Cryptofiction

"Shore I'm shy a good hat!" exclaimed Big John whimsically, as they slackened speed and began to look about through the gloom for some sign of the Colonel and the pack train. He took off his old Montana Stetson and twirled it ruefully in his hands. It was black as the night, where it had been gray, and out of two holes up near the crown he stuck two fingers and wiggled them at the boys. "I shore oughtta go on the stage after that panther stunt, boys," he drawled, his face breaking into a slow grin, "When I left you, I worked around to whar the Injuns hed their big fire an' got me some charcoal. Then I crep' over to them rocks an' lay thar, waitin' till you come, and blackin' up the ole cage all over good. Then I cuts two holes in her, an' dolls her up with yore matches tied in two round bundles. Arter a while, when I thinks you-all shore must be hyarabouts, I spits on me hands and rubs them matches good. Shore 'twas funny!" he chuckled. "I looks me ole sombrero over an' like to hev scairt myself to death with them two fox fire eyes glarin' at me out'n thet black hat! But 'twan't a fleabite to the way them redskins lit out, an' you two boys allowed to sell yore lives dear when I lets out that yelp intended to represent a panther's call an' oozes out into the scenery!"

"I was just frozen stiff with fright," admitted Scotty frankly. "We thought it was the Old Boy, himself, coming for us!—I'm not sure about it, even now!"

Niltci grunted and stopped, transfixed with astonishment. "You?" he asked, incredulously, pointing his finger at Big John.

"Shore 'twas me, Injun. Shore!" cackled the latter, facetiously.

"No!"

"Thunder, yes!" came back Big John, raising his voice all he dared.

"NO!—Heap big lie!" squeaked Niltci. "Dsilyi's panther him come!" he insisted.

"I tell you, it was a stroke of genius, John!" laughed Sid; "the Indians must think it's all over, or inside, with Niltci, now! That idea came to me, back there when we were freeing him; so I kept his thongs so they wouldn't find anything. Makes it all the more miraculous, you see. They won't think of following us."

Big John's jaw dropped and he stopped dead. "Sid, you shore has a headpiece on you!" he declared, admiringly. "I never thought of that myself. My idee was jest to heave a gosh-almighty scare into 'em—but I never thought I'd get you boys, too!" and he broke into a huge chuckle again.

A tiny point of light winked twice out of the gloom ahead, and then all was impenetrable darkness again.

"Over this way, fellows," whispered Scotty, who had noticed it, "that's the Colonel's flasher. He must have heard us."

They headed over, and presently the dim outlines of the horses showed up. Colonel Colvin greeted them delightedly and then explained briefly to Niltci his plan. The Indian boy agreed, submissively, and they all set off down into the canyon. A mile further they broke into a trot with Niltci hanging to the Colonel's stirrup.

"Of course there's plenty of good hunting, boys, all over this wonderful Arizona," said the Colonel as they rode along. "All through the canyons of the pine belt south of Flagstaff there is deer and bear, and we could reach it by riding southwest from here. But I want you to see the Grand Canyon,—the big sight that no American should permit himself to miss,—and the way to get it all, and first-class big game hunting besides, is from that vast network of canyons and crags back of the north rim. It's a desert ride, either way we decide to go, southwest to the pine belt or west to the Ferry. We'll take the latter. It's eighty miles from here and just one drink the whole way. Here's where our oats-and-water scheme scintillates, for we can do it in three days, with good grain feed and water enough to keep the horses full of pep."

As they debouched from Canyon Cheyo the pack train was halted to make these adjustments. All the pannier water cans were filled from the brook and a full bucket of oats taken out of them was fed to each horse. The rest was put in gunny sacks and the loads redistributed so that there was an extra cayuse for Niltci to ride. They fixed up an improvised saddle made of a tarp, a folded blanket and a cinch strap for him, and then all the spare stuff was cached.

Bidding the running stream a last good-by, the train started climbing up a mighty ravine that led out to the vast desert plateau to the west.

Arrived at the head of it, a high mesa greeted them, stretching for miles to the northwest. Under its flanks the party rode, while the soft, cold desert wind sifted the desert sand in a faintly audible ticking around the horses' feet. It was a tired and sleepy party that saw the sunrise, five hours later, with thirty miles of travel behind them. Bare desolation, and color, color, color, everywhere the eye roamed! Blue cliffs, red cliffs, yellow cliffs, black buttes; and, to the west, the enchanted walls of the ghostly White Mesa.

During the heat of the day the train halted under the shade of a rocky nest of bowlders as high as a house, and the horses were fed and watered and picketed out to nibble what sparse vegetation they could find. The four men spread out bed rolls, and, with the four dogs insisting on bunking in their midst, slept in an indescribable huddle, too tired to boot them off.

