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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Trapper, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Trapper
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Illustrator: Arthur Heming
+
+Release Date: May 3, 2010 [EBook #32236]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreaders at
+http://www.fadedpage.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on. (_See
+page 105._)]
+
+
+
+
+_THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES_
+
+_EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK_
+
+THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Story of the West Series.
+
+EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK.
+
+Each Illustrated, 12mo, Cloth.
+
+
++The Story of the Railroad.+
+
+By CY WARMAN, Author of "The Express Messenger." $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Cowboy.+
+
+By E. HOUGH. Illustrated by William L. Wells and C. M. Russell. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Mine.+
+
+Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada.
+
+By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Indian.+
+
+By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, Author of "Pawnee Hero Stories," "Blackfoot
+Lodge Tales," etc. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Soldier.+
+
+By Brevet Brigadier-General GEORGE A. FORSYTH, U. S. A. (retired).
+Illustrated by R. F. Zogbaum. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Trapper.+
+
+By A. C. LAUT, Author of "Heralds of Empire." Illustrated by Hemment.
+$1.25 net; postage, 12 cents additional.
+
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+  THE STORY
+  OF THE TRAPPER
+
+  BY
+
+  A. C. LAUT
+
+  AUTHOR OF HERALDS OF EMPIRE
+  AND LORDS OF THE NORTH
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR HEMING
+  AND OTHERS_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+  1916
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1902
+
+  BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+  Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+TO ALL WHO KNOW
+
+THE GIPSY YEARNING FOR THE WILDS
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+The picturesque figure of the trapper follows close behind the Indian in
+the unfolding of the panorama of the West. There is the explorer, but
+the trapper himself preceded the explorers--witness Lewis's and Clark's
+meetings with trappers on their journey. The trapper's hard-earned
+knowledge of the vast empire lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by
+later comers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occasional
+records in the documents of fur companies, or reports of military
+expeditions, or here and there in the name of a pass, a stream, a
+mountain, or a fort. His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the
+woods and streams was the expression of a primitive instinct old as the
+history of mankind. The development of the motives which led the first
+pioneer trappers afield from the days of the first Eastern settlements,
+the industrial organizations which followed, the commanding commercial
+results which were evolved from the trafficking of Radisson and
+Groseillers in the North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,
+and the American enterprise which led, among other results, to the
+foundation of the Astor fortunes, would form no inconsiderable part of a
+history of North America. The present volume aims simply to show the
+type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch in a series of
+pictures the checkered life of this adventurer of the wilderness.
+
+The trapper of the early West was a composite figure. From the Northeast
+came a splendid succession of French explorers like La Vérendrye, with
+_coureurs des bois_, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders
+pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard, illustrated in
+figures like Garces and others, held out hands which rarely grasped the
+waiting commerce. From the north and northeast there was the steady
+advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in the deeds of the
+Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the leaders of the organized fur trade,
+explorers, traders, captains of industry, carrying the flags of the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern America to the
+Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast the Russian appeared as fur
+trader in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the close of the
+century saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of the fur
+traffic of that coast. The American trapper becomes a conspicuous figure
+in the early years of the nineteenth century. The emporium of his
+traffic was St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance and
+prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase and continued for
+forty years. The complete history of the American fur trade of the far
+West has been written by Captain H. M. Chittenden in volumes which will
+be included among the classics of early Western history. Although his
+history is a publication designed for limited circulation, no student or
+specialist in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his
+faithful and comprehensive work.
+
+In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for the general reader a
+vivid picture of an adventurous figure, which is painted with a
+singleness of purpose and a distinctness impossible of realization in
+the large and detailed histories of the American fur trade and the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the various special relations
+and journals and narratives. The author's wilderness lore and her
+knowledge of the life, added to her acquaintance with its literature,
+have borne fruit in a personification of the Western and Northern
+trappers who live in her pages. It is the man whom we follow not merely
+in the evolution of the Western fur traffic, but also in the course of
+his strange life in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his
+craft against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most picturesque figure
+which is sketched in these pages with the etcher's art that selects
+essentials while boldly disregarding details. This figure as it is
+outlined here will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and
+the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own appeal. A strange
+chapter in history is outlined for those who would gain an insight into
+the factors which had to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft,
+exemplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is painted in
+pictures which breathe the very atmosphere of that life of stream and
+forest which has not lost its appeal even in these days of urban
+centralization. The flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the
+stealthy tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man against
+brute and savage, may be followed throughout a narrative which is
+constant in its fresh and personal interest.
+
+The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and there is still an
+American fur trade; but the golden days are past, and the heroic age of
+the American trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even more
+than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly realized by his
+successors. It is time to tell his story, to show what manner of man he
+was, and to preserve for a different age the adventurous character of a
+Romany of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesqueness and daring
+of his primeval life, and also, judged by more practical standards, a
+figure of serious historical import in his relations to exploration and
+commerce, and even affairs of politics and state.
+
+If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure in the early
+exploitation of an empire, his larger significance may be held of far
+more consequence to us than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in
+his life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple. The record of his
+dealings with the red man and with white competitors is darkened by many
+stains. His return from his lonely journeys afield brought an outbreak
+of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the range, but with all
+this the stern life of the old frontier bred a race of men who did their
+work. That work was the development of the only natural resources of
+vast regions in this country and to the Northward, which were utilized
+for long periods. There was also the task of exploration, the breaking
+the way for others, and as pioneer and as builder of commerce the
+trapper's part in our early history has a significance which cloaks the
+frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden wilds.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+  I.--GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS                             1
+
+  II.--THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT                            8
+
+  III.--THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP                               22
+
+  IV.--THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP            28
+
+  V.--MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS           38
+
+  VI.--THE FRENCH TRAPPER                                    50
+
+  VII.--THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS                                  65
+
+  VIII.--THE MOUNTAINEERS                                    81
+
+  IX.--THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER                             102
+
+  X.--THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS                           117
+
+  XI.--THE INDIAN TRAPPER                                   128
+
+  XII.--BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER                           144
+
+  XIII.--JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER                          160
+
+  XIV.--THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD               181
+
+  XV.--KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT                                 206
+
+  XVI.--OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT     222
+
+  XVII.--THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES THEM          240
+
+  XVIII.--UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN    258
+
+  XIX.--WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR                         275
+
+  APPENDIX                                                  281
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                           FACING
+                                                             PAGE
+
+  WITH EYE AND EAR ALERT THE MAN PADDLES SILENTLY ON   _Frontispiece_
+
+  INDIAN _VOYAGEURS_ "PACKING" OVER LONG _PORTAGE_           30
+
+  TRADERS RUNNING A MACKINAW OR KEEL-BOAT DOWN THE RAPIDS    57
+
+  THE BUFFALO-HUNT                                           78
+
+  THEY DODGE THE COMING SWEEP OF THE UPLIFTED ARM           143
+
+  CARRYING GOODS OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED
+  RED RIVER OX-CARTS                                        198
+
+  FORT MACPHERSON, THE MOST NORTHERLY POST OF THE
+  HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY                                      228
+
+  TYPES OF FUR PRESSES                                      250
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS
+
+
+Fearing nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no law, ruling his
+stronghold of the wilds like a despot, checkmating rivals with a
+deviltry that beggars parallel, wassailing with a shamelessness that
+might have put Rome's worst deeds to the blush,
+fighting--fighting--fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew
+no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever stand as a type of
+the worst and the best in the militant heroes of mankind.
