolves, lions, bears, and wildcats; but they are excellent swimmers, and in water they easily elude their enemies, and through it they conveniently bring their harvests home. Water is necessary for their existence, and to have this at all times compels the construction of dams and ponds.

In the new Moraine Colony one of the houses was torn to pieces by some animal, probably a bear. This was before Thanksgiving. About midwinter a prospector left his tunnel a few miles away, came to the colony, and dynamited a house, and "got seven of them." Next year two houses were built on the ruins of the two just fallen. That year's harvest-home was broken by deadly attacks of enemies. In gathering the harvest the beavers showed a preference for some aspens that were growing in a moist place about one hundred feet from the water. Whether it was the size of these or their peculiar flavor that determined their election in preference to nearer ones, I could not determine. One day, while several beavers were cutting here, they were surprised by a mountain lion, which leaped upon and killed one of the harvesters. The next day the lion surprised and killed another. Two or three days later a coyote killed one on the same blood-stained spot, and then overtook and killed two others as they fled for the water. I could not see these deadly attacks from the boulder-pile, but in each case the sight of flying beavers sent me rushing upon the scene, where I beheld the cause of their desperate retreat. But despite dangers they persisted until the last of these aspens was harvested. During the winter the bark was eaten from these, and the next season their clean wood was used in the walls of a new house.

One spring I several times visited a number of colonies while trying to determine the number of young brought forth at a birth. Six furry little fellows sunning themselves on top of their rude home were the first discovery; this was the twelfth of May. By the close of the month I had come in sight of many youngsters, and found the average number to be five. One mother proudly exhibited eight, while another, one who all winter had been harassed by trappers and who lived in a burrow on the bank, could display but one. In the Moraine Colony the three sets of youngsters numbered two, three, and five. Great times these had as they were growing up. They played over the house, and such fun they had nosing and pushing each other off a large boulder into the water! A thousand merry ripples they sent to the shore as they raced, wrestled, and dived in the pond, both in the sunshine and in the shadows of the willows along the shore.

The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders,—the Ice King's marbles,—and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich the hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days. If Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon another planet I could wish that I might be born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water.

A BEAVER HOUSE IN WINTER

The autumn of the year when I watched the young beavers I had the pleasure of seeing some immigrants pass me en route for a new home in the Moraine Colony. Of course they may have been only visitors, or have come temporarily to assist in the harvesting; but I like to think of them as immigrants, and a number of things testified that immigrants they were. One evening I had long been lying on a boulder by the stream below the colony, waiting for a gift from the gods. It came. Out of the water within ten feet of me scrambled the most patriarchal, as well as the largest, beaver that I have ever seen. I wanted to take off my hat to him, I wanted to ask him to tell me the story of his life, but from long habit I simply lay still and watched and thought in silence. He was making a portage round a cascade. As he scrambled up over the rocks, I noticed that he had but two fingers on his right hand. He was followed, in single file, by four others; one of these was minus a finger on the left hand. The next morning I read that five immigrants had arrived in the Moraine Colony. They had registered their footprints in the muddy margin of the lower pond. Had an agent been sent to invite these colonists, or had they come out of their own adventurous spirit? The day following their arrival I trailed them backward in the hope of learning whence they came and why they had moved. They had traveled in the water most of the time; but in places they had come out on the bank to go round a waterfall or to avoid an obstruction. Here and there I saw their tracks in the mud and traced them to a beaver settlement in which the houses and dams had been recently wrecked. A near-by rancher told me that he had been "making it hot" for all beavers in his meadow. During the next two years I occasionally saw this patriarchal beaver or his tracks thereabout.

It is the custom among old male beavers to idle away two or three months of each summer in exploring the neighboring brooks and streams. But they never fail to return in time for autumn activities. It thus becomes plain how, when an old colony needs to move, some one in it knows where to go and the route to follow.

I had enjoyed the ways of "our first engineers" for several years before it dawned upon me that their works might be useful to man and that the beaver might justly be called the first conservationist. One dry winter the stream through the Moraine Colony ran low and froze to the bottom, and the only trout in it that survived were those in the deep holes of these beaver ponds. Another demonstration of their usefulness came one gray day. The easy rain of two days ended in a heavy downpour and a deluge of water on the mountainside above. This mountain-slope was still barren from the forest fire. It had but little to absorb or delay the excess of water, which was speedily shed into the stream below. Flooding down the stream's channel came a roaring avalanche or waterslide, with a rubbish-filled front that was five or six feet high. This expanded as it rolled into the pond and swept far out on the sides, while the front, greatly lowered, rushed over the dam. Much of this water was caught and temporarily detained in the ponds, and by the time it poured over the last dam its volume was greatly reduced and its speed checked. The ponds had broken the rush and prevented a flood.

Every beaver pond is a settling-basin that takes sediment and soil from the water that passes through it. If this soil were carried down it would not only be lost, but it would clog the deep waterway, the river channel. Deposited in the pond, it will in time become productive. During past ages the millions of beaver dams in the United States have spread soil over thousands of square miles and rendered them productive. Beavers prepared the way for numerous forests and meadows, for countless orchards and peaceful, productive valleys.

The Moraine colonists gathered an unusually large harvest during the autumn of 1909. Seven hundred and thirty-two sapling aspens and several hundred willows were massed in the main pond by the largest house. This pile, which was mostly below the water-line, was three feet deep and one hundred and twenty-four feet in circumference. Would a new house be built this fall? This unusually large harvest plainly told that either children or immigrants had increased the population of the colony. Of course, a hard winter may also have been expected.

No; they were not to build a new house, but the old house by the harvest pile was to be enlarged. One day, just as the evening shadow of Long's Peak had covered the pond, I peeped over a log on top of the dam to watch the work. The house was only forty feet distant. Not a ripple stirred among the inverted peaks and pines in the clear, shadow-enameled pond. A lone beaver rose quietly in the scene from the water near the house. Swimming noiselessly, he made a circuit of the pond. Then for a time, and without any apparent purpose, he swam back and forth over a short, straight course; he moved leisurely, and occasionally made a shallow, quiet dive. He did not appear to be watching anything in particular or to have anything special on his mind. Yet his eyes may have been scouting for enemies and his mind may have been full of house plans. Finally he dived deeply, and the next I saw of him he was climbing up the side of the house addition with a pawful of mud.

By this time a number of beavers were swimming in the pond after the manner of the first one. Presently all began to work. The addition already stood more than two feet above the water-line. The top of this was crescent-shaped and was about seven feet long and half as wide. It was made mostly of mud, which was plentifully reinforced with willow cuttings and aspen sticks. For a time all the workers busied themselves in carrying mud and roots from the bottom of the pond and placing these on the slowly rising addition. Eleven were working at one time. By and by three swam ashore, each in a different direction and each a few seconds apart. After a minute or two they returned from the shore, each carrying or trailing a long willow. These were dragged to the top of the addition, laid down, and trampled in the mud. Meantime the mud-carriers kept steadily at their work; again willows were brought, but this time four beavers went, and, as before, each was independent of the others. I did not see how this work could go on without some one bossing the thing, but I failed to detect any beaver acting as overseer. While there was general coöperation, each acted independently most of the time and sometimes was apparently oblivious of the others. These beavers simply worked,—slowly, silently, and steadily; and they were still working away methodically and with dignified deliberation when darkness hid them.

Most beaver houses are conical and round of outline. This house originally was slightly elliptical and measured forty-one feet in circumference. After enlargement it was almost a flattened ellipse and measured sixty-three feet in circumference. Generally I have found that small beaver houses are round and large ones elliptical.

One of the last large interesting works of the Moraine Colony was the making of a new pond. This was made alongside the main pond and about fifty feet distant from it. A low ridge separated the two. As it was nearly one hundred feet from the stream, a ditch or canal was dug from the stream, below the main pond, to fill it. The new pond was made for the purpose of reaching with a waterway an aspen grove on its farther shore.

The making of the dam showed more forethought than the getting of the water into the pond. With the exception of aspen, no dam-making material such as beavers commonly use was to be found. The population of the colony was now large, while aspen, the chief food-supply, was becoming scarce. Would the beavers see far enough ahead to realize this? Evidently they did; at any rate not a single precious aspen was used in making the dam. Close to the dam-site was a supply of young lodge-pole pines; but it is against the tradition of the beaver to cut green pines or spruces. Two of these lodge-poles were cut, but evidently these pitchy, smelly things were not to the beavers' taste and no more of them were used.

Not far away were scores of fire-killed trees, both standing and fallen. "Surely," I said to myself, when two dead chunks had been dragged into place, "they are not going to use this dead timber?" A beaver avoids gnawing dead wood; it is slow work, and besides is very hard on the teeth. Most of these dead trees were inconveniently large, and were fire-hardened and full of sand-filled weather-cracks; but contrary to all my years of observation, they, after long, hard labor, built an excellent dam from this material.

