The Piegan Indians are a branch of the Blackfeet tribe, and in the early days they were almost as noted horse raiders as the Absarokes who flourished near the Three Tetons, in the country of the Yellowstone. Back and forth across the passes they came and went in their nefarious traffic, secure from pursuit among the horns of these lonely heights. The vicinity of the eternal ice-fields, probably this little basin itself, sheltered the shadowy bands, and thus the glacier became known by their name. Still, you may look in vain on the maps for Piegan Glacier; you will find it called Sperry instead. The old name was discarded for that of a Professor who spent some weeks exploring its crevasses and under whose supervision a corps of college students spent a part of one summer's vacation, building the glacier trail. Yet there are those who love the old names as they love the traditions for which they stand, and to them the glacier will forever bear the time-honoured title of these Indians who have long since disappeared from its solitudes.
As the hours pass we draw from our guide and story-teller something of himself. Little by little, in fragmentary allusions and always incidentally, during that even-tide and the days following, we learn thus much of his life. He was born in those troublous days of Indian fighting on the frontier, shortly after his father, an army officer, was ordered out on campaign against the Sioux. When he was but a few weeks old word came to his mother that her husband had been killed, and she, sick and heart-broken, died, leaving besides this infant one other boy. The two children were left to the care of the officers at Fort Kehoe, but they were separated while both were so young that they did not realize the parting nor remember each other. Our guide became the ward of a lieutenant who had been a friend of his father. He played among the soldiers and Indian scouts at the Fort until he came to the age when he felt the desire to learn, then he went East to school, afterwards to college, always returning in the summer to ride the range or to lose himself in the mountains. And when the college days were done that old cry of the West, that old craving for the life that knows no restraint nor hindering bonds, beckoned him back inevitably as Fate. Again and again he had gone forth on the world's highway, once to serve in Cuba in the war with Spain, where in a yellow-fever hospital he met for the first time his older brother, who even then was dying of the pestilence, but always he returned to the freedom of the wilderness. He is a type in himself, who belongs to the time of Lewis and Clark, rather than to this century—a man who lives too late. And there is about him, for all his carefree indifference to the world, something of indefinable pathos. He is quite alone—he has no kinsfolk and few friends. He is a man without a home but the forests, who has renounced human companionship for the solitudes, without a love but the mountains, to whom the greatest sorrow would be the knowledge that he might never look upon them again.
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A cloud, heavy with rain, drifts across the sky, and big, cool drops splash with a hissing noise in the fire, upon our upturned faces, upon the warm, flower-sown earth which exhales, like incense, the odours of sun-heated soil and summer shower. The bright flames deepen to a blood-red glow and ashes gather like hoar frost on the cooling logs and boughs. The circle around the fire disperses to seek the narcotic gift breathed by the pines, sung as a lullaby by the voices of trees and streams.
The start for the glacier is made while the day is young. Pack horses and camp are left behind and with the guide leading the way, the tortuous climb is begun. Sheer as those rock-walls seemed to be, there is a footing for the careful ponies, as from narrow ledge to ledge they turn and zigzag up the mountain-face; and naked as those steeps appeared, they are animated with frisking conies and marmots, and hidden among the stones are rarely exquisite flowers. Here the mountain lilies grow, blossoms with brown eyes in each of their three white petals, covered with soft, silvery fur which makes them seem of the texture of velvet. These lilies are somewhat similar to the Mariposa lily of the California Sierras. The ground-cedar, a minute and delicate plant; strange varieties of fern and moss, and everchanging, unfamiliar flowers appear as we ascend, until, wheeling dizzily hundreds of feet above the basin upon the slight and slippery trail, with things beneath dwarfed by distance into a pigmy world and things above looming formidably, the increasing altitude shears the rocks and leaves them bare and grim. The air grows sharp with icy chill, great billowy, low-trailing clouds drag over the mountain-tops, down the ravines and float in detached banners in free spaces below. Broad stretches of snow lie ahead. The painstaking ponies pick their way across them, for it is fifteen feet down to solid ground. Sluggish streams creep between banks crusty with old ice, and pretty falls, broken into lacy meshes of foam, cascade down a parapet of rock and baptize us as we pass. In this spot the stone wall has been worn into a grotto where the water plays as in a fountain. From every little fissure ferns dart their long green lances and feathery fronds, and the rocks are grown over with moss.
