148 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



shuffle, like a creek running under slide-rock; biit I 

 hoped they would, streamlike, come to the surface far- 

 ther on. From moment to moment I chose the least dif- 

 ficult route, as does a wild man or a wild beast in mark- 

 ing out a trail for the first time. On the north side of 

 the creek I scrambled through some very much tangled 

 " down timber " amid the " green timber," always going 

 up, of course, and presently emerged upon a five-acre 

 tract of very coarse and cruelly sharp slide-rock. Over 

 that toilsome stretch I went with the attention which such 

 treacherous and dangerous stuff demands, and finally I 

 reached the upper limit of that also. 



Looking ahead, I saw my waterfall, hard at work 

 pouring a collection of two-inch streams over a fifty-foot 

 precipice, — all of which promptly vanished from sight 

 under the slide-rock that had been carried across the 

 stream-bed. At that time, the fall was not very impres- 

 sive, because the volume of water was too small for 

 grandeur. Still, a natural waterfall in a mountain land- 

 scape is always grateful to the eye, and companionable. 



As I picked my way upward over the slide-rock, the 

 plaintive, whistling cry of the pika, or little chief " hare," 

 came to me from a chaos of large rocks piled near the 

 edge of a half-acre of weeds. The cry sounds like the 

 word cheap, pitched very high and much prolonged. 

 The cry of this creature is so elusive one seldom can 

 locate it with precision, so making as good a guess as 

 possible, I sat down to wait for the little brother of the 

 rocks to appear. 



I sat motionless for perhaps ten minutes, and then 



