s were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for
mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to
right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the
collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after
the bolters with her ears laid flat.

Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling
torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that
stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky
green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in
summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced
masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of
that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that
little indurated line running up the side of the cliff--just a
displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that
winds in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and
mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?

"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says
the mountaineer.

Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been
enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that
track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has
the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above
tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long
grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.

Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where
a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is
a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.

Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at
such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper
saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when
she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up
the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as
pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it
up, out of very sympathy went away.

Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but
as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead