CHAPTER XXI--The Climb Up the Tower of Chief Mountain, the IndianRelic on the Summit and An Eagle's Nest
How Mills managed to wake up just at the time he wanted to, without anyalarm clock, the scouts never were able to fathom, but he always could.He was awake and shaking them at four-thirty the next day. Joe was up onthe instant, and putting on his outer clothes, but Tom groaned when hetried to move, and fell back into his blankets with an "Ouch!"
"Your sick friend strikes me as better than you are," Mills taunted him.
"Why wouldn't he be? He's been weeks in the saddle now," Tom retorted,stung into sitting up. "I'll be all right by to-morrow--you see if I'mnot."
"Well, I'm sorry you're too lame to climb Chief to-day," Mills said,with a wink at Joe.
That brought Tom out of his blankets entirely, and on to his feet. "Toolame, your grandmother!" he cried. "I'd like to see you get my ropewithout me!"
"Oh, it's been climbed without a rope, many a time," Mills laughed.
Tom was up now, and thoroughly awake, and began to see the joke. Hegrinned rather sheepishly, and went out of the tent with his towel.Meanwhile, Joe beat reveille on a frying-pan, and lit his fire.
By six o'clock breakfast was eaten, the horses packed again, and theparty on its way. They went up the trail but a short distance, and thenturned sharp to the north, and began at once to climb the long spinewhich connects Chief Mountain with the main range to the west. It was alittle over a mile to the summit of this spine, rising from 6,000 feetto 7,400. A horse does not trot up such a grade, but neither does hehave to climb like a goat. In an hour, they were at the summit, andcould look at last not only eastward, along the ridge, to the limestonetower of Chief which was their goal, but down the slope on the northside to the valley of the Belly River, and across it to the easternshoulders of Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, 10,438 feet.
Here, in the open, grassy ridges at timber-line, the horses wereunsaddled and unpacked, so if they lay down to roll, they could do nodamage, and the party, with Tom's rope and the cameras, set out alongthe ridge due east toward the towering cliff of Chief, which looked likea huge castle battlement, or watch-tower. It was not over a two-milewalk to the shale pile at the base of the summit precipice, by an easygrade, though the going was sometimes rough. The topographical map Joecarried showed that they rose from 7,400 feet to over 8,000, at the topof the shale pile, and as the mountain is 9,056 feet high, that leftabout a thousand feet of cliff for the final ascent.
Chief Mt.--the Sentinel of the Prairies]
At the top of the shale they paused, while Mills and Tom consulted. Thisgreat limestone rock was not such a hard proposition as parts of theIceberg Lake cliff, and after a careful survey of the ground, theydecided the best way to handle six people on the rope was to send aleader up with the end, to anchor where he could find strong anchorage,and then let the rest use it as a rail, rather than fastening it aroundeach person's waist.
Tom went in number one position, with the Ranger as number two, and Joewas stationed at the bottom, to brace and throw a loop around anybodywho might, by chance, slip. In many places, Mills played Tom out nearlythe whole length of the rope, where the incline was sufficiently off theperpendicular, and the rest had almost a hundred feet of rope rail toclimb by. In only a few places was there real vertical climbing, andthose as the summit was neared. Before noon they were all over the lastpitch, on the summit.
Robert Crimmins ran to the outer edge of this summit at once, and lookedout over the vast green prairie, stretching mile on endless mile to theeast, like waves of the sea, and shouted.
"Father, come here!" he called. "Say, this is just like riding on thebowsprit of a tremendous ship!"
Everybody hurried over, to feel the same sensation, all except Joe. "Itell you what it feels like to me," he said. "It feels as if I was onthe front edge of the earth crust when it rode up and over the otheredge. This must be the very end of the overthrust."
"That's so," Mr. Crimmins agreed. "I've been reading up on thisgeological formation. This cliff under us--it must be three thousandfeet down to the shale slide--was the front edge of the overthrust. Youcan see that. The Belly River has carved away one side, Kennedy Creekthe other, but this old lump of limestone has resisted all thebombardments of frost and water, glacier and storm, and the weather hascarved it into a watch-tower of the prairies, an outpost sentinel of theGreat Divide."
