The open spaces; incidents of nights and days under the blue sky

Front matter

SPACES

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Class

Contents

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Preface v

CHAPTER

Chapter I Sleeping Out

Almost everything creeps to cover at night — the birds to their boughs, the beasts to their lairs, and man to his bolted house. The night-prowlers — those with specially gifted eyes or noses — are only a few out of the many. The rank and file as soon as the sun has gone down begin to look about for shelter. A fear of the dark drives them into hiding.

Even when man ventures to "sleep out," he does so with a canvas tent over him. His forefathers were less luxurious and got on with a lean-to thatched with boughs or a tepee wrapped with birch-bark or deerskins. But generations, time out of mind, have been afraid to sleep under the night sky unprotected. Some scrap of cover, some coign of seclusion, has always been deemed necessary. It might turn cold or wet, or the moon might shine in one's face and warp the features, or perchance the heavens might fall.

Besides, there was vision of the pestilence that walketh in darkness and ravening wolves that prey by night.

In the country to the east of the Mississippi perhaps the tent is necessary. For instance, in the Adirondack or the Maine woods, one is always liable to be deluged by rain, and the ground is never entirely dry even in summer. It is not a good camping country, notwithstanding the thousands of tent-pegs driven there every year. Aside from the dampness, it is usually camping in a forest — something that is nearly as unsatisfactory as sleeping in a cave. Much romance and some poetry have been extracted out of sleeping under the pines with the flickering lights of the camp-fire thrown up on the red trunks and spreading boughs. Many a dawn I have watched the sprays of pine overhead grow into form and color with the coming light, while blue jays and Douglas squirrels chattered and barked at me from neighboring trees. It is an idyllic experience in the open forests of California, especially if you have company with you; but sleeping in the Eastern woods alone, or even in the northern Pacific woods, is dreary enough. The stars and the sky and the night wind are shut out. You hardlv

SLEEPING OUT.

know when daylight comes or goes, for you cannot see the rising or the setting sun, and you can make no certainty ^of the weather, for you cannot see the clouds. A forest is usually good hunting country for deer and bear, but it is not a comfortable place for the camper. He is too "cabined, cribbed, confined."

Quite different from the forests are the great prairies and uplands of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. There the tent is quite superfluous, because during the long summer rainfall is infrequent. You rest in the open, and by night or day can see around you in an immense ring. Cries in the night, the whimper of wolves, the grazing of horses, the sound of approaching hoofs, the rush of wind, the roll of thunder, can be rightly located and judged. You rest easily because you know what is going on about you. And if sleep does not come there are the filmy clouds of the cirrus, the constellations slowly moving to the west, the Milky Way powdered with infinite groupings of stars. What a never-ending source of wonder! And not entirely without practical uses to the camper. How many times under the open sky have I wakened and known the time of night by the position of certain bright stars ! How many times have I ridden the open prairies at night laying my course by the North Star, or getting other bearings by the blazing splendor of Arcturus !

Any sort of a tent, in any country, isolates you from the world without. One of the unique scares of my life came to me in the foot-hills of the Big Horn Mountains, where one autumn I was camping under canvas with a companion. We had been hunting and the carcass of a deer was hanging from a small pinyon some fifty yards from the camp-fire. One night, sleeping in our figure-A tent with the door-flap pegged down, we were awakened by the catlike scream or yowl of a mountain-lion. Had we been in the open we might have seen him and perhaps taken a shot at him. As it was, we sat up in our blankets and wondered what to do. While poised there momentarily in the darkness the tent-flap was suddenly burst open by some large beast that sprang directly upon me. In warding him off I threw out both hands before me and they struck coarse hair. For a moment my heart stopped beating. Then the animal began to growl and I recognized my friend's setter dog. He had been sleeping outside by the burnt-out camp-fire, and, frightened by the cry, had dashed against the tent-flap and landed directly upon me. The mountain-lion had been inspecting the carcass of our deer in the pinyon. He could have dragged away or eaten everything in the camp for all that we could have known of him sleeping in our canvas tent.

