“Ho,” said Hugh to Jack, “I reckon we started a moose or an elk here, and he’s going up the mountain.”
They rode forward and in a very few moments reached the gravelly borders of a lake which was hemmed in on three sides by mountains. Just opposite them and seen against the great dark precipice, which partly hid the glacier from their view, fell a white line of foam, the melting water of the great ice mass which supplied the lake. At the head of the lake was a narrow fringe of willows and then an open meadow of small extent, broken on one side by a low, rocky, pine-grown knoll. Behind the little meadow rose a thousand feet of black precipice, and above this was the glacier. Behind the glacier stood a jagged wall of rock, but on either side to the right and the left rose abruptly high mountains, which seemed to terminate in knife edges of naked rock. The scene was perhaps the grandest and most beautiful that Jack had ever beheld near at hand. It made him feel solemn, while Hugh’s look at these tremendous heights was full of respect and admiration.
“Son,” said Hugh, “those mountains there seem to threaten one, rather than to ask him to come on. It’s a job to get up there, and I don’t feel sure that we can do it in one day. If we go, we’ve got to start right away, and we’d better leave our animals here and take it afoot from this on.”
“Yes,” said Jack, “we can’t get the horses any further; and we may as well picket them here.”
Joe asked, “You are going to try to climb up there?”
“Why, yes, Joe,” replied Jack. “I want to get on to that ice up there if I can, and maybe look over on to the other side of the mountains.”
“Well,” said Joe, “I don’t like those mountains much; they scare me. I’d like to get back on the prairie where the sun shines warm and you can ride wherever you want to.”
“Oh, come on,” said Jack; “if you get up there, you’ll be where no Piegan has been before. Come along.”
“Come on, Joe,” said Hugh. “You may as well get used to the mountains now as any other time.”
The three tied their horses to pine trees, and took off the bridles so that they could feed. Then Hugh said, “Now, I reckon the best thing for us to do is to try to work our way around this lake and climb up that place where the water is tumbling down. It looks like a bad place, but it’s liable to be a good deal easier than it looks. We don’t know anything about these mountainsides, and if we try to go up them we’re liable to take a whole lot of time, and not get anywhere to-night. Let’s go right around this lake, crawl through the alder brush that grows at its edge, and then try to get up that flume where the water comes down. I think we can do it.”