Long Trail

“ The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard tablelands or the well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah and Nevada ”

“ We are setting out on the Long Trail. It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before Democracy arrives. It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and we'll not quit till we get him. You remember what our old visitor said about "splitting the air to get somewhere." We are going to quit "sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere." We are going to set out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up. ”

“ If it should ever be my lot to take the Long Trail at short notice, I hope it will be under a blue sky and a blazing sun. It was hard to be philosophic, or even decently calm, standing there in the sickly glow of the fading coals with old Hans mutely reminding us that life is a tenuous thread, easily snipped. ”

“ But how many, after they had paraded that mile-long street with its mud, its seething foam of life, its blare of gramophones and its blaze of dance-halls, ached for their southland homes again! You could read the disappointment in their sun-tanned faces. Yet they were the eager navigators of the lakes, the reckless amateurs of the rivers. This was a something different from the trail. It was as if, after all their efforts, they had butted up against a stone wall. There was "nothing doing," no ground left, and only hard work, the hardest on earth. ”

“ Away he went with a new fire in his blood, and an odd prickling in his hair; away on a long, hard follow through interminable woods and hills, with the trail growing fresher as he flew. All day he followed, and toward night it turned and led him homeward. ”

“ On the way back to camp not a cry, not a rustle disturbed the perfect stillness. The moon shone wondrously clear, making magic of the familiar woods; the lake began whispering to its banks; the air trembled at times to that rushing sound of music which is heard only on still nights in dense forest, and which always fills one with wonder, as if hearing at last the old harmony of the spheres. All around the trail or the gliding canoe the great wilderness stood silent, alert, listening. ”

“ For an hour or more, running like startled deer, they had tried to follow their own snow-shoe trail back over the wide barrens into the friendly woods; but already the snow had filled it brim full, and whatever faint trace was left of the long raquettes was caught up by the gale and whirled away with a howl of exultation. Before them as they ran every trail of wolf and caribou and snow-shoe, and every distant landmark, had vanished; the world was but a chaos of mad rolling snow clouds ”

“ There were men from the mines in their flannel shirts and corduroys, their Stetsons and high boots. There were men from the trail in sweaters and mackinaws, German socks and caps with ear-flaps. But all were bronzed and bearded, fleshless and clean-limbed. I marvelled at the seriousness of their faces, till I remembered that here was no problem of a languorous sunland, but one of grim emergency. It was a man's game up here in the North, a man's game in a man's land, where the sunlight of the long, long day is ever haunted by the shadow of the long, long night. ”

“ Our trail now lay along the uplands through the day, where we could see the long line of covered wagons, sometimes two or three abreast, drawing itself in its windings like a huge white snake across this great sea of rolling green. ”

“ They will go through a vast and lonely land travelling along the wide valleys of frozen rivers, up long narrow gulches filled with snow, over miles of wind-swept mesas, and across high, treeless, mountain ridges. "All goes well, if all goes well," is a proverb of the trail, for in winter-time there, death is always near. ”

“ It requires no fore-vision to know that the land has a future above anxiety. Up this trail there is a new world to be possessed, an unequalled empire, in which men may go hither and yon as they please. It gives my feet a staccato movement to think of it. Some city folk there are who might fear the trail, but this were foolish. It is good to ride on a long trail and laugh out loud for sheer joy. On the trail, the ear of Society is closed and there are smoked goggles on her eyes.
I have been talking to a stripling from Nova Scotia, who has been here these four months. ”

“ Lines formed in his face, and in those lines were the travail of the North, the bite of the frost, all that he had achieved and suffered—the long, unending weeks of trail, the bleak tundra shore of Point Barrow, the smashing ice-jam of the Yukon, the battles with animals and men, the lean-dragged days of famine, the long months of stinging hell among the mosquitoes of the Koyokuk, the toil of pick and shovel, the scars and mars of pack-strap and tump-line, the straight meat diet with the dogs, and all the long procession of twenty full years of toil and sweat and endeavor. ”

“ I hesitated only long enough to picture the trail. There was only that one mile on which I used the shoes, and though the snow there was deep I could wade through without them. It would mean perhaps an hour longer, but it wasn't two o'clock yet and I had a full six hours to travel fifteen miles. I decided to go.
I set out and made fast time until I struck the drifts on the summit. The short spell of gloom we called day had ended, and it was rapidly growing dark. Before I got over that mile there would be no light, and this unpleasant white fog would be blindfolding my eyes as well. ”

“ When it was finished we spent the evening by the camp fire, smoking and talking of the three men retreating down our old trail, and trying to calculate at which one of the camping places they were bivouacked. Every night since our parting this had been our chief diversion, and I must confess that with each day that took us farther away from them an increased loneliness impressed itself upon us. Solemn and vast was the great silence of the trackless wilderness as more and more we came to realize our utter isolation from all the rest of the world and all mankind. ”

“ I know not what it is,—what lesser pressure of air, to which we respond like a barometer; or what unknown chords there are within us that sleep for years in the midst of society and that waken and answer, like an animal's, to the subtle influence of nature,—but one can never be watched by an unseen wild animal without feeling it vaguely; and one can never be so keen on the trail that the storm, before it breaks, will not whisper a warning to turn back to shelter before it is too late. To Noel and Mooka, alone on the barrens, the sun was no dimmer than before ”

“ About the hardest thing that we have set out to do yet has been to carry a secret message across the mountains, one hundred miles, from our town to another town, with our own pack outfit, and finding our own trail, and do it in fifteen days including Sundays. ”

