I
IT was summertime in the mountains—that short, passionate burst of warm life between the long seasons of the snow. The world lay panting in the white light of the sun, over gorge and pine-clad hill floated streamers of haze, and along the ground slanted thin, blue shadows. The sky pulsed in ether waves and the distant peaks, azure also, with traceries of silver, were as dim as the memory of a dream. In this untrodden wilderness the passing years have left no record save in the gradual growth of forest trees, and in its rugged beauty it is the same as a century ago. Therefore time itself seems arrested, and it is scarcely strange to come upon a buffalo skull naked and bleached by sun and rain, and close by, half hidden in the loose rocks, an arrow head of pure, black obsidian.
This, then, was once the scene of a brave chase when wind-swift Indians pursued mad, hurtling herds over mountain slope and plain. These empty fastnesses thrilled to the shock of thousands of beating hoofs, these hills flung back the echo to the brooding silence as the black tide flowed on, pressed by deadly huntsmen armed with barb and bow. And even then, far over the horizon, unseen by hunted and hunters, silent as the shadow of a cloud, inevitable as destiny, came the White Race, moving swifter than either one, driving them unawares toward the great abyss where they should vanish forever into the Happy Hunting Ground, lighted by perpetual Summer and peopled by immortal herds and tribes.