Greenhorn

“ I am referring now to the real tenderfoot, the fellow who cannot learn, who is incapable ever of adjusting himself to the demands of the wild life. Sometimes a man is merely green, inexperienced. But give him a chance and he soon picks up the game. That is your greenhorn, not your tenderfoot. Down near Monache meadows we came across an individual leading an old pack-mare up the trail. ”

“ Greenhorns from the far-distant East were proving their greenness by buying all kinds of useless articles, which later they would throw away one by one, and were armed in a manner befitting buccaneers of the Spanish Main. To them, easiest of all, were old and heavy oxen sold, animals certain to grow footsore and useless by the time they had covered a few hundred miles. ”

“ Hanneh Breineh hissed. “Moisheh dries out the marrow from his head worrying for the dollar, and these high-educated brothers sit themselves on top of his neck like leeches. Greenhorns—opera—the world is coming to an end!” ”

“ Here and there is an aged thorn which has attained almost the size and girth of a forest tree, and in places Scotch firs lift their stately heads. In their tops the sea-sound murmurs, and about them is the hot fragrance the sun draws out of their resinous branches mingling with the tanny odour of the bracken. An alley through hollies meeting overhead is like a tunnel; it issues on a broad sunny level where four roads meet, each beckoning so enticingly, one is fain to sit down awhile to weigh their claims. One source of the peculiar loveliness of such a holm is that all the ways are green. ”

“ The hedge itself is really of blackthorn, but its white or pink-ticked blossoms have faded and given place to haws. Here and there, as far as you can see, up through it grow wild dwarf oak bushes, their foliage crimson or carmine tipped, dwarf plane-trees, with broad sienna leaves, that glitter in the sunshine as if they had been varnished; and elder-trees with big white stars of blossom, and rougher leaves of darkest green. Young elms, too, are yonder, and infant ash trees with stems as black as ink and strangely tinted leaves. ”

“ The bighorn is also an inhabitant of these mountains, and the natives have several robes made of their skins. The mountains near this place are high, steep, and strewed with rocks, which are principally black. Several species of fir, white pine, and white cedar, forms their covering, while near the river we see the cottonwood, sweet-willow, a species of maple, the broad-leafed ash, the purple haw, a small species of cherry, the purple currant, gooseberry, red-willow, the vining and whiteberry honeysuckle, the huckleberry, sacacommis, two kinds of mountain holly, and the common ash. ”

“ A long green valley bounded by pleasant, round-topped, bush-clad hills. The slopes are dotted with kraals, the blue wood-smoke curling aloft from the yellow thatch of many a beehive-shaped hut, the red-ochred forms of the inhabitants moving about—early as it is—making a not unpleasing contrast to the eye against the bright green of the pastures, though by no means pleasing to another sense, at far closer quarters. But the thorn enclosures contain no cattle, although it is milking-time, nor do any stand around outside, only a few sheep and goats. ”

“ Shortly we descend into a narrow glen, then zigzag up the flank of the fell. After a hard pull (the day is hot; the distant hills are swinging in vapour) we come to easier angles. The road is delved out of the hillside, the home of bracken and creeping stagshorn, with, by rills almost silent with drought, trees of hawthorn, alder and rowan. Below us—over spears of larch, over chevaux-de-frise of oak and ash and birch, over green and bronze cupolas of sycamore and beech, is the vale of Derwent, from Lodore to the furthest Man of Skiddaw. ”

“ On the hills grew high brush, some of it very beautiful. The buckthorn, for example, was just coming out; and the dogwood, and the mountain laurel. At first these clumps of bush were few and scattered; and the surface of the hills, carpeted with short grass, rolled gently away, or broke in stone dikes and outcrops. Then later, as we mounted, they drew together until they covered the mountainsides completely, save where oaks and madrone kept clear some space for themselves. ”

“ But the bighorn could do no more. In the soft fleece of the snow he stood cowed and trembling. The snow came on faster, and wiped out the trail of the flock; he made no motion to go after. Such a death comes to the wild sheep of the mountains often enough: to fail from old age in some sudden storm, to sink in the loose snow and await the quest of the wolf, or the colder mercy of the drift. He turned his back to the storm which began to slant a little with the rising wind, and looked not once at Jerry nor at the hills where he had been bred. ”

“ After leaving Greenville, at the foot, which is the nucleus of a town some eight or ten years old, you see but three or four houses for the whole length of the lake, or about forty miles, three of them the public-houses at which the steamer is advertised to stop, and the shore is an unbroken wilderness. The prevailing wood seemed to be spruce, fir, birch, and rock-maple. You could easily distinguish the hard wood from the soft, or "black growth," as it is called, at a great distance,—the former being smooth,round-topped, and light green, with a bowery and cultivated look. ”

“ Upon the right, close by, is the ash copse, with its border of thick fir trees; on the left oaks at intervals stand along the hedge; in front stretches the undulating surface of an immense pasture field called The Warren. Like a prairie it rolls gently away, dotted with hawthorn bushes, here and there a crab tree, and two rows of noble elms, in both of which the rooks are busy in spring. Beyond, the ground rises, and the small upland meadows are so thickly timbered as to look like distant glades of a forest; still farther are the downs. ”

“ The view from the Gornergrat is certainly one of the grandest on God’s earth. Here, as nowhere else, can the average person, without danger or fatigue, get into the very heart of the glacier world. One stands on a rocky ledge, the Gornergrat, and all around and below sweep and swirl the great frozen rivers. From their far brink rise the bare jagged peak of the Matterhorn and the round snow-clad shoulders of the Breithorn and Monta Rosa. Way down below lies the green valley with Zermatt in its hollow, and away as far as the eye can reach are ranges upon ranges of snow mountains. ”