["Some speech!" Tom whispered to Joe.]
But Joe did not laugh. He felt exactly what Mr. Crimmins meant, and itwas very thrilling. It seemed as if he could see exactly what happenedmyriads of years ago when the earth cracked, and one edge of the greatcrust was shoved forward on to the prairie, and as if he could see whathad happened since, to carve the crust into peaks and valleys.
Mills, meanwhile, had been walking about. Now he called to them, andthey all went over where he stood, and saw him pointing to the bleachedskull of a large animal on the ground.
"What's that?" the men asked.
"Buffalo," he answered.
"How on earth did it get up here?" said Mr. Crimmins. "There are onlythree things, without wings, which can climb this cliff, surely,--goats,mountain sheep, and men. You needn't try to tell me a buffalo couldclimb up here!"
"Shan't try," the Ranger answered. "A Blackfoot brought that up."
"What for?" Joe asked.
"To use for a pillow while he was getting his medicine. You know, whenan Indian boy gets about the age of you scouts, he has to take a sweatbath (made by putting hot stones in a closed lodge and pouring water on'em) to purify himself, and then he goes off to some wild, lonely placeand just waits there, naked, without any food, till he has a vision.This vision tells him what his special 'medicine' is to be, which willbring him good luck. Old Yellow Wolf told me we'd find the skull uphere. He knew the brave that brought it up for a pillow. He said theyoung Indian stayed four days on the summit before he got his'medicine.'"
"Say, if I stayed up here four days, naked, I'd need some medicine whenI got down!" young Crimmins laughed. "Let's take the skull for asouvenir."
"Oh, no!" Joe cried, forgetting that he was only a cook and guide forthe party. "That would be--be desecration! Let it stay here, where theIndian left it!"
Mr. Crimmins looked at him sharply but kindly. "Joe is right," he said."Let it stay here as a record of a race too fast vanishing. I like tothink of that naked Indian boy, all alone, climbing this great rocktower and for four whole days sitting up here far above the world,waiting for a vision from his gods. You wouldn't catch one of ourAmerican boys doing anything like that. Yet we think we are vastlysuperior to the Indians!"
"But his vision, after all, probably came because he was dizzy for lackof food, and it was a superstition that it could furnish him a'medicine' to bring good luck," Mr. Taylor said.
"Superstition or not," the other replied, "it represented the instinctto go out alone, and meditate on solemn things. Didn't it, Joe?"
"Yes, sir!" Joe answered, his own heart full of enthusiasm for thispicture of the lone, naked Indian on top of the watch-tower of theprairies.
But Tom and Robert Crimmins, who had less imagination, had wandered awayto an edge of the cliff, to toss stones over into the depths below, andsuddenly the rest heard them shouting, and ran to the edge.
One of the stones they had thrown over had landed on a ledge someseventy-five feet below, and scared off a golden eagle, which was nowsailing away from the cliff face with tremendous beats of his hugewings, each beat taking him up, it seemed, fifty feet, till soon he wassoaring in circles out over the prairie, and sweeping back, with wingsat rest, far overhead, evidently alarmed but intent on finding out whathad disturbed him.
Crawling to the edge, and looking over, the party could see a big neston 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 therewere some little eagles in it!"
"You might be sorry if there we
re," Mills answered briefly, as Tomfastened the rope under his arms. "I'm not even sure of the bird now theyoung are out. Here, take my revolver, and if it comes at you, let himhave it."
