branches far above. At length he
reached the top of the mountain, to find a wide, open space, with heavy
forest in front, and a bare, ghastly, burned-over district to his right.
Fox growled, and appeared about to dash forward. Then, in an opening
through the forest, Wade espied a large bull elk, standing at gaze,
evidently watching him. He was a gray old bull, with broken antlers.
Wade made no move to shoot, and presently the elk walked out of sight.

"Too old an' tough, Fox," explained the hunter to the anxious dog. But
perhaps that was not all Wade's motive in sparing him.

Once more mounted, Wade turned his attention to the burned district. It
was a dreary, hideous splotch, a blackened slash in the green cover of
the mountain. It sloped down into a wide hollow and up another bare
slope. The ground was littered with bleached logs, trees that had been
killed first by fire and then felled by wind. Here and there a lofty,
spectral trunk still withstood the blasts. Across the hollow sloped a
considerable area where all trees were dead and still standing--a
melancholy sight. Beyond, and far round and down to the left, opened up
a slope of spruce and bare ridge, where a few cedars showed dark, and
then came black, spear-tipped forest again, leading the eye to the
magnificent panorama of endless range on range, purple in the distance.

Wade found patches of grass where beds had been recently occupied.

"Mountain-sheep, by cracky!" exclaimed the hunter. "An' fresh tracks,
too!... Now I wonder if it wouldn't do to kill a sheep an' tell
Belllounds I couldn't find any elk."

The hunter had no qualms about killing mountain-sheep, but he loved the
lordly stags and would have lied to spare them. He rode on, with keen
gaze shifting everywhere to catch a movement of something in this
wilderness before him. If there was any living animal in sight it did
not move. Wade crossed the hollow, wended a circuitous route through the
upstanding forest of dead timber, and entered a thick woods that skirted
the rim of the mountain. Presently he came out upon the open rim, from
which the depths of green and gray yawned mightily. Far across, Old
White Slides loomed up, higher now, with a dignity and majesty
unheralded from below.

Wade found fresh sheep tracks in the yellow clay of the rim, small as
little deer tracks, showing that they had just been made by ewes and
lambs. Not a ram track in the group!

"Well, that lets me out," said Wade,