It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. The others slept around him. A distant coyote raised his piercing cry, soft and plaintive in the vast solitude; the blurred forms of the horses dotted the little swale in front of their camp. Then came the false dawn of the moon, and Big John awoke and nudged Niltci, whom he had elected assistant horse wrangler, and they began silently to pack the animals.

The sight of them at work was too much for Sid; he awoke his father and Scotty, for at least they could attend to the saddle horses and help break camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an enormous red moon rose slowly over the mesas to the east. Higher and higher it soared, becoming smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the haze over the desert. Then, in a splendor of white light, clear as daylight and pricking out the buttes in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the pack train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; color was there none, but of sharp contrast, of strangely rugged and distorted rock formations, of vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a play as to place one in imagination in some selenitic valley of the moon.

The afternoon of the third day found the pack train climbing down the frightful escarpments of a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado. There had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst torture, no accident; but all were weary, the men silent, the dogs limping painfully, the horses plodding on persistently. A ringing whoop from Big John and the roar and rumble of waters announced the sighting of the famous Red River. Out of the gray ramparts of Cataract Canyon it swept, to flood past them in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful in its headlong drive for the sea—the river that has more to show for its labors than any other river in the whole world.

Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the opposite bank, to man the flatboat which crosses here by an overhead wire and trolley wheel tackle. Swiftly it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate the whole party, and, paying the toll, the horses were ridden onto its capacious flat floor. The reluctant dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out for its return trip across the Colorado. As the water boiled and swirled around its gunwales Sid looked downstream at the mighty chasm of black gneiss into which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless boom like the thunder of a distant Niagara. He could not keep his eyes off it. From there on the canyon would become inconceivably grander and more majestic, one of the seven wonders of the world,—yet what was it, in the infinite program of Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an inconspicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which is our world? If this remnant of a stream was so awe-inspiring to man, what must it have been when that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up to Wyoming was flooding out through these same gates to the ocean! The very thought gave Sid a glimpse,—like a rift through the clouds at some mountain top,—of the unapproachable dignity of Nature. Man, at his best, is but a mere insult in her presence, an audacious, unspanked microbe, that has occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her cosmic processes, even when his whole history is told from start to finish.

A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giving the horses unlimited oats and water once more, and then they pushed southwest through a bare and sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain dominated the Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing in his nine thousand feet of snow-topped height. Once around its flanks they were in a fine country of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the rocky buttes and parapets and pinnacles that overhung the enormous slopes of the Grand Canyon basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the rim they established camp. The boys' little green five-by-six-foot wall tent was set up, with a pair of shears in front and its ridge rope run back to encircle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little tent was a wonder of a forest home, for its five pounds of weight. High enough to stand up in, it had a gauze window in the rear wall, with a flap to it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed in when it stormed; it had a netting front door over a sill a foot high, and the cover flap of the front door was V-shaped, so that it formed a porch when held out horizontally by two upright poles, making a shady place to sit under and one sheltered from rain for a cooking space when needed.

The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor of their tent, sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their sleeping bags, and hung wall pockets at the head of each bed to hold all their small camp belongings. Then they went out to inspect the Colonel's bivouac. Near their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and lightness for one lone hiker. A stretcher bed hung on two stout poles, which were lashed to a pair of shears about a foot above the soil, and over the shears ran a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it and pegged down behind to form a windbreak. Its front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so that the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, in out of the rain; and he could sit on the bed and tend his meal or clean his rifle, or just loaf or lie at ease on it. As the boys approached he was filling the bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse.

"Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. The Service camp cot is the coldest thing to sleep on ever devised by the brain of man,—unless you put a layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then it is good, and comfortable and warm."

He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay down, to dream indolently in the sunny, pine-scented glade, while through a rift in the foliage his eyes drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon. "This is good enough, for the present, boys," he grunted, stretching his arms in lazy happiness. "I haven't any idea when we'll ever bother to leave here again, but to-morrow we'll hang up a deer and try to get the dogs on a cougar."

Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest of the camp. The tinkle of horse bells came from a little mountain meadow where their ponies had been turned out. Up near them a gray and black patterned blanket, hanging in a tree, told where Niltci had staked out his claim for sleeping quarters. Under a nest of big pines lay Big John's bed roll on a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring in the ravine, that facetious child of Montana was at work making a stone fireplace, and already he had a saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather above the rodent zone.

It was all good; too good to be true; too wild and beautiful and sublime, and filled to the brim with Nature's plenty for any but very honest men to live there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural lassitude had come over the boys. Nature gives these periods, when she is in her mild and genial moods, for times of recuperation to her children. They are not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, round pinnacle of yellow rock, invited by the mists of immense distance that lay beyond it. On its brink they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had found a lodgment there. Below and before them stretched the vast gulf of the canyon, clear to its south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to do anything but lie there and look. There are spectacles of Nature that man never tires of dreaming over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling surf. This canyon is one of them. For a long time neither youth said a word.

