chanted the Mountain Climber as we started out blithely. But long ere we crossed the divide separating the town from the valley of the Elwha River we realized that if Billy knew how to walk he emphatically refused to put his knowledge into practice. For Billy was a stubborn loafer until it came to night time, when he bent his pent-up energy to getting as far from camp as possible between dusk and sun-up.
There are three distinct methods of travel on the trail. You may ride horses and carry your supplies on a pack-horse. You may walk and let the pack animal do the burden bearing. Or you may be a host unto yourself and bear your entire household on your back, with your own legs supplying locomotion. On this trip we chose the middle course, and walked, while Billy was our common carrier. Back packing is a strenuous undertaking where many miles are to be covered, and yet a superfluity of horses is a nuisance if the going is rough and instead of gaining speed with many animals you actually lose it. So it seemed to us the best way was to go afoot, with a single pack-horse.
The brawling Elwha was our guide to Olympus, for its headwaters spring almost from the base of the mountain, and our trail wandered up the bank of the stream until, perhaps a dozen miles beyond our departure point from the highroad, we came to an appetizing meadow, and the pleasantest mountain home imaginable.
It was the log house of the "Humes Boys," who seem as much of an institution in the Olympics as the mountains themselves. Bred in the Adirondacks the Humes migrated westward and hit upon this isolated homestead in the corner of Washington, where a growing influx of hunters and fishermen finds them out and they are kept busy during the summer months as guides and packers to the many vacationists who know them and their knowledge of the surrounding regions. In the winter they trap and—I imagine from the evident tastes of Grant Humes—read good books on out-of-door subjects, close to the glowing stove, while the winds whistle up and down the valley and the snow piles high. Gardeners, too, they are in a modest way, raising all their vegetables. And cooks! What cooks! In years gone by some pioneer settler had planted plum trees, and when we first saw Grant Humes no housewife was busier with jelly-making than he.
"It's a bother now, and I don't suppose I enjoy it more than any other man likes such work," said he. "But when we're here in January and February, pretty well shut off from the world, and there's a great sameness about the food, I tell you a hundred glasses of plum jelly look almighty good—not to mention tasting!"
I can vouch for the taste of it in September; if the midwinter season improves the flavor I'm in a most receptive mood for a Christmas invitation to the cabin on the Elwha!
For those who have the right sort of taste, existence such as the Humes's must seem quite Utopian. Their garden and their rifles, supplemented by importations from the store "down below," feed them; their meadows supply hay for their stock; fuel of course is everywhere, and a little captivated stream brought to the house in a hand-hewed flume supplies an icy approximation of "running water." Hemming in the meadowland oasis are giant hills, their neighboring flanks hidden by mighty timber, their summits gray and brown beneath mantles of brush and berry, closing in the valley so resolutely that its hours of sunlight are almost as meager as in the cavernous fjord lands of Norway.
After Humes's the trail wound through abysmal forest depths, skirting fir and pine and cedar of unbelievable girth, or making irksome detours where some fallen monarch blocked the way. Needles and ferns there were underfoot, a drapery of moss overhead, and everywhere a penetrating silence. The most silent woods imaginable are those of the wet coast country, where the trees are enormous and set close together, thickets and ferns clutter the ground beneath them, and moss clings to the lower limbs; sunlight, if not a total stranger, at best is but an itinerant acquaintance.
When the whim seized it the fickle trail deserted one bank of the Elwha for the other, one of us leading Billy across while his companion, in vain effort to keep dry-shod, essayed perilous crossings on logs, often as not resulting in disaster.
Toward evening of the fourth day we dragged Billy up a final hill. Except for scattered and weather-beaten blazes, all vestiges of the trail had vanished, and, in fact, Grant Humes had told us that no one had been that way for two years, a fact testified by fallen trees and the unrepaired destruction of spring freshets. Hidden at the base of giant Douglas firs was all that remained of the Elwha, now scarcely more than a brook, its waters opaquely white with the silt of glaciers close at hand. Suddenly we emerged upon a hillock and below us lay Elwha Basin, where the river has its birth.