"Those green-robed senators of mighty woods
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir."
There I made views of some of the giant cedars, the dense moss-hung jungles, the great fir trees, etc. In these dark, densely-shaded woods I had to take off the flying shutter and make time exposures. I gave three to five seconds to each plate. In the prints the trees and other objects nearest to the lens are of course over-exposed, but the details in the shadows and objects in the extreme distance are clearly and beautifully brought out. For these time exposures I placed the camera on some convenient log, stump, or stone, in lieu of a tripod. In two instances I seated the rear end of the instrument on the ground, with the lens bearing up through the tops of the trees. The whitened trunk and broken, straggling arms of one great old dead fir—one that has flourished in this rich soil and drawn sustenance from the moist, ozone-laden atmosphere of these mountains for hundreds of years, but has lived out his time and is now going the way of all things earthly—forms the subject of one of the best and most interesting pictures of the whole series. The tops of several other trees—birch, maple, etc., that stood near the fir—are also shown in the picture. It can best be seen and appreciated by holding it above your head, looking up at it, and imagining yourself there in the forest, looking up through the tops of the giant trees into the blue ethereal dome of heaven.
CHAPTER IX.
N the morning I got up early to look for Douglass Bill, thinking and hoping he might have landed during the night, but no one had seen him and there was no strange canoe in the harbor. After breakfast, in order to kill time, I climbed the mountain east of the hotel to a height of about a thousand feet. It is heavily timbered, and I found plenty of fresh deer-signs within plain sound of the hammers wielded by the carpenters at work on the hotel, but failed to get a shot. I returned at eleven o'clock, but Bill had not yet shown up. Three other Indians were there, however, with three deer in their canoe, which they had killed on the opposite side of the lake the day before. I now concluded that Mr. Major's confidence in Bill was misplaced; that he was not going to keep his contract, and was, in short, as treacherous, as unreliable, and as consummate a liar as other Indians; so I entered into negotiations with these three Indians to get one or two of them to go with me. But they had planned a trip to New Westminster, to sell their venison, and I could not induce any one of them to go, though I offered big wages, and a premium on each head of game I might kill, besides. They said that if I wished they would take me to their village—which is five miles down the river—and that there were several good goat hunters there whom I could get. I accepted their offer of transportation, stepped into the canoe, and we pulled out. As we entered the shoal water in the river I asked for a pole, and impelled by it and the three paddles we sped down the stream at a rapid rate.
There was a cold, disagreeable rain falling and a chilly north wind blowing. This storm had brought clouds of ducks into the river, among them several flocks of canvas backs. The Indians, who were using smooth-bore muskets, killed several of these toothsome fowls. One flock rose ahead of us and started directly down the river, but by some kind of native intuition the Indians seemed to know that they would come back up the opposite shore. They dropped their guns, caught up the paddles and plied them with such force that every stroke fairly lifted the light cedar canoe out of the water, and we shot across the river with the speed of a deer. Sure enough, after flying a hundred yards down stream the ducks turned and, hugging the shore, undertook to pass up the river on the other side, but we cut them off, so that they had to pass over our heads. At this juncture the two muskets carried by the two young men cracked and three canvas backs dropped, limp and lifeless, into the water within a few feet of us.