A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing. But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer looked back over his shoulder. "Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his words. "What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?" "Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the sound." "And when no sound comes back?" "Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still! People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you chills!" So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky. If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness. Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell tinkling.