Theodore Winthrop

“ We presently turned just aside from the trail into an episode of beautiful prairie, one of a succession along the plateau at the crest of the range. At this height of about five thousand feet, the snows remain until June. In this fair, oval, forest-circled prairie of my nooning, the grass was long and succulent, as if it grew in the bed of a drained lake. The horses, undressed, were allowed to plunge and wallow in the deep herbage. Only horse heads soon could be seen, moving about like their brother hippopotami, swimming in sedges. ”

“ Far is near, distance is annihilated this brilliant day of summer, for us recreated with Hippocrene, strawberries, shade of fir and tall snow-fed grass. Down the mountain range seems nothing after our long laborious up “the half is more than the whole.” “Lead on, Loolowcan, intelligent brave, toward the residence of the late Sowee.”
More fair prairies linked themselves along the trail. From these alpine pastures the future will draw butter and cheese, pasturing migratory cattle there, when summer dries the scanty grass upon the macadamized prairies of Whulge. ”

“ No shade of Sowee came to my slumbers with warnings against the wolf in guise of a Klickatat brave. I had no ghostly incubus to shake off, but sprang up recreate in body and soul. Life is vivid when it thus awakes. To be is to do.
And to-day much is to be done. Long leagues away, beyond a gorge of difficulty, is the open rolling hill country, and again far beyond are the lodges of the people of Owhhigh. “To-day,” said Loolowcan, “we must go copa nika ilihee, to my home, to Weenas.” ”

“ Mongers of pestled poisons may punch their pills in malodorous mortars, roll them in floury palms, pack them in pink boxes, and send them forth to distress a world of patients: — but Nature, who if she even feels one’s pulse does it by a gentle pressure of atmosphere, — Nature, knowing that her children in their travels always need lively tonics, tells wind, sun, and dew, servitors of hers, clean and fine of touch, to manipulate gay strawberries, and dispose them attractively on fair green terraces, shaded at parching noon. ”

“ Loolowcan has either chosen his protector according to the law of likeness, or, choosing it by chance, has become assimilated to its characteristics. A wolfish youth is the protege of Talipus, — an unfaithful, sinister, cannibal-looking son of a horse-thief. Wolfish likewise is his appetite; when he asks me for more dinner, and this without stint or decorum he does, he glares as if, grouse failing, pork and hard-tack gone, he could call to Talipus to send in a pack of wolves incarnate, and pounce with them upon me. ”

“ They champed as their nature was; — Klale like a hungry gentleman, — Gubbins like a hungry clodhopper, — Antipodes like a lubberly oaf. They were laying in, according to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s rule, supply at this meal for five days; without such power, neither man nor horse is fit to tramp the Northwest.
I lay on the beautiful verdant bank plucking now dextrously and now sinistrously of strawberries, that summer, climbing late to these snowy heights, had just ripened. ”

“ All along the journey I had been quietly probing the nature of Loolowcan, my most intimate associate thus far among the unalloyed copper-skins. Chinook jargon was indeed but a blunt probe, yet perhaps delicate enough to follow up such rough bits of conglomerate as served him for ideas. An inductive philosopher, tracing the laws of developing human thought in corpore viti of a frowzy savage, finds his work simple, — the nuggets are on the surface. Those tough pebbles known to some metaphysicians as innate ideas, can be studied in Loolowcan in their process of formation out of instincts. ”

“ Number One is the prize number in Loolowcan’s lottery of life. He thinks of that number; he dreams of it alone. When he lies down to sleep, he plots what he will do in the morning with his prize and his possession; when he wakes, he at once proceeds to execute his plots. Loolowcan knows that there are powers out of himself; rights out of himself he does not comprehend, or even conceive. ”

“ Fire in the forest is light, heat, and cheer. When ours was nurtured to the self-sustaining point, we searched to find where the sage Sowee kept his potables. Carefully covered up in sedges was a slender supply of water, worth concealing from vulgar dabblers. Its diamond drops were hidden away so thoroughly that we must mine for them by torchlight. I held a flaring torch, while Loolowcan lay in wait for the trickle, and captured it in a tin pot. ”

“ Mortals, shrinking from the responsibility of a high destiny and dreading to know how divine the Divine would have them, always imagine an avatar of some one not lower than a half-god when a gift of great price comes to the world. ”

“ Night is really only beautiful so far as it is not night, — that is, for its stars, which are sources of resolute daylight in other spheres, and for its moon, which is daylight’s memory, realized, softened, and refined. ”

“ Klale, the Humorous, kicks playfully, elongating his legs in preparatory gymnastics. Gubbins, the average horse, kicks calmly at his saddler, merely as a protest. Antipodes, the spiteful Blunderer, kicks in a revolutionary manner, rolls under his pack-saddle, and will not budge without maltreatment. Ill-educated Antipodes views mankind only as excoriators of his back, and general flagellants. Klickatats kept him raw in flesh and temper; under me his physical condition improves; his character is not yet affected.
Before sunrise we quitted the house of Sowee. ”

“ How wild he looked, that youth so frowzy by daylight, as, stooping under the tall sedges, he clutched those priceless sparkles.
Upon the carte du jour at Restaurant Sowee was written Grouse. “How shall we have them?” said I, cook and convive, to Loolowcan, marmiton and convive. “One of these cocks of the mountain shall be fried, since gridiron is not,” responded I to myself, after meditation. “Two shall be spitted, and roasted; and, as Azrael may not want us before breakfast to-morrow, the fourth shall go upon the carte de dejeuner.”
“O Pork! what a creature thou art!” ”

“ Medical men command us to swallow twice a day one bitter pill confectioned of all disgust. Nature doses us, by no means against our will, with many sweet boluses of delight, berries compacted of acidulated, sugary spiciness. Nature, tenderest of leeches, — no bolus of hers is pleasanter medicament than her ruddy strawberries. ”

“ Afterward we talk, — Flame and I, — we think together strong and passionate thoughts of purpose and achievement. These emotions of manhood die away, and we share pensive memories of happiness missed, or disdained, or feebly grasped and torn away ”

“ Grouse third shook off his mortal remains, and sped to heaven. The two others, contrary to rule, for I had shot the lower, fled, cowardly carrying their beavy bodies to die of cold, starvation, or old age. “The good die first,” — ay, Wordsworth! among birds this is verity; for the good are the fat, who, because of their avoirdupois, lag in flight, or alight upon lower branches and are easiest shot.
Loolowcan bagged my three trophies and added them to the first. Henceforth the thought of a grouse supper became a fixed idea with me. ”

“ He has the advantage of no elaborate system of human inventions to unlearn. He has no distinct fetichism. None of the North American Indians have, in the accurate sense of the term; their nomad life and tough struggle with instructive Nature in her roughness save them from such elaborate fetichism as may exist in more indolent climes and countries.
Loolowcan has his tamanoüs. It is Talipus, the Wolf, a “hyas skookoom tamanoüs, a very mighty demon,” he informs me. He does not worship it ”

“ In fact, he keeps Talipus, his tamanoüs, as a kind of ideal hobby, very much as a savage civilized man entertains a pet bulldog or a tame bear, a link between himself and the rude, dangerous forces of nature. ”

“ Slow-footed oxen, leaning inward and sustaining each other, like two roysterers unsteady after wassail, might clumsily toil up such a road as this, hauling up stout, white-cotton-roofed wagons, filled with the babies and Lares of emigrants ”

“ All these the hearty youth assimilates, and grows healthily. And now I educate him to manliness, training him on great joints, shoulders, and marrowy portions. He becomes erelong a power and a friend able to requite me generously for my care. ”