WHERE THE ANTELOPE WILL
GO THE BEAR WILL FOLLOW
XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE
Blessings for dawn and the rosy lights and for the cloudlessness of the morning! Had mist enshrouded us we should have had to have remained high up on the slippery knife-edge of the mountain till the mist had passed. We were able to descend, cautiously, cautiously, for three hours in a trackless precipitous zig-zag to the red peak of a lower mountain and a high snow-bound lake, where we made a good fire and made coffee with our last coffee, and lay down again and slept. Then we washed in the snow and ceased to be old weather-beaten tramps and recaptured our yesterdays and our youth, and Vachel began to sing again and our knapsacks felt lighter, as indeed they were, for we had eaten up all the rations, even the iron rations.
Then we walked to the valley of the Sun Mountain adown the rocks of a continuous cascade. The descent to the snow-bound lake and the red peak had seemed impossible, and we essayed the impossible again. It was not merely a polite walk downstairs. Every step that we took was a problem. We used our hands and the strength of our wrists as much as our feet and the tension of our ankles. Constantly were we faced with fifteen to twenty-foot drops on to narrow ledges, where a balance must be kept when we alighted.
No doubt I am by nature a mountaineer and hillsman, half a Highlander, at least, and Vachel’s genius is the genius of the plains. I am an antelope and he is a bear, we tell each other.
“You lead,” says Vachel. “Where the antelope will go the bear will follow after him, but the antelope will not follow the bear.”
So he followed downward, and we took the most abominable chances of breaking our legs or our necks—we had to take them. Then presently we came to what seemed a full forty-foot sheer drop of foaming water—an impossible descent, you would say, for all the grasp and grip in it was water-washed and water-smoothed by ages of water—impossible, impossible. But no, face it, think it over, it can be managed. O caution, caution! Trust yourself to the Almighty Protector and grit your teeth!
Timidity fought daring all the way down. We sat once or twice, and regarded the view. One thing was certain: we could not climb back to the places we had come from. If we did not continue downward we had to remain where we were.
We did things which one does not do without guides and ropes and the paraphernalia of mountaineering, and when we got down to the tortured fissured rocks below the cataract we looked up whence we had come and said again to ourselves, “Impossible, impossible!”