"It's just the Canyon, yet," said Sid, at length. "Wait till we get down into it—then we'll begin to appreciate it!"

Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out refreshed and ready to perform prodigies. The horses were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off through a high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with Ruler and the pups all over the timber, running in wide casts around the main course of the cavalcade. Down into the shallow gulches and across wooded promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These ravines were the gentlest beginnings of that vast shore line which once rimmed the course of the Colorado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always the great physical fact of the Canyon was there. You couldn't get away from it, couldn't forget it for a moment.

Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bellow, a houndy song that told the world he had found something. The pups dashed over at his call. Big John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already unraveling the trail, his long, ropy tail swinging in circles as he snuffed along, yelping at intervals as he ran The party gathered around the track, while Niltci bent down with his face almost in it. A faint impression was there, in the leaves, large and round, but without any particular formation.

"Cougar. Beeg!" pronounced the Navaho boy after a careful examination.

"I told you they was lion-broke!" exulted Big John. "Them runs we had after the Black Panther spiled 'em for small stuff,—Ruler's broke, anyway."

A ringing, resounding chime of hound voices rang up from the depths of the ravine below. All four of them were in that chorus, even Lee who was proving backward and slow in his development.

"Ride, boys! They've started him!" whooped Colonel Colvin, vaulting into his saddle. He thundered off down the ravine, with Sid and Niltci hard after him.

Big John headed his horse up across the slope. "Come on, son!" he called to Scotty. "We'll ooze for a point an' watch which way the varmint goes. He mought turn an' come back up, an' he'd git away if no one was up here."

Immediately they topped the slope, the white mustang began to race off through the dense young timber that covered the promontory. Scotty drove in his spurs and hung low over his saddle, guarding his eyes from the slap of branches. It took some riding to keep up with Big John! After a time the ground pitched down dizzily. Through the trees Scotty got glimpses of the purple void out there, and above him rose the long lines of pinnacles of yellow buttes. Far down below he could hear the constant chiming of the hounds. The chase was crossing their front. Then the trees grew suddenly sparse and short below them, and Big John reined the white mustang sharply up on his haunches where he slid with all four hoofs braced in the crumbly soil.

It was awful, on ahead! The land seemed to end nowhere, with unheard-of voids below. Looking up, Scotty could see the yellow cliffs frowning high above him, now, while the clayey rock they were standing in was reddish.

"Right yere's whar we ties up and takes to shank's mare!" said Big John, dismounting, tethering his mustang to a stout sapling and taking off his lariat coil. Scotty followed suit, wondering how they were ever going to get up again. And then a queer shiver of realization burst upon him. This red rock was only the next below the top of all those long bars of color that line the infinite slopes of the Grand Canyon!

They slid down to the brink of the ledge and looked over. A great slope, acres in area and covered with sparse timber, appeared below. Ruler was streaking down through it, volleying his approval of the trail. Almost vertically below Scotty was Pepper's sturdy back, the hound hesitating over the passage of some shelf below him. Bourbon and Lee were far up the slope, while the small figures of the Colonel, Sid and the Navaho could be seen far above to the left, sliding down a high roof of yellow clay.

A sheer fall of two hundred feet lay directly in front of them. It seemed nothing at all in this abyss of infinite distances. Big John ran along the brink of it, dislodging stones which shot out, to hit the slope below after a tense interval of fall, and then go bounding on down to disappear from sight over the brink of shelves that led on down to yet lower depths. Scotty worked after him, somewhat more cautiously, but with none of the respect that he would have had for such a precipice as this anywhere else. His sense of proportion was utterly lost here.

A crumbled corner of the shelf gave them a steep slide, down which without a second's hesitation Big John plunged. Whizz! Ankle-deep in red earth, accompanied by a cloud of big and little stones, he shot down the slope. Scotty followed, giving himself no time to let his imagination work. They tore on after the hounds, through thick, bushy pines and spruces that covered the slope. Without any warning at all, save the interminable blue distance ahead, it suddenly ended in another frightful precipice. Scotty brought up on the brink of it, hugging a sapling and glad to see that for once Big John had stopped.

Over to the right the trees trailed down to a point, terminated by a tall red cliff, craggy-faced, indented with great slabs and bowlders, which threw huge shadows of themselves on the next cliff beyond. A sort of chasm or chimney led down its side, a mighty cleft full of bowlders in which all the skyscrapers in the world could be piled and never be found. Down this impossible, preposterous thing the dogs were climbing, as their voices proclaimed.

