The next day was lowering and cold. I spent the morning trying to get fish, and retired sour and disappointed when every one else succeeded and I failed. Sometime I am going back to Red Eagle Lake, and I shall take with me a tin of coral-colored salmon eggs—a trick I learned from George Locke on the Flathead River later on. And then I intend to have my photograph taken with strings of fish like bunches of bananas around me.
VI
THE CALL
As the days went on there was a subtle change in the party. Women, who had to be helped into their saddles at the beginning of the trip, swung into them easily. Waistbands were looser, eyes were clearer; we were tanned; we were calm with the large calmness of the great outdoors. And with each succeeding day the feeling of achievement grew. We were doing things and doing them without effort. To some of us the mountains had made their ancient appeal. Never again should we be clear of their call.
To those of us who felt all this inevitably in the future would come times when cities and even civilization itself would cramp.
I have traveled a great deal. The Alps have never held this lure for me. Perhaps it is because these great mountains are my own, in my own country. Cities call—I have heard them. But there is no voice in all the world so insistent to me as the wordless call of the Rockies. I shall go back. Those who go once always hope to go back. The lure of the great free spaces is in their blood.
We crossed many passes. Dawson Pass was the first difficult Rocky Mountain pass I had ever seen. There was a time when I had thought that a mountain pass was a depression. It is not. A mountain pass is a place where the impossible becomes barely possible. It is a place where wild game has, after much striving, discovered that it may get from one mountain valley to another. Along these game trails men have built new paths. Again and again we rode through long green valleys, the trail slowly rising until it had left timber far below. Then at last we confronted a great rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. Up this, by infinite windings, back and forward went the trail. At the top was the pass.
