Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade. Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises. Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it up, out of very sympathy went away. Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead"--the thing jumped from side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front." Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted, or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree. Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--! Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog. These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?