epeatedly, our horses frequently falling upon the
ice. Even harder upon them were their no less frequent slips among the
rocks of the banks.

Much to my relief, I was not required to witness the sufferings of the
poor beasts coming down through the worst of that terrible canyon. On
New Year's Day Brown and I were sent ahead to hunt. Within the first few
hours we had the good fortune to bring down a huge-horned mountain ram.
Leaving this in our path for the others to skin and dress, we struggled
on down the ever-narrowing valley all that day and the next without
sighting any other game.

On the third of January we found ourselves fighting our way along in the
gloomy depths of a cleft that wound and twisted through the very bowels
of the mountains. The bottom of this tremendous gorge was almost filled
with the foaming, roaring torrent of the river, while on either side the
cliffs towered skyward in sheer, precipitous precipices, thousands of
feet high. Never before had I seen or heard of such a terrific chasm,
and may I never again be caught in its like!

Leaping and slipping over the icy rocks beside the furious rapids and
falls, and creeping along the narrow ledges of ice that here and there
rimmed the less torrential stretches of the stream, we at last gained a
spot where a little ravine ran up through the face of the precipice. We
saw that it was impossible for us to descend that gloomy gorge even a
few yards farther. The icy waters of the roaring cascades swept the bed
of the chasm from wall to wall.

Yet to ascend the side cleft seemed no less beyond our power. The water,
running down from above earlier in the season, had coated the rocky
surface from top to bottom with an unbroken slide of ice. It seemed
outright madness to attempt that dizzy ascent. However, a man never
knows what he can do until he has tried. We set to, I with my tomahawk
and Brown with his axe, and by cutting footholds, turn about, in the ice
of the ravine's bottom, we slowly worked our way up the giddy rise.
Again and again we came near to slipping and so plunging headlong down
that glassy slide. After the first hundred feet, we dared no longer look
back below, for fear of being overcome with dizziness. Yet at last we
came to easier climbing, and, scaling the side of the ravine, found
ourselves safe on the mountain ridge, far above the river and its
cavernous gorge.

Here we soon killed a deer, and leaving the greater part of the carcass