While Buck browsed, Sheldon sought the way out. He turned to his right, climbing the flank of the mountain. A man could go up readily enough at this spot, clambering from one rock to another. The boulders were not unlike easily imagined steps placed by the giant deity of the wild. But it took no second look to be sure that never was the horse foaled that could follow its master here.
Tempting the man there rose from the ridge a tall, bare, and barren peak from which he could hope to have an extended sweep of world about him. He thought that he could come to it within an hour. And if he were to retrace his steps a little, seeking an escape from the cul de sac into which the stream had led him, it was well to have a look at the country now from some such peak.
He had done this before, perhaps half a dozen times, always selecting carefully the peak which promised the widest expanse of view with the least brush to struggle through. But never had he had the unlimited panorama which rewarded him now. At last he was at the top, after not one but two hours’ hard climb; and he felt that, in sober truth, he had found the top of the world, that he had surmounted it, that he was less in its realm than in that of the wide, blue sky.
Far below the thunder of the stream he had just left was lost, smothered in the walls of its own cañon, stifled among the forests. Here there mounted only the whisper from the imperceptibly stirring millions of branches, not unlike the vague murmur in a sea shell. The peak itself might have been the altar of the god of silence.
East, west, south, whence he had come, Sheldon saw ridge on ridge, peak after peak, No-Luck Land running away until, with other ridges and peaks, it melted into the sky-line.
Looking north, and almost at his feet, the mountainside fell away precipitously. He estimated that he was at an altitude not less than eleven thousand feet. There was snow here, plenty of it, thawing so slowly that not nearly all of it would be gone when the winter came again.
Below him, in the tumbled boulders, were pockets of snow, with bare spaces, and the hardy mountain flowers in the shallow soil. Down he looked and down, until it seemed as though the steep-sided mountains fell away many thousands of dizzy feet. And there below was the wide valley, all one edge of it meadow-land, all the other edge given over to a mighty forest, and at the jagged line lying between wood and field a little lake, calm and blue, with white rocks along the farther rim.
On all sides of the valley lay the sheer mountains, shutting it in so that a man might look down and see the beauties beneath him and yet hesitate to descend, thinking of the difficulties of getting both in and out.
Sheldon had not forgotten the imprint of the bare foot. Nor was he ready to give up the search he had begun, there being no little stubbornness in the man’s nature.
But he stared long down into the valley before him, thinking of the solitude to be found there; the game to be hunted if a man sought game; thinking that some time he would make his way down yonder, joying in the thought that his foot would be the first for years, perhaps generations or even centuries, to travel there. No, however, he would turn back to where Buck waited; seek the pass that must lead out, and learn, if it was fated that he should know, who had made the tracks at the crossing.