Scotty looked up. Already the entire world seemed to have been stood up on end above him. The green pines and yellow pinnacles of the rim above looked like a line of mere dents in it, with a little dark moss covering their tops. It would be days and days of work getting up there again! But Big John had only paused to get the location of the dogs in mind before he set off again along that precipice wall. Scotty followed. He might as well be killed sticking close to Big John as be killed anyhow, by some fall which could only end up in the Colorado itself, perhaps half a mile yet below him in a vertical line!

Ruler had charged out of the bottom of the chimney, barking a regular hullabaloo of a treeing call. If the dogs had slid down this cleft, men could climb down it, the boy reasoned as he began descending an almost perpendicular chimney, hanging to small, stout pines and catching his toes in crevices in the rock. They came upon Lee, whining piteously, afraid of being left behind, afraid to make the jump that would land in a sort of chute already worn with dog and cougar tracks where the others had gone down. Big John picked him up unceremoniously and tossed him into the chute, where he sprawled and slid with lightning speed down to the slope below. Without a word the man climbed on down after him, with Scotty panting and laboring behind.

Once on the slope below a columnar yellow pine loomed up far down the slide. It had survived avalanches, rock slides, ice rifts—was Nature's survival of the fittest, to seed the slopes beneath it and below it. Upon one of its branches the tawny body of the cougar crouched, treed, spitting at the dogs prancing below, twitching his tail angrily, ready to spring on the instant.

"Shoot, you little wart—if you miss I'll pisen yore grub!" barked Big John at Scotty, holding his own rifle at the ready. Scotty braced himself and poised the heavy .405. He had always prided himself on his shooting, but never in any such condition as this. His whole body shook with fatigue; he was covered with a scalding perspiration. Hold as he might, the bead refused to steady. Its square white patch nearly covered the cougar at that range, yet it could not have been over two hundred yards. Scotty finally attempted trigger release on the swing. The rifle went off, driving his shoulder back a foot with its recoil and, as they watched, a huge spall of bark flew out of the tree trunk above the cougar's back. Instantly he sprang down among the yelping dogs. A whirlwind of unbelievably swift action ensued. Yellow and brown were inextricably mixed as the cougar struck this way and that, the dogs darting in from every angle, the cat turning to strike as each grabbed a new hold. Big John raced forward, his rifle at shoulder, ready to put in a shot at the first possible instant.

Then the cougar made a sidewise swipe of his paw, so swift that the eye could not follow it. The steel hooks of his claws caught in Ruler's ear and the cat pulled him towards a snarling open mouth, towards the glistening white fangs that awaited him. But with a furious tug the dog tore himself loose, his ear slitting to ribbons. Big John fired at that tense instant when dog and cougar were braced in the fixed rigidity of their tug of war. The cat leaped in the air, high above the whole mob of dogs, landed running, and darted like a squirrel over the brink of the ledge.

The dogs tore after him. Big John and Scotty raced down the slope in giant strides, that for Scotty kept getting longer and longer as his momentum gained. He finally threw himself sideways to the ground as he felt himself falling downhill rather than running.

"Thar he is!—Mark left!" rasped Big John hoarsely, pointing below. The ledge was a mere escarpment, and along its base the cougar was flying, his tail erect and bushy like a scared household tabby. Pepper clung like a viper to his hock, while Ruler was trying to forge ahead and get a throat hold. Then the cat disappeared into a rock crevice taking the dogs with him.

Putting in their last burst of speed, Scotty and Big John threw themselves over to it. The huge rocky knife-edge that made the cleft, stuck up like a fan,—one of those little insignificant spalls on the cliff faces, as seen from El Tovar. Here it was enormous, and led down to no one knew where. A hoarse, snarling murmur and the worrying and fighting of dogs came up from inside it.

"Run down to the lower edge, Scotty!" yelled Big John. "I'll drop a rock in here an' he'll come out to you like a bat out of hades."

Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the lower edge of the crack where the rock fan sprang up ten feet thick from the cliff. The narrow crack between it and the wall was dark as a pocket; nothing came from there but the maddening roars of Ruler and the snarling of the cat. Then Big John whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock resounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the cougar exploded in a frightful cat-spit. His rear was covered with dogs, but his chest showed clear and tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy .405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its recoil. A reeking mass of animals shot past him in a fury of flying paws, rolled over and over down the slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst of a nest of scraggy pinyons.

"Did you git him?" yelled Big John's voice from above.

"You bet!" crowed Scotty. "Come on down and help me with the dogs."

There was a rumble of falling stones and Big John dropped down beside him.

"I knowed one good poak from thet ole cannon of the Doc's would fotch him," he laughed. "Good shootin', son! Git some clubs, now, an' we'll gentle them pesky dawgs."

They needed to, for a glorious dog-fight was in full swing over the dead body of the cougar.


