We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a new trail around it.Six times a minute we held our breaths and stood on tiptoe with anxiety, powerless to help, while the horse did his best.At the especially bad places we checked them off one after another, congratulating ourselves on so much saved as each came across without accident.When there were no bad places, the trail was so extraordinarily steep that we ahead were in constant dread of a horse's falling on us from behind, and our legs did become wearied to incipient paralysis by the constant stiff checking of the descent.Moreover every second or so one of the big loose stones with which the trail was cumbered would be dislodged and come bouncing down among us.We dodged and swore;the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of our legs.The day was full of an intense nervous strain, an entire absorption in the precise present.
We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead.
All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much about the scenery.The only outside impression we received was that the canon floor was slowly rising to meet us.
Then strangely enough, as it seemed, we stepped off to level ground.
Our watches said half-past three.We had made five miles in a little under seven hours.
Remained only the crossing of the river.This was no mean task, but we accomplished it lightly, searching out a ford.There were high grasses, and on the other side of them a grove of very tall cottonwoods, clean as a park.First of all we cooked things; then we spread things; then we lay on our backs and smoked things, our hands clasped back of our heads.We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer cliff of old Mount Tunemah, very much as a man would cock his eye at a tiger in a cage.
Already the meat-hawks, the fluffy Canada jays, had found us out, and were prepared to swoop down boldly on whatever offered to their predatory skill.
We had nothing for them yet,--there were no remains of the lunch,--but the fire-irons were out, and ribs of venison were roasting slowly over the coals in preparation for the evening meal.Directly opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were two huge mountain peaks, part of the wall that shut us in, over against us in a height we had not dared ascribe to the sky itself.By and by the shadow of these mountains rose on the westerly wall.It crept up at first slowly, extinguishing color; afterwards more rapidly as the sun approached the horizon.
The sunlight disappeared.A moment's gray intervened, and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid on the peaks its enchantment.Little by little that too faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded by the glory of a dream that continued with it after the others.Heretofore it had seemed to us an insignificant peak, apparently overtopped by many, but by this token we knew it to be the highest of them all.
Then ensued another pause, as though to give the invisible scene-shifter time to accomplish his work, followed by a shower of evening coolness, that seemed to sift through the trees like a soft and gentle rain.
We ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a trifle uncertainly at the food, wondering at the distant mountain on which the Day had made its final stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy dark that flowed down the canon in the manner of a heavy smoke.
In the notch between the two huge mountains blazed a star,--accurately in the notch, like the front sight of a rifle sighted into the marvelous depths of space.Then the moon rose.
First we knew of it when it touched the crest of our two mountains.The night has strange effects on the hills.A moment before they had menaced black and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the moon their very substance seemed to dissolve, leaving in the upper atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous, fragile, ghostly simulacrums of themselves you could imagine in the realms of fairy-land.They seemed actually to float, to poise like cloud-shapes about to dissolve.And against them were cast the inky silhouettes of three fir-trees in the shadow near at hand.
Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out to us with the voices of old accustomed friends in another wilderness.The winds rustled.