From our eyrie we look down into a small lake called Peary's, sunk within dark and desolate cliffs, shattered and ground down into fantastic forms. It is but partly thawed and its cold, blue-green centre is enclosed in opaque, greenish-white ice and drifts of snow. Indeed snow is everywhere in broken drifts—in the furrowed mountain-combs and along the level in smooth white stretches. Close to the margin of the ice-sealed shores is a grotesque, sapless, scrubby vegetation, as strange in its way as the brilliant-hued waters or the rocks that impress us with huge antiquity and elemental crudeness, as though we stood face to face with Earth's infancy, close in the wake of ebbing, primeval seas. But for all the savage roughness and arctic chill this is a scene to cherish and remember—the blue cup of heaven, flecked with a thistledown of clouds, the black menace of shivered rock-crests, the dazzle of the snow and the darkly beautiful waters that are neither blue nor green yet seemingly of both colours, held fast in the circle of cold, pale ice.
Above this lake, down an overhanging wall, are more little falls, indeed the whole country is interlaced with them as though the life-blood of the mountains flowed in silver veins upon the surface. Within the hollow over the stone barrier lies Nansen's Lake, even more frigid in its ice-sheath, more palely green in the little patch of water which the sun has laid bare. And although the mountains soar tremendously, yet ever and anon the course lies upward over the frowning brows, over the very crowns of the Range, until the high peaks, stripped of atmospheric illusion, stand stark and naked to the gaze. There is in this sudden intimacy with the fellows of the clouds, the veiled lords of upper air, an awe which we feel before powers incomprehensible.
At last the trail ceases; overhead are cliffs no horse could climb. The guide ties the ponies, and with a stout rope clambers ahead up a smoothly sculptured parapet. We follow him and find ourselves on a bleak waste which leads to a small basin, strewn with great boulders and lesser rocks, dark and of the colour of slate. Growing upon these rock-heaps are masses of flowering moss starred by tiny pink buds and blossoms, or white spattered with the crimson of heart's blood. And now the guide begins to whistle—a long, plaintive note which is answered presently by a similar sound and a shrill, infantile treble, cheeping, cheeping among the stones. Then from the security of her home a Ptarmigan, or Arctic Grouse, hops into the open with her family of five chicks jumping on her patient back, and tumbling, the merest puff-balls, at her feet. She chirps softly to them, proud and dignified in her maternity, ever watchful of her pretty little brood. She is dressed in Quakerish summer-garb of mottled grey, the feathers covering her to the utmost extremity of her toes. Once the winter snows descend, these birds become as white as the frigid regions which they inhabit. Ordinarily they are very wild, but this little mother, knowing only friendliness from human visitors, comes forth trustfully with her beloved young, suffers them to be handled and caressed and she, herself, with wings dropped in the semblance of a pretty courtesy, jumps into the hand of the guide, and from that perch feeds daintily on the pink and white buds of the moss, as fragilely lovely as the snowflakes to which they appear strangely akin. Indeed, the bird, the flowers and the environing snow all seem more of the cloud-land than of the earth.
But there is a sequel to the story of this little grouse, which is, unhappily, a tragedy. Not long after she greeted us, giving an air of friendliness to the forbidding, wind-swept rocks, a Tyrolese came hunting through the mountains. He made his camp near the home of the Ptarmigan and her little ones, and one day when the guide came calling to her there was no answer but the empty whistling of the wind. He called again and again; he searched among the crags and the rock-heaps, then he came upon the ashes of a camp-fire and the mottled feathers and silken down of the Ptarmigan and her chicks. She had been betrayed at last by her trustfulness, and she and her brood had been cruelly sacrificed to the blood-lust and appetite of that enemy of poor dumb things—the man with the gun.
*****