t)p,c. i 5 , 1905,1 
FORESt AND STREAM. 
mil he cnulfl get fi view of tl:e oacoming party, while 
c yaiitfed lor hiiii'ai its base. He stood there, pef- 
aps a huildred yards from us, looking, lobkin^ out over 
le piaiii, alid we began to get nervous; at least I did. 
thought that he never would come down and give 
s his plan. I must confess that, now the time was at 
and when I was to engage irt art assault, I dreaded it, 
ml would have been mightily glad at that momeilt to 
e safely with Berry away up on the Marias. But there 
ould be no retreat-; I .must go with the rest and do 
ty share, and I longed to have it alt over with. 
After a wait of five or ten minutes, Heavy Breast 
oined us. “They will pass some distance east of here.” 
le said. “We will ride down this coulee and meet 
hem.” It wasn’t much of a coulee, just a low, widr 
epression in the plain, but deep enough to conceal us. 
fvery little way our leader would cautiously ride up to 
he edge of it and look out southward, and finally be 
ailed a halt. “We are now right in their path,” he 
aid. “As soon as we can hear the beat of their horses' 
.oofs we will dash up out of here at them.” 
How my heart did thump, my throat felt dry; I was 
ertainly scared. Like one in a daze, I heard Heavy 
Ireast give the command, and up we went out of the 
oulee, our leader shouting, “Take courage; take cour- 
:ge! Let us wipe them out!” 
The enemy and the herd they were driving were not 
note than a hundred yards distant when we got up on a 
evel with them, and our appearance was so sudden that 
heir horses were stampeded, some running off to the 
■ast and some to the west. For a moment they tried 
0 round them in again, and then we were among them, 
md they did their best to check our advance, firing 
heir guns and arrows. Some were armed only with 
he bow. One after another I saw four of them tumble 
Tom their horses to the ground, and the rest turned and 
led in all directions, our party close after them. They 
autnumbered us, but they seemed to have little courage. 
Perhaps our sudden and unexpected onslaught had de- 
ar oralized them at the start. Somehow, the moment 
1 rode out of the coulee and saw them, I felt no more 
fear, but instead became excited and anxious to be right 
at the front. I fired at several of them, but of course 
could not tell if they fell to my shots or those of our 
party. When they turned and fled I singled out one 
of them, a fellow riding a big strawberry pinto, and 
took after him. He made straight for Hairy Cap and 
its sheltering pines, and I saw at once that he had the 
better horse and would get away unless I could stop 
him with a bullet; and how I did try to do so, firing 
shot after shot, each time thinking “This time I must 
certainly hit him.” But I didn’t. Three times he loaded 
his flint lock and shot back at me. His aim must 
have been as bad as mine, for I never even heard the 
-whiz of the bullets, nor saw them strike. On, on he 
wvent, putting more distance between us all the time. 
jl le had now reached the foot of the butte, and urged the 
horse up its steep side, soon reaching a point where it 
■Nvas so nearly perpendicular that the animal could carry 
him no further. He jumped off and scrambled on up, 
leaving the horse. I also dismounted, kneeled down, 
and taking deliberate' aim, fired three shots before he 
reached the pines. I saw the bullets strike, and not one 
of them was within ten feet of the fleeing mark. It was 
about the worst shooting I ever did. 
Of course, I was not foolish enough to try to hunt 
the Indian in those thick pines, where he would have 
every advantage of me. His horse had run down the 
hill and out on the plain. I took after it, and soon cap- 
tured it. Riding back to the place where we had 
charged out of the coulee, I could see members of our 
' party coming in from all directions, driving more or less 
' horses before them, and soon we were all together 
again. We had not lost a man, and only one was 
wounded, a youth named Tail-feathers; an arrow had 
'fearfully lacerated his right cheek, and he was puffed 
up with pride. Nine of the enemy had fallen, and 
sixty-three of their horses had been taken. Every one 
was jubilant over the result. Every one was talking 
at once, telling in detail what he had done. I managed 
to attract Heavy Breast’s attention. “Who were they?” 