When in a strange land it behooves one always to sleep like a jack-rabbit — that is, with one eye open. A white tent in the moonlight, that every Indian or bear or wolf can recognize as easily as a camp-fire, is merely an advertisement of your presence. It puts blinders on your eyes and cotton in your ears, so that anything can sneak upon you. There may be no great danger threatening — usually there is none at all — but when you are alone in the wilderness you need all your senses about you, and each one of them acutely attuned. One night in Montana, camping near the edge of the Crow Indian Reservation, I was much concerned by the fact that several Indians, riding across country in the night, had discovered our camp. They halted some distance away and I could hear them talking among themselves. Our tent (taken along to please my companion) had betrayed us. The result was that I spent a bad night, rifle in hand, holding guard over our horse-bunch a quarter of a mile down the river. Indians do not enjoy being shot up in a fight any more than palefaces, but they delight in horsestealing. Stampeding a camper's horses at night is their great play, for the enjoyment of which they will run some risk.

A similar experience, but with the advantage on my side, happened to me many years ago on the Mexican border, below Arivaca. An old trail leading over into Sonora crossed there, and near the boundary-line was a deserted adobe hut. Not far from the hut was a hole in the ground with some green water in it, called, by a stretch of the imagination, a **well.'' I was camped there because of the water, but I had no tent; neither did I sleep in the hut nor near the well. I stretched out my blankets in some thin greasewood and slept with my ear to the ground, knowing quite well that the border passes were runways of the marauder. In the middle of the night I was wakened by the sound of galloping horses and men's voices. Down from the north came five riders, their horses blowing, and they themselves muttering and cursing over some mishap. When they saw the hut they stopped and came together as though for a council of war. Then they deployed, surrounded the hut at a distance, and began helloing at the supposed occupant. Getting no answer, they fired two shots into the adobe.

Still without response they dismounted, approached, and finally found the hut deserted. There was some more violent swearing, and then they began a search for the water-hole, which they evidently knew was somewhere on the premises. My presence they never suspected, and I should have remained unseen had it not been for my horse, picketed a quarter of a mile beyond me. A horse can always be relied upon to get his owner into trouble, and my beast at this juncture let out a long, loud neigh. He had heard or winded the other horses and his social instincts were aroused. The men — they evidently were horse- thieves and were riding hard to get over the border and away from some sheriff's posse — pricked up their ears at once. One of them started in the direction of the staked horse, and unfortunately his way led my way. At thirty yards distance I called to him to stop. He jumped as though he had been shot at, and caught at his six-shooter. I quickly informed him that if he drew his gun I would shoot. He desisted. What did he want? Water for their horses. Where was the well ? I told him. Who was I and what was I doing there ? Merely studying desert geology. Who were they ? — that was more important. No reply. They passed on down into Mexico, I watching them off the premises with my rifle on my knee.

The moral of that tale is that had I been camped down in a foolish tent they could have located me instantly and shot me through the canvas. As it was, I had the advantage and could have bagged all five of them before they could have gotten into action. Of course such incidents are rare. One sleeps soundly night after night in the open, without even the whir of a night-hawk or the yelp of a coyote to ruffle his repose. I know of no safer place to sleep. Yet while in the Southwest I was frequently asked if I were not afraid to sleep alone in the desert. I always answered with another question: "Afraid of what ?" There is much greater danger in the city street. The only danger is from men, not beasts, and men are very scarce in the desert. Well, suppose you became ill ? But you do not get ill under the blue sky. It is in the town and in the hospital that people sicken and die. But suppose something should bite you — a rattlesnake, for instance ? Yes, but suppose at home you fell down the porch steps and fractured your skull ? You are far more likely to meet with trouble on the porch than to be bitten by a rattlesnake.

Occasionally in sleeping out one gets wet in summer showers, but that is a slight matter. The piece of tarpaulin, one half of which goes under you and the other half over you, and in which you wrap your blankets when riding, can usually be relied upon to shed the brunt of any short-lived storm. You lie on your back with your knees up, making something tent-shaped of the tarpaulin, and the water drains off. If it is a long storm with much rainfall the water will eventually get under you, and, if you have been foolish enough to make your bed in a hollow instead of on a slope, the water will get in at you. There is nothing for it but to get up and seek such shelter as rock or bush or tree will afford. But again such happenings are rare. The great camping country of the plains is arid and the conditions of sleeping out are ideal.

That does not mean that the camper can dismiss all care with the coming of the dark. Every one who sleeps out does so with both ears listening, and in his soundest sleep is partly conscious of keeping watch. Indians and horse-thieves do not bother him, for their coming or going is very infrequent; but he has to look out for his own outfit. Now the most important part of an outfit is the horse-bunch. You can never aflfbrd to be left afoot in unsettled country by your horses slipping away from you. And all the plains horses know how to cut and run if the opportunity ofiFers. Every one of them has a partner to whom he is devoted and from whom he is not willingly separated. If the partners are in camp together they are generally content, but look out if you take one of them away with you and leave the other behind. The one with you, at the first opportunity, will take his back track to join his partner and you will have great difficulty in catching him. A horse will sometimes go for seventy or a hundred miles hunting for his partner without stopping to eat or drink.

