Once more mounted, Wade turned his attention to the burned district.  It was a dreary, hideous splotch, a blackened slash in the green cover of the mountain.  It sloped down into a wide hollow and up another bare slope.  The ground was littered with bleached logs, trees that had been killed first by fire and then felled by wind.  Here and there a lofty, spectral trunk still withstood the blasts.  Across the hollow sloped a considerable area where all trees were dead and still standing—­a melancholy sight.  Beyond, and far round and down to the left, opened up a slope of spruce and bare ridge, where a few cedars showed dark, and then came black, spear-tipped forest again, leading the eye to the magnificent panorama of endless range on range, purple in the distance.

Wade found patches of grass where beds had been recently occupied.

“Mountain-sheep, by cracky!” exclaimed the hunter.  “An’ fresh tracks, too!...  Now I wonder if it wouldn’t do to kill a sheep an’ tell Belllounds I couldn’t find any elk.”

The hunter had no qualms about killing mountain-sheep, but he loved the lordly stags and would have lied to spare them.  He rode on, with keen gaze shifting everywhere to catch a movement of something in this wilderness before him.  If there was any living animal in sight it did not move.  Wade crossed the hollow, wended a circuitous route through the upstanding forest of dead timber, and entered a thick woods that skirted the rim of the mountain.  Presently he came out upon the open rim, from which the depths of green and gray yawned mightily.  Far across, Old White Slides loomed up, higher now, with a dignity and majesty unheralded from below.

Wade found fresh sheep tracks in the yellow clay of the rim, small as little deer tracks, showing that they had just been made by ewes and lambs.  Not a ram track in the group!

“Well, that lets me out,” said Wade, as he peered under the bluff for sight of the sheep.  They had gone over the steep rim as if they had wings.  “Beats hell how sheep can go down without fallin’!  An’ how they can hide!”

He knew they were near at hand and he wasted time peering to spy them out.  Nevertheless, he could not locate them.  Fox waited impatiently for the word to let him prove how easily he could rout them out, but this permission was not forthcoming.

“We’re huntin’ elk, you Jack-of-all-dogs,” reprovingly spoke the hunter to Fox.

So they went on around the rim, and after a couple of miles of travel came to the forest, and then open heads of hollows that widened and deepened down.  Here was excellent pasture and cover for elk.  Wade left the rim to ride down these slow-descending half-open ridges, where cedars grew and jack-pines stood in clumps, and little grassy-bordered brooks babbled between.  He saw tracks where a big buck deer had crossed ahead of him, and then he flushed a covey of grouse that scared the horses, and then he saw where a bear had pulled a rotten log to pieces.  Fox did not show any interest in these things.