One of them crept into a hollow in the bark of a great spruce and stayed there for a long time, and Jack thought that he was taking a nap before starting out for his supper.
For some hours Jack sat there watching the birds and having a delightfully lazy time. Once in a while he looked across the creek to the place where the horses were, and could see two figures, which he knew must be Hugh and Joe. They seemed in no hurry to return to the camp, but had gone beyond the horses and almost to the crest of the hill above the old camp where the bears had been killed.
At length when the birds had all gone off and he felt a little tired of doing nothing, Jack took up his rifle and crossing the tiny stream which lay before the camp, clambered half a mile or more up the mountainside. It was steep, but not bad going.
There was little sign of game, but, presently, on one of the ledges, Jack walked into a little brood of Franklin’s grouse; a mother and half a dozen young ones as big as a quail.
At first the old bird seemed rather uneasy, but not sufficiently alarmed to resort to any of the common tricks for leading an intruder away from her young, and Jack sat down on the ground close to them and watched them for a long time. They did not seem very active birds, nor did they display much energy in searching for food. They seemed to him rather lazy, and at last he rose and, leaving them, went on.
From his high perch he could see far into the distance and could now overlook the great cliff lying south of the camp, which he discovered to be the northern boundary of an immense snow field which ran back a long way to a vast mountain and to the ridges which extended from it on either hand.
“My,” said Jack to himself, “that will be no fool of a climb to cross that ice and get on those ridges. We will have to do that before very long.”
Looking down across the valley he could now see Hugh and Joe returning to camp, and turning about retraced his steps and got to the tent soon after the others.
The next morning Hugh proposed that they should explore still further the valley which lay to the east of the camp, up which they had ridden when they had been here before. There was no special reason for hunting, since they still had plenty of the sheep killed a few days before.
It took some little time to go across the stream and bring in the horses—the pack animals along with the others, since there was no place over where they were feeding where they could be tied up. The long level ledges of rock that formed the floor of the bench gave no opportunity for driving a picket pin down into the soil, and indeed the feed was so scattered that a picketed horse would get nothing to eat.