eyes wide and his mouth ajar, the picture of abject terror and consternation. “Where is he?” he cried when he saw me. “Where is he?” “Didn’t he come this way?” I asked. “Nothing came this way,” replied the old man. “But I heard his roars—he must have been as large as an elephant.” “He was,” I admitted; “but where in the world do you suppose he disappeared to?” Then came a possible explanation to my mind. I returned to the point at which the bear had hurled me down and peered over the edge of the cliff into the abyss below. Far, far down I saw a small brown blotch near the bottom of the canon. It was the bear. My second shot must have killed him, and so his dead body, after hurling me to the path, had toppled over into the abyss. I shivered at the thought of how close I, too, must have been to going over with him. It took us a long time to reach the carcass, and arduous labor to remove the great pelt. But at last the thing was accomplished, and we returned to camp dragging the heavy trophy behind us. Here we devoted another considerable period to scraping and curing it. When this was done to our satisfaction we made heavy boots, trousers, and coats of the shaggy skin, turning the fur in. From the scraps we fashioned caps that came down around our ears, with flaps that fell about our shoulders and breasts. We were now fairly well equipped for our search for a pass to the opposite side of the Mountains of the Clouds. Our first step now was to move our camp upward to the very edge of the perpetual snows which cap this lofty range. Here we built a snug, secure little hut, which we provisioned and stored with fuel for its diminutive fireplace. With our hut as a base we sallied forth in search of a pass across the range. Our every move was carefully noted upon our maps which we now kept in duplicate. By this means we were saved tedious and unnecessary retracing of ways already explored. Systematically we worked upward in both directions from our base, and when we had at last
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