“He couldn’t,”said I; “the cañon-wall is too steep; no wolf could scramble up.”
“Well, if he didn’t,”remarked my companion, “how did he get his feet wet? Look here at his tracks.”
As he said this, Joe pointed to the bare stone before us, where the wolf’s wet tracks were plainly visible.
“Well,”said I, “then I suppose there must be a way up after all. Wait a moment, Joe, while I take a look.”
Jumping from the buckboard, I stepped over to the boulders whence the wolf had appeared, where, to my surprise, I found a pool, or, rather, a big puddle of water, which, overflowing, dripped into the cañon.
Where the water came from I could not at first detect, but on a more careful inspection I found that it ran, a tiny thread, along a crack in the lava not more than a couple of inches wide, which, on tracing it back, I found we had driven over without noticing. Apparently the water came down from the “bubble”through a rift in the crater-wall.
As I have stated before, several of the little craters contributed small streams of water to our creek, but this was not one of them, so, turning to my companion, I said:
“Joe, this is the first time I have ever seen any water come down from that ‘bubble.’ Let us climb up to the top and take a look inside.”
Away we went, therefore, scrambling up the rocky slope, when, having reached the rim, we looked down into the little crater. The area of its floor was only about an acre in extent, but instead of being grown over with grass and sagebrush, as was the case with most of them, this one was covered with blocks of stone of all sizes, some of them weighing several tons. It was evident that the walls, which were only about thirty feet in height, had at one time been much higher, but that in the course of ages they had broken down and thus littered the little bowl-shaped depression with the fragments.
The thread of water which had drawn us up there came trickling out from among these blocks of stone, and we set out at once to trace it up to its source while we still had daylight. But this, we found, was by no means easy, for, though the stream did not dodge about much, but ran pretty directly down to the crack in the wall, its course was so much impeded by rocks, under and around which it had to make its way—while over and around them we had to make our way—that it was ten or fifteen minutes before we discovered where it came from.