ouse up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the
valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder
River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to
trap all through the valley.

But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily
foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in
the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.
beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be
misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the
hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the
mountaineers to their secret retreats.

Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.

Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,
Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the
Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with
their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River
Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping
from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the
_rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle
the spies by trapping from west to east.

Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing
southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom
they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward
on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in
time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.

Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at
Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been
notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;
possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.

Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers
Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals
could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the
mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer
dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten
the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,
explained the need to hasten provisions, and with