and then climbed up the opposite
side. I broke cover within a few yards of him. What a splendid fellow
he looked! He was about thirteen hands high, and carried the most
beautiful head of horns that I had ever seen upon an elk. His mane was
bristled up, his nostril was distended, and, turning from the pack, he
surveyed me, as though taking the measure of his new antagonist. Not
seeming satisfied, he deliberately turned, and, descending from the
level space, he carefully, picked his way. Down narrow elk-runs along
the steep precipices, and, at a slow walk, with the whole pack in
single file at his heels, he clambered down toward the river. I
followed on his track over places which I would not pass in cold blood;
and I shortly halted above a cataract of some eighty feet in depth,
about a hundred paces from the great waterfall of three hundred feet.

It was extremely grand; the roar of the falls so entirely hushed all
other sounds that the voices of the hounds were perfectly inaudible,
although within a few yards of me, as I looked down upon them from a
rock that overhung the river.

The elk stood upon the brink of the swollen torrent; he could not
retreat, as the wall of rock was behind him, with the small step-like
path by which he had descended; this was now occupied by the yelling
pack.

The hounds knew the danger of the place; but the buck, accustomed to
these haunts from his birth, suddenly leapt across the boiling rapids,
and springing from rock to rock along the verge of the cataract, he
gained the opposite side. Here he had mistaken his landing-place, as a
shelving rock, upon which he had alighted, was so steep that he could
not retain his footing, and he gradually slid down toward the river.

At this moment, to my horror, both "Bran" and "Lucifer" dashed across
the torrent, and bounding from rock to rock, they sprung at the already
tottering elk, and in another moment both he and they rolled over in a
confused mass into the boiling torrent. One more instant and they
reappeared, the buck gallantly stemming the current, which his great
length of limb and weight enabled him to do; the dogs, overwhelmed in
the foam of the rapids, were swept down toward the fall, in spite of
their frantic exertions to gain the bank.

They were not fifteen feet from the edge of the fall, and I saw them
spun round and round in the whirlpools being hurried toward certain
destruction. The poor dogs seemed aware of the danger,