I walked back over the hills to camp, where we found Captain G. and the commissary with the best of two deer they had shot. Later, Mr. C. and Mr. K. came in with four elk, so that we were well supplied. Of these various meats the deer proved the best, the mountain-sheep the poorest. The minimum of the night temperature was 34° Fahrenheit. At eighty-five hundred feet above tide the change at sundown was abrupt. Our camp-fires had filled the little valley with smoke, and through it the moon rose red and sombre above the pine-clad outlines of the eastward hills.
The next day Mr. E. and I, who liked to break the journey by a walk, started early, and, following a clear trail, soon passed the mules. We left Pelican Creek on our right, and crossed a low divide into a cooly,[B] the valley of Broad Creek: a second divide separated this from Cañon Creek, both of which enter the Yellowstone below the falls.
After some six miles afoot over grassy rolling plains and bits of wood, the command overtook us, and, mounting, we followed the major for an hour or two through bogs and streams, where now and then down went a horse and over went a trooper, or some one or two held back at a nasty crossing until the major smiled a little viciously, when the unlucky ones plunged in and got through or not as might chance.
About twelve some of us held up to lunch, the train and escort passing us. We followed them soon through dense woods, and at last up a small brook in a deep ravine among boulders big and small. At last we lost the trail at the foot of a slope one thousand feet high of loose stones and earth, from the top of which a cry hailed us, and we saw that somehow the command had got up. The ascent was very steep, but before we made it a mule rolled down. As he was laden with fresh antelope and deer meat, the scattering of the yet red joints as he fell made it look as if the poor beast had been torn limb from limb; but, as a packer remarked, "Mules has got an all-fired lot of livin' in 'em;" and the mule was repacked and started up again. "They jist falls to make yer mad, anyway," added the friendly biographer of the mule.
The sheer mountain-side above us was not to be tried mounted; so afoot, bridle in hand, we started up, pulling the horses after us. I had not thought it could be as hard work as it proved. There was a singular and unfeeling lack of intelligence in the fashion the horse had of differing with his leader. When the man was well blown and stopped, the horse was sure to be on his heels, or if the man desired to move the horse had his own opinion and proved restive. At last, horses and men came out on a bit of level woodland opening into glades full of snow. We were eighty-four hundred feet in air, on a spur of Amethyst or Specimen Mountain. We had meant, having made eighteen miles, to camp somewhere on this hill, but the demon who drives men to go a bit farther infested the major that day; so presently the bugle sounded, and we were in the saddle again, and off for a delusive five-mile ride. As Mr. G. Chopper once remarked, "De mile-stones to hebben ain't set no furder apart dan dem in dis yere land;" and I believed him ere that day was done.
The top of this great hill, which may be some ten thousand feet in height, is large and irregular. Our trail lay over its south-eastern shoulder. After a little ride through the woods we came out abruptly on a vast rolling plain sloping to the north-east, and broadening as it fell away from us until, with intervals of belts of wood, it ended in a much larger plain on a lower level, quite half a mile distant, and of perhaps one thousand acres. About us, in the coolies, the "Indian paint-brush" and numberless flowers quite strange to us all so tinted the dried grasses of these little vales as to make the general hue seem a lovely pink-gray. Below us, for a mile, rolled grassy slopes, now tawny from the summer's rainless heat, and set with thousands of balsam-firs in groups, scattered as with the hand of unerring taste here and there over all the broad expanse. Many of them stood alone, slim, tall, gracious cones of green, feathered low, and surrounded by a brighter green ring of small shoots extending from two to four feet beyond where the lowest boughs, touching the earth, were reflected up from it again in graceful curves. On all sides long vistas, bounded by these charming trees, stretched up into the higher spurs. Ever the same flowers, ever the same amazing look of centuries of cultivation, and the feeling that it would be natural to come of a sudden on a gentleman's seat or basking cows, rather than upon the scared doe and dappled fawn which fled through the coverts near us. We had seen many of these parks, but none like this one, nor any sight of plain and tree and flowers so utterly satisfying in its complete beauty. It wanted but a contrast, and, as we rode through and out of a line of firs, with a cry of wonder and simple admiration the rudest trooper pulled up his horse to gaze, and the most brutal mule-guard paused, with nothing in his heart but joy at the splendor of it.
At our feet the mountain fell away abruptly, pine-clad, and at its base the broad plain of the East Branch of the Yellowstone wandered through a vast valley, beyond which, in a huge semicircle, rose a thousand nameless mountains, summit over summit, snow-flecked or snow-clad, in boundless fields—a grim, lonely, desolate horror of rugged, barren peaks, of dark gray for the most part, cleft by deep shadows, and right in face of us one superb slab of very pale gray buttressed limestone, perhaps a good thousand feet high. I thought it the most savage mountain-scenery I had ever beheld, while the almost feminine and tender beauty of the parks which dotted these wild hills was something to bear in remembrance.
But the escort was moving, the mules crowding on behind our halted column; so presently we were slipping, sliding, floundering down the hillside, now on steep slopes, which made one a bit nervous to ride along; now waiting for the axemen to clear away the tangle of trees crushed to earth by the burden of some year of excessive snow; now on the horses, now off, through marsh and thicket. I ask myself if I could ride that ride to-day: it seems to me as if I could not. One so fully gets rid of nerves in that clear, dry altitude and wholesome life that the worst perils, with a little repetition, become as trifles, and no one talks about things which at home would make a newspaper paragraph. Yet I believe each of us confessed to some remnant of nervousness, some special dread. Riding an hour or two at night in a dense wood with no trail is an experiment I advise any man to try who thinks he has no nerves. A good steep slope of a thousand feet of loose stones to cross is not much more exhilarating: nobody likes it.
The command was far ahead of two or three of us when we had our final sensation at a smart little torrent near the foot of the hill, a tributary of the main river. The horses dive, in a manner, into a cut made dark by overgrowth of trees, then down a slippery bank, scuttle through wild waters surging to the cinche, over vast boulders and up the farther bank, the stirrups striking the rocks to left or right, till horse and man draw long breaths of relief, and we are out on the slightly-rolling valley of the East Yellowstone, and turn our heads away from Specimen Mountain toward Soda Butte.
Captain G. and I, who had fallen to the rear, rode leisurely northward athwart the open prairie on a clear trail, which twice crossed the shallow river, and, leaving the main valley, carried us up a narrowing vale on slightly rising ground. On either side and in front rose abrupt mountains some two thousand feet above the plain, and below the remarkable outline of Soda Butte marked the line of the Park boundary. Near by was a little corral where at some time herdsmen had settled to give their cattle the use of the abundant grasses of these well-watered valleys. When there are no Indian scares, the cattle herdsmen make immense marches in summer, gradually concentrating their stock as the autumn comes on and returning to the shelter of some permanent ranche. The very severity and steadiness of the winters are an advantage to cattle, which do not suffer so much from low temperature as from lack of food. Farther south, the frequent thaws rot the dried grasses, which are otherwise admirable fodder, but in Montana the steady cold is rather preservative, and the winds leave large parts of the plains so free from snow that cattle readily provide themselves with food.