I thought he had stopped, but sometime later he resumed, still regarding the moon.
“Like kinder spoonin’.”
BLACKFEET INDIANS AT GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.
But it takes a moon to bring out the softer side of the guide nature, and they waste little time in thoughts of “kinder spoonin’” when they have a party on a difficult trail. There they are nurse-maids, advisers and grooms, entertainers and disciplinarians, all in an outwardly casual manner. As they swing in their saddles up the trail, what they are thinking has much to do with whom they are guiding. We saw all kinds of “doods” while at Glacier, and some would have driven me mad, but I never yet saw a guide lose his temper.
“Honest,” confided Johnson,—Johnson is an old timer who limps from an ancient quarrel with a grizzly, and wears overalls and twisted braces and humps together in the saddle,—“honest, there’s some of them you couldn’t suit not if you had the prettiest pair of wings ever was.”
There was the gentleman who appeared in very loud chaps and bandana and showed his knowledge of western life, regardless of the fact that Toby’s horse and mine just behind him were showing a tendency to buck, by shouting, “Hi-yi” and bringing down his Stetson with a bang on the neck of the spiritless hack the guides had sardonically bestowed on him.
There was the fond mother who held up the whole party to Logan Pass while she pleaded with her twelve-year-old son to wear one of her veils to keep off the flies. Poor little chap! His red face showed the tortures he endured, and the guide turned away and pretended not to hear.
There was the old lady and her spinster daughter from Philadelphia who took a special camping trip high into the mountains where crystal streams start from their parent glaciers, and insisted on the guide boiling every drop of water before they would drink it. And when they left they sent all the saddle bags to be dry cleaned, thereby ruining them.
There was also Mr. Legion, who had never been on a horse before, who complained all the twenty-six miles up and down hill that his stirrups were too long, and too short, that his horse wouldn’t go, and that he jolted when he trotted, that the saddle was too hard and that the guide went so fast nobody could keep up with him. It was Mrs. Legion who got dizzy at the steep places and stopped the procession on the worst switchback while she got off and walked, or insisted on taking her eight-year-old child along, and then frightened both the child and herself into hysteria when they gazed down on those lake-threaded valleys straight beneath them.