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As for the roads—oh, those Rocky Mountain roads! They make coaching quite a different thing from that on the smooth boulevards around New York. I have twice made seventy-five miles in twelve hours, by having four relays, but the average rate of travel is about twenty miles in eight hours. And the day when I first took the ribbons in my hands to guide—four horses we were from nine in the morning till five at night going twelve miles. This was the way of it: Nimrod and I were on a hunting trip in the Canadian Rockies, and as the government map said there was a road, though not a good one, we decided to carry our belongings in a four-horse wagon, in which we could also ride if we liked, and to have saddle horses besides.
Green, a man of the region, was the driver and cook, and we had as guest a famous bear hunter from the Sierra Nevadas. On the first two days out from the little mountain town where we started, we saw many tracks of black bear, which encouraged the hunters to think that they might find a grizzly (which, by the way, they did not).
The dust was thick and red, enveloping us all day long like some horrible insistent monster that had resolved itself into atoms to choke, blind and strangle us. Nimrod looked like a clay man—hair, eyebrows, mustache, skin, and clothes were all one solid coating of red dust. We were all alike. Even the sugar, paper-wrapped in the bottom of a box, covered by other boxes, bags and a canvas, became adulterated almost past use.
On the fourth day this changed, and we camped at the foot of a granite mountain. It made one think of the Glass Mountain of fable, with its smooth stretches of polished rock shining in the sun. That a human being should dare to take a wagon over such a place seemed incredible. Yet there the road was, zigzagging up the rocky slope, while here and there the jagged outlines of blasted rock showed where the all-powerful dynamite had been used to make a resting place for straining horses.
That morning excitement surrounded our out-of-door breakfast table. We had had strange visitors during the night, while we slept. A mountain lion, the beautiful tan-coated vibrant-tailed puma, had nosed within ten feet of me and then, not liking the camp-fire glow and unalarmed by my inert form, had silently retreated.
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It made me feel creepy to see how easily that lithe-limbed powerful creature might have had me for a midnight meal. But I was not trying to do him harm, and so he granted me the same tolerance. Then, too, not far away was a bear track, and the canned peaches were fewer than the night before.
All of this caused Nimrod and the bear-hunter to saddle their horses early; and agreeing to meet us at night on the other side of the mountain, where the map showed a stream, they set out for a day's hunt. Nimrod's horse having gone slightly lame, I offered mine, a swift-footed intelligent dear, and agreed to ride in the wagon.