The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter XII

by Theodore Winthrop

Lightning And Torchlight

A little before noon we left the hut of blue mud, the mission of Atinam. We forded the shallow river, and Ferdinand cheerily led the way straight up the steep hill-side. From its summit I could overlook, for farewell, the parallel ranges, walls of my three valleys of adventure. There were no forests over those vast arid mounds to narrow the view. Hills of Weenas, hills of Nachchese, valley of Atinam, — I took my last glance over their large monotony.

I might glance over the landscape, and recall my crowded life in it, only while the horses breathed after their climb, and no longer. If not eighty, certainly sixty miles away over the mountains is the Columbia, Achilles of rivers. And, says Ferdinand, “it must be a race all day with time, all night with time, a close race with time to-morrow.” If uncertainty of success is a condition of success, we shall win the race. But no dalliance, no staying to study landscape; we must on, steadily as the Princess Parazaide, whatever sermons there be in the stones along our way.

Vast were the hilly sweeps we overcame. Nags of mine, ye had toil that penultimate day of August. But straight from far snow cliffs came electric airs, forerunners of the nightly gale. And the sun, that it might never be deemed a cruel tyrant, had provided remedies against its own involuntary despotism, in streams from the snows of Tacoma, melted not beyond the point of delicious coolness. Snow crystals married with sunbeams came gliding down the valleys on their wedding tour. Down the gorges in the basalt, and so by pool and plunge, the transfigured being, a new element, poured to the pebbly reaches below. Whenever we had climbed the long bulk of a dusty hill-side, dreary with wild sage, a stunted and abortive tree, the mean ensign of barrenness, and then descended the hot, thirsty slopes of a declivity as dreary, down in the valley always we found the antidote to dust, thirst, and sterility, the precious boon of water hidden among grass and trees, — sunshine’s gift brought from the snows to cure the pangs of sunshine. Sparkling draughts of water were ready in vale after vale. I had but to stoop from my saddle while Klale drank, and scoop the bright flow in a leather cup long dedicated to Ægle, in classic fountains of historic lands.

Ferdinand’s temptation and test of faithfulness befell him before we had gone two leagues on our way. As the fates threw Shabbiest in the path of Loolowcan, now Ferdinand’s tempter appeared. One watches his man narrowly at such a moment. Which Janus-face will he turn? the one that sees the past, or the one that looks toward the future? Will he be the bold and true radical, or the slinking conservative? The combat, with its Parthian flights and Pyrrhic victories, is generally more briefly called life, and its result character.

Thus far I had only the coarse public facts on Ferdinand as a theme for analysis. When Mystery takes care that a man shall exist, and have a few years’ career in villany or heroism, Mystery also takes care to set upon the man’s front a half-decipherable inscription. Fudnun was attractive, not repulsive, in the traits that mark character. By physiognomy, I deemed him a truish man, a goodish fellow, a wiseish nomad. But how was I to know what education had made of him? what indiscriminate vengeance be might have in his heart? what treachery in return for other blanketeers’ treachery? The same spirit of our darksome enlightenment that makes slavery possible, makes maltreatment of Indians certain. Fudnun might feel himself nominated to punish in me the wrongs of his race.

The Indian who was to be Fudnun’s Mephistophiles was riding seemingly astray and purposeless across the world, like an Indian. But when the stranger, coming full tilt through a bending defile, saw us, it was too late to skulk. He pulled up his wild black horse, noticed me with a cool Howdydo, and opened fire upon Fudnun, with gutturals not at all cheerful. Fudnun informed me that the tenor of the new-comer’s oration was like Shabbiest’s to Loolowcan, yesterday.

So, then, big Brownskin on a fiery black mustang, inferior chief with shirt and leggins of buckskin reddened with clay, sulky siwash of Skloo’s band, armed with gun and knife, — thou too art inhospitable to the parting guest, — thou too art unwilling that by the aid of Fudnun, my friend, I should speed out of the country toward the Columbia. Now, then, none of this! Avaunt! Make tracks!

