As he trudged along toilsomely, Ralph kept a look out for game as well as for the trail, for the camp larder needed replenishing with fresh meat, and he was anxious to bring home his share. In this way he covered some three or four miles, now losing the elusive trail, now picking it up again. The mountain side was steep and rocky and strewn with the fallen trunks of forest giants. But Ralph’s muscles were tough, and clean living and athletics had given him sinew and staying power, so that he was conscious of but little fatigue after a long stretch of such traveling.
Almost as skillfully as Coyote Pete might have done in those days in the southwest, the boy read the trail. Here the ponies had galloped. There they had paused and nibbled grass; in other places, broken boughs or abrasions on a fallen tree trunk marked their path. There were two of the ponies; but just which pair they were, Ralph had, of course, no means of determining.
One thing was plain, they must have been badly frightened; for as has been said in the mountain solitudes, as a rule, ponies will stick close to camp. They appear to dread being separated from human companionship, and few packers or trailers ever find it necessary to tether their animals.
At last the ridge was topped and beyond him, by clambering on a rock, Ralph looked into a deep valley with ridge on ridge of mountains rising beyond it, and beyond them again some snow-capped peaks of considerable height. He scanned the valley as closely as he could, but big timber grew thickly on its sides and bottom and he was not able to see much. There were some open spaces, it is true, but in none of these could he see anything of the missing ponies.
Ralph sat himself down on the flat-topped rock he had climbed, and pulling a bit of chocolate out of his pocket, began to nibble it. He was munching away on his lunch when he saw an odd-looking gray bird, not unlike a partridge, sitting in a hemlock not far from him. The bird did not appear to be scared and regarded the boy with its head cocked inquisitively on one side.
“Well, here goes Number One for the pot,” thought Ralph to himself.
He raised his rifle, and taking careful aim fired at the gray bird. But his hand was shaking somewhat from the exertions of his climb, during which he had had to haul himself over many rough places by grabbing branches, and his bullet flew wide.
“Bother it all,” exclaimed the boy impatiently. “I am a muff for fair.”
But to his astonishment, although the bullet had nicked off some leaves and showered them over the bird’s head, it had not moved. It still sat there giving from time to time an odd sort of croaking sound, not unlike the clucking of a barnyard “biddy.”
“I know what you are now,” chuckled Ralph to himself, for the fact that the bird did not stir helped him to recognize its species from a description given the night before by Mountain Jim, “you’re a ‘fool-hen,’ and you are certainly living up to your name.”