I followed on his track over places which I would not pass in cold blood; and I shortly halted above a cataract of some eighty feet in depth, about a hundred paces from the great waterfall of three hundred feet.
It was extremely grand; the roar of the falls so entirely hushed all other sounds that the voices of the hounds were perfectly inaudible, although within a few yards of me, as I looked down upon them from a rock that overhung the river.
The elk stood upon the brink of the swollen torrent; he could not retreat, as the wall of rock was behind him, with the small step-like path by which he had descended; this was now occupied by the yelling pack.
The hounds knew the danger of the place; but the buck, accustomed to these haunts from his birth, suddenly leapt across the boiling rapids, and springing from rock to rock along the verge of the cataract, he gained the opposite side.

Here he had mistaken his landing-place, as a shelving rock, upon which he had alighted, was so steep that he could not retain his footing, and he gradually slid down toward the river.
At this moment, to my horror, both "Bran" and "Lucifer" dashed across the torrent, and bounding from rock to rock, they sprung at the already tottering elk, and in another moment both he and they rolled over in a confused mass into the boiling torrent.

One more instant and they reappeared, the buck gallantly stemming the current, which his great length of limb and weight enabled him to do; the dogs, overwhelmed in the foam of the rapids, were swept down toward the fall, in spite of their frantic exertions to gain the bank.
They were not fifteen feet from the edge of the fall, and I saw them spun round and round in the whirlpools being hurried toward certain destruction.

The poor dogs seemed aware of the danger, and made the most extraordinary efforts to avoid their fate.

They were my two favorites of the pack, and I screamed out words of encouragement to them, although the voice of a cannon could not have been heard among the roar of waters.