第34章

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 unpacking at evening would find some missing from the ranks.

"Lily's a goner, sure," said Wes."I don't know how she's got this far except by drunken man's luck.

She'll never make the Tunemah."

"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Tenderfoot, naming his own fool horse; "I see where I start in to walk.""Sort of a `morituri te salutamur,' " said I.

We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet, leading our saddle-horses to save their strength.

Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily of the rarified air.Then at the top of the world we paused on the brink of nothing to tighten cinches, while the cold wind swept by us, the snow glittered in a sunlight become silvery like that of early April, and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a distance inconceivably remote, as though the horizon had been set back for their accommodation.

To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you will see drifted into a sharp crest across a corner of your yard; only this windrow was twenty feet high and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight of its age.We climbed it and looked over directly into the eye of a round Alpine lake seven or eight hundred feet below.It was of an intense cobalt blue, a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of water, deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant of Tyre.White ice floated in it.The savage fierce granite needles and knife-edges of the mountain crest hemmed it about.

But this was temporizing, and we knew it.The first drop of the trail was so steep that we could flip a pebble to the first level of it, and so rough in its water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it seemed that at the first step a horse must necessarily fall end over end.We made it successfully, however, and breathed deep.Even Lily, by a miracle of lucky scrambling, did not even stumble.

"Now she's easy for a little ways," said Wes, "then we'll get busy."When we "got busy" we took our guns in our hands to preserve them from a fall, and started in.

Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more places.