In the daytime the burros would graze off a hundred yards or more, but as twilight came on they would edge in toward camp. And all night long they would stay close to the camp-fire. This was instinct. They seemed to act on the principle that caution was the parent of safety. The loud, piercing, scream of the mountain lion had terrified their ancestry since Cortez had made the conquest of Mexico. The second night we were at this camp we were awakened by the cries of one of these creatures, which appeared not more than 300 yards south of us. Just north of us was a sheer, almost perpendicular battlement of decomposed quartz rising some ten or twelve hundred feet higher than where we were. This weird, almost human cry would echo back to us. It was not a roar, but more like a cry of distress, which the brute kept up at intervals for nearly half an hour, without seeming to change position. At the first outcry we all got up. I "chunked up" our camp-fire, replenished it with dry fuel, and soon we had a big blaze. As the flames leaped up and the flitting shadows appeared among the scattering spruce and aspen along the little prong of the Picorice, together with the sound of the water-fall just above us, the neighing of my own horse, the closely huddled burros at the fireside, the long-drawn-out wail of the lion, the superstitious Mexican cook, crossing himself and muttering something about the Virgin Mary, made a show worth going a long ways to see and hear. At this camp our daily routine was about as follows: Breakfast about 7 A. M. Old Mr. Justice, the mineralogist, would take his gun and fishing-tackle and start down the cañon to where two other little brooks came into the one on which we were camped. He, generally, was not absent more than two or three hours, when he would come back with a fine string of mountain trout. The Doctor and myself would leave camp just after breakfast, each carrying a stout tarpaulin pouch about the size of an army haversack hung over our shoulders regulation style. We carried a stone-hammer, a small pick, a hatchet, our guns, and lunch. We would take a certain direction for the hunting of specimens. Neither of us knew anything about mining or minerals. When we found anything that we thought might contain precious metals, we would take a chunk of it, number it, pasting a piece of paper on it, marking the spot where we found it with a corresponding number. But it is safe to say that after one of these day cruises, we could not go back and find half the places where we had picked up specimens, especially when we were above timber-line around Old Baldy; for here we would zigzag around minor buttes, cross over gorges, up slopes, and down steep inclines, ever keeping in our mind the way back to camp, and a weather eye out for old Ephraim, or a cinnamon bear, whose territory we were then in. When the afternoon was pretty well gone we would head for camp, and never failed but once to strike it all right.