I asked. 
“They were Crees.” 
“How could you tell that they were?” 
“Why,T understood some of the words they shouted,” 
ne replied. “But even if they had not uttered a sound, 
I would still have recognized them by their mean faces 
any by their dress.” 
I rode, over to one of them lying on the ground 
nearby. He had been scalped, but I could see that his 
countenance was quite different from a Blackfoot’s 
face. Besides, there were three blue tattoed marks on 
his chin, and his moccasins and garments were unlike 
anything I had seen before. 
We changed horses and turned homeward, plodding 
along steadily all that afternoon. The excitement was 
over, and the more I thought of it, the more pleased I 
was that I had not killed the Cree I chased into the 
pines. But the others; those I had fired at and seen 
drop; I succeeded in convincing myself that they were- 
not niy bullets that had caused iliern li.i fall. Had | 
not fired as many as twenty shots at the man I chaSed 
and each one had sped wide of the mark? Of course, it 
was not I who laid th^m low. I had captured a fine 
horse, one stronger and more swift thaii my own 
good mount, and I was satisfied. 
We got home in the course of foiir Or five days, and 
you may well believe that there was great exciterrtent 
over our arrival, and many a dartce with the scalps by 
those who had at one time or another lost dear ones at 
the hands of the Crees. Hands and faces and mocca- 
sins painted black, bearing the scalps on a willow stick, 
little parties would go from one part of the village to 
another, sing the sad song of the dead, and dance in 
step to its slow time. I thought it a very impressive 
ceremony, and wish I could remember the song, just for 
the sake of old times. 
Dear old Berry and his wife killed the fatted calf over 
my safe return; at least we had, besides choice meats 
and bread and beaus, three dried apple pies and a 
plum (raisin)) duff for dinner. And I will remark that 
the two latter cour.ses were a rare treat in those days 
in that country. I was glad, glad to get back to the 
fort. How cheerful was the blaze in the wide fireplace 
of my sleeping room ; how soft my couch of buffalo 
robes and blankets! I stayed pretty close to them for 
a time, and did nothing but sleep and eat and smoke; 
it seemed as if I would never get enough sleep. 
Walter B. Anderson, 
[to be continued.] 
On Getting Lost. 
Editor Forest and Stream: _ 
In his article, “On Not Getting Lost in the Woods, 
Mr. Manly Hardy is rather severe on those “would-be 
instructors” who assume to teach how to keep from 
getting’ lost in the woods. He lumps all such together 
as novices who could not themselves practice the ex- 
pedients that they recommend. A sorry bunch of hum- 
bugs, truly! 
I think that the trouble with some of those writers 
is in making sweeping generalizations from facts ob- 
served in limited areas. For example, in a certain 
region, perhaps not five miles square, the moss grows 
thickest on the north or northwest side of the trunks 
of straight trees, in a majority of instances. From this 
a hasty observer deduces the rule: “Moss always grpvvs 
thickest on the north side of a tree.” Of course, this is 
not true. Moss favors that side of a tree which catches 
and holds the most moisture and at the same time re- 
ceives plenty of air. Consequently it is thickest on the 
top of a prostrate log, on the upper side of a leaning 
trunk, and, usually, but not always, on the most shaded 
side of a straight trunk, where the woods are thin 
enough to admit light freely. Where there is a heavy 
stand of timber the moss grows pretty evenly all 
around, or its growth may be erratic. If the man who 
believes unreservedly in the moss theory should rely 
upon it in the big woods of the Mississippi bottoms, 
he would find the south looking down upon him from 
the mid-day sun, for the moss grows evenly up to the 
level of last spring’s overflow. _ 
However, there is such a thing as making too sweep- 
ing generalizations in a negative way, and I fear that 
Mr. Hardy himself has fallen into this error. If I un- 
derstand him correctly — and his words seem plain 
enough — he contends that there is no use at all in look- 
ing for natural signs of direction in any forest; that 
experienced men never place any reliance on thern; 
that “a good woodsman finds his way, just as an ani- 
mal does, by a certain kind of instinct”; that it is useless 
to offer novices any counsel as to how to find_ their 
way out of the woods, because a lost man is an insane 
man anyway; and that the only advice worth giving is 
that “you had better never get lost.” To each and to 
all of these conclusions I respectfully demur. They may 
hold good in some cases; but not, by ,kny means, in a 
majority of cases. 
