ge.
When I had almost reached the jagged rocks, the snow-cornice caved
upon me, and not only buried me, but came perilously near knocking me
into the depths beneath. But at last I stood upon the top in safety.

A short walk from the top brought me out upon a high hill of snow that
sloped steeply down into the woods. The snow was soft, and I sat down
in it and slid "a blue streak"--my blue overalls recording the
streak--for a quarter of a mile, and then came to a sudden and
confusing stop; one of my webs had caught on a spine of one of the
dwarfed and almost buried trees at timber-line.

When I had traveled a short distance below timber-line, a fearful
crashing caused me to turn; I was in time to see fragments of snow
flying in all directions, and snow-dust boiling up in a great geyser
column. A snow-slide had swept down and struck a granite cliff. As I
stood there, another slide started on the heights above timber, and
with a far-off roar swept down in awful magnificence, with a
comet-like tail of snow-dust. Just at timber-line it struck a ledge
and glanced to one side, and at the same time shot up into the air so
high that for an instant I saw the treetops beneath it. But it came
back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it
crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the
bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees
that it had crushed down and swept before it.

As I had left the trail on the heights, I was now far from it and in a
rugged and wholly unfrequented section, so that coming upon the fresh
tracks of a mountain lion did not surprise me. But I was not prepared
for what occurred soon afterward. Noticing a steamy vapor rising from
a hole in the snow by the protruding roots of an overturned tree, I
walked to the hole to learn the cause of it. One whiff of the vapor
stiffened my hair and limbered my legs. I shot down a steep slope,
dodging trees and rocks. The vapor was rank with the odor from a bear.

[Illustration: A SNOW-SLIDE TRACK]

At the bottom of the slope I found the frozen surface of a stream
much easier walking than the soft snow. All went well until I came to
some rapids, where, with no warning whatever, the thin ice dropped me
into the cold current among the boulders. I scrambled to my feet, with
the ice flying like broken glass. The water came only a little above
my knees, but as I had gone under the surface, and was completely
dre