ail was possible, we would camp at Doubtful Lake.

XIV

DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

The first part of that adventurous day was quiet. We moved sedately
along on an overgrown trail, mountain walls so close on each side that
the valley lay in shadow. I rode next to Dan Devore that day, and on the
trail he stopped his horse and showed me the place where Hughie McKeever
was found.

Dan Devore and Hughie McKeever went out one November to go up to
Horseshoe Basin. Dan left before the heaviest snows came, leaving
McKeever alone. When McKeever had not appeared by February, Dan went in
for him. His cabin was empty.

He had kept a diary up to the 24th of December, when it stopped
abruptly. There were a few marten skins in the cabin, and his outfit.
That was all. In some cottonwoods, not far from the camp, they found his
hatchet and his bag hanging to a tree.

It looked for a time, as though the mystery of Hughie McKeever's
disappearance would be one of the unsolved tragedies of the mountains.
But a trapper, whose route took him along Thunder Creek that spring,
noticed that his dog made a side trip each time, away from the trail. At
last he investigated, and found the body of Hughie McKeever. He had
probably been caught in a snow-slide, for his leg was broken below the
knee. Unable to walk, he had put his snowshoes on his hands and,
dragging the broken leg, had crawled six miles through the snow and ice
of the mountain winter. When he was found, he was only a mile and a half
from his cabin and safety.

There are many other tragedies of that valley. There was a man who went
up Bridge Creek to see a claim he had located there. He was to be out
four days. But in ten days he had not appeared, which was not
surprising, for there was twenty-five feet of snow, and when the snow
had frozen so that rescuers could travel over the crust, they went up
after him. He was lying in one of the bunks of his cabin with a
mattress over him, frozen to death.

So, Dan said, they covered him in the snow with a mattress, and went
back in the spring to bury him.

Every winter, in those mountain valleys, men who cannot get their
outfits out before the snow shoot their horses or cut their throats
rather than let them freeze or starve to death. It is a grim country,
the Cascade country. One man shot nine in this very valley last winter.

Our naturalist had been caught the winter before in the first snowstorm
of the season. He was from daylight