"Yes, you heard better than I did," my partner admitted, "but that is not what saved us. I am sure that the gods caused the pack-thong to break and stop us; otherwise we should have been right in the path of the slide."
Re-slinging our packs, we climbed the rough mass of the slide, round and over big boulders, ice blocks, and tree trunks, through piles of brush and broken branches. At the apex of the heap Pitamakan reached down, pulled something from the earth-stained snow, and passed it to me. It was the head and neck of a mountain goat, crushed almost flat, the flesh of which was still warm.
"You see what would have happened to us if my pack-thong had not broken," he said grimly.
"It must be that many goats perish in this way," I remarked.
"Yes, and also many bighorn," he said. "I have heard the old hunters say that the bears, when they first come out in the spring, get their living from these slides. They travel from one to another, and paw round in search of the dead animals buried in them."
At daylight we entered an open park where we could see back toward the summit. There was no doubt that we had traveled a long way during the night, for the mountain opposite our abandoned lodge looked twenty miles distant. The valley here was fully a mile wide, and the mountains bordering it were covered with pines clear to the summit. They were not more than a thousand feet high, and the western rim of them seemed not more than fifteen miles away. We believed that from where they ended the distance could not be great to the lake of the Flatheads.
Down here the snow was only about four feet deep, less than half the depth of it where we had wintered. The air became warm much earlier in the morning than it did up there. Using the snowshoes now, as the crust was getting weak, we kept going, although very tired. During the two hours that we were able to travel after sunrise, we passed great numbers of elk, and not a few moose, and when, finally, the snow grew spongy and obliged us to stop for the day, we were plainly within the deer range, for both white-tail and mule-deer were as plentiful as jack-rabbits are in certain parts of the plains.
We stopped for our much-needed rest on a bare sandbar of the river, and with bow and drill started a little fire and roasted some dry meat. The sun shone warm there, and after eating, we lay down on the sand and slept until almost night.
Starting on again as soon as the snow crusted, we traveled the rest of the night without any trouble, and soon after daybreak suddenly passed the snow-line and stepped into green-sprouting grass. The summer birds had come, and were singing all round us. A meadow-lark, on a bush close by, was especially tuneful, and Pitamakan mocked it:
"Kit-ah-kim ai-siks-is-to-ki!" (Your sister is dark-complexioned!) he cried gleefully. "Oh, no, little yellow-breast, you make a mistake. I have no sister."