Trek

“ Many of the readers may not know that for an expedition like this, where the waggon party expect to be travelling for months, perhaps for a year, through a country where roads are almost unknown, and where the great heavily-laden, but wonderfully strongly-made waggon, has to be dragged over rocks, through swamps, and into and out of rivers, a team of fourteen, sixteen, or, as in this case, even twenty oxen, will be yoked to the great chain or rope called the trek-tow. For some of the poor animals are sure to succumb during the journey ”

“ The camels like to have the lantern ahead of them and move briskly forward in pursuit. Twelve or thirteen hours of walking, if conditions have been good, bring us to the end of the day’s trek, though sometimes we cannot go on so long.
“Eddar ya ayan; home for you who are weary,” is shouted by the guide and repeated by every man in the caravan. Then the men collect the camels and divide them, the water-camels here, those carrying tents over there, the camels with luggage for the barricade yonder. The camels are barrakked— kneel with grunts of satisfaction to have their loads removed. ”

“ An hour's hard riding brought him into a tremendously rough country, where the trail at times was nothing more than a narrow defile or ledge, and sheer walls of rock rose thousands of feet above, their giant edges cutting the blue sky like the teeth of a mighty saw. ”

“ The Iroquois war-trail ran at our elbows, trodden a foot deep, hard as a sheep path, and from eighteen inches to two feet in width—a clean, firm, unbroken trail through a primeval wilderness, running mile after mile, mile after mile, over mountains, through valleys, by lonely lakes, along lost rivers, to the distant Canadas in the North. ”

“ When a traveler, overcome by the long and painful ascent of a mountain, finally reaches the summit, he finds it pleasant to him to sit on a rock and, while recovering from his fatigue, contemplate the plain which he has crossed, the river whose windings he has followed and which at this moment spreads out below him, and also the difficult, even dangerous, ground, the sand, the marshes, over which he has come with great exertion. ”

“ From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind you like a thread so that never do you quite lose connection with your selves. There is something a little fearful to the imaginative in the insistence of it. You may camp, you may linger, but some time or another, sooner or later, you must go on, and when you do, then once again the Trail takes up its continuity without reference to the muddied place you have tramped out in your indecision or indolence or obstinacy or necessity. ”

“ You may go as a walker, taking the river-side path, or making a way for yourself through the tangled thickets or across the open meadows. You may go as a sailor, launching your light canoe on the swift current and committing yourself for a day, or a week, or a month, to the delightful uncertainties of a voyage through the forest. You may go as a wader, stepping into the stream and going down with it, through rapids and shallows and deeper pools, until you come to the end of your courage and the daylight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,—fate held back her eager hand.
A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the long trail, without which all would fail.
Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand its toll of salvage. ”

“ The trail passes along on high ground—say a thousand feet above sea level—and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. ”

“ The traveler who forgets or loses the trail will lose his way, or miss the best of life. The trail is the directest approach to the fountain of life, and this immortal way delays age and commands youth to linger. While you delay along the trail, Father Time pauses to lean upon his scythe. The trail wanders away from the fever and the fret, and leads to where the Red Gods call. ”

“ The heedless mirth of the shipboard was changed to the care of the trail.
We flung ourselves in the struggle, packing our grub in relays,
Step by step to the summit in the bale of the winter days.
Floundering deep in the sump-holes, stumbling out again;
Crying with cold and weakness, crazy with fear and pain.
Then from the depths of our travail, ere our spirits were broke,
Grim, tenacious and savage, the lust of the trail awoke.
“Klondike or bust!” rang the slogan; every man for his own. ”

“ Railway construction in the mountains follows the pass, but persons who admire scenery from vestibuled coaches know nothing of the old pass of the pack-trail, the binding brush, the fallen timber, the slides, the swift creeks, the gulches, the precipices to which the trail must cling.
The trail itself—the original trail—is invariably the line of least resistance. It proceeds on the theory that it is easier to go around than through or over. If traveling on the other side of a creek is easier it crosses. ”

“ For any journey, by rail or by boat, one has a general idea of the direction to be taken, the character of the land or water to be crossed, and of what one will find at the end. So it should be in striking the trail. Learn all you can about the path you are to follow. ”

“ I should be interested to know whether others feel the same glamour that I do in the contemplation of such syllables as the Lo-Lo Trail, the Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright Angel Trail. A certain elasticity of application too leaves room for the more connotation. A trail may be almost anything. There are wagon-trails which East would rank as macadam roads; horse-trails that would compare favorably with our best bridle-paths; foot-trails in the fur country worn by constant use as smooth as so many garden-walks. ”

“ When the trail was of this description, the guide generally strode along in company with one of the drivers.
As the greater part of my work was in the wild forest regions, there were many trips when the guide was always at the front. Marvellously gifted were some of these men. The reader must bear in mind the fact that there were no roads or vestiges of a path. Often the whole distance we wished to go was through the dense unbroken forest. The snow, some winters, was from two to four feet deep. ”

“ The curé might [5] preach himself black in the face proving that a camp on the sand and a bed à la belle étoile, under the stars, are much more poetic in the telling than in life; that voyageurs don’t pass all their lives clothed in picturesque costumes chanting ditties to the rhythmic dip of paddle blades; that, in fact, when your voyageur sets out in spring he passes half his time in ice water to mid-waist tracking canoes up rapids, and that where the portage is rocky glassed with ice, you can follow the sorry fellow’s path by blood from the cuts in his feet. ”

