“I suppose we’ve got to go before long, Hugh,” replied Jack. “I was counting up the days only the day before yesterday, and figured that we hadn’t much more time here in the mountains. I hate to go, but there’s nothing else to do, I suppose.
“It seems to me that each year I dislike more and more to go back. I’ve never had such good times as I’ve had with you. I think of them all winter when I’m back in New York; for about six months I think of the good time I had last year, and then for the other months I think of the good time I’m going to have next year. I hope we’ll have lots more of them.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “I hope we will. I don’t know, though; I’m getting old, and I don’t think I get about quite as easily as I used to. Of course, I can ride and walk as far as I could when you first came out, but it’s sure that a time is coming when I’ll get crippled up and won’t be able to do as much as I can now. I’ve got some old hurts that sometimes bother me a whole lot now in winter, when I’m not moving around very much, and the older a man gets the more things like that trouble him.”
“Well,” said Jack, “you can still ride farther and do more than any man I ever saw, and I guess it will be a long time before you are laid up.”
The next morning Hugh roused the boys while it was still only gray dawn and sent them across the creek to bring in the horses, and by the time they returned breakfast had been cooked, the tent taken down and many of the packs made up, and an hour or two later the little train was retracing its steps toward the lower country.
As they started, Hugh said, “Of course, we could make quite a cut off in distance by going down on this side of the creek and I don’t believe we’d have much trouble, but then none of us have been over the ground. We might find some place where we couldn’t get the horses down easily, and worse than all, we might have trouble crossing the river. It’ll take us an hour or more longer perhaps to go around the way we came, but that way we know we can keep out of trouble, and that’s the way we better go.”
All day long they traveled down the river, following the trail that they had made coming up. At one point, one of the horses mired in a bog-hole and there was some difficulty in getting him out, but by pulling and urging and getting some willow brush and throwing it under him so that he could get his front feet on it, he finally managed to pull himself out without having his load taken off.
As they were passing through an open place, from which they could see the towering precipice of the great mountains across the creek, Joe remarked, “I think I see three bears.”
All stopped and looked in the direction in which he pointed, and there, sure enough, far up on the precipice above them, they saw one very large bear and two much smaller ones, industriously feeding below the ledges. They did not see the travelers, but were much too far off to be shot at. Joe asked Hugh at what he estimated the distance, and Hugh said, “Anywhere from six hundred yards to half a mile.”
Of course, Jack was strongly tempted to suggest that they should stop here and try to hunt the bears, but he knew that the prospect of getting them was small and so said nothing about it, and after watching the unconscious animals for a time, the train moved on.