4 THE ADVENTURES OF A NATURE GUIDE 



seared, sunburnt eyes — snow-blindness. Unfortu- 

 nately, I had failed to take even the precaution 

 of blackening my face, which would have dulled 

 the glare. At the summit my eyes became so 

 painful that I could endure the light only a few 

 seconds at a time. Occasionally I sat down and 

 closed them for a minute or two. Finally, while 

 doing this, the lids adhered to the balls and the 

 eyes swelled so that I could not open them. 



Blind on the summit of the Continental Divide! 

 I made a grab for my useful staff which I had left 

 standing beside me in the snow. In the fraction 

 of a second that elapsed between thinking of the 

 staff and finding it my brain woke up to the seri- 

 ousness of the situation. To the nearest trees 

 it was more than a mile, and the nearest house was 

 many miles away across ridges of rough mountains. 

 I had matches and a hatchet, but no provisions. 

 Still, while well aware of my peril, I was only 

 moderately excited, feeling no terror. Less start- 

 ling incidents have shocked me more, narrow 

 escapes from street automobiles have terrified me. 



It had been a wondrous morning. The day 

 cleared after a heavy fall of fluffy snow. I had 

 snowshoed up the slope through a ragged, snow- 

 carpeted spruce forest, whose shadows wrought 

 splendid black-and-white effects upon the shining 

 floor. There were thousands of towering, slender 

 spruces, each brilliantly laden with snow flowers, 

 standing soft, white, and motionless in the sunlight 



