23. CHAPTER XXIII.
IF there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our
timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of
life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person.
We did not see a human being but ourselves during the time, or
hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the
waves, the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off
thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us was dense and cool,
the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the
broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or
black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its
circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred
with land-slides, cloven by canñons and valleys, and
helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble
picture. The view was always fascinating, bewitching, entrancing.
The eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm;
it suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always,
but must close sometimes in sleep.
We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two
protecting boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for
us. We never took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first
break of dawn we were always up and running foot-races to tone
down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. That is,
Johnny was—but I held his hat. While smoking the pipe of peace
after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of
the sun, and followed the
conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the
captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures
grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest,
precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the
miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to "business."
That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north
shore. There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray,
sometimes white. This gives the marvelous transparency of the
water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the lake. We
usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from shore, and then lay
down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour
whither it would. We seldom talked.
It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the
luxurious rest and indolence brought. The shore all along was
indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow
sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep mountain-sides
rose right up aloft into space—rose up like a vast wall a little out of
the perpendicular, and thickly wooded with tall pines.
So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only
twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that
the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was
even eighty
feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout,
every hand's-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a
granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the
bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface,
till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not
resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the
boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we
could see that when we
had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty
feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these
great depths, the water was not
merely
transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects seen through
it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every
minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply
through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all
spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high
aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions
"balloon-voyages."
We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week.
We could see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness
under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not
bite—they could see the line too plainly, perhaps. We frequently
selected the trout we wanted, and rested the bait patiently and
persistently on the end of his nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he
would only shake it off with an annoyed manner, and shift his
position.
We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all
it looked so sunny. Sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a
mile or two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there,
because of the immense depth. By official measurement the lake
in its centre is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet
deep!
Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp,
and smoked pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At night,
by the camp-fire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the
mind—and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only
a whole summer's acquaintance with them could enable the
student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds.
We never slept in our "house." It never recurred to us, for one
thing; and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was
enough. We did not wish to strain it.
By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back
to the old camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day,
and reached home again about night-fall,
pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was carrying the main bulk
of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, I took the loaf of
bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them
down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the
frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and
looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the
premises!
Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the
flames to get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and
watched the devastation.
The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the
fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful
to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My
coffee-pot was gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half
the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six
or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling
was something terrific. We were driven to the boat by the intense
heat, and there we remained, spell-bound.
Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding
tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges—surmounted
them and disappeared in the canñons beyond—burst into
view upon higher and farther ridges, presently—shed a grander
illumination abroad, and dove again—flamed out again, directly,
higher and still higher up the mountain-side—threw out skirmishing
parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson
spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far
as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it
were with a tangled network of red lava streams. Away across the
water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the
firmament above was a reflected hell!
Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing
mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were
beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it
that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger
fascination.
We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours.
We never thought of supper, and never felt fatigue. But at eleven
o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision,
and then darkness stole down upon the landscape again.
Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The
provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see.
We were homeless wanderers again, without any property. Our
fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance. Our pine
forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our
broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our
usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep.
The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while out a
long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not
try to land. So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled
heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or
four miles beyond the camp. The storm was increasing, and it
became evident that it was better to take the hazard of beaching
the boat than go down in a hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in,
with tall white-caps following, and I sat down in the stern-sheets
and pointed her head-on to the shore. The instant the bow struck,
a wave came over the stern that washed crew and cargo ashore,
and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered in the lee of a boulder all
the rest of the day, and froze all the night through. In the morning
the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp
without any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we ate up
the rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out to Carson to
tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded, upon
payment of damages.
We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a
hair-breadth escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never
be recorded in any history.