Cryptozoology, BioForteana, Zoological Oddities, Unusual Natural History

	Chapter VIII Silent Pines and Yellow Crags "Shore I'm shy a good hat!" exclaimed Big John whimsically, as they slackened speed and began to look about through the gloom for some sign of the Colonel and the pack train. He took off his old Montana Stetson and twirled it ruefully in his hands. It was black as the night, where it had been gray, and out of two holes up near the crown he stuck two fingers and wiggled them at the boys. "I shore oughtta go on the stage after that panther stunt, boys," he drawled, his face breaking into a slow grin, "When I left you, I worked around to whar the Injuns hed their big fire an' got me some charcoal. Then I crep' over to them rocks an' lay thar, waitin' till you come, and blackin' up the ole cage all over good. Then I cuts two holes in her, an' dolls her up with yore matches tied in two round bundles. Arter a while, when I thinks you-all shore must be hyarabouts, I spits on me hands and rubs them matches good. Shore 'twas funny!" he chuckled. "I looks me ole sombrero over an' like to hev scairt myself to death with them two fox fire eyes glarin' at me out'n thet black hat! But 'twan't a fleabite to the way them redskins lit out, an' you two boys allowed to sell yore lives dear when I lets out that yelp intended to represent a panther's call an' oozes out into the scenery!" "I was just frozen stiff with fright," admitted Scotty frankly. "We thought it was the Old Boy, himself, coming for us!—I'm not sure about it, even now!" Niltci grunted and stopped, transfixed with astonishment. "You?" he asked, incredulously, pointing his finger at Big John. "Shore 'twas me, Injun. Shore!" cackled the latter, facetiously. "No!" "Thunder, yes!" came back Big John, raising his voice all he dared. "NO!—Heap big lie!" squeaked Niltci. "Dsilyi's panther him come!" he insisted. "I tell you, it was a stroke of genius, John!" laughed Sid; "the Indians must think it's all over, or inside, with Niltci, now! That idea came to me, back there when we were freeing him; so I kept his thongs so they wouldn't find anything. Makes it all the more miraculous, you see. They won't think of following us." Big John's jaw dropped and he stopped dead. "Sid, you shore has a headpiece on you!" he declared, admiringly. "I never thought of that myself. My idee was jest to heave a gosh-almighty scare into 'em—but I never thought I'd get you boys, too!" and he broke into a huge chuckle again. A tiny point of light winked twice out of the gloom ahead, and then all was impenetrable darkness again. "Over this way, fellows," whispered Scotty, who had noticed it, "that's the Colonel's flasher. He must have heard us." They headed over, and presently the dim outlines of the horses showed up. Colonel Colvin greeted them delightedly and then explained briefly to Niltci his plan. The Indian boy agreed, submissively, and they all set off down into the canyon. A mile further they broke into a trot with Niltci hanging to the Colonel's stirrup. "Of course there's plenty of good hunting, boys, all over this wonderful Arizona," said the Colonel as they rode along. "All through the canyons of the pine belt south of Flagstaff there is deer and bear, and we could reach it by riding southwest from here. But I want you to see the Grand Canyon,—the big sight that no American should permit himself to miss,—and the way to get it all, and first-class big game hunting besides, is from that vast network of canyons and crags back of the north rim. It's a desert ride, either way we decide to go, southwest to the pine belt or west to the Ferry. We'll take the latter. It's eighty miles from here and just one drink the whole way. Here's where our oats-and-water scheme scintillates, for we can do it in three days, with good grain feed and water enough to keep the horses full of pep." As they debouched from Canyon Cheyo the pack train was halted to make these adjustments. All the pannier water cans were filled from the brook and a full bucket of oats taken out of them was fed to each horse. The rest was put in gunny sacks and the loads redistributed so that there was an extra cayuse for Niltci to ride. They fixed up an improvised saddle made of a tarp, a folded blanket and a cinch strap for him, and then all the spare stuff was cached. Bidding the running stream a last good-by, the train started climbing up a mighty ravine that led out to the vast desert plateau to the west. Arrived at the head of it, a high mesa greeted them, stretching for miles to the northwest. Under its flanks the party rode, while the soft, cold desert wind sifted the desert sand in a faintly audible ticking around the horses' feet. It was a tired and sleepy party that saw the sunrise, five hours later, with thirty miles of travel behind them. Bare desolation, and color, color, color, everywhere the eye roamed! Blue cliffs, red cliffs, yellow cliffs, black buttes; and, to the west, the enchanted walls of the ghostly White Mesa. During the heat of the day the train halted under the shade of a rocky nest of bowlders as high as a house, and the horses were fed and watered and picketed out to nibble what sparse vegetation they could find. The four men spread out bed rolls, and, with the four dogs insisting on bunking in their midst, slept in an indescribable huddle, too tired to boot them off. It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. The others slept around him. A distant coyote raised his piercing cry, soft and plaintive in the vast solitude; the blurred forms of the horses dotted the little swale in front of their camp. Then came the false dawn of the moon, and Big John awoke and nudged Niltci, whom he had elected assistant horse wrangler, and they began silently to pack the animals. The sight of them at work was too much for Sid; he awoke his father and Scotty, for at least they could attend to the saddle horses and help break camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an enormous red moon rose slowly over the mesas to the east. Higher and higher it soared, becoming smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the haze over the desert. Then, in a splendor of white light, clear as daylight and pricking out