Boy Scouts in Glacier Park

by Walter Prichard Eaton

  CHAPTER XI--To Gunsight Lake, and Joe Falls Into a Crevasse onBlackfeet Glacier

  The Ranger was the first up in the morning. He gave Joe a shake by theshoulder, and Joe half opened one sleepy eye and said, "Aw, ma, it ain'ttime to get up yet."

  Then he heard Mills chuckle, and he realized where he was. He looked athis watch, and saw that it was almost six. Outside, it was broaddaylight, and the sun was flooding up the lake.

  Joe sat up and threw back the blankets. "Golly, I'm sore and stiff," hesaid, rubbing himself. "Been sleeping on a cot, and I'm soft, I guess."

  "You also did twenty-two miles yesterday," Mills remarked. "Well, Ihaven't told 'em yet, but we're going to do only seven to-day, and thenhave a side trip for the young folks. Guess Mother Jones will want tostay in camp and help you get supper."

  "She'd better try!" cried Joe, springing up at the word "supper," for itreminded him that it was his job to get breakfast. He had a quick washin the brook which ran past the camp, and set about making some biscuit,bacon and eggs, coffee and flapjacks. His fire was going merrily, and inits heat he had begun to get warm (for the night chill was still in theair, and you could almost see your breath), when he saw CongressmanElkins poking a sleepy face out of the men's tent flap, with his hairall tousled, and his body bent half double. He spied the fire, and madea hobble for it.

  "Say, Joe, let me get some of that heat, will you?" he said.

  "Sure," Joe laughed. "Didn't you have blankets enough?"

  "I had five--ought to be enough, in the third week of July, you'd think.But I shivered all night, and every time I shivered a new branch in ourwonderful bough bed found a fresh spot on my anatomy to puncture. I'mbeginning to think Mrs. Jones is right about this roughing it stuff."

  "No, sir, she isn't," Joe answered, as he set his batter of biscuit overthe fire. "Only you have to learn how to do it, and get hardened to it abit, too. How'd you have the blankets?"

  "How'd I have 'em? Over me, of course."

  "That's the trouble," said Joe. "The secret of sleeping warm is to have'em _under_ you, too. That's where as much cold comes as from above,even in a bed. You roll yourself up in 'em to-night and see if you'renot warm."

  "Where'd you learn all this?" the congressman asked. "You look prettyyoung to be a camp cook. Live around here?"

  "Oh, no, sir, I live in Massachusetts. I learned how to camp as a BoyScout. My chum--another scout--and I came out here this summer, becauseI was--I wasn't very well. He's got a job at Many Glacier tepee camp,and I'm getting so well now Mr. Mills got me to go as cook, 'cause I'dmade coffee and things for him and he knew I could cook."

  "I suppose you learned cooking as a scout, too, eh?"

  "Yes, sir," Joe answered, pouring out the ground coffee into the pot. "Iworked to get a merit badge in cooking. You see, I could help motherwith it, too, when she was sick, or anything."

  "Well, I'm beginning to have a better opinion of the Boy Scouts everyminute," the man laughed, sniffing the food and warming his hands by theblaze. "I thought it was just a kind of fad."

  "Oh, no, sir!" Joe cried. "Why, all our little scouts, after a year, arelots better boys, and everybody says it's been a fine thing for thetown!"

  "Here, daddy, you stop bribing the cook to give you breakfast inadvance!" a laughing voice interrupted them. Joe turned, and saw LucyElkins coming from her tent. Her hair was down her back, in brown waves,so that she looked almost like a little girl, and she was smiling andbright and gay as the morning sun.

  "I suppose _you_ slept well," her father said, "weren't cold and no pineboughs in your ribs."

  "I don't know," she answered. "I slept so hard I can't tell whether Iwas cold or not. But I know I'm hungry. Why don't you wake everybody up,Joe, and let's get to business."

  She went off up the brook with her tooth-brush and towel, and theRanger, taking a pan, beat reveille on it with two sticks. Other sleepyheads emerged, Mrs. Jones last of all, looking very cross and shivery.By the time they had all got fully dressed and washed, and the girls hadbraided their hair (letting the braids hang down their backs), the twoguides appeared. They had spent the night just down the lake at the SunCamp chalets, with other guides, friends of theirs.

  Joe set his eggs to cooking last of all, got the dishes ready, pouredthe coffee, and then gave the now familiar yell,

  "Come and get it!"

  That is a call in Glacier Park no one has to hear a second time. EvenMrs. 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 missedher morning bath, and silenced her own tongue with a bite of bacon thatwas more nourishing than ladylike in size. The breakfast disappeared indouble quick time, and Val went up the hill for the horses, while Millsand Dick began to strike the tents and arrange the packs, and Joecleaned his dishes and packed his provisions.