I have determined to do all I can to perpetuate the beaver, and I wish I could interest every man, woman, boy, and girl in the land to help in this. Beaver works are so picturesque and so useful to man that I trust this persistent practicer of conservation will not perish from the hills and mountains of our land. His growing scarcity is awakening some interest in him, and I hope and half believe that before many years every brook that is born on a great watershed will, as it goes swiftly, merrily singing down the slopes toward the sea, pass through and be steadied in a poetic pond that is made and will be maintained by our patient, persistent, faithful friend the beaver.

Harvest Time with Beavers

Harvest Time with Beavers

One autumn I watched a beaver colony and observed the customs of its primitive inhabitants as they gathered their harvest for winter. It was the Spruce Tree Colony, the most attractive one of the sixteen beaver municipalities on the big moraine on the slope of Long's Peak.

The first evening I concealed myself close to the beaver house by the edge of the pond. Just at sunset a large, aged beaver of striking, patriarchal appearance, rose in the water by the house and swam slowly, silently round the pond. He kept close to the shore and appeared to be scouting to see if an enemy lurked near. On completing the circuit of the pond, he climbed upon the end of a log that was thrust a few feet out into the water. Presently several other beaver appeared in the water close to the house. A few of these at once left the pond and nosed quietly about on the shore. The others swam about for some minutes and then joined their comrades on land, where all rested for a time.

Meanwhile the aged beaver had lifted a small aspen limb out of the water and was squatted on the log, leisurely eating bark. Before many minutes elapsed the other beaver became restless and finally started up the slope in a runway. They traveled slowly in single file and one by one vanished amid the tall sedge. The old beaver slipped noiselessly into the water, and a series of low waves pointed toward the house. It was dark as I stole away in silence for the night, and Mars was gently throbbing in the black water.

This was an old beaver settlement, and the numerous harvests gathered by its inhabitants had long since exhausted the near-by growths of aspen, the bark of which is the favorite food of North American beaver, though the bark of willow, cottonwood, alder, and birch is also eaten. An examination of the aspen supply, together with the lines of transportation,—the runways, canals, and ponds,—indicated that this year's harvest would have to be brought a long distance. The place it would come from was an aspen grove far up the slope, about a quarter of a mile distant from the main house, and perhaps a hundred and twenty feet above it. In this grove I cut three notches in the trunks of several trees to enable me to identify them whether in the garnered pile by a house or along the line of transportation to it.

The grounds of this colony occupied several acres on a terraced, moderately steep slope of a mountain moraine. Along one side rushed a swift stream on which the colonists maintained three but little used ponds. On the opposite side were the slope and summit of the moraine. There was a large pond at the bottom, and one or two small ponds, or water-filled basins, dotted each of the five terraces which rose above. The entire grounds were perforated with subterranean passageways or tunnels.

Beaver commonly fill their ponds by damming a brook or a river. But this colony obtained most of its water-supply from springs poured forth abundantly on the uppermost terrace, where the water was led into one pond and a number of basins. Overflowing from these, it either made a merry, tiny cascade or went to lubricate a slide on the short slopes which led to the ponds on the terrace below. The waters from all terraces were gathered into a large pond at the bottom. This pond measured six hundred feet in circumference. The crooked and almost encircling grass-grown dam was six feet high, and four hundred feet long. In its upper edge stood the main house, which was eighty feet high and forty feet in circumference. There was also another house on one of the terraces.

After notching the aspens I spent some time exploring the colony grounds and did not return to the marked trees until forty-eight hours had elapsed. Harvest had begun, and one of the largest notched trees had been felled and removed. Its gnawed stump was six inches in diameter and stood fifteen inches high. The limbs had been trimmed off, and a number of these lay scattered about the stump. The trunk, which must have been about eighteen feet long, had disappeared, cut into lengths of from three to six feet, probably, and started toward the harvest pile. Wondering for which house these logs were intended, I followed, hoping to trace and trail them to the house, or find them en route. From the spot where they were cut, they had evidently been rolled down a steep, grassy seventy-foot slope, at the bottom of this dragged an equal distance over a level stretch among some lodge-pole pines, and then pushed or dragged along a narrow runway that had been cut through a rank growth of willows. Once through the willows, they were pushed into the uppermost pond. They were taken across this, forced over the dam on the opposite side, and shot down a slide into the pond which contained the smaller house. Only forty-eight hours before, the little logs which I was following were in a tree, and now I expected to find them by this house. It was good work to have got them here so quickly, I thought. But no logs could be found by the house or in the pond! The folks at this place had not yet laid up anything for winter. The logs must have gone farther.

On the opposite side of this pond I found where the logs had been dragged across the broad dam and then heaved into a long, wet slide which landed them in a small, shallow harbor in the grass. From this point a canal about eighty feet long ran around the brow of the terrace and ended at the top of a long slide which reached to the big pond. This canal was new and probably had been dug especially for this harvest. For sixty feet of its length it was quite regular in form and had an average width of thirty inches and a depth of fourteen. The mud dug in making it was piled evenly along the lower side. Altogether it looked more like the work of a careful man with a shovel than of beaver without tools. Seepage and overflow water from the ponds above filled and flowed slowly through it and out at the farther end, where it swept down the long slide into the big pond. Through this canal the logs had been taken one by one. At the farther end I found the butt-end log. It probably had been too heavy to heave out of the canal, but tracks in the mud indicated that there was a hard tussle before it was abandoned.

A BEAVER CANAL
Length 334 feet, average depth 15 inches, average width 26 inches

The pile of winter supplies was started. Close to the big house a few aspen leaves fluttered on twigs in the water; evidently these twigs were attached to limbs or larger pieces of aspen that were piled beneath the surface. Could it be that the aspen which I had marked on the mountainside a quarter of a mile distant so short a time before, and which I had followed over slope and slide, canal and basin, was now piled on the bottom of this pond? I waded out into the water, prodded about with a pole, and found several smaller logs. Dragging one of these to the surface, I found there were three notches on it.

Evidently these heavy green tree cuttings had been sunk to the bottom simply by the piling of other similar cuttings upon them. With this heavy material in the still water a slight contact with the bottom would prevent the drifting of accumulating cuttings until a heavy pile could be formed. However, in deep or swift water I have noticed that an anchorage for the first few pieces was secured by placing these upon the lower slope of the house or against the dam.

Scores of aspens were felled in the grove where the notched ones were. They were trimmed, cut into sections, and limbs, logs, and all taken over the route of the one I had followed, and at last placed in a pile beside the big house. This harvest gathering went on for a month. All about was busy, earnest preparation for winter. The squirrels from the tree-tops kept a rattling rain of cones on the leaf-strewn forest floor, the cheery chipmunk foraged and frolicked among the withered leaves and plants, while aspens with leaves of gold fell before the ivory sickles of the beaver. Splendid glimpses, grand views, I had of this strange harvest-home. How busy the beavers were! They were busy in the grove on the steep mountainside; they tugged logs along the runways; they hurried them across the water-basins, wrestled with them in canals, and merrily piled them by the rude house in the water. And I watched them through the changing hours; I saw their shadowy activity in the starry, silent night; I saw them hopefully leave home for the harvest groves in the serene twilight, and I watched them working busily in the light of the noonday sun.

Most of the aspens were cut off between thirteen and fifteen inches above the ground. A few stumps were less than five inches high, while a number were four feet high. These high cuttings were probably made from reclining trunks of lodged aspens which were afterward removed. The average diameter of the aspens cut was four and one half inches at the top of the stump. Numerous seedlings of an inch diameter were cut, and the largest tree felled for this harvest measured fourteen inches across the stump. This had been laid low only a few hours before I found it, and a bushel of white chips and cuttings encircled the lifeless stump like a wreath. In falling, the top had become entangled in an alder thicket and lodged six feet from the ground. It remained in this position for several days and was apparently abandoned; but the last time I went to see it the alders which upheld it were being cut away. Although the alders were thick upon the ground, only those which had upheld the aspen had been cut. It may be that the beaver which felled them looked and thought before they went ahead with the cutting.

Why had this and several other large aspens been left uncut in a place where all were convenient for harvest? All other neighboring aspens were cut years ago. One explanation is that the beaver realized that the tops of the aspens were entangled and interlocked in the limbs of crowding spruces and would not fall if cut off at the bottom. This and one other were the only large ones that were felled, and the tops of these had been recently released by the overturning of some spruces and the breaking of several branches on others. Other scattered large aspens were left uncut, but all of these were clasped in the arms of near-by spruces.

It was the habit of these colonists to transfer a tree to the harvest pile promptly after cutting it down. But one morning I found logs on slides and in canals, and unfinished work in the grove, as though everything had been suddenly dropped in the night when work was at its height. Coyotes had howled freely during the night, but this was not uncommon. In going over the grounds I found the explanation of this untidy work in a bear track and numerous wolf tracks, freshly moulded in the muddy places.