+
+Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon won victories that
+upset the geography of earth. The fur traders never at any time exceeded
+a few thousands in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sallied
+out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent that has bred a new
+race.
+
+Like John Colter,[1] whom Manuel Lisa met coming from the wilds a
+hundred years ago, the trapper strapped a pack to his back, slung a
+rifle over his shoulder, and, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped
+into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else, like Williams of
+the Arkansas, the trapper left the moorings of civilization in a canoe,
+hunted at night, hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding
+down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-current screened by the
+branches of driftwood, and if a sudden halloo of marauders came from the
+distance, cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got away
+under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert
+set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often
+compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
+Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the
+Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who
+brought down their pelts to the mountain _rendezvous_ of Pierre's Hole,
+or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur
+Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling cañon walls
+where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too
+sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the
+haft.[2] Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur
+traders clubbed together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of
+the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.
+Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted
+antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
+River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day
+think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut
+off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland
+route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at
+all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,
+Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.
+
+The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence--to go ahead
+without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's
+life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of
+the most thrilling pages in history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart
+Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed
+the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward
+to the region of Hudson Bay.[3] Returning with tales of fabulous wealth
+to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by
+members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence
+secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and
+honourable body--as the company was called--reaped enormous profits from
+the bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,
+half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and
+Severn Rivers, or at York Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of
+Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number
+of licenses for the fur trade in Canada; and the old English company had
+no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but
+waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts
+on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville[4] might march overland from
+Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the
+stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off
+like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient
+company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable
+adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost
+furs.
+
+But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously
+in all parts of the east.
+
+This resulted from two events--England's victory over France at Quebec,
+and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of
+French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which
+limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army
+of some two thousand men--_voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs de
+lard_,[5] famous hunters, traders, and trappers--on their own resources.
+The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and
+MacTavishes--Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal--were quick to
+seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company
+and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off
+Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to
+the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old
+French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against
+all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the
+larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor'
+Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous
+ubiquity.
+
+But at that stage came the other factor--American Independence. Locked
+in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could
+France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles
+and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and
+Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the
+Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase,
+and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its
+fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours
+had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the
+west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for
+furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report
+of the north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had
+stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty
+Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.
+
+Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its
+eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,[6]
+Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river
+named after him,[7] and forced his way across the northern Rockies to
+the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's
+lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At
+Michilimackinac--one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur
+posts--was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old
+French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes
+to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily
+pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado--the fur
+country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by
+the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.
+
+Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get
+possession first.
+
+Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at
+the same time and in the same light. And the war began.
+
+The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the
+Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out
+of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent
+state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening
+that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were
+not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what
+was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America
+and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of
+New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes,
+was not asleep.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired
+to make immortal.]
+
+[Footnote 2: While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the
+former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a
+voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw
+Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right
+arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff.
+With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his
+moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a
+monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this
+trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.]
+
+[Footnote 4: 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana
+after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for
+France--one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur
+trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in
+a network irrespective of flag.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in
+contradistinction to the trappers and _voyageurs_.]
+
+[Footnote 6: This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay
+Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne,
+unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his
+too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La
+Perouse's campaign of 1782.]
+
+[Footnote 7: To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the
+Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT
+
+
+If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur
+country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become
+international history; but three companies were at strife for possession
+of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was
+"beaver"--not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all
+means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth
+company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own
+existence.
+
+From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the
+mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York,
+Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory
+west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur
+trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues
+to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company
+lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling
+heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in
+the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not
+yet come.
+
+Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and
+Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,
+Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as
+interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the
+spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the
+full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or
+"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by
+means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.
+Where the water was shallow the _voyageurs_ poled single file, facing
+the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars
+were used.
+
+Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the
+wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they
+were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring
+the deserter back dead or alive--orders that were filled to the letter,
+for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.
+Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
+man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this
+lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their
+return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine
+the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for
+three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
+promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.
+
+Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been
+buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit
+might see the canoes of the French _voyageurs_ going up and down the
+river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,[8] whose death, like that of many
+a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of
+empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in
+vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from
+rival traders;[9] past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;
+past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank with weapons
+ready; up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn--went Lisa,
+stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those thieves and pirates
+and marauders of the western wilderness. Stockades were hastily stuck in
+the ground, banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the two
+usual bastions that could send a raking fire along all four walls; and
+Lisa was ready for trade.
+
+In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded to the water-line
+with furs. The Missouri Company was formally organized,[10] and yearly
+expeditions were sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks of
+the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of the two hundred and
+fifty men employed, fifty were trained riflemen for the defence of the
+trappers; but this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their
+lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years. Among the victims
+was Drouillard, struck down wheeling his horse round and round as a
+shield, literally torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten
+according to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a brave man
+imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing, ammunition, and peltries
+were carried to the Nor' Westers' trading posts north of the
+boundary.[11] Not if the West were to be baptized in blood would the
+traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Missouri men under Andrew
+Henry's leadership moved south-west over the mountains into the region
+that was to become famous as Pierre's Hole.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor remained idle. The same
+year that Lisa organized his Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a
+charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. To
+lessen competition in the great scheme gradually framing itself in his
+mind, he bought out that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade[12] which
+was within the United States, the posts in the British dominions falling
+into the hands of the all-powerful Nor' Westers. Intimate with the
+leading partners of the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid
+rivalry on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third interest in
+his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.