  At half-past eight, the party was in the saddle again, Mills at thehead, and started up the trail, along the lake shore, toward thegleaming white field of Blackfeet Glacier and the red, snow-spangledcone of Mount Jackson.

  "Where are we bound to-day?" some one asked.

  "Only seven miles, to Gunsight Lake," the Ranger answered. "I thoughtmaybe you'd like an easy stage to-day, and this afternoon those thatwanted to could go up on the glacier."

  "The man is almost intelligent!" Mrs. Jones exclaimed. "Only sevenmiles--that sounds more reasonable to me."

  They were seven easy miles, too, up a streamside by an easy grade, agood deal of the way through tall timber, and past a beaver dam, thefirst one Joe had ever seen. It was made of small logs, twigs andgrasses, all matted together, and plastered neatly and tightly with mud,and must have been a hundred feet long and perhaps three feet high, sothat a considerable little pond had backed up behind it, in which,rising above the water, were the huts, which looked like larger andbetter built muskrat huts. Joe pulled down his horse to a slow walk ashe passed, and saw the little canals the beavers had made, leading fromthe bed of the stream back into the willow and aspen swamp. He figuredout that the chief reason the beavers build dams is so they can floodsuch a grove of young willows, aspens, etc., and float out the tiny logsthey cut (the young shoots, with tender bark), to their houses, wherethey store them for winter food. Later he asked Mills, and found he wasright. When the beavers can find deep water, with food trees right onthe bank, they will not bother to make dams.

  Joe lingered till Val yelled at him to "get a move on," hoping he mightsee one of the little animals at work, but the beaver works mostly atnight 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 openmeadow at its foot by eleven o'clock. The lake, a smallish one, lay atthe bottom of a great horseshoe amphitheatre. If you will imagine theHarvard stadium two or three miles long instead of two or three hundredyards, with sides almost precipitous and three thousand feet high, and agreen lake where the football gridiron is, you have a picture ofGunsight. The closed end of the horseshoe was the Divide, and that waswhere the Gunsight Pass lay, over which they would climb to-morrow. Thenorth side was Fusillade Mountain, the south side was the great shoulderof Mount Jackson (the summit being invisible from this point). Themeadow where they were to camp was just out at the open end, where theycould see around the shoulder of Jackson to the glittering field ofBlackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park, hung on the upper slopes ofthe Divide, to the southwest, and where, behind them, rose the hugecliffs of Citadel Mountain, which is exactly like old Fort Sumter or theold fort on Governor's Island, enlarged to the "_nth_" power. (If youdon't know what "enlarged to the _nth_ power" means, it's either becauseyou have not studied your algebra, or have not reached algebra yet.) Thefloor of the meadow was full of wild flowers, especially the great, tallwhite spikes of the Indian basket grass, and full, too, of low balsamsand pines.

  Close to the shore of the lake lay a big pile of lumber, old, twistediron beds, half a cook-stove, and the like.

  "What on ear
th happened here?" asked Mrs. Elkins.

  "Avalanche," said the Ranger. "Was a chalet here--Gunsight chalet. Inthe winter of 1915-16 a snowslide started down Jackson, and this iswhat's left."

  "Oh, heavens!" Mrs. Jones cried, looking up the red precipices ofJackson to the snow-fields far above, "do you suppose there'll beanother one?"

  "We don't often have 'em in July, marm," said Mills briefly, "but younever can tell," and he winked at Joe.

  They now pitched tents near the lake, and Joe set about cooking a hotlunch, for he had plenty of time. While the water was heating, he gotsome boards from the pile of wreckage, and made a rough table andbenches. Then he started out to gather some flowers. Lucy and Alice sawhim, and came to help. The three of them, in ten minutes, found thirtydifferent kinds of flowers, all in a space of two or three hundred feet,and made three bunches, which they stood in tin cans on the table, andthen put little pine boughs around the cans "to camouflage them," as Joesaid.

  "I told you Joe was a poet," Lucy said to Alice. "I'll bet he'll producea table-cloth in a minute."

  "Can't do that," Joe laughed, "unless you'll climb up and get me one ofthose up there----" and he gestured toward the white snow-fields far upthe cliffs, which did, indeed, look like huge sheets, or table-cloths,flung on the rocky ledges to dry.

  As soon as the tents were pitched, and lunch was over, Mills said:

  "Well, who wants to go up to Blackfeet Glacier?"

  "I do!" from Bob.

  "I do!" from Lucy.

  "I do!" from Alice.

  "I do, if I can go on horseback," from Mr. Elkins.

  "Same as Elkins," from Mr. Jones.

  "I want to sit still," from Mrs. Jones.

  "I couldn't leave Mrs. Jones all alone," from Mrs. Elkins.

  "You haven't spoken, Joe," said Lucy.

