The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor of their tent, sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their sleeping bags, and hung wall pockets at the head of each bed to hold all their small camp belongings. Then they went out to inspect the Colonel’s bivouac. Near their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and lightness for one lone hiker. A stretcher bed hung on two stout poles, which were lashed to a pair of shears about a foot above the soil, and over the shears ran a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it and pegged down behind to form a windbreak. Its front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so that the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, in out of the rain; and he could sit on the bed and tend his meal or clean his rifle, or just loaf or lie at ease on it. As the boys approached he was filling the bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse.
“Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. The Service camp cot is the coldest thing to sleep on ever devised by the brain of man,—unless you put a layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then it is good, and comfortable and warm.”
He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay down, to dream indolently in the sunny, pine-scented glade, while through a rift in the foliage his eyes drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon. “This is good enough, for the present, boys,” he grunted, stretching his arms in lazy happiness. “I haven’t any idea when we’ll ever bother to leave here again, but to-morrow we’ll hang up a deer and try to get the dogs on a cougar.”
Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest of the camp. The tinkle of horse bells came from a little mountain meadow where their ponies had been turned out. Up near them a gray and black patterned blanket, hanging in a tree, told where Niltci had staked out his claim for sleeping quarters. Under a nest of big pines lay Big John’s bed roll on a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring in the ravine, that facetious child of Montana was at work making a stone fireplace, and already he had a saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather above the rodent zone.
It was all good; too good to be true; too wild and beautiful and sublime, and filled to the brim with Nature’s plenty for any but very honest men to live there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural lassitude had come over the boys. Nature gives these periods, when she is in her mild and genial moods, for times of recuperation to her children. They are not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, round pinnacle of yellow rock, invited by the mists of immense distance that lay beyond it. On its brink they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had found a lodgment there. Below and before them stretched the vast gulf of the canyon, clear to its south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to do anything but lie there and look. There are spectacles of Nature that man never tires of dreaming over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling surf. This canyon is one of them. For a long time neither youth said a word.
“It’s just the Canyon, yet,” said Sid, at length. “Wait till we get down into it—then we’ll begin to appreciate it!”
Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out refreshed and ready to perform prodigies. The horses were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off through a high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with Ruler and the pups all over the timber, running in wide casts around the main course of the cavalcade. Down into the shallow gulches and across wooded promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These ravines were the gentlest beginnings of that vast shore line which once rimmed the course of the Colorado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always the great physical fact of the Canyon was there. You couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t forget it for a moment.
Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bellow, a houndy song that told the world he had found something. The pups dashed over at his call. Big John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already unraveling the trail, his long, ropy tail swinging in circles as he snuffed along, yelping at intervals as he ran. The party gathered around the track, while Niltci bent down with his face almost in it. A faint impression was there, in the leaves, large and round, but without any particular formation.
“Cougar. Beeg!” pronounced the Navaho boy after a careful examination.
“I told you they was lion-broke!” exulted Big John. “Them runs we had after the Black Panther spiled ’em for small stuff,—Ruler’s broke, anyway.”