It was my calculation to get to Hulse’s empty log-house, twelve miles distant, and camp there that night; but my progress was very slow. The road for miles ran along a steep mountain-side. It was buried many feet in snow. It was all a sheet of snow inclined at an angle most difficult to travel. In places acres of snow had slipped in a body from above, covering the ordinary level five or six feet in depth. These accumulations, while coming down, would have brushed a human being away with the facility with which a cart-load of sand dumped on your cellar-door would overwhelm a fly. I saw whole groves of pines whose trunks had been cut off by these slips ten or twelve feet from the roots. I felt small and insignificant, and speculated whether, after all, I was of any more importance than a fly or any other bug in the sum total of things generally. I thought of how much more importance a man was in a newspaper office than in the solitude of these mountains. Then the sun hurried toward the west and the cold blue and brassy tints of the winter’s eve merged together. The route along the “River Hill” side became steeper and steeper, the snow more hummocky from successive slides and the way more disorganized. It was very slippery. The snow had an ice finish on the surface like a hard coating of enamel. I took off the snowshoes and bore them and the balancing-pole on my shoulders, picking my way laboriously, step by step. Below me extended a very long, smooth, steep slide, like a white Mansard roof, several hundred feet in height. Finally I was obliged to stamp an indentation in the enamelled surface at every step, with my heels, to secure footing. The slippery and regularly graded descent below broke off occasionally into precipices of fifty or sixty feet in height. A person slipping here would, of course, accomplish portions of the descent on mere empty air. The trouble was not so much in getting through the air as in bringing up after going through. A fall never hurts anybody. It’s the sudden stoppage when you’re through. I expected momentarily to slip. The sun was rapidly going down and I felt a tendency to follow suit. At the point where I did slip the view was magnificent. Over full thirty miles of peak and pine the setting sun was shedding. I saw these peaks disappear like a flash. The grand curtain of Nature was not rung down at the call of night. It was I who fell before the curtain. I went down perhaps three hundred feet of the incline, generally in a sitting position. My long Norwegian snowshoes, jerked from my grasp, sailed down ahead of me, one diverging a little to the right, the other to the left, and the balancing pole scooting straight ahead. All of us went together with a beautiful uniformity and regularity of formation. The whole descent of 300 feet did not occupy more than six seconds, yet in that brief space of time my mind appeared to photograph on itself at least a dozen phases of the situation and as many past memories and future possibilities. I saw the stumps seeming to rush past me uphill, while I was really rushing past them downhill, and the reflection came to me that if I collided with even one of them the result would be worse for me than the stump. This did not comfort me. As each successive stump hurried up the mountain I said, by the unspoken operation of thought, “There goes another stump. A miss is as good as a mile. I may bring up in one piece yet, though, if I go off one of these precipices, I may make my last appearance on any stage in several pieces.” I remember, also, the sensation caused by the seat of my outside pantaloons tearing out through the excessive friction. I had on two pairs of pantaloons when I started. I thought, also, during all these risks and lightning-like escapades of my far-away Eastern home, of the girls I had left behind years before, of the dear old cool stone door-steps on the sycamore-embowered Main street of our village, on which the girls used to sit on warm summer and Sunday nights. Yes, in this inappreciable space of time and under such extraordinary conditions I thought of this, and even wondered if the other fellow sat there now with his arm hidden in the darkness of the hall, where they kept no lamp in summer for fear of drawing mosquitoes, trying to reach round that girl. The human mind is certainly a wonderful piece of business. I think the more it is shocked, agitated, and stirred up at certain intervals the faster it works and the more it takes cognizance of. The man who month in and month out moves backward and forward in a groove of habit is apt to think the same old thoughts over and over again in the same old way. The man who is beaten and banged about from pillar to post and Dan to Beersheba, who is continually tumbling into new events and situations, is liable to think a great many new things and think of them in many new ways. From a mundane consideration of time on this slide I soon reached my destination. Regarding my own mental sensations, the trip seemed one of many minutes. It was not the bottom of the hill where I stopped. The bottom of that hill terminated in the Stanislaus River, and was preceded by a precipice 200 feet high. Had I gone off that my journey downward would have been accomplished on a basis of three of the four elements known to the ancients, namely, earth, air, and water, and from all accounts, and my own impressions of my deserts at that