They landed twelve trout between them, although Hester’s share was by far the greater, and they ate all twelve for the lunch that they spread on a flat, sun-warmed shelf of Eagle Rock. Such a feast as it was, with sizzling fried bacon, toasted cheese sandwiches, hot cocoa, and the trout cooked to a turn by Hester. Afterward they sat and talked for a very long time, talked of everything and of nothing, until Hester jumped up and said there was only just time for a swim before going home.
“I did not know,” said Nancy a little doubtfully, “that swimming was one of the usual sports in the Rocky Mountains.”
“Most of the water is too cold to be pleasant,” replied Hester, “but this pool is warm enough. It is the only one I know of. Roddy found it long ago, and taught me to swim here. He says perhaps it was beavers that helped to dam it and went away years before we discovered it. The stream is fed by melted snow, like all the others, but it runs very shallow for miles above here, out in the open where the sun can warm it. By mid-afternoon, like this, it is not cold at all.”
She donned her bathing suit and dropped into the water with a splash. After a moment of doubt and hesitation, her two friends followed.
“Oh!” cried Beatrice and “Oh,” echoed Nancy, “I did not know it would be like this!”
A person who has never bathed in the clear, rock pools of the high mountainsides cannot know what real exhilaration is. The two girls caught their breath with delight and wonder, with a pleasure that was quite indescribable. To plunge into the crystal-blue water, to know that it has poured down from the vast glaciers and great, empty snow-fields where no human foot ever comes, to feel all the tingling freshness of the water without its deadly cold—there are few things like it in the world. The girls laughed and splashed and swam and floated until Hester warned them that it was not wise to stay in too long, and they came out reluctantly to dry themselves in the sun.
They scrambled almost to the top of Eagle Rock, found a shelf that was sheltered from the wind, and sat down in a row, swinging their feet over the void beneath and looking out over the long ranges of hills and mountains, brown, russet, red, and chrome-yellow, fading to the blue peaks in the far distance.
“That must be a mountain sheep, that dot moving there opposite us,” Hester observed. “And you can see Gray Cloud Pass over beyond the shoulder of this nearest hill. The tuft of green above is that stretch of woods growing around the lake, but see how bare the slope is where it goes up beyond—nothing but solid rock and overhanging cliffs to the very top. There is a little trail that picks its way back and forth over the face of the mountain; it is called Dead Man’s Mile, there is so much danger, just there, from unsteady footing and rocks falling from above.”
Beatrice remembered how she had come to grief even on the lower, easier slope, and shuddered at the thought of the difficulties higher up.
“Yet I should like to climb it,” she thought. The very impossibility of the idea made it seem all the more inviting.