One of the stones they had thrown over had landed on a ledge some seventy-five feet below, and scared off a golden eagle, which was now sailing away from the cliff face with tremendous beats of his huge wings, each beat taking him up, it seemed, fifty feet, till soon he was soaring in circles out over the prairie, and sweeping back, with wings at rest, far overhead, evidently alarmed but intent on finding out what had disturbed him.
Crawling to the edge, and looking over, the party could see a big nest on the ledge below, with white things in it, and beside it, like bones.
"I"m going to have a photograph of that!" Tom cried. "Gee, I wish there were some little eagles in it!"
"You might be sorry if there were," Mills answered briefly, as Tom fastened the rope under his arms. "I"m not even sure of the bird now the young are out. Here, take my revolver, and if it comes at you, let him have it."
Tom put his camera in one pocket, the automatic in the other, and the men above lowered him over the edge, where he swung almost free, and had to kick the cliffside with his feet to keep himself from spinning and keep his face outward. The eagle still circled above, now and then swooping nearer till they could hear the wing beats, but it was evidently afraid to attack. Tom finally reached the ledge, landing, in fact, with both feet in the nest. It was a huge affair of sticks, lined with dry prairie gra.s.s, almost as high as his shoulders, and four feet across. He climbed out, watching the eagle with one eye, and took a couple of snapshots of it, then picked up some of the bones and examined them, grasped the rope just above his face, to ease the strain under his arms, and gave the signal to those above.
As he began to rise from the nest, the eagle swooped ever nearer, now lower than the men on the summit, so they could see its vast wing spread, its brown back and rusty colored head and neck.
Tom let go of the rope with his hands, and got the pistol out of his pocket. To tell the truth, he was beginning to get uncomfortable. As the eagle swooped within fifty feet of him, and he could see its glinting eyes, he lifted the gun and fired. Naturally, you cannot shoot a rapidly moving object with a pistol, while you yourself are dangling and spinning on the end of a rope, with any great precision of aim. He did not hit the bird, but he frightened it. With an incredibly quick change of tack, it tilted up on one wing, soared outward and upward, two hundred feet overhead, and far out from the cliff. The men hauled Tom back over the edge.
"Well, I got my picture!" Tom exclaimed. "Say, but that"s a whale of a nest! And side of it is a little skeleton, either of a kid or a baby lamb, and lots of small bones like rabbits and birds, and a fresh, half eaten ground squirrel. That"s what the old eagle was eating when we disturbed him, I guess. Gee, it"s a regular bone yard down there. Don"t smell very good, either. I don"t think I care for eagles much."
"I didn"t care for that one, when he was coming at you!" Joe said, his face still white.
"I didn"t myself," Tom admitted. "Wish I"d had the nerve to photograph the old birdie instead of shooting at him."
"They don"t like to have their pictures taken," said Mills, with a short laugh.
After this excitement, the descent of the mountain began. Half-way down, Joe left the rope, at a wide ledge, and went some distance along it, to one side, to get a photograph of the whole party on the cliffside. After he had snapped it, he kept on along the ledge a way, just to see where it went to. After a hundred feet, it turned a sharp corner, and as Joe rounded this turn, he suddenly was face to face with a big old ram! He was quite as astonished as the sheep, but he instinctively pointed his camera and snapped the bulb, just as the ram lowered its head as if to b.u.t.t.
Joe flattened himself against the wall, not wishing to be knocked off fifty feet to the slope below. But the sheep decided not to b.u.t.t.
Instead, he turned tail, dashed a few feet back on the ledge, and went over head first. Joe ran to the spot in time to see him land on a little shelf twenty feet lower down, bounce off that to a ledge still lower, and then trot around an easy slope and disappear from sight. Not having had time to roll his film, he couldn"t take another picture. But he returned to the party in triumph. Tom might have a picture of an eagle"s nest, but now he had one of a live bighorn! The fact that his camera was focused for a hundred feet, as he had just taken the party on the rope when he met the sheep, and so his close-up of the old ram would be somewhat blurry, did not occur to him till long after, when the film was developed.
