THE GAME OF THE HIGH PEAKS: THE WHITE GOAT jgi 



But we were confident that the goat would not travel far with such a 

 wound after he had been chased as we had chased him. Next morning 

 at daybreak we again climbed the mountain and took up the trail. Soon 

 it led into others and we lost it, but we kept up the hunt nevertheless for 

 hour after hour, making continually wider and wider circles. At last, 

 about midday, our perseverance was rewarded, for coming silently out on a 

 great bare cliff shoulder, I spied the goat lying on a ledge below me and 

 some seventy yards off. This time I shot true, and he rose only to fall 

 back dead ; and a minute afterward we were standing over him, handling 

 the glossy black horns and admiring the snow-white coat. 



After this we struck our tent and shifted camp some thirty miles to a 

 wide valley through whose pine-clad bottom flowed a river, hurrying on 

 to the Pacific between unending forests. On one hand the valley was 

 hemmed in by an unbroken line of frowning cliffs, and on the other by 

 chains of lofty mountains in whose sides the ravines cut deep gashes. 



The clear weather had grown colder. At night the frost skimmed 

 with thin ice the edges of the ponds and small lakes that at long intervals 

 dotted the vast reaches of woodland. But we were very comfortable, and 

 hardly needed our furs, for as evening fell we kindled huge fires, to give 

 us both light and warmth; and even in very cold weather a man can 

 sleep out comfortably enough with no bedding if he lights two fires and 

 gets in between them, or finds a sheltered nook or corner across the 

 front of which a single great blaze can be made. The long walks and our 

 work as cragsmen hardened our thews, and made us eat and sleep as even 

 our life on the ranch could hardly do : the mountaineer must always be 

 more sinewy than the horseman. The clear, cold water of the swift 

 streams too was a welcome change from the tepid and muddy currents of 

 the rivers of the plains ; and we heartily enjoyed the baths, a plunge into 

 one of the icy pools making us gasp for breath and causing the blood to 

 tingle in our veins with the shock. 



Our tent was pitched in a little glade, which was but a few yards 

 across, and carpeted thickly with the red kinnikinic berries, in their 

 season beloved of bears, and from the leaves of which bush the Indians 

 make a substitute for tobacco. Little three-toed woodpeckers with yellow 

 crests scrambled about over the trees near by, while the great log- cocks 

 hammered and rattled on the tall dead trunks. Jays that were dark blue 

 all over came familiarly round camp in company with the ever-present 

 moose-birds or whisky jacks. There were many grouse in the woods, of 

 three kinds, blue, spruce, and ruffed, and these varied our diet and 

 also furnished us with some sport with our rifles, as we always shot them 



