The range man does not look upon riding as a formal parade, but likes to practise circus tricks, or lounge at ease while he smokes, reads a book, sings, or plays some musical instrument. I have seen the cowhand wile away the time by eating a quart of pickles. For my part, a luncheon from the wallets is part of the {189} procedure of every pack drive, followed by a comfortable nap in the saddle. Horses often doze at a walk, even, I suspect, at the trot, and a nap for man and horse adds a great deal to the endurance of both. As to going afoot, it takes a very steep down hill track to enforce such a thing upon me. Rumour says that we will walk half a mile to get a pony from pasture in order to ride a hundred yards on an errand. But to be afoot is for the range horseman the last depth of calamity and degradation. My last experience of this was a traverse of the Canadian Rockies, when my partner and I rode along the bed and bars of a river until we were washed away. After that we took to the bush, a wonderful labyrinth of deadfall, beaver swamp and snowslides, which we managed to climb through by following the tracks of some wapiti. We had to work about twenty hours a day, and the four days reduced our clothes and boots to rags, but our luck was better than that of another party of four men who tried the same pass that season and were not heard of afterwards. I will not tempt young travellers by giving them the name of that pass. GUIDANCE. While the range man never walks, but makes the saddle his home, and {190} lives at ease, it would be an error to suppose him unobservant. In wild countries one's life depends on alertness. [Sidenote: Scouting] Few range men trust a compass, which may be lost or broken, is hard to read at night, difficult to steady at any time, and apt to point at one's gun. Point the hour hand of your watch at the sun, and half way to XII is south (for the northern hemisphere). If the sky is overcast polish a coin or finger nail and hold a match or a pin upon it vertically. The upright match will cast a shadow made by the unseen sun. So much for the rule of thumb, but one's real reliance is on the indications of the landscape: the reading of trees and bushes as shaped by the prevalent wind; the reading of rocks or tree trunks for any mosses or lichens which grow on the side (north for northern hemisphere) on which the sun does not shine; and sundry other signs local to different regions. The constant habit of locating north grows to an instinct. In Petrograd, as a stranger unable to ask questions or read signs in Russian, on level alluvial land, in a thick winter night, without having seen one inch of the route before, I was able to walk by the shortest {191} cut three and a half miles directly to my hotel.