+
+Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected Mr. Astor's proposal
+with a scorn born of unshaken confidence, and at once prepared to
+anticipate American possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor countered
+by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' Westers for his Pacific
+Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall, a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with
+a bumptious idea of authority which was always making other eyes smart,
+was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to round the Horn and at the
+headquarters of the company on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a
+relative of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have left the
+northern traders from some momentary pique; for he soon went back to the
+Canadian companies, became chief factor at Fort Garry,[13] the
+headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time governor of
+Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied Sir Alexander MacKenzie on
+his famous northern trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor
+with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a rollicking winterer
+from The Labrador, with the hail-fellow-well-met-air of an equal among
+the mercurial French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the game,
+independent spirit that made Nor' Westers famous.
+
+Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn--with its crew of twenty, and
+choleric Captain Thorn, and four[14] partners headed by the fussy little
+MacDougall in mutiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks
+always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sailors' way, and
+thirteen _voyageurs_ ever grumbling at the ocean swell that gave them
+qualms unknown on inland waters--little need be said. Washington Irving
+has told this story; and what Washington Irving leaves untold, Captain
+Chittenden has recently unearthed from the files of the Missouri
+archives.
+
+The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6, 1810. The captain had
+been a naval officer, and cursed the partners for their easy familiarity
+with the men before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot of
+scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick _voyageurs_ for a set of
+fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's amiable feelings were
+reciprocated by every Nor' Wester on board.
+
+Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii sighted in February, some
+thirty Sandwich Islanders engaged for service in the new company, and
+the Columbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives were lost
+attempting to run small boats against the turbulent swell of tide and
+current. The place to land, the site to build, details of the new fort,
+Astoria--all were subjects for the jangling that went on between the
+fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain Thorn, till the Tonquin
+weighed anchor on the 1st of June and sailed away to trade on the north
+coast, accompanied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay, and one clerk,
+James Lewis.
+
+The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn continued to dictate a
+wrong-headed course. In spite of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians
+off the ship and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were
+treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over his decks. Once,
+when MacKay was on shore, Thorn lost his temper, struck an impertinent
+chief in the face with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from
+the ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had happened, he
+warned the captain of Indian vengeance and urged him to leave the
+harbour. These warnings the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians,
+and no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost servile.
+
+One morning, when Thorn, and MacKay were yet asleep, a pirogue with
+twenty Indians approached the ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held
+up furs to trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe glided near
+and another band mounted the ship's ladder. Soon the vessel was
+completely surrounded with canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs,
+the squaws laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the ship's
+side. This day the Indians were neither pertinacious nor impertinent in
+their trade. Matters went swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew
+noticed with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and other
+weapons in exchange for their furs and that groups were casually
+stationing themselves at positions of wonderful advantage on the deck.
+MacKay and Thorn were quickly called.
+
+This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.
+
+MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation and again warned the
+captain. Again Thorn slighted the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The
+Indians thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade. Then the
+dour-headed Thorn understood. With a shout he ordered the decks cleared.
+His shout was answered by a counter-shout--the wild, shrill shriekings
+of the Indian war-cry! All the newly-bought weapons flashed in the
+morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first, bending over a pile of goods,
+and rolled down the companion-way with a mortal stab in his back.
+MacKay was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club and
+pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws received him on their
+knives. Thorn had been roused so suddenly that he had no weapon but his
+pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms
+of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the
+wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard
+to the knives of the squaws.
+
+While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and
+Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men
+who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
+and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell
+down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the
+cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This
+sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The
+survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which
+drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.
+
+All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;
+but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the
+Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
+below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians
+launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man--one of
+those who had fallen down the hatch wounded--staggered up to the deck,
+waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of
+booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of
+carrion-birds. Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with
+a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to
+atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants
+of what had been living men but a moment before.
+
+The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,[15] had
+determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to
+escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a
+match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better
+have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where
+they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty
+that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this
+disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
+with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of
+the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri
+and Columbia.
+
+Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men building a fort
+on the Upper Columbia. If these had been the overland party, they would
+have come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who had himself been
+a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador
+was preparing to go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific
+Company; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the apparition of nine
+white men in a canoe flying a British flag.
+
+The North-West Company arrived just three months too late!
+
+David Thompson, the partner at the head of the newcomers, had been
+delayed in the mountains by the desertion of his guides. Much to the
+disgust of Labrador Stuart, who might change masters often but was loyal
+to only one master at a time, MacDougall and Thompson hailed each other
+as old friends. Every respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to
+the Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading rivalry, he
+should have been nothing more than a North-West spy, to be guardedly
+received in a Pacific Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed
+with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with a supply of
+Astoria provisions.
+
+History is not permitted to jump at conclusions, but unanswered
+questions will always cling round Thompson's visit. Did he bear some
+message from the Nor' Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an
+honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon that he shook free of
+Thompson's company on their way back up the Columbia? Why did MacDougall
+lose his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness? How could the
+next party of Nor' Westers take him back into the fold and grant him a
+partnership _ostensibly_ without the knowledge of the North-West annual
+council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?
+
+Early in August wandering tribes brought news of the Tonquin's
+destruction, and Astoria bestirred itself to strengthen pickets, erect
+bastions, mount four-pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's
+North-West training now came out, and he entered on a policy of
+conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his marrying Comcomly's
+daughter. He also perpetrated the world-famous threat of letting
+small-pox out of a bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained
+good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the schooner Dolly was
+built, and New Year's Day of 1812 ushered in with a firing of cannon and
+festive allowance of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of the
+overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale of blundering and
+mismanagement that must have been gall to MacKenzie, the old Nor' Wester
+accompanying them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria in February,
+and two other detachments later.
+
+The management of the overlanders had been intrusted to Wilson Price
+Hunt of New Jersey, who at once proceeded to Montreal with Donald
+MacKenzie, the Nor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-West Company
+was first felt. Rum, threats, promises, and sudden orders whisking them
+away prevented capable _voyageurs_ from enlisting under the Pacific
+Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged, which explains in part
+why these empty braggarts so often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the
+Ottawa in a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake to
+Michilimackinac.
+
+Here the hand of the North-West Company was again felt. Tattlers went
+from man to man telling yarns of terror to frighten _engagés_ back. Did
+a man enlist? Sudden debts were remembered or manufactured, and the bill
+presented to Hunt. Was a _voyageur_ on the point of embarking? A swarm
+of naked brats with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt
+finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr. Ramsay Crooks, a
+distinguished Nor' Wester, who afterward became famous as the president
+of the American Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay and the
+Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where the machinations of another
+rival were put to work.
+
+Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part in the Pacific
+Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Missouri traders did not propose to see
+his field invaded. The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis
+in engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was finally ready in
+March, 1811, to set out with his sixty men up the Missouri, Lisa
+resurrected a liquor debt against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter,
+with the fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten dollars a
+quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going overland through the woods
+and meeting Hunt's party farther up-stream, beyond the law.
