om the same cause. Your peace of mind deserts
you. You stare straight ahead, sit VERY light indeed, and perhaps turn
the least bit sick. The horse, however, does not mind, nor will you,
after a little. There is absolutely nothing to do but to sit steady
and give your animal his head. In a fairly extended experience I never
got off the edge but once. Then somebody shot a gun immediately ahead;
my horse tried to turn around, slipped, and slid backwards until he
overhung the chasm. Fortunately his hind feet caught a tiny bush. He
gave a mighty heave, and regained the trail. Afterwards I took a look
and found that there were no more bushes for a hundred feet either way.

Next in terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by lacets up a very
steep side hill. The effect is cumulative. Each turn brings you one
stage higher, adds definitely one more unit to the test of your
hardihood. This last has not terrified you; how about the next? or the
next? or the one after that? There is not the slightest danger. You
appreciate this point after you have met head-on some old-timer. After
you have speculated frantically how you are to pass him, he solves the
problem by calmly turning his horse off the edge and sliding to the
next lacet below. Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not
much matter whether you get off such a trail or not.

The real bad places are quite as likely to be on the level as on the
slant. The tremendous granite slides, where the cliff has avalanched
thousands of tons of loose jagged rock-fragments across the passage,
are the worst. There your horse has to be a goat in balance. He must
pick his way from the top of one fragment to the other, and if he slips
into the interstices he probably breaks a leg. In some parts of the
granite country are also smooth rock aprons where footing is especially
difficult, and where often a slip on them means a toboggan chute off
into space. I know of one spot where such an apron curves off the
shoulder of the mountain. Your horse slides directly down it until his
hoofs encounter a little crevice. Checking at this, he turns sharp to
the left and so off to the good trail again. If he does not check at
the little crevice, he slides on over the curve of the shoulder and
lands too far down to bury.

Loose rocks in numbers on a very steep and narrow trail are always an
abomination, and a numerous abomination at that. A horse slides,
skates, slithers. It has a