"And if I should have a son, and ever want to bring him out here and show him the things that I saw when I was a boy, he could not see them?"
"I don't believe he could. I tell you, son, this country has changed an awful lot since I first saw it, and it seems to me it's changing more and more all the time, and quicker now than it used to. I used to think that the time would never come when I couldn't go out and kill meat if I wanted it; but my ideas have changed a whole lot in the last year or two, and I believe now that the time will come when there won't be any game left for a man to shoot with a rifle. I used to think that the buffalo could never be killed off, but I've seen 'em killed off over part of the country, and I may live long enough to see 'em killed off everywhere."
"Well," said Jack, "it seems as if there ought to be some way to stop that."
"Yes, there ought to be," said Hugh, "but you see, every fellow that comes out into the mountains, he's just like you and me; we think the other fellow oughtn't to kill game, but we ought to kill it. We claim that we don't kill anything more than what we want to eat, and these other fellows claim, maybe—if they're buffalo skinners or elk skinners—that they don't kill any more than they want to skin. Each man thinks that what he'll kill won't do any harm; but when they're all at work killing as hard as they can, the upshot of it is that there's no game left."
"I see," said Jack; "each one of us is thinking about himself and about nobody else, and yet each one of us is likely to talk about what the other people do. You must have seen lots of game in your life, Hugh," he added.
"Yes, son," said Hugh, "I've seen a heap of game. Why, at one time men used to travel day after day, and never be out of sight of game; and most times the game was not afraid at all. Buffalo or elk or antelope would just move out the way, and a man never thought of shooting at anything until he needed meat to eat. Of course in those times we never took anything but the best parts, and so it often happened that we killed an animal every two or three days. But we never thought, up to within a very few years ago, when railroads began to come into the country, that things would be much different from what they were then; but when the railroads came, they brought a heap of people, a good many of them hunters, and a good many of them men who came to live on the land where the game had always roamed without being bothered by anybody, except maybe once a year when Indians happened to pass that way and perhaps camped in the neighborhood for a few weeks. Of course the time has been when a man could easily enough kill a car-load of game in a day, but in the old times no one had any reason for doing that. We could only eat about so much meat, and wear about so much buckskin; and ammunition cost money, and nobody wanted to waste it."
CHAPTER XIII
A PACK HORSE IN DANGER
They had not gone far down the river the next morning when the mountains on either side drew closer together, and the valley narrowed greatly. Before they had gone far Hugh stopped, and, turning, said to the boys as they came up, "I don't like the looks of things ahead; I reckon we'll have to go up on the hillside down below here. Looks to me like we were coming to a cañon."
A little farther along it proved so; and Hugh, after going ahead and making a little investigation, called out to the boys to bring on the animals. They found him on a narrow game trail, which began to climb the hill among thick timber, where the trees stood so close on both sides of the trail that it was evident that there might be trouble in getting the packs along. Hugh got an axe out of the pack, and, going ahead on foot, began to chop the branches on either side, so as to make room for the loaded horses. Two or three times he found small trees fallen across the trail, and, as it was extremely steep, it was necessary to cut out each one of these. Progress was slow, but after two or three hours they emerged from the timber and could see ahead of them the trail leading along a very steep hillside. Immediately below the trail grew underbrush, and below that the rocks fell off sharply to the river. From the hillside a number of little brooks and springs trickled down, making slippery, muddy places in the trail over which it was necessary to go carefully. Hugh several times called back to the boys, saying, "Go slow along this place, and don't crowd the animals; let each one take its time, and you boys go on foot. The horses will follow all right."