1 86 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



still there, toward the south, and above us. We decided 

 that the Director's semaphore system was a good thing. 



" We knew that our best chance for success lay in 

 getting above the goat, to prevent his escape to the peaks, 

 then in cornering him, somewhere. After a long diag- 

 onal climb we found ourselves under the wall of the 

 snow-capped mountain, which rose sheer up two hundred 

 feet or more, then rounded off into a dome going about 

 three hundred feet higher. Now, just here we found 

 a very strange feature of mountain work. A great rock 

 buttress stretched along the foot of the mountain wall, 

 originally continuous, and several hundred feet long. 

 But somehow a big section had been riven out of the mid- 

 dle of that ridge, going quite down to the general face 

 of that mountain-side, like a railway cut standing almost 

 on end. This central cut-out section is now the head 

 of a big slide, five hundred feet wide at the cliff, from 

 which it descends at a fearful pitch. 



" This slide is now bounded at the top by two ridges 

 of rock, each with a steep wall facing the gap. The 

 space lying between these walls is filled with masses of 

 frost-riven rock, from the peak above, varying in size 

 from dust to rocks the size of a freight car. The weight 

 and momentum of the larger rocks had carried them well 

 down the mountain, and some of them were so evenly 

 balanced that it seemed as if a touch would be sufficient 

 to send them thundering on. 



"We stood on the top of the northern ridge, close under 

 the foot of the cliff, and looked down the rock wall which 

 dropped almost perpendicularly to the slide-way far 



