“Well, I got my picture!” Tom exclaimed. “Say, but that’s a whale of a nest! And side of it is a little skeleton, either of a kid or a baby lamb, and lots of small bones like rabbits and birds, and a fresh, half eaten ground squirrel. That’s what the old eagle was eating when we disturbed him, I guess. Gee, it’s a regular bone yard down there. Don’t smell very good, either. I don’t think I care for eagles much.”
“I didn’t care for that one, when he was coming at you!” Joe said, his face still white.
“I didn’t myself,” Tom admitted. “Wish I’d had the nerve to photograph the old birdie instead of shooting at him.”
“They don’t like to have their pictures taken,” said Mills, with a short laugh.
After this excitement, the descent of the mountain began. Half-way down, Joe left the rope, at a wide ledge, and went some distance along it, to one side, to get a photograph of the whole party on the cliffside. After he had snapped it, he kept on along the ledge a way, just to see where it went to. After a hundred feet, it turned a sharp corner, and as Joe rounded this turn, he suddenly was face to face with a big old ram! He was quite as astonished as the sheep, but he instinctively pointed his camera and snapped the bulb, just as the ram lowered its head as if to butt.
Joe flattened himself against the wall, not wishing to be knocked off fifty feet to the slope below. But the sheep decided not to butt. Instead, he turned tail, dashed a few feet back on the ledge, and went over head first. Joe ran to the spot in time to see him land on a little shelf twenty feet lower down, bounce off that to a ledge still lower, and then trot around an easy slope and disappear from sight. Not having had time to roll his film, he couldn’t take another picture. But he returned to the party in triumph. Tom might have a picture of an eagle’s nest, but now he had one of a live bighorn! The fact that his camera was focused for a hundred feet, as he had just taken the party on the rope when he met the sheep, and so his close-up of the old ram would be somewhat blurry, did not occur to him till long after, when the film was developed.
After a quick lunch, mainly of Charlie Chaplin sandwiches, the horses were packed again, and they descended the north slope of the ridge, by an easy grade, getting rapidly into timber, and after five miles or so reached the valley of the Belly River, turned up that, and presently made camp at the mouth of the Glenns Lakes, two long, narrow, green lakes reaching in toward the Divide, with the towering walls of Cleveland, which they had seen clearly from Chief, rising right out of these lakes, but now, they saw to their sorrow, going up into clouds.
“I thought so,” Mills said. “Bad weather. It don’t look to me as if we could tackle Cleveland to-morrow. I wanted to try him from this side, too—go up on that long shoulder that comes down south, and then east, toward us. We could get up on that and make a base camp. Well, we’ll camp here to-night, and if he’s still under to-morrow, we can go over Ahern Pass to Flat Top, and then try him from the west side. That’s the side they usually go up, anyhow.”
So they pitched their tents in a meadow by the Belly River, with the clouds gradually shredding out overhead till they finally wrapped the tower of Chief, and hid it from sight, and the cold grew uncomfortable, so that everybody save Joe set about chopping a big supply of wood. Night came early under the cloud mantle, and with no glimpse of the stars, or the tops of those great walls towering up overhead, it was a lonely spot. As Joe was dropping to sleep he heard a coyote barking somewhere out near the horses, a weird, sad sound, like the coughing laugh of an idiot. He shivered at the sound still more, and tried to roll his blanket tighter.
“But you’ve got to get used to it, old scout, if you are going to be a forest ranger,” he told himself.