So we were once more on the move. We divided our stores and goods evenly among the five horses, and being one horse deficient, Donogh, the Iroquois, and the scout took it in turn to walk. As the weather was now very fine and warm, we cached the leather tent, and some other items for which there was no use. We travelled quietly, but by starting early and camping late managed to make good distances each day. Our course lay along the line of mixed wooded and prairie country which bordered the Red Deer river. We kept a sharp look out for hostile Indians, and took precautions at night to secure the horses from attack.
As thus we journeyed towards the west, we entered upon a very beautiful land; grassy hills spread away beyond each other in a constant succession, long winding lakes came in view as we gained the summits of ridges, and the valleys and lake shores held groves of mixed cottonwood and pine-trees, which gave camping grounds of fairy-like beauty amid the vast stillness of the wilderness. One evening, it was about the end of June, we gained a range of hills which during two days had bounded our horizon on the west.
Long ere we reached them, Red Cloud had promised me a view from their ridges surpassing anything I had yet looked at in the great prairie.
Slowly up the east side of the hill we held our way, while every now and again a long-eared hare sprang from the grass before us, and vanished into brake or coppice. At last the top was gained. The sun yet shone on the bare ridge, but the prairie beneath on either side was in shadow, and already the blue line of shade was creeping up the hill to where we stood. Fifty miles away to the west the vast plain came to an end. A huge rampart mountain rose up into the sunset skies, poising for a moment the great orb of the sun on its loftiest pinnacles of snow. Far away to north and south this rampart range was laid along the horizon, until the edges of mountain tops were only faintly visible above the plain on the verge of vision to south-west and north-west.
“The Rocky Mountains at last,” I said, half musing, to myself, as thus I beheld this grand range lying in all the glory of the summer sunset.
“That is the name the first fur-traders gave them,” said Red Cloud; “but the Indian has better titles for them; ‘The Mountains of the Setting Sun,’ ‘The Ridge of the World.’ He who would scale the icy peaks, they say, would see the land beyond the grave.”
As now I looked across the great intervening plain, slowly fading into twilight, and saw the glittering edge of the long line of mountain top, clear cut against the lustrous after-glow, the red man’s thought which would make this giant range the line of separation between life and death seemed to be no far-fetched fancy. Here ended the great prairie. There was the shore of that vast wilderness, over which my steps had wandered through so many varied scenes of toil, tumult, and adventure. Beyond, all was unknown. And then came back to me a vision of those well-remembered hill-tops of my early days; the heather-covered slopes of Seefin, the wild crags of Cooma-sa-harn, the flat rock that marked the giant’s grave on Coolrue.
The sound of a footstep approaching from behind roused me from my reverie of home. I turned; Donogh stood beside me; there was a strange wistful look in his eyes.
“Ah, master!” he said, “it makes me think of the old home again, to look at those mountains, and the sun going down behind them as he used to do in Glencar.”