Our house, whose ridge-pole was full eighteen feet from the ground, began gradually to disappear. At intervals of three or four days it was necessary to shovel the snow from the roof, which would otherwise have been crushed in. This added to the accumulation about us. Snow covered up the windows and mounted to the eaves. The path to the spring was through a cut high above our heads. That to the barn was through another similar. Snow all about us lay at an average depth of eight feet. Only the sloping roof of the house was visible, and so much in color did it assimilate with the surrounding rocks, pines, and snow that one unacquainted with the locality might have passed within a few feet of it without recognizing it as a human residence.
December, January, February, and March passed, and we heard nothing from the great world outside of and below us. We arose in the morning, cooked, ate our breakfast, got out fencing stuff till dinner time, going and returning from our work on snowshoes, and digging in the snow a pit large enough to work in. We ate our noon beans, returned to work, skated back to the house by half-past two to get in firewood for the night, and at half-past three or four the dark winter’s day was over, and we had fifteen hours to live through before getting the next day’s meagre allowance of light, for Eureka Valley is a narrow cleft in the mountains not over a quarter of a mile in width, and lined on either side by ridges 1,500 to 2,000 feet in height. The sun merely looked in at the eastern end about nine A.M., said “good day,” and was off again. We rolled in sufficient firewood every night to supply any civilized family for a week. Two-thirds of the caloric generated went up our chimney. It did not have far to go, either. The chimney was very wide and very low. At night a person unacquainted with the country might have tumbled into the house through that chimney. The winds of heaven did tumble into it frequently, scattering ashes and sometimes cinders throughout the domicil. Sometimes they thus assailed us while getting breakfast. We consumed ashes plentifully in our breakfasts; we drank small charcoal in our coffee; we found it in the bread. On cold mornings the flapjacks would cool on one side ere they were baked on the other. A warm meal was enjoyed only by placing the tin coffee-cup on the hot coals after drinking, and a similar process was necessary with the other viands. The “other viands” were generally bread, bacon, beans, and beef. It was peculiar beef. It was beef fattened on oak leaves and bark. Perhaps some of you California ancients may recollect the two consecutive rainless summers of “’63” and “’64,” when tens of thousands of cattle were driven from the totally dried-up plains into the mountains for feed.
During those years, at the Rock River ranch in Stanislaus County, where the plains meet the first hummocks of the Nevada foothills, I have seen that long, lean line of staggering, starving, dying kine stretching away as far as the eye could reach, and at every hundred yards lay a dead or dying animal. So they went for days, urged forward by the vaquero’s lash and their own agony for something to eat. Even when they gained the grass of the mountains it was only to find it all eaten off and the ground trodden to a dry, red, powdery dust by the hungry legions which had preceded them. It was a dreadful sight, for those poor brutes are as human in their sufferings through deprivation of food and water, when at night they lay down and moaned on the parched red earth, as men, women, and children would be. Well, the strongest survived and a portion reached the country about Eureka Valley. They came in, fed well during the summer, and one-third at least never went out again. The vaqueros could not keep them together in that rough country. They wandered about, climbed miles of mountain-sides, found little plateaus or valleys hidden away here or there, where they feasted on the rich “bunch grass.” They gained, by devious windings, high mountain-tops and little nooks quite hidden from their keepers’ eyes and quite past finding out. The herdsmen could not collect or drive them all out in the fall. They were left behind. All went well with them until the first snows of winter. Then instinctively those cattle sought to make their way out of the mountain fastnesses. Instinctively, too, they travelled westward toward the plains. And at the same time the first fall of snow was covered with tracks of deer, bear and Indians, all going down to the warmer regions. But the cattle were too late. Their progress was slow. More and more snow came and they were stopped. Some thus impeded trod down the snow into a corral, round which they tramped and tramped until they froze to death. Some of these cattle were thus embayed along the track of the Sonora and Mono road, and the white man making his way out was obliged to turn aside, for the wide, sharp-horned beast “held the fort” and threatened impalement to all that entered. Others, finding the south and sunny sides of the mountains, lived there until February, browsing on the oak leaves and bark. These we killed occasionally and buried the meat in the snow about our house. But it was beef quite juiceless, tasteless, tough and stringy. It was literally starvation beef for those who ate it, and the soup we made from it was in color and consistency a thin and almost transparent fluid.
