Roughing it De Luxe | Page 9

met plenty of tourists who had seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.
I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with any extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybody gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect--nay, more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes. Joy-riders never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no--the Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besides carrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid in the most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, like one's relatives by marriage--and not mad most of the time, like the old-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad all the time--incurably, enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it.
We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Ca?on first of all takes the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal wound of a ca?on to the very gizzard of the world.
Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked out the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinary folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side all the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loose stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than a foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which he never does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has not happened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might not even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and a thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a tremendous sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon.
As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a buckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately the road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the sunshine is a benediction.
Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop up romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by the heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.
Anon--that is to say, at the end of those ten miles--you come to the head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You ride past little sunken gardens