Gradually we worked back along the ridge toward camp, and headed several ravines that ran and widened down into the big canyon.  All at once R.C. held up a warning finger.  “Listen!” With abatement of breath I listened, but heard nothing except the mournful sough of the pines.  “Thought I heard a whistle,” he said.  We went on, all eyes and ears.

R.C. and I flattered ourselves that together we made rather a good hunting team.  We were fairly well versed in woodcraft and could slip along stealthily.  I possessed an Indian sense of direction that had never yet failed me.  To be sure we had much to learn about deer stalking.  But I had never hunted with any man whose ears were as quick as R.C.’s.  A naturally keen hearing, and many years of still hunting, accounted for this faculty.  As for myself, the one gift of which I was especially proud was my eyesight.  Almost invariably I could see game in the woods before any one who was with me.  This had applied to all my guides except Indians.  And I believed that five summers on the Pacific, searching the wide expanse of ocean for swordfish fins, had made my eyes all the keener for the woods.  R.C. and I played at a game in which he tried to hear the movement of some forest denizen before I saw it.  This fun for us dated back to boyhood days.

Suddenly R.C. stopped short, with his head turning to one side, and his body stiffening.  “I heard that whistle again,” he said.  We stood perfectly motionless for a long moment.  Then from far off in the forest I heard a high, clear, melodious, bugling note.  How thrilling, how lonely a sound!

“It’s a bull-elk,” I replied.  Then we sat down upon a log and listened.  R.C. had heard that whistle in Colorado, but had not recognized it.  Just as the mournful howl of a wolf is the wildest, most haunting sound of the wilderness, so is the bugle of the elk the noblest, most melodious and thrilling.  With tingling nerves and strained ears we listened.  We heard elk bugling in different directions, hard to locate.  One bull appeared to be low down, another high up, another working away.  R.C. and I decided to stalk them.  The law prohibited the killing of elk, but that was no reason why we might not trail them, and have the sport of seeing them in their native haunts.  So we stole softly through the woods, halting now and then to listen, pleased to note that every whistle we heard appeared to be closer.

At last, apparently only a deep thicketed ravine separated us from the ridge upon which the elk were bugling.  Here our stalk began to become really exciting.  We did not make any noise threading that wet thicket, and we ascended the opposite slope very cautiously.  What little wind there was blew from the elk toward us, so they could not scent us.  Once up on the edge of the ridge we halted to listen.  After a long time we heard a far-away bugle, then another at least half a mile distant.  Had we miscalculated?  R.C. was for working down the ridge and I was for