“ The legacy of this untrodden expanse is unlimited productiveness of soil, waterways and forest. The solitary explorer with pack horse and canoe spyed out a winding trail which the railways’ impedimenta of progress has speedily straightened and made easy for the quasi pioneer. ”

“ If, for example, the trail points in the direction of a mountain pass, or toward any other place which affords the only passage through a particular section of country, it would not be worth while to spend much time in hunting it, as it would probably be regained at the pass. ”

“ I have heard a mule-driver overwhelmed with skeptical derision because he claimed to have upset but six times in traversing a certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in charts of the mountains are marked many trails which are only "ways through,"—you will find few traces of predecessors; the same can be said of trails in the great forests where even an Indian is sometimes at fault. ”

“ But the trail of the mountains means more than wonder; it means hard work. Unless you stick to the beaten path, where the freighters have lost so many mules that they have finally decided to fix things up a bit, you are due for lots of trouble. Bad places will come to be a nightmare with you and a topic of conversation with whomever you may meet. We once enjoyed the company of a prospector three days while he made up his mind to tackle a certain bit of trail we had just descended. ”

“ Picking the trail route over forested ridges calls for every bit of the skill gained in our years of tramping. There is never time to go it slow, to explore every possibility. Usually there is one hasty day to lay out the line for a week’s work. For a basis there is the look of the region, from some distant point, from a summit climbed last year, perhaps. For a help, there is the compass, but in our hill country we use it little. ”

“ I fancy a man, choosing his route, could start at Race Point and go down the land by beach and by dune, to a point far beyond the one reached by the second, farthest, land-exploring expedition of the Pilgrim scouts from this point, without seeing more evidence of human settlement than the wheel tracks of a road deep in sand or a glimpse of the towering turrets of the Pilgrim monument which dominates the landscape for a long distance. ”

“ As the traveller rises from one side of a mountain to a corner of the road, where it hurries perpendicularly down the other side, his eye may fathom a valley several thousand feet beneath, rich in vegetation, and surrounded on all points by rugged mountains covered with illimitable forests of fir, through the branches of which, here and there, the grey rocks glare, like skulls scattered over a green field ”

“ If it comes from the west and you trail eastward, the wind will strike your back going away from camp and should strike your face returning, provided its direction does not change. Again, if you go east, your camp will lie west of you, and your homeward path must be westward. Consult your compass and know exactly which direction you take when leaving camp, and blaze your trail as you go, looking backward frequently to see how landmarks should appear as you face them returning. ”

“ I should be always scenting the old trail, lad, the trail that leads straight out of the Gate to swoop down to the South Seas. Do you think a man who has felt his ship's bows heave and plunge under him in the long Pacific swell—just ahead of him a reef breaking white into the lagoon, and beyond a fence of feathery palms—cares to follow hounds over gray hedges under a gray November sky? ”

“ Then, too, old Rover will be losing the trail about that time. When that bearded friend of yours and his guide leave the floe to go upon the solid shore-ice of the islands, the floe is going to keep right on moving north. That breaks the trail. See? When we strike the end of that trail we can go due south and strike the islands. If the air is at all clear, we can see them. It's a clumsy arrangement, but better than going it without a trail. ”

“ HITTING THE TRAIL WALKING tours are popularly supposed to be feasible chiefly for those to whom this method of travel is incidental to their occupation—timber cruisers, landlookers, prospectors, game wardens and trappers of the North—men who daily match themselves against the forces of Nature. ”

“ Their guide’s advice was always so good that they continued their slow progress, the baggage-horses ruling the rate at which they were able to proceed; and for the next hour they went on ascending and zigzagging alone; the rugged mountain track, with defile and gorge and ridge of rock rising fold upon fold, making their path increase in grandeur at every turn, till they were in one of nature’s wildest fastnesses, and with the air perceptibly brisker and more keen. ”

“ So up they toiled through pitch darkness, through rain and cloud, passed the night in a building said to be on the summit, and returned down the mountain in the morning, to catch their train, through as dense a fog as ever exasperated a hurried tourist. But they had been to the top! Are there anywhere else in the world people who travel two hundred miles for a single day’s recreation? ”

“ Travel, like politics, makes strange bedfellows, and especially that kind of travel in which all companions must, from necessity, mingle on a common level, eat their simple rations by the same camp fire, and sleep side by side beneath the same open sky. This observation is suggested by a night spent in camp near Bear River. Our ox train had just forded that rocky stream, to avoid the excessive toll which was demanded for the privilege of crossing upon the new bridge. ”

“ The Laps follow after them, dragging painfully their laden sledges in the broad track left by the thousands of galloping beasts—a day’s journey, and they are yet far from the sea, and the trail is yet broad. ”

“ You cannot carry a boat in the forest, and you will discover enough reasons why in a five-minute trail to make their enumeration tiresome. The zest of the whole thing lies in not knowing the difficulties beforehand, and then, if properly equipped, a man who sits at a desk the year through can find no happier days than he will in his canoe when the still waters run through the dark forests and the rapid boils below. ”