After a quick lunch, mainly of Charlie Chaplin sandwiches, the horses were packed again, and they descended the north slope of the ridge, by an easy grade, getting rapidly into timber, and after five miles or so reached the valley of the Belly River, turned up that, and presently made camp at the mouth of the Glenns Lakes, two long, narrow, green lakes reaching in toward the Divide, with the towering walls of Cleveland, which they had seen clearly from Chief, rising right out of these lakes, but now, they saw to their sorrow, going up into clouds.
"I thought so," Mills said. "Bad weather. It don"t look to me as if we could tackle Cleveland to-morrow. I wanted to try him from this side, too--go up on that long shoulder that comes down south, and then east, toward us. We could get up on that and make a base camp. Well, we"ll camp here to-night, and if he"s still under to-morrow, we can go over Ahern Pa.s.s to Flat Top, and then try him from the west side. That"s the side they usually go up, anyhow."
So they pitched their tents in a meadow by the Belly River, with the clouds gradually shredding out overhead till they finally wrapped the tower of Chief, and hid it from sight, and the cold grew uncomfortable, so that everybody save Joe set about chopping a big supply of wood.
Night came early under the cloud mantle, and with no glimpse of the stars, or the tops of those great walls towering up overhead, it was a lonely spot. As Joe was dropping to sleep he heard a coyote barking somewhere out near the horses, a weird, sad sound, like the coughing laugh of an idiot. He shivered at the sound still more, and tried to roll his blanket tighter.
"But you"ve got to get used to it, old scout, if you are going to be a forest ranger," he told himself.
Certainly it did not trouble Mills, who was already sound asleep.
CHAPTER XXII--A Blizzard on Flat Top--The Camp is Christened "Valley Forge"
The next day the mountains were still under. It wasn"t raining, but the clouds were a dark, gun metal color, and seemed to rest like heavy smoke on the rocks overhead.
"Nothing doing," said Mills. "They may be over for two days yet, and it will surely rain. We"ll keep the trail over Ahern Pa.s.s, and make Flat Top to-day. All out!"
And it was a strange day that followed. The trail was none too good, with much fallen timber to drive the packhorses around for the first two or three miles, and it very soon got up into a wild, desolate, narrow canon under the southern wall of Mount Merritt, with the water of Lake Elizabeth beside the path, looking in this gray light under the lowering clouds a sort of dead, chalky green. Beyond Lake Elizabeth the canon grew steeper and narrower, the cliffs of Mount Merritt went sheer up into the clouds, and on the other side of the valley rose the equally steep walls that were the reverse side of the Iceberg Lake cliffs Tom had scaled. But the tops both of Merritt and these cliffs were hidden in cloud, that swirled and raised and lowered as the upper wind currents. .h.i.t it. When they reached Lake Helen, at the head of the canon, where the trail began to switchback up the wall of the Divide, they could see, just under the clouds, poised, it seemed, almost over their heads, no less than four glaciers, one of them apparently hanging on a shelf and ready to fall off at any moment. In fact, a huge cake as big as a house did fall off, and crashed down with a great roar to the rocks below, even as they watched.
"The mountain gnomes are bombarding us!" Mr. Crimmins laughed.
They went steadily and steeply up, on the switchbacks, and reached the top of the Divide at noon. But half an hour before they got to the Divide they were in the clouds, in a thick, damp, chilling fog, that was not rain and yet covered their clothes with drops of moisture, made their hands wet and cold, and of course obscured every vestige of a view.
"Well," said the Ranger, "here we are on the backbone of the world. Over there is Heaven"s Peak. Just to the left, only a mile away, Tom, is the top of the Iceberg Lake head wall. If it was clear, you could take Joe over and show him where you climbed. But I guess as it is we"ll get down as fast as we can, and not even wait for lunch."
"Anything to get out of this," the men said, blowing on their wet, numb fingers.
