More Adventures Of The Great Brain (8 page)

   
“There are plenty of springs in these mountains,” Papa said. “We must take the canyon to the right because Adenville lies in that direction.”

   
Well, all I can say is that Papa was right about one thing. There were springs in those mountains with enough water for us and the horses. But it sure wasn’t the way to Adenville. The canyon to the right came to a fork of two more canyons. We took the one to the right and ended up in a blind canyon. We came back and took the other canyon, and again ended up in a fork, and again took the canyon to the right. We came back and took the other canyon. Finally we came to another canyon that had a stream of water running down it.

   
It was a good thing we camped on high ground that night because we had the worst cloudburst I’d ever seen or heard. The rain came down as if poured from giant buckets in the sky. The river was a raging torrent of water when we came out of the tent in the morning, although the rain had stopped.

   
“There is nothing like roughing it,” Papa said cheerfully as he made sourdough biscuits with the last of our flour. “I could spend all summer in these mountains, but we’d better start for home. Your mother will be worried. We are a couple of days overdue now.”

   
Boy,
did that make me feel better. I was sure that we were lost in the mountains, and all the time Papa had only been pretending to be lost to give us boys an exciting adventure.

Sweyn must have been thinking the same thing. “You mean we aren’t lost?” he asked.

   
“How can a person be lost in the mountains when there is running water?” Papa asked as he pointed at the rain-swelled river. “Water runs downhill. All we have to do is to follow this river downstream, and it will lead us out of these mountains.”

   
“Then why didn’t we follow the other stream?” Sweyn asked.

   
“That would have taken us out on the other side of the mountains from Adenville,” Papa answered.

   
We followed the river downstream until we came to a waterfall. Papa said we would bypass the waterfall the same way we had bypassed the cliff, by going down one side of the canyon around the waterfall with Sweyn and Dusty holding the buckboard from tipping over.

   
Tom and I were walking behind; Papa was sitting on the seat of the buckboard. I had my head down to see where I was stepping when I heard Sweyn scream. I looked up, and it felt as if my chest had caved in. The strain on the lariat had become too much, and it had broken. I was stunned with horror. Papa leaped from the seat of the buckboard just a second before it turned over and went tumbling down the side of the canyon, pulling the team with it.

   
I ran crying to Papa and threw my arms around his waist. He patted my head.

   
“Next time we’ll take pack horses,” he said calmly as if he lost a buckboard every day of the week.

   
The buckboard was a total wreck, with two wheels smashed so badly they couldn’t possibly be fixed. Bess was standing up and shaking with fright, but Dick kept trying to stand up only to fall down and was screaming something awful. We made our way down the steep slope of the canyon to where the horses were.
Papa unhitched Bess and had Sweyn tie one end of his broken lariat around her neck and take
her to one side with Dusty. Then Papa knelt down and examined poor old Dick. His face was grave as he stood up.

   
“His right foreleg is broken,” he said. “I’ll have to shoot him.”

   
Sweyn got his .22 rifle from the holster attached to his saddle and handed it to Papa. I watched Papa put the end of the barrel in Dick’s ear and then turned my head away. I heard the sound of the shot. I turned around. Dick still seemed to be moving. Papa shot him again in the head. Then the horse lay still.

   
Our tent was ripped in half, and our supplies were scattered all over the side of the canyon. We salvaged what we could and made a pack horse out of Bess.

   
Papa mounted Dusty and led the pack horse, Sweyn and I followed close behind on foot, and Tom lagged behind again.

   
We followed the stream downhill until afternoon of the following day. Then Papa pulled Dusty to a halt.

   
“Don’t worry, boys, “he shouted over his shoulder.”When we round that bend up ahead, you’ll be able to see the mouth of the canyon.”

   
I felt cheered up enough to start whistling. My whistling stopped suddenly as we rounded the bend in the canyon. Instead of the mouth of the canyon I saw a thousand-foot high wall of granite forming another blind canyon. The river ran downhill all right, just as Papa said it would, but this river went right under that thousand-foot wall of granite, forming an underground river.

Papa dismounted. He folded his arms and stared at that granite wall as if it had a lot of nerve being there.

I knew we were hopelessly lost and began to cry.

   
“Stop that blubbering, J.D.,” Tom said. “It will upset Papa.”

   
“I think Dad is already upset,” Sweyn said. “We are lost for sure. I’ve only about a dozen shells left for my rifle, and I doubt if Dad has any shells left for the shotgun.”

   
“Who needs shells?” Tom asked. “Let’s build a lean-to for Papa first and then set some deadfall traps.”

   
Papa sat down on a boulder and stared at the granite cliff as though if he stared at it long enough it would disappear.

   
Us
boys unsaddled Dusty and unpacked Bess. We put hobbles on them and turned them loose to graze.

