Joe unlimbered the moving-picture camera,
and the Head used the remainder of his small stock of iodine on the
injured horses. The sun shone on the flowers and the snow, on the pail
in which our cocoa was cooking, on the barrels of our unused guns and
the buckles of the saddles. We watched the pack-horses coming down, tiny
pin-point figures, oddly distorted by the great packs. And we rested for
the descent.
I do not know why we thought that descent from Cascade Pass on the
Pacific side was going to be easy. It was by far the most nerve-racking
part of the trip. Yet we started off blithely enough. Perhaps Buddy knew
that he was the first horse to make that desperate excursion. He
developed a strange nervousness, and took to leaping off the trail in
bad places, so that one moment I was a part of the procession and the
next was likely to be six feet above the trail on a rocky ledge, with no
apparent way to get down.
We had expected that there would be less snow on the western slope, but
at the beginning of the trip we found snow everywhere. And whereas
before the rock-slides had been wretchedly uncomfortable but at
comparatively low altitudes, now we found ourselves climbing across
slides which hugged the mountain thousands of feet above the valley.
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