After the bulk of the harvest was gathered, I went one day to the opposite side of the moraine and briefly observed the methods of the Island beaver colony. The ways of the two colonies were in some things very different. In the Spruce Tree Colony the custom was to move the felled aspen promptly to the harvest pile. In the Island Colony the custom was to cut down most of the harvest before transporting any of it to the pile beside the house. Of the one hundred and sixty-two trees that had been felled for this harvest, one hundred and twenty-seven were still lying where they fell. However, the work of transporting was getting under way; a few logs were in the pile beside the house, and numerous others were scattered along the canals, runways, and slides between the house and the harvest grove.

There was more wasted labor, too, in the Island Colony. This was noticeable in the attempts that had been made to fell limb-entangled trees that could not fall. One five-inch aspen had three times been cut off at the bottom. The third cut was more than three feet from the ground, and was made by a beaver working from the top of a fallen log. Still this high-cut aspen refused to come down and there it hung like a collapsed balloon entangled in tree-tops.

Before the white man came it is probable that beaver did most of their work in the day-time. But at present, except in the most remote localities, day work is perilous. Prowling hunters have compelled most beaver to work at night. The Spruce Tree Colony was an isolated one, and occasionally its members worked and even played in the sunshine. Each day I secluded myself, kept still, and waited; and on a few occasions watched them as they worked in the light.

One windy day, just as I was unroping myself from the shaking limb of a spruce, four beaver were plodding along in single file beneath. They had come out of a hole between the roots of the spruce. At an aspen growth about fifty feet distant they separated. Though they had been closely assembled, each appeared utterly oblivious of the presence of the others. One squatted on the ground by an aspen, took a bite of bark out of it and ate leisurely. By and by he rose, clasped the aspen with fore paws and began to bite chips from it systematically. He was deliberately cutting it down. The most aged beaver waddled near an aspen, gazed into its top for a few seconds, then moved away about ten feet and started to fell a five-inch aspen. The one rejected was entangled at the top. Presently the third beaver selected a tree, and after some trouble to get comfortably seated, or squatted, also began cutting. The fourth beaver disappeared and I did not see him again. While I was looking for this one the huge, aged beaver whose venerable appearance had impressed me the first evening appeared on the scene. He came out of a hole beneath some spruces about a hundred feet distant. He looked neither to right nor to left, nor up nor down, as he ambled toward the aspen growth. When about halfway there he wheeled suddenly and took an uneasy survey of the open he had traversed, as though he had heard an enemy behind. Then with apparently stolid indifference he went on leisurely, and for a time paused among the cutters, which did nothing to indicate that they realized his presence. He ate some bark from a green limb on the ground, moved on, and went into the hole beneath me. He appeared so large that I afterward measured the distance between the two aspens where he paused. He was not less than three and a half feet long and probably weighed fifty pounds. He had all his toes; there was no white spot on his body; in fact, there was neither mark nor blemish by which I could positively identify him. Yet I feel that in my month around the colony I beheld the patriarch of the first evening in several scenes of action.

ASPENS CUT BY BEAVER

Sixty-seven minutes after the second beaver began cutting he made a brief pause; then he suddenly thudded the ground with his tail, hurriedly took out a few more chips, and ran away, with the other two beaver a little in advance, just as his four-inch aspen settled over and then fell. All paused for a time close to the hole beneath me, and then the old beaver returned to his work. The one that had felled his tree followed closely and at once began on another aspen. The other beaver, with his aspen half cut off, went into the hole and did not again come out. By and by an old and a young beaver came out of the hole. The young one at once began cutting limbs off the recently felled aspen, while the other began work on the half-cut tree; but he ignored the work already done, and finally severed the trunk about four inches above the cut made by the other. Suddenly the old beaver whacked the ground and ran, but at thirty feet distant he paused and nervously thumped the ground with his tail, as his aspen slowly settled and fell. Then he went into the hole beneath me.

This year's harvest was so much larger than usual that it may be the population of this colony had been increased by the arrival of emigrants from a persecuted colony down in the valley. The total harvest numbered four hundred and forty-three trees. These made a harvest pile four feet high and ninety feet in circumference. A thick covering of willows was placed on top of the harvest pile,—I cannot tell for what reason unless it was to sink all the aspen below reach of the ice. This bulk of stores together with numerous roots of willow and water plants, which in the water are eaten from the bottom of the pond, would support a numerous beaver population through the days of ice and snow.

On the last tour through the colony everything was ready for the long and cold winter. Dams were in repair and ponds were brimming over with water, the fresh coats of mud on the houses were freezing to defy enemies, and a bountiful harvest was home. Harvest-gathering is full of hope and romance. What a joy it must be to every man or animal who has a hand in it! What a satisfaction, too, for all dependent upon a harvest, to know that there is abundance stored for all the frosty days!

The people of this wild, strange, picturesque colony had planned and prepared well. I wished them a winter unvisited by cruel fate or foe, and trusted that when June came again the fat and furry young beaver would play with the aged one amid the tiger lilies in the shadows of the big spruce trees.

Mountain-Top Weather

Mountain-Top Weather

The narrow Alpine zone of peaks and snow that forms the crest of the Rocky Mountains has its own individual elemental moods, its characteristic winds, its electrical and other peculiarities, and a climate of its own. Commonly its days are serene and sunny, but from time to time it has hail and snow and showers of wind-blown rain, cold as ice-water. It is subject to violent changes from clear, calm air to blizzard.

I have enjoyed these strange, silent heights in every season of the year. In climbing scores of these peaks, in crossing the passes, often on snowshoes, and in camping here and there on the skyline, I have encountered these climatic changes and had numerous strange experiences. From these experiences I realize that the transcontinental aviator, with this realm of peak and sky, will have some delightful as well as serious surprises. He will encounter stern conditions. He may, like a storm-defying bird, be carried from his course by treacherous currents and battle with breakers or struggle in vain in the monstrous, invisible maelstroms that beset this ocean of air. Of these skyline factors the more imposing are wind, cold, clouds, rain, snow, and subtle, capricious electricity.

High winds are common across the summits of these mountains; and they are most prevalent in winter. Those of summer, though less frequent and much more short-lived, are a menace on account of their fury and the suddenness with which they surprise and sweep the heights.

Early one summer, while exploring a wide alpine moorland above the timber-line, I—and some others—had an experience with one of those sudden stormbursts. The region was utterly wild, but up to it straggling tourists occasionally rode for a view of the surrounding mountain world. All alone, I was studying the ways of the wild inhabitants of the heights. I had spent the calm, sunny morning in watching a solitary bighorn that was feeding among some boulders. He was aged, and he ate as though his teeth were poor and walked as though afflicted with rheumatism. Suddenly this patriarch forgot his age and fled precipitately, with almost the speed of frightened youth. I leaped upon a boulder to watch him, but was instantly knocked headlong by a wild blast of wind. In falling I caught sight of a straw hat and a wrecked umbrella falling out of the sky. Rising amid the pelting gale of flung hail, ice-water, and snow, I pushed my way in the teeth of the storm, hoping for shelter in the lee of a rock-pile about a hundred yards distant. A lady's disheveled hat blew by me, and with the howl of the wind came, almost drowned, excited human utterances. Nearing the rock-pile, I caught a vague view of a merry-go-round of man and horse, then a glimpse of the last gyration, in which an elderly Eastern gentleman parted company with a stampeded bronco.

Five tourists had ridden up in the sunshine to enjoy the heights, and the suddenness and fierceness of the storm had thrown them into a panic and stampeded their horses. They were drenched and severely chilled, and they were frightened. I made haste to tell them that the storm would be brief. While I was still trying to reassure them, the clouds commenced to dissolve and the sun came out. Presently all were watching the majestic soaring of two eagles up in the blue, while I went off to collect five scattered saddle-ponies that were contentedly feeding far away on the moor.

Though the winter winds are of slower development, they are more prolonged and are tempestuously powerful. Occasionally these winds blow for days; and where they follow a fall of snow they blow and whirl this about so wildly that the air is befogged for several hundred feet above the earth. So violently and thickly is the powdered snow flung about that a few minutes at a time is the longest that one can see or breathe in it. These high winter winds come out of the west in a deep, broad stratum that is far above most of the surface over which they blow. Commonly a high wind strikes the western slope of the Continental Divide a little below the altitude of eleven thousand feet. This striking throws it into fierce confusion. It rolls whirling up the steeps and frequently shoots far above the highest peaks. Across the passes it sweeps, roars down the cañons on the eastern slope, and rushes out across the plains. Though the western slope below eleven thousand feet is a calm zone, the entire eastern slope is being whipped and scourged by a flood of wind. Occasionally the temperature of these winds is warm.

These swift, insistent winds, torn, intercepted, and deflected by dashing against the broken skyline, produce currents, counter-currents, sleepy eddies, violent vertical whirls, and milling maelstroms that are tilted at every angle. In places there is a gale blowing upward, and here and there the air pours heavily down in an invisible but almost crushing air-fall.

