ating desolation of the
Bad Lands, and the home ranch and the "folks" from Maine and the loyal
friends of the Maltese Cross. He had good friends in the East, but
there was a warmth and a stalwart sincerity in the comradeship of
these men and women which he had scarcely found elsewhere. Through the
cold evenings of that early spring he loved to lie stretched at full
length on the elk-hides and wolf-skins in front of the great
fireplace, while the blazing logs crackled and roared, and Sewall and
Dow and the "womenfolks" recounted the happenings of the season of his
absence.

Spring came early that year and about the 20th of March a great
ice-jam, which had formed at a bend far up the river, came slowly past
Elkhorn, roaring and crunching and piling the ice high on both banks.

There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house [he
wrote "Bamie"], the swelling mass of broken fragments having
been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then
broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the
stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice-floes, tumbled
over each other in the wildest confusion. No horse could by
any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even thus it
is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like
arctic explorers.

Early in the spring, Sewall and Dow had crossed the river to hunt for
a few days in the rough hills to the east, and had killed four deer
which they had hung in a tree to keep them from the coyotes. Roosevelt
determined to go with his men to bring home the deer, but when, after
infinite difficulty, they reached the thicket of dwarf cedars where
the deer had been hung, they found nothing save scattered pieces of
their carcasses, and roundabout the deeply marked footprints of a pair
of cougars, or "mountain lions." The beasts had evidently been at work
for some time and had eaten almost every scrap of flesh. Roosevelt and
his men followed their tracks into a tangle of rocky hills, but,
before they had come in sight of the quarry, dusk obscured the
footprints and they returned home resolved to renew the pursuit at
dawn. They tied their boat securely to a tree high up on the bank.

The next day Roosevelt made arrangements with a companion of many
hunts, "old man" Tompkins, who was living in the shack which Captain
Robins had occupied, to make a determined pursuit of the cougars; but
when, the following morning, he was ready