He seemed to take an interest in everything about us and surprised me with the knowledge which he showed of nature and her little oddities. Once he picked up a twig saying that it had grown on the north side of a tree, and again a scrap of rock which he said was sandstone. “They’re all sandstone, these mountains,” he said, or rather asked, as if he were not quite sure of himself and afraid that I would contradict him.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess they’re mostly sandstone,” though, to tell you the truth, they might have been soapstone for all I knew.
Not once did he speak of the war and when I cautiously mentioned it in a casual way he paid no attention. It seemed that he had forgotten all about it—blessed lapse of memory, I thought.
Well, after a while we came upon rough country, like a miniature chain of mountains up there amid those mighty peaks. Here were rocky hollows and no end of little caves and glens—such picturesqueness as I had never seen. They say these caves are filled with the bones of extinct animals and one bleached relic I picked up. But my companion told me that it was only wood. “See,” he said smiling, “it has a grain.”
I think it was the first instance of a genuine smile that I had seen upon his wan countenance.
Presently he kneeled down and examined some mossy earth, and straightway, to my regret, he became greatly excited. We were in a sort of little canon which extended some hundred yards or so and petered out in an area of fairly level forest land where the trees grew sparsely in a rocky soil.
“What is it?” I asked, a bit anxiously.
“See?” he said, standing and placing his heel in the moss. “See?”
“You mean it’s a footprint?” I asked.
“See?” he asked nervously, almost in suspense, as if dreading my reply.