They were in a land of nothingness—cold and bleak and comfortless. On all sides wastes of loose stones and snow patches swept away from them. About them were the lofty peaks, so diamond clear in their dazzling whiteness that it pained the eye to look at them. They were crossing the knees of Dewlap mountain, making toward the south. They camped on windswept reaches, their mattresses the cold, hard rocks. Melted snow formed their water supply, and fuel that they had picked up in the warmer zone below them was nursed with miserly discretion.
After a day and a night in this forbidding land Shirttail Henry loosed the burros, for nothing grew for them to eat except the inch-high dwarf willows, and these were few. Burros will continue content for days and days without food or water, but Charmian demanded their release after twenty-four hours of deprivation. With indignant snorts, they kicked up their heels, and the bell burro set a bee-line course over the backward trail. When they reached the Hudsonian Zone, Henry said, they would browse their way gradually down through the Canadian, and into the Transition, where they would find an abundance of chaparral; and later they would reach the horses at the lake and remain close to them until snow drove the entire band to the lower contours, from whence they might wander even to the home ranch on the desert.
A rather serious catastrophe overtook the United States Weather Bureau on the day before the burros were released. Shirttail Henry had installed his rain gauge for the night, and had no more than turned his back on it when the bell burro was attracted by the brightness of its brass. She approached it with mincing steps, and, as is the custom of her kind, began trying to eat it. A burro seems incapable of deciding whether an object is for food by looking at it or smelling of it. He starts in to eat it, assuming that all things are good to eat until proved otherwise. The burro soon decided that in this instance she had made a grave mistake, and forthwith dropped the gauge. But not until the thin cylinder of brass had been dented and pinched in so that, as a recorder of the fall of rain, it was absolutely useless.
Mary Temple witnessed the desecration, but shouted too late. Henry wheeled in time, however, to capture the miscreant. He held her by the leather band that encircled her neck, and to which her tinkling bell was fastened, and looked her fiercely in the eye.
“Ass,” he said, “ye ain’t my canary, an’ I know ye ain’t got no sense. But if ye was mine, d’ye know what I’d do to ye? I’d hold ye by this here strap here, an’ I’d get me a club, an’ I’d take it an’ I’d knock yer gysh-danged head off. Heh-heh-heh!”
Snow covered the greater part of the land where the explorers had loosed the asses. Henry rigged up his drag, and on it stowed the outfit. Henry and Andy took the lead ropes, and Dr. Shonto walked behind to push. By following a zigzag course the leaders were able to keep the sledge running upon snow for the greater part of the time, and when only bare rocks lay before them the party portaged the cargo and the sledge to snowy stretches beyond.
Their up-and-down course continued, and many a slope taxed the strength of all to get the laden sledge to the summit. But the general trend was downward, for they were crossing the knees of Dewlap, the only divide which gave access to the country wherein lay the mysterious valley of their quest. Gradually, after days of slow travel, the snow patches grew fewer and fewer, and the air grew noticeably warmer as they worked downward into the Hudsonian Zone once more. Then altogether the snow disappeared; scattering trees greeted them, Alpine hemlocks, silver pines—trees more friendly, it seemed to the awed wanderers, than any they ever had seen before. They saw a wolverine—infrequent animal—a white-tailed jackrabbit, and on one rare day a pure white squirrel, with pink-lidded eyes, quite curious and friendly.
They discarded the sledge, cached such tin-protected provisions as they could not carry on their backs, and forged on into a land of growing delights. They left the semi-bleak Hudsonian Zone above them and entered the friendly Canadian, where the Yosemite fox sparrow, the Sierra grouse, and the ruby-crowned kinglet greeted them; and among the mammals the jumping mouse, the yellow-haired porcupine, the Sierra chickaree, and the navigator shrew. The forest was heavy again, and there was firewood and the shelter of companionable conifers. Straight into the south Shirttail Henry led the way, down into a gigantic cup of the mountain range where grasses grew and sunlight flooded the land.
The forest became patchy, broken by occasional mountain meadows, rubble slides, cañons through which fires had spread their devastation and left sentinel trees and slopes covered with chaparral. Deep, impassible gorges forced them miles and miles to the east or the west, and sometimes turned them in the direction from whence they came. And in descending into one of these, after having followed its grim lip for many miles in search of a crossing, the redoubtable Mary fell, rolled down a steep incline, and terminated her mad descent in an ice-cold creek.
“Well,” she remarked, as her anxious friends stumbled and slid down to her, “it’s lucky I landed close to water, for right here I stay until the rest of you forsake your life of sin and come back to me on your way home. I’ve sprained my ankle terribly. Two of you hold me while Doctor Shonto pulls my leg.”