Cautiously Ross advanced toward the voice, testing the strength of the crust at every step until it gave under the stamping of his heel. Then he stopped and found himself looking down a section of shelving crust into a hole filled with loose snow, willow tops--and Leslie. "Great guns!" cried Ross. "What are you doing in there?" Leslie attempted to respond nonchalantly, but his face was nearly as white as the bed of snow he was occupying, and his teeth chattered with cold and fright. "I've been flopping around here for half an hour yelling," he explained jerkily, "and have only managed to sink deeper and break off more crust and more willow tops." "Rub your nose and face the next thing you do," advised Ross immediately, "or you'll be a mass of frost bite." He rubbed his own nose meditatively. Then grasping the axe he cried cheerfully, "Hold the fort a while longer down there, Less, and relief will arrive. See here! I hadn't finished the wood and I ran off with the axe. Now I'll skiddoo and cut a pole and help you out. And don't forget to rub your face!" Laboriously and fearfully--lest he meet with Leslie's fate--Ross climbed the side of the mountain until he stood among the branches of a sturdy spruce, the depth of snow raising him to that height. Cutting and trimming a long limb, he dragged it back to the canon. Projecting one end over the hole he sat hard on the other. Then Leslie, by jumping and seizing the projecting end, and bracing against the sloping sheet of crust, climbed, breathless but relieved, to the surface of the snow. "I tell you what, Ross," he said emphatically as they made their way gingerly back to the shack, "I've done all the research work I want to in this canon!" He shivered and slapped his hands smartly together. "Without snow-shoes we are helpless here, and the McKenzies know it!" To make snow-shoes without boards or small nails or a hammer was impossible to workmen of their inexperience. They broke up some boxes and put in all their spare time for days experimenting, but to no purpose. "Even if we did succeed, Less," Ross comforted himself one day as he looked gloomily at their latest failure, "we couldn't escape from here. We have no idea where we are, whether we are nearer Red Lodge or Cody or Timbuctoo. We would merely start out and leave a half-way comfortable certainty for a mighty ticklish uncertainty." "That's right," agreed Leslie, "and we couldn't pack enough food on our backs to last many days, nor can we tell when a storm is coming." In fact, storms were the order of the day. By the middle of February immense masses of snow curled out over the cliffs on the side of the mountain opposite the shack waiting for the warm chinooks of spring to send them hurtling down into the canon. Fortunately, the mountain above the shack was lower than its neighbors, and the face, heavily wooded, sloped back more gently until it reached a great elevation.