90 THE STORY OF THE TKAPPER 



mountain night, the trapper is unalarmed. He knows 

 it is only some great rock loosened by the day s thaw 

 rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish 

 laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It 

 is only the cougar prowling cattishly through the under 

 brush perhaps still-hunting the hunter. The lonely call 

 overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle lilting 

 and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter 

 loneliness. 



Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shad 

 ows across the valley the mountaineers are astir, with 

 the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of bunch-grass 

 as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader s bell 

 tinkling. 



The mountaineers usually left their hunting- 

 grounds early in May. They seldom reached their 

 rendezvous before July or August. Three months 

 travelling a thousand miles ! Three hundred miles a 

 month ! Ten miles a day ! It is not a record that shows 

 well beside our modern sixty miles an hour a thousand 

 miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our 

 latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went 

 along, they would make slower time than the mountain 

 eers of a century ago. 



Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, 

 cut and braced together while the cavalcade waited. 

 Muskegs where the industrious little beaver had flood 

 ed a valley by damming up the central stream often 

 mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out 

 the unfortunate; and where the mire was very treach 

 erous and the surrounding mountains too steep for 

 foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a trail 

 across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them 



