.

On that first part of the trip, we had three dogs with us--Chubb and
Doc, as well as Whiskers. They ran in the dust with their tongues out,
and lay panting under bushes at each stop. Here and there we found the
track of sheep driven into the mountain to graze. For a hundred or two
hundred feet in width, it was eaten completely clean, for sheep have a
way of tearing up even the roots of the grass so that nothing green
lives behind them. They carry blight into a country like this.

Then, at last, we found the first arrow of the journey, and turned off
the trail to camp.

On that first evening, the arrow landed us in a great spruce grove where
the trees averaged a hundred and twenty-five feet in height. Below, the
ground was cleared and level and covered with fine moss. The great gray
trunks rose to Gothic arches of green. It was a churchly place. And
running through it were little streams living with trout.

And in this saintly spot, quiet and peaceful, its only noise the
babbling of little rivers, dwelt billions on billions of mosquitoes that
were for the first time learning the delights of the human frame as
food.

There was no getting away from them. Open our mouths and we inhaled
them. They hung in dense clouds about us and fought over the best
locations. They held loud and noisy conversations about us, and got in
our ears and up our nostrils and into our coffee. They went
trout-fishing with us and put up the tents with us; dined with us and on
us. But they let us alone at night.

It is a curious thing about the mountain mosquito as I know him. He is a
lazy insect. He retires at sundown and does not begin to get in any
active work until eight o'clock the following morning. He keeps union
hours.

Something of this we had anticipated, and I had ordered
mosquito-netting, to be worn as veils. When it was unrolled, it proved
to be a brilliant scarlet, a scarlet which faded in hot weather on to
necks and faces and turned us suddenly red and hideous.

Although it was late in the afternoon when we reached that first camp,
Camp Romany, two or three of us caught more than a hundred trout before
sundown. We should have done better had it not been necessary to stop
and scratch every thirty seconds.

That night, the Woodsman built a great bonfire. We huddled about it,
glad of its warmth, for although the days were hot, the nights, with the
wind from the snow-covered peaks overhead, were very cold. The tall,
unbranch