the buttes in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the pack train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; color was there none, but of sharp contrast, of strangely rugged and distorted rock formations, of vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a play as to place one in imagination in some selenitic valley of the moon. The afternoon of the third day found the pack train climbing down the frightful escarpments of a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado. There had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst torture, no accident; but all were weary, the men silent, the dogs limping painfully, the horses plodding on persistently. A ringing whoop from Big John and the roar and rumble of waters announced the sighting of the famous Red River. Out of the gray ramparts of Cataract Canyon it swept, to flood past them in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful in its headlong drive for the sea—the river that has more to show for its labors than any other river in the whole world. Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the opposite bank, to man the flatboat which crosses here by an overhead wire and trolley wheel tackle. Swiftly it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate the whole party, and, paying the toll, the horses were ridden onto its capacious flat floor. The reluctant dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out for its return trip across the Colorado. As the water boiled and swirled around its gunwales Sid looked downstream at the mighty chasm of black gneiss into which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless boom like the thunder of a distant Niagara. He could not keep his eyes off it. From there on the canyon would become inconceivably grander and more majestic, one of the seven wonders of the world,—yet what was it, in the infinite program of Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an inconspicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which is our world? If this remnant of a stream was so awe-inspiring to man, what must it have been when that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up to Wyoming was flooding out through these same gates to the ocean! The very thought gave Sid a glimpse,—like a rift through the clouds at some mountain top,—of the unapproachable dignity of Nature. Man, at his best, is but a mere insult in her presence, an audacious, unspanked microbe, that has occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her cosmic processes, even when his whole history is told from start to finish. A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giving the horses unlimited oats and water once more, and then they pushed southwest through a bare and sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain dominated the Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing in his nine thousand feet of snow-topped height. Once around its flanks they were in a fine country of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the rocky buttes and parapets and pinnacles that overhung the enormous slopes of the Grand Canyon basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the rim they established camp. The boys' little green five-by-six-foot wall tent was set up, with a pair of shears in front and its ridge rope run back to encircle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little tent was a wonder of a forest home, for its five pounds of weight. High enough to stand up in, it had a gauze window in the rear wall, with a flap to it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed in when it stormed; it had a netting front door over a sill a foot high, and the cover flap of the front door was V-shaped, so that it formed a porch when held out horizontally by two upright poles, making a shady place to sit under and one sheltered from rain for a cooking space when needed. The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor of their tent, sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their sleeping bags, and hung wall pockets at the head of each bed to hold all their small camp belongings. Then they went out to inspect the Colonel's bivouac. Near their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and lightness for one lone hiker. A stretcher bed hung on two stout poles, which were lashed to a pair of shears about a foot above the soil, and over the shears ran a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it and pegged down behind to form a windbreak. Its front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so that the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, in out of the rain; and he could sit on the bed and tend his meal or clean his rifle, or just loaf or lie at ease on it. As the boys approached he was filling the bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse. "Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. The Service camp cot is the coldest thing to sleep on ever devised by the brain of man,—unless you put a layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then it is good, and comfortable and warm." He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay down, to dream indolently in the sunny, pine-scented glade, while through a rift in the foliage his eyes drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon. "This is good enough, for the present, boys," he grunted, stretching his arms in lazy happiness. "I haven't any idea when we'll ever bother to leave here again, but to-morrow we'll hang up a deer and try to get the dogs on a cougar." Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest of the camp. The tinkle of horse bells came from a little mountain meadow where their ponies had been turned out. Up near them a gray and black patterned blanket, hanging in a tree, told where Niltci had staked out his claim for sleeping quarters. Under a nest of big pines lay Big John's bed roll on a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring in the ravine, that facetious child of Montana was at work making a stone fireplace, and already he had a saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather above the rodent zone. It was all good; too good to be true; too wild and beautiful and sublime, and filled to the brim with Nature's plenty for any but very honest men to live there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural lassitude had come over the boys. Nature gives these periods, when she is in her mild and genial moods, for times of recuperation to her children. They are not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, round pinnacle of yellow rock, invited by the mists of immense distance that lay beyond it. On its brink they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had found a lodgment there. Below and before them stretched the vast gulf of the canyon, clear to its south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to do anything but lie there and look. There are spectacles of Nature that man never tires of dreaming over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling surf. This canyon is one of them. For a long time neither youth said a word. "It's just the Canyon, yet," said Sid, at length. "Wait till we get down into it—then we'll begin to appreciate it!" Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out refreshed and ready to perform prodigies. The horses were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off through a high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with Ruler and the pups all over the timber, running in wide casts around the main course of the cavalcade. Down into the shallow gulches and across wooded promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These ravines were the gentlest beginnings of that vast shore line which once rimmed the course of the Colorado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always the great physical fact of the Canyon was there. You couldn't get away from it, couldn't forget it for a moment. Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bellow, a houndy song that told the world he had found something. The pups dashed over at his call. Big John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already unraveling the trail, his long, ropy tail swinging in circles as he snuffed along, yelping at intervals as he ran The party gathered around the track, while Niltci bent down with his face almost in it. A faint impression was there, in the leaves, large and round, but without any particular formation. "Cougar. Beeg!" pronounced the Navaho boy after a careful examination. "I told you they was lion-broke!" exulted Big John. "Them runs we had after the Black Panther spiled 'em for small stuff,—Ruler's broke, anyway." A ringing, resounding chime of hound voices rang up from the depths of the ravine below. All four of them were in that chorus, even Lee who was proving backward and slow in his development. "Ride, boys! They've started him!" whooped Colonel Colvin, vaulting into his saddle. He thundered off down the ravine, with Sid and Niltci hard after him. Big John headed his horse up across the slope. "Come on, son!" he called to Scotty. "We'll ooze for a point an' watch which way the varmint goes. He mought turn an' come back up, an' he'd git away if no one was up here." Immediately they topped the slope, the white mustang began to race off through the dense young timber that covered the promontory. Scotty drove in his spurs and hung low over his saddle, guarding his eyes from the slap of branches. It took some riding to keep up with Big John! After a time the ground pitched down dizzily. Through the trees Scotty got glimpses of the purple void out there, and above him rose the long lines of pinnacles of yellow buttes. Far down below he could hear the constant chiming of the hounds. The chase was crossing their front. Then the trees grew suddenly sparse and short below them, and Big John reined the white mustang sharply up on his haunches where he slid with all four hoofs braced in the crumbly soil. It was awful, on ahead! The land seemed to end nowhere, with unheard-of voids below. Looking up, Scotty could see the yellow cliffs frowning high above him, now, while the clayey rock they were standing in was reddish. "Right yere's whar we ties up and takes to shank's mare!" said Big John, dismounting, tethering his mustang to a stout sapling and taking off his lariat coil. Scotty followed suit, wondering how they were ever going to get up again. And then a queer shiver of realization burst upon him. This red rock was only the next below the top of all those long bars of color that line the infinite slopes of the Grand Canyon! They slid down to the brink of the ledge and looked over. A great slope, acres in area and covered with sparse timber, appeared below. Ruler was streaking down through it, volleying his approval of the trail. Almost vertically below Scotty was Pepper's sturdy back, the hound hesitating over the passage of some shelf below him. Bourbon and Lee were far up the slope, while the small figures of the Colonel, Sid and the Navaho could be seen far above to the left, sliding down a high roof of yellow clay. A sheer fall of two hundred feet lay directly in front of them. It seemed nothing at all in this abyss of infinite distances. Big John ran along the brink of it, dislodging stones which shot out, to hit the slope below after a tense interval of fall, and then go bounding on down to disappear from sight over the brink of shelves that led on down to yet lower depths. Scotty worked after him, somewhat more cautiously, but with none of the respect that he would have had for such a precipice as this anywhere else. His sense of proportion was utterly lost here. A crumbled corner of the shelf gave them a steep slide, down which without a second's hesitation Big John plunged. Whizz! Ankle-deep in red earth, accompanied by a cloud of big and little stones, he shot down the slope. Scotty followed, giving himself no time to let his imagination work. They tore on after the hounds, through thick, bushy pines and spruces that covered the slope. Without any warning at all, save the interminable blue distance ahead, it suddenly ended in another frightful precipice. Scotty brought up on the brink of it, hugging a sapling and glad to see that for once Big John had stopped. Over to the right the trees trailed down to a point, terminated by a tall red