The doctor smiled. “My family and a lot of my friends think I’m crazy to risk my neck climbing,” he went on, “but they don’t know. They don’t know the fun of pitting your human cunning and will power against a precipice, and then, when you’ve conquered it, reaching a wild spot like this and seeing the whole world spread out at your feet. There’s nothing like it. I give my patients pills, but this is the medicine I take myself.”
They now ate their sandwiches, which were pretty well mashed up in their pockets, and quenched their thirst as best they could by eating snow. Then they explored along the ragged ridge a bit, finding in the centre of the spine, winding in and out amid the rough battlements, a distinct game trail, like a foot-path. In spots it was so plain that you would have thought men walked over it every day.
Mills presently went on ahead, softly, and after a while they saw him beckoning to them, and cautioning silence. He was at the edge of the cliff, peering over. Tom and the doctor tiptoed up and looked over, also.
There, not a hundred feet below them, on a wide ledge, were five goats! There was an old billy, standing on the edge, looking off and down, evidently inspecting with some suspicion the party which was now lighting a camp-fire for luncheon down on the lake shore. There were two nannies, one eating moss and one scratching herself with her hind leg. And, finally, there were two kids, as playful as kittens, jumping around. Now and then one of the kids would give a leap and go up the cliff to a rock projection higher than his head, jump from that to another, and so climb ten or a dozen feet. Then he would jump off, head foremost, and land beside the old goats.
The three unsuspected human beings watched them for several minutes. It certainly was a pretty sight, and the most wonderful part of it to Tom was that these kids were born up here, thousands of feet above the level earth, and perhaps would never get lower in their lives than the shale slide above Iceberg Lake!
“You always have to get at ’em from above,” Mills whispered. “They don’t seem to expect danger from that quarter. It’s below that they watch out. Want to see ’em dive?”
The doctor nodded, and the Ranger suddenly gave a loud shout.
The old billy did not even look up. He simply went head foremost over the edge of the shelf, where he had been standing, and disappeared. One by one, in exactly the same place, the others followed him, a kid going last. From where the men lay, a hundred feet above, the goats appeared to be dropping off into space, and to certain death.
“Good gracious!” Dr. Kent exclaimed. “Where’d they go to?”
Mills didn’t answer. His eyes were scanning the cliff wall below. Suddenly he pointed to the left, at least two hundred yards away and lower down the slope. There were the five goats, trotting along like three big snowballs and two little ones, on a shelf not a foot wide. They went around a sort of cornice on a shelf so narrow that the men, a quarter of a mile away, actually could not see it at all—the goats seemed to be just moving like flies on a wall—and disappeared. A moment later they came in sight again, farther around on the cliff, climbing rapidly up a gully, or chimney, by sharp, quick leaps from side to side, each leap landing them higher, and at the top they reached a shelf which led to the summit, and disappeared.