Foxes in abundance were about us, and they stayed all winter. They were of all shades of color from red to grayish black. Now a story was current in the mountains that black-fox skins commanded very high prices, say from $80 to $100 each, and that “silvery-grays” would bring $25 or $30. So we bought strychnine, powdered bits of beef therewith, scattered them judiciously about the valley, and were rewarded with twenty or thirty dead foxes by spring. It required many hours’ labor to dress a skin properly, for the meat and fat must be carefully scraped away with a bit of glass, and if that happened to cut through the hide your skin is good for nothing. Certainly, at very moderate wages, each skin cost $7 or $8 in the labor required to trap, or poison it, if you please, and to cure and dress it afterward. When the gentle spring-time came and access was obtained to certain opulent San Francisco furriers, we were offered $1.50 for the choicest skins and 37-1/2 cents for the ordinary ones. Whereat the mountaineer got on his independence, refused to sell his hard-earned peltries at such beggarly prices, and kept them for his own use and adornment.
Then our dogs too would wander off, eat the strychnined fox bait, and become dead dogs. We had five when the winter commenced, which number in the spring was reduced to one—the most worthless of all, and the very one which we prayed might get poisoned. These dogs had plenty of oak-bark fattened beef at home. They were never stinted in this respect. What we could not eat—and the most of the beef we cooked we couldn’t eat—we gave freely to our dogs. But that wouldn’t content the dog. Like man, he had the hunting instinct in his nature. He wanted something new; something rich, rare, racy, with a spice of adventure in it; something he couldn’t get at home. He wanted to find a bit of frozen beef in some far-off romantic spot a mile or two from the house and this on finding he would devour, under the impression that stolen waters are sweet, and poisoned beef eaten in secret is pleasant. And then he would lay himself down by the frozen brookside and gently breathe his life away; or come staggering, shaking, trembling home, under the action of the drug, and thus dashing in our domestic circle scatter us to the four corners of the big log house, thinking him a mad dog. I lost thus my own dog, “Put,” named briefly after General Israel Putnam of the Revolution, a most intelligent animal of some hybrid species; a dog that while alone in the mountains I could leave to guard my camp, with a certainty that he would devour every eatable thing left within his reach ere my return, and meet me afterward wagging his tail and licking his chops, with that truthful, companionable expression in his eye, which said plainer than words: “I’ve done it again, but it was so good.” I shall never own another dog like “Put,” and I never want to. He would climb a tree as far as one could hang a bit of bacon upon it. He would in lonesome places keep me awake all night, growling and barking at imaginary beasts, and then fraternize with the coyotes and invite them home to breakfast. Near the Big Meadows, in Mono County, a disreputable female coyote came down from a mountain side and followed “Put,” one morning as I journeyed by on my borrowed steed, howling, yelping, and filling the surrounding air with a viragoish clamor. I presume it was another case of abandonment.
It was a winter of deathly quiet in Eureka Valley. Enveloped in snow, it lay in a shroud. Occasionally a tempest would find its way into the gorge and rampage around for a while, roaring through the pines and dislodging the frozen lumps of snow in their branches, which whirled down, bang! bang! bang! like so many rocks on our housetop. Sometimes we heard the rumble of rocks or snowslides tumbling from the mountains. But usually a dead, awful quiet prevailed. It wore on one worse than any uproar. No sound from day to day of rumble or rattle of cart or wagon, no church bells, no milkman’s bell, no gossip or chatter of inhabitants, no street for them to walk down or gossip in, none of the daily clamor of civilized life save what we made ourselves. It was a curious sensation to see one or both of my two companions at a distance from the house. They looked such insignificant specks in the whitened valley. And to meet the same man after four or five hours of absence and to know that he had nothing new to tell, that he hadn’t been anywhere in a certain sense, since without neighbors’ houses or neighboring villages there was “nowhere” to get that sort of bracing-up that one derives from any sort of companionship.
We were very cozy and comfortable during those long winter nights, seated in the red glare of our rudely-built, wide-mouthed fireplace. But sometimes, on a clear moonlight night, I have, for the sake of change, put on the snowshoes and glided a few hundred yards away from the house. In that intense and icy silence the beating of one’s heart could be distinctly heard, and the crunching of the snow under foot sounded harsh and disagreeable. All about the myriads of tall pines in the valley and on the mountain-side were pointing straight to the heavens, and the crags in black shadow above and behind them maintained also the same stern, unyielding silence. The faintest whisper of a breeze would have been a relief. If you gained an elevation it was but to see and feel more miles on miles of snow, pines, peaks, and silence. Very grand, but a trifle awful; it seemed as if everything must have stopped. In such isolation it was difficult to realize that miles away were crowded, babbling, bustling, rallying, roaring cities, full of men and women, all absorbed and intent on such miserably trifling things as boots and shoes, pantaloons and breakfasts, suppers, beds, corsets, and cucumbers. We were outside of creation. We had stepped off. We seemed in the dread, dreary outer regions of space, where the sun had not warmed things into life. It was an awful sort of church and a cold one. It might not make a sceptic devotional; it would certainly cause him to wonder where he came from or where he was going to. A half-hour of this cold, silent Sierran winter morning was quite enough of the sublime. It sent one back to the fireside with an increased thankfulness for such comforts as coffee, tobacco, and warm blankets.
