72 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



adopted me as his special master, rode with me whenever 

 I would let him, and slept on the foot of my bed at night, 

 growling defiance at anything that came near. I grew 

 attached to the friendly, bright little fellow, and at the 

 end of the hunt took him home with me as a playmate 

 for the children. 



It was a great, wild country. In the creek bottoms 

 there were a good many ranches ; but we only occasionally 

 passed by these, on our way to our hunting grounds in the 

 wilderness along the edge of the snow-line. The moun- 

 tains crowded close together in chain, peak, and table- 

 land; all the higher ones were wrapped in an unrent 

 shroud of snow. We saw a good many deer, and fresh 

 sign of elk, but no elk themselves, although we were in- 

 formed that bands were to be found in the high spruce 

 timber where the snows were so deep that it would have 

 been impossible to go on horseback, while going on foot 

 would have been inconceivably fatiguing. The country 

 was open. The high peaks were bare of trees. Cotton- 

 woods, and occasionally dwarfed birch or maple and wil- 

 lows, fringed the streams; aspens grew in groves higher 

 up. There were pinyons and cedars on the slopes of the 

 foothills; spruce clustered here and there in the cooler 

 ravines and valleys and high up the mountains. The 

 dense oak brush and thick growing cedars were hard on 

 our clothes, and sometimes on our bodies. 



Bear and cougars had once been very plentiful 

 throughout this region, but during the last three or four 

 years the cougars have greatly diminished in numbers 

 throughout northern Colorado, and the bears have dimin- 