Mr. Hardy’s article seems to have been called out py- 
Mr. E. A. Spears’ note on the prevailing easterly in- 
clination of the feathery tip of the hemlock, as observed 
in the Adirondacks, and by my own corroboration of 
this habit among the hemlocks of the southern Ap- 
palachian forest. Now, Mr. Spears and I were simply 
reporting facts observed in given localities. Neither 
of us assumed to base upon them a general law. The 
hemlocks of Maine may point toward the zenith or the 
nadir without impugning the reliability of our individual 
observations. . 
To make my own position in this matter clear, permit 
me to quote from an article that I published elsewhere: 
“No general rule can be established from such signs 
as the growth of moss on trees, the preponderance of 
branches on the south side of a tree, or the prevailing 
direction in which the tips of tall saplings point; al- 
though in a given locality such signs may be fairly 
constant.” I then went on to mention a few natural 
signs of direction that I believed to be fairly constant, 
such as the thickness of bark and width of annual rings 
of wood growth in old trees ' (usually greatest on the 
north and northeast sides*), the building habits of cer- 
tain animals, and especially the habit of the compass- 
plant and the prairie dock, which, in a majority of 
cases present the edges of their leaves north and south. 
My recent note on the hemlock’s feather pointing to- 
ward the rising sun was by way of illustration of the fact 
that, in one locality known to me, this is a reasonably 
true sign of direction. I do not believe that there is 
~*This matter was carefully tested some years ago by the New 
York State Forestry Commission, and the result published m 
one of their annual reports. I cannot cite, volume and page, as 
my library here in the wilderness is not what you would call 
extensive. 
48 ? 
any one sign wliich, taken by itself and obsetved iff 
only a few iso):,i(cd_ trees or plants, is worthy of q 
traveler's confidence; but I do know that many expert 
woodsmen often steer their course,, , when the sky is 
obscured, by observing a great number of the signs 
which nature places in the forest, and by averaging the 
results. _ _ 
To be explicit: Here, -veherfe I live now, in the Great 
Smoky Mountains^ is the finest _ forest of mixed hard- 
w'oods and softwoods that remains untouched in Amer- 
ica. It contains a greater variety of trees_ and shrubs 
than can be found in any one forest outside of these 
southern Appalachians. The stand, as a rule, is heavy. 
The country is very rough, the mountains being steep, 
and rising from three to four thousand feet above their 
valleys. Some of the summits are higher than Mt. 
Washington; but there is no tree-limit, save as the 
beech and birch and buckeye peter out where the 
balsam begins. Naked rocks of any considerable size 
are seldom seen. The soil is good to the tops of the 
highest peaks. A few mountains, known as “balds,” are 
crowned with natural meadows of blue grass, where 
stock ranges wild through nine months of the year; 
but everywhere else tliere is dense forest, matted by 
luxuriant undergrowth. Greenbriar, dog-hobble, black- 
berry vines, and other thorny or trippy shrubs, and 
fallen timber, make travel laborious where there is no 
trail; but these are nothing compared to the “slicks” 
of rhododendron which appear in patches of hundreds 
of acres on many of the abutting ridges and along the 
headwaters of nearly all of the mountain streams. 
(Rhododendron is called “laurel” by the natives; we 
also have plenty of the real mountain laurel, here called 
“ivy,” which grows to a trunk diameter of a foot or 
more, but it is not so hard to traverse as the^ other, 
being larger and growing further apart.) These “slicks” 
are so called because little if any timber grows in them, 
and they have a sleek appearance when seen ^from a 
distance. Small patches are variously called “wooly- 
heads,” “lettuce beds,” “yaller patches,” and large ones, 
especially where they cover cliffs and other impedi- 
ments, are known as “hells”— ■'well deserying the 
epithet. The upper mountain region is quite unin- 
habited. 