One winter I placed an air-meter in Granite Pass, at twelve thousand feet altitude on the slope of Long's Peak. During the first high wind I fought my way up to read what the meter said. Both the meter and myself found the wind exceeded the speed limit. Emerging above the trees at timber-line, I had to face the unbroken fury of the gale as it swept down the slope from the heights above. The region was barren of snow. The wind dashed me with sandblasts and pelted me with gravel volleys that were almost unbearable. My face and wrists were bruised, and blood was drawn in many places where the gravel struck.

WIND-BLOWN TREES AT TIMBER-LINE

Seeking rest and shelter from this persistent punishment, I approached a crag and when only a few yards away was struck and overturned by the milling air-current around it. The air was so agitated around this crag that its churnings followed me, like disturbed water, under and behind the large rock-fragments, where shelter was hoped for but only partly secured.

On the last slope below the meter the wind simply played with me. I was overthrown, tripped, knocked down, blown explosively off my feet and dropped. Sometimes the wind dropped me heavily, but just as often it eased me down. I made no attempt to stand erect; most of the time this was impossible and at all times it was very dangerous. Now and then the wind rolled me as I lay resting upon a smooth place. Advancing was akin to swimming a whirlpool or to wrestling one's way up a slope despite the ceaseless opposition of a vigorous, tireless opponent.

At last I crawled and climbed up to the buzzing cups of the meter. So swiftly were they rotating they formed a blurred circle, like a fast-revolving life-preserver. The meter showed that the wind was passing with a speed of from one hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and seventy miles an hour. The meter blew up—or, rather, flew to pieces—during a swifter spurt.

The wind so loudly ripped and roared round the top of the peak that I determined to scale the summit and experience its wildest and most eloquent efforts. All my strength and climbing knowledge were required to prevent my being literally blown out of converging rock channels through which the wind gushed; again and again I clung with all my might to avoid being torn from the ledges. Fortunately not a bruise was received, though many times this was narrowly avoided.

The top of the peak, an area of between three and four acres and comparatively level, was in an easy eddy, almost a calm when compared with the wind's activities below and near by. Apparently the wind-current collided so forcefully with the western wall of the peak that it was thrown far above the summit before recovering to continue its way eastward; but against the resisting spurs and pinnacles a little below summit-level the wind roared, boomed, and crashed in its determined, passionate onsweep.

The better to hear this grand uproar, I advanced to the western edge of the summit. Here my hat was torn off, but not quite grasped, by the upshooting blast. It fell into the swirl above the summit and in large circles floated upward at slow speed, rising directly above the top of the peak. It rose and circled so slowly that I threw several stones at it, trying to knock it down before it rose out of range. The diameter of the circle through which it floated was about one hundred and fifty feet; when it had risen five, or perhaps six, hundred feet above the summit it suddenly tumbled over and over as though about to fall, but instead of falling it sailed off toward the east as though a carrier pigeon hurrying for a known and definite place in the horizon.

Some of the gulf-streams, hell-gates, whirlpools, rough channels, and dangerous tides in the sea of air either are in fixed places or adjust themselves to winds from a different quarter so definitely that their location can be told by considering them in connection with the direction of the wind. Thus the sea of air may be partly charted and the position of some of its dangerous places, even in mountain-top oceans, positively known.

However, there are dangerous mountain-top winds of one kind, or, more properly, numerous local air-blasts, that are sometimes created within these high winds, that do not appear to have any habits. It would be easier to tell where the next thunderbolt would fall than where the next one of these would explode. One of these might be called a cannon wind. An old prospector, who had experienced countless high winds among the crags, once stated that high, gusty winds on mountain-slopes "sometimes shoot off a cannon." These explosive blasts touch only a short, narrow space, but in this they are almost irresistible.

Isolated clouds often soften and beautify the stern heights as they silently float and drift among peaks and passes. Flocks of these sky birds frequently float about together. On sunny days, in addition to giving a charm to the peaks, their restless shadows never tire of readjusting themselves and are ever trying to find a foundation or a place of rest upon the tempestuous topography of the heights below. Now and then a deep, dense cloud-stratum will cover the crests and envelop the summit slopes for days. These vapory strata usually feel but little wind and they vary in thickness from a few hundred to a few thousand feet. Sometimes one of these rests so serenely that it suggests an aggregation of clouds pushed off to one side because temporarily the sky does not need them elsewhere for either decorative or precipitative purposes. Now and then they do drop rain or snow, but most of the time they appear to be in a procrastinating mood and unable to decide whether to precipitate or to move on.

Commonly the upper surfaces of cloud-strata appear like a peaceful silver-gray sea. They appear woolly and sometimes fluffy, level, and often so vast that they sweep away beyond the horizon. Peaks and ridges often pierce their interminable surface with romantic continents and islands; along their romantic shores, above the surface of the picturesque sea, the airship could sail in safe poetic flight, though the foggy depths below were too dense for any traveler to penetrate.

One spring the snow fell continuously around my cabin for three days. Reports told that the storm was general over the Rocky Mountain region. Later investigations showed that that cloud and storm were spread over a quarter of a million square miles. Over this entire area there was made a comparatively even deposit of thirty inches of snow.

All over the area, the bottom, or under surface, of the cloud was at an altitude of approximately nine thousand feet. My cabin, with an altitude of nine thousand, was immersed in cloud, though at times it was one hundred feet or so below it. Fully satisfied of the widespread and general nature of the storm, and convinced of the comparatively level line of the bottom surface of the cloud, I determined to measure its vertical depth and observe its slow movements by climbing above its silver lining. This was the third day of the storm. On snowshoes up the mountainside I went through this almost opaque sheep's-wool cloud. It was not bitterly cold, but cloud and snow combined were blinding, and only a ravine and instinct enabled me to make my way.

At an altitude of about twelve thousand feet the depth of the snow became suddenly less, soon falling to only an inch or so. Within a few rods of where it began to grow shallow I burst through the upper surface of the cloud. Around me and above there was not a flake of snow. Over the entire storm-area of a quarter of a million square miles, all heights above twelve thousand had escaped both cloud and snow. The cloud, which thus lay between the altitudes of nine thousand and twelve thousand feet, was three thousand feet deep.

When I rose above the surface of this sea the sun was shining upon it. It was a smooth sea; not a breath of wind ruffled it. The top of Long's Peak rose bald and broken above. Climbing to the top of a commanding ridge, I long watched this beautiful expanse of cloud and could scarcely realize that it was steadily flinging multitudes of snowflakes upon slopes and snows below. Though practically stationary, this cloud expanse had some slight movements. These were somewhat akin to those of a huge raft that is becalmed in a quiet harbor. Slowly, easily, and almost imperceptibly the entire mass slid forward along the mountains; it moved but a short distance, paused for some minutes, then slowly slid back a trifle farther than it had advanced. After a brief stop the entire mass, as though anchored in the centre, started to swing in an easy, deliberate rotation; after a few degrees of movement it paused, hesitated, then swung with slow, heavy movement back. In addition to these shifting horizontal motions there was a short vertical one. The entire mass slowly sank and settled two or three hundred feet, then, with scarcely a pause, rose easily to the level from which it sank. Only once did it rise above this level.

During all seasons of the year there are oft-recurring periods when the mountains sit in sunshine and all the winds are still. In days of this kind the transcontinental passengers in glass-bottomed airships would have a bird's-eye view of sublime scenes. The purple forests, the embowered, peaceful parks, the drifted snows, the streams that fold and shine through the forests,—all these combine and cover magnificently the billowed and broken distances, while ever floating up from below are the soft, ebbing, and intermittent songs from white water that leaps in glory.

Though the summits of the Rocky Mountains are always cool, it is only in rare, brief times that they fall within the frigid spell of Farthest North and become cruelly cold. The climate among these mountain-tops is much milder than people far away imagine.

The electrical effects that enliven and sometimes illuminate these summits are peculiar and often highly interesting. Thunderbolts—lightning-strokes—are rare, far less frequent than in most lowland districts. However, when lightning does strike the heights, it appears to have many times the force that is displayed in lowland strokes. My conclusions concerning the infrequency of thunderbolts on these sky-piercing peaks are drawn chiefly from my own experience. I have stood through storms upon more than a score of Rocky Mountain summits that were upward of fourteen thousand feet above the tides. Only one of these peaks was struck; this was Long's Peak, which rises to the height of 14,256 feet above the sea.

Seventy storms I have experienced on the summit of this peak, and during these it was struck but three times to my knowledge. One of these strokes fell a thousand feet below the top; two struck the same spot on the edge of the summit. The rock struck was granite, and the effects of the strokes were similar; hundreds of pounds of shattered rock fragments were flung horizontally afar. Out of scores of experiences in rain-drenched passes I have record of but two thunderbolts. Both of these were heavy. In all these instances the thunderbolt descended at a time when the storm-cloud was a few hundred feet above the place struck.

