Here, again, they lost considerable time; for even Davoren’s stronger mind was beguiled by the glory of that splendid scene. He consented to a week’s halt on the margin of the Athabasca, climbed the mountain-steeps with his friend, chased the bighorn with footstep light and daring as the chamois-hunter’s; and found himself sometimes, after the keen pleasures of the hunt, with his moccasins in rags, and his naked feet cut and bleeding, a fact of which he had been supremely unconscious so long as the chase lasted. Sometimes, after descending to the lower earth, laden with their quarry, the hunters looked upward and saw the precipices they had trodden, the narrow cornice of rock along which they had run in pursuit of their prey—saw, and shuddered. Had they been really within a hair’s-breadth of death? These were the brightest days of their journey. Their stores were yet ample, and seemed inexhaustible. They feasted on fresh meat nightly; yet, with a laudable prudence, smoked and dried some portion of their prey. In the indulgence of their sporting propensities they squandered a good deal of ammunition. They smoked half-a-dozen pipes of tobacco daily. In a word, they enjoyed the present, with a culpable shortsightedness as to the future. This delay turned the balance against them. While they loitered, autumn stole on with footstep almost impalpable, in that region of evergreen. The first sharp frost of early October awakened Lucius to a sense of their folly. He gave the word for the march forward, refusing to listen to Geoffrey’s entreaty for one day more—one more wild hunt among those mighty crags between earth and sky. The sea-captain and Kekek-ooarsis, their Indian guide, had been meritoriously employed during this delay in constructing a raft for the passage of the Athabasca, at this point a wide lake whose peaceful waters spread themselves amid an amphitheatre of mountains. While they were getting ready for the passage of the river they were surprised by a party of half-breeds—friendly, but starving. Anxious as they were to husband their resources, humanity compelled them to furnish these hapless wanderers with a meal. In return for this hospitality, the natives gave them some good advice, urging them on no account to trust themselves to the current of the river—a mode of transit which seemed easy and tempting—as it abounded in dangerous rapids. They afforded farther information as to the trail on ahead, and these sons of the old and new world parted, well pleased with one another.