  Poor Joe--how he wanted to climb up and see a real glacier! But hesmiled bravely and cheerfully.

  "I shall have to stay and get dinner," he answered.

  "Oh, that's too bad! I just _know_ you're dying to see the glacier. Mr.Mills, wouldn't we be back in time for Joe to get dinner, if he went?"

  "Well, we might be, if dinner was a bit late, and you didn't have aroast turkey," the Ranger said.

  "Well, I move we have late dinner, and take Joe along. All in favor, sayaye."

  Bob and Alice yelled "Aye!" and Mr. Elkins said, "Jones and I arepaired, so it's a vote."

  Joe tried to say some word of thanks to Lucy, but he couldn't manage it.Besides, he had no time, for Mrs. Jones broke in:

  "Well, I'd like to know if you expect Mrs. Elkins and me to stay hereall alone?"

  "You might be getting the dinner, Martha," her husband grinned.

  "Val will stay in camp," Mills said. "He's fed up on glaciers, anyhow,ain't you, Val?"

  The young cowboy nodded. "You can have 'em all," he said, "and welcome."

  So Joe found himself in the small party headed for Blackfeet Glacier, assoon as he had put his stew to simmer over a small fire, which Valpromised to keep going. Mills took three of the strongest ropes from thepacks, and they set off up the steep, rough trail climbing the shoulderof Jackson. They soon had a superb view below them, first of the meadow,with their own tents like white dots in it, and then back down the canyonto St. Mary Lake, and the great pink and gray pyramid ofGoing-to-the-Sun Mountain. But it was not long before every one stoppedlooking at the view, and paid entire attention to the trail. This was aside trail, not one of the regular tourist highways, and it was notbuilt for comfort. It was tremendously steep, and very rough, more likea flight of high, irregular stone steps than a path.

  "Oh, I think this is terrible on the poor horses!" Lucy said, as herhorse scrambled up a rock, and she had to cling to his mane to stick onthe saddle.

  "Get out and walk, then," Mills called back. "Grab hold of your horse'stail, and let him pull you up."

  "Say, what you giving us?" said Bob. "Think I want to go down the hillagain backwards?"

  Mills laughed. "Think these horses are mules?" he answered. "See, thisis the way."

  He got off his horse, grabbed it by the tail, and to everybody'ssurprised amusement, the horse started up, with the Ranger scramblingbehind him, half climbing, half being pulled along.

  Every one else got off, too, and in single file, each person clinging tohis horse's tail, they began the ascent again. The horses, beingconsiderably longer legged than men, climbed faster up the high stepsthan a man could do alone, but with the horse's tail to hang on to, youcould manage to keep up. Everybody laughed at first, yelling at oneanother, but in three minutes the yells had ceased, and in five, thelaughter. No one had any breath left for that. If Joe had thought, heprobably would have been frightened, for he was certainly disobeying thedoctor, but he was having too good a time to remember doctors, and aseven the lack of breath did not make him cough, he had nothing to remindhim. Panting, covered with perspiration, the two congressmen were aboutready to quit. They presently reached a more level place, a high uplandmeadow covered with flowers, and mounting again rode up and across this,and came at last near the lower edge of a great snow-field, whichstretched away southward for three miles, broken here and there bypeninsulas and islands of rock, and stretched upward clear to the summitof the Divide over their heads, at an angle of about forty-five degreesat first, but much steeper near the top.

  "The biggest glacier in the Park," said Mills.

  "Where?" said Mr. Elkins. "All I see is snow."

  "I know it--too bad, but we had so much snow last winter it's not meltedoff yet. But take my word for it, that's all ice underneath."

  "Hooray, let's climb out on it!" Bob shouted.

  "Not for me--I've climbed enough to-day," his father said, stillpuffing.

  It ended with the two congressmen resting in the meadow, while Mills,Dick the guide, Joe, the girls, and Bob, climbed up some way over therocks without any trail, and reached at length a place where the vastsnow-field seemed to be sliding down past them, like a huge, silentriver. Of course, it did not move, but it gave that illusion.

  "What a place to ski!" said Joe.

  "Wow!" yelled Bob, "you bet! You'd get some jump at the bottom, too."

  Mills grinned. "About as far as whichever place you're going to when youdie," he said, as he began to uncoil his three ropes, fastening themtogether.

  "What's the big idea?" asked Bob. "That snow's soft; you wouldn't slipin that."

  And, to prove it, he started down the rocks, and out on to thesnow-covered glacier.

  Mills suddenly spoke with a sharp note Joe had never heard him use.

  "Come back here!" he said.

  Bob came.

  "Now, Joe," he said, "you go first on the rope, because you've gotspikes in your shoes. We've got to look out for crevasses. Sound yourfooting when it looks suspicious. We'd need Alpine stocks to go far."

  He fastened one end under Joe's arms.