During the greater number of high-altitude storms the cloud is in contact with the surface or but little removed from it. Never have I known the lightning to strike when the clouds were close to the surface or touching it. It is, however, common, during times of low-dragging clouds, for the surface air to be heavily charged with electrical fluid. This often is accompanied with strange effects. Prominent among these is a low pulsating hum or an intermittent buz-z-z-z, with now and then a sharp zit-zit! Sometimes accompanying, at other times only briefly breaking in, are subdued camp-fire cracklings and roarings. Falling snowflakes, during these times, are occasionally briefly luminous, like fireflies, the instant they touch the earth. Hair-pulling is the commonest effect that people experience in these sizzling electrical storms. There is a straightening of the hairs and apparently a sharp pull upon each. As John Muir has it, "You are sure to be lost in wonder and praise and every hair of your head will stand up and hum and sing like an enthusiastic congregation." Most people take very gravely their first experience of this kind; especially when accompanied, as it often is, with apparent near-by bee-buzzings and a purplish roll or halo around the head. During these times a sudden finger movement will produce a crackling snap or spark.

On rare occasions these interesting peculiarities become irritating and sometimes serious to one. In "A Watcher on the Heights," in "Wild Life on the Rockies," I have described a case of this kind. A few people suffer from a muscular cramp or spasm, and occasionally the muscles are so tensed that breathing becomes difficult and heart-action disturbed. I have never known an electrical storm to be fatal. Relief from the effects of such a storm may generally be had by lying between big stones or beneath shelving rocks. On one occasion I saw two ladies and four gentlemen lay dignity aside and obtain relief by jamming into a place barely large enough for two. In my own case, activity invariably intensified these effects; and the touching of steel or iron often had the same results. For some years a family resided upon the slope of Mt. Teller, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. Commonly during storms the stove and pipe were charged with fluid so heavily that it was a case of hands off and let dinner wait, and sometimes spoil, until the heavens shut off the current.

The sustaining buoyancy of the air to aerial things decreases with altitude. In this "light" air some motor machinery is less efficient than it is in the lowlands. It is probable that aviators will always find the air around uplifted peaks much less serviceable than this element upon the surface of the sea. But known and unknown dangers in the air will be mastered, and ere long the dangers to those who take flight through the air will be no greater than the dangers to those who go down to the sea in ships. Flying across the crest of the continent, above the crags and cañons, will be enchanting, and this journey through the upper air may bring to many the first stirring message from the rocks and templed hills.

Rob of the Rockies

Rob of the Rockies

Hurrying out of the flood-swept mountains in northern Colorado, in May, 1905, I came upon a shaggy black and white dog, hopelessly fastened in an entanglement of flood-moored barbed-wire fence that had been caught in a clump of willows. He had been carried down with the flood and was coated with earth. Masses of mud clung here and there to his matted hair, and his handsome tail was encased as though in a plaster cast. He was bruised, and the barbs had given him several cuts. One ear was slit, and a blood-clot from a cut on his head almost closed his left eye.

Had I not chanced upon him, he probably would have perished from hunger and slow torture. Though he must have spent twelve hours in this miserable barbed binding, he made no outcry. The barbs repeatedly penetrated his skin, as I untangled and uncoiled the wires from around his neck and between his legs. As he neither flinched nor howled, I did him the injustice to suppose that he was almost dead. He trusted me, and as I rolled him about, taking off that last thorny tangle, the slit ear, bloody muzzle, and muddy head could not hide from me an expression of gratitude in his intelligent face.

Returning from a camping-trip, and narrowly escaping drowning, too, I was a dirty vagabond myself. When the last wire dropped from the prisoner, he enthusiastically began to share his earth coating with me. He leaped up and half clasped me in his fore legs, at the same time wiping most of the mud off his head on one side of my face. Then he darted between my legs, racing about and occasionally leaping or flinging himself against me; each time he leaped, he twisted as he came up so that he struck me with his back, head, or side, and thus managed to transfer much of this fertile coat to me. He finally ended by giving several barks, and then racing to the near-by river for a drink and a bath. I, too, needed another cloudburst.

Just what kinds of dogs may have made his mixed ancestry could not be told. Occasionally I had a glimpse of a collie in him, but for all practical purposes he was a shepherd, and he frequently exhibited traits for which the shepherd is celebrated. I could never find out where he came from. It may be that the flood separated him from his master's team; he may have been washed away from one of the flooded ranches; or he may have been, as the stage-driver later told me, "a tramp dog that has been seen in North Park, Cheyenne, and Greeley." Home he may have left; master he may have lost; or tramp he may have been; but he insisted on going with me, and after a kindly though forceful protest, I gave in and told him he might follow.

The flood had swept all bridges away, and I was hurrying down the Poudre, hoping to find a place to cross without being compelled to swim. He followed, and kept close to my heels as I wound in and out among flood débris and willow-clumps. But I did not find a place that appeared shallow.

As it was necessary to cross, I patted my companion good-by, thinking he would not care to go farther, and waded in. He squatted by the water's edge and set up a howl. I stopped and explained to him that this was very bad crossing for an injured dog, and that we would better separate; but he only howled the more. He wanted to go with me, but was afraid to try alone.

Returning to the bank, I found a rope in the flood wreckage, tied this around his neck and waded in. He followed cheerfully, but swam with effort. When about half way across, and in the water up to my shoulders, I attached myself to a floating log lest the dog should weaken and need help. Within sixty or seventy feet of the desired bank we struck a stretch of swift, deep water, in which I was compelled to let the animal go and swim for the shore. My companion was swept down by the current, and the rope caught on a snag, entangling my legs so that I had to cut it or drown. The current swept poor doggie against some stranded wreckage in midstream. On this he climbed, while I struggled on to the bank.

I called to him to come on, but he only howled. Again I called, patted my knees, made friendly gesticulations, and did all I could think of to encourage him. Finally, I told him that if he would only start I would come part way and be ready to help him if he got into trouble. But he would not start. Not desiring the task of returning for him through the cold, strong current, and feeling in a hurry, I started on. He howled and then cried so piteously that I went back and towed him safely ashore.

That night some good people of the ranch house treated both of us kindly, and in the morning they wanted to keep my companion. I was willing that he should stay, for he would have a good place, and I was bound for Denver, where I feared some accident would befall him. But he growled and ran away when the man advanced to tie him. I started on afoot and he joined me, insisting on following.

All the time he had been with me his only thought appeared to be to stay with me. Game, dogs, horses, and people he saw and passed with expressionless face, except two or three times when he imagined I was in danger; then he was instantly alert for my defense. When the stage overtook us, and stopped to let me in, he leaped in also, and squatted by the driver with such an air of importance that I half expected to see him take the lines and drive.

I lost him in my rush to make the train at the station. He could, of course, have kept with me had he been without fear, or if he had really so desired. As the train pulled out, I saw him start down-street with an air of unconscious confidence that told of wide experience. He was a tramp dog.

The next time I saw him was several months later, in Leadville, some two hundred miles from where he left me. Where, in the mean time, he may have rambled, what towns he may have visited, or what good days or troubles he may have had, I have no means of knowing.

I came walking into Leadville with snowshoes under my arm, from two weeks' snowshoeing and camping on the upper slopes of the Rockies. The ends of broken tree limbs had torn numerous right-angled triangles in my clothes, my soft hat was unduly slouchy, and fourteen nights' intimate association with a camp-fire, along with only an infrequent, indifferent contact with water, had made me a sight to behold,—for dogs, anyway. On the outskirts, one snarly cur noticed me and barked; in a few minutes at least a dozen dogs were closely following and making me unwelcome to their haunts. They grew bold with time, numbers, and closer inspection of me. They crowded unpleasantly close. Realizing that if one of them became courageous enough to make a snap at my legs, all might follow his example, I began to sidle out of the middle of the street, intending to leap a fence close by and take refuge in a house.

Before I could realize it, they were snapping right and left at me, and howling as they collided with the tail of a snowshoe which I used as a bayonet. We were close to the fence, I trying to find time to turn and leap over; but I was too busy, and, without assistance, it is probable that I should have been badly bitten.

Suddenly there was something like a football mix-up at my feet, then followed a yelping of curs, with tucked tails dashing right and left to avoid the ferocious tackles of a shaggy black and white dog. It was Rob, who was delighted to see me, and whom I assured that he was most welcome.

He had been seen about Leadville for two or three months, and several persons had bits of information concerning him. All agreed that he had held aloof from other dogs, and that he quietly ignored the friendly greetings of all who made advances. He was not quarrelsome, but had nearly killed a bulldog that had attacked a boy. On one occasion, a braying burro so irritated him that he made a savage attack on the long-eared beast, and sent him pell-mell down the street, braying in a most excited manner.

The drivers of ore wagons reported that he occasionally followed them to and from the mines up the mountainside. At one livery-stable he was a frequent caller, and usually came in to have a drink; but no one knew where he ate or slept. One day a little mittened girl had left her sled, to play with him. He had responded in a most friendly manner, and had raced, jumped, circled, and barked; at last he had carried her slowly, proudly on his back.

I grew greatly interested in his biography, and wondered what could have shaped his life so strangely. In what kind of a home was his pretty puppyhood spent? Why was he so indifferent to dogs and people, and had he left or lost a master?