CHAPTER XXVII.
LEAVING HIGH LIFE.
Near the end of March I resolved to leave Eureka Valley. Sonora, Tuolumne County, was fifty-six miles distant. That was my goal. Thirty miles of the way lay over deep snow, and was to be travelled over on snowshoes. The Norwegian snowshoe is a long wooden skate or runner, turned up at the forward end, greased on the lower side, with a strap in the middle to hold the foot. The Indian snowshoe is a flat network, fastened to a frame, in shape something like an enlarged tennis racket. It is like locomotion shod with a couple of market-baskets. The principal use of the pole, carried in the hands with the Norwegian shoe, is to serve as a brake and helm while going downhill. Some put it under the arm and others straddle it while making a descent. The arm position is the most dignified. The legs must be kept straddled at a ridiculous distance apart, and the first few days’ practice seems to split a person nearly in two. If, with the Indian snowshoe, you tumble down on a hillside it is almost impossible to get up again, and the unfortunate must remain in a recumbent position very much like that assumed by the heathen when they go down on all fours before their god, until some one unstraps his shoes. I preferred the Norwegian shoe. The first pair I ever used I made one evening about dusk. I was going toward Eureka Valley from Sonora, and had met the first fallen snow. From a mere crisp it grew deeper and deeper. I found a pile of “shakes”—long, rough shingles used in the mountains—and made my shoes from two of them. They were not more than a quarter the proper length. They kept me busy the rest of the night picking myself up. I think I must have fallen down some four hundred times. When we came to a down grade they went of their own accord and ran away with me. Sometimes but one shoe would slip off and glide down a bank, sometimes two, sometimes all of us went together, balance-pole included, and a bag I had lashed to my back would swing over my head and bang me in the face. It was a lively night’s entertainment for only one man in the heart of the wilderness. There was no monotony about it; nothing tedious or depressing. Just as fast as I recovered from one fall and started I got the next. I swore a good deal. There was not anything else to be said. One couldn’t argue with—things. It was the only recreation afforded by that phase of the trip. To have kept one’s temper and remained expletiveless would have been to burst. I avoided the superior and more expensive epithets as much as possible and confined myself to second-rate strong language. But when I started for my final trip out of the mountains, I had become a tolerable snowshoe amateur. A pack was lashed to my back. It held a blanket, some meat, bread, coffee, sugar, one fox skin and my worldly wardrobe. The morning light had not dawned when I started.
After a couple of miles’ advance my feet felt like lumps of ice. I examined my boots. The leather was frozen hard and stiff. The pain was too great for endurance. I made my way back to the house, found Hays and Welch at breakfast, removed my boots and stockings, and saw three waxy-looking toes, the right big one included. They were frozen. The heat of the fire produced additional twinges, like boring with red-hot knitting-needles. I wrapped some thicknesses of flannel around both boots, put them on again, and made another start. Eureka Valley soon disappeared behind me. I never saw it again, and probably never shall. But its picture is indelibly graven on my memory. We lived in the gem of the locality. All the landscape gardening skill in the world could produce nothing to equal it. A clear crystal stream ran by the door. The grove was a natural park, level as a floor, with pines all about, 150 feet high. We had a cascade and little miniature mountains of rock, with oak and pines springing from their crevices. No tame tree could be coaxed to grow as did these wild ones of the mountains. Some were independent of soil altogether, and flourished vigorously rooted in rocky fissures. We had the tiniest of meadows concealed behind these little mountains of our domain. Other grassy plateaus were perched sixty or eighty feet over our heads on the mountain. Nor was this all at once revealed. It required half a day to get over all the labyrinth of meadow, mount, and dale within half a mile of our house. All this was set in a gigantic frame—the dark green, thickly-wooded mountain-sides running up 2,000 feet above our heads, while to the eastward through the narrow gorge rose bare peaks twenty and thirty miles away, from whose tops, on sunshiny, breezy mornings, the snow could be seen driving in immense vapor-like clouds and tinged a roseate hue. People who visit the Yosemite have seen but one of the thousand pictures set in the Sierras.