"I tell you what, Ross," he said emphatically as they made their way gingerly back to the shack, "I’ve done all the research work I want to in this cañon!" He shivered and slapped his hands smartly together. "Without snow-shoes we are helpless here, and the McKenzies know it!"
To make snow-shoes without boards or small nails or a hammer was impossible to workmen of their inexperience. They broke up some boxes and put in all their spare time for days experimenting, but to no purpose.
"Even if we did succeed, Less," Ross comforted himself one day as he looked gloomily at their latest failure, "we couldn’t escape from here. We have no idea where we are, whether we are nearer Red Lodge or Cody or Timbuctoo. We would merely start out and leave a half-way comfortable certainty for a mighty ticklish uncertainty."
"That’s right," agreed Leslie, "and we couldn’t pack enough food on our backs to last many days, nor can we tell when a storm is coming."
In fact, storms were the order of the day. By the middle of February immense masses of snow curled out over the cliffs on the side of the mountain opposite the shack waiting for the warm chinooks of spring to send them hurtling down into the cañon. Fortunately, the mountain above the shack was lower than its neighbors, and the face, heavily wooded, sloped back more gently until it reached a great elevation.
"The trees here prove that there have been no snowslides within the memory of this generation, at any rate," Ross broke out one day as they were sawing the branches from a spruce on the mountainside above the shack. "Now, if the shack were on the other side––"
"But it wouldn’t be built on the other side," interrupted Leslie. "No cabin builder would do such a thing unless he built when he first struck this country as young and green as we were!"
Ross laughed and started the branch he had trimmed down the mountainside on the crust. It skidded along rapidly until it wedged itself into a great snow bank which had drifted from the shack to the trees on either side, and through which the boys had tunneled. With the last branch sent home in this convenient fashion, Ross shouldered the axe and picked up the saw, while Leslie took the gun from a near-by branch where it had been slung, and followed down the mountainside.
With the increase in the depth of the snow, the coyotes and gray wolves had grown bolder, and without the gun the boys never went now outside of their dooryard, as they called the spaces they had cleared around the shack. So far, however, the coyotes had only skulked near the strongly built lean-to, attracted by the smell of the meat, while the wolves contented themselves by howling at night from the rocks far above the cabin, and being answered from the mountainside opposite.
"I have always heard that the gray wolf is a coward," commented Leslie as the two entered the shack. "We have not had a glimpse of one yet."