“If this storm clears to-day, as it ’pears likely to, I’ll take ye up the mountain to help ye git the lay o’ things. We’ll need some more meat anyway.”
The mountaineer’s weather instinct proved true. A clear sunset followed by a sharp night brought the morning sky out clear and crisp. Before the sun was very high, the two were well up the wooded slopes. Uncle Dave led the way; Fred, leading old Buck, brought up the rear.
Their trail led through a wildly beautiful country. Autumn had flung a riot of colors over the leaves and grasses. Wild life was astir. The pine hens, startled from their morning meal among the seeds and berries, would whir from the ground and perch up in the trees within easy reach of Fred’s shotgun. He bagged half a dozen of the blue fantails, then tied his gun to his horse; for as Uncle Dave suggested, they weren’t “out on a murderin’ expedition, like tom fool dudes.”
A climb of about two hours brought them up to the rim of the first range. As they lifted to the top, a panorama of craggy grandeur burst into full view. A wild mountain valley patched with pine and aspen groves lay below them. Its farther side—a mighty saw-tooth range of jagged granite peaks, barren, savage spires and broken domes and buttresses of ragged rock, streaked with ancient snow banks—towered high into the blue. Shaggy canyons, down which foaming streams leaped and shouted, had made great chasms in the face of the range, scarring and carving it into fantastic forms. The valley floor was gentler, a meadowy, flower-tangled stretch of quiet beauty. The streams here, though still playful, had spread in places into delightful little lakes, glimpses of which could be caught shining through the trees.
“That’s the doin’s of the flat-tails,” remarked Uncle Dave, as they paused on the summit to breathe a spell.
“Did the beaver make those lakes?” asked Fred.
“Sartinly.”
“How did they do it?”
“Maybe we kin ketch ’em at their work if we’ll go careful; then you kin see fer yerself,” was the quiet reply.
“This is the place I call Grizzly Cove,” he went on; “I killed a big silvertip over by that grove o’ pine once. There’s a heap o’ beaver in this stream and further down in the main canyon. Don’t think it’s ever been trapped much. Old Pierre, the French trapper, might o’ nosed about here, but I reckon he found all he wanted in his hole further down. Over by them dead aspens I killed the elk whose big antlers are above my fireplace. Shouldn’t wonder if we’d scare up a bunch o’ ’em to-day, or maybe some black-tail.”