Ah, How Brightly Its Ripples Danced In The
Glittering Sunshine, And How Musically Its Waters Murmured Like
The Streams Of Windward Hawaii!
We lost our way over and over
again, though the "innocent" young men had been there before;
indeed, it would require some talent to master the intricacies of
that devious trail, but settlers making hay always appeared in
the nick of time to put us on the right track.
Very fair it was,
after the brown and burning plains, and the variety was endless.
Cotton-wood trees were green and bright, aspens shivered in gold
tremulousness, wild grape-vines trailed their lemon-colored
foliage along the ground, and the Virginia creeper hung its
crimson sprays here and there, lightening up green and gold into
glory. Sometimes from under the cool and bowery shade of the
colored tangle we passed into the cool St. Vrain, and then were
wedged between its margin and lofty cliffs and terraces of
incredibly staring, fantastic rocks, lined, patched, and splashed
with carmine, vermilion, greens of all tints, blue, yellow,
orange, violet, deep crimson, coloring that no artist would dare
to represent, and of which, in sober prose, I scarcely dare tell.
Long's wonderful peaks, which hitherto had gleamed above the
green, now disappeared, to be seen no more for twenty miles. We
entered on an ascending valley, where the gorgeous hues of the
rocks were intensified by the blue gloom of the pitch pines, and
then taking a track to the north-west, we left the softer world
behind, and all traces of man and his works, and plunged into
the Rocky Mountains.
There were wonderful ascents then up which I led my horse; wild
fantastic views opening up continually, a recurrence of
surprises; the air keener and purer with every mile, the
sensation of loneliness more singular. A tremendous ascent among
rocks and pines to a height of 9,000 feet brought us to a passage
seven feet wide through a wall of rock, with an abrupt descent of
2,000 feet, and a yet higher ascent beyond. I never saw anything
so strange as looking back. It was a single gigantic ridge which
we had passed through, standing up knifelike, built up entirely
of great brick-shaped masses of bright red rock, some of them as
large as the Royal Institution, Edinburgh, piled one on another
by Titans. Pitch pines grew out of their crevices, but there
was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall of similar
construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky.
Fifteen miles more over great ridges, along passes dark with
shadow, and so narrow that we had to ride in the beds of the
streams which had excavated them, round the bases of colossal
pyramids of rock crested with pines, up into fair upland "parks,"
scarlet in patches with the poison oak, parks so beautifully
arranged by nature that I momentarily expected to come upon some
stately mansion, but that afternoon crested blue jays and
chipmunks had them all to themselves. Here, in the early
morning, deer, bighorn, and the stately elk, come down to feed,
and there, in the night, prowl and growl the Rocky Mountain lion,
the grizzly bear, and the cowardly wolf. There were chasms of
immense depth, dark with the indigo gloom of pines, and mountains
with snow gleaming on their splintered crests, loveliness to
bewilder and grandeur to awe, and still streams and shady pools,
and cool depths of shadow; mountains again, dense with pines,
among which patches of aspen gleamed like gold; valleys
where the yellow cotton-wood mingled with the crimson oak, and
so, on and on through the lengthening shadows, till the trail,
which in places had been hardly legible, became well defined, and
we entered a long gulch with broad swellings of grass belted with
pines.
A very pretty mare, hobbled, was feeding; a collie dog barked at
us, and among the scrub, not far from the track, there was a
rude, black log cabin, as rough as it could be to be a shelter at
all, with smoke coming out of the roof and window. We diverged
towards it; it mattered not that it was the home, or rather den,
of a notorious "ruffian" and "desperado." One of my companions
had disappeared hours before, the remaining one was a town-bred
youth. I longed to speak to some one who loved the mountains. I
called the hut a DEN - it looked like the den of a wild beast.
The big dog lay outside it in a threatening attitude and growled.
The mud roof was covered with lynx, beaver, and other furs laid
out to dry, beaver paws were pinned out on the logs, a part of
the carcass of a deer hung at one end of the cabin, a skinned
beaver lay in front of a heap of peltry just within the door, and
antlers of deer, old horseshoes, and offal of many animals, lay
about the den.
Roused by the growling of the dog, his owner came out, a broad,
thickset man, about the middle height, with an old cap on his
head, and wearing a grey hunting suit much the worse for wear
(almost falling to pieces, in fact), a digger's scarf knotted
round his waist, a knife in his belt, and "a bosom friend," a
revolver, sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat; his
feet, which were very small, were bare, except for some
dilapidated moccasins made of horse hide. The marvel was how his
clothes hung together, and on him. The scarf round his waist
must have had something to do with it. His face was remarkable.
He is a man about forty-five, and must have been strikingly
handsome. He has large grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with
well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose, and a very
handsome mouth. His face was smooth shaven except for a dense
mustache and imperial. Tawny hair, in thin uncared-for curls,
fell from under his hunter's cap and over his collar.
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