There are rates from chalet to chalet—including a night's lodging in comfortable beds, morning breakfast, evening dinner, and a carefully packed luncheon—that are astonishingly cheap. For those who wish to go even more simply, there are the tepee camps. There are three of these, at St. Mary's, Going-to-the-Sun, and Many Glaciers. They comprise a number of Indian tepees grouped about a central cabin which includes a kitchen provided with a range and cooking utensils. The tepees themselves are wooden-floored and each is equipped with two single cot beds and bedding. At all of the tepee camps the charge for lodging is fifty cents per bed per night; the use of the range and cooking utensils is free. At the chalets near by, hikers may purchase food at very reasonable prices.
It is, you see, possible to go through Glacier Park without Howard Eaton. It is even safe, and, to those who have never known Howard, highly satisfactory. But there will be something missing—that curious thing called personality, which could take forty-two entirely different, blasé, feeble-muscled, uncertain, and effete Easterners and mould them in a few days into a homogeneous whole: that took excursionists and made them philosophers and sportsmen.
He was hunting in Arizona later on. The party ate venison, duck, and mountain lion—which tastes like veal.
"We have had several fights with grizzlies," he wrote. "They are so strong that they have whipped the hounds and carved them up some in each fight. Country pretty rough and considerable fallen timber, which delays us. I was kicked the other day by a horse when almost up to a bear. The boys thought I had a broken leg or two, so they let the bear escape."
He was sending a rider off to the nearest post-office and wondering what was doing in the war.
"Has Port Arthur fallen yet?" he inquired whimsically.
A hunter who puts the greenest tenderfoot at ease and teaches him without apparently teaching at all; a host whose first thought is always for his guests; a calm-faced man with twinkling blue eyes, who is proud of his "boys" and his friends all over the world—that is Howard Eaton as nearly as he can be put on paper.
Wherever he is when he reads this, hunting in Arizona or the Jackson Hole country, or snowed in at the ranch at Wolf, I hope he will forgive me for putting him into print, in memory of those days when the entire forty-two of us followed him, like the tail of a kite, across the Great Divide.