until eight o'clock at night making
two miles of trail. He had to break it, foot by foot, for the horses.

As we rode up the gorge toward the pass, it was evident, from the amount
of snow in the mountains, that stories had not been exaggerated. The
packers looked dubious. Even if we could make the climb to Doubtful
Lake, it seemed impossible that we could get farther. But the monotony
of the long ride was broken that afternoon by our first sight, as a
party, of a bear.

[Illustration: _Mountain miles: The trail up Swiftcurrent Pass, Glacier
National Park_]

It came out on a ledge of the mountain, perhaps three hundred yards
away, and proceeded, with great deliberation, to walk across a
rock-slide. It paid no attention whatever to us and to the wild
excitement which followed its discovery. Instantly, the three junior
Rineharts were off their horses, and our artillery attack was being
prepared. At the first shot, the pack-ponies went crazy. They lunged and
jumped, and even Buddy showed signs of strain, leaping what I imagine to
be some eleven feet in the air and coming back on four rigid knees.
Followed such a peppering of that cliff as it had never had before.
Little clouds of rock-dust rose above the bear, in front of him, behind
him, and below him. He stopped, mildly astonished, and looked around.
More noise, more bucking on the trail, more dust. The bear walked on a
trifle faster.

It had been arranged that the first bear was to be left for the juniors.
So the packers and the rest of the party watched and advised.

But, as I have related elsewhere in this narrative, there were no
casualties. The bear, as far as I know, is living to-day, an honored
member of his community, and still telling how he survived the great
war. At last he disappeared into a cave, and we went on without so much
as a single skin to decorate a college room.

We went on.

What odds and ends of knowledge we picked up on those long days in the
saddle! That if lightning strikes a pine even lightly, it kills, but
that a fir will ordinarily survive; that mountain miles are measured
air-line, so that twenty-five miles may really be forty, and that, even
then, they are calculated on the level, so that one is credited with
only the base of the triangle while he is laboriously climbing up its
hypotenuse. I am personally acquainted with the hypotenuses of a good
many mountains, and there is no use trying to pretend that they are
bases. They are n