But he declined to make tracks, and held the too facile Ferdinand in powwow. I questioned in my prudent heart whether I should do what I twitched to do, namely, use the Owhhigh whip upon this scowling interloper. The wristlet of otter-fur tightened in my grasp; I shook the long lash carelessly about the sturdy, legs of the wiry horse of Brownskin the Tempter, stinging them restive, horse and man. With revengeful venom of the blackest in his mind, the copper-headed, snaky beguiler continued his solicitations, urging Ferdinand, as that excellent worthy afterwards told me, not merely to desert, but to aid in a scheme of pillage, and whatever outrage might precede or follow pillage.

Ferdinand, as I trusted, was proof against the wily wheedler, though he sputtered poisonously in a language I knew not. Ferdinand at last shook off that serpent influence, and turned toward the trail. Copper-head, baffled, gave me a glance with a bite in it, and galloped away too much enraged to ask more barbarico, for all my valuables as a present.

“Ha, ha!” chuckled Fudnun, shaking his head, showing his white teeth, and seeming as happy as a school-girl with a new conundrum; “ha, ha!” chuckled he, as if this were a joke of the freshest. “Yaka tikky memloose mika pe capsualla conoway ikta; he want kill you and steal all the traps. Halo nika; not at all I. Wake kahquah klimmeriwhit Fudnun, — wake cultus man ocook; not so is Fudnun a liar, — no dastard he.”

Certainly not, Fudnun the Trusty! I divined you rightly, then. Your Janus-face points aright. You are not a spoilt Indian. I set you in the scale against Loolowcan the Frowzy, and once more half believe in honesty of barbarians. Having defied temptation, henceforth you are true.

Fudnun had thus far ridden the mission mare, while Gubbins pranced bare-back. Now the foal began to sigh for his native heath, and shrink from strange, wild scenes. We therefore stopped, and turned them out into the wide world. They could wallow in the long sedges therealong, and drink of the brook. No Indian of all the country-side would allow his thievish heart to covet an animal with the Mission brand. Me, or any other intrusive pasaiooks, he might rob of beast or the burden of beast, but whatever belonged to the priests was taboo. And if mission property could not protect itself, woe be to the thief when the green, gleaming coat of the dread inevitable Kamaiakan was seen along his trail.

Gubbins must again endure a rider more humane than Loolowcan. Antipodes’s packs were now ridiculously light, as Æsop’s bag at the end of the journey. We could press on fleet over hill and dale, on and on, steadily riding as if we bore tidings of joy, or rode for succor for the beleaguered of a starving city. On, never flagging, we sped, and drew, as day walled, toward the wooded mountains. Never a moment we rested, traversing tenantless wastes, until deep in the afternoon we came to a large, pure well of exquisite water, predicted by Ferdinand, wisest of nomads.

There, in a glade emeralded with richest of grass, I reposed, elaborating strength for my night ride. Meanwhile, my horses, with never a leg the less than when I proved them on the Macadam of Squally, swallowed green landscape fast, as if they feared this feast were a mirage, and the water-sprite would presently roll up her green drapery and vanish. The horses, with or without fancies or forethought, instinctively made ready for the coming trial.

Sweet are such episodes of travel in the fair spots of earth. Sweet, though the fare be but pork toasted on a stick, and hard-tack to which mustiness has but slightly penetrated. And if after feast so Spartan, before a night to be sleepless, a siesta propose itself, who will refuse? Not the wise traveller, to whom sleep or food never come amiss. By the Fountain of Fudnun the Jolly, to whom in less busy times life was a long joke, sleep, or repose not quite losing consciousness, might be permitted. For now my doubts of winning the race were beheaded by trenchant intuitions of success, and wriggled away into the background. Such doubts necessarily forecrawl a man on the march toward any object; it is well if he can timely destroy them, lest they trip up the rider’s hopeful ardor.

Distance, lying in long coils from Whulge onward, I had nearly trampled to death; its great back showed marks of my victorious hoofs; only the head reared itself, monstrous and unsubdued. One more great rampart of mountains must be stormed, and for this final assault Klale, Antipodes, and Gubbins were still taking in such stuff as courage is made of. Feed on, trusty trio; I love the sound of those jaws. It racks my heart to know that I must still demand much go-ahead of you. But though an exacting, I have been a merciful master. Ye have had long grass, to be digested into leaps, short grass for walking material, and sometimes a prairie-flower for inspiring a demivolt. I have whipped you, Antipodes, but have I whaled you? And now that you have taken your fill of grass, long, short, and flowery, let us away, to climb the great ridges before nightfall.

