shore of Yellowstone Lake and the Madison
Mountains, by scaling which I could easily reach the settlements in
the Madison valley; and the other, to retrace my journey over the long
and discouraging route by which I had entered the country. Of these
routes the last-mentioned seemed the least inviting, probably because
I had so recently traversed it, and was familiar with its
difficulties. I had heard and read so much concerning the desolation
and elemental upheavals and violent waters of the upper valley of the
Snake, that I dared not attempt to return in that direction. The route
by the Madison Range, encumbered by the single obstruction of the
mountain barrier, was much the shortest, and so, most unwisely as will
hereafter appear, I adopted it.

Filling my pouches with thistle-roots, I took a parting survey of the
little solitude that had afforded me food and fire the preceding ten
days, and with something of that melancholy feeling experienced by one
who leaves his home to grapple with untried adventures, started for
the nearest point on Yellowstone Lake. All that day I traveled over
timber-heaps, amid tree-tops, and through thickets. At noon I took the
precaution to obtain fire. With a brand which I kept alive by frequent
blowing, and constant waving to and fro, at a late hour in the
afternoon, faint and exhausted, I kindled a fire for the night on the
only vacant spot I could find amid a dense wilderness of pines. The
deep gloom of the forest, in the spectral light which revealed on all
sides of me a compact and unending growth of trunks, and an impervious
canopy of somber foliage; the shrieking of night-birds; the
supernaturally human scream of the Mountain lion; the prolonged howl
of the wolf, made me insensible to all other forms of suffering.

[Illustration: A Night of Terror.]

The burn on my hip was so inflamed that I could only sleep in a
sitting posture. Seated with my back against a tree, the smoke from
the fire almost enveloping me in its suffocating folds, I vainly
tried, amid the din and uproar of this horrible serenade, to woo the
drowsy god. My imagination was instinct with terror. At one moment it
seemed as if, in the density of a thicket, I could see the blazing
eyes of a formidable forest monster fixed upon me, preparatory to a
deadly leap; at another I fancied that I heard the swift approach of a
pack of yelping wolves through the distant brushwood, which in a few
minutes would tear me limb from