In a minute or two they reached the first snow-field. Joe did not want to appear too green and excited, but he was almost trembling with excitement, just the same. He had reached the level of summer snow! He was above timber-line, or almost above, and here in a great northern hollow was a vast drift, four hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep in the middle, which Mills said would not melt all summer! Little streams of water were gushing out from the lower side, and the snow was very soft and coarse, like rock salt. The trail went right across it, the horses picking their way carefully over the treacherous footing. They climbed but a little way more, and they were on the top of the pass.
When you think of a mountain pass, probably, you think of a deep valley or cañon between the hills, but a pass is not like that at all in the high Rockies. In order to get over the Continental Divide (which the Indians called “the backbone of the world”), you have to climb, and the pass is simply a point on this spine which is not quite so high as other points, and can be reached, moreover, from the base. Joe found himself in a little meadow which was full of stunted pine trees, the last of the timber, with snowdrifts, and with bright gold dog-tooth violets, some of them coming right up and blossoming through two inches of snow. On either side of him, the Divide rose up perhaps another five hundred or a thousand feet, in pyramids of naked rock. Ahead, to the west, he could see a great hole, where the Divide dropped down on the other side, and ten miles away across this hole a wonderful sharp-peaked mountain all covered with snow, and looking like the pictures of the Alps in his old geography.
“What’s that mountain?” he asked.
“Heaven’s Peak,” said the Ranger. “Good name for it, eh?”
“It sure is!” said Joe.
Mills stopped the horses in a little grassy glade, sheltered from the wind by a group of stunted pines, and unslung the packs.
“You’re going to make me some more of that coffee,” he laughed, opening one of his dunnage bags.
While Joe was building the fire, Mills pointed up the great slope of naked, tumbled rocks to the south. “Climb up there some day,” said he, “and down the other side, and you’ll get on top of the Divide above Swift Current Glacier. It’s narrow—just a knife blade, and all along the centre of it you’ll see a game trail.”
While they were eating lunch, Joe was amused to see the ground squirrels—hundreds of them, it seemed—come up out of their holes in the grass and look at the intruders. They sat up on their hind legs, pressed their front paws against their stomachs, and made a cheeping noise, almost like birds.
“Looks as if they were mechanical toys,” Joe laughed, “and had to squeeze their middles to get a sound.”