cliff, craggy-faced, indented with great slabs and bowlders, which threw huge shadows of themselves on the next cliff beyond. A sort of chasm or chimney led down its side, a mighty cleft full of bowlders in which all the skyscrapers in the world could be piled and never be found. Down this impossible, preposterous thing the dogs were climbing, as their voices proclaimed. Scotty looked up. Already the entire world seemed to have been stood up on end above him. The green pines and yellow pinnacles of the rim above looked like a line of mere dents in it, with a little dark moss covering their tops. It would be days and days of work getting up there again! But Big John had only paused to get the location of the dogs in mind before he set off again along that precipice wall. Scotty followed. He might as well be killed sticking close to Big John as be killed anyhow, by some fall which could only end up in the Colorado itself, perhaps half a mile yet below him in a vertical line! Ruler had charged out of the bottom of the chimney, barking a regular hullabaloo of a treeing call. If the dogs had slid down this cleft, men could climb down it, the boy reasoned as he began descending an almost perpendicular chimney, hanging to small, stout pines and catching his toes in crevices in the rock. They came upon Lee, whining piteously, afraid of being left behind, afraid to make the jump that would land in a sort of chute already worn with dog and cougar tracks where the others had gone down. Big John picked him up unceremoniously and tossed him into the chute, where he sprawled and slid with lightning speed down to the slope below. Without a word the man climbed on down after him, with Scotty panting and laboring behind. Once on the slope below a columnar yellow pine loomed up far down the slide. It had survived avalanches, rock slides, ice rifts—was Nature's survival of the fittest, to seed the slopes beneath it and below it. Upon one of its branches the tawny body of the cougar crouched, treed, spitting at the dogs prancing below, twitching his tail angrily, ready to spring on the instant. "Shoot, you little wart—if you miss I'll pisen yore grub!" barked Big John at Scotty, holding his own rifle at the ready. Scotty braced himself and poised the heavy .405. He had always prided himself on his shooting, but never in any such condition as this. His whole body shook with fatigue; he was covered with a scalding perspiration. Hold as he might, the bead refused to steady. Its square white patch nearly covered the cougar at that range, yet it could not have been over two hundred yards. Scotty finally attempted trigger release on the swing. The rifle went off, driving his shoulder back a foot with its recoil and, as they watched, a huge spall of bark flew out of the tree trunk above the cougar's back. Instantly he sprang down among the yelping dogs. A whirlwind of unbelievably swift action ensued. Yellow and brown were inextricably mixed as the cougar struck this way and that, the dogs darting in from every angle, the cat turning to strike as each grabbed a new hold. Big John raced forward, his rifle at shoulder, ready to put in a shot at the first possible instant. Then the cougar made a sidewise swipe of his paw, so swift that the eye could not follow it. The steel hooks of his claws caught in Ruler's ear and the cat pulled him towards a snarling open mouth, towards the glistening white fangs that awaited him. But with a furious tug the dog tore himself loose, his ear slitting to ribbons. Big John fired at that tense instant when dog and cougar were braced in the fixed rigidity of their tug of war. The cat leaped in the air, high above the whole mob of dogs, landed running, and darted like a squirrel over the brink of the ledge. The dogs tore after him. Big John and Scotty raced down the slope in giant strides, that for Scotty kept getting longer and longer as his momentum gained. He finally threw himself sideways to the ground as he felt himself falling downhill rather than running. "Thar he is!—Mark left!" rasped Big John hoarsely, pointing below. The ledge was a mere escarpment, and along its base the cougar was flying, his tail erect and bushy like a scared household tabby. Pepper clung like a viper to his hock, while Ruler was trying to forge ahead and get a throat hold. Then the cat disappeared into a rock crevice taking the dogs with him. Putting in their last burst of speed, Scotty and Big John threw themselves over to it. The huge rocky knife-edge that made the cleft, stuck up like a fan,—one of those little insignificant spalls on the cliff faces, as seen from El Tovar. Here it was enormous, and led down to no one knew where. A hoarse, snarling murmur and the worrying and fighting of dogs came up from inside it. "Run down to the lower edge, Scotty!" yelled Big John. "I'll drop a rock in here an' he'll come out to you like a bat out of hades." Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the lower edge of the crack where the rock fan sprang up ten feet thick from the cliff. The narrow crack between it and the wall was dark as a pocket; nothing came from there but the maddening roars of Ruler and the snarling of the cat. Then Big John whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock resounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the cougar exploded in a frightful cat-spit. His rear was covered with dogs, but his chest showed clear and tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy .405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its recoil. A reeking mass of animals shot past him in a fury of flying paws, rolled over and over down the slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst of a nest of scraggy pinyons. "Did you git him?" yelled Big John's voice from above. "You bet!" crowed Scotty. "Come on down and help me with the dogs." There was a rumble of falling stones and Big John dropped down beside him. "I knowed one good poak from thet ole cannon of the Doc's would fotch him," he laughed. "Good shootin', son! Git some clubs, now, an' we'll gentle them pesky dawgs." They needed to, for a glorious dog-fight was in full swing over the dead body of the cougar.
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