How I Extricated Myself From The Difficulty, Deponent
Sayeth Not.
The rest of the evening has been spent in preparing
to cross the mountains.
Chalmers says he knows the way well, and
that we shall sleep to-morrow at the foot of Long's Peak. Mrs.
Chalmers repents of having consented, and conjures up doleful
visions of what the family will come to when left headless, and
of disasters among the cows and hens. I could tell her that the
eldest son and the "hired man" have plotted to close the saw-mill
and go on a hunting and fishing expedition, that the cows will
stray, and that the individual spoken respectfully of as "Mr.
Skunk" will make havoc in the hen-house.
NAMELESS REGION, ROCKY MOUNTAINS, September.
This is indeed far removed. It seems farther away from you than
any place I have been to yet, except the frozen top of the
volcano of Mauna Loa. It is so little profaned by man that if
one were compelled to live here in solitude one might truly say
of the bears, deer, and elk which abound, "Their tameness is
shocking to me." It is the world of "big game." Just now a
heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long,
stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so
near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under
his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of
us last night.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 57 of 274
Words from 15488 to 15739
of 74789
