The rubber band
round the neck allows it to be lifted with ease.
I do not wish to give the impression that there were mosquitoes
everywhere. But when there were mosquitoes, there was nothing
clandestine about it.
The next day we crossed Cloudy Pass and started down the Agnes Creek
Valley. It was to be a forced march of twenty-five miles over a trail
which no one was sure existed. There had, at one time, been a trail, but
avalanches have a way, in these mountain valleys, of destroying all
landmarks, and rock-slides come down from the great cliffs, fill
creek-beds, and form swamps. Whether we could get down at all or not was
a question. To the eternal credit of our guides, we made it. For the
upper five miles below Cloudy Pass it was touch and go. Even with the
sharp hatchet of the Woodsman ahead, with his blazes on the trees where
the trail had been obliterated, it was the hardest kind of going.
Here were ditches that the horses leaped; here were rushing streams
where they could hardly keep their footing. Again, a long mile or two of
swamp and almost impenetrable jungle, where only the Woodsman's
axe-marks gave us courage to go on.
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