No matter what the weather, he usually slept outdoors. He understood, however, that he was welcome to come into my cabin day or night, and was a frequent caller. In the cabin he was dignified and never used it as a place of amusement. IV Scotch enjoyed being with me, and great times we had together. Many of our best days were in the wilds. Here he often suffered from hunger, cold, hardships, and sometimes from accident; yet never did he complain. Usually he endured the unpleasant things as a matter of course. Though very lonely when left by himself, he never allowed this feeling to cause a slighting of duty. On one occasion he was supremely tried but did his duty as he understood it and was faithful under circumstances of loneliness, danger, and possible death. At the close of one of our winter trips, Scotch and I started across the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains in face of weather conditions that indicated a snowstorm or a blizzard before we could gain the other side. We had eaten the last of our food twenty-four hours before, and could no longer wait for fair weather. So off we started to scale the snowy steeps of the cold, gray heights a thousand feet above. The mountains already were deeply snow-covered and it would have been a hard trip even without the discomforts and dangers of a storm. I was on snowshoes, and for a week we had been camping and tramping through the snowy forests and glacier meadows at the source of Grand River, two miles above the sea. The primeval Rocky Mountain forests are just as near to Nature's heart in winter as in summer. I had found so much to study and enjoy that the long distance from a food-supply, even when the last mouthful was eaten, had not aroused me to the seriousness of the situation. Scotch had not complained, and appeared to have the keenest collie interest in the tracks and trails, the scenes and silences away from the haunts of man. The snow lay seven feet deep, but by keeping in my snowshoe-tracks Scotch easily followed me about. Our last camp was in the depths of an alpine forest, at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Here, though zero weather prevailed, we were easily comfortable beside a fire under the protection of an overhanging cliff. After a walk through woods the sun came blazing in our faces past the snow-piled crags on Long's Peak, and threw slender blue shadows of the spiry spruces far out in a white glacier meadow to meet us. Reëntering the tall but open woods, we saw, down the long aisles and limb-arched avenues, a forest of tree-columns, entangled in sunlight and shadow, standing on a snowy marble floor. We were on the Pacific slope, and our plan was to cross the summit by the shortest way between timber-line there and timber-line on the Atlantic side. This meant ascending a thousand feet and descending an equal distance, traveling five miles amid bleak, rugged environment.