Mr. Rogers agreed with them, and evidently persuaded their parents. “After all,” he wrote, “you’ll really be taking a term in practical field forestry, and Joe can never hope to get a position as a forester if he hasn’t fully recovered his health. The government won’t take a sick man on the job. Learn all you can, especially how to take care of yourselves.”
So the boys sent home for their very warmest winter clothes, mittens, pull down hats, ski boots and skis and some school books and stories to read evenings. Mills said he could get them real Indian snow-shoes in the Park, and elk skin sleeping-bags. He was even more delighted at the prospect of having them than they were at staying. It meant he would have company till nearly Christmas, and the scouts knew how lonely he usually was in the winter, because that was one thing he had never talked about.
The tepee camp closed about mid-September, when it got too cold for many hikers to come over the high passes, and the next two weeks Tom worked as a regular guide, with a license badge from the Park superintendent. Joe also had a couple of jobs with camping parties, but he had had his badge from the start. All the hotels and chalets closed on October first, and then the boys moved into the Ranger’s cabin.
They were glad to move, too. Already winter had begun to come, up on the Divide. The snow that fell did not melt, and the line of it was creeping down the bare, rocky slopes of Gould. The nights were cold, and water froze in a kettle, and ice formed on the edge of the lake on a still night. Before the last bus had departed, all three made a trip out to Glacier Park station and laid in supplies for the winter.
“The next trip we make may be on snow-shoes,” the Ranger said. “That’s fifty miles afoot, packing your sleeping-bag on your back.”
The horses presently were sent down to the prairie to winter, and Joe got some of the hens from the hotel, which otherwise would have been killed or taken away, and installed them in the stable.
“We’ll have fresh eggs for a while, anyhow,” he declared.
“What you going to feed ’em with?” the Ranger asked.
“I got two barrels of feed,” said Joe, “and our table scraps. When the feed gives out, we’ll live on fricasseed chicken. Anyhow, I’ll keep one good one alive till Thanksgiving, and we’ll have some fresh meat that day.”
In the weeks that followed, Tom and Joe lived a hardy, active life afoot, sometimes going with the Ranger up the high trails to inspect where the early snows first slid, so that he could get a line on the spots in which the most danger to the trails lay.