Roughing it De Luxe

"The trouble with you fellows," said the man, "is that you are too dad-blamed technical. The point is that I'm here, and here I'm going to stay."

"But," they told him, "you can't stay here. You'd starve to death like that poor devil that some prospectors found in that gulch yonder—turned to dusty bones, with a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock under his head. You'd just naturally starve to death."

"There you go again," he said, "importing these trivial foreign matters into the discussion. Let us confine ourselves to the main issue, which is that I am not going back. This rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I," he said, or words to that effect.

So insisting, he sat down, putting his own firm base against the said rock, and prepared to become a permanent resident. He was a grown man and the guides were less gentle with him than they had been with the lady school teacher. They roped his arms at the elbows and hoisted him upon a mule and tied his legs together under the mule's belly, and they brought him out of there like a sack of bran—only he made more noise than any sack of bran has ever been known to make.

Coming back up out of the Grand Cañon is an even more inspiring and amazing performance than going down. But by now—anyhow this was my experience, and they tell me it is the common experience—you are beginning to get used to the sensation of skirting along the raw and ragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns where, going down, your hair pushed your hat off, no longer affright you; you take them jauntily—almost debonairly. You feel that you are now an old mountain-scaler, and your soul begins to crave for a trip with a few more thrills to the square inch in it. You get your wish. You go down Hermit Trail, which its middle name is thrills; and there you make the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk.

The Hydrophobic Skunk is a creature of such surpassing accomplishments and vivid personality that I feel he is entitled to a new chapter. The Hydrophobic Skunk will be continued in our next.

RABID AND HIS FRIENDS

The Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand Cañon and, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a Federal office, is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody ever saw him—that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists who had seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.

I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with any extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybody gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect—nay, more than that, respect and veneration—wherever he goes. Joy-riders never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no—the Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besides carrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid in the most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, like one's relatives by marriage—and not mad most of the time, like the old-fashioned railroad ticket agent—but mad all the time—incurably, enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it.

We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Cañon first of all takes the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal wound of a cañon to the very gizzard of the world.

Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked out the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinary folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side all the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loose stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than a foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped—which he never does—or if you rolled off on your own hook—which has not happened to date—that puny little wall would hardly stop you—might not even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and a thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a tremendous sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon.

As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a buckboard ride of ten miles—ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately the road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the sunshine is a benediction.

Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop up romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by the heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.

Anon—that is to say, at the end of those ten miles—you come to the head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You ride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty fir trees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned with the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blistered vistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail, which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apaches and later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward with their stolen pony herds.

You pass above the gloomy shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a great box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock and balancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at the end of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midway between Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty, the official hermit of the Grand Cañon.

Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with warped legs and mild blue eyes and a set of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect that you cannot tell at first look whether they are just coming out or just going back in. He belongs—or did belong—to the vast vanishing race of oldtime gold prospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under an accommodating flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like a snuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, a breadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretch of the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds the trail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in the night; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quiet existence.

Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah, weekending in the whale, had a perfectly uproarious time; but Shorty thrives on a solitude that is too vast for imagining. He would not trade jobs with the most potted potentate alive—only sometimes in mid-summer he feels the need of a change stealing over him, and then he goes afoot out into the middle of Death Valley and spends a happy vacation of five or six weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat. He takes Toby with him.

Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like a carpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly—after the model of his master's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You have only to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttling away to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all round looking for red invaders. Not finding any he comes slowly back, crushed to the earth with disappointment. Nobody has ever been able to decide what Toby would do with the Indians if he found them; but he and Shorty are in perfect accord. They have been associated together ever since Toby was a pup and Shorty went into the hermit business, and that was ten years ago. Sitting cross-legged on a flat rock like a little gnome, with his puckered eyes squinting off at space, Shorty told us how once upon a time he came near losing Toby.

"Me and Toby," he said, "was over to Flagstaff, and that was several years ago. There was a saloon man over there owned a bulldog and he wanted that his bulldog and Toby should fight. Toby can lick mighty nigh any dog alive; but I didn't want that Toby should fight. But this here saloon man wouldn't listen. He sicked his bulldog on to Toby and in about a minute Toby was taking that bulldog all apart.

"This here saloon man he got mad then—he got awful mad. He wanted to kill Toby and he pulled out his pistol. I begged him mighty hard please not to shoot Toby—I did so! I stood in front of Toby to protect him and I begged that man not to do it. Then some other fellows made him put up his gun, and me and Toby came on away from there." His voice trailed off. "I certainly would 'a' hated to lose Toby. We set a heap of store by one another—don't we, dog?" And Toby testified that it was so—testified with wriggling body and licking tongue and dancing eyes and a madly wagging stump tail.

