After calling to my guide in vain, I mounted the mule, slung my guns over my shoulder and led the pony with one hand, following the tracks. The finest prescription for dampening the ardor of a sportsman is to require him to try what I did that day. Even in light doses it works like a charm. It dampened not only my ardor but also my feet, and—when my saddle turned and I landed in a snowdrift—my head and arms too. After various accidents and involuntary dismounts, I lost all desire for venison and wanted to go home.
Playing horse-holder for a cow-puncher was not my ideal sport.
Then the mule cut his foot and refused to be comforted; so I mounted the broncho and led Buckskin. This arrangement was worse. Whenever we came to a log, Broncho would take it as a circus horse does a hurdle, but Buckskin would stop short and almost wrench my arm from its socket.
Sometimes the beasts decided to take different sides of a tree, and I was powerless to prevent them. Overhanging boughs would brush me from the saddle as Buckskin jumped under them, or deluge me with snow as he ran against them. All this time I had to follow the footprints of my escort—the man who had promised to show me game. At sunset I gave it up and returned to the main cañon to wait for him. Tying the animals, I built a huge fire as a beacon and ate Shorthorns’ lunch. At dark I fired my rifle three times as a signal, and later he appeared, though without any deer. He claimed to have seen them, but of course had some good excuse for not shooting one. Excuses all the way from poor ammunition to tenderness of heart, are as thick in that country as “leaves in Valombrosa.” Mr. X. had not even had the excitement and happiness (?) of trailing a deer—or a cowboy.
Besides a few snipe killed at a swamp called by Shorthorns a “cineky,” from the Spanish sieneca, we still depended upon Uncle Sam’s subsistence stores for our daily bread.
Preferring hunting to mule whacking, I one day tramped all over the mountain tops, and halting for lunch at the rincon (Spanish for inner corner) of the range, enjoyed some of the finest scenery outside a modern theatre. Here the ground fell precipitously for several hundred feet, and at a height of 9,000 feet I could look down upon several neighboring ranges. Peaks and ranges that from the plains seemed mountains, were now but ant-hills and ploughed furrows in an otherwise velvet carpet of rich brown. The Guadaloupe range, covered with snow and ice, was a vast iceberg, beyond what my friend Shorthorns called the “mirredge.” The distant Rio Grande was plainly visible, and one could fancy smoke rising from the site of El Paso, more than a hundred miles to the south. A gypsum formation, called the White Sands, covered miles of the prairie, and from my lofty position resembled a sea lashed to foam.
It was beautiful, but it was not game.
One Saturday night, a fierce rain-storm added to the complications. It came to stay, too. All day Sunday we could do no more than hug the chosy fireplace and tell lies about former hunts. One newspaper was found, and we read an account of a polar expedition’s suffering. We feared we should need a few points before escaping from our situation, and studied “Grover Cleveland’s” ribs and hams, and our well-oiled hunting-boots, and wondered how long canine steaks and leather soup would prove palatable. As no abatement of the storm came at night, we reached the good resolution stage and agreed never to do ever so many things.
On Monday it cleared slightly, and we lost no time in packing up and moving to a lower altitude and milder climate. Going down the cañon, ropes were tied to the wagons, and all hands lowered each in turn over the dangerous places. With an abrupt descent, our teams made good time, and we were proud of the veteran manner in which our wagons shot down the cañon with the reckless abandon of mountain trains. On the way, we bought a side of fresh pork, and it was surprising how game it did taste when seasoned with jelly and a good appetite.
That night, while camped on the way to Shorthorns’ place, something dropped. It was snow. Early in the morning, the cook lighted a fire in our tent and said it was cold. We thought so too, and as we dug our clothing from drifts inside the tent, we wished the author of “Beautiful Snow” could have a little of it in his. We washed our faces in the beautiful white article and looked at the weather. The animals were tied to the wagons only a few feet from our tent, yet so fierce was the storm, that we could hardly see them. Breakfast that morning was light—all except the bread—as Sibley stores are not intended for cooking, and no fire could live outside. We devoted the day to shoveling snow from the tents, feeding the fire and wondering how the deer and elk enjoyed the weather. Our curiosity on this score, however, was not sufficient to lure us from shelter.