Series 2 of 7
Gifford Pinchot, who later became chief of the U.S. Forest Service, was working for the National Forest Commission in 1896 when he traveled south through the Swan Valley with Jack Monroe, a trapper and guide. In the first installment of the 7-part series, they had arrived at a cabin inhabited by a trapper named Wood, who sent them on their way with venison and a sketch map to a deserted cabin where they could find flour.
That night we spent with another trapper, who took us, in the morning, across the river on a jam of trees, roots and all the woody wreck which a mountain river in flood sometimes deposits on the shallows. Near the bank, on the other side, there was an immense pine tree upon which the bears had long been in the habit of sharpening their claws. The trunk was scratched with innumerable vertical grooves, some old, others quite fresh and the little heap of rubbish which often makes a mound about the foot of a large tree was tramped into a flat path about a foot above the level of the ground.
Later in the day we found where one of these same bears had been living on the very gamey remains of a horse. The ground all about was full of sign and there were numerous beds of crushed and discolored grass where the animal had rested after a meal.
After making camp, I spent the afternoon wandering through the woods. Deer were very plenty, in and about small stagnant ponds in the neighborhood but we still had meat enough for supper and breakfast and there was every reason to believe that we should have no trouble in killing what we needed at the end of the next days walk.
As night began to fall I climbed a spruce tree immediately over the remains of the horse and spent a couple of hours fighting the innumerable mosquitoes and watching for the bear which never came. The fire seemed not only cheerful and desirable but altogether essential, when at last I stumbled back to camp, where Monroe was waiting for me under the shelter of a great spruce on the bank of a pond. It rained during the night but the tree kept us dry, and our one blanket, with the fire, made us very comfortable.
Next morning I was up at half-past four and spent another hour or two in my tree, but with no gain to anyone but the mosquitoes. After I came down the dogs delayed us in unseemly (and odorously successful) pursuit of a skunk that had been at the bait during the night but about ten o’clock we started for the cabin with the flour, which eventually we named “Camp Plenty.”
The forest was here chiefly of lodge-pole pine, small trees, sometimes with towering larches above them. These small pines seem to the traveler on foot, to lie prostrate for at least as large a part of their career as their upright lives and the endless process of lifting your feet over them is thoroughly exhausting, for they are usually propped well off the ground on their own branches or on the trunks of their neighbors.
To be continued...
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