   
“Dad has got us into a mess,” Sweyn said as he got the axe we had salvaged from the wreck.

   
“If it was just a mess, I wouldn’t care,” I said. “But I think Papa has got us lost in these mountains.”

   
“Crying over spilt milk won’t do any good,” Tom said. “We’ve got to make camp, and make sure we have something to eat. Let’s get busy.”

   
We followed Sweyn to a grove of aspen trees. We found two strong Y-shaped branches on them. Sweyn cut them off with the axe. Tom cut the small branches off them with his jackknife. We went back to where we were going to make our campsite. With his jackknife Tom dug two holes about six inches deep and about ten feet apart. We stuck the aspen poles in the holes with the Y on top and packed dirt around them. By that time Sweyn joined us with a straight branch of a tree from which he’d chopped off all the branches. Tom stripped enough bark from it to make thongs with his jackknife. Then we put the pole between the Y’s on the poles in the ground and lashed them together with the bark. We got the piece of tent we’d salvaged and draped it over the pole between the two Y’s. Then we put rocks all around the edge of the piece of tent so the wind couldn’t blow it away. Next we cut some pine branches and carried them into the tent to use for a mattress.

   
“That will take care of Papa,” Tom said. “We can sleep in our blankets around the camp fire.
Now for some deadfalls.”

   
We walked along the bank of the river until we came to a game trail used by animals that came down to the river to drink at night. While Tom carved sticks for the deadfalls, Sweyn and I found three big flat slabs of rock, which we carried to the game trail. We waited until Tom had carved the notches in the sticks to spring the trap of the deadfall. Then I picked some wild clover along the bank of the river. Tom used some blades of wild grass to tie the clover to the end of the stick that would trigger the deadfall. Then he set the figure 4 of the deadfall with three sticks together in their notches. He held the figure 4 while Sweyn and I carefully placed one end of one of the flat slabs of rock on top of it. When a rabbit or any other small game animal nibbled on the bait on the end of the bait stick, it would dislodge the notches on the other two sticks and cause the flat rock to fall on it and kill it or stun it so that it would be under the rock in the morning.

   
When we returned to our campsite, Papa was still sitting on the boulder. Tom and I made a camp fire. Sweyn went hunting and used two of his precious shells to kill a rabbit and one quail, which we had for supper.

   
I was scared and felt like crying, and Papa sure didn’t help matters after we’d finished eating.

“I don’t want to alarm you, boys,” he said as he puffed on his pipe, “but things look quite serious.”

   
Sweyn doubled up his knees and held them with his hands. “Mom certainly must have told Uncle Mark to come look for us when we didn’t get back on time,” he said.

   
“Where would he look?” Papa asked. “He had no idea where we were going except up Beaver Canyon.”

   
“But he could find the tracks of the horses and buckboard,” Sweyn said.

   
“You are forgetting that cloudburst we had,” Papa said. “It certainly washed out any tracks made by the horses and the buckboard.”

   
I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer and began to cry. “We are going to die,” I sobbed.

   
“We certainly aren’t going to die,” Papa said. “I read an article one time about a man who was lost in the Rocky Mountains for five years. He managed to live on small game, fish, pinenuts, and wild berries until finally he was rescued by some trappers.” Then Papa stood up and stretched. “I think it is time to bed down now,” he said.

   
Papa went into his lean-to. We wrapped ourselves in our blankets and lay down around the fire. Papa sure didn’t make me feel any better with that story of the man lost for five years. We were going to die in these mountains. I would never see Mamma or Aunt Bertha or any of my friends again. Someday some renegade Indians might find us and scalp us and torture us to death. That would perhaps be better than living the rest of our lives in this wilderness. But we hadn’t seen any sign of Indians. That meant only one thing. Someday some intrepid explorer or trapper would come across our bleached bones and wonder if they were the bones of white people or Indians. We were doomed.
Doomed to die in this wilderness.

   
Tom touched my shoulder. “For gosh sakes, J.D.,” he whispered, “stop that bawling and go to sleep.”

   
“I can’t help it,” I cried softly. “We are doomed to live the rest of our lives in these mountains like Paiute Indians, eating grasshoppers, ants, wild berries, and pinenuts
     
“

   
“Will you shut up with that doomed business,” Tom interrupted me. “You don’t think for a minute I’d let my great brain let us get lost in these mountains, do you?”

   
I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. What a fool I had been when I had my brother and his great brain with us.

   
“God bless your great brain,” I said and promptly fell asleep.

   
The next morning we found we’d caught two rabbits in our deadfalls and four trout on our night fishing poles. We ate the trout for breakfast and saved the rabbits. Papa was very quiet. After we had finished eating, Papa went back to the boulder and sat staring at that thousand-foot-high granite cliff as if trying to come to some decision. We had just finished washing the tin plates and knives and forks when he motioned to us.