172 



RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



had to traverse is hard work anyhow, as there are sure to be accidents 

 happening to the animals all the time, while their packs receive rough 

 treatment from jutting rocks and overhanging branches, or from the half- 

 fallen tree-trunks under which the animals wriggle ; and if the loads are 

 continually coming loose, or slipping so as to gall the horses' backs and 

 make them sore, the labor and anxiety are increased tenfold. 



In a day or two we were in the heart of the vast wooded wilderness. 

 A broad, lonely river ran through its midst, cleaving asunder the mountain 

 chains. Range after range, peak upon peak, the mountains towered on 

 every side, the lower timbered to the top, the higher with bare crests of 

 gray crags, or else hooded with fields of shining snow. The deep valleys 

 lay half in darkness, hemmed in by steep, timbered slopes and straight 

 rock walls. The torrents, broken into glittering foam masses, sprang 

 down through the chasms that they had rent in the sides of the high hills, 

 lingered in black pools under the shadows of the scarred cliffs, and reach- 

 ing the rank, tree-choked valleys, gathered into rapid streams of clear 

 brown water, that drenched the drooping limbs of the tangled alders. 

 Over the whole land lay like a shroud the mighty growth of the unbroken 

 evergreen forest spruce and hemlock, fir, balsam, tamarack, and lofty 

 pine. 



Yet even these vast wastes of shadowy woodland were once pene- 

 trated by members of that adventurous and now fast vanishing folk, the 

 American frontiersmen. Once or twice, while walking silently over the 

 spongy moss beneath the somber archways of the pines, we saw on a 

 tree-trunk a dim, faint ax-scar, the bark almost grown over it, showing 

 where, many years before, some fur-trapper had chopped a deeper blaze 

 than usual in making out a "spotted line" man's first highway in the 

 primeval forest; or on some hill-side we would come to the more recent, 

 but already half-obliterated, traces of a miner's handiwork. The trap- 

 per and the miner were the pioneers of the mountains, as the hunter 

 and the cowboy have been the pioneers of the plains ; they are all of the 

 same type, these sinewy men of the border, fearless and self-reliant, who 

 are ever driven restlessly onward through the wilderness by the half- 

 formed desires that make their eyes haggard and eager. There is no 

 plain so lonely that their feet have not trodden it; no mountain so far off 

 that their eyes have not scanned its grandeur. 



We took nearly a week in going to our hunting-grounds and out from 

 them again. This was tedious work, for the pace was slow, and it was 

 accompanied with some real labor. In places the mountain paths were 

 very steep and the ponies could with difficulty scramble along them ; 



