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Finally a resting place is reached where the grandeur of the view can be enjoyed; and then a shorter stairway completes the ascent of the wall, but not of the hill, so there is still a considerable upward walk through the forest of tall pines all carpeted with brilliant mats of kinnikinic with its shining leaves, glowing in shades of green and red, trying to rival the bright scarlet berries.
There was one chief reason for this: he was born in the almost impenetrable fastnesses at the head of the creek, and his cubhood had been spent amid its brambles of wild currants and soap berries and its rich red ground carpets of kinnikinic. It was home. In it he was alone. It was the one part of his domain that he held inviolate from all other bears.
Then came the sapoos oowin six hours after he had left the clay wallow. The kinnikinic berries, the soap berries, the jackpine pitch, the spruce and balsam needles, and the water he had drunk, all mixed in his stomach in one big compelling dose, brought it about and Thor felt tremendously better, so much better that for the first time he turned and growled back in the direction of his enemies.
Only these bits of flint enmeshed in the clinging tendrils of Indian tobacco, or kinnikinic, were left to tell the tale of his heroism. Of course, I didn't give up hunting or trapping or even my hope of finding a gold mine, altogether. I continued to exercise my six-shooter, though repeated failures to find my mark made it easy for me to depend more and more on my camera for "shots."
From the time the furry anemone lifted its lavender-blue petals above the dwindling snow patch, until the apples formed on the wild rose bushes and the kinnikinic berries turned red, it was a continuous nosegay.
The kinnikinic here resembles the wintergreen of the east, while in the mountains in Colorado it grows in the form of a shrub two to three feet in height, but with no variation in the leaf or berry. At last perserverance is rewarded with a view of the cave buildings and the summit of the hill rising yet higher beyond, and tall, straight pines swaying in the rising wind over all.
The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl. She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence.
The cook-stove occupied the center of the room, and around it a narrow space had been left for the dancers. The air was suffocating to white lungs, what with human emanations combined with the thick fumes of kinnikinic. Watusk, still sporting the frock coat and the finger-rings, had improved his costume by the addition of a battered silk hat with a chaplet of red paper roses around the brim.
The road leads through majestic woods with ferns ten feet high beneath some of the thickets, and across a gravelly plain deforested by fire many years ago. Orange lilies are plentiful, and handsome shining mats of the kinnikinic, sprinkled with bright scarlet berries.
All bitterness is not quinine, but certainly bitter things were Thor's remedies, and as he made his way up the gorge his nose hung close to the ground, and he sniffed in the low copses and thick bush-tangles he passed. He came to a small green spot covered with kinnikinic, a ground plant two inches high which bore red berries as big as a small pea.