The six tent frames were in a kind of semicircle at the edge of the trees, facing a large stone fire pit and looking out over the grassy floor of the basin and the largest of the beaver ponds out in the middle. Out beyond the pond, the draw rose sharply in a series of steeply slanted meadows. Directly overhead, almost as if it were leaning over the little basin, the bulky white mass of Glacier Peak rose ponderously, so huge as to be almost unbelievable.
There was a rocked-up spring behind the last tent frame, a sandy-bottomed pocket of icy water about two feet deep and perhaps three feet across. The outflow trickled off along the edge of the trees toward the horse corrals at the lower end of the camp.
None of the trees in the little grove were much more than fifteen feet tall, and they were brushy — spruce mostly. We were within a quarter of a mile of the timberline. There were a lot of low shrubs — heather, Miller said — lying in under the trees, and moss in the open spaces. I noticed a lot of sticks and downed trees lying around.
“Beaver,” Miller said. “Greatest firewood collectors around.”
McKlearey rode on in and climbed down off his horse. He still kept off to himself.
“Clint’ll be along in a few minutes,” Miller said. “Let’s get a fire goin’ so we can have some coffee.”
We all moved around picking up firewood, and Miller scraped the debris out of the fire pit. The wood was bone dry, and it only took a few minutes for a good blaze to get started.
Then Clint came in with the pack-string, and we started to unpack. The two-gallon coffee pot and a big iron grill that looked like a chunk of sidewalk grating were the first things to come off. Clint filled the pot from the spring behind the tent frames while Miller piled several big rocks in close to the fire to set the grill on.
“A man can cook with just a fire if he’s of a mind,” he said, “but this makes things a whole lot simpler.” He set the grill in place while Clint dumped several fistfuls of grounds into the water in the pot.
“Don’t you use the basket?” Stan asked.
“Lost it a couple years ago,” Clint said. “Don’t do no good up this high anyway. Water boils at about a hundred and seventy up here. You gotta get the grounds down close to the fire and kinda fry the juice out. Gives you somethin’ to chew on in your coffee with them grounds floatin’ loose, but that never hurt nobody.”
He rummaged around in one of the packs and came up with a sack of salt and dumped a couple pinches in. Then he did something that still makes my hair stand on end. He fished out a dozen eggs, took one and cracked it neatly on a rock. Then he drank it, right out of the shell. I heard Sloane gag slightly. Clint paid no attention to us but crumbled the shell in his fist and dropped it in the pot. Then he clamped on the lid and put the pot down on the grill over the fire.
“I’ve heard of the salt before, Clint,” I said when my stomach settled back down, “but why the eggshell?”
“Damn if I know,” he said. “Only thing is, I never tasted coffee fit to drink without it had some eggshell in it.”
I didn’t ask him why he’d drunk the raw egg. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.
“We’ll have some jerky and cold biscuits with our coffee,” Miller said. “That’ll tide us till we get camp set up and Clint can fix a real meal.”
We all sat around the fire on logs and stumps waiting for the coffee to boil. It boiled over, hissing into the fire with a pungent smell, three times. Each time Clint doused cold water into the pot and let it boil again. Then, the fourth time, he decided it was ready to drink. I’ll have to admit that it was damned good coffee. The strips of beef-jerky chewed a bit like old harness leather, but they were good, too, and the cold biscuits with honey set things off just right. I don’t think I’d realized just how hungry I was.
Miller brushed the crumbs out of his mustache and filled his coffee mug again. “First thing is to check out the corrals,” he said. “We’ll need two good ones anyway — that way we won’t be stirrin’ up the pack animals ever’time we want a saddle horse. Way we’ll do it is this: Go around those nearest two corrals and yank real hard on ever’ place that’s wired. Any place that comes loose, we’ll rewire. Balin’ wire is looped around that dead tree by the spring. Soon as we get that done, we can unsaddle the stock and turn ’em loose in the corrals. We brought some oats for ’em, but we’ll have to picket ’em out to graze in the daytime while you men are up on the ridge. After we get the horses tended to, we’ll set up the tents.”
“Couldn’t some of us start on the tents while the others work on the corrals?” Sloane asked, puffing slightly again.
“I suppose we could,” Miller said, “but we’ll do ‘er the way I said before. Me’n old Clint there was in the Horse-Marines when we was pups, and the first thing we learned was to see to the stock first. Up here a man without a horse is in real trouble. She’s a long damn walk back down.”
“I see what you mean,” Cal said, breathing heavily. He was used to making the decisions, but Miller was in charge, and now we all knew it.
It only took us about fifteen minutes to check out the corrals. Most of the lashings were still tight. Then we unsaddled the horses and turned them into the corrals, laying the saddles over the top rail of a corral we weren’t using. Miller dumped oats from a burlap sack into a manger that opened onto both corrals. The horses nuzzled at him and he moved among them. He spoke to them, his voice curiously gentle as he did.
Then we all went up to the fire and had another cup of coffee. The sun was sliding down toward the tops of the peaks above us, and the air was taking on a decided chill. We stood looking at the welter of packs, sleeping bags, and rolled-up tenting that lay in a heap under the tent frames.
“Take a week to get all that squared away,” Jack said.
“Hour on the outside,” Clint disagreed.
First we put up the tents. They were little six-by-eight jobs that fit neatly over the frames. Miller and Clint showed us how to set them up and pull them tight. We set up five tents and then piled all the packs in the end one.
“Leave the front of that one open and tied back so’s I can get in and out easy,” Clint said. He showed us where to put the packs to make sure he knew where everything was. Then Miller sent us out to gather moss to pile into the rectangular log bed frames on the ground inside the tents.
“Next to feathers, that’s about the softest bed you’re gonna find.”
“Right now, I could sleep on rocks,” I told him.
“No point in that unless you have to.” He grinned.
It really took a surprisingly short period of time to set up camp. Miller and Clint had it all down pat, and McKlearey was a damned good field soldier. He seemed to be everywhere, checking tent ropes, ditching around the tents, cleaning dead leaves out of the spring. His cut hand didn’t seem to bother him, but the bandage was getting pretty used-looking. Miller took to calling him “Sarge,” and Lou responded with “Cap,” something the rest of us didn’t have guts enough to try yet. Maybe it was that they’d both been in the Marines. Lou seemed to be coming around. He even gave Stan some friendly advice about his bedding, pointing out that the sticks Stan had gathered with the moss he put in his bed frame might be just a touch lumpy.
Sloane grinned at us all as we hauled in our third load of moss and began to blow up an air mattress.
“You goddamn candy-ass,” Jack said.
“Brains,” Sloane said, tapping his forehead. “This ol’ massa ain’t about to sleep on no col’, col’ groun’.” He went on blowing into the mattress. He was sitting on the ground near the fire, and his face kept getting redder and redder. He really didn’t seem to be making much headway with the mattress. Then he got a funny look on his face and sort of sagged over sideways until he was lying facedown in the dirt.