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Show AN EXPERIENCE OF SNOW-SHOES. A great many people can't imagine snow-shoes in the way they are intended to be managed. Of course, any one could build a rail fence with there, if enough were supplied, or split ‘em up into kindling wood, or convert ‘em into cricket bats, or-well, do almost anything with them except walk on top of the snow with them. That's what a great many people can't manage to do with them, and I know what I am asserting. I tried it one time. Compared to a pair of snow-shoes, such as I experienced, roller-skates are things of joy and a bucking mustang symbolizes reliability in the matter of locomotion. It came about in the course of business. I was "running" the Bodie paper, which was published in Aurora, just across the Nevada State line. In order to make the official advertisements in the paper legal, it was absolutely necessary that the papers should be circulated in Bodie on the day of weekly publication. On one of those days it was snowing, so the stage did not make its regular trip, and I set out to find some means of sending a bundle of papers over to Bodie. In the principal saloon, in every mining camp the main depot for news and general intelligence, I found a man who had a pair of snow-shoes. "Will you go to Bodie for me?" "I will." "How much?" "Fifty dollars." "And only ten miles." "My friend, I've got the only pair of snow-shoes in Aurora." The peculiar and binding force of the man's argument struck me with redoubled power when he added, after an eloquent pause, "And snow-shoes are the only things on which a trip to Bodie can be made for twenty-four hours." "Fifty dollars!" I repeated, "why I suppose I could buy a pair of snow-shoes for less that that." "Buy a pair? You needn't do that, even if you could. I'll lend you mine for nothing." I was surprised. Here was a man controlling a monopoly which, in a most unmonopolist manner, he was offering to place in my charge free of cost. "If you only would," I said, "I wouldn't mind taking the trip, just for the novelty of the thing. You are very kind. Let's take a drink." The generous monopolist accepted the invitation, and so did all his friends, who were numerous. "Now," I said, "if you have those shoes about you I will just put them on and start right away." The man stared at me curiously. "I haven't them about me exactly, but they are in the back room." He brought them out and I was surprised. They were not just what I thought they would be. The pictures I had seen of snow-shoes represented things made of a light frame of wood, flat-iron shaped, three or four feet long, and laced with rawhide thongs, like the end of a lacrosse stick. The "shoes" the man brought out and laid out in the street were pieces of pine fourteen feet long, five inches wide and about an inch thick, with one end slightly curved upward. Across the center of the shoes were straps, into which the feet were thrust and hold in place. The bottom of the shoes were polished and shellacked into amazing slipperiness. "These are not the kind of shoes I have been accustomed to," I said, with some misgivings. "You have seen the Canadian shoes, then," my man said. "These are Norwegian shoes. Just strap your papers on your back and start off." I fixed my feet into the shoes and my bundle of papers on my back, but did not start. I felt as little like starting as though I had fastened my feet to the sidewalk. "Just shove your feet ahead," said the owner, and the crowd which had gathered in front of the saloon to see me start volunteered much valuable advice to the same effect. Finally I did shove, but just as far as I pushed my left foot forward, my right foot pushed itself backward. Then I came together like a pair of shears, I tried it several times, but with results aggravatingly the same. I would have kept that action up even longer than I did, for, though it was not exactly what I wanted to do, it was easy to do, had not a spectator in the crowd remarked to a companion, critically. "He does a pretty good double-shuffle; I wonder what kind of a jig he dances?" Then I stood still for a little while in the middle of the street, and looked at the crowd on the sidewalk, and wished that I had not borrowed the shoes. I tried to summon up enough moral courage to give up the attempt, and might have done so, had not the fellow who had admired my double-shuffle said: "Do you think, Bill, that he's doing this for fun, or will he really start an independent mail line in opposition to Wells, Fargo & Co.?" The owner of the shoes gave me some more advice then, by which I profited. "Just kind of hold on by your toes," he said. Instinctively I knew what was intended by "holding on by my toes," and when I next slid my left foot forward I bore down with the front of my right foot, and was delighted and surprised to find that I stuck there, so to say. Then I bore down with my left and brought up my right, advanced it, repeated the operation, and felt a thrill of satisfaction to find myself sliding over the deep, soft snow, my 11-foot-long shoes leaving only a narrow, shallow trail behind. My thrill did not last long. I bore down on the front of one foot just a little too much once, and the toe of my shoe caught in the snow, and there was a sudden convulsion, an upheaval, a disturbance of the order of events that was startling. I must have been under considerable headway, for when the end of that shoe stuck in the snow I rose in the air, much as if I had been fired out of a mortar, like the magician's wife. The earth appeared to be leaving me with astonishing suddenness, but it was nothing compared with the suddenness with which I immediately