Early next spring, after vainly trying to follow the trail of explorer Pike, I struck out on a road that led me across the Wet Mountain valley up into Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When well up into the mountains, I saw a large dog walking slowly toward me, and at once recognized him as Rob. Although clean and well-fed, he held his head low and walked as though discouraged. The instant he scented me, however, he leaped forward and greeted me with many a wag, bark, and leap. He was one hundred miles from Leadville, and fully three hundred miles from the flood scene on the Poudre. He faced about and followed me up into the alpine heights, far beyond trail. We saw a number of deer and many mountain sheep; these he barely noticed, but a bear that we came upon he was most eager to fight.

The second night in the mountains, near Horne's Peak, we had an exciting time with a mountain lion. Coyotes howled during the evening, much to the dog's annoyance. It was a cold night, and, being without bedding, I had moved the fire and lain down upon the warm earth. The fire was at my feet, a crag rose above my head, and Rob was curled up against my back. A shrill, uncanny cry of the lion roused me after less than an hour's sleep. The dog was frightened and cuddled up close to my face. The lion was on a low terrace in the crag, not many yards distant. Having been much in the wilds alone and never having been attacked by lions, I had no fear of them; but none had ever been so audacious as this one. I began to think that perhaps it might be true that a lion would leap upon a dog boldly at night, even though the dog lay at the feet of his master. I kept close watch, threw stones at suspicious shadows on the cliff terraces, and maintained a blazing fire.

Long before sunrise we started down the mountain. Both Rob and I were hungry, and although we startled birds and rabbits, Rob paid not the least attention to them. At noon, on Madano Pass, I lay down for a sleep and used Rob for a pillow. This he evidently enjoyed, for he lay still with head stretched out and one eye open.

At mid-afternoon we met a sheep-herder who was carrying a club. I had seen this man elsewhere, and, on recognizing me as he came up, he waved his club by the way of expressing gladness. Rob misinterpreted this demonstration, and dragged me almost to the frightened herder before I could make him understand that this ragged, unwashed, club-carrying fellow had no ill wishes for me.

I had in mind to climb Sierra Blanca the following day, and hoped to spend the night in a ranch house on the northern slope of this great peak. Toward sundown Rob and I climbed through a pole fence and entered the ranch house-yard. Round a corner of the house came a boy racing on a willow switch pony. On seeing us, he stopped, relaxed his hold on the willow and started for Rob. How happily he ran, holding out both eager hands! The dog sprang playfully backward, and began to dodge and bark as the boy laughingly and repeatedly fell while trying to catch him. Just as I entered the house, Rob was trying to climb to the top of the fence after his new playmate.

That night Rob was agreeable with every one in the house, and even had a romp with the cat. These people wanted to keep him, and offered money and their best saddle-horse. I knew that with them he would have kind treatment to the day of his death. I wanted him, too, but I knew the weeks of mountain-exploring just before me would be too hard for him. "Rob is a free dog," I said, "and is, of his own choice, simply traveling with me as a companion. I cannot sell or give him away. I like him, but, if he wants to stay, it will be a pleasure to me to leave him."

The next morning every one was wondering whether Rob would go or stay. The dog had made up his mind. He watched me prepare to leave with keenest interest, but it was evident that he had planned to stay, and his boy friend was very happy. As I passed through the yard, these two were playing together; at the gate I called good-by, at which Rob paused, gave a few happy barks, and then raced away, to try to follow his mountain boy to the top of the old pole fence.

Sierra Blanca

Sierra Blanca

I was rambling alone on snowshoes, doing some winter observations in the alpine heights of the Sangre de Cristo range. It was miles to the nearest house. There was but little snow upon the mountains, and, for winter, the day was warm. I was thirsty, and a spring which burst forth among the fragments of petrified wood was more inviting than the water-bottle in my pocket. The water was cool and clear, tasteless and, to all appearances, pure.

As I rose from drinking, a deadly, all-gone feeling overcame me. After a few seconds of this, a violent and prolonged nausea came on. Evidently I had discovered a mineral spring! Perhaps it was arsenic, perhaps some other poison. Poison of some kind it must have been, and poisonous mineral springs are not unknown.

The sickness was very like seasickness, with a severe internal pain and a mental stimulus added. After a few minutes I partly recovered from these effects and set off sadly for the nearest house of which I had heard. This was eight or ten miles distant and I hoped to find it through the guidance of a crude map which a prospector had prepared for me. I had not before explored this mountainous section.

SIERRA BLANCA IN WINTER

The gulches and ridges which descended the slope at right angles to my course gave me a rough sea which kept me stirred up. I advanced in tottering installments; a slow, short advance would be made on wobbly legs, then a heave-to, as pay for the advance gained.

Now and then there was smoothness, and I took an occasional look at severe Sierra Blanca now looming big before me. It was mostly bare and brown with a number of icy plates and ornaments shining in the sun.

At last in the evening light, from the top of a gigantic moraine, I looked down upon the river and a log ranch-house nestling in a grassy open bordered with clumps of spruces. An old lady and gentleman with real sympathy in their faces stood in the doorway and for a moment watched me, then hastened to help me from the pole fence to the door.

While giving them an incoherent account of my experience, I fell into a stupor, and although I had evidently much to say concerning drinking and apparently showed symptoms of too much drink, these old people did not think me drunk. Waking from a fantastic dream I heard, "Does he need any more sage tea?" The Western pioneers have faith in sage tea and many ascribe to it all the life-saving, life-extending qualities usually claimed for patent medicines. The following morning I was able to walk about, while my slightly bloated, bronzed face did not appear so badly. Altogether, I looked much better than I felt.

These good old people declared that they had not seen better days, but that they were living the simple life from choice. They loved the peace of this isolated mountain home and the companionship of the grand old peak. In the Central States the wife had been a professor in a State school, while the husband had been a State's Attorney.

The nearest neighbor was four miles downstream, and no one lived farther up the mountain. The nearest railroad station was seventy rough mountain-road miles away. It appeared best to hasten to Denver, but two days in a jarring wagon to reach the railroad seemed more than I could endure. I had not planned even to try for the top of Colorado's highest peak in midwinter, but the way across Sierra Blanca was shorter and probably much easier than the way around. Across the range, directly over the shoulder of Sierra Blanca, lay historic Fort Garland. It was only thirty miles away, and I determined to cross the range and reach it in time for the midnight train. On hearing this resolution the old people were at first astonished, but after a moment they felt that they at last knew who I was.

"You must be the Snow Man! Surely no one but he would try to do this in winter."

They, with scores of other upland-dwellers, had heard numerous and wild accounts of my lone, unarmed camping-trips and winter adventures in the mountain snows.

The misgivings of the old gentleman concerning the wisdom of my move grew stronger when he perceived how weak I was, as we proceeded on mule-back up the slope of Sierra Blanca. The ice blocked us at timber-line, and in his parting handclasp I felt the hope and fear of a father who sees his son go away into the world. He appeared to realize that I was not only weak, but that at any moment I might collapse. He knew the heights were steep and stern, and that in the twenty-odd miles to Fort Garland there was neither house nor human being to help me. Apparently he hoped that at the last moment I would change my mind and turn back.

Up the northern side of the peak I made my way. Now and then it was necessary to cut a few steps in the ice-plated steeps. The shoulder of the peak across which I was to go was thirteen thousand feet above the sea, and in making the last climb to this it was necessary to choose between a precipitous ice-covered slope and an extremely steep rock-slide,—more correctly a rock glacier. I picked my way up this with the greatest caution. To start a rock avalanche would be easy, for the loose rocks lay insecure on a slope of perilous steepness. From time to time in resting I heard the entire mass settling, snarling, and grinding its way with glacier slowness down the steep.

Just beneath the shoulder the tilting steepness of this rocky débris showed all too well that the slightest provocation would set a grinding whirlpool of a stone river madly flowing. The expected at last happened when a boulder upon which I lightly leaped settled and then gave way. The rocks before made haste to get out of the way, while those behind began readjusting themselves. The liveliest of foot-work kept me on top of the now settling, hesitating, and inclined-to-roll boulder. There was nothing substantial upon which to leap.

Slowly the heavy boulder settled forward with a roll, now right, now left, with me on top trying to avoid being tumbled into the grinding mill hopper below. At last, on the left, a sliding mass of crushed, macadamized rock offered a possible means of escape. Not daring to risk thrusting a leg into this uncertain mass, I allowed myself to fall easily backwards until my body was almost horizontal, and then face upwards I threw myself off the boulder with all my strength. The rock gave a great plunge, and went bounding down the slope, sending the smaller stuff flying before at each contact with the earth.

Though completely relaxed, and with the snowshoes on my back acting as a buffer, the landing was something of a jolt. For a few seconds I lay limp and spread out, and drifted slowly along with the slow-sliding mass of macadam. When this came to rest, I rose up and with the greatest concern for my foundation, made my way upwards, and at last lay down to breathe and rest upon the solid granite shoulder of Sierra Blanca.

