“My,” said Jack, “that’s a terrible place.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “it would be mighty lonesome for a man who was put down anywhere in there.”
“I don’t like to look at it,” said Joe, “it scares me. I don’t like these mountains. I like the prairie, where it’s warm and where you can see a long way.”
“Do you suppose that anything lives down there, Hugh?” said Jack.
“Well, I don’t know,” was the answer. “I reckon likely the goats go down there in summer to get cool, but how they get up here again if they go down there, I don’t know. Maybe there are some places where a goat or a man could get down, but I can’t see them from here.”
“Well,” said Jack, “I’d hate to go hunting down there, and I don’t believe I’d go if I saw a dozen goats.”
“No,” said Hugh, “I don’t reckon you would. I think it would be better to try to find some easier place to do your hunting. It’s scary looking.”
They spent a long time looking down into this gulf, and the longer they looked the more dark and forbidding it seemed. Hugh said that the waters from the melting snow and ice must run down into some river that entered Flat Head Lake, but what river it was he did not know, for he had never been in the mountains on the other side of the range.
At length, retreating from the edge of the precipice, they went out to the other side of the rocks, and, sitting down, ate the little lunch of fried sheep meat and bread that they had brought in their pockets. Then Hugh smoked his pipe, and presently they started to return to camp.
“How are you going back, Hugh?” asked Jack. “The way we came or some other way?”