While he worked, the sun came up warm, and then grew dim with a kind of haze.
“A storm’s brewing,” he told himself. “The first big snow is long overdue, so we’ll get it right when it comes.”
His friends, the kingfishers, who had lived all summer in a hole at the top of the bank, had long since gone, and the camp-robbers, who scolded him incessantly, sat silent in the tall pine trees near the cabin. He noticed that the eagle that nested in an inaccessible peak across the river swooped for home and stayed there. The redsides and the bull trout in the river would no longer bite, and he remembered now that the coyote who denned among the rocks well up the mountain had howled last night as if possessed: all signs of storm and winter.
By noon a penetrating chill had crept into the air, and Bruce looked oftener across the river.
“It’s just like him to stay out and sleep under a rock all night with a storm coming,” he told himself uneasily.
This would be no new thing for Slim in one of his ugly moods, and ordinarily it did not matter, for he kept his pockets well filled with strips of jerked elk and venison, while in the rags of his heavy flannel shirt he seemed as impervious to cold as he was to heat.
Chancing to glance over his shoulder and raise his eyes to the side of the mountain, which was separated from the one at the back of the bar by a cañon, a smile of pleasure suddenly lighted Bruce’s dark face, and he stopped rocking.
“Old Felix and his family!” he chuckled. Whimsically he raised both arms aloft in a gesture of welcome. “Ha—they see me!”
The band of mountain sheep picking their way down the rough side stopped short and looked.
“It’s all of a month since they’ve been down for salt.” Then his face fell. “By George, we’re shy on salt!”