+
+Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a search party of twenty
+picked _voyageurs_ to go up the Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew
+Henry who had fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake River.
+Traders too often secured safe passage through hostile territory in
+those lawless days by giving the savages muskets enough to blow out the
+brains of the next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by Crooks
+and MacLellan.[16] Perhaps that was his reason for pushing ahead at all
+speed to overtake Hunt before either party had reached Sioux territory.
+
+Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa came, the harder Hunt
+fled. This curious race lasted for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa
+coming up with the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Spaniard
+tampered with Dorion. Had not two English travellers intervened, Hunt
+and Lisa would have settled their quarrel with pistols for two.
+Thereafter the rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping
+to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the mountains.
+
+That overland journey was one of the most pitiful, fatuous, mismanaged
+expeditions in the fur trade. Why a party of sixty-four well-armed,
+well-provisioned men failed in doing what any two _voyageurs_ or
+trappers were doing every day, can only be explained by comparison to a
+bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild prairie creature the bit, and
+it will carry its rider through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left,
+east, and west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as
+helpless as the rider. So with the _voyageur_. Crossing the mountains
+alone in his own way, he could evade famine and danger and attack by
+lifting a brother trader's cache--hidden provisions--or tarrying in
+Indian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the daughter of a
+hostile chief, or creeping so quietly through the woods neither game
+nor Indian scout could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of
+sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into detachments, weak,
+emaciated, stripped naked, on the verge of dementia and cannibalism, now
+shouting to each other across a roaring cañon, now sinking in despair
+before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached Astoria after
+nearly a year's wanderings.
+
+Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with re-enforcements of men
+and provisions. More posts were established inland. After several futile
+attempts, despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under direction of
+Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska to trade with the Russians. Word
+came from the North-West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with
+England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was wrecked. Astoria was now
+altogether in the hands of men who had been Nor' Westers.
+
+And what was the alert North-West Company doing?[17]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
+were not yet so far south.]
+
+[Footnote 10: In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
+of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern
+continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full
+particulars.]
+
+[Footnote 11: This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander
+Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.
+Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the
+corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction
+to the North-West.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The modern Winnipeg.]
+
+[Footnote 14: MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Franchère, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
+detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering
+the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchère, says
+Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all
+accounts--Franchère's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's--are from
+the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the
+massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him
+on account of his race. Franchère became prominent in Montreal, Cox in
+British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where
+the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old
+settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part
+in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth
+century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost
+everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of
+late from the daily journals of two North-West partners--MacDonald of
+Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,
+and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP
+
+
+"_It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should
+send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had
+established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William
+(overland) to meet the ship on the coast_," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a
+North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.
+
+This was decided at the North-West council of 1812, held annually on the
+shores of Lake Superior. It was just a year from the time that Thompson
+had discovered the American fort in the hands of former Nor' Westers. At
+this meeting Thompson's report must have been read.
+
+The overland party was to be led by the two partners, John George
+MacTavish and Alexander Henry, the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by
+Donald MacTavish, who had actually been appointed governor of the
+American fort in anticipation of victory. On the Isaac Todd also went
+MacDonald of Garth.[18]
+
+The overland expedition was to thread that labyrinth of water-ways
+connecting Lake Superior and the Saskatchewan, thence across the plains
+to Athabasca, over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through
+Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the Columbia through
+Kootenay plains to Astoria. One has only to recall the roaring cañons of
+the northern Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless
+precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this route was than that
+followed by Hunt from St. Louis to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the
+plains and the width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did this,
+but passed down the middle of the Rockies for nearly a thousand miles.
+
+Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to
+England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naïve assurance of
+victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger,
+difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the
+terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's
+mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their
+ship. "_A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew_," writes
+MacDonald of Garth, "_a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and
+a rascally crew_." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British
+convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay
+barmaid Jane[19] drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the
+rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency.
+"_We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were
+driven half-way to the Cape of Good Hope; ... at last doubled the cape
+under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our
+sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale_,"
+wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.
+
+It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months
+after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness
+were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the
+Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a
+month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the
+Isaac Todd.
+
+And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army
+of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself
+into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the
+Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving
+rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not
+decamp.
+
+Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor'
+Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the
+bragging _voyageurs_ told those quaking Astorians terrible things of
+what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and
+captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne
+alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns,
+knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant
+courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran
+up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above
+Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at
+forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his conscience with the
+excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the
+Raccoon.
+
+At the end of November a large ship was sighted standing in over the bar
+with all sails spread but no ensign out. Three shots were fired from
+Astoria. There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost Mr. Hunt
+coming back from Alaskan trade on the Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers
+hastily packed their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their
+_voyageurs_ scampering up-stream to hide and await a signal. But
+MacDougall was equal to the emergency. He launched out for the ship,
+prepared to be an American if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'
+Wester if it were the Raccoon with a company partner.
+
+It was the Raccoon, and the British captain addressed the Astorians in
+words that have become historic: "_Is this the fort I've heard so much
+about? D---- me, I could batter it down in two hours with a
+four-pounder!_"
+
+Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above Astoria, with traders
+and marines drawn up under arms to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira
+was broken against the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British
+possession by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired from the
+bastions.
+
+At this stage all accounts, particularly American accounts, have rung
+down the curtain on the catastrophe, leaving the Nor' Westers
+intoxicated with success. But another act was to complete the disasters
+of Astoria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift judgment
+on the revelling Nor' Westers.
+
+The Raccoon left on the last day of 1813. MacDougall had been appointed
+partner in the North-West Company, and the other Canadians re-engaged
+under their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the Pedler, which he
+had chartered after the wreck of Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it
+was too late to do more than carry away those Americans still loyal to
+Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence he made his way to
+Europe. The others were captured off California and they afterward
+scattered to all parts of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of
+Nor' Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger MacTavish, set
+out for the long journey across the mountains and prairie to the
+company's headquarters at Port William. In the flotilla of ten canoes
+went many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came the belated
+Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white flag at its foretop and the
+dissolute old Governor MacTavish holding a high carnival of riot in the
+cabin.
+
+No darker picture exists than that of Astoria--or Fort George, as the
+British called it--under Governor MacTavish's _régime_. The picture is
+from the hand of a North-West partner himself. _"Not in bed till 2 A.
+M.; ... the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... famous fellows for
+grog they are; ... diced for articles belonging to Mr. M.,"_ Alexander
+Henry had written when the Raccoon was in port; and now under Governor
+MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to decency was discarded.
+
+"_Avec les loups il faut hurler_" was a common saying among Nor'
+Westers, and perhaps that very assimilation to the native races which
+contributed so much to success also contributed to the trader's undoing.
+White men and Indians vied with each other in mutual debasement. Chinook
+and Saxon and Frenchmen alike lay on the sand sodden with corruption;
+and if one died from carousals, companions weighted neck and feet with
+stones and pushed the corpse into the river. Quarrels broke out between
+the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the
+underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the
+gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; _seven hours
+rowing one mile_, innocently states the record of another day, _the tide
+running seven feet high past the fort_.
+
+The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled
+horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running
+its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of
+countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.
+Governor MacTavish[20] and Alexander Henry had embarked with six
+_voyageurs_ to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A
+tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of
+the fort.
+
+So perished the conquerors of Astoria!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 18: A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
+in the American War of Independence.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
+white woman on the Columbia.]
+
+[Footnote 20: In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
+MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be
+distinguished from others of blameless lives.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP
+
+
+Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their
+ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many
+dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort
+George.
+
+Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed
+the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their
+towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia
+where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial
+sediment, now raving through a narrow cañon, now teased into a white
+whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
+forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,
+and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.
+
+"_A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille_," wrote the mighty
+MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old
+trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "_Nearing the mountains we
+got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here_ (at the
+Great Bend) _we left canoes and began a mountain pass_ (Yellow Head
+Pass).... _The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding
+by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in,
+frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in,
+... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four
+days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the
+Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires
+we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the
+morning."_
+
+They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled
+down-stream to the _portage_ between Athabasca River and the
+Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus
+(Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and
+the _voyageurs_ launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand
+miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort
+William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.
+
+Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a
+million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed
+guard of three hundred men.[22] Coasting along the north shore of Lake
+Superior, the _voyageurs_ came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's
+establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the
+greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the
+Lakes.
+
+"_Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four
+Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps_," writes MacDonald, showing
+to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were
+overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The
+strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had
+been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore
+bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich
+prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under
+the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to
+Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River.
+William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence
+of the furs.
+
+Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was hovering about the
+Sault, the other cruising into the countless recesses of the north
+shore. Against the latter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces,
+boarding her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness, "_pinning
+the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck_." Lying snugly at anchor, the
+victors awaited the coming of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her
+cast anchor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and took both
+schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all apprehension of capture, the
+North-West brigade proceeded eastward to the Ottawa River, and without
+further adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confusion from
+another cause.
+
+At the very time when war endangered the entire route of the Nor'
+Westers from Montreal to the Pacific, the Hudson's Bay Company awakened
+from its long sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in the
+United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans for the control of all
+Canada's fur trade. Like Mr. Astor, he too had been the guest at the
+North-West banquets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard fabulous
+things from those magnates of the north about wealth made in the fur
+trade. Returning to England, Lord Selkirk bought up enough stock of the
+Hudson's Bay Company to give him full control, and secured from the
+shareholders an enormous grant of land surrounding the mouths of the Red
+and Assiniboine rivers.
+
+Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were situated Fort Douglas
+(later Fort Garry, now Winnipeg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay
+Company, and Fort Gibraltar, the North-West post whence supplies were
+sent all the way from the Mandans on the Missouri to the Eskimo in the
+arctics.
+
+Not satisfied with this _coup_, Lord Selkirk engaged Colin Robertson, an
+old Nor' Wester, to gather a brigade of _voyageurs_ two hundred strong
+at Montreal and proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca,
+MacKenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy, blustering,
+bragging company of gaily-bedizened fellows that had turned the streets
+of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end
+of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy revellers! Eighteen of
+them died of starvation in the far, cold north, owing to the conflict
+between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.
+
+Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his
+newly-acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson
+Bay. These people were given lands, and in return expected to defend
+the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers. The Nor' Westers struck back
+by discouraging the colonists, shipping them free out of the country,
+and getting possession of their arms.
+
+Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regiment, New York,
+governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Douglas, at once issued
+proclamations forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers and
+ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the strength of these
+proclamations two or three outlying North-West forts were destroyed and
+North-West fur brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,[23] the North-West
+partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his _Bois-Brûlés_, a
+ragged half-breed army of wild plain rangers under Cuthbert Grant,
+canter across the two miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a
+volley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To save the post for the
+Hudson's Bay Company, Miles MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped
+out of the country.
+
+But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time till the valiant
+North-West defenders had scattered to their winter posts. Then an armed
+party seized Duncan Cameron not far from the North-West fort, and with
+pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the Nor' Wester.
+Afterward, when Semple, the new Hudson's Bay governor, was absent from
+Fort Douglas and could not therefore be held responsible for
+consequences, the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson who
+had brought the large brigade from Montreal, marched across the prairie
+to Fort Gibraltar, captured Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers'
+stores, and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retaliation for
+MacDonell's expulsion, the North-West partner was shipped down to Hudson
+Bay, where he might as well have been on Devil's Island for all the
+chance of escape.
+
+One company at fault as often as the other, similar outrages were
+perpetrated in all parts of the north fur country, the blood of rival
+traders being spilt without a qualm of conscience or thought of results.
+The effect of this conflict among white men on the bloodthirsty
+red-skins one may guess. The _Bois-Brûlés_ were clamouring for Cuthbert
+Grant's permission to wipe the English--meaning the Hudson's Bay
+men--off the earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux under Chief
+Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let them defend the Hudson's
+Bay--meaning kill the Nor' Westers.
+
+The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of Fort Gibraltar. That
+post had sent all supplies to North-West forts. If Fort Douglas of the
+Hudson's Bay Company, past which North-West canoes must paddle to turn
+westward to the plains, should intercept the incoming brigade of Nor'
+Westers' supplies, what would become of the two thousand North-West
+traders and _voyageurs_ and _engagés_ inland? Whether the Hudson's Bay
+had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers were determined to prevent
+the possibility.
+
+Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms, scouts went
+scouring across the plains to rally the _Bois-Brûlés_ from Portage la
+Prairie and Souris and Qu'Appelle.[24] Led by Cuthbert Grant, they
+skirted north of the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies
+above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers to mistake this
+armed cavalcade, red with paint and chanting war-songs, for hostiles.
+
+Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the alarm. Ordering a
+field-piece to follow, Governor Semple marched out with a little army of
+twenty-eight Hudson's Bay men. The Nor' Westers thought that he meant to
+obstruct their way till his other forces had captured their coming
+canoes. The Hudson's Bay thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the
+Selkirk settlers.
