the fatness of butter. You wander at will in the ample though
definite limits of your domain. You lie on your back and examine
dispassionately, with an interest entirely detached, the huge
cliff-walls of the valley. Days slip by. Really, it needs at least an
angel with a flaming sword to force you to move on.

We turned away from our view and addressed ourselves to the task of
finding out just when we were going to get there. The first day we
bobbed up and over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet
elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the wide bowl-like
amphitheatre of a basin. The second day we climbed over things and
finally ended in a small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an
elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet. There we rested-over a
day, camped under a single pine-tree, with the quick-growing mountain
grasses thick about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides, and
the plunge into the canon on the other. As we needed meat, we spent
part of the day in finding a deer. The rest of the time we watched
idly for bear.

Bears are great travelers. They will often go twenty miles overnight,
apparently for the sheer delight of being on the move. Also are they
exceedingly loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting to places,
and they hate to go down steep hills. You see, their fore legs are
short. Therefore they are skilled in the choice of easy routes through
the mountains, and once having made the choice they stick to it until
through certain narrow places on the route selected they have worn a
trail as smooth as a garden-path. The old prospectors used quite
occasionally to pick out the horse-passes by trusting in general to the
bear migrations, and many a well-traveled route of to-day is
superimposed over the way-through picked out by old bruin long ago.

Of such was our own trail. Therefore we kept our rifles at hand and
our eyes open for a straggler. But none came, though we baited craftily
with portions of our deer. All we gained was a rattlesnake, and he
seemed a bit out of place so high up in the air.

Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still twenty-two hundred feet
above our elevation. We gazed on it sadly, for directly by its summit,
and for five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of reputation was
that trail beyond all others. The horses, as we bunched them in
preparation for the packing, took on a new interest, for it was on the
cards that the