The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”

“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s mother,—“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,” she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left behind after all.”

“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not whine about it.”

Jack went to bed by himself, except on Sunday nights; then his mother went with him, and saw that he laid his clothes in a neat pile on the trunk by his bed,—for in a camp bedroom trunks sometimes take the place of chairs,—and heard him say his prayers, and sometimes they talked together a little while before she kissed him good-night. That night was Sunday night, and Jack’s mother asked him, while she watched his undressing, if it ever made him dizzy to stand on high places and look down. Jack did not seem to know what that feeling was like; and then she asked him how far he had ever ridden on Mrs. O’Dowd at one time. Jack thought he had never ridden farther than Mr. Hensley’s ranch—that was three miles away, six miles in all, going and coming; but he had rested at the ranch, and had walked for a part of the journey when his sister Polly had resolved to ride by herself, instead of behind him, holding on to his jacket.

It made his mother very happy to tell the boy that the next day, if nothing happened to prevent, he was to set out with the fishing party for a week’s camping up the river. She knew how, in his reticent child’s heart, he had envied them. He was seated on the side of his bed, emptying the beach sand out of his stockings, when she told him. He said nothing at first, and one who did not know his plain little face as his mother knew it might have thought he was indifferent. She took a last look at him, before leaving the room. It seemed but a very little while ago that the close-cropped whity-brown head on the pillow had been covered with locks like thistle-down, which had never been touched with the scissors; that the dark little work-hardened hands (for Jack’s play was always work) lying outside the sheet had been kissed a dozen times a day for joy of their rosy palms and dimples. And to-morrow the boy would put on spurs,—no, not spurs, but a spur, left over from the men’s accoutrements,—and he would ride—to be sure it was only Mrs. O’Dowd, but no less would the journey be one of the landmarks in his life. And many older adventurers than Jack have set out in this way on their first emprise,—not very heroically equipped, except for brave and joyous dreams and good faith in their ability to keep the pace set by better-mounted comrades.

Jack woke next morning with a delightful feeling that this day was not going to be like any other day he had known. Preparations for the journey had already begun. In the cook-tent two boxes were being filled with things to eat and things to cook them with. These were to be covered with canvas, roped, and fastened, one on each side of the pack-mule’s pack-saddle. On the piazza, saddle-bags were being packed; guns, ammunition, fishing-rods, rubber coats, and cushions were being collected in a heap for John to carry down to the beach to be ferried across the river, where the man from Turner’s horse-ranch was already waiting with the animals. The saddle-horses and Mrs. O’Dowd were to cross by the ford above the rapids. The boat went back and forth two or three times, and in the last load went Jack and his mother and Polly in the care of one of the young engineers. The stir of departure had fired Polly’s imagination. It was not mamma saying good-by to Polly,—it was Polly saying good-by to mamma, before riding off with “bubba” on an expedition of their own. She was telling about it, in a soft, joyous recitative, to any one who had time to listen. The man from Turner’s had brought, for Mrs. Gilmour to ride, a mule he called a lady’s animal, but remarked that for his own use he preferred one that would go. Mrs. Gilmour thought that she did, too; so the side-saddle was changed from the “lady’s animal” to the mule that “would go.”

The pack-mule was “packed,” the men’s horses were across the ford, mamma had kissed Polly, two pairs and a half of spurs were jingling impatiently on the rocks,—but where was Mrs. O’Dowd?

She was dallying at the ford,—she was coy about taking to the water. Sticks and straps and emphatic words of encouragement had no effect upon her. She had unfortunately had time to make up her mind, and she had made it up not to cross the river. She was persuaded finally, by means of a “lass’ rope” around her neck. Everybody was laughing at her subdued way of making herself conspicuous, delaying the whole party and meekly implying that it was everybody’s fault but her own.

The camp of the engineers was on a little river of Idaho that rises in the Bitter-root range of the Rocky Mountains, and flows into the swift, silent current of the great Snake River, which flows into the Columbia, which flows into the Pacific; so that the waters of this little inland river see a great deal of grand and peculiar scenery on their way to the ocean. But the river as it flows past the camp is still very young and inexperienced. Its waters have carried no craft larger than a lumberman’s pirogue, or the coffin-shaped box the Chinese wood-drivers use for a boat. Its cañons have never echoed to a locomotive’s scream; it knows not towns nor villages; not even a telegraph pole has ever been reared on its banks. It is just out of the mountains, hurrying down through the gate of its last cañon to the desert plains. But young and provincial as it is, it has an ancestral history very ancient and respectable, if mystery and tragedy and years of reticence can give dignity to a family history. The river’s story has been patiently recorded on the tablets of the black basalt bluffs that face each other across its channel. Their language it is not given to everybody to read. The geologists tell a wonderful tale which they learned from those inscriptions on the rocks. They do not say how many years ago, but long enough to have given a very ancient name to our river,—had there been any one living at that time to call it by a name,—it met with a fearful obstruction, a very dragon in its path, which threatened to devour it altogether, or to scatter it in little streams over the face of the earth. A flood of melted, boiling-hot lava burst up suddenly in the river’s bed, making it to boil like a pot, and crowded into the granite gorges through which the river had found its way, half filling them. It was a battle between the heavens and the earth,—the stream of molten rock, blinding hot from the caverns beneath the earth’s crust, meeting the sweet cool waters from the clouds that troop about the mountains or hide their tops in mist and snow. The life-giving flood prevailed over that which brought only defacement and death. The sullen lava flux settled, shrank, and hardened at last, fitting into the granite gorges as melted lead fits the mould into which it is poured. The waters kept flowing down, never resting till they had worn a new channel in the path of the old one, only narrower and deeper, down through the intruding lava. When the river was first known to men, wherever its course lay through a granite gorge the granite was seen to be lined in places, often continuously for miles, with black lava rock, or basalt, standing in lofty palisades with deeply scarred and graven fronts and with long slides of crumbled rock at their feet, descending to the level of the river.

Another part of the river’s story has been toilsomely written in the trails that wind along its shores, worn by the feet of men and animals. Whose feet were the first to tread them, and on what errands? This is the part of the river’s story some of us would like best to know. But this the geologist cannot tell us.