Now our hunting trips, which are mostly for bears, 
are in the high mountains. We rendezvous at some 
hut that herdsmen use in summer, perched on the sum- 
mit of the main divide (the Hall Cabin, for example, 
straddles the State line, half in North Carolina and 
half in Tennessee). Our “standers” are picketed for 
several miles along the divide, at 4>ooo to 6,000 feet, 
and along its abutting ridges, on the various crossings; 
for the bears mostly den on the bleak and abrupt Ten- 
nessee slope and come over to feed on the abundant mast 
of the gentler and sunnier Carolina slope. The drivers 
start with the dogs from the creek valleys below. 
We ard out in all sorts of weather, in rain and snow 
as well as on clear days, and the chase may continue 
from dawn until long after dark, the bear perhaps 
running for ten or fifteen, miles through the roughest 
of all this rough country. When the drivers get into 
a “slick” so low and dense that they cannot crawl 
through it nor force a passage, they flounder somehow 
over the top. It is worse than any canebrake. 
Well, the point that I am coming to (although now 
tempted to run off into a bear story) is this : Of all our 
difficulties, fog is the worst. Our mountains are called 
the Great Smoky Range because of the dreamy haze 
of impalpable mist in which they are always wrapped 
excepting when hidden in clouds. The latter is often 
the case. When we are in the clouds we call them 
“fog.” The clouds may descend upon us, or ascend 
from below, at any time, suddenly, and the fog is some- 
times so thick that a man cannot see thirty feet in any 
direction. It is a very common experience for_ us to 
be caught in the fog. It may lift within five minutes, 
or it may continue for a day, two days, three days — 
there is no foretelling. It may be accompanied by 
drenching rain, or by a keen wind, so that we cannot 
sit around waiting on the chance of its rising. Below 
the balsam zone, the leaves in autumn lie very thinly 
upon the ground, so that a scurry of wind may at any 
moment obliterate the trail for some distance. When 
the fog settles upon the mountain, a man hurrying 
along to get into the valley before nightfall, and over- 
confident, perhaps, of his bearings, may easily miss the 
trail and find himself on the wrong ridge-^where? 
Once off the trail, there are no blazes to guide him, 
and the going, at best, is damnable. If one could only 
see out, he would not hesitate; but he cannot see a 
tree two rods away. The devil himself might get 
tangled up here if he ever came so high up in the moun- 
tains. (Walt Proctor, who used to live in, the^ “last 
house,” says that he does not— says that Old Nipk is 
“kept too busy down in the settlements.”) 
It is of serious import for a man, in such case, to 
decide, rather promptly, on what particular ridge he 
may have straggled; for many of these ridges are very 
thickety, some of them lead into “hells,” and on others 
one’s progress is impeded by cliffs. To descend im- 
mediately into a creek valley would be the worst thing 
he could do, for the headwaters generally rise in al- 
most impenetrable laurel and their beds are rough ^nd 
steep. 
Now, what does a mountaineer do in such dilemma? 
Trust to instinct? Not a bit of it. There is not a 
man in these' mountains (nor elsewhere, according to 
my belief) who is endowed with the homing instinct. 
Our lost man might not be able to explain, his process, 
he would probably not even be conscious of the in- 
finitude of details involved, but this is what he would 
do: First, he would scan the trees and shrubs, closely 
observing ’ their prevailing habit of growth; then he 
would examine the ground itself; he would move about 
like a dog scenting for a trail; presently he would find 
evidence, not single, but collective — gathered from many 
sources — which his memory and reasoning powers 
would combine into a theory of locality, and, four times 
out of five, his theory would prove correct. I have 
known mountaineers, on a pitch-dark night, to identify 
the ridge they were on by feeling the trees; and there 
were no blazes on those trees, either. They did not 
