CHAPTER XXIV.
A RACE WITH AN AVALANCHE.
THE little party had encamped in a hollow in the prairie, where, after eating their sparse lunch, they lolled on the ground, the men smoking their pipes, while their animals cropped the grass before lying down for the rest which they needed as much as their owners.
“Yes,” said Eph Bozeman, after the conversation had lasted a half hour, and took the form of reminiscences on the part of the adults, “I war eighteen years old when I went on my first trappin’ hunt with my old friend Kit Carson, and there war three trappers beside us. I war younger in them days than now, and I don’t quite understand how Kit come to let me do one of the foolishest things a younker of my age ever tried.
“It war in the fall of the year that we five went away up in the Wild River Mountain, meanin’ to stay thar till spring. Kit had been in the same region a few years before, but he said no trap had ever been set in the place, and we was sure of makin’ a good haul before the winter war over. It was November, and we went to work at once. We were purty well north, and so high up that I don’t think warm weather ever strikes the place.
“We had good luck from the start, and by the time snow began to fly had stowed away in the cave we fixed up for our winter quarters more peltries than Kit had took the whole season before. That was good; but when we begun to figure up how much money we war going to have to divide down at Bent’s Fort, after the winter war over, from the sale of the furs, Kit shook his head and said the season warn’t ended yet.
“Since we war sure of having ugly weather we had got ready for it. The luggage that war strapped to the back of our pack mules had a pair of snow-shoes for each of us, and we all knowed how to use ‘em.
“The first snow-fall come in the beginnin’ of December, but it didn’t amount to much. Howsumever, we catched it the next week, heavy. It begun comin’ down one afternoon just as it war growin’ dark. It war thin and sand-like, and when it hit our faces stung like needle p’ints. Carson went outside, and after studyin’ the sky as best he could, when he couldn’t see it at all, said it war goin’ to be the storm of the winter.