AN INDIAN SALMON FISHERY.
CHAPTER XI.
had left my bedding at the Hot Springs Hotel, and returning to get it staid there all night. Early next morning (Friday, November 12) we crossed Harrison Lake, in a drenching rain, to the foot of a high mountain, about two miles from the springs, on which Pean, Captain George, and other Indians said there were plenty of goats. We beached our canoe, and made up packs for the climb up the mountain. The outfit consisted of our guns, my sleeping-bag, Pean's gun and blankets, a few sea biscuits, a piece of bacon, and some salt.
My sleeping-bag was wrapped up in a piece of canvas, and when I handed it to Pean, he commenced to unroll it to put his blankets in with it, but I objected. Visions of the insects with which I knew his bedding was inhabited rose up before me. I thought of the rotary drill, key-hole saw, and suction pump with which they are said to be armed, and I did not want any of them in my bag. So I unrolled the canvas only a part of its length, laid his blankets in and rolled it up again, hoping the remaining folds might prevent the vermin from finding their way in, and my reckoning proved correct. One of his blankets had been white in its day, but had long since lost its grip on that color, and was now about as pronounced a brunette as its owner. The other blanket was gray, but even through this sombre shade, as well as through the rank odor it emitted, gave evidence that it had not been washed for many years. Pean brought with him a cotton bedspread that had also once been white, but left this with the canoe. In my pack I carried the grub, and an extra coat for use on the mountain, where we expected to encounter colder weather.
We started up the mountain at ten o'clock in the forenoon. For the first two miles we skirted its base to the eastward, through dense timber, crossing several deep, dark jungles and swamps. Then we began the ascent proper, and as soon as we got up a few hundred feet on the mountain side, we found numerous fresh deer-signs. We halted to rest, when Pean took from its case his gun, which up to this time he had kept covered, and which I naturally supposed to be a good, modern weapon. It proved, however, an old smooth bore, muzzle-loading, percussion-lock musket, of .65 calibre, with a barrel about fifty inches long. He drew out the wiping stick, on the end of which was a wormer, pulled a wad of paper from the gun and poured a charge of shot out into his hand. This he put carefully into his shot-bag. Then he took from another pouch a No. 1 buckshot, and dropped it into the muzzle of his musket. It rolled down onto the powder, when he again inserted the bunch of paper, rammed it home with the rod, put on a cap, and was loaded for bear, deer, or whatever else he might encounter. He then replaced the musket in its sealskin cover as carefully as if it had been a $300 breech-loader.