Tom put his camera in one pocket, the automatic in the other, and themen above lowered him over the edge, where he swung almost free, and hadto kick the cliffside with his feet to keep himself from spinning andkeep his face outward. The eagle still circled above, now and thenswooping nearer till they could hear the wing beats, but it wasevidently afraid to attack. Tom finally reached the ledge, landing, infact, with both feet in the nest. It was a huge affair of sticks, linedwith dry prairie grass, almost as high as his shoulders, and four feetacross. He climbed out, watching the eagle with one eye, and took acouple of snapshots of it, then picked up some of the bones and examinedthem, grasped the rope just above his face, to ease the strain under hisarms, and gave the signal to those above.
As he began to rise from the nest, the eagle swooped ever nearer, nowlower than the men on the summit, so they could see its vast wingspread, its brown back and rusty colored head and neck.
Tom let go of the rope with his hands, and got the pistol out of hispocket. To tell the truth, he was beginning to get uncomfortable. As theeagle swooped within fifty feet of him, and he could see its glintingeyes, he lifted the gun and fired. Naturally, you cannot shoot a rapidlymoving object with a pistol, while you yourself are dangling andspinning on the end of a rope, with any great precision of aim. He didnot hit the bird, but he frightened it. With an incredibly quick changeof tack, it tilted up on one wing, soared outward and upward, twohundred feet overhead, and far out from the cliff. The men hauled Tomback over the edge.
"Well, I got my picture!" Tom exclaimed. "Say, but that's a whale of anest! And side of it is a little skeleton, either of a kid or a babylamb, and lots of small bones like rabbits and birds, and a fresh, halfeaten ground squirrel. That's what the old eagle was eating when wedisturbed him, I guess. Gee, it's a regular bone yard down there. Don'tsmell 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, hisface still white.
"I didn't myself," Tom admitted. "Wish I'd had the nerve to photographthe old birdie instead of shooting at him."
"They don't like to have their pictures taken," said Mills, with a shortlaugh.
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, toone side, to get a photograph of the whole party on the cliffside. Afterhe had snapped it, he kept on along the ledge a way, just to see whereit went to. After a hundred feet, it turned a sharp corner, and as Joerounded this turn, he suddenly was face to face with a big old ram! Hewas quite as astonished as the sheep, but he instinctively pointed hiscamera and snapped the bulb, just as the ram lowered its head as if tobutt.
Joe flattened himself against the wall, not wishing to be knocked offfifty feet to the slope below. But the sheep decided not to butt.Instead, he turned tail, dashed a few feet back on the ledge, and wentover head first. Joe ran to the spot in time to see him land on a littleshelf twenty feet lower down, bounce off that to a ledge still lower,and then trot around an easy slope and disappear from sight. Not havinghad time to roll his film, he couldn't take another picture. But hereturned to the party in triumph. Tom might have a picture of an eagle'snest, but now he had one of a live bighorn! The fact that his camera wasfocused for a hundred feet, as he had just taken the party on the ropewhen he met the sheep, and so his close-up of the old ram would besomewhat blurry, did not occur to him till long after, when the film wasdeveloped.
After a quick lunch, mainly of Charlie Chaplin sandwiches, the horseswere packed again, and they descended the north slope of the ridge, byan easy grade, getting rapidly into timber, and after five miles or soreached the valley of the Belly River, turned up that, and presentlymade camp at the mouth of the Glenns Lakes, two long, narrow, greenlakes reaching in toward the Divide, with the towering walls ofCleveland, which they had seen clearly from Chief, rising right out ofthese 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 wecould 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'llcamp here to-night, and if he's still under to-morrow, we can go overAhern Pass to Flat Top, and then try him from the west side. That's theside they usually go up, anyhow."
So they pitched their tents in a meadow by the Belly River, with theclouds gradually shredding out overhead till they finally wrapped thetower 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 thestars, or the tops of those great walls towering up overhead, it was alonely spot. As Joe was dropping to sleep he heard a coyote barkingsomewhere out near the horses, a weird, sad sound, like the coughinglaugh of an idiot. He shivered at the sound still more, and tried toroll his blanket tighter.
"But you've got to get used to it, old scout, if you are going to be aforest ranger," he told himself.
Certainly it did not trouble Mills, who was already sound asleep.