Instead of stopping by the lake, where there was but little feed and not a very good camping place, Hugh went on to their old camp, where the tent was pitched and the scaffold erected and covered with meat. A good breeze was blowing, and Hugh declared that if they stayed here one day more, the meat would be in shape to pack.
By the time the camp was made, the sun was touching the western mountains, and it was too late to do anything that day.
“If we had a little more daylight, son,” said Hugh, “I’d send you out with that fishing rod of yours to catch some trout, but it’s too late for that. Now, I’ll just get supper, and we’ll have a good long night and to-morrow morning we can all go up the middle fork of this creek, and see what there is there.”
The wind fell with the sun, and after supper they sat around the fire, resting. Toward the mountains they could hear the never-ceasing rumble of the falls from the river, and now and then this sound would be drowned by a thunderous roar from the mountains, ending in a long, hissing sound. After the boys had listened to these noises for some time, Joe said to Hugh, “What is this we hear, White Bull? It sounds like the Thunder Bird flapping his wings at first, and then kind of dies off into a smaller noise.”
“Why,” said Hugh, “those are snowslides coming down from the mountains here and there. You see to-day has been pretty warm, and the sun has shone hot and heated up the rocks, and in lots of places the snow has melted so much that it lets go its hold on the steep slopes and rushes down the mountainside. You boys have never been in the mountains at this time of the year, but you’ll find that when the snow is melting in spring, it’s always sliding down the mountains. It’s a mighty dangerous time to be in the high hills, because a man can never tell when one of these snowslides is going to start, and when it does, it gets going so fast there’s no chance for a man to dodge it. Lots of men have been killed by being covered up by such slides, and often they are so big and come so hard that they smash everything that gets in their way.”
“Yes, White Bull, that’s so,” said Joe. “Jack and I saw two places near where we were camped yesterday where the snow had come down and broken off big strong trees, trees bigger around than your body.”
“Yes,” said Hugh. “There are lots of such places in the mountains, and we’re likely to see more of them before we get out. These mountains,” he went on, “are a great place to see what wind and water can do. There’s no place that I know of where the wind can blow so hard; there’s no place where the snow is worse, and there’s no place where the floods are more powerful. Of course, none of those things lasts very long, but any one of them can do a heap of damage in a mighty short time. Down in the high mountains of Colorado I have seen some bad snowslides, and I knew a little fellow down there that used to carry the mail over the range that got caught in a snowslide once. Luckily, he only got caught on the edge of it and it didn’t kill him. It just carried him along a little ways, rolling him over and over, and fetched him out on a point of solid rock that he managed to hang on to, but although he wasn’t in the snow more than a minute or two, he was all bruised up and felt for a good many days afterward as if he’d been beaten with a club.
“Joe Bruce, too,” he continued, “got caught in a snowslide once when he was crossing the mountains, and came pretty near being killed; but he, too, only got caught on the edge and got thrown around some and came out with his life.”
“Well,” said Joe, “I never heard him speak about that.”
“No,” said Hugh, “I reckon not. You know Bruce ain’t no great talker; he ain’t much of a hand to tell about things that have happened to himself. And that reminds me, did I ever tell you about the way Bruce got back a horse that was stolen once from Carroll & Steele, when they ran a trading-post down in Benton in the early days? That’s a pretty good story, but it’s better to hear Joe Bruce tell it than anybody else. Still, maybe I can give you an idea of what happened.”