34 2 Hunting Trips on the Prairie 



of camp without his rifle. We rode down the val 

 ley in which we had camped, through alternate pine 

 groves and open glades, until we reached the canyon, 

 and then skirted its brink for a mile or so. It was 

 a great chasm, many miles in length, as if the table 

 land had been rent asunder by some terrible and 

 unknown force; its sides were sheer walls of rock, 

 rising three or four hundred feet in the air, and 

 worn by the weather till they looked like the towers 

 and battlements of some vast fortress. Between 

 them at the bottom was a space, in some places nearly 

 a quarter of a mile wide, in others very narrow, 

 through whose middle foamed a deep, rapid torrent 

 of which the sources lay far back among the snow- 

 topped mountains around Cloud Peak. In this val 

 ley, dark-green, sombre pines stood in groups, stiff 

 and erect; and here and there among them were 

 groves of poplar and cottonwood, with slender 

 branches and trembling leaves, their bright green al 

 ready changing to yellow in the sharp fall weather. 

 We went down to where the mouth of the canyon 

 opened out, and rode our horses to the end of a 

 great jutting promontory of rock, thrust out into 

 the plain; and in the cold, clear air we looked far 

 over the broad valley of the Bighorn as it lay at 

 our very feet, walled in on the other side by the dis 

 tant chain of the Rocky Mountains. 



Turning our horses, we rode back along the edge 

 of another canyon-like valley, with a brook flowing 

 down its centre, and its rocky sides covered with an 

 uninterrupted pine forest the place of all others in 