We came, not long before sunset, to the great mountain range, — another buttress of the Cascade system. Full against the plain rose a bulky earthwork. Klickatats on mustangs had been, ever since Klickatats first learned to ride, forever assaulting this fortress in elaborate zigzags, engineered with skill. And here, for fifteen hundred feet, we too must climb, driving our horses before us; we bending forward, and they struggling up on tiptoe and consuming energy far too rapidly.

The sun was prematurely gone when we reached the edge of easier slope above this mural front. Where I should have seen, westward, the Cascades and Tacoma bright as sunny cloud, but firmer than cloud, were now no mountains black with pines, was no Tacoma against the rose of sunset. A gloomy purple storm lay over the Cascades, vaster than they. A mass of thunderous darkness had swept in from ocean, and now stayed majestic, overlooking the wide world. Would it retreat with the sun, to do havoc wherever white sails were strained in hopeless flight, and whirl the spray from wrecking coral-reefs to the calm lagoons within? Or would it take a night of Titanic revelry among the everlasting hills, toppling crag into chasm, shaking down avalanches to drown their roar with roar of louder thunder, tossing great trees over into the torrents to see their strong death-struggle in the foam, by the ghastly beauty of lightning, revealing a spectacle born and dead in an instant? Or must it, with no choice of its own, range with the whirl of the globe, taking giant pleasure or doing giant ruin as the chances of Nature offered? Which of these was to be the destiny of that purple storm, poised and lowering over the hidden mountains? I could divine its decision, or its obedience, by prophetic puffs of roasted air, that ever and anon, in a sudden calm that had now befallen, smote me, as if some impish urchin, one of the pages of Æolus, dancing on a piping wind-bag, was looking my way and smiting his breezy cheeks.

Beside that envelope of storm hiding the west from floor to cope, there was only to be seen, now softened with dull violet haze, the large, rude region of my day’s gallop, — thirty miles of surging earth, seamed with frequent valleys of streams flowing eastward, where scanty belts of timber grew by the water-side.

When August’s sun, the remorseless, is gone, whether behind the ragged rims of a hurricane or the crest of a sierra, men and horses revive in that long shade. Twilight is sweet and restoring in itself, and also to an unforeseeing trio of mustangs, as promising the period when men encamp and horses are unsaddled. Therefore, now, although the air was heavy and the light lurid, we chased along the trail, mounting slowly ever, and winding on through files of pines; — vigorously we chased on, as if twilight of eve were twilight of dawn, and our day but now begun.

Among the silent pines, deeper into the darkening wood. But the same power that swept darkness forward in a steady growing inundation, banished also silence. The overcoming storm was battling with stillness, and slowly enveloping the strife with thicker and thicker pall, such as hangs over fields trod by the loud agonies of war.

A far forerunner of the gale struck suddenly upon the mountain-front, like an early shot of battle, fired to know the death range. While the roar of this first blast was passing away, and the trees were swaying back to stillness, a fugue of growling winds came following after. The alarmed whispers from leaf to leaf grew thicker now, joining to an undertone of delicate wailing a liquid sound, but sad, like the noise of a waterfall falling all the hours into a sunless pool where one has drowned because his life and soul could bear life and light no longer. Again, with gush of blacker darkness, came a throng of blasts tramping close; and after them was seeming calm, — calm only in seeming, and filled with the same whispers of alarm, the same dreary, feeble wail, and now with sobs desperate, irrepressible.