+
+It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two parties met at the edge
+of a swamp beside a cluster of trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor'
+Westers say that Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and
+tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay say that the
+governor had no sooner got within range than the half-breed scout leaped
+down and fired from the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.
+
+It is well known how the first blood of battle has the same effect on
+all men of whatever race. The human is eclipsed by that brute savagery
+which comes down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In a trice
+twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead. While Grant had turned to
+obtain carriers to bear the wounded governor off the field, poor Semple
+was brutally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who ran from body
+to body, perpetrating the crimes of ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to
+expostulate. The wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft
+velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds crooning the sad
+monotone of a limitless sea, closed over a scene of savages drunk with
+slaughter, of men gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors
+thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the slain.
+
+Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them down-stream to Lake
+Winnipeg, where dwelt the friendly Chief Peguis. On the river they met
+the indomitable Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He
+brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved by the expelled
+governor's account of disorders, Lord Selkirk was hastening north, armed
+with the authority of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in
+full regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted on his barges
+and stores of munition that ill agreed with the professions of a
+peaceful justice.
+
+The time has gone past for quibbling as to the earl's motives in pushing
+north armed like a lord of war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with
+his army of Des Meurons[25] at the Sault. In August Lord Selkirk
+appeared before Port William with uniformed soldiers in eleven boats.
+The justice of the peace set his soldiers digging trenches opposite the
+Nor' Westers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had enough of
+blood. They capitulated without one blow. Selkirk took full possession.
+
+Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the rivers, he sent Captain
+d'Orsennens overland westward to Red River, where Fort Douglas was
+captured back one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the fort
+walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had been just as ruthless on
+the Saskatchewan. Nor' Westers were captured as they disembarked to pass
+Grand Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where Franklin the
+explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreated. One of them was the same John
+George MacTavish who had helped to capture Astoria; another, Frobisher,
+a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse. The Deschamps
+murderers of Seven Oaks fled south, where their crimes brought terrible
+vengeance from American traders.
+
+Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay Company were in a
+curious quandary. Suits enough were pressing in the courts to ruin both
+companies; and for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hudson
+Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth told and the crimes
+probed. There was only one way out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the
+companies amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In April,
+1822, a new fort was built half-way between the sites of Gibraltar and
+Fort Douglas, and given the new name of Fort Garry by Sir George
+Simpson, the governor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thousand
+men thrown out of employment by the union at once crossed the line and
+enlisted with American traders.
+
+The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength that comes from
+victorious conflict--so strong, indeed, that it not only held the
+Canadian field, but in spite of the American law[26] forbidding British
+traders in the United States, reached as far south as Utah and the
+Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with lusty rivals.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 21: Some say seventy-four.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria
+capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of
+1812.]
+
+[Footnote 23: An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New
+York.]
+
+[Footnote 24: More of the _voyageurs'_ romance; named because of a voice
+heard calling and calling across the lake as _voyageurs_ entered the
+valley--said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover,
+though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the _voyageurs'_ song
+among the hills.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.]
+
+[Footnote 26: A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to
+the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's
+enforcement.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS
+
+
+That Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when he pursued the Astorians up
+the Missouri continued to be dogged by misfortune on the west side of
+the mountains. Game was scarce and his half-starving followers were
+scattered, some to the British posts in the north, some to the Spaniards
+in the south, and some to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry
+forced his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Aricara country.
+The British war broke out and the Missouri Company were compelled to
+abandon the dangerous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase
+arms from the British traders, raid the Americans, and scurry back to
+Canada.
+
+When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred Missouri men were again
+in the mountains; but they suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's
+party were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who succeeded to
+Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed over to the Columbia, had all
+his supplies stolen, reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville,
+almost destitute. The British rivals received him with that hospitality
+for which they were renowned when trade was not involved, and gave him
+escort up the Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to Red
+River, thence overland to the Mandan country and St. Louis.
+
+These two disasters marked the wane of the Missouri Company.
+
+But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on land than he must to
+sea again, the indomitable Andrew Henry linked his fortunes with General
+Ashley of St. Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell, Bridger,
+Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sublettes--men who made the Rocky
+Mountain trade famous--Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to the
+mountains the first year and two hundred the next. In that time not less
+than twenty-five lives were lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts
+were obtained and the expeditions were a loss.
+
+But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's Bay trappers loaded with
+beaver pelts in the Columbia basin, west of the Rockies. They had become
+separated from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian. Details of
+this bargain will never be known; but when Smith came east he had the
+Hudson's Bay furs. This was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men
+and the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.
+
+Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met their supplies
+annually at a _rendezvous_ in the mountains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad
+valley below the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or
+Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been
+massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin; but that did not
+deter General Ashley himself from going up the Platte, across the divide
+to Salt Lake. Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper, with an
+enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hudson's Bay man left Salt
+Lake, he had no furs; and when General Ashley came away, his packers
+were laden with a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This was
+the second brush between Rocky Mountain and Hudson's Bay, and again the
+mountaineers scored.
+
+The third encounter was more to the credit of both companies. After
+three years' wanderings, Smith found himself stranded and destitute at
+the British post of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,
+his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay sent a punitive
+force to recover his property, gave him a $20,000 draft for the full
+value of the recovered furs, and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth
+Rocky Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each other's rights
+in the valley of the Columbia, but southward the old code prevailed.
+Fitzpatrick, a Rocky Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogden
+at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once plied the argument of
+whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the
+mountains to St. Louis.
+
+The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution
+seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.
+
+Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down
+before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of
+their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of
+Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the
+Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
+rank outrage--particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West
+partners were seized, manacled, and sent to a wilderness--and now the
+Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain
+trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival
+that could outcheat their cheatery.
+
+In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of
+America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who
+have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to
+the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.
+
+In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for
+their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away
+from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild
+Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off
+civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with
+the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were
+lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong
+of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
+Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long
+beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from
+ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
+adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his
+luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet
+weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
+themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,
+tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every
+trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best
+hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed,
+and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of
+the hunt.
+
+Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the
+valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each
+party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky
+Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even
+now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's
+Bay hunters.
+
+The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance
+gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of
+comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky
+Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.
+
+No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never
+lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers
+sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with
+Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a
+kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the
+clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The
+powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the
+Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches,
+and shot from cover.
+
+All the trappers at the _rendezvous_ spurred to the fight, priming guns,
+casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle
+lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew,
+twelve men lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded;
+and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe
+exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of
+Pierre's Hole.
+
+Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky
+fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds
+than the strangers who had shadowed them at the _rendezvous_ came up.
+Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and
+unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by
+tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing
+packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on
+persistently for three months.