In ten hours the midnight train would be due in Fort Garland, and as the way was all downgrade, I hoped that my strength would hold out till I caught it. But, turning my eyes from the descent to the summit, I forgot the world below, and also my poison-weakened body. Suddenly I felt and knew only the charm and the call of the summit. There are times when Nature completely commands her citizens. A splendid landscape, sunset clouds, or a rainbow on a near-by mountain's slope,—by these one may be as completely charmed and made as completely captive as were those who heard the music of Orpheus' lyre. My youthful dream had been to scale peak after peak, and from the earthly spires to see the scenic world far below and far away. All this had come true, though of many trips into the sky and cloudland, none had been up to the bold heights of Blanca. Thinking that the poisoned water might take me from the list of those who seek good tidings in the heights, I suddenly determined to reach those wintry wonder-heights while yet I had the strength. I rose from relaxation, laid down my snowshoes, and started for the summit.

Blanca is a mountain with an enormous amount of material in it,—enough for a score of sizable peaks. Its battered head is nearly two thousand feet above its rugged shoulder. The sun sank slowly as I moved along a rocky skyline ridge and at last gained the summit.

Beyond an infinite ocean of low, broken peaks, sank the sun. It was a wonderful sunset effect in that mountain-dotted, mountain-walled plain, the San Luis Valley. Mist-wreathed peaks rose from the plain, one side glowing in burning gold, the other bannered with black shadows. The low, ragged clouds dragged slanting shadows across the golden pale. A million slender silver threads were flung out in a measureless horizontal fan from the far-away sun. The sunset from the summit of Sierra Blanca was the grandest that I have ever seen. The prismatic brilliancy played on peak and cloud, then changed into purple, fading into misty gray, while the light of this strong mountain day slowly vanished in the infinite silence of a perfect mountain night.

Then came the serious business of getting down and off the rough slope and out of the inky woods before darkness took complete possession. After intense vigilance and effort for two hours, I emerged from the forest-robed slope and started across the easy, sloping plain beneath a million stars.

The night was mild and still. Slowly, across the wide brown way, I made my course, guided by a low star that hung above Fort Garland. My strength ran low, and, in order to sustain it, I moved slowly, lying down and relaxing every few minutes. My mind was clear and strangely active. With pleasure I recalled in order the experiences of the day and the wonderful sunset with which it came triumphantly to a close. As I followed a straight line across the cactus-padded plains, I could not help wondering whether the Denver physicians would tell me that going up to see the sunset was a serious blunder, or a poison-eliminating triumph. However, the possibility of dying was a thought that never came.

At eleven o'clock, when instinctively and positively I felt that I had traveled far enough, I paused; but from Fort Garland neither sound nor light came to greet me in the silent, mysterious night. I might pass close to the low, dull adobes of this station without realizing its presence. So confident was I that I had gone far enough that I commenced a series of constantly enlarging semicircles, trying to locate in the darkness the hidden fort. In the midst of these, a coyote challenged, and a dog answered. I hastened toward the dog and came upon a single low adobe full of Mexicans who could not understand me. However, their soft accents awakened vivid memories in my mind, and distinctly my strangely stimulated brain took me back through fifteen years to the seedling orange groves in the land of to-morrow where I had lingered and learned to speak their tongue. An offer of five dollars for transportation to Fort Garland in time for the midnight train sent Mexicans flying in all directions as though I had hurled a bomb.

Two boys with an ancient, wobbling horse and buckboard landed me at the platform as the headlight-glare of my train swept across it. The big, good-natured conductor greeted me with "Here's the Snow Man again,—worse starved than ever!"

The Wealth of the Woods

The Wealth of the Woods

The ancients told many wonderful legends concerning the tree, and claimed for it numerous extraordinary qualities. Modern experience is finding some of these legends to be almost literal truth, and increasing knowledge of the tree shows that it has many of those high qualities for which it was anciently revered. Though people no longer think of it as the Tree of Life, they are beginning to realize that the tree is what enables our race to make a living and to live comfortably and hopefully upon this beautiful world.

Camping among forests quickly gives one a home feeling for them and develops an appreciation of their value. How different American history might have been had Columbus discovered a treeless land! The American forests have largely contributed to the development of the country. The first settlers on the Atlantic coast felled and used the waiting trees for home-building; they also used wood for fuel, furniture, and fortifications. When trading-posts were established in the wilderness the axe was as essential as the gun. From Atlantic to Pacific the pioneers built their cabins of wood. As the country developed, wood continued to be indispensable; it was used in almost every industry, and to-day it has a more general use than ever.

SPANISH MOSS AT LAKE CHARLES, LOUISIANA

Forests enrich us in many ways. One of these is through the supply of wood which they produce,—which they annually produce. Wood is one of the most useful materials used by man. Wood is the home-making material. It gives good cheer to a million hearthstones. How extensively it is used for tools, furniture, and vehicles, for mine timbers and railroad development! The living influences which forests exert, the environments which they create and maintain, are potent to enable man best to manage and control the earth, the air, and the water, so that these will give him the greatest service and do him the least damage.

Forests are water-distributors, and everywhere their presence tends to prevent both floods and extreme low water; they check evaporation and assist drainage; they create soil; they resist sudden changes of temperature; they break and temper the winds; they do sanitary work by taking impurities from the air; they shelter and furnish homes for millions of birds which destroy enormous numbers of weed-seed and injurious insects. Lastly, and possibly most important, forests make this earth comfortable and beautiful. Next to the soil, they are the most useful and helpful of Nature's agencies.

Forests are moderators of climate. They heat and cool slowly. Their slow response to change resists sudden changes, and, consequently, they mitigate the rudeness with which sudden changes are always accompanied. Sudden changes of temperature are often annoying and enervating to man, and frequently do severe damage to domestic plants and animals. They sometimes have what may be called an explosive effect upon the life-tissues of many plants and animals which man has domesticated and is producing for his benefit. Many plants have been domesticated and largely so specialized that they have been rendered less hardy. With good care, these plants are heavy producers, but, to have from them a premium harvest each year, they need the genial clime, the stimulating shelter, and the constant protection which only forests can supply. Closely allied to changes of temperature is the movement of the air. In the sea every peninsula is a breakwater: on land every grove is a windbreak. The effect of the violence of high winds on fruited orchards and fields of golden grain may be compared to the beatings of innumerable clubs. Hot waves and cold waves come like withering breaths of flame and frost to trees and plants. High winds may be mastered by the forest. The forest will make even the Storm King calm, and it will also soften, temper, and subdue the hottest or the coldest waves that blow. Forests may be placed so as to make every field a harbor.

The air is an invisible blotter that is constantly absorbing moisture. Its capacity to evaporate and absorb increases with rapidity of movement. Roughly, six times as much water is evaporated from a place that is swept by a twenty-five-mile wind as from a place in the dead calm of the forest. The quantity of water evaporated within a forest or in its shelter is many times less than is evaporated from the soil in an exposed situation. This shelter and the consequent decreased evaporation may save a crop in a dry season. During seasons of scanty rainfall the crops often fail, probably not because sufficient water has not fallen, but because the thirsty winds have drawn from the soil so much moisture that the water-table in the soil is lowered below the reach of the roots of the growing plants.

In the arid West the extra-dry winds are insatiable. In many localities their annual capacity to absorb water is greater than the annual precipitation of water. In "dry-farming" localities, the central idea is to save all the water that Nature supplies, to prevent the moisture from evaporating, to protect it from the robber winds. Forests greatly check evaporation, and Professor L. G. Carpenter, the celebrated irrigation engineer, says that forests are absolutely necessary for the interests of irrigated agriculture. Considering the many influences of the forest that are beneficial to agriculture, it would seem as though ideal forest environments would be the best annual assurance that the crops of the field would not fail and that the soil would most generously respond to the seed-sower.

So well is man served in the distribution of the waters and the management of their movements by the forests, that forests seem almost to think. The forest is an eternal mediator between winds and gravity in their never-ending struggle for the possession of the waters. The forest seems to try to take the intermittent and ever-varying rainfall and send the collected waters in slow and steady stream back to the sea. It has marked success, and one may say it is only to the extent the forest succeeds in doing this that the waters become helpful to man. Possibly they may need assistance in this work. Anyway, so great is the evaporation on the mountains of the West that John Muir says, "Cut down the groves and the streams will vanish." Many investigators assert that only thirty per cent of the rainfall is returned by the rivers to the sea. Evaporation—winds—probably carry away the greater portion of the remainder. Afforestation has created springs and streams, not by increasing rainfall, although the forests may do this, but by saving the water that falls,—by checking evaporation. On some exposed watersheds the winds carry off as much as ninety per cent of the annual precipitation. It seems plain that wider, better forests would mean deeper, steadier streams. Forests not only check evaporation, but they store water and guard it from the greed of gravity. The forest gets the water into the ground where a brake is put upon the pull of gravity. Forest floors are covered with fluffy little rugs and pierced with countless tree-roots. So all-absorbing is the porous, rug-covered forest floor that most of the water that falls in the forest goes into the ground; a small percentage may run off on the surface, but the greater part settles into the earth and seeps slowly by subterranean drainage, till at last it bubbles out in a spring some distance away and below the place where the raindrops came to earth. The underground drainage, upon which the forest insists, is much slower and steadier than the surface drainage of a treeless place. The tendency of the forest is to take the water of the widely separated rainy days and dole it out daily to the streams. The forest may be described as a large, ever-leaking reservoir.