period, it might have ultimately terminated in fire. The snow was soft where I brought up. I stopped. “It is good for me to be here,” I said; “here will I pass the night.” I possessed a little mountain wisdom, and foresaw the impossibility and inutility of making the ascent that night. I had belted to my waist a sharp hatchet. Around me were many dead pine limbs, projecting from the snow. The mountain-side exposure was southern. About the roots of a great pine on the little plateau where I had brought up the snow had partly melted away. I enlarged the cavity, using the hatchet as pick and shovel. I made my home for the night in this cavity. Kindling a fire with my dead branches, I chopped directly into it the thick dry bark of the pine. This supply of fuel alone was plentiful and lasted me the entire night. I disclaim here all intent of posing in print as a hero, for on many occasions I am disgusted by my mental and physical cowardice. But on this particular night, and it was a very long one, I felt no fear; I spent it very pleasantly. I cooked and ate, and drank my coffee with a relish, born of mountain air and exercise. My coffee-pot was another peripatetic appurtenance belted to my waist. Culinarily, I was for myself a travelling boarding-house, being guest, landlord and chambermaid all in one. The fire blazed cheerfully, and the fully-seasoned oak branches soon made a bed of solid live coals. My snow hole at the tree’s base slowly enlarged as it melted away. The hillside being inclined carried away all the moisture. After supper I sang. I felt that here I could sing in safety and without damage to other ears, because no one could hear me. Music hath charms to soothe, and all that, but it must not be savage music. Mine at that time was savage. It is now. If I feel a tendency to inflict any vocal misery on mankind, I go forth into solitude, and commit the outrage on inanimate defenseless objects which cannot strike back. After singing, I spoke all the pieces of my schoolboy days. I quoted Shakespeare, and really admired myself in Hamlet’s soliloquy. I never heard a more satisfactory rendition. This was another piece of consideration for my fellow-beings. Others, less sensitive to the ill they may do, rush on the stage and torture audiences. After the dramatic performance I rehearsed my political speech. I was even coming from the mountains with full intent to stand, or rather run, for the Legislature from Tuolumne County, which I did, greatly to the misery of the party. The speech was impromptu. So the long night wore away. The day became overcast. The winds occasionally stirred and moaned through the lofty pines above me. Then they sank to soft mournful whispering music and ceased. The snapping of the fire sounded sharply in the solitude. From the river far below came a confused, murmuring, babbling sound like the clamor of some vast, distant multitude, and this seemed varied at times by cries weird and louder. Lumps of frozen snow fell from treetops far and near, and as they struck branch after branch sounded like the plunging of horses in the drifts. I dozed fitfully and awoke with the red coals staring me in the face and the startling realization that the elements were preparing for a heavy storm.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LAST OF HIGH LIFE.
In writing this experience I disdain all intent of making myself out a first-class sufferer or adventurer. Other men by hundreds on our frontiers have endured far more, suffered far more, passed through many more perils and combated them more courageously. Mine as compared to theirs is a mere priming, a rush-light candle to an electric lamp. Our mountains and lone valleys hold many a skeleton whose unburied, unrecorded bones are the only relics and proofs of a live, lingering death, preceded by hours of pain and misery. Mine was the merest foretaste of their hardships and sufferings, and it is my chief desire that this story shall help to a clearer realization of the perils, hardships, and sufferings of our unknown pioneers. I passed a very comfortable night at the foot of my snowslide, save sundry aches in my three frozen toes. I have passed very many nights far more uncomfortably when surrounded by all the so-called comforts of civilization, in insect-infested beds at slovenly taverns, in rooms stifling with the midsummer heat of New York; in cold, fireless chambers with damp beds. Some of our civilization doesn’t civilize in the matter of comfort. Down there in my snow hole I was better off in regard to artificial heat than one-third the population of France, who, in their damp stone houses, shiver over a pot of coals from November till April, while thousands have not even this luxury. I had any amount of fuel about me, provisions for days, powder and shot, and if more snow came I had but to let it fall, build up the walls of my hole and protect me from the blasts. I knew of a man caught thus in a storm on the Summit, who made a hole for himself by kindling a fire on the snow, allowing it to melt, and going downward with it as it melted. When the storm ended his cavity was twice the size of a hogshead, and he emerged from it and came to our house in Eureka Valley. Snow rightly applied, will prove man’s greatest protector from cold, providing it is deep enough. It is the intensely cold blast sweeping over hard, frozen ground, that kills both animal and vegetable life.