struck the snow, plowed the snow, rather, for I continued to progress for a dozen yards after my outstretched arms first struck the snow, and when I came to a halt my sleeves were filled with snow up to my armpits. I can't attempt to describe the work it was to regain my feet. I had to unfasten the shoes, lay them out properly, and then climb up on top of them. I did not pay any attention to the crowd back there by the saloon, though I may have lacked in politeness thereby, as the crowd appeared to be paying considerable attention to me. It was not so far away but that I heard some one ask "What was it-a comet?" "No," some one else remarked, "I think it was a land-slide, or an earthquake, or both." Then I made another start, and traveled carefully until I reached the brow of the first hill. When I began to descend the bill, which was long and steep, I knew what rapid transit was. I had no more than started than I was traveling at the rate of a mile a minute. Leaning back, with my shoes forming exactly parallel lines, I came so near flying that my breath left my body, and I was powerless to recover it. But the total lack of breath did not trouble me as much as the lack of something else I suddenly remembered to have forgotten. It flashed through my mind that I had heard of this kind of snow-shoeing before, and that in going down hill men had to regulate their speed and steer themselves by a pole, or staff, used as a drag and rudder. At the same instant, for all this flashed at once through my mind, I felt the need of some means of either altering my course or stopping myself, for ?? in the line of my lightning passage, and not so very far ahead, was a bluff partaking almost of the dignity of a precipice, over which I was sure of going unless I could steer around its edge, where the road ran, or else stop. To alter my course without a staff I felt at that moment to be an undertaking very much in the nature of lifting myself by my boot-straps, and to stop, something like interfering with a locomotive on a down-grade. As short a time as it took me to realize all this, I had yet made an unpleasant advance toward the edge of the bluff, and I recollected, with uncomfortable vividness, that at the foot of that bluff was the rocky, icy bed of a dashing winter torrent. The situation was seriously alarming. Suddenly one of my shoes was diverted from its line parallel with the other, and that accident caused a startling change in the aspect of affairs. If the reader will pause a moment to consider the method by which I was traveling, he will realize what the result would be if the two long shoes were diverted even the slightest degree from exactly parallel lines. One of my shoes slightly pointed outward. At the rate I was going that meant that my feet were departing from each other something like twenty feet a second. It occurred all at once, so to say, when my legs were stretched out like those of the stage contortionists, and I felt that my body was about to divide itself in twain, each half taking its separate and individual course, and at its own sweet will make its disappearance over the bluff at points much further apart than I hoped my body ever to separate. I again left the earth. I described a graceful, I trust, parabola, flew a certain remarkable number of feet in the air and landed on my head. I think not much more than my feet remained above the snow. Indeed it was the resistance the shoes offered to the snow that prevented me from going to the bottom of the deep drift into which I dived. It was some time before I felt entirely sure that I had not split in two, as I thought I should. I felt very much broke up, but managed to dig out and he on the surface and recover breath and view the situation. The latter was not encouraging. Within a few feet from the edge of the bluff, at the bottom of the hill, thoroughly convinced that I was not a success as a snow-shoe traveler, bruised in body and mind, and anxious only to return to town and get dry and warm and feel safe, I saw no way out of my difficulty. I tried to walk with the shoes first. The effort was a lamentable failure. No such process as "holding on by my toe" effected a headway up the hill. The slippery shoes would slide back with me as fast as I attempted to climb up. Then I took off the shoes and tried to walk. That was worse. I floundered around up to my waist in the light snow, and only got mad. Then I sat down on the shoes and thought. I could not climb up without the shoes, and the shoes were too slippery to climb with. Naturally, after turning this grave problem over in my mind for some time, the solution presented itself, the shoes must be made less slippery. I took off a long woolen scarf which I wore around my neck, cut it in two, and tied each half over my own and the snow-shoes. That settled it. I learned afterward, by the way, that travelers on that kind of snow-shoes carried pieces of gunny sack with them for the same purpose I used my scarf, giving the shoes a "hold" on the snow and making hill-climbing possible. When I got back to the saloon, which was after a long, hard struggle-I cheerfully gave up the shoes to the owner with the remark. "I guess you can make the trip: I've had fun enough. I will give you an order for the $50." The owner answered, coolly, "Well, you see, you've been enjoying yourself so long that I could not start out now and reach Bodie in time to return to-night. Board and lodging are high in Bodie, and I guess I'll have to charge you $75 for the trip. I won't charge you anything for the use of the shoes. There is nothing mean about me." I gave the man an order for the amount, under the revised terms.-San Francisco Post. |