Wild Freedom

No seasoned mountaineer would have tried to cross the mountain range encumbered as John Parks was, and with the cloud streamers blown out stiff from the summits and snapping off little fleecy bits which the wind hurried across the sky. Even in the lowlands the norther had spread an arctic chill, and the bald heights must be insufferably cold. To be sure, the trip would have been practicable enough to warmly dressed, active men, but the little burro would slow the pace of the journey to a dreary crawl; and, besides, there was Tommy to think of. Hardened far beyond city children by his three years in the mountains, still at twelve there is a marked limit to a boy's endurance. And he was already fagged by the journey, for, though they had come only ten miles since morning, it had been bitter work for Tommy up and down the. hills, and it might be ten miles more across the summits and down to shelter on the farther side.
John Parks consulted his son.
"We could camp over yonder, Tommy," he said. "You see that little hollow with the pines standing around it?"
Tommy looked, and his heart went out to the circle among the trees as though the night had already closed and the evergreens were full of shine and shadow from a fire built in their midst.
"But," went on John Parks, "it's not far past noon, and just over that next crest is the place!"
And he lifted his gaunt face with that strange smile which Tommy knew so well. All his life he had seen his father looking off from the sorrows of every day to a bright tomorrow.
"So what do you think, Tommy?" said John Parks, resting his hand on the shoulder of his son. "Do you think we could make it without tiring you out?"
The wind stooped against them and passed an icy thrill through the body of the boy, but when he looked up he found the smile still on his father's face as though he heard already the far-off murmur of the Turnbull River. What a weary way they had come to find that promised land!
"Oh," he said, "I can make it, Dad. You don't need to worry about me."
The hand closed on his shoulder.
"Ah, you're a tough fellow. Tommy," said John Parks. "We'll try it, then!"
They trudged on, the burro grunting and switching its tail before them. They climbed two thousand feet in three miles with the trees dwindling and dwarfing until they came to a waist-high hedge of lodgepole pine, willow, and tough shrubs at timber line, a hedge shaved level across the top by the edge of storm winds, running in and out along the mountainsides at one height like the verge of green water. Above was the bald region of the summit. The sun had melted the surface snow; the wind had frozen it again; and now it blazed like glass. That was poor footing for the climb. Even the burro, as it pressed out from the thicket, shrank back after trying the glazed surface with a tentative hoof. Moreover, the wind now leaped into their faces. It flattened the burro's ears and drove his tail straight out. Tommy looked up in dismay, but John Parks shook a bony hand above his head.