Ever since I had been in the company of this masterful forest companion I had obeyed his commands as a matter of course, and so was not surprised to see the fingers instantly relax their grasp and the knife go gyrating to the mysterious depths. In a few moments Big Pete was up and over the edge of the rock and hidden from my view.
Seizing the long-handled shepherd’s crook, I caught the dangling end of the lariat, and was soon scrambling up the face of the cliff, leaving a trail which the veriest novice would not fail to notice and sending showers of the crumbling stones down the path taken by the knife; it was several minutes before I had clambered over the face of the projecting crag and was safe across the black chasm which lay athwart our trail.
If the Wild Hunter was indeed my father, he certainly was a woodcrafter and scout to bring pride to a fellow’s heart, for I doubted not that the Indian boy was his retainer because the porcupine quill decorations on his buckskin shirt had the same peculiar pattern as that on the wamus of the Wild Hunter himself as well as on the collar of the pet sheep I had killed, and also on the buckskin bag of gold.
CHAPTER XIV
Only those persons who have made solitary trips over snow-capped mountain ridges can appreciate the overwhelming feeling of solitude that I felt on looking about me. To whatever point of view I turned my eyes were greeted with a tumbled sea composed of stupendous petrified billows.
The occasional fields of snow were the white froth of the stony waves and the turquoise colored glacial lakes between the crags rather added to the effect of an angry ocean than detracted from it.
On a closer examination, some of the rocks appeared to be rough bits of unfinished worlds still retaining the form they had when poured from the mighty blast furnaces of the Creator. It was God’s workshop strewn with huge fragments, still bearing the marks of His mallet and chisel; yet these cold barren wastes were the pasture lands of the shaggy-coated white goats and the lithe-limbed bighorned sheep.
Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the air and with a jump I instinctively looked for a vision of the Wild Hunter, but a moment later realized that the sound I heard was but the warning cry of a whistling marmot. Again the silence was broken, this time by a low rumbling sound which increased in volume until it roared like a broadside from an old forty-four-gun man-of-war, each crag and peak taking up the sound and hurling it against its neighbor, until the reverberating noise seemed to come from all points of the compass.
Away in the distance I could see a white stream pouring from the precipitous edge of an elevated glacier; this seeming mountain torrent I knew was not water, but ice, thousands of tons of which having cracked and broken from the edge of the glacier, were now being dashed over the hard face of the rock into minute fragments.
The white stream could be seen to decrease perceptibly in size, from a broad sheet to a wide band, a narrow ribbon, a line, a hair and then disappear altogether. While the distant mountains were still growling, mumbling and playing shuttlecock with the echoes a timid chief hare went hopping across a green half-acre of grass at the damp edge of a melting snow patch in my path. Overhead a golden eagle sailed with a small mammal in its talons; strange reddish-colored bumblebees busied themselves in a bunch of flowers growing in a crevice in the rocks at my feet.