Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
The forest here was composed of lodge-pole pines, which on the ridges grew close together, with tall slender trunks, while in the valleys the growth was more open. Though the sun was behind the mountains, there was yet plenty of light by which to shoot, but it faded rapidly.
It was six o'clock when the last one in the party reached the rickety wooden stairs that made the last ascent of a hundred feet to the Dome possible. Ham and Willis had been on top for some minutes, and were sitting on a huge boulder just at the foot of a lodge-pole that had been erected on the very summit for a flagstaff.
But, as I said above, the only narrow escape I met with was not from one of these dangerous African animals, but from a grizzly bear. It was about twenty-four years ago. I had wounded the bear just at sunset, in a wood of lodge-pole pines, and, following him, I wounded him again, as he stood on the other side of a thicket.
Within ten miles they veered away from Cheyenne to the southeast, and Cutler struck out on a trail of his own more freely. By midnight he was on Lodge-Pole Creek, sleeping sound among the last trees that he would pass. He slept twelve hours, having gone to bed knowing he must not come into town by daylight.
Having secured a piece of meat, formally presented to him on the end of a lodge-pole, he offered himself to the view of his own people, alarming them by his glaring eyes and sunken cheeks, and told them that he had come back to haunt them for a stingy, inconsiderate lot, because the gate-keeper of heaven had refused to admit him on so ill-conditioned a mount. The camp broke up in dismay.
Soot says that there isn't room on his lodge-pole for half the scalps that he has taken. Bad luck to the spalpeen, he will peel the topknot from the head of a lovely woman, or swaat child, such as I used to be, as quick as he would from the crown of a man of my size. He's an old riprobate, is the same, and Soot says he can niver die resigned and at pace with all mankind till he shoots him."
The animals with the lodge-pole carriages go as they please, no special care being taken to guide them, but they too instinctively keep within sound of the leader. I will again quote Garrard for an accurate description of the moving camp when he was with the Cheyennes in 1847:
"Look yonder," said Raymond; "you see that big hollow there; the Indians must have gone that way, if they went anywhere about here." We reached the gap, which was like a deep notch cut into the mountain ridge, and here we soon discerned an ant-hill furrowed with the mark of a lodge-pole. This was quite enough; there could be no doubt now.
He used to dream, as he rode down the bridle path, of the day coming when all the vast domain of National Forests would be like that trail; not a stick of underbrush or slash as big as your finger; not a stump above eighteen inches high; all the scaled logs piled neat as card board boxes; open park below the resinous cinnamon-smelling lodge-pole line and englemann spruce, hardly a branch lower on the trees than the height of a man; and such a rain of tempered light from the clicking pine needles and whorled spruces as might have come through the rose window of a cathedral.
Through this tangle it was impossible to move without making noise, for a fire had swept over it and young lodge-pole trees had sprung up so close together that it was impossible to move without crashing into them. It was while on hands and knees in one of these thickets of new growth that I came upon bear tracks.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking