pretended to be good natured, but to me who had always been so vigorous and active and enduring it was not fun.  It was tragic.  But all was not gloom for me.  This very afternoon Nielsen, the giant, showed that a stiff climb out of the canyon, at that eight thousand feet altitude, completely floored him.  Yet I accomplished that with comparative ease.  I could climb, which seemed proof that I was gaining.  A man becomes used to certain labors and exercises.  I thought the crosscut saw a wonderful tool to train a man, but it must require time.  It harked back to pioneer days when men were men.  Nielsen said he had lived among Mexican boys who sawed logs for nineteen cents apiece and earned seven dollars a day.  Copple said three minutes was good time to saw a four-foot log in two pieces.  So much for physical condition!  As for firewood, for which our crosscut saw was intended, pitch pine and yellow pine and spruce were all odorous and inflammable woods, but they did not make good firewood.  Dead aspen was good; dead oak the best.  It burned to red hot coals with little smoke.  As for camp-fires, any kind of dry wood pleased, smoke or no smoke.  In fact I loved the smell and color of wood-smoke, in spite of the fact that it made my eyes smart.

By October first, which was the opening day of the hunting season, I had labored at various exercises until I felt fit to pack a rifle through the woods.  R.C. and I went out alone on foot.  Not by any means was the day auspicious.  The sun tried to show through a steely haze, making only a pale shift of sunshine.  And the air was rather chilly.  Enthusiasm, however, knew no deterrents.  We walked a mile down Beaver Dam Canyon, then climbed the western slope.  As long as the sun shone I knew the country fairly well, or rather my direction.  We slipped along through the silent woods, satisfied with everything.  Presently the sun broke through the clouds, and shone fitfully, making intervals of shadow, and others of golden-green verdure.

Along an edge of one of the grassy parks we came across fresh deer tracks.  Several deer had run out of the woods just ahead of us, evidently having winded us.  One track was that of a big buck.  We trailed these tracks across the park, then made a detour in hopes of heading the deer off, but failed.  A huge, dark cloud scudded out of the west and let down a shower of fine rain.  We kept dry under a spreading spruce.  The forest then was gloomy and cool with only a faint moan of wind and pattering of raindrops to break the silence.  The cloud passed by, the sun shone again, the forest glittered in its dress of diamonds.  There had been but little frost, so that aspen and maple thickets had not yet taken on their cloth of gold and blaze of red.  Most of the leaves were still on the trees, making these thickets impossible to see into.  We hunted along the edges of these, and across the wide, open ridge from canyon to canyon, and saw nothing but old tracks.  Black and white clouds rolled up and brought a squall.  We took to another spruce tent for shelter.  After this squall the sky became obscured by a field of gray cloud through which the sun shone dimly.  This matter worried me.  I was aware of my direction then, but if I lost the sun I would soon be in difficulties.