"--the thing jumped from
side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and
away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men
hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."

Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like
stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are
tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every
climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at
every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,
or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.

Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching
themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the
mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as
wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden
chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading
ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--!

Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous
enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often
followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like
banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?

A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain
by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line
rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the
inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand
feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was
nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail
from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen
to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to
regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.
But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing
as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no
larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer
looked back over his shoulder.

"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the
trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his
words.

"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of