Aside from these getaways there are occasional scares that must be reckoned with. In urban or suburban territory a horse's sense of sight or smell or hearing is very dull and almost negligible. He sees only a saddle or a wagon and smells [10]

only a measure of oats. But in the open the mustang or plains horse has very acute senses. And, being naturally something of a fool, he is always suspicious. If thirty-six hours before a bear has passed through where he is picketed, he soon catches the scent and is not to be quieted. Around and around on his picket-pin he will go hour after hour, head up and tail up, stopping every few minutes to snort at the air. If he is not double hoppled he will pull the pin and run. Any moving animal is likely to frighten a picketed horse — an elk, a mountain-lion, a gray wolf. And during a lightning-storm or a driving rain he may break away and get to timber, even if indisposed to make a long run of it.

And sometimes the camp supplies need watching. Coyotes are always sneaking about a camp, nosing for something to eat, picking up refuse; and occasionally at night, if everything is very quiet, they will slip in and raid the grub-box or chew off a bit of greasy strap from a saddle, or jump for any provender that may be hanging in bags from trees. They are a very clever family, the coyote tribe, and can get what they want without getting into trouble quite as readily as the fox family.

Even bears are fairly good camp-thieves, and in some of the national parks they are now very bold in their entrances and exits. In the Yellowstone Park some twenty years ago a bear in camp one night broke into the bacon-box and was making a good meal when I interrupted him with an axe. Guns were not allowed in the park, and an axe was my only weapon. It was sufficient. The bear started on a run down a decline and through a meadow where I had seven horses picketed. The horses saw him coming, pulled their picket-pins, and ran for fifteen miles through the timber. It was four o'clock the next afternoon when I found them, bunched together under a slide of rock, high up on a mountainside.

After a week or more in camp all the night sounds become familiar to you, and only a few of them are disturbing. The whimper of coyotes just before daylight means nothing. They are usually harmless hoodlums, and oftentimes are good sentinels for you. As long as they keep up their whimpering, there is no dangerous prowler about; but their sudden silence and sneaking away may mean that a bear or a mountain-lion has come on the scene. The gray wolf has a deep [121 bass bay, but you seldom hear it near the camp. He is up in the mountains hustling mountain-sheep across a rock slide, or far away over the hills with brother wolves running a mule-deer in relays. He is usually too careful of his skin to be seen of a camper. Bears with their grunting woof are in the same class. The garbage-can bears of the national parks are not typical of those in the wild. Even the big silver-tip in the Rocky Mountain country has to be sought out and run down. He never hunts you. As for the grizzly, he is no more. His habitat was the Coast Range of California, but the gun, the trap, and poison have done for him.

The more frequent night sounds about a camp are of horses grazing, stamping, snorting, or whinnying, the call of belated quail, the whir of bats, or the hoot of owls. At certain times of the year when birds are migrating, there will be the honk of geese, the far sky-call of crane, perhaps the whistle of curlew, or the pipe of golden plovers moving in flocks. It is not easy to see bird flights by night unless the flocks are flying very low. When there is a full moon you occasionally get strings of ducks or brant in silhouette as they cross the moon's disk, reminding you perhaps of some Japanese print by Okio or Hiroshige; but usually the night fliers are not seen.

This is especially true of the smaller birds that seem to move north or south by night, perhaps for protection from the hawks. The swallows, warblers, thrushes, larks, bobolinks, tanagers migrate in large straggling flocks, and keep up an incessant chirping and twittering, but they are too high up to be made out. The larger birds usually move by day. Some of them, like the hawks, have no fear [of enemies, and go by overhead with great swiftness. So far as I have observed, they make no sound and attract no attention.

