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long before we had discovered a pass to the opposite side."
"We must cross them," I reiterated. "We will cross them."
I had a plan, and that plan we carried out. It took some time.
First we made a permanent camp part way up the slopes where there
was good water. Then we set out in search of the great, shaggy
cave bear of the higher altitudes.
He is a mighty animal--a terrible animal. He is but little larger
than his cousin of the lesser, lower hills; but he makes up for it
in the awfulness of his ferocity and in the length and thickness
of his shaggy coat. It was his coat that we were after.
We came upon him quite unexpectedly. I was trudg-ing in advance
along a rocky trail worn smooth by the padded feet of countless
ages of wild beasts. At a shoul-der of the mountain around which
the path ran I came face to face with the Titan.
I was going up for a fur coat. He was coming down for breakfast.
Each realized that here was the very thing he sought.
With a horrid roar the beast charged me.
At my right the cliff rose straight upward for thou-sands of feet.
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At my left it dropped into a dim, abysmal canon.
In front of me was the bear.
Behind me was Perry.
I shouted to him in warning, and then I raised my rifle and fired
into the broad breast of the creature. There was no time to take
aim; the thing was too close upon me.
But that my bullet took effect was evident from the howl of rage
and pain that broke from the frothing jowls. It didn't stop him,
though.
I fired again, and then he was upon me. Down I went beneath his
ton of maddened, clawing flesh and bone and sinew.
I thought my time had come. I remember feeling sorry for poor old
Perry, left all alone in this inhos-pitable, savage world.
And then of a sudden I realized that the bear was gone and that I
was quite unharmed. I leaped to my feet, my rifle still clutched
in my hand, and looked about for my antagonist.
I thought that I should find him farther down the trail, probably
finishing Perry, and so I leaped in the direction I supposed him
to be, to find Perry perched upon a pro-jecting rock several feet
above the trail. My cry of warn-ing had given him time to reach
this point of safety.
There he squatted, his 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 re-turned to the
point at which the bear had hurled me down and peered over the edge
of the cliff into the abyss below.
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r r
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 di-minutive 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 discovered what seemed might prove a
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