Fitful bursts of weeping rain were now coming thicker, until control ceased, and the floods fell with no interval, borne on furiously, dashing against every upright object as great crushing wave-walls smite on walls of cliff by the sea-side. The surges of wind were mightier than the furious rain drift, and with their strength and their roaring came the majesty of thunder, constant as the wind. Long ago, from where the clouds lay solid on the mountains great booming sounds had come, as if these masses rolling over the summits had struck with muffled crash upon crags below; and when those purple glooms stayed in hesitating poise upon the Cascades, lightnings were passing in among them, calling them together for the march, and signalling on the laggards. Now a great outer continent, a belt of storm world, was revolving over earth, and shaping itself to the region it traversed. In this storm zone, revealed by the scenic flames of neighbor lightning, were mountains huger than any ever heaped by Titanic forces assaulting heaven from earth. There were sudden clefts, and ravines with long sweeping flanks, and chasms where a cloud mountain-side had fallen in, leaving a precipice all ragged and ruinous, ready itself to fall. There were plateaus and surgy sweeps of cloud-land, valleys of gentleness, dells sweet and placid, passes by toppling crags from vale to vale, great stairways up to Alpine levels on high, garden-like Arcadias among horrent heights, realms changefully splendid, — all revealed by the undulations of broad, rosy lightning and lightning’s violet hues, where it shone, through their gloom of clouds. These clouds so black and terrible, hurrying on a night so black and dreary, were not then terrible and dreary in themselves, but only while there was no light to prove their beauty, — when light gleamed, they shone transcendent.

Lightning, besides its business of revelation, had some gymnastic feats of its own to show the world; to spring at some great round-topped, toppling cloud-crag, and down to the valleys beneath; to shoot through tunnels of darkness, and across chasms, hanging a bending line of light athwart, like the cable bridges of the Andes.

Lightning was also casting blinding splendors over the permanent world below the storm. Wherever the trail bent toward the vantage edges of the mountain-side, every flash disclosed magnificent breadth of lonely landscape, and then the vision was instantly limited to the dense darkness around, darker to dazzled eyes. But soon there were no such moments of darkness nor any silence. Thunder-tone flowed into thunder-tone, as blasts had thickened to a gale, and lightning made pervading light, flickering and unsteady as fevered pulses.

Such was the machinery of this drama, and as to the actors, I and my party, what of them?

Wet were they all, yea, drenched. And why should not a little biped be drenched? It is an honor to the like of him that splendid phenomena should take the trouble to notice him even with ridicule. And drenching by an August thunder-storm is not chilly misery. Nor are men on a hooihut considering damage to their integuments. On a hooihut, we wear no tiles that to-morrow will be pulp; nor coats with power to shrink and never again be shapely. Therefore, while the air beat upon us with electric thrills, and the furious excitements of the tempest were around us, we dashed along the narrow thread of the trail between the innumerable pines, — dashed along, acting with the might of the storm, as if we were a part of it, and reacting with ardors of our own against its fury.

Ferdinand, wrapped in a white blanket, led the way; Antipodes followed as main body; Klale and I were the third division of my army. Flooded lightning showed us our slender path winding up the illumined vista, and marked more clearly, in the long, coarse mountain grass, by rain pools.

For all the ceaselessness of flashes there would sometimes be moments of utter darkness, when the eyes closed involuntarily, and the look blenched, confounded and dazzled by the sudden gloom. Then the vista would disappear, the path be blotted out, and Ferdinand, white blanketeer, be annulled, so far as vision knew. But before night could gain power from permanence, or my guide could lose his last ocular image of the silver pathway, again flashes went curving above us, the floods of light poured forth, and the forest was betrayed as if clear noon were master.

The path had now bent inward, away from the edge of the mountain. Under the roofing pines we could see no more the stormy pageantry. The straight black trunks opened before us; we were to go on, on, guided by the beautiful ghastliness of lightning, fit illumination of terrible rites in the penetralia of this austere forest. Very wet neophytes we should arrive in the presence of whatever antique hierophant there might be wonder-working within the roofless sanctuary whither the lightning was leading us.

By this time the grandeurs of the storm were ended. Madness and pangs died away into sullen grief. Passion was over; tame realities were coming. There had been a majestic overture crowded with discordant concords, and there was nothing left for the opera but dull recitative. Night became undramatic; sulky instead of inspired; grizzly instead of splendorous. Solid rain now took the place of atmosphere. While the storm rampaged, it was adventurous and heroic to breast it; now our journey became an offensive plod. So long as lightning declared the path, it was exciting to chase therein; our present meaner guide was the sound of our own splashing in the trail.

