At half-past eight, the party was in the saddle again, Mills at the head, and started up the trail, along the lake sh.o.r.e, toward the gleaming white field of Blackfeet Glacier and the red, snow-spangled cone of Mount Jackson.
"Where are we bound to-day?" some one asked.
"Only seven miles, to Gunsight Lake," the Ranger answered. "I thought maybe you"d like an easy stage to-day, and this afternoon those that wanted to could go up on the glacier."
"The man is almost intelligent!" Mrs. Jones exclaimed. "Only seven miles--that sounds more reasonable to me."
They were seven easy miles, too, up a streamside by an easy grade, a good deal of the way through tall timber, and past a beaver dam, the first one Joe had ever seen. It was made of small logs, twigs and gra.s.ses, all matted together, and plastered neatly and tightly with mud, and must have been a hundred feet long and perhaps three feet high, so that a considerable little pond had backed up behind it, in which, rising above the water, were the huts, which looked like larger and better built muskrat huts. Joe pulled down his horse to a slow walk as he pa.s.sed, and saw the little ca.n.a.ls the beavers had made, leading from the bed of the stream back into the willow and aspen swamp. He figured out that the chief reason the beavers build dams is so they can flood such a grove of young willows, aspens, etc., and float out the tiny logs they cut (the young shoots, with tender bark), to their houses, where they store them for winter food. Later he asked Mills, and found he was right. When the beavers can find deep water, with food trees right on the bank, they will not bother to make dams.
Joe lingered till Val yelled at him to "get a move on," hoping he might see one of the little animals at work, but the beaver works mostly at night when he has to be above water, and not one was now to be seen.
It was a short, easy trip to Gunsight Lake, and they reached the open meadow at its foot by eleven o"clock. The lake, a smallish one, lay at the bottom of a great horseshoe amphitheatre. If you will imagine the Harvard stadium two or three miles long instead of two or three hundred yards, with sides almost precipitous and three thousand feet high, and a green lake where the football gridiron is, you have a picture of Gunsight. The closed end of the horseshoe was the Divide, and that was where the Gunsight Pa.s.s lay, over which they would climb to-morrow. The north side was Fusillade Mountain, the south side was the great shoulder of Mount Jackson (the summit being invisible from this point). The meadow where they were to camp was just out at the open end, where they could see around the shoulder of Jackson to the glittering field of Blackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park, hung on the upper slopes of the Divide, to the southwest, and where, behind them, rose the huge cliffs of Citadel Mountain, which is exactly like old Fort Sumter or the old fort on Governor"s Island, enlarged to the "_nth_" power. (If you don"t know what "enlarged to the _nth_ power" means, it"s either because you have not studied your algebra, or have not reached algebra yet.) The floor of the meadow was full of wild flowers, especially the great, tall white spikes of the Indian basket gra.s.s, and full, too, of low balsams and pines.
Close to the sh.o.r.e of the lake lay a big pile of lumber, old, twisted iron beds, half a cook-stove, and the like.
"What on earth happened here?" asked Mrs. Elkins.
"Avalanche," said the Ranger. "Was a chalet here--Gunsight chalet. In the winter of 1915-16 a snowslide started down Jackson, and this is what"s left."
"Oh, heavens!" Mrs. Jones cried, looking up the red precipices of Jackson to the snow-fields far above, "do you suppose there"ll be another one?"
"We don"t often have "em in July, marm," said Mills briefly, "but you never can tell," and he winked at Joe.
They now pitched tents near the lake, and Joe set about cooking a hot lunch, for he had plenty of time. While the water was heating, he got some boards from the pile of wreckage, and made a rough table and benches. Then he started out to gather some flowers. Lucy and Alice saw him, and came to help. The three of them, in ten minutes, found thirty different kinds of flowers, all in a s.p.a.ce of two or three hundred feet, and made three bunches, which they stood in tin cans on the table, and then put little pine boughs around the cans "to camouflage them," as Joe said.
"I told you Joe was a poet," Lucy said to Alice. "I"ll bet he"ll produce a table-cloth in a minute."
"Can"t do that," Joe laughed, "unless you"ll climb up and get me one of those up there----" and he gestured toward the white snow-fields far up the cliffs, which did, indeed, look like huge sheets, or table-cloths, flung on the rocky ledges to dry.
