Without wasting time, Pete began to prepare them for cooking. He soon built a fire of some sticks which he gleaned from one or two twisted and gnarled evergreens that had wandered above timber line and cooked the birds over the embers. He gave a brace to me, and sitting on a boulder with our feet hanging over the edge we ate our evening meal without salt or pepper, and then each of us curled up like a grey wolf under the shelter of a stone and slept as safely as if we were in our bed rolls down in the genial atmosphere of the park in place of being in the bitingly cold air of the bleak mountain tops.
I, at least, slept soundly, and, thanks to the clothes Pete had so kindly made for me, I do not remember feeling cold. When I awoke again it was daylight and I could scarcely believe that I had been asleep more than five minutes since my friend bade me good-night. Big Pete was up before me, of course, and when I opened my eyes I found him cooking breakfast and making tea in a tin cup over those economical fires he so loved to build even when we were in the park where there was fuel enough for a roaring bonfire. It’s queer how difficult it is to make water boil on a mountain top.
“Well, now fer the witch-b’ar track agin,” said Big Pete, wiping his mouth.
“Witch-bear!” I exclaimed. “Oh—yes—you don’t mean to tell me you kept following the track of that two-legged bear this far, Pete?” I exclaimed, suddenly recalling that we had started out following a mysterious moccasin trail that had later turned into bear tracks.
“Sartin’ sure. Didn’t you figger out that that tha’ b’ar war the Injun or tha’ Wild Hunter who put on moccasins made o’ b’ar feet when he thought we’d foller him?” asked Pete.
“Yes, I did, but I forgot—maybe that ram was the Wild Hunter himself—blame it. Nothing will astonish me in this country.”
“Yes, you fergot everything, even yore head when you started to foller that tha’ ram yesterday. But I didn’t. I jest kept peggin’ away at them tha’ rumswattel b’ar tracks and I followed ’em right up to yonder cliff. They go on from tha’, but I left ’em last night to come over by you. Come on, we’ll pick ’em up agin.” And off he started.
It was soon evident that it was an exceedingly active bear which we were following for it could climb over green glacier ice like a Swiss guide and over rocks like a goat. It led us a wild, wild chase over crevasses, friable and treacherous stones covered with “verglass,” over dangerous couloirs and all the other things talked of in the Alps but forgotten in the Rockies, to high elevations, where frozen snow combed over the beetling crags, and the avalanches roared and thundered down the rocks, dashing the fragments of stone over the lower ice fields. We were not roped together like mountain climbers in the Swiss or Tyrolean Alps; we got the real thrills by using our own hands and feet without ice pick, staff or hobnailed shoes.
But Big Pete never hesitated and I followed him without a word, and when the trail led along the edge of a dizzy height I could look at the middle of Big Pete’s broad back and then my head would not swim. It required quick and good judgment to tell just how much of a slant made a loose stone unsafe to step upon. It was exciting and exhilarating work, and the violent exercise kept me so warm that I carried most of my clothes in a bundle on my back. Presently our path led us into a goat trail, one of those century old paths made by shaggy white Alpine animals, and used by them as regular highways. There were plenty of fresh goat signs, and the broad path led us over a saddle mountain to the verge of a cliff, beyond which it seemed impossible for anything but birds to pursue the trail. Here we sat down to rest and to make a cup of tea over a tiny fire, although wood was plentiful at this place, it being in the timber line.
Below us lay a valley, into which numerous small glaciers emptied their everlasting supply of ice and blocks of stone, and horse-tail falls poured from the melting snow fields. It might have presented enchanting prospects to an iceman or a bighorn, or a Rocky Mountain goat, but for two tired men it was a gloomy, dangerous and desolate place and I felt certain that even a witch-bear would not choose such a dangerous place as a camping ground. We had finished our tea and I was feeling somewhat refreshed when I noticed a peculiar stinging sensation about my face; I felt as if I had been attacked by some peculiar form of insect. But there were none in sight.