148 My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

as long as there was light, but the sun soon set over the wonder

ful mountains, and although there was a little crescent moon,

still, it soon grew very dark and we had to keep close behind

each other, single file, and go very carefully as the trail lay along the mountainside. Often we had to traverse dark woods and trust entirely to the horses, who behaved beautifully and stepped carefully over the fallen logs. Twice, Dodge, our guide, lost the trail, and it gave one a very eerie feeling, but he found it again and on we went. Once at about i i P. M., Theodore suggested stopping and making a great fire, and waiting until daylight to go on, for he was afraid that we would be tired out, but we all preferred to continue, and about 11:30, to our great joy, we heard the roar of the Falls and suddenly came out on the deep Canyon, looking very wonderful and mysterious in the dim starlight. We reached our Camp after twelve o'clock, having been fifteen hours away from it, thirteen and a half of which we had been in the saddle. It was really an experience."

It was a hazardous ride and I did not terrify my aunt by some of the incidents such as the severe discomfort suffered by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt when she was thrown and narrowly escaped a broken back, and when a few hours later my own horse sank in a quicksand and barely recovered himself in time to struggle to terra firma again, not to mention the dangers of the utter darkness when the small, dim crescent moon faded from the horizon. My brother was the real leader of the cavalcade, for the guide, Ira Dodge, proved singularly incompetent. Theodore kept up our flagging spirits, exhausted as we were by the long rough day in the saddle, and although furious with Dodge because of his ignorance of the trail through which he was supposed to guide us, he still gave us the sense of confidence, which is one's only hope on such an adventure. Looking back over that camping trip in the Yellowstone, the prominent figure of the whole holiday was, of course, my brother. He was a boy in his tricks and teasing, crawling under the tent flaps at night, pretending to be the unexpected bear which we always dreaded.

He was a real inspiration in his knowledge of the fauna and birds

of the vicinity and his willingness to give us the benefit of that

knowledge.

I find in my diary of that excursion a catalogue of the birds

and other animals which he himself had pointed out to me, mak

ing me marvel again at the rapid observation which he had made

part of his physical equipment. I note: "During the first four

days we have been in the Park, we have seen chipmunk, red

squirrel, little black bear, elk watering with the horses, musk

rat in the streams, golden eagle, Peregrine falcon and other varie

ties, red-tailed hawk and pigeon hawk, Clark's crow, Canada

jay, raven, bittern, Canada goose, mallard and teal ducks, chica

dee, nuthatch, dwarf-thrush, robin, water oozel, sunbird, longspur, grass finch, yellow-crowned warbler, Rocky Mountain white-throated sparrow, song-sparrow, and wren."

Each one of the above I saw with the eyes of Theodore Roosevelt, and can still hear the tones of his voice as he described to me their habits of life and the differences between them and others of their kind. To him this trip must, of necessity, have been somewhat dull, based as it was upon the companionship of three women who were not hunters; but never once during those weeks did he seem anything but happy, and as far as we were concerned, to see the beauties of nature through those ardent eyes, to hear the bird-notes through those ears, attuned to each song, and to listen constantly to his stories of wood and plain, his interpretation of the lives of those mighty pioneer men of the West-all of this comes back to me, as a rare experience which I have gladly stored away in what Emerson calls "the amber of memory." How we laughed over the strange rules and regulations of the park ! Fierce bears were trapped, but could not be killed without the kind permission of one of the secretaries in Washington, the correspondence on the subject affording my brother infinite amusement. His methods under like circumstances would have been so very different !

The experiences at Elkhorn Ranch and again in the Yellow-

The Elkhorn Ranch

149