I always like autumn in the high country. All the summer campers went home and left the near trails empty, so I could walk naked from the camp to the creek and back without having to listen to a buck snort. The summer T-storms have quit, and it isn't yet time for the snow. The weather is so perfect it makes my face hurt in the mornings when I lean down over the fire to blow up some coals for the morning coffee. I smell like campfires and mules.
I never liked tents, and usually didn’t used them. I just set up my tarps, slept with the bags and saddles. Cool-back pads laid on a ground tarp, wrapped my vest around my dayclothes for a pillow. No bed ever rested me as good as this.
Autumn pastures are thick with hot flowers and drying annuals, which the horses and mules love, and which keep them strong and enthusiastic. My little mare was so enthusiastic that, on some crisp mornings, I had to hop 50 yards with one foot in the stirrup, trying to get up in the saddle while she sauntered out of camp...ah, man, those arabs love to walk....the goddam mules fall in line behind her, watch me hop along like an idiot. Mules laugh, you know. I could always tell.
My favorite camps were the alpine ones—high above normal trees—where the mountain gods play canyon, stacking rocks the size of small towns into walls that make your mind go blank trying to take them in. Snow, flakes the size of a glove, drifting down, steal the casual colors from the air, turn the stunted high-sierra junipers into dark shadows. Younger me, sits cross-legged on a saddle blanket, with a tarp over my shoulders, watching my small stove heat coffee in a GI canteen cup. I put in extra sugar and powdered milk, let the cup heat my hands through my gloves. All the casual sounds have been absorbed by the snow. My heart beats in my ears. Stereo winds sing on the canyon walls, sing across the stands of small trees, fly up the canyon and meet above me in the notch at the top of the canyon. If I look up there, I could see the scratch on the canyon wall—the trail, actually—that we will traverse later on in the morning. I hear the horse and mules scuffing around in the trees, clattering among the rocks, lipping out scraps of fodder from around the bases of the little trees and bushes. Now and then one of them will look toward the camp in anticipation. The GI cup is warm in my hands. The mountain gods look down on me with calm eyes. I would stay here forever.
Mark G Carter, aka Mule
