He turned and made off straight up the steep, till he had put a good mile between himself and the point of danger. Then, dropping into a ravine till their course was quite hidden from all hostile eyes in the timber, he led the way around the mountainside for several miles. On a high ledge, secure from any unseen approach, the flock rested for an hour or two, chewing the cud in peace in the vast silence of the bare and sun-bathed peaks. When once more they descended to the timber belt and its seductive pasturage there were three or four miles of tangled ridge and ravine between them and the scene of their morning's adventure.
In the meantime, Pete Allen, weary with climbing, sore with disappointment, tormented with as many flies as his own New Brunswick backwoods would have let loose upon him at the worst of the season, was beginning to wonder if the hunt of the mountain sheep was as simple an affair as he had fancied it. After climbing all the morning he had failed to gain another glimpse of the great brown ram. At last, however, about noon, he came upon their trail, leading down to the grass. With a long breath of relief, he stopped, drank at a bubbling icy spring, ate his cold bacon and crackers, and smoked a pipe. The trail was none too fresh, so he knew there was nothing to be gained by rash haste. After his pipe, he followed the trail down to the glades. His trained eyes soon told him what had happened. The encounter with the wolf was an open page to him. Having satisfied himself that there was nothing of interest left in that patch of timber--though all the while the puma was eyeing him with curious interest from a great branch not far overhead--he took up the trail of the flock's flight, and started once more up the mountain. Sweating heavily, and angrily brushing the flies from his eyes and nose and ears, he managed to distinguish the trail for a couple of miles along the difficult ravines, but at last, at the root of a precipice which, in his eastern judgment, was quite impassable to anything without wings, he lost it irretrievably.
Arguing that the flock must sooner or later return to their pasturage, he picked his way on a long diagonal down the mountainside, traversed a succession of grass patches, which showed never a trace of hoof print, and at length found himself in a bewildering maze of low, abrupt ridges, dense thickets, and narrow strips of green glade.