On the hottest summer day (and the temperature, like everything Californian, was generous—114 degrees in the shade being not at all unusual) they would strip themselves of all but their war paint and feathers, build a fire in a cave, and dance around it. These convolutions began slowly and rhythmically, gradually getting faster and faster, until, at the height of the ecstasy, with wild war whoops they would dash into the water of the McCloud River, whose average temperature was forty degrees.
One day, during work, a crowbar was needed. George Campbell, a Yankee whom I had heard was married to an Indian woman, came to me and asked if I would walk up to his home in the woods, a matter of nine miles, and fetch one down, telling me I could take my time and have breakfast with his family. I should have remembered one or two of George’s characteristics and been wary. He used to come in to meals, look his hands all over, and say: “Well, what won’t rub off won’t eat off.” Also, I remember one day noticing him scratch his thigh. I asked, “Got a flea?” He answered: “Flea? Think I’m a Digger Injun? No, it’s a louse.”
However, I disregarded these small pleasantries and went for the crowbar. There on one side of the tepee was a dead fire, and in it sat the Indian grandmother, ninety years old, entirely naked, and spilling the ashes over her ugly, brown shriveled legs. Some distance away was the wife, rather good-looking, cooking salmon at another fire. When it was done she rubbed it up into meal which made a sort of pemmican when dry. In the large bowl, into which she put this when ground, sat a naked and very dirty baby, quietly amusing himself in the midst of the family dinner! I took my crowbar and departed breakfastless.
Henry Casey, a young architect from Richardson’s office in New York, was the cause of my going to the north of California. We met in San Francisco, where he was building some houses, and as the doctor had ordered him to lead an outdoor life, we planned to make a camp in the wilds. I went up in the spring and he joined me in August. Casey was suffering from tuberculosis, and the rough life and high altitude were supposed to be his only salvation. We were two foolish tenderfoot boys, and our amateur attempts were dramatic and almost disastrous—for Casey.
The camp—no tent or cabin, but only a brush shelter—was pitched in a curve of the falls of the McCloud River, which flowed through a gorge, making the volume of water deeper than it was wide. We planned to live by hunting and fishing, with the addition of one or two staple foods, and helped by the large bloodhound I had purchased in one of the towns. All went well for awhile until it began to rain; Casey came down with a violent attack of pleurisy, and our hunting dog proved to be the type that would run back three weeks into the past unless we pointed his nose in the right direction. Poor Casey! What he must have suffered, lying on that damp, improvised pallet with that terrible pain in his side! The rain did not stop for days. It streamed through the shelter, keeping everything eternally wet and all but put out the fire. I did the best I could. First I painted him with iodine, then, taking the gunny sacks in which we had brought food, I hung them (damp from the rain) on stakes about the flames, and clapped them steaming hot to the side of my pal until I absolutely scalded a square piece of flesh off his body. The doctor told me afterwards that it was the only thing that saved him.
For days the rainfall kept up, and it seemed as if the heavens were soon to fall. We were exhausted. Except for one partridge and a rabbit I had managed to kill, our food had been bacon, coffee, and bread of my manufacture. The wood was wet, and it was one man’s job to keep the fire going. Life to me was becoming a serious matter. If it had not been for abounding youth, I think I should have thrown up the sponge.... Then without any warning, the rain stopped.
I shall never forget the morning it cleared. I had been up for two nights and had snatched only an hour of sleep before dawn. Waking before six o’clock, I went down into the river cañon, unable to get the customary mental reaction from Nature’s vagaries. I was pretty tired and the sunlight did not cheer me. Sitting down on a rock in the river gorge, I gazed into the water. Then something turned my attention and, looking up quickly, I saw the picture. Snowcapped Shasta, which had shrunk like a corpse in the graying weather, suddenly towered like a giant, to meet the rosy dawn, and, proud in its setting of the river of low oxidized silver, it rose (as do certain flowers), seeming to unfold on their stems to say “good-morning” to the sun.
Those lines of Tennyson came back:
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.