Thus, limping and reluctant, I took leave of my pets. The ambulance had arrived to rush me to the hospital where my knee was to be treated. As long as I could see them, they looked after me, wondering at my desertion. CHAPTER FIFTEEN ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK It had been my boyhood dream to find a region unspoiled by man, wild, primitive. When I saw that rugged wilderness called the Rockies I was sure I had found it. Miles and miles of virgin forest, innocent of ax and saw; miles and miles of fertile valleys, yet to feel the touch of plow; miles and miles of unclaimed homesteads with never the smoke of a settler's chimney! Deer and elk, sheep and bear roamed the forests, beavers preëmpted the valleys, trout spashed and rippled the waters of the lakes and rivers. Yes, this was purely primeval, natural, uncivilized. But the old-timers did not agree with me. Parson Lamb, whose nearest neighbor was ten miles away, complained that the country was being spoiled. "It's gotten so nowadays you can't see a mountain 'thout craning your neck around some fellow's shack; cabins everywhere cluttering up the scenery." I recalled my father's chuckling about the pioneers always moving on as soon as a country got settled up. Surely the Parson was having his little joke! One day when I was out looking for Mr. and Mrs. Peg, I ran upon an old trapper. "Huh!" he said, "won't be long till they won't be no critters atall. They ain't enough now to pay for trap-bait. Game ain't what it useter be in these parts, I tell you, sonny. I'm goin' ter pull up stakes for a real game country!" To me, lately from the thickly settled prairies of Kansas, practically destitute of game, their fears seemed unfounded. I thought they exaggerated, and could not understand their point of view. But I came to understand. I lived to see even greater changes take place, in the twenty-five years I wandered through the country, that Parson Lamb had witnessed from the day he hewed his way through the forest, that he might get his covered wagon into the valley, to that night when I fell across his threshold after pushing my bicycle over Bald Mountain. For even as I rambled and camped, a subtle change was taking place so slowly that for some time I was unaware of it. I saw fewer animals in a day's journey. At first, when I missed bands of deer or wild sheep, or some familiar bear, from their usual haunts, I assumed that they had shifted their range to more distant mountains. All at once I realized that for a long time I had not come upon a single elk nor even the tracks of one. I was startled. I made far excursions into the more remote regions, to verify my assumption that the game had merely retreated from the more settled parts. From the tops of lofty peaks, I looked down upon countless valleys with the hope that somewhere, surely, I would find them. I saw only a few stragglers.