and creaked in the wind, we huddled
about the cook-stove in the light of a lantern, listening to the loud
talk of a couple of packers who were discussing their business with
enormous enthusiasm. Happily they grew sleepy at last and peace
settled upon us. I unrolled my sleeping bag and slept dreamlessly
until the "Russian nobleman," who did the cooking, waked me.

Morning broke bleak and desolate. Mysterious clouds which hid the
peaks were still streaming wildly down the canyon. We got away at
last, leaving behind us that sad little meadow and its gruesome
lakes, and began the slow and toilsome descent over slippery ledges
of rock, among endless rows of rotting carcasses, over poisonous
streams and through desolate, fire-marked, and ghastly forests of
small pines. Everywhere were the traces of the furious flood of
humankind that had broken over this height in the early spring.
Wreckage of sleighs, abandoned tackle, heaps of camp refuse,
clothing, and most eloquent of all the pathway itself, worn into the
pitiless iron ledges, made it possible for me to realize something of
the scene.

Down there in the gully, on the sullen drift of snow, the winter
trail could still be seen like an unclean ribbon and here, where the
shrivelled hides of horses lay thick, wound the summer pathway. Up
yonder summit, lock-stepped like a file of convicts, with tongues
protruding and breath roaring from their distended throats, thousands
of men had climbed with killing burdens on their backs, mad to reach
the great inland river and the gold belt. Like the men of the Long
Trail, they, too, had no time to find the gold under their feet.

It was terrible to see how on every slippery ledge the ranks of
horses had broken like waves to fall in heaps like rows of seaweed,
tumbled, contorted, and grinning. Their dried skins had taken on the
color of the soil, so that I sometimes set foot upon them without
realizing what they were. Many of them had saddles on and nearly all
had lead-ropes. Some of them had even been tied to trees and left to
starve.

In all this could be read the merciless greed and impracticability of
these goldseekers. Men who had never driven a horse in their lives,
and had no idea what an animal could do, or what he required to eat,
loaded their outfits upon some poor patient beast and drove him
without feed until, weakened and insecure of foot, he slipped and
fell on some one of these cruel ledges of flinty rock.

The busin