Soon after this began their time of trial and hardship. They had to cross the river many times in their journey—sometimes on rafts, sometimes fording the stream—and often in imminent peril of an abrupt ending of their troubles by drowning. They crossed pleasant oases of green prairie, verdant valleys all abloom with wild flowers, gentian and tiger lilies, cineraria, blue borage—the last-lingering traces of summer’s footfall in the sheltered nooks. Sometimes they came upon patches where the forest-trees were blackened by fire, or had fallen among the ashes of the underwood. Sometimes they had to cut their way through the wood, and made slow and painful progress. Sometimes they lost the trail, and only regained it after a day’s wasted labour. One of their horses died—the other was reduced to a mere skeleton—so rare had now become the glimpses of pasture. They looked at this spectral equine with sad prophetic eyes, not knowing how long it might be before they would be reduced to the painful necessity of cooking and eating him; and with a doleful foreboding that, when famine brought them to that strait, the faithful steed would be found to consist solely of bone and hide. So they tramped on laboriously and with a dogged patience till they lost the trail once more; and this time even the Indian’s sagacity proved utterly at fault, and all their efforts to regain it were vain. They found themselves in a trackless ring of forest, to them as darksome a circle as the lowest deep in Dante’s Inferno, and here beheld the first snow-storm fall white upon the black pine-tops. Here, in one of their vain wanderings in search of the lost track, they came upon a dead Indian, seated stark and ghastly at the foot of a giant pine, draped in his blanket, and bent as if still stooping over the ashes of the fire wherewith he had tried to keep the ebbing life warm in his wasted clay. This gruesome stranger was headless. Famine had wasted him to the very bone; his skin was mere parchment, stretched tightly over the gaunt skeleton; the whitening bones of his horse bestrewed the ground by his side. How he came in that awful condition, what had befallen the missing head, they knew not. Even conjecture was here at fault. But the spectacle struck them with indescribable horror. So too might they be found; the skeleton horse crouched dead at their feet, beside the ashes of the last fire at which their dim eyes had gazed in the final agonies of starvation. This incident made them desperate.