“Come and get it!”
That is a call in Glacier Park no one has to hear a second time. Even Mrs. Jones perked up, and stopped complaining about how cold she was, and how she hated to clean her teeth in ice water, and how she missed her morning bath, and silenced her own tongue with a bite of bacon that was more nourishing than ladylike in size. The breakfast disappeared in double quick time, and Val went up the hill for the horses, while Mills and Dick began to strike the tents and arrange the packs, and Joe cleaned his dishes and packed his provisions.
At half-past eight, the party was in the saddle again, Mills at the head, and started up the trail, along the lake shore, toward the gleaming white field of Blackfeet Glacier and the red, snow-spangled cone of Mount Jackson.
“Where are we bound to-day?” some one asked.
“Only seven miles, to Gunsight Lake,” the Ranger answered. “I thought maybe you’d like an easy stage to-day, and this afternoon those that wanted to could go up on the glacier.”
“The man is almost intelligent!” Mrs. Jones exclaimed. “Only seven miles—that sounds more reasonable to me.”
They were seven easy miles, too, up a streamside by an easy grade, a good deal of the way through tall timber, and past a beaver dam, the first one Joe had ever seen. It was made of small logs, twigs and grasses, all matted together, and plastered neatly and tightly with mud, and must have been a hundred feet long and perhaps three feet high, so that a considerable little pond had backed up behind it, in which, rising above the water, were the huts, which looked like larger and better built muskrat huts. Joe pulled down his horse to a slow walk as he passed, and saw the little canals the beavers had made, leading from the bed of the stream back into the willow and aspen swamp. He figured out that the chief reason the beavers build dams is so they can flood such a grove of young willows, aspens, etc., and float out the tiny logs they cut (the young shoots, with tender bark), to their houses, where they store them for winter food. Later he asked Mills, and found he was right. When the beavers can find deep water, with food trees right on the bank, they will not bother to make dams.
Joe lingered till Val yelled at him to “get a move on,” hoping he might see one of the little animals at work, but the beaver works mostly at night when he has to be above water, and not one was now to be seen.
It was a short, easy trip to Gunsight Lake, and they reached the open meadow at its foot by eleven o’clock. The lake, a smallish one, lay at the bottom of a great horseshoe amphitheatre. If you will imagine the Harvard stadium two or three miles long instead of two or three hundred yards, with sides almost precipitous and three thousand feet high, and a green lake where the football gridiron is, you have a picture of Gunsight. The closed end of the horseshoe was the Divide, and that was where the Gunsight Pass lay, over which they would climb to-morrow. The north side was Fusillade Mountain, the south side was the great shoulder of Mount Jackson (the summit being invisible from this point). The meadow where they were to camp was just out at the open end, where they could see around the shoulder of Jackson to the glittering field of Blackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park, hung on the upper slopes of the Divide, to the southwest, and where, behind them, rose the huge cliffs of Citadel Mountain, which is exactly like old Fort Sumter or the old fort on Governor’s Island, enlarged to the “nth” power. (If you don’t know what “enlarged to the nth power” means, it’s either because you have not studied your algebra, or have not reached algebra yet.) The floor of the meadow was full of wild flowers, especially the great, tall white spikes of the Indian basket grass, and full, too, of low balsams and pines.
Close to the shore of the lake lay a big pile of lumber, old, twisted iron beds, half a cook-stove, and the like.