  "You next, Dick, to brace if Joe goes under. Then the rest of you, andI'll be the rear anchor."

  He made the rope fast around Dick, twenty feet behind Joe, then told Boband the girls to hold it fast at equal intervals, and fastened the rearend around his own waist

  "Now, Joe, let her go," he said.

  Joe went down the rocks, and out on the great snow-field, tilted likethe roof of a house. It was soft, as Bob had said, but not like ordinarysoft snow. It was more like walking in cold, wet, rock salt, and thefooting was anything but sure. Joe went cautiously, slowly climbingupward and outward at the same time, and as he looked below him, downthat smooth, glistening, white slope, and realized that if he once gotstarted sliding he would probably go half a mile and shoot off the loweredge into space, he felt his heart, for a minute, go down somewhere intohis boots. So he looked up, instead of downward, and felt better.

  Everything went well for some hundreds of yards, and the whole party, ontheir rope, were well out on the great snow-field, when Joe saw justahead of him a very slight depression in the snow. Bracing with hisr
ight foot, he put his left forward, and hit this depression smartly. Itcaved in! He tried to spring back, yelling to Dick to brace, but hisright foot, with nothing but snow for the spikes to hold in, slipped,and he felt himself going down. He had no time to think, only just aterrible flash in his brain of accidents he had read about to Alpineclimbers, before the rope caught him under the armpits with a cruelyank; he hung for a minute surrounded by the wet, cold snow which wasfalling down his neck, and then he felt himself being tugged up again byDick.

  Mills had come up, bringing the rope around Bob and the girls in a loop,by the time Dick had him out.

  "Hurt?" he asked.

  Joe was poking snow out of his neck, and loosening the grip of the ropeunder his arms.

  "I--I guess not!" he panted. "Gee, that gave me some surprise, though. Ithought something was coming, and tested it with one foot, but the otherslipped."

  "We ought to have ice axes," Mills said. "The snow's getting too thin.Back's the word."

  Joe looked around at the rest of the party, and saw that Lucy and Alicehad turned deadly pale, and even Bob was looking sober.

  "Are you sure you aren't hurt, Joe?" Lucy asked.

  "I'll get dinner, O.K.," Joe answered.

  Meanwhile Mills had approached the hole where Joe went under, and calledthe rest to come and look, one by one, while he and Dick braced therope.

  Joe looked, too. His fall had collapsed a snow bridge over a crevasse,and through the hole, which was six feet wide or more, they could seedown through a layer of snow into what looked like a bottomless slitbetween walls of dirty green ice. A cold, damp, chilling breath came upfrom the hole, and far below they could hear water running.

  "Now you get the big idea, Bob, eh?" said Mills. "See why we had therope?"

  "Yes, and I bet old cookie's glad it was a strong one," Bob replied."Say, I wish it had been me'd been ahead!"

  "Oh, do you?" the Ranger laughed. "Want to be lowered down?"

  "Oh, no--Mr. Mills!" Alice cried.

  "Cheer up, he wouldn't let me," Mills grinned. "Besides, he's too fatand heavy to pull up again."

  "If a feller fell down there, and they didn't get him up, and he frozeinto the ice, would he come out some time at the bottom of the glacier?"Bob asked.

  "I guess he would," said Mills, "but his widow might get tired waitingand marry again."

  "Mr. Mills, you're perfectly awful" said Lucy, with a shudder. "Take usback from this horrid place."

  Crevasse in Blackfeet Glacier]

  They went back carefully in their own tracks, and rejoined thecongressmen, who, it seemed, had climbed where they could watch, and hadseen the whole thing from a distance. There was much excited talk aboutJoe's experience all the way down (on the down trip they led theirhorses over the steep part, needing no help on the descent), and Joe,sore as he was under the arms and rather shaky from the shock, began tofeel like quite a hero. In fact, by the time they reached the levelmeadows at camp, it did not seem terrible at all, and every one hadbegun to enjoy it.

  "Except me," said Lucy. "I shall dream all night of the way poor Joe'shead went suddenly out of sight, and I saw Dick bracing on that rope andwondered if it would hold!"

  "The moral is," said her father, "have a good rope."

  "I should say the moral was, don't climb in foolish places," Mrs. Jonesdeclared, for the two women had of course been told the story at once.

  "Gee, ma," Bob declared, "if everybody was like you, we wouldn't knowthere were any Rocky Mountains. Somebody's got to take a chance!"

  Mills had said nothing. Now he spoke, in his brief, quiet way.

  "It was a sound rope. Nobody took a chance," he said. "We don't let 'emin the Park."

  There did not seem to be any reply to this. The girls went into theirtent to rest, Joe changed his wet boots--which were soaked with thesnow--and his wet shirt, and set busily about getting dinner. After all,he was the cook, and there was no further time for being a hero.