“We must be nearly to the pass,” she thought at last, and stopped to look back. Broken Bow Valley had shrunk to a mere creek-bed, one among many watercourses winding beneath. The heavy, dark forest seemed to cling, like a blanket, to the lower slopes of the mountains, as though it had slipped away from the smooth rocky shoulders of the heights above. Gray Cloud Pass was not a very high one, but to her inexperienced eyes, the depths below her were almost enough to make her dizzy. A cold wind blew down from the ice-fields so that she huddled herself into the grateful warmth of her sheepskin coat.
Higher still they mounted until they came, as Hester had foretold, to an impassable mass of rock that had fallen across the trail. The détour was difficult, up a barren slope covered with stunted bushes, and out on a naked spur whence she could look away at peak beyond peak, some bleak and dark, some shining with never-melting snow. Such tiny specks of creatures as she and Buck were, crawling like flies over the rocky hillside!
“Don’t leave the trail.” So Hester had warned, but there could be no harm in climbing a little higher, since she could see so plainly where her pathway began again and wound crookedly to the narrow passage between two huge boulders where she and Buck must go through. Above her, caught in a cleft in the great shoulder of the mountain, was a still, dark lake, its waters held in this cup of the rocks and fed by the melting snows of the ice-fields far above. She felt that she must see it closer and urged her pony forward.
It was as still as a polished mirror, deep-blue and fringed by a dark circle of pines. While she stood, staring fascinated at the gleaming surface, a deer came down to drink, swam leisurely across the far end of the lake, and disappeared into the forest. The motion seemed to break her dream, for she turned quickly in the saddle and looked down. She had climbed above the very summit of the pass, for she could see where the trail dipped downhill again, disappearing in a mass of trees. It even seemed that she could discern a cottage below and a wide, open slope of hillside. She could also see, however, that the sun was perilously near the line of the mountain tops and that the day was coming to an end.