“ Sometimes in the spring of the year the winds from Lorn have it their own way with the Highlands. They will come tearing furious over the hundred hills, spurred the faster by the prongs of Cruachan and Dunchuach, and the large woods of home toss before them like corn before the hook. Up come the poor roots and over on their broken arms go the tall trees, and in the morning the deer will trot through new lanes cut in the forest. ”

“ The pasture ferns climb too, and the pasture birds love the wooded summit as well as they do the slopes far below the pioneer's farm. The June delight which echoes in the bobolink music in the meadows so far below sweeps up the mountain-side in scent and song and color till it blossoms from the Puritan spruces on the very top of Thorn. There one glimpses the rare outpouring of joy that comes from reticent natures. They are in love, these prim black spruces, and they cannot wholly hide it however hard they try. ”

“ But the bighorn, the wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress, cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep among the lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. ”

“ At that point a green gorge stretches up between two spurs of the hill above, a green gorge covered with soft, pneumatic turf cropped like a lawn by the innumerable sheep which range over those high pastures. And then on and up, through the pleasant, slanting valley, until the heather-covered plateau is reached.
There one surveys a vast expanse of wild and lonely moor, all purple, green, and brown. At huge distances great peaks rise up—the peaks of the Snowdon range—and on clear moments the white and glistening cap of the emperor mountain of Wales shines in its distant majesty. ”

“ My young readers may remember that many similar feats have been witnessed in the Rocky Mountains of America, performed by the “bighorn”—a wild sheep that inhabits these mountains, so closely resembling the Ovis ammon of the Himalayas, as to be regarded by some naturalists as belonging to the same species. The hunters of the American wilderness positively assert that the bighorn fearlessly flings himself from high cliffs, alighting on his horns ”

“ Attractive as it is when robed in the bloom and leafage of summer, the thorn develops a new beauty in its gnarled and naked branches and the hoariness of its gray antiquity. Loveliest, too, are the birch and hemlock in midwinter; whilst the swamp, ablaze with the scarlet fruit of the Prinos and smooth winterberry, presents its most 92vivid life above the snow. From it, likewise, I catch the gleam of the golden willow, with purple rufous lights that smolder amid the twigs and branchlets of the shrubs which seek its cool and solitude. ”

“ The flesh of the big-horn, when fat, is more tender, juicy, and delicious than that of any other animal I know of, but it is a bon bouche which will not grace the tables of our city epicures until a railroad to the Rocky Mountains affords the means of transporting it to a market a thousand miles distant from its haunts. In its habits the mountain sheep greatly resembles the chamois of Switzerland, and it is hunted in the same manner. ”

“ In wet weather, no man can climb any of them, and at such times they are greasy, muddy, sliding grounds. Oftentimes when a Bighorn is seen on a hill-top, the hunter has to ramble about for three or four miles before he can approach within gunshot of the game, and if the Bighorn ever sees his enemy, pursuit is useless. The tops of some of these hills, and in some cases whole hills about thirty feet high, are composed of a conglomerated mass of stones, sand, and clay, with earth of various sorts, fused together, and having a brick-like appearance. ”

“ Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. ”

“ From the northwest comes the Green, in a narrow, winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a cañon that seems bottomless, from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliff and ledges of rock—not such ledges as you may have seen, where the quarry-man splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains, that, rolled on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as you may have seen, where the swallow builds his nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit. ”

“ The climb from here along the snow-free rock ridge to the summit of the Gross Grünhorn was child’s play. The weather was perfect; and no cold wind whipped our faces. We might almost have been climbing on a fine summer’s day, so warm were the rocks, and so good the climbing conditions. We sat on the top of the Gross Grünhorn (13,278 ft.) till well after three. The view from this summit is almost unique. One is so closed in on all sides by great peaks that, no matter where the eye roves, [Pg 105] it rests on nothing save rock and ice and perpetual snow. ”

“ On one side of the water-slide the ground rises very sharply, but up the other side a tiny path twists through the wood, and opens quite suddenly on a very still valley with steep sides and a broad, open space between. A mountain-ash bearing vividly scarlet bunches of berries hangs over the stream close to the opening; but beyond, only a few stunted thorns grow sparsely amongst an abundance of heather, furze, bracken, and whortleberries. ”

“ No green valleys suggesting the homes of human folk are there to offer a contrast to the sterner majesty of nature.
Within three-quarters of an hour of leaving the summit, we were back on the Grüneckhorn, and there conceived the idea of descending by the hitherto unclimbed south face, a tremendously steep snow slope through which rocks jutted out here and there. ”

“ But at whatever season you seek the bighorn, remember that he is very easily driven away, that all his senses are exceptionally keen, and that from his vantage ground above he incessantly watches the valley beneath. ”

“ Catching the oars and starting again, the boats are once more borne down the stream, until we land at a small cottonwood grove on the bank and camp for noon.
During the afternoon we run down to a point where the river sweeps the foot of an overhanging cliff, and here we camp for the night. The sun is yet two hours high, so I climb the cliffs and walk back among the strangely carved rocks of the Green River bad lands. These are sandstones and shales, gray and buff, red and brown, blue and black strata in many alternations, lying nearly horizontal, and almost without soil and vegetation. ”

“ Along the wall of cliff which bounds this side of the valley, are other falls of equal beauty, though less fame. The Jungfrau and Wetterhorn close its extremity, and up the mountains, on the stream’s opposite shore, the green pastures stretch nearly to the summit, dotted with chalets to receive cattle and herdsmen, some seeming too high for human foot to rest on. ”