fresh tracks of Don and the lion. Running down this
dry, clean bed was the easiest going I ever found in the canyon. Every
rod the course jumped in a fall from four to ten feet, often more, and
these I slid down. How I ever kept Don in hearing was a marvel, but
still I did.

The lion evidently had no further intention of taking to a tree. From
the size of his track I concluded he was old and I feared every moment
to hear the sounds of a fight. Jones had said that nearly always in
the case of one hound chasing an old lion, the lion would lie in wait
for him and kill him. And I was afraid for Don.

Down, down, down, we went, till the yellow rim above seemed a thin
band of gold. I saw that we were almost to the canyon proper, and
I wondered what would happen when we reached it. The dark shaded
watercourse suddenly shot out into bright light and ended in a deep
cove, with perpendicular walls fifty feet high. I could see where
a few rods farther on this cove opened into a huge, airy, colored
canyon.

I called the hound, wondering if he had gone to the right or left of
the cove. His bay answered me coming from the cedars far to the right.
I turned with all the speed left in me, for I felt the chase nearing
an end. Tracks of hound and lion once more showed in the dust. The
slope was steep and stones I sent rolling cracked down below. Soon I
had a cliff above me and had to go slow and cautiously. A misstep or
slide would have precipitated me into the cove.

Almost before I knew what I was about, I stood gasping on the gigantic
second wall of the canyon, with nothing but thin air under me, except,
far below, faint and indistinct purple clefts, red ridges, dotted
slopes, running down to merge in a dark, winding strip of water,
that was the Rio Colorado. A sullen murmur soared out of the abyss.

[Illustration: TWO LIONS IN ONE TREE]

[Illustration: JONES, EMETT, AND THE NAVAJO WITH THE LIONS]

The coloring of my mood changed. Never had the canyon struck me so
terribly with its illimitable space, its dread depth, its unscalable
cliffs, and particularly with the desolate, forbidding quality of its
silence.

I heard Don bark. Turning the corner of the cliff wall I saw him on a
narrow shelf. He was coming toward me and when he reached me he faced
again to the wall and barked fiercely. The hair on his neck bristled.
I knew he did not fancy that narrow strip of rock, nor did I. But a
sudden, grim, cold something had taken pos