a ledge?"

"Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw
bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the
sound."

"And when no sound comes back?"

"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!
People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the
sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you
chills!"

So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon
riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the
lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on
men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.

If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the
trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by
the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar
prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the
hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle
lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.

Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley
the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of
bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
tinkling.

The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They
seldom reached their _rendezvous_ before July or August. Three months
travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a
day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an
hour--a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would
make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.

Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced
together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious
little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream
often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the
unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding
mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a
trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them afloat, and
overlaying