Suddenly they all slipped and fell, but rose again quickly, laughing.Then they slipped and fell again, but this time with the startling consciousness that it was not THEY who had slipped, but THE SNOW! As they regained their feet they could plainly see now that a large crack on the white field, some twenty feet in width, extended between them and the carcass of the bear, showing the glistening rock below.Again they were thrown down with a sharp shock.Jackson Tribbs, who had been showing a strange excitement, suddenly gave a cry of warning."Lie flat, fellers! but keep a-crawlin' and jumpin'.We're goin' down a slide!" And the next moment they were sliding and tossing, apparently with the whole snow-field, down towards the gullied precipice.
What happened after this, and how long it lasted, they never knew.
For, hurried along with increasing momentum, but always mechanically clutching at the snow, and bounding from it as they swept on, they sometimes lost breath, and even consciousness.At times they were half suffocated in rolling masses of drift, and again free and skimming over its arrested surface, but always falling, as it seemed to them, almost perpendicularly.In one of these shocks they seemed to be going through a thicket of underbrush; but Provy Smith knew that they were the tops of pine-trees.At last there was one shock longer and lasting, followed by a deepening thunder below them.The avalanche had struck a ledge in the mountain side, and precipitated its lower part into the valley.
Then everything was still, until Provy heard Julian's voice calling.He answered, but there was no response from Tribbs.Had he gone over into the valley? They set up a despairing shout! Avoice--a smothered one--that might be his, came apparently from the snow beneath them.They shouted again; the voice, vague and hollow, responded, but it was now surely his.