arly explorers and discover
new worlds which had led me West also tempted my boyish feet off the
beaten, man-made trails. I was told that trails were the safe, the
sure routes into and out of the wilds, but their very existence
proclaimed that other men had been there before me. I was not the
first on those narrow, winding high roads. I preferred the game trails
to them, but I liked better still to push beyond even those faint
guides, into the unmarked, untracked wilderness. There I found the
last frontier, as primitive as when bold Columbus dared the unknown
seas, and my young heart thrilled at such high adventure.

Late one fall, I climbed high above timberline on the Long's Peak
trail, and, following my adventurous impulse, left the cairn-marked
pathway and swung over to the big moraine that lay south. From its top
I peeped into the chasm that lies between it and the Peak, then angled
down its abrupt slope to a sparkling waterfall, and, following along
the swift, icy stream above it, was climbing toward Chasm Lake, when an
eerie wail rose from the gorge below. Somewhere down there a coyote
was protesting the crimes committed against his race. His yammering
notes rose and fell, ascending and descending the full run of the
scale, swelled into a throaty howl and broke into jerky, wailing yaps
like a chorus of satyrs. The uninitiated could never have believed all
those sounds came from one wolfish throat; it seemed that it must be
that the entire pack, or at least half a dozen animals, raised that
woeful lamentation.

Facing, first one way and then another, I tried to locate the
brokenhearted mourner. But Long's sheer, precipitous face and the
lofty cliffs around me formed a vast amphitheater about which echoes
raced, crossing and recrossing, intermingling. For a full minute the
coyote howled, his sharp staccato notes rising higher and higher, the
echoes returning from all directions, first sharply, then blurred,
faint, fainter. The higher the sounds climbed the gorge the longer
were the intervals between echoes, for the canyon walls sloped back and
were wider apart toward the top. I counted seven distant echoes of a
single sharp bark before it trailed off into numberless
indistinguishable echoes. The varying angles and heights of the walls
altered their tones, but just as they reached the top they came in
uniform volume, and then overflowed the lower north rim and were lost.

For ten minutes that coyote