I looked up at dawn, after finishing my breakfast, or rather the remains of the banquet which had continued at intervals all night—for there is nothing like eating and drinking to keep up one’s spirits and keep out the cold, and one strong cup of coffee under such conditions is worth a pint of whiskey, since it gives a renewal of vigor which doesn’t flash up and then out like alcohol. I looked on the contract before me. I had that three hundred feet of steep icy incline to climb. There was no getting round it by gradual or zigzag upward approaches. The way to the right and left broke off in ugly precipices. A little exploration to find an easier route satisfied me and sent me back frightened to my camp. For crossing on what I deemed snows with a firm foundation underneath, I was startled to find my pole running through this surface in an empty void beneath. Then the entire area for twenty feet square suddenly settled down an inch or two with an ominous scrunch! which sent my heart seemingly up in my mouth and my hair up on its various ends. I was walking on a frail crust of snow which had formed over the deep gorges ploughed by the rains and torrents of ages down the mountain side. Some of these were fifteen or twenty feet deep, with rocky sides almost perpendicular, and such pits, blocked up at either end with snow, were regular man-traps. I hauled myself up to the place from whence I had slipped the previous evening. The job occupied the entire morning. There were the two snowshoes, the pole and my pack to manage, besides my own earthly organization. In places the descent was so steep that I was obliged to drag myself and cargo upward a foot at a time, and then chock my feet with a knife to prevent slipping back. The moral of which is, it is easier to go down than to go up, and easier to fall than to rise in many ways. It does seem singular that these coincidences should be so coincident between the world of materiality and that of morality. It was a very laborious task, and when about noon I reached the top, I was sick from exhaustion, and lay down for some minutes on the ledge of snow hardly wide enough to hold me. Then, with shaky knees, I picked my way very slowly over another dangerous mile around the mountain-side, where every step was furnished with extra accommodation for slipping, and in many spots where, had I slipped, I should have gone farther and fared much worse than on the evening before. I wished I was a goose, for a goose could in four minutes have accomplished a distance which took me all day. We pride ourselves on our powers and the ways and means we have devised for transporting our clumsy carcases, but after all, in point of locomotion, we are individually miserably inferior to a goose, and all our ingenuity and mind has not been able only to lift us from the inferior position wherein nature has in this respect placed us, as compared with a goose.
I arrived at Hulse’s empty cabin about an hour before dark. The place looked melancholy, murderous, and cold. The locality was higher than ours in Eureka Valley, and not so well protected. Of the house little was visible save the ridgepole. Five feet of snow lay on the kitchen roof, which could easily be walked on. I gained entrance with some difficulty through the upper sash of a front window. The door was permanently barred for the winter by snow. I was no sooner in the house than the requirements of the situation drove me out again to collect fuel for the night. There was no rest for the wicked. It is only when man is entirely alone that he realizes how many things are necessary not only to his comfort but his very existence. A bear could have lain during the night in comfort at that house on a bed of straw. The assertion that “man wants but little here below” is not true, and should no longer pass uncontradicted. Here was I, at that time, a dweller in the wilderness with the foxes—a tramp, standing almost within the threshhold of beggary, owner neither of house nor lands, and a cipher “on change.” Yet I couldn’t get along without iron and steel, phosphorus and sulphur, or my matches, coffee from the tropics, sugar from the Indies, salt from somewhere, pepper from pepperland, grain ground to flour, chemicals to “raise it,” tea from China, and utensils of tin to keep it in. It is good to be so alone once in one’s life to realize how much man’s present development is due to the numberless articles he brings from all the ends of the earth for his subsistence and comfort, and what an endless amount of labor is necessary to keep him up to his present standard of development.
