“Now,” said Hugh, “let’s put these ropes on, leaving a little slack in our hands. Then if any one of the three sees that one of the others is going to slip or fall, he must stand still and do the best he can to support his partner. Look out, too,” he went on, “about where you’re stepping. Try to follow as nearly as you can just where I go, and I’ll try the snow with my stick, and if I find a soft place we’ll go around it.”
They started up the snow slope, directing their course toward the side of the great mountain, until they had come pretty close to it. Then Hugh turned off to the left, and plodded steadily along, vigorously punching the snow with his pole. Occasionally he stopped to rest and to draw a few deep breaths, and on one of these occasions Hugh said to Jack, “You can see, son, why I don’t want to get close to the mountains here,” and he waved his hand toward the rocks, at the foot of which Jack saw many places where recent snowslides from high up on the mountain had rushed down and thrown great masses of snow and even great pieces of rock far out on the slope which they were ascending.
“As the sun gets higher,” Hugh went on, “and the rocks get warm, this snow loosens its hold on the mountain, and sometimes a very little thing will break the last hold it has, and the whole mass will come rushing down. We don’t want to get close enough under the rocks to have any of that stuff hit us.”
“Well, White Bull,” asked Joe, “why don’t you keep far out from the mountain?”
“It’s like this,” replied Hugh; “you see out there in the middle of the ice the slope is steepest, and there in the middle is where the ice moves fastest. For that reason it’s more likely to be cracked and broken there, and it’s into those crevices that a man might slip and get hurt. We want to dodge those cracks in the ice on the one hand, and the falling snow and rocks on the other, and that is just what I’m trying to do.”
“I tell you, Hugh,” said Jack, admiringly, “you seem to see everything and to think of everything.”
“Oh, no,” replied Hugh, “there’s lots of things that I don’t see and lots of things that I don’t think of, but, of course, a man that’s been a long time in the mountains gets to know some things, and if he’s got any sense he tries to keep himself out of danger.”
For an hour or two more they climbed steadily, always keeping near the rim of the great basin, yet well away from the rocks, and at last they were on snow that was almost level, and well up toward a wall of rock, which sometimes stood up high, or again was broken down and so low that it was but six or eight feet above the level of the snow. Gradually they drew near to this wall, which was bare of snow and from which, therefore, Hugh anticipated no danger, until at last they had come so close to it that it seemed that they might reach it at almost any point.
Hugh kept on to a place where the wall was quite broken down, and then, turning, reached the edge of the snow and stepped across to the rocks, where the others joined him.
Through the opening where they were standing they could see mountains, and, taking two or three steps forward, looked into a black gorge full of snow and ice, from which a narrow valley led away to the southwest. It was the coldest, most desolate place that any of them had ever looked into. Below, a precipice fell away a sheer thousand feet, and then, piled up in the valley, one could not tell how thickly, was the snow, sometimes broken and showing green ice beneath it, and sometimes with an immense peak of rock sticking out through it. There was no life to be seen, and no green thing; only black rocks, white snow and dark ice.