But, except in periods of migration, birds do not usually fly or move around at night. The majority of the bird family goes to bed early with its head tucked under its wing. Only the killers, such as the owls or bats, remain out. And about the only bird sound one hears in the dark, except the hooting of owls, is the dismal note of the poorwill. He is the same bird as the whippoorwili of the Mississippi Valley, though in the Rocky Mountain region he shortens his call. But not his persistence. He keeps reiterating "poorwill** for hours at a time, until the maddened camper would gladly wring his neck. [14]

The smaller animals, the mice, rats, and weasels, move about continuously after dark; and every camper knows that the rabbits begin to stir just before sunset, and that in the early dawn they are settling themselves for the day in some thin bush or bunch of grass. Riding by moonlight I have often seen the jack-rabbits feeding on dry grass, dashing off occasionally as in play, capering in circles, or jumping straight up in the air. I have never, at any time, caught one of them sleeping or nodding or with his eyes shut. I doubt very. much if the jack-rabbit ever sleeps, just as I am certain that he never drinks, and that he can live an indefinite time on nothing moister than dry grass. On the desert the water ration of every animal is reduced to a minimum, and the ground-squirrels, kangaroo rats, and gophers are in the category with the jack-rabbit in getting on without it. As for the prairie-dog, he, too, is denied water, but he gets moisture from grass and roots. Any of the desert rodents will eat green herbage when they can f.nd it, but a few of them can flourish without it.

The reptile contingent need hardly be reckoned with at night, though every new camper has his vague apprehension of snakes crawling over him [15]

in the dark. In Montana one night I was awakened by a feeling similar to some one's finger being drawn slowly along my back-bone. I was sleeping on the ground, rolled in blankets Indian fashion; but I could feel that moving something through the blankets very plainly. I knew instinctively that it was a snake, and lay still for a moment wondering whether I should roll over on him and try to crush him or roll away from him. I decided, rather spasmodically, that valor did not require a Laokcoon contest and that I had better roll away from him. How I got started I hardly knew, but once in action I did not stop until I was ten feet away. He rattled, but as it was too dark to see him, I again decided that valor did not call for a fight. I crept carefully back, got hold of a corner of my tarpaulin and jerked it out from under the snake. I then moved some hundred yards away, leaving him to rattle himself quiet. Again, a few evenings after, and camped farther on, while going out in the dark with an axe and a picket-pin to stake a horse, I caught the rattle of a snake at the foot of a sage-bush. I chopped into the bush until the rattle stopped, but could not see the snake.

With these two exceptions — and I think they were exceptional — I have never known snakes to move about at night. They have not a night eye and are particularly averse to chilly evening winds. Basking in the sun by day and creeping into a hole or under a rock by night is their usual habit. Lizards, horned toads, Gila monsters are not different. As for trap-door spiders, tarantulas, scorpions, they are not great travellers. They usually have holes in the sand or sod, or under a rock, and the camper has to look sharply if he sees them at all. Occasionally one creeps into the blankets or gets into a shoe or a hat, but that is because the camper has settled down in the wrong place, with blankets or clothing tossed atop of a spider settlement or a scorpion's nest.

Animals and their movements or cries by night are things that the camper eventually accepts as he does the crackle of his camp-fire or the low growl of his dog. They are passing events. A more lasting impression is that which he sees above him as he lies on his back — the night sky. He never quite gets over the wonder of the great arch and that vast belt made up of infinite stars called the Milky Way. The stars seem studded as in a broad band or architectural rib that reaches [17]

up and under the huge purple vault. One is at first attracted by the blaze of the more prominent stars, the green-white Sirius, the blue Vega, the orange Betelgeuse, the pearly yellow Capella. If the air is very thick they will seem to twinkle; if you are in high regions where the air is thin they will appear quite still, shining and splendid. Their color in high altitudes becomes more apparent, and you perhaps marvel over the whiteness of Sirius which indicates youth, or the orange of Betelgeuse which points to age and decline. Ah ! the wonder of those great sun-stars, their magnitude, their heat and light, their swift flight through space, and the enormous pull of their gravity !

But you are clutching at fragments, details of the pattern. The bright stars merely happen to be those near our world. The bowl of the Dipper contains no light within the square perceptible to the unaided eye, but the telescope has discovered over a thousand stars in that space, and the larger the telescope the more stars there are to appear. The Milky Way that looks as though strewn with diamond-dust is made up of millions of stars. The newer telescopes make of that portion of the heavens a bright shining field, caused [18]

by countless far-away stars whose lights crowd together on the plate. What is the splendor of Aldebaran or Arcturus to this stupendous glimpse of the infinite — this bringing forward of countless suns from the depths of space! And, wonder upon wonder, they are all moving at terrific paces in enormous orbits ! The entire belt of the Milky Way is supposed to be moving as a mass through space. Whither? Whence the measureless energy that started or keeps such colossal bodies in motion? And where and what are we in this mighty scheme of things ? Are we anything more than petty animalculae clinging to a cold discarded fragment of a sun ? You turn over in your blankets and listen to the yap of a distant coyote. Along that Milky Way lies madness.