Ferdinand still led on, finding the way by instinct. He could see naught, and I could see not even him in his white toga, except when some belated flash of the rear-guard turned its lantern hither and thither, seeking its comrades. We kept together by whistling to and fro. Observe this fact; for it is said that Indians do not whistle. Also that they eat no pork. For this latter reason some have connected them with the Lost Tribes. With regard to the latter charge, I can speak from a considerable range of induction. Indians only eat no pork when they have no pork. Not one to whom I have offered that viand of low civilization ever refused it, but clutched it with more or less ardor, proportioned to his state of repletion at the moment. My facts for induction on whistling among the Red Men are fewer. This one, however, I present confidently: Fudnun the Blanketeer whistled tunefully.

Ours was but a faint trail, rarely traversed, often illegible, even by full daylight, to untrained eyes, as I learned afterwards. What wonder, then, that we wandered often, and that the keenness of Fudnun’s vision was often tried, as he peered about and searched by intelligent zigzags in the darkness of night, under the darkness of pines, along the matted, muffling grass, for the slight clew of our progress? What wonder, then, that at last we erred totally, and searched in vain?

“Halo klap; no find,” said Fudnun the Trusty, coming back rather disconsolate.

Perforce of the great controls of Nature, we must submit, and take this night involuntary rest, quite lost in the forest.

Fudnun unsaddled. The horses could show no dislike to their fare. The grass was long, plenteous, and every blade was hung with lubricating rain-drops. Meanwhile, I, groping about, found some bits of punk and dry fuel in a natural fireplace hollowed in an ancient pine, one of the giants. The genius loci here, being of monotonous cast of mind, had given himself totally to pine culture. I could see nothing, but I had a sense that immense rough-barked pines were standing all about, watching my movements, — what was I doing, grubbing there at the roots of their big brother?

I was at work to light a fire. Fire was once a thing to be kept safe by vestals; but now we can do without them; fire sacred is cared for on myriads of domestic hearths; fire profane is in our pantaloons pocket. One may evoke it in an instant, as I did now. The tricksy sprite alighted in my tindery tipsoo, and presently involved my punk and my chips and all my larger fuel, as fast as I could seek it, by the growing blaze, among the ruins of the forest.

Fudnun took his supper, and soon was asleep, coiled in a heap among the saddles. As for me, I watched and drowsed, squatted before the fire, mummied in my blankets. Not a position, certainly, for cheerful reveries. A drizzle, thick as metaphysics, surrounded me. In its glowing cavity was my fire, eating its way slowly into the dead old heart of the tree, baking my face, but not drying my back. I was fortunately hungry, and hunger is excellent entertainment. A hungry man has something to think of, and if be is his own cook, something to do. I frizzled my pork and toasted my biscuit-chips; then I ate the same, and that part of the frolic was over. I longed for a tin cup of tea, well boiled and bitter, but it was “water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” I could not concentrate the drizzle, nor collect the drops from the grass, nor wring a supply from my wet clothes, — no tea, then, the best friend of the campaigner. In fact, as I could not sleep and recruit, and as I was in rather sorry plight, there was nothing to be done except to endure despondency and be patient.

Such pauses as this, midway in minor difficulty, are profitable, if patience can but come up from the rear, and marshal her sister faculties for steadier future march. In such isolated halts in a man’s life, when the future is not so certain as to make him disdain the past, he discovers the lessons there were in empiric days or years, of hurry and dash. In the lonely forest, dark with midnight and storms, where his fire casts but a gloaming light, — in such a solitude a man self-dependent will hear the oracles speak to him if they are to speak. He who would ask his fate at Delphi goes not along the summer-blooming plains, nor in among the vine-clad trellises, nor through the groves of olives, gray and ancient in gentle realms of Arcady. The Delphic gorge is stern and wild, and would affright all but one who is resolute to wring a favorable fate from the cave of prophecy. Poetic visions do not visit beds of roses, and no good thing or thought came out of Sybaris.