My fuel was pine bark, stripped from the surrounding trees. It came off easily in great sheets, making an imposing-looking pile as heaped in the kitchen, and burned like shavings. The night passed in alternate cat naps and firing up. I would doze, to wake up shivering, finding the room dark and the fire nearly out. Throwing on more bark, the flames leaped up. I dozed again, to wake up in cold and darkness as before. It was a gloomier camp than the one of the night previous. An empty house always has a tomb-like atmosphere about it, and, when alone, I prefer a bivouac under the trees. With morning came a heavy snowstorm, or rather a continuation of the snow that had been falling all winter. I started out. The pine boughs along the road brushed my face, where, in summer, they would have been many feet over my head. The strap of one of my snowshoes tore out of the wood, and left me crippled as to further progress until I repaired it. The snow was soft, and to get off the shoes was to sink in it to the middle. I was literally afloat on a sea of snow, and to get overboard was to founder and flounder—another proof of man’s miserable helplessness as compared with the goose. It began to occur to me that this storm was one of unusual severity. It blew violently, and the snow at times came in such whirls that I could not open my eyes for several seconds. If I had not in this story determined, in point of detail, to reduce everything to a rigid mathematical accuracy of statement, I might say that the snow blinded me for minutes, since seconds seem very long under these circumstances. Time seems to be a quality or a something, which, in point of length or shortness, is largely dependent on one’s condition and sensations. A good time is always short—a bad time always long.
The aim on starting that morning was to reach Strawberry Flat, fourteen miles distant. There is no road over the Sierras without its Strawberry Flat, generally so called because no strawberries are ever found there. This Strawberry Flat, then, contained a population of four men, and was regarded by us in Eureka valley as a bustling place. In two hours I gave up all idea of reaching Strawberry Flat, and I concentrated my hopes on an empty house four miles below Hulse’s. Given good weather and a crust on the snow, I could with tolerable ease have made the fourteen miles between Hulse’s and Strawberry. But the wind was ahead, the snow constantly blinded me, and as it came much more horizontally as driven by the blast than perpendicularly, and being of a sleety nature, formed at intervals of every few minutes a slim film of ice on my face, which, as with my hand I swept it off, fell to the ground in broken ice casts of my ordinary countenance. The empty house was at last reached. It was past noon. The empty house was not there. Where it once stood was more empty than ever. The weight of the snow had crushed the shanty. A few timbers and splinters sticking out told the story. There was but one thing to do—return to Hulse’s. To go forward was impossible, and so I fought my way back. It was a hard fight, for the wind and the snow at times seemed as if inspired by the demons of the air or some spirit cause or effect which is expressed by such term. They beat and buffeted and blinded me, so that twice I lost my way, blundered about in circles, and got back to Hulse’s about three in the afternoon only through the wandering of sheer stupidity or the guidance of some special providence—perhaps both. Tired as I was it was necessary to go straightway to work and get in more pine bark for the night. There was no lack of business on this trip. I never had a moment to spare from morning till night. One’s body is an imperious master, and, unsupported by civilization or the help of one’s fellow-beings, it keeps one on the keen jump to supply it with food, fuel, and cover.