Down from the sky comes the coolness of the upper-air stratum. It is almost a nightly occurrence in the arid regions, even in the heat of summer, for the temperature to fall forty or fifty degrees. You drop off to sleep with a warm breeze blowing over you. By midnight you wake up and begin feeling about for blankets. Perhaps before dawn you are burrowing in the sand to get warm. What has become of the one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit that baked you at noonday ? The heat has radiated upward and the cold has descended to take its place.

What a clean cold ! How scentless, saltless, stainless ! It is the purest air in the world — this air which people at one time considered deadly, and which even those of to-day avoid by creeping into a house or a tent. Ah ! how you sleep ! And how unconcernedly you breathe in the oxygen of the blue — nature's great restorer ! Even the warm air that blows immediately after dusk has some of this life-giving power. You feel it streaming over your face and through your hair and it has the soothing effect of fairy fingers — or perhaps some loved woman's hands that once had the power to bring you sleep.

What a strange feeling, sleeping under the wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back to your habitat, to your original environment, to your native heritage. With that feeling you snuggle down in your blankets content to let ambitions slip and the glory of the world pass you by. The honk of the wild goose, calling from the upper space, has for you more understanding and the stars of the sky depth more lure. At last you are free. You are at home in the infinite, and your possessions, your government, your [20]

people dwindle away into needle-points of insignificance. Danger ? Sleep on serenely ! Danger lies within the pale of civilization, not in the wilderness.

Chapter II Riding The Open

There never was greater joy for the naturelover than riding into the unknown. Astride of a good plains horse, in unexplored country — not knowing what was coming over the next divide, or what lay in the far valley, or what new world would be disclosed from the top of yonder mountain — the lure of the unexpected lent eagerness to the ride. The nipping air of early morning, the long shafts of the rising sun, the great arch of the shifting blue overhead, the far vistas of table-lands and mountains all added to your zest. You were off and away. Nothing could stop you.

Something of your pleasure depended upon your horse. In Indian days, when unexplored country lay almost everywhere west of the Mississippi, the riding was not always enjoyable because the Indian cayuse that one rode was a combination of fool and devil. He was a wild mustang of the plains that had been run down, lassoed, brutally broken in a few days, and left to nurse his enmity forever after. And he never failed to [22]

keep that enmity alive. Every time you lassoed him there was a fight. When bridled with a bit of rawhide or rope, and saddled with nothing more than a flap of buffalo-skin, there was another fight. He glared at you, with ears laid back and lips half bared, as though he would gladly eat you. Mounting him was a feat of vaulting which sometimes landed you on his back and sometimes did not. If you landed 'rightly, it was always a question of whether you would stay. The born impulse of the cayuse was to buck. He curved his back and went into the air. When he came down it was with stiff legs and a sharp back-bone that made you wish you were elsewhere. Two or three jounces of this kind and you were not sorry to get back to earth. Riding a bucking cow-pony, with a deep-seated saddle in which one could get a stirrup hold, was not such a difficult affair; but keeping one's place on a barebacked Indian pony was quite another performance.

The cayuse was never to be trusted at any time. You might ride him for hours or days or months, but he would always be waiting his time and planning trouble for you. One of his dearest tricks was to rear up on his hind legs, with any sharp little pull on the reins, and fall over back- [23]

ward. The main object of that play was to catch you under him and squeeze the life out of you. Doubtless some of the violent rearing was due to mouth tenderness, and some of the falling backward to clumsiness; but bad intention was at the root of things.

In swimming a river the same rearing and falling over backward were carried out when the cayuse could feel his hind feet on the bottom; but his commoner trick in river-swimming was to get his head and neck down flat on the water and roll over with you. Nothing but a stiff rein and a rawhide quirt, well applied around the ears, could dissuade him from rolling. If he chanced to get you off so that you had to let go of him, he immediately seized the opportunity to pound you with his forefeet, very much as a deer in the water will sometimes turn and hit a following hound. A blow from an unshod hoof under such circumstances might be thought a matter of no great moment, but if you happened to be the one hit, you had reason to think otherwise.