Old Ephraim.. 317 



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 straight up 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 valley, dark-green, 

 sombre pines stood in groups, stiff and erect ; and here 

 and there among them were groves of poplar and cotton- 

 wood, with slender branches and trembling leaves, their 

 bright green already 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 distant 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 whose inaccessible 

 wildness and ruggedness a bear would find a safe 

 retreat. After some time we came to where other valleys, 

 with steep, grass-grown sides, covered with sage-brush, 

 branched out from it, and we followed one of these out 



