“How do you know it’s alone?” Cap asked mildly. “Come on back to sleep. You believe in ha’nts? A trick of the wind, that’s all.”
I heard no further sound, so I followed Cap and turned in. And, although I lay awake for what seemed like long hours, I heard nothing more.
Maybe it was, like Cap suggested, a trick of the wind. But I didn’t believe it.
VIII
Nor was it a trick of the wind. Somewhere in those mountains I knew there was something… or somebody. ,..
When daylight came I was high in the hills. There was no trail where I rode. To the south there was, but I had switched off. I rode up into the trees, then got down from my horse and switched to moccasins. I went back over my tracks and smoothed them out. Then I mounted up again and headed higher.
Pines grew thick, giving way to spruce. Sometimes I was weaving among trees so close there was scarce room to pass, and half the time I was bent down low to get under branches, or was walking on the soft pine needles and leading that appaloosa.
It was in my mind that I would come out on the ridge not far from that first keyhole pass, and it worked out that way. I found myself on a crest where I could see far and away in all directions.
To the north a huge peak called Storm Bong shouldered against the bright sky, with sunlight on the snow. The canyon of the Vallecitos, through which I’d climbed, fell away steeply below me, and on my right I could look for miles over some of the most rugged country I ever saw.
I rode into the high valley where that ghost lake was. It looked unchanged until I got near it. My old trail was partly covered over by water. There had been rains since my last trip, and the lake was acres larger despite the run-off.
The trail down the chute was about the same. Maybe there was a mite more water over the trail, but not enough to interfere. Riding into my lonely valley, I felt like I was coming home.
First off, I checked the tree where I had left the meat hanging. The meat was gone, but there were no bones about, as there would have been if a wild animal had pulled it down. If there had been any tracks the rain had beat them out.
Next I went on to the mine, and scouted around. I left everything as it was, only I staked a claim, marking down its limits on a piece of tanned hide so’s I’d have a map if it came to trouble.
Then I set out to scout that valley, for it was in my mind that there must be an easier way out. And I discovered that the stream flowing down the chute actually flowed north. Then it took a sharp bend to the west and flowed down from the mountain to join the Vallecitos. For the first time I realized that the stream beside which Cap and I had camped was not the one that fell down the chute.
A dim trail, maybe left by ancient Indians, headed off to the east, and far off I could see several other high lakes. And, riding up through the trees to the ridge top, where I could look the country over, I found that across the valley and beyond a ridge was still another long, high valley. Through it a stream flowed almost due north.
Among the trees that lined the ridges which bordered these valleys there was some grass, but in the valley bottoms there were meadows, rich and green. Remembering the short-grass range country of Texas and the high plains, I thought what magnificent summer range these high valleys would make.
But my concern now was to find a new trail down to the Vallecitos and, if possible, to learn who lived up here and had taken my meat.
Riding north, I looked along the ridge toward the end. The valley seemed to be completely enclosed but, farther on, I discovered that it took a sharp turn, narrowed, and came to an end in a wall of forest.
It was there, under the trees, that I found a fresh footprint.
Dismounting, I followed the faint tracks. Here and there grass was still pressed down, so the trail must have been made while the dew was on it, early that very morning. Suddenly I found a snare. Here there were several footprints, but no blood and no hair., so evidently the snare had caught nothing. Squatting on my heels, I studied it. Cunningly done, it resembled no Indian snare I had seen.
I walked my horse across the high meadow that lay beyond the curtain of trees. The ground was nigh covered by alpine gold-flower, bright yellow, and almighty pretty to look at. And along some of the trickles running down from the melting snow a kind of primrose was growing.
The trees were mostly blue spruce, shading off into aspen and, on the high ridges above timber-line, there were a few squat bristle-cone pines, gnarled from their endless war with the wind.
A couple of times I found where whoever it was I was trailing had stopped to pick some kind of herb out of the grass, or to drink at a stream.
All of a sudden I came to a place where the tracks stopped. Here the person had climbed a big rock, and grass stains had rubbed off the moccasins onto the rock. The meaning was plain enough. He, she, it, or whatever, had caught sight of me trailing it.
From atop the boulder I sighted back down the way I had come and, sure enough, my back trail could be seen at a dozen points in the last few miles.
So I sat down on the rock and took time to study the country. Unless I was mistaken, that party was somewhere not too far off, a-looking me over. What I wished was for them to see I meant no harm.
After a while, I went back to my horse, which had been feeding on the good meadow grass. I rode across a trickle of water and up a long gouge in the mountainside until I topped out where there was nothing but a few bristle-cone pines, a land of gray gravel, and some scattered, lightning-struck trees.
Off to my right, and some distance ahead, I could see a stream running down the mountain to the northeast. It looked like here was another way out of this jumble of ridges and mountain meadows.
Starting the appaloosa ahead, I saw his ears come up. Following his look, I saw a movement, far off, at the edge of a clump of aspen on a slope. But before I could get out my glasses, whatever it was had gone. Riding on, I came to a place where somebody had been kneeling beside a snow-stream, evidently for a drink. If my guessing was right that was the third drink in the last couple of hours. Possibly it was less time than that… and in this high country, with moisture in the air, it seemed too much drinking. Nor was the weather that warm.
Puzzled, I started on again. All of a sudden the tracks weren’t hard to follow. Whoever it was had headed straight for some place, and was too busy getting there to think of covering trail … or else I was believed to be lost down below somewhere.
A moment later I saw where the person I followed had fallen down, then got up, and gone on. Sick… that drinking could mean fever. Sick and, unless I missed my guess, all alone. The tracks disappeared. It took me several minutes of circling and scouting to find the likely spot. From here on it was judgment more than tracks, for the person had taken to rock, and there was a-plenty of it.
The appaloosa made work of scrambling over that rock, so I got down and walked.
It was coming up to night, and there was no way I knew of to get down off the mountain at night.
Time to time I stopped, trying the air for smoke or sound, but there was none.
Whatever I was hunting had taken off in a wild area of boulders and lightning-struck trees, where the gray ridges had been lashed and whipped by storm.
Off on the horizon I could see great black thunderheads piling up, and I knew this place would be hell during an electrical storm. Somehow I had to get down from there, and fast. Time or two before, I’d been caught in high peaks by a storm, although never so high as this. I’d seen lightning leaping from peak to peak, and sometimes in sheets of blue flame.
The boulders were a maze. Great slabs of rock stood on knife edges, looking like rows of broken molars, split and rotten. Without warning, a canyon dropped away in front of me for maybe five hundred feet of almost sheer fall. Off to the left I could see an eyebrow of trail.