As we mounted and jogged away we looked back, and the pair of them—Shorty and Toby—were sitting there side by side in perfect harmony and perfect content; and I could not help wondering, in a country where we sometimes hang a man for killing a man, what would have been adequate punishment for a brute who would kill Toby and leave Shorty without his partner! In another minute, though, we had rounded a jagged sandstone shoulder and they were out of sight.

About that time Johnny, our guide, felt moved to speech, and we hearkened to his words and hungered for more, for Johnny knows the ranges of the Northwest as a city dweller knows his own little side street. In the fall of the year Johnny comes down to the Cañon and serves as a guide a while; and then, when he gets so he just can't stand associating with tourists any longer, he packs his warbags and journeys back to the Northern Range and enjoys the company of cows a spell. Cows are not exactly exciting, but they don't ask fool questions.

A highly competent young person is Johnny and a cowpuncher of parts. Most of the Cañon guides are cowpunchers—accomplished ones, too, and of high standing in the profession. With a touch of reverence Johnny pointed out to us Sam Scovel, the greatest bronco buster of his time, now engaged in piloting tourists.

"Can he ride?" echoed Johnny in answer to our question. "Scovel could ride an earthquake if she stood still long enough for him to mount! He rode Steamboat—not Young Steamboat, but Old Steamboat! He rode Rocking Chair, and he's the only man that ever did do that and not be called on in a couple of days to attend his own funeral."

This day he told us about one Tom, who lived up in Wyoming, where Johnny came from. It appeared that in an easier day Tom was hired by some cattle men to thin out the sheep herders who insisted upon invading the public ranges. By Johnny's account Tom did the thinning with conscientious attention to detail and gave general satisfaction for a while; but eventually he grew careless in his methods and took to killing parties who were under the protection of the game laws. Likewise his own private collection of yearlings began to increase with a rapidity which was only to be accounted for on the theory that a large number of calves were coming into the world with Tom's brand for a birthmark. So he lost popularity. Several times his funeral was privily arranged, but on each occasion was postponed owing to the failure of the corpse to be present. Finally he killed a young boy and was caught and convicted, and one morning they took him out and hanged him rather extensively.

"Tom was mighty methodical," said Johnny. "He got five hundred a head for killing sheep herders—that was the regular tariff. Every time he bumped one off he'd put a stone under his head, which was his private mark—a kind of a duebill, as you might say. And when they'd find that dead herder with the rock under his head they'd know there was another five hundred comin' to Tom on the books; they always paid it, too. Once in a while, though, he'd cut loose in a saloon and garner in some fellows that wasn't sheep herders. There was quite a number that thought Tom acted kind of ungentlemanly when he was drinkin'."

We went on and on at a lazy mule-trot, hearing the unwritten annals of the range from one who had seen them enacted at first hand. Pretty soon we passed a herd of burros with mealy, dusty noses and spotty hides, feeding on prickly pears and rock lichens; and just before sunset we slid down the last declivity out upon the plateau and came to a camp as was a camp!

This was roughing it de luxe with a most de-luxey vengeance! Here were three tents, or rather three canvas houses, with wooden half-walls; and they were spick-and-span inside and out, and had glass windows in them and doors and matched wooden floors. The one that was a bedroom had gay Navajo blankets on the floor, and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and a washstand with white towels and good lathery soap. And there were two beds—not cots or bunks, but regular beds—with wire springs and mattresses and white sheets and pillowslips. They were not veteran sheets and vintage pillowslips either, but clean and spotless ones. The mess tent was provided with a table with a clean cloth to go over it, and there were china dishes and china cups and shiny knives, forks and spoons. Every scrap of this equipment had been brought down from the top on burro packs. The Grand Cañon is scenically artistic, but it is a non-producing district. And outside there was a corral for the mules; a canvas storehouse; hitching stakes for the burros; a Dutch oven, and a little forge where the guides sometimes shoe a mule. They aren't blacksmiths; they merely have to be. Bill was in charge of the camp—a dark, rangy, good-looking young leading man of a cowboy, wearing his blue shirt and his red neckerchief with an air. He spoke with the soft Texas drawl and in his way was as competent as Johnny.

