Hunting in Many Lands: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club

by Unknown

We had camped for the night at the last of those ranches which stretch along the bottom lands of the St. Mary River, and just as we started, its owner, Indian Billy, decided to go with us.

Even he had never been to the foot of his tribe's famous peak, and the dark-skinned idlers of the ranch who gathered about us as we flung the lash ropes over our horses could tell us little more than legends of it. Several Bloods from across the Canadian border declared that the boundary line ran, not where the white men had marked it on the prairie with their insignificant piles of stones, but through the deep cleft in the Chief's wall, where the Great Spirit himself had placed it; thus giving to the Bloods, who knew it best, their proper share of the mountain. And, getting warmer in their enthusiasm, they reminded Billy of their standing challenge to his tribe, the Piegans—fifty horses to anyone who should run around that wall, small as it seemed, in half a day.

For our part it was hard to realize even on that cold September morning that the long dreaming was over and the reality before us. It took all the straining of the pack ponies on the wet lead-ropes to remind us that we were at last climbing the foothills of the great peak. Our presence there, far from breaking the long enchantment, surrendered us bodily to it, and Billy, riding over the successive slopes before us, swaying in the saddle with the hawk-like motion of the prairie Indian, seemed a fit ambassador to lead us to his king. As the day passed, the clouds gradually lightened; and finally, just as we surmounted one of the higher foothills, at the summit of the long, sloping, forest-clad pedestal before us broke through the crown of the Chief. Toward us, on the east, it showed a black rectangular wall 2,000 feet in length, 1,500 in height, and from its sharp corners the broken mists streamed away southward like tattered garments.

A few hasty pictures, taken while Fox mended a broken pack cinch, and we pressed on toward the foot of the mountain. Some benign influence was with us even thus early, and we were guided into the easiest way. Streaks of burned forest, bristling with windfalls, were slowly but successfully threaded, long rock slides luckily avoided, while we mounted steadily slope after slope; until finally, late in the afternoon, we pulled our panting horses out, just above timber line, upon the comparatively level summit of the pedestal. The foot of the great crown wall was still a mile away and 1,000 feet above us, but we were near enough and high enough for our purpose; and in a deep basin, sheltered from the wind and carpeted with softest mountain grass, and with the only water in the neighborhood sparkling up from a spring in the bottom, we found a perfect camp. As soon as the tents were pitched, Fox set about preparing dinner, while the seven horses, freed from their loads, buried their noses in the grass in perfect contentment.

As he sat in the door of the tent, the Doctor's eyes seemed glued to his field glass, while the object lenses ever pointed in the one direction, westward; under the brim of the Indian's broad hat, as he lay apparently dozing before the fire, I could see his black eyes fixed on the same point; and even Fox, constantly shifting his position about the fire, rarely took one which placed his back toward that black wall behind which the sun was now gradually sinking. For myself, all the longing of the past year had concentrated itself into a desire to rush over this last remaining distance; to get to that magic crown, to feel it with hand and foot, and to see whether, as the Piegans aver, it denied even a single foothold for a mortal man.

After dinner the Doctor and I did go to it. We clambered out of our little basin on to the higher portion of the domelike pedestal, and from this platform, on which rests the great crown, looked past its two edges at the vast mountain range behind it, stretching north and south. Then we picked our way toward it, through the loose boulders and broken rock; saw the summit hang further and further over us as we advanced into the gloom at its foot, and after finally reaching it and pressing ourselves against it where it rose sheer from its pedestal, we hurried back to camp through the twilight, thoroughly awed by the solemnity of the place.

The storm of the morning had cleared into a most perfect night; and, as we lay about the fire, Billy told us all that the old men had told him of the Chief. A full-blooded Piegan, in his new life as a ranchman he had not lost touch with the traditions of his tribe. Only one Piegan, he said, had ever attempted to climb the mountain. Years ago a hunting party of their young men had been encamped on the opposite side, where the cliffs do not overhang so much, and ledges run temptingly up for a distance; and one of them, the youngest and most ambitious of the band, declared that he would go to the summit. He started, and his companions watched him from below until he passed along one of the very highest ledges, out of sight. Then the spirit of the mountain must have met him; for, though they waited many days, and searched for him all around the base, he never came back. And the Piegans, being a prairie tribe and not over fond of the mountains at best, thereafter avoided any close acquaintance with their king.

A story had come to them, however, from the Flatheads across the range—a tribe whose prowess they always respected in war, as they believed in their truthfulness in peace—and as the story related to their mountain, they had treasured it among their own legends. Still earlier, many years before even the oldest Piegan was a boy, there had lived a great Flathead warrior, a man watched over by a spirit so mighty that no peril of battle or of the hunt could overcome him. When at last in his old age he came to die, he told the young men his long-kept secret. Many years before, as the time approached for him to go off into the forest and sleep his warrior sleep, in which he hoped to see the vision which should be his guide and protection through life, he had decided to seek a spot and a spirit which had never before been tried. So, carrying the usual sacred bison skull for his pillow, he had crossed the mountains eastward into the far-off Piegan country. Then, with none to aid him save the steady power of his own courage, he had ventured upon the ledges of the Chief of the Mountains, and, choking down each gasp of panic when at overhanging corners the black walls seemed striving to thrust him off and down, he had finally forced his way to the very summit. For four days and nights he had fasted there, sleeping in the great cleft which one can see from far out on the prairie. On each of the first three nights, with ever increasing violence, the spirit of the mountain had come to him and threatened to hurl him off the face of the cliff if he did not go down on the following day. Each time he had refused to go, and had spent the day pacing the summit, chanting his warrior song and waving his peace pipe in the air as an offering, until finally, on the fourth night, the spirit had yielded, had smoked the pipe, and had given him the token of his life. None of the young Flatheads, however, said Billy, had dared to follow their great warrior's example; so that to this day he was the only man who had braved the spirit of the Chief and made it his friend.