As soon as the tents were pitched, and lunch was over, Mills said:
"Well, who wants to go up to Blackfeet Glacier?"
"I do!" from Bob.
"I do!" from Lucy.
"I do!" from Alice.
"I do, if I can go on horseback," from Mr. Elkins.
"Same as Elkins," from Mr. Jones.
"I want to sit still," from Mrs. Jones.
"I couldn"t leave Mrs. Jones all alone," from Mrs. Elkins.
"You haven"t spoken, Joe," said Lucy.
Poor Joe--how he wanted to climb up and see a real glacier! But he smiled bravely and cheerfully.
"I shall have to stay and get dinner," he answered.
"Oh, that"s too bad! I just _know_ you"re dying to see the glacier. Mr.
Mills, wouldn"t we be back in time for Joe to get dinner, if he went?"
"Well, we might be, if dinner was a bit late, and you didn"t have a roast turkey," the Ranger said.
"Well, I move we have late dinner, and take Joe along. All in favor, say aye."
Bob and Alice yelled "Aye!" and Mr. Elkins said, "Jones and I are paired, so it"s a vote."
Joe tried to say some word of thanks to Lucy, but he couldn"t manage it.
Besides, he had no time, for Mrs. Jones broke in:
"Well, I"d like to know if you expect Mrs. Elkins and me to stay here all alone?"
"You might be getting the dinner, Martha," her husband grinned.
"Val will stay in camp," Mills said. "He"s fed up on glaciers, anyhow, ain"t you, Val?"
The young cowboy nodded. "You can have "em all," he said, "and welcome."
So Joe found himself in the small party headed for Blackfeet Glacier, as soon as he had put his stew to simmer over a small fire, which Val promised to keep going. Mills took three of the strongest ropes from the packs, and they set off up the steep, rough trail climbing the shoulder of Jackson. They soon had a superb view below them, first of the meadow, with their own tents like white dots in it, and then back down the canon to St. Mary Lake, and the great pink and gray pyramid of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But it was not long before every one stopped looking at the view, and paid entire attention to the trail. This was a side trail, not one of the regular tourist highways, and it was not built for comfort. It was tremendously steep, and very rough, more like a flight of high, irregular stone steps than a path.
"Oh, I think this is terrible on the poor horses!" Lucy said, as her horse scrambled up a rock, and she had to cling to his mane to stick on the saddle.
"Get out and walk, then," Mills called back. "Grab hold of your horse"s tail, and let him pull you up."
"Say, what you giving us?" said Bob. "Think I want to go down the hill again backwards?"
Mills laughed. "Think these horses are mules?" he answered. "See, this is the way."
He got off his horse, grabbed it by the tail, and to everybody"s surprised amus.e.m.e.nt, the horse started up, with the Ranger scrambling behind him, half climbing, half being pulled along.
Every one else got off, too, and in single file, each person clinging to his horse"s tail, they began the ascent again. The horses, being considerably longer legged than men, climbed faster up the high steps than a man could do alone, but with the horse"s tail to hang on to, you could manage to keep up. Everybody laughed at first, yelling at one another, but in three minutes the yells had ceased, and in five, the laughter. No one had any breath left for that. If Joe had thought, he probably would have been frightened, for he was certainly disobeying the doctor, but he was having too good a time to remember doctors, and as even the lack of breath did not make him cough, he had nothing to remind him. Panting, covered with perspiration, the two congressmen were about ready to quit. They presently reached a more level place, a high upland meadow covered with flowers, and mounting again rode up and across this, and came at last near the lower edge of a great snow-field, which stretched away southward for three miles, broken here and there by peninsulas and islands of rock, and stretched upward clear to the summit of the Divide over their heads, at an angle of about forty-five degrees at first, but much steeper near the top.
"The biggest glacier in the Park," said Mills.
"Where?" said Mr. Elkins. "All I see is snow."
"I know it--too bad, but we had so much snow last winter it"s not melted off yet. But take my word for it, that"s all ice underneath."
"Hooray, let"s climb out on it!" Bob shouted.
"Not for me--I"ve climbed enough to-day," his father said, still puffing.
It ended with the two congressmen resting in the meadow, while Mills, d.i.c.k the guide, Joe, the girls, and Bob, climbed up some way over the rocks without any trail, and reached at length a place where the vast snow-field seemed to be sliding down past them, like a huge, silent river. Of course, it did not move, but it gave that illusion.