rnal credit of our guides, we made it. For the
upper five miles below Cloudy Pass it was touch and go. Even with the
sharp hatchet of the Woodsman ahead, with his blazes on the trees where
the trail had been obliterated, it was the hardest kind of going.

Here were ditches that the horses leaped; here were rushing streams
where they could hardly keep their footing. Again, a long mile or two of
swamp and almost impenetrable jungle, where only the Woodsman's
axe-marks gave us courage to go on. We were mired at times, and again
there were long stretches over rock-slides, where the horses scrambled
like cats.

But with every mile there came a sense of exhilaration. We were making
progress.

There was little or no life to be seen. The Woodsman, going ahead of us,
encountered a brown bear reaching up for a cluster of salmon-berries. He
ambled away, quite unconcerned, and happily ignorant of that desperate
trio of junior Rineharts, bearing down on him with almost the entire
contents of the best gun shop in Spokane.

It should have been a great place for bears, that Agnes Creek Valley.
There were ripe huckleberries, service-berries, salmon-and
manzanita-berries. There were plenty of places where, if I had been a
bear, I should have been entirely happy--caves and great rocks, and
good, cold water. And I believe they were there. But thirty-one horses
and a sort of family tendency to see if there is an echo anywhere about,
and such loud inquiries as, "Are you all right, mother?" and "Who the
dickens has any matches?"--these things are fatal to seeing wild life.

Indeed, the next time I am overcome by one of my mad desires to see a
bear, I shall go to the zoo.

It was fifteen years, I believe, since Dan Devore had seen the Agnes
Creek Valley. From the condition of the trail, I am inclined to think
that Dan was the last man who had ever used it. And such a wonderland
as it is! Such marvels of flowers as we descended, such wild
tiger-lilies and columbines and Mariposa lilies! What berries and
queen's-cup and chalice-cup and bird's-bill! There was trillium, too,
although it was not in bloom, and devil's-club, a plant which stings and
sets up a painful swelling. There were yew trees, those trees which the
Indians use for making their bows, wild white rhododendron and spirea,
cottonwood, white pine, hemlock, Douglas spruce, and white fir.
Everywhere there was mountain-ash, the berries beloved of bears. And
high up on the mountain