And yet he knew that within the past few years many people had passed through this place. He knew that the miners had washed the sands of the rivers, but found that they did not pay; that trappers had caught the beaver and the marten, and had soon trapped almost all of them. Now it was for him to find whether the game was as plenty as had been said.
At all events, Jackson's Lake with the wide meadows that surrounded it, and the superb mountains that walled it in on one side, made this a lovely spot. The lake shone in the sunlight like a sheet of silver, and was dotted with pine-clad islands. On the west its waters flowed close beneath the great mountains which rose above it, but on the other three sides a belt of forest grew close to the water, and back of this belt, broad meadow lands, with groups of trees and low rounded clumps of willows, looked almost like a park. Further to the eastward bare ridges rose higher and higher, forming the foot-hills of the main range, and still further to the east and southeast were massive mountains, more distant—and so seeming lower—than the Teton Range, but which were the Continental Divide. Jack looked, and looked, and enjoyed this beautiful view; but after a little he realized that time was passing, and that he must move on, and do his hunting, and get to camp.
He crossed the ridge, and began to ride down the side of the mountain toward the south, following the crest of a hog-back, which would take him down to the valley of the lake by a gentle slope. Below, and to his left, was a narrow valley, in which stood green timber, and among the green timber much that was dead and much that was down.
Chapter IX
AN ELK HUNT UNDER THE TETONS
He was riding along slowly, letting Pawnee make his own way among the loose rocks and tree-trunks, when he caught sight of an animal standing with its tail toward him, in a little opening among the trees. For an instant he thought it was a buckskin horse, and the idea flashed through his mind that there must be a camp down there. Almost before the thought had taken form, the animal moved a little, and he saw that it was an elk. He slipped off his horse on the side furthest from the animal, and led Pawnee out of sight behind a clump of pines, and left him there. Then he crept back to the ridge. In the timber below he soon made out half-a-dozen elk, and as he watched, he could see quite a large bunch of cows and calves. He lay there, watching and waiting. The drop down the hill into the valley was very steep, and he was hoping that the elk might move into some position where he would not have to go down to them. They seemed uneasy and suspicious, and presently something startled them, and they ran a little way, and then stopped, looking back up the valley. Two big heifers stood almost side by side facing opposite ways, with their shoulders close together, and their heads in such position that their necks seemed to cross. Jack raised his gun and took a careful sight at the necks, just below the heads, and pulled the trigger. One of the cows dropped instantly, while the other, standing a moment to look, turned and ran off. He heard the elk crashing through the timber of the valley, and then saw them climbing the bald hills on the other side, stopping every little while to look back, and at last walking slowly off over the hills.
A convenient side ridge gave Pawnee a good road down to where the cow had fallen, but she had rolled far down the hill, and finally had stopped on a little level place. She was quite dead. The animal was rather large for Jack to handle, but with some trouble he managed to cut off her hams and sirloins, and tying the two hams together by the gambrel joints, he balanced them on his saddle, and then tying the sirloins on behind, set out on foot for camp. There was much scrambling up steep hillsides, and down others quite as steep, and some working through the thick underbrush, before he came out into the open lake valley. Here progress was more rapid. Jack walked swiftly, and Pawnee followed close behind. After a time he came on the trail made by the pack train, some hours before, and hurrying along this, presently saw in the distance what looked like a house. Before he reached it, however, the trail that he was following turned sharply to the right, and led down toward the river, two or three miles below the lake.
As he approached the tall cottonwood timber, which he supposed grew on the shores of the river, he saw the horses feeding close to it, and before long the cone of the lodge showed through the leaves, and a little later he stopped by the fire.
"Good boy," said Hugh. "I'm mighty glad to get that meat. That'll keep us going for quite a while, and now that we've got fresh meat, and dried meat and fish, we're bound to live well."
"Animal's in good order, too," he continued, as he began to lift the meat from the saddle. "I expect you picked out a heifer, didn't you?"