So there, “lone upon the mountain, the pinetrees wailing round me,” I seemed to hear some of those great calming words without which life goes restless, and may not dream of peace. For early, thoughtful years and eras of ours are saddened and bewildered by the sting of evil, others’ and our own; poisonous bigotries grapple with faith from its cradle; we are driven along the gantlet of selfishness; love, the surest test of nobleness, seems the most hopeless test, discovering only the ignoble; we dwell among comrades of chance, not choice, and cannot find our allies, know not any other law of growth than the unreflecting stir about us. So instinctive faith dies, and because without faith the soul dies, we must seek it, and perhaps wander for it as far and not hopefully, — wander perhaps as far as to the forests of Tacoma.

As I sat by my fire, thinking over the wide world, and feeling that I looked less blindly, than once upon its mysteries, suddenly I was visited by a brilliant omen.

All at once the darksome forest became startlingly full of light. A broad glare descended through the lowering night, and shed about me strange, weird lustre. I sprang up, and beheld a pillar of flame hung on high in the gloom.

An omen quite too simply explicable. I had kindled my fire in the hollow of a giant dead trunk. Flame slowly crept up within, burning itself a way through the dry core, until it gained the truncated summit, sixty feet aloft, and leaped outward in a mighty flash. Once escaped, after its stealthy growth, the fire roared furiously up this chimney of its own making. The long flame streamed away from its gigantic torch, lashing, among the trees and tossing gleams, sparks and great red flakes into the inner glooms of the wood. Nobler such an exit for one of the forest primeval than to rot away and be a century in slow dying. His brethren around watched sombrely the funeral pyre of their brother. Their moaning to the wind mingled with the roar of his magnificent death-song.

Trust Nature. None of the thaurmaturgists, strong in magical splendors, ever devised such a spectacle as this. I had fought my way, a pressing devotee, into the inner shrine, unbullied by the blare of the tempest, and this was the boon offered by Nature to celebrate my initiation.

The fire roared, and there was another roaring. Ferdinand snored roaringly from his coiled position among the traps. A snore is the expression of gratitude for sleep, not less genuine for its unconsciousness. Every breath is a plaudit to Morpheus, the burlesque of a sigh of joy. Snoring is to sleep what laughter is to waking. Fudnun’s snore in the solitary woods, among the great inarticulate facts of nature, was society and conversation. He seemed to utter amens of content in long-drawn cadence.

As I could not take my tall torch in hand and be a path-finder, I patrolled about the woods, admiring it where it stood, a brilliant beacon. The blossom of flame still unfolded, unfading, and as leaf after leaf fell away like the petals of roses, other petals opened about the unconsumed bud. Firelight gave rich greenness to the dark pines. Sometimes a higher quiver of flame would seize an overhanging branch and sally off gayly; but the blast soon extinguished these escapades.

Fire gnaws quicker than the tooth of Time. I was sitting, drowsy and cowering, near my furnace, when a warning noise aroused me. A catastrophe was at hand. Flames grew intenser, and careered with leaps more frantic, as now, with a riving uproar, the giant old trunk cut away at its base, cracked, trembled, swayed, and fell in sublime ruin. At this strange tumult, loud and harsh in the dull dead of night, the horses, affrighted, looked up with the light of the flame in their eyes, and then dashed off furiously.

Fudnun also was startled. He woke; he uncoiled; he stared; he grunted; he recoiled; he slept; he snored.

Mouldering away in cheerless ruin lay the trunk all along in the dank grass. Its glory had quenched itself in time, for now, Aurora being in the sulks, a fusty dawn, the slipshod drudge of her palace, was come as substitute for the rosy goddess, to wake the world to malecontent. Enchantment was perished. My torch, bright flarer through darkness, became mere kitchen fuel. Fudnun awoke to snore no more. He squatted in a mass, warming his musty members after their bedrizzled cramps of the night. Then we toasted our pork over the embers, completing the degradation of the pine. It had had its centuries of dignity, while its juniors, lengthening upward ungainly, envied its fair proportions. Then the juniors had times of rejoicing within their cortex, in their vegetable hearts, when glory of foliage fell away from their senior’s crown, and larger share of sunlight came to the hungry youngsters. And now the junior pines were in high feather that an unsightly monument of the past and memento mori was gone, and lay a vertebrated skeleton of white ashes in the glade it sheltered so fatherly once.