The sun, which had been winking farewells to us over the rim above, dropped out of sight as suddenly as though it had fallen into a well. From the bottom the shadows went slanting along the glooming walls of the gorges, swallowing up the yellow patches of sunlight that still lingered near the top like blacksnakes swallowing eggs. Every second the colors shifted and changed; what had been blue a moment before was now purple and in another minute would be a velvety black. A little lost ghost of an echo stole out of a hole and went straying up and down, feebly mocking our remarks and making them sound cheap and tawdry.

Then the new moon showed as a silver fish, balancing on its tail and arching itself like a hooked skipjack. In a purpling sky the stars popped out like pinpricks and the peace that passes all understanding came over us. I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to say that, in my opinion, David Belasco has never done anything in the way of scenic effects to beat a moonrise in the Grand Cañon.

I reckon we might have been there until now—my companion and I—soaking our souls in the unutterable beauty of that place, only just about that time we smelled something frying. There was also a most delectable sputtering sound as of fat meat turning over on a hot skillet; but just the smell alone was a square meal for a poor family. The meeting adjourned by acclamation. Just because a man has a soul is no reason he shouldn't have an appetite.

That Johnny certainly could cook! Served on china dishes upon a cloth-covered table, we had mounds of fried steaks and shoals of fried bacon; and a bushel, more or less, of sheepherder potatoes; and green peas and sliced peaches out of cans; and sourdough biscuits as light as kisses and much more filling; and fresh butter and fresh milk; and coffee as black as your hat and strong as sin. How easy it is for civilized man to become primitive and comfortable in his way of eating, especially if he has just ridden ten miles on a buckboard and nine more on a mule and is away down at the bottom of the Grand Cañon—and there is nobody to look on disapprovingly when he takes a bite that would be a credit to a steam shovel!

Despite all reports to the contrary, I wish to state that it is no trouble at all to eat green peas off a knifeblade—you merely mix them in with potatoes for a cement; and fried steak—take it from an old steak-eater—tastes best when eaten with those tools of Nature's own providing, both hands and your teeth. An hour passed—busy, yet pleasant—and we were both gorged to the gills and had reared back with our cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum of black coffee apiece, when Johnny, speaking in an offhand way to Bill, who was still hiding away biscuits inside of himself like a parlor prestidigitator, said:

"Seen any of them old hydrophobies the last day or two?"

"Not so many," said Bill casually. "There was a couple out last night pirootin' round in the moonlight. I reckon, though, there'll be quite a flock of 'em out tonight. A new moon always seems to fetch 'em up from the river."

Both of us quit blowing on our coffee and we put the cups down. I think I was the one who spoke.

"I beg your pardon," I asked, "but what did you say would be out tonight?"

"We were just speakin' to one another about them Hydrophoby Skunks," said Bill apologetically. "This here Cañon is where they mostly hang out and frolic 'round."

I laid down my cigar, too. I admit I was interested.

"Oh!" I said softly—like that. "Is it? Do they?"

"Yes," said Johnny. "I reckin there's liable to be one come shovin' his old nose into that door any minute. Or probably two—they mostly travels in pairs—sets, as you might say."

"You'd know one the minute you saw him, though," said Bill. "They're smaller than a regular skunk and spotted where the other kind is striped. And they got little red eyes. You won't have no trouble at all recognizin' one."

It was at this juncture that we both got up and moved back by the stove. It was warmer there and the chill of evening seemed to be settling down noticeably.

"Funny thing about Hydrophoby Skunks," went on Johnny after a moment of pensive thought—"mad, you know!"

"What makes them mad?" The two of us asked the question together.

"Born that way!" explained Bill—"mad from the start, and won't never do nothin' to get shut of it."

"Ahem—they never attack humans, I suppose?"

"Don't they?" said Johnny, as if surprised at such ignorance. "Why, humans is their favorite pastime! Humans is just pie to a Hydrophoby Skunk. It ain't really any fun to be bit by a Hydrophoby Skunk neither." He raised his coffee cup to his lips and imbibed deeply.

"Which you certainly said something then, Johnny," stated Bill. "You see," he went on, turning to us, "they aim to catch you asleep and they creep up right soft and take holt of you—take holt of a year usually—and clamp their teeth and just hang on for further orders. Some says they hang on till it thunders, same as snappin' turtles. But that's a lie, I judge, because there's weeks on a stretch down here when it don't thunder. All the cases I ever heard of they let go at sun-up."

"It is right painful at the time," said Johnny, taking up the thread of the narrative; "and then in nine days you go mad yourself. Remember that fellow the Hydrophoby Skunk bit down here by the rapids, Bill? Let's see now—what was that hombre's name?"