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One winter I walked on snowshoes on the upper slopes of the "snowy"
range of the Rockies, from the Wyoming line on the north to near the
New Mexico line on the south. This was a long walk, and it was full of
amusement and adventure. I walked most of the way on the crest of the
continent. The broken nature of the surface gave me ups and downs.
Sometimes I would descend to the level of seven thousand feet, and
occasionally I climbed some peak that was fourteen thousand feet above
the tides.

I had not been out many days on this trip when I was caught in a storm
on the heights above tree-line. I at once started downward for the
woods. The way among the crags and precipices was slippery; the wind
threatened every moment to hurl me over a cliff; the wind-blown snow
filled the air so that I could see only a few feet, and at times not
at all. But it was too cold to stop. For two hours I fought my way
downward through the storm, and so dark was it during the last
half-hour that I literally felt my way with my staff. Once in the
woods, I took off a snowshoe, dug a large hole in the snow down to
the earth, built a fire, and soon forgot the perilous descent. After
eating from my supply of raisins, I dozed a little, and woke to find
all calm and the moon shining in glory on a snowy mountain-world of
peaks and pines. I put on my snowshoes, climbed upward beneath the
moon, and from the summit of Lead Mountain, thirteen thousand feet
high, saw the sun rise in splendor on a world of white.

The tracks and records in the snow which I read in passing made
something of a daily newspaper for me. They told much of news of the
wilds. Sometimes I read of the games that the snowshoe rabbit had
played; of a starving time among the brave mountain sheep on the
heights; of the quiet content in the ptarmigan neighborhood; of the
dinner that the pines had given the grouse; of the amusements and
exercises on the deer's stamping-ground; of the cunning of foxes; of
the visits of magpies, the excursions of lynxes, and the red records
of mountain lions.

The mountain lion is something of a game-hog and an epicure. He
prefers warm blood for every meal, and is very wasteful. I have much
evidence against him; his worst one-day record that I have shows five
tragedies. In this time he killed a mountain sheep, a fawn, a grouse,
a rabbit, and a porcupine; and as if this were not enough, he was
about to kill another sheep when a dark object on snowshoes