“ We would do our part and we knew that Fitz and Ward would do theirs in keeping the major safe.
That appeared a long ride. Twenty miles is a big stretch, at night, and when you are so anxious.
We were to follow on the main trail for half a mile until we came to a bridge. But before crossing the bridge there was a gate on the right, and a hay road through a field. After we had crossed the field we would pass out by another gate, and would take a trail that led up on top of the mesa. Then it was nineteen miles across the mesa, to the mines. The mines would have a light. ”

“ If once we began to fuss and not believe, and experiment, then we both would get muddled and we might lose ourselves completely. I remembered what old Jerry the prospector once had said: "When you're on a trail, and you've been told that it goes somewhere, keep it till you get there. Nobody can describe a trail by inches." ”

“ They had made the trail for me on these three miles, and even for a matter of four or five miles south of the church, as I found out. It is that kind of a road which you want for long drives: where others who have short drives and, therefore, do not need to consider their horses break the crust of the snow and pack it down. I hoped that a goodly part of my day’s trip would be in the nature of a chain of shorter, much frequented stretches ”

“ It only means you do not comprehend the ways of men at our frontier posts.
Some men are here preparing to take the wagon trail to Grand Prairie in the Peace River District. This trail, they tell me, is one hundred and fifty miles long, and may be traversed in six days, a journey which from other points formerly took as many weeks. Hitherto, it has seemed the faraway edge of the world, a place for none save the adventurous blooded and sturdy, but in this day it seems to lie at our very door, for, in the North, one hundred and fifty miles is merely a stone's cast. ”

“ But spare your feelings a moment; you never know the end of a story till you come to the end of the trail. To follow Keeonekh [147] is to learn that he still has his head on, and that he knows the country more intimately than we do.
Just over the low ridge yonder is another lake; and under the ledge which you see cropping out is a spring-hole that never freezes. It is nearer than the mouth of the inlet, though the traveling looks much harder, uphill through deep snow. ”

“ There is probably nothing that marks the progress of civilization more distinctly than [Pg 50] do the perfected modes and conveniences of travel. It is strange, but true, however, that so long as our prairies shall stretch themselves from river to ocean the imprint of the overland trail can never be obliterated. Today, after a lapse of over fifty years, whoever passes within seeing distance of the old trail can, upon the crest of grain and grass, note its serpentine windings, as marked by a light and sickly color of green. ”

“ I made the turn to the southeast and walked my horses. Here, where the trail wound along through the chasm of the bush, the light from my cone would, over the horses’ backs, strike twigs and leaves now and then. Everything seemed to drip and to weep. All nature was weeping I walked the horses for ten minutes more. Then I stopped. It must have been just at the point where the grade began; but I do not know for sure.
I fumbled a long while for my shoes; but at last I found them and put them on over my dry woollens. When I had shaken myself out of my robes, I jumped to the ground. ”

“ Toward evening gathering clouds augured an early renewal of the storm, and Stanton and I had just put up the stove in the tent in anticipation of it when Pete and Easton, the latter thoroughly fagged out, came into camp.
“Well, Pete,” I asked, “what luck?”
“Find trail all right,” he answered. “Can’t follow him easy. Long carry. First lake far, maybe eleven, twelve mile. Little ponds not much good for canoe. Trail old. Not used long time. All time go up hill.” ”

“ There was, however, always a trail over this mile-long drift. The school, of course, had something to do with that. But when you drive four feet above the ground, with nothing but uncertain drifts on both sides of the trail, you want to be chary of speeding your horses along. One wrong step, and a horse might wallow in snow up to his belly, and you would lose more time than you could make up for in an hour’s breathless career. A horse is afraid, too, of trotting there, and it takes a great deal of urging to make him do it. ”

“ Then Eleemos, dozing away in the winter sunshine, would hear an unusual racket in the scrub behind him,—some heavy animal brushing about heedlessly and sniffing loudly at a cold trail. No wolf certainly, for a wolf makes no noise. So Eleemos would get down from his warm rock and slip away, stopping to look back and listen jauntily to the clumsy brute behind him, till he ran plump into the jaws of the other wolf that was watching alert and silent beside the runway. ”

“ The trail of the burros and of the horses, mixed, continued on, and left the plateau and dipped down into a wide flat, getting nearer to the timber on the slope opposite. Then out from our left, or on the fire side, a man came riding hard. ”

“ Up and down goes the trail, now over hardwood ridges where great sugar maples stand wide apart, now through dim evergreen valleys or cedar swamps where one must feel his way; and at last, from the summit of a ridge, comes a gleam of blue ahead. It is the lake, eureka, I have found it, asleep amid its eternal hills! Over it bend the trees, as if they loved it. On every point stands a giant pine, like the king-man of old, lifting head and shoulders above his fellows. From the water’s edge the forest sweeps away grandly to the sky line. ”

“ The trail was steep and long and without water. During the descent we passed first and last probably twoscore of tourists, all on foot. A good half of them were delicate women,—young, middle-aged, a few gray-haired and evidently upwards of sixty. There were also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of condition. Probably nine out of ten, counting in the entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at home where grow street-cars and hansoms, to even the mildest sort of exercise. ”

“ The trail, instead of taking the direction of the river, as the pursuers believed it would, ran precisely parallel to it. So long as the savage kept away from the stream—that is, so long as he did not take to a canoe—his trail could be followed with absolute certainty, and he be overtaken beyond doubt. Impeded by an unwilling captive, he could not avoid a rapid gain upon him by his pursuers ”