As I lay stretched in my blankets before the blaze that night I heard from time to time a sharp crack overhead. I gazed upward and made a most unpleasant discovery. It was another form of Damocles’ sword over me. The rafters were bent like bows from the great pressure of the snow on the roof. The cracking was a notice that they might not stand the strain much longer. The roof might at any time tumble in with several tons of snow upon me. This weight was steadily increasing. I could not go out in the storm, nor could I remove the snow from the roof. The situation kept my mind busy while the body was at rest, and anxiety and suspense are about as wearing as toting in pine bark after snow-shoeing all day in a snowstorm. Hulse’s was my home and anxious seat for two days. The sword of Damocles hung and cracked, but did not fall. I found Hulse’s store of provision under the boards of the front room floor. The boards were weighted down by a great pile of shingles. It was this monument of shingles in the parlor which caused me to suspect the existence of the cache. Taking from the big box I found underneath a renewed supply of flour and pork, and breaking the face of Hulse’s family clock, also packed therein, a matter never revealed until this present writing, I re-closed it, buried it, boarded it over and re-piled the shingles over it.
On the fourth morning of this excursion the storm was over, the sky clear, the heavens brightly blue, and the newly fallen snow had dressed the pines all in new suits. For the second time I bade Hulse’s lone house a doubtful farewell, for after travelling all day I had before succeeded only in bringing up there at night, and knew not but that I might do so again. The newly fallen snow being very light and feathery, I made slow progress. A frozen crust grants the best track for snowshoes. As the sun got higher it melted this feathery top snow, fusing it into a close, sodden mass, which stuck and bunched on the bottoms of the shoe runners. This delayed me still more. Other troublesome obstacles were the little rivulets and brooks, which, cutting through the snow, left banks on either side six or seven feet in height. To climb these was difficult. The snow gave way, and one could only flounder through and up to the top. Besides, it was necessary to wade the creeks. This wet my feet and caused more snow to bunch and freeze on them. Night came, and with it an increase of cold, which, causing the snow to freeze to a crust on top, iced and smoothed the track anew for me. But with one additional facility for making progress, I lacked another. That was the strength and freshness with which I had started at morn.
My day had been one of most laborious progress, wading creeks, floundering through their soft snowbanks, and stopping every ten minutes to clean my shoes of damp snow. I had no other grease for their bottoms save a bit of pork, which I wore out upon them. Snowshoes won’t run well unless frequently greased. Then there was no rest for my body. The supply of pines from about whose roots the snow had melted away had given out; to step off the shoes was to sink to the middle; to rest at all was to rest squatting; a few minutes’ trial of this position under the most favorable circumstances will convince any reader of its back-aching tendencies. Man is a lying animal; I mean he must lie down to recuperate. My meals I cooked on the snow. The regular menu was coffee, bread, and pork. The base of the kitchen was a big piece of dry pine bark, always at hand. On this the fire was kindled. The evolution of coffee under these conditions was slow, because the water for making it had first to be melted from snow in the coffee-pot, and snow under these circumstances melts with an exasperating slowness. The quantity required to make a single pint of water is something remarkable. I think I was obliged to fill that vessel four or five times with snow to get the suitable quantity of water. Then it must be remembered that the water would not proceed to boil until all the snow was melted. “A watched pot never boils,” but a watched pot of plain water is velocity itself when compared with a pot of snow and water watched by a tired and hungry being in the wilderness. Night found me twelve miles from Strawberry Flat. About one in the morning I found another empty cabin. This was four miles from the desired haven. It was desolation inside and out—the windows gone, the door torn from its hinges, the inside a litter of snow and rubbish, and one dead cow in the kitchen. The cooking-stove remained. I cleared the grate of snow and attempted a fire. It wouldn’t draw. Of course it wouldn’t draw, for the stovepipe was full of snow. Then I kindled the fire on the top of the stove and gradually burned up a portion of the house. Like Sherman and Napoleon, I lived on the country invaded. The firelight cast its ruddy glow on the surrounding domestic desolation and the red dead cow, which, being frozen hard as a rock, served for a seat. I waited for the morn; but the morn would not come. I saw from the sashless windows the preliminary streaks of dawn ever so faintly lighting up the eastern horizon full forty times, and found they were only in my imagination, so covetous for the coming day. When the sun did rise he came up in the opposite direction.