So they dropped down on the west side of the Divide, getting out of the cloud below timber-line, and stopped while Joe made hot coffee. Then they pushed on down still farther, picked up a better trail in the deep woods in a canon beside a stream--Mineral Creek Canon; and turning sharp north, began slowly and gradually to climb again. It was the kind of a day when n.o.body does much talking, and even the horses seemed to plug dejectedly along. After two or three miles, however, they began to go up more rapidly, out of deep timber, into a region of meadows and low balsams. Joe was the first to smell the balsams, and sniffed eagerly.
"I"m going to have a real bed to-night," he called to Mills, "if you don"t look. I know it"s against the rules to cut bough beds in the Park."
"I won"t look, if you won"t tell," Mills called back. "We have to make that rule to protect the trees, but way up here in the wilds Uncle Sam won"t miss a few twigs, I guess."
They were now nearly under the clouds again. To their right a steep debris pile rose, and ended in a jagged cliff wall, which disappeared in the vapor. To the left was a wooded slope, and ahead the trail climbed sharply to a ridge which could barely be seen under the clouds.
"We"re almost at the north end of Flat Top Mountain," the Ranger said.
"That cliff to the right is the Divide, and dead ahead that ridge you see is the Divide turning sharp left and running across to the western range. From here on into Canada the western range is the watershed. We could climb to the top of that ridge--only half a mile, and camp on the Divide, if you want to."
"And spend the night in the cloud? Excuse me!" Mr. Crimmins said. "This is bad enough."
"All right--all off," the Ranger answered.
He called to Joe and Tom, and the three of them pitched the two tents in a sheltered spot, in the centre of a grove of balsams about twenty feet tall.
"And peg "em down hard," he said. "Anything may come out of those clouds to-night. Now, Tom, get a good big supply of wood, and stack it up dry, under a pack cover, while I turn out the horses."
While Joe was getting supper, the three tourists gathered balsam boughs for beds, following Mills" orders to take only a few twigs from any one tree.
"It"s against the rules," he said, "but we may need to sleep as warm as we can to-night."
"I believe you," Robert Crimmins replied, blowing on his numb fingers.
Tom, meanwhile, combed the region all around for dead wood. The supply was none too large, for they were perilously close to timber-line; and under the cloud darkness was coming on early, to make the job harder.
But he finally found a large dead tree, down in a sheltered hollow by the stream, and got four or five good logs out of that, and a lot of smaller stuff. The two tents were pitched facing each other, with a camp-fire and Joe"s fire pit between, and with the surrounding evergreens for a windbreak and the tent flaps open to catch the heat, they were pretty comfortable that evening, though every one wore his sweater, and Joe and Tom, who had brought their mackinaws, were glad enough to put them on, too.
n.o.body undressed that night at all, except to take off his boots and put on an extra pair of socks instead. The wind was rising steadily, the tents shook, the evergreens over them sighed and whistled, and Joe lay awake for the first time since he had been in the Park, with a curious feeling that something was going to happen.
He got to sleep at last, but he woke up presently--it seemed to him that he woke up immediately--and peering through the tent flap saw no sign of a fire. At least, he thought, the embers ought still to be glowing. He slipped out of his blankets as softly as he could, climbed over Mills, who was sleeping nearest the entrance, and started to unbuckle the flap.
As he did so, a gust of wind hit the tent, half lifting it off its pole, and blew the flap wildly in. As it blew in, something soft and cold and stinging hit Joe"s face. Snow! He stuck out his head for an instant, and all he could see was a kind of swirling, waving, hissing white darkness.
It was bitter cold, too, and the fire was out. Dimly he could see the outline of the other tent, and the roof of it was white with drift. No use trying to build up the fire in that! He fought the wind to close the flap again.
But the swirl of the snow in his face had waked the Ranger.
"What"s the matter?" he said.
"A blizzard," Joe replied, as another gust of wind strained the canvas and rattled the guy ropes.
"I thought something would come out of this," said Mills. "Hang it, we ought to have camped lower down. I"d rather be drowned than frozen."