PIPESTONE LETTERS NO. 1

By N. Vernon-Wood

—WB Ranch, Pipestone Creek

Alberta, Canada

To Mr. John Lincoln

Wall Street, N.Y.

DEAR FRIEND,

When you made me promise to send you a letter every month, you shure cooked up a bunch of grief for me, but maybe in about ten years, I’ll Get so I dont mind it, and be a second Mc. Pheel.

Mac wrote to me a few years back from the Knickerbocker Club, and said he wanted to hire six guides & seventeen ponies to bust out into the hills with. Could I supply same, & for how much? I told him Yes, & made a price. Then the rukus started. He sent another letter from the University club and said he wanted guides that were congenial & capable, and could haze a string without resorting to blasphemy, cussing, or plain bad language. That just about disqualified any jinglers I’d ever crossed trails with, but I needed the trip, and figured maybe the boys could coax a mile an hour out of the buzzard heads, without turning the wolves of oratory plumb loose, so I promised a flock of silver tongued wranglers.

The answer came from the Union League, and he said he expected the roughnecks to camp at least 100 yards from the Pilgrims. Thats all right by me, it will give the help a chance to catch up on the words they missed durin the day. It would take Doc Elliots five foot shelf to hold all the letters that bird sent, an in the end, he took a motor trip through the Rockies, in a car that had everything on it but the kitchen sink.

I asked another New Yorker, who come up that year, if he knew Mc. Pheel, “Shure,” he says, “He made a wad of money & retired a year or so back. He hasnt many friends, or much to occupy his time, so he writes himself a letter from the Lotus Club, and addresses it to the Ritz. Then he hightails to the Ritz, and asks for his mail, gallops over to the Yale Club and answeres it.” By the hand carved horns of Astors pet goat, I bet thats true, an Mac had picked on me to sort of fill out spare time with.

I get a bang out of tryin to figure what kind of camp mate a guy will make, from the letters he writes, and I bet all you Dudes do the same, when you read the line we peddle tryin to coax you out here to show you last years Elk tracks. An lots of times we both get fooled.

Seems to me, most city guys picture a guide as either a bow legged ex cow poke, full of hard likker an cuss words, or else a lumber jack, three axe handles an a plug of spittin tobacco between the eyes, an we generally expect a Pilgrim to be washin, Shaving, and cleaning his nails, when he ought to be scrambling up a slide to try and bust a bear.

I BOOKED A SHEEP HUNT one time, with a feller that said he had done considerable huntin in Maine, New Brunswick and such, and he didn’t want any frills. Just the sort of outfit I would take, if I was going on my own. Me, when I go out I figure to travel comfortable. The days when a hunk of sow belly, a sack of flour, an a rifle an fish hook, was considered an outfit, have passed out for me. An extra horse load of fixins make an auful difference when it rains three four days at a time, or when the game aint rallying round like you hoped. A comfortable camp has saved many an outfit from developin into a sore head convention.

When my Pilgrim unloaded off the Trans Canada, he looked like “what the well dressed club man is wearin.” I parked him in my shack to change his dry goods, an went down to the corral to tack a pair of front shoes on old Baldy, as I figured I’d shure need him to carry the extra wardrobe an toilet assesories.

Meantime, the hunter says to my wife, “Can your husband really climb, he appears awfully slim?” Well, says my home foreman, “I admit he has to stand twice in one place to cast a shadow, but he ought to be able to climb, he’s all the time goin straight up.”

Two three days later we made camp in the sheep country, in one of them September storms that make you wonder what all you did with your summers earnings. After it cleared, it was cold, an a wind blowing that was mighty thin. We oozed over a couple of ridges without seeing a thing, and quite late we spotted a small bunch of rams, in a pocket right under a glacier.

It took us quite a while to get around to that cirque, and the Pilgrims legs were getting sort of secondhand, but we didn’t have much daylight left, so I kept plugging. I sort of forgot him as I got hopped up creeping on the bunch, which were just around the next shoulder of rock, an when I stopped to give him a chance to get organized, he wasn’t there.

I backtracked, and found him squatting in the lee of a boulder, trying to get his fingures warm, an feeling fed up, tired, an to hell with it anyway. I tell him the bunch are only a few hundred yards ahead, but don’t get any enthusiastic reaction.

WHEN A MAN gets low in his mind thataway, get him hostile, so I curl my lip at him an say, “So you’re the bird thats so hard eh. Whyinhell didnnt you come out here in the summer so you could pick posies, an hunt butterflies? an a heap more to that effect. Pretty soon he damns me all over the place, an says, “By the red eyed old Jeehosophat, you slabsided long drink of pump water, if you can make it, I can.” An in twenty minutes or so, he’d accumulated a head I was proud of myself.

After that, we got right friendly, an inside a week he was the dirtiest man between the Crows Nest & the Saskatchewan. He was too busy havin a good time to bother with what he called non-essentials. They was enough sheep gravey in his whiskers to do a roundup crew.

Which proves Solomon was dead right, when he said you cant look at a cayuse, an tell how high he’ll buck.

Me an Jim are figuring on going onto the Simpson Summit pretty soon. We need a new rug for the shack, and theres the old grizzly ramming around up there.

So long, an Yours truly,

“TEX.”

Hunting and Fishing, September 1932, 16