But in ten days he had not appeared, which was not
surprising, for there was twenty-five feet of snow, and when the snow
had frozen so that rescuers could travel over the crust, they went up
after him. He was lying in one of the bunks of his cabin with a
mattress over him, frozen to death.
So, Dan said, they covered him in the snow with a mattress, and went
back in the spring to bury him.
Every winter, in those mountain valleys, men who cannot get their
outfits out before the snow shoot their horses or cut their throats
rather than let them freeze or starve to death. It is a grim country,
the Cascade country. One man shot nine in this very valley last winter.
Our naturalist had been caught the winter before in the first snowstorm
of the season. He was from daylight until eight o'clock at night making
two miles of trail. He had to break it, foot by foot, for the horses.
As we rode up the gorge toward the pass, it was evident, from the amount
of snow in the mountains, that stories had not been exaggerated. The
packers looked dubious. Even if we could make the climb to Doubtful
Lake, it seemed impossible that we could get farther.
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