Adventures in contentment truly--the utter content of simplicity and isolation. Also, ventures in optimism, for where the trails wind mountainward there is just one place for the pessimist, and that is at home. [Illustration: A trailside dip in a mountain lake] [Illustration: "Sliding down snow-fields is fun, though chilly"] The infallible Mr. Webster defines success as "the prosperous termination of an enterprise." Mr. Webster is wrong, however, when it comes to camping, as my friend Mac and I recently demonstrated beyond possibility of argument. The prime object of the trip in question was game. We were out ten days and returned with no game; the venison we counted ours still roams the hills, and the grouse are sunning themselves--except the half-dozen the puppies ate! It came about in this wise. We started in sunshine and forthwith encountered the business end of a storm, comprised, in about equal parts, of blizzard, tropical downpour, and tornado. It continued for four days, soaked and half-froze us, and swept the highlands clean of game, in preference for sheltered valleys, far away and inaccessible to us. We hunted persistently, however, and walked countless miles. Incidentally, we lost our horses, and spent one strenuous day tracking them. Finally Fortune relented a trifle and we bagged a half-dozen grouse, which we treasured and bore homeward for our family tables. But a persistently unkind fate elected that we sleep beside a forest ranger's cabin where also reposed a litter of spaniel puppies, who forced an entrance to our packs in the night and devoured every vestige of grouse except a few of the less nutritious feathers. Assuredly that enterprise had no prosperous termination; yet, somehow, in the illogical way of the woods it seemed to us a success--we had enjoyed it so! After all, camping is a queer game, totally inexplicable to the uninitiated. As with some kinds of sinning, the more you do the more you desire. Assuredly it is a madness--a species of midsummer madness, in whose throes the sufferer renounces most of the comforts of civilization, assuming instead all the discomforts of the wilderness. These campers are lovers of the Open, and like lovers the world over, there is no reason in them. In the wooing season they hie in pursuit of their beckoning mistress, who permits closest approach, seemingly, where the trails are the least trodden, the timber the tallest, and the mountains the mightiest. There are many delightful methods of taking such pilgrimages, but none more alluring than a-horseback, with all one's worldly goods lashed to the back of a pack-horse, so that freedom of movement is limited only by one's will and one's woodcraft.