The forest is so large a reservoir that it rarely overflows, and seepage from it is so slow that it seldom goes dry. The presence of a forest on a watershed tends to give the stream which rises thereon its daily supply of water, whether it rains every day or not. By checking evaporation, the forest swells the volume of sea-going water in this stream, and thereby increases its water-power and makes it more useful as a deep waterway. Forests so regulate stream-flow that if all the watersheds were forested but few floods would occur. Forest-destruction has allowed many a flood to form and foam and to ruin a thousand homes. A deforested hillside may, in a single storm, loose the hoarded soil of a thousand years. Deforestation may result in filling a river-channel and in stopping boats a thousand miles downstream. By bringing forests to our aid, we may almost domesticate and control winds and waters!

One of the most important resources is soil,—the cream of the earth, the plant-food of the world. Scientists estimate that it takes nature ten thousand years to create a foot of soil. This heritage of ages, though so valuable and so slowly created, may speedily be washed away and lost. Forests help to anchor it and to hold it in productive places. Every tree stands upon an inverted basket of roots and rootlets. Rains may come and rains may go, but these roots hold the soil in place. The soil of forest-covered hillsides is reinforced and anchored with a webwork of the roots and rootlets of the forest. Assisting in the soil-anchorage is the accumulation of twigs and leaves, the litter rugs on the forest floor. These cover the soil, and protect it from both wind and water erosion. The roots and rugs not only hold soil, but add to the soil matter by catching and holding the trash, silt, dust, and sediment that is blown or washed into the forest. The forest also creates new soil, enriches the very land it is using. Trash on a forest floor absorbs nitrogenous matter from the air; every fallen leaf is a flake of a fertilizer; roots pry rocks apart, and this sets up chemical action. Acids given off by tree-roots dissolve even the rocks, and turn these to soil. A tree, unlike most plants, creates more soil than it consumes. In a forest the soil is steadily growing richer and deeper.

Birds are one of the resources of the country. They are the protectors, the winged watchmen, of the products which man needs. Birds are hearty eaters, and the food which they devour consists mostly of noxious weed-seed and injurious insects. Several species of birds feed freely upon caterpillars, moths, wood-lice, wood-borers, and other deadly tree-enemies. Most species of birds need the forest for shelter, a home, and a breeding-place; and, having the forest, they multiply and fly out into the fields and orchards, and wage a more persistent warfare even than the farmer upon the insistent and innumerable crop-injuring weeds, and also the swarms of insatiable crop-devouring insects. Birds work for us all the time, and board themselves most of the time. Birds are of inestimable value to agriculture, but many of these useful species need forest shelter. So to lose a forest means at the same time to lose the service of these birds.

The forest is a sanitary agent. It is constantly eliminating impurities from the earth and the air. Trees check, sweep, and filter from the air quantities of filthy, germ-laden dust. Their leaves absorb the poisonous gases from the air. Roots assist in drainage, and absorb impurities from the soil. Roots also give off acids, and these acids, together with the acids released by the fallen, decaying leaves, have a sterilizing effect upon the soil. Trees help to keep the earth sweet and clean, and water which comes from a forested watershed is likely to be pure. Many unsanitary areas have been redeemed and rendered healthy by tree-planting.

Numerous are the products and the influences of the trees. Many medicines for the sick-room are compounded wholly or in part from the bark, the fruit, the juices, or the leaves of trees. Fruits and nuts are at least the poetry of the dining-table. One may say of trees what the French physician said of water: needed externally, internally, and eternally! United we stand, but divided we fall, is the history of peoples and forests. Forest-destruction seems to offer the speediest way by which a nation may go into decline or death. "Without forests" are two words that may be written upon the maps of most depopulated lands and declining nations.

When one who is acquainted with both history and natural history reads of a nation that "its forests are destroyed," he naturally pictures the train of evils that inevitably follow,—the waste and failure that will come without the presence of forests to prevent. He realizes that the ultimate condition to be expected in this land is a waste of desolate distances, arched with a gray, sad sky beneath which a few lonely ruins stand crumbling and pathetic in the desert's drifting sand.

The trees are our friends. As an agency for promoting and sustaining the general welfare, the forest stands preëminent. A nation which appreciates trees, which maintains sufficient forests, and these in the most serviceable places, may expect to enjoy regularly the richest of harvests; it will be a nation of homes and land that is comfortable, full of hope, and beautiful.

The Forest Fire

The Forest Fire

Forest fires led me to abandon the most nearly ideal journey through the wilds I had ever embarked upon, but the conflagrations that took me aside filled a series of my days and nights with wild, fiery exhibitions and stirring experiences. It was early September and I had started southward along the crest of the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado. All autumn was to be mine and upon this alpine skyline I was to saunter southward, possibly to the land of cactus and mirage. Not being commanded by either the calendar or the compass, no day was to be marred by hurrying. I was just to linger and read all the nature stories in the heights that I could comprehend or enjoy. From my starting-place, twelve thousand feet above the tides, miles of continental slopes could be seen that sent their streams east and west to the two far-off seas. With many a loitering advance, with many a glad going back, intense days were lived. After two great weeks I climbed off the treeless heights and went down into the woods to watch and learn the deadly and dramatic ways of forest fires.

A FOREST FIRE ON THE GRAND RIVER

This revolution in plans was brought about by the view from amid the broken granite on the summit of Long's Peak. Far below and far away the magnificent mountain distances reposed in the autumn sunshine. The dark crags, snowy summits, light-tipped peaks, bright lakes, purple forests traced with silver streams and groves of aspen,—all fused and faded away in the golden haze. But these splendid scenes were being blurred and blotted out by the smoke of a dozen or more forest fires.

Little realizing that for six weeks I was to hesitate on fire-threatened heights and hurry through smoke-filled forests, I took a good look at the destruction from afar and then hastened toward the nearest fire-front. This was a smoke-clouded blaze on the Rabbit-Ear Range that was storming its way eastward. In a few hours it would travel to the Grand River, which flowed southward through a straight, mountain-walled valley that was about half a mile wide. Along the river, occupying about half the width of the valley, was a picturesque grassy avenue that stretched for miles between ragged forest-edges.

There was but little wind and, hoping to see the big game that the flames might drive into the open, I innocently took my stand in the centre of the grassy stretch directly before the fire. This great smoky fire-billow, as I viewed it from the heights while I was descending, was advancing with a formidable crooked front about three miles across. The left wing was more than a mile in advance of the active though lagging right one. As I afterward learned, the difference in speed of the two wings was caused chiefly by topography; the forest conditions were similar, but the left wing had for some time been burning up a slope while the right had traveled down one. Fire burns swiftly up a slope, but slowly down it. Set fire simultaneously to the top and the bottom of a forest on a steep slope and the blaze at the bottom will overrun at least nine-tenths of the area. Flame and the drafts that it creates sweep upward.

Upon a huge lava boulder in the grassy stretch I commanded a view of more than a mile of the forest-edge and was close to where a game trail came into it out of the fiery woods. On this burning forest-border a picturesque, unplanned wild-animal parade passed before me.

Scattered flakes of ashes were falling when a herd of elk led the exodus of wild folk from the fire-doomed forest. They came stringing out of the woods into the open, with both old and young going forward without confusion and as though headed for a definite place or pasture. They splashed through a beaver pond without stopping and continued their way up the river. There was no show of fear, no suggestion of retreat. They never looked back. Deer straggled out singly and in groups. It was plain that all were fleeing from danger, all were excitedly trying to get out of the way of something; and they did not appear to know where they were going. Apparently they gave more troubled attention to the roaring, the breath, and the movements of that fiery, mysterious monster than to the seeking of a place of permanent safety. In the grassy open, into which the smoke was beginning to drift and hang, the deer scattered and lingered. At each roar of the fire they turned hither and thither excitedly to look and listen. A flock of mountain sheep, in a long, narrow, closely pressed rank and led by an alert, aggressive bighorn, presented a fine appearance as it raced into the open. The admirable directness of these wild animals put them out of the category occupied by tame, "silly sheep." Without slackening pace they swept across the grassy valley in a straight line and vanished in the wooded slope beyond. Now and then a coyote appeared from somewhere and stopped for a time in the open among the deer; all these wise little wolves were a trifle nervous, but each had himself well in hand. Glimpses were had of two stealthy mountain lions, now leaping, now creeping, now swiftly fleeing.