+
+Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a
+dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers
+the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become
+serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the
+dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
+leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into
+the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this
+escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs
+and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated
+by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of
+the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.
+
+The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to
+through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks
+and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in
+Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to
+enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company
+all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing
+the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in
+1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the
+American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown
+out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the
+Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
+had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American
+to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.
+
+This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing
+MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and
+became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his
+ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,
+"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,
+for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.
+
+Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the
+artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion
+Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur
+company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union
+in MacKenzie's reign.
+
+Once a free trapper came floating down the Missouri with his canoe full
+of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be
+obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a
+French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately
+vain. Strutting about the court-yard, feeling himself a very prince of
+importance, he saw MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the
+other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than it was wise. The
+_dénouement_ was a vision of the flaxen-haired Siegfried sprinting at
+the top of his speed through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie
+flourishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here. The
+outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on sight, and haunted the
+fort gates with a loaded rifle till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a
+mulatto servant to "wing" the fellow with a shot in the shoulder, when
+he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and sent away.
+
+At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built an opposition fort
+just below Union and lay in wait for the coming of the Blackfeet to
+trade with the American Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his
+bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out sallied from Fort
+Union a band in full regalia, with drum and trumpet and piccolo and
+fife--wonders that would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.
+Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages, and what was not
+supposed to be in the Indian country--liquor. When these methods failed
+to outbuy rivals, MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for a
+beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain trappers were forced to
+capitulate, and their post passed over to the American Fur Company.
+
+In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting _finale_ to the
+turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The Deschamps family, who
+had perpetrated the worst butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the
+fight between Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as interpreters
+for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boastful of their murderous record in
+Canada, the father, mother, and eight grown children were usually so
+violent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English gentleman, used to
+quiet their outrage and prevent trouble by dropping laudanum in their
+cups. Once they slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest
+their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came to life defiant
+as ever. At Union was a very handsome young half-breed fellow by the
+name of Gardepie, whose life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take
+from sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free trappers,
+Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one morning at breakfast with all
+the gruesome mutilation of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a
+younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and nerved to the deed with
+alcohol, the Deschamps undertook to avenge their father's death by
+killing all the whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the
+alarm was carried to Fort Union.
+
+Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union. Many trappers had been
+assassinated by a Deschamps. Indians had been flogged by them for no
+other purpose than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort
+Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the Deschamps were
+on the war-path.
+
+The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands and took an oath to
+exterminate the murderous clan. The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's
+control. Seizing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the prairie
+to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain trappers, where the
+murderers were intrenched. All valuables were removed from the fort.
+Time was given for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns were
+turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of crime, the mother,
+rushed out, holding forward the Indian pipe of peace and begging for
+mercy.
+
+She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and fell shot through the
+heart.
+
+At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter and learn if the
+Deschamps were all dead? Treachery was feared. The assailants set fire
+to the fort. In the light of the flames one man was espied crouching in
+the bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot the last of the
+Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion sent him leaping five feet into
+the air to fall back dead, and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the
+burning tower.[29]
+
+Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the
+fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found François Deschamps
+backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all
+ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and
+his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without
+shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally
+wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union.
+
+This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict
+among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were
+rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the
+militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured
+furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander
+through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a
+year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers
+who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper
+Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast
+hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the
+fences of settlers.
+
+In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the
+seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis
+against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and
+again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the
+Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the
+Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the
+conflict waged round their forts.
+
+In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort
+Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in
+savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In
+the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort
+Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.
+MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
+breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could
+not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing
+old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the
+friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in
+all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of
+the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young
+children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of
+defence till all were safely back among the whites.
+
+This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway
+of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the
+Saskatchewan.
+
+Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks
+only at the black spot.
+
+In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the
+trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a
+thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
+have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Chittenden.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more
+circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE FRENCH TRAPPER
+
+
+To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the
+town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the
+most picturesque figure in America's history.
+
+Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of
+Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was
+the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you
+may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper.
+
+Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to
+freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the
+young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom
+from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living
+all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the
+farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.
+Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with
+provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to
+$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade
+enough for two years.
+
+At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the
+value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original
+investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
+trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when
+twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see
+a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
+share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only
+beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from
+Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.
+
+Two partners[30] have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from
+the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the
+Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.
+The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship
+was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
+by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even
+death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of
+the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in
+the wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off punishment, or till
+he had lost taste for civilized life and remained in the wilderness,
+_coureur des bois_, _voyageur_, or leader of a band of half-wild
+retainers whom he ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious
+connecting link between the savagery of the New World and the _noblesse_
+of the Old.
+
+Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mississippi; Le Moyne
+d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana to Hudson Bay; La Mothe Cadillac in
+Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Louisiana; La Vérendrye exploring from
+Lake Superior to the Rockies; Radisson on Hudson Bay--all won their fame
+as explorers and discoverers in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred
+years before any English mind knew of the Missouri, French _voyageurs_
+had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the regions now called
+Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin were known to New Englanders, the
+French were trapping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two
+centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went to New Mexico to
+spy on Spanish trade.
+
+East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom the French trapper
+shunned--the English colonists and the Iroquois. North of the St.
+Lawrence was a power that he shunned still more--the French governor,
+who had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded and
+trapped without license. But between St. Louis and MacKenzie River was a
+great unclaimed wilderness, whence came the best furs.
+
+Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the French trapper.
+
+There were four ways by which he entered his hunting-ground: (1) Sailing
+from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, he ascended the river in
+pirogue or dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with means
+to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit overland to the Illinois,
+or Ohio, which he rafted down to the Mississippi, and then taking to
+canoe turned north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always a grand
+_rendezvous_ for the French and Indian hunters, to Green Bay on Lake
+Michigan, thence up-stream to Fox River, overland to the Wisconsin, and
+down-stream to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the Soo" to
+Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-ground. Whichever way he went
+his course was mainly up-stream and north: hence the name _Pays d'en
+Haut_ vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay between the
+Missouri and the MacKenzie River.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as
+the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the
+Missouri to St. Louis, or from the _Pays d'en Haut_ to Montreal, few
+escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves
+his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the
+fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to
+exist to the opening of the next hunting season.
+
+It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the
+preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,
+whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the
+green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down
+each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great
+things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the
+proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the
+inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the
+bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.
+
+It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw--for the Pierre
+adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an
+Indian wife--design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the
+French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay
+moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu
+of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned
+head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made
+of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or
+musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.
+
+None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to
+the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of
+the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.
+He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that
+he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,
+while he attends to the trapping that is _gain_ rather than _game_. For
+clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,
+like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly
+deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
+her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the
+marriage means that he has cast off the last vestige of civilization and
+henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.
