“It must be all under snow up there,” remarked Joe. “I wonder you are not afraid of being buried alive.”
The hermit smiled. “I’m not afraid of that,” said he. “It is true the gulch below me gets drifted pretty full—there is probably forty feet of snow in it at this moment—but the point where my house stands always seems to escape; a fact which is due, I think, to the shape of the cliff behind it. It is in the form of a horseshoe, and whichever way the wind blows, the cliff seems to give it a twist which sends the snow off in one direction or another, so that, while the drifts are piled up all around me, the head of the gulch is always fairly free.”
“That’s convenient,” said Joe. “But for all that, I think I should be afraid to live there myself, especially in the spring.”
“Why?” asked the hermit. “Why in the spring particularly?”
“I should be afraid of snowslides. The mountain above the cliff is very steep—at least it looks so from here.”
“It is very steep, extremely steep, and the snow up there is very heavy this winter—I went up to examine it two days ago. But at the same time I saw no traces of there ever having been a slide. There are a good many trees growing on the slope, some of them of large size, which is pretty fair evidence that there has been no slide for a long time—not for a hundred years probably. For as you see, there and there”—pointing to two long, bare tracks on the mountain-side—“when the slides do come down they clean off every tree in their course. No, I have no fear of snowslides.
“By the way,” he continued, “there is one thing you might tell Tom Connor when you see him, and that is that Big Reuben’s creek heads in a shallow draw on the mountain above my house. If you follow with your eye from the summit of the cliff upward, you will notice a stretch of bare rock, and above it a strip of trees extending downward from left to right. It is among those trees that the creek heads.
“You might mention that to Connor,” he went on, “in case he should prefer to begin his prospecting downward from the head of the creek instead of upward from Big Reuben’s gorge. And tell him, too, that if he will come to me, I shall be glad to take him up there at any time.”
“Very well,” said I, “we’ll do so.”