At the time, I was camped in a beautiful valley high among the mountains which divide southwestern Montana from Idaho. The weather was cold, and there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground, so that the conditions were favorable for tracking and stalking. The country was well wooded, but the forest was not dense, and there were many open glades. Early one morning, just about dawn, the cook, who had been up for a few minutes, waked me, to say that a bull wapiti was calling not far off. I rolled out of my bed and was dressed in short order. The bull had by this time passed the camp, and was travelling toward a range of mountains on the other side of the stream which ran down the valley bottom. He was evidently not alarmed, for he was still challenging. I gulped down a cup of hot coffee, munched a piece of hardtack, and thrust four or five other pieces and a cold elk tongue into my hunting-shirt, and then, as it had grown light enough to travel, started after the wapiti. I supposed that in a few minutes I should either have overtaken him or abandoned the pursuit, and I took the food with me simply because in the wilderness it never pays to be unprepared for emergencies. The wisdom of such a course was shown in this instance by the fact that I did not see camp again until long after dark. I at first tried to cut off the wapiti by trotting through the woods toward the pass for which I supposed he was headed. The morning was cold, and, as always happens at the outset when one starts to take violent exercise under such circumstances, the running caused me to break into a perspiration; so that the first time I stopped to listen for the wapiti a regular fog rose over my glasses and then froze on them. I could not see a thing, and after wiping them found I had to keep gently moving in order to prevent them from clouding over again. It is on such cold mornings, or else in very rainy weather, that the man who has not been gifted with good eyes is most sensible of his limitations. I once lost a caribou which I had been following at speed over the snow because when I came into sight and halted the moisture instantly formed and froze on my glasses so that I could not see anything, and before I got them clear the game had vanished. Whatever happened, I was bound that I should not lose this wapiti from a similar accident.