+
+After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of
+Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,
+he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
+English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,
+he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed
+out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to
+Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of peltries on his rafts and
+canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,
+two, and three hundred dollars a year.
+
+It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,
+with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become _coureur des
+bois_ and _voyageur_, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the
+Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four
+companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the
+Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
+Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and
+the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the
+American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers
+and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English
+Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the
+French trapper still saw life through the glamour of _la gloire_ and
+_noblesse_, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
+starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at
+hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his _chansons_ brought
+over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
+at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a
+prayer to Sainte Anne, the _voyageurs'_ saint, just before his canoe
+took the plunge.
+
+Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
+Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of
+figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value
+of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded
+banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of
+wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,
+clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between
+like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the
+_voyageurs_ hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze
+like a seagull.
+
+Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and
+racing leaps each _voyageur_ knows what to expect. No man asks
+questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod
+pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the
+green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It
+vaults--springs--bounds, with a shiver of live waters under the keel and
+a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as
+wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push
+of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the
+danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another
+lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.
+
+[Illustration: Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids
+of Slave River without unloading.]
+
+But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar
+becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The
+lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;
+and the _voyageurs_ are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.
+Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to _sauter
+les rapides_, as the _voyageurs_ say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps,
+some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the crew, got
+his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.
+One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.
+
+Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a _portage_. Coming back this
+way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.
+If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high
+above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the
+water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is
+"tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all
+dangerous, each _voyageur_ lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps
+across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long _portage_ is
+measured by the number of pipes the _voyageur_ smokes, each lighting up
+meaning a brief rest; and a _portage_ of many "pipes" will be taken at a
+running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine
+miles is the length of one famous _portage_ opposite the Chaudière Falls
+on the Ottawa.
+
+In winter the _voyageur_ becomes _coureur des bois_ to his new masters.
+Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests
+wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or
+rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow
+steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick;
+sometimes to the _marche donc! marche donc!_ of the driver, with crisp
+tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled
+to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the
+northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a
+belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping
+his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.
+
+These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.
+
+At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining--the
+Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two
+important centres of trade in furs which are not imported--St. Paul and
+St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the
+Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for
+the great companies a hundred years ago.
+
+The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and
+Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes
+seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class
+who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor
+like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber
+ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a
+by-word.
+
+And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something
+of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer
+going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound
+from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the
+captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as
+usual!"
+
+As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those _chansons populaires_, which
+have been sung by every generation of _voyageurs_ since Frenchmen came
+to America, _A La Claire Fontaine_, a song which the French trappers'
+ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle
+lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then--was it
+possible?--these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were
+singing--what? A song of the _Grand Monarque_ which has led armies to
+battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern
+wilds--
+
+  "Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre
+  Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"
+
+Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was
+from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival
+traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself
+more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in
+doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known
+outside the range of human criminals.
+
+Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered
+fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carcass. He
+recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to
+bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The
+man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of
+approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of
+man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across
+the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He
+may even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.
+Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager;
+so the man sets a circle of traps round the carcass.
+
+The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer
+remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been
+there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up,
+sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and
+dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had
+been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind
+and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.
+
+Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full
+stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length
+away.
+
+The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on _le sacré carcajou_.
+Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes
+grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved
+himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and
+spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer
+but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again
+he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the
+deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.
+
+Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or
+wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is
+nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine
+will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had been scented.
+Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on
+doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which
+characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much
+fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the
+badger's or the fox's.
+
+Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker
+and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to
+save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
+wounded, weaklings, and laggards--the wolverine has the nose of a fox,
+with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for
+tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
+intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one
+trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,
+he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,
+but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout
+of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was
+more than he could stand.
+
+In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one
+design--destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock
+yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the
+musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and
+buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to
+the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached
+provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees
+and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the
+wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,
+like a shark behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there
+will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the
+lodge when the man is at the traps.
+
+But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be
+snared--gluttony and curiosity.
+
+After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds that the wolverine has
+been making as regular rounds of the traps as he has himself. It is then
+a question whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the
+hunting-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on James Bay, of
+an Indian hunter and his wife who were literally brought to the verge of
+starvation by a wolverine that nightly destroyed their traps. The
+contest ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred miles from
+the haunts of that "bad devil--oh--he--bad devil--carcajou!" Remembering
+the curiosity and gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest
+steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon or fish, and
+places it where the wolverine tracks run. Around this he sets a circle
+of his traps, tying them securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In
+all likelihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which will cover
+traces of the man-smell.
+
+Night passes. In the morning the man comes to his traps. The meat has
+been taken. All else is as before. Not a track marks the snow; but in
+midwinter meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels for the
+hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the stakes has been pulled up
+and carried off. That is a sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is
+as he thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolverine; but the
+cunning beast had pulled with all his strength, snapped the attached
+sapling, and escaped. A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned
+limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth and hobbles as
+hard as three legs will carry him to the hiding of a bush, or better
+still, to the frozen surface of a river, hidden by high banks, with
+glare ice which will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds
+only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper shape, with the
+spring opened to release the imprisoned leg.
+
+The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the river to study out
+the problem of unclinching the spring.
+
+One more device remains to the man. It is a gun trick. The loaded weapon
+is hidden full-cock under leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel
+is the bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger. The first
+pull will blow the thief's head off.
+
+The trap experience would have frightened any other animals a week's run
+from man's tracks; but the wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows
+he will find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.
+
+Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have the cord gnawed
+through and the bait stolen. A wolverine is not to be easily tricked;
+but its gluttony and curiosity bring it within man's reach.
+
+The man watches until he knows the part of the woods where the wolverine
+nightly gallops. He then procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough
+to balance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off. The gun is
+suspended from some dense evergreen, which will hide the weapon. The
+bait hangs from the trigger above the wolverine's reach.
+
+Then a curious game begins.
+
+One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks round and round the
+tree as if determined to ferret out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.
+
+The next morning the tracks have come to a stand below the meat. If the
+wolverine could only get up to the bait, one whiff would tell him
+whether the man-smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his
+mark is deep printed in the snow.
+
+The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.
+
+The rascal may become so bold in his predatory visits that the man may
+be tempted to chance a shot without waiting.
+
+But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of the cord. There comes a
+night when the wolverine's curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A
+quick clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke blows the
+robber's head into space.
+
+The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.
+
+He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a solitary man ever had;
+but for the consolation of those whose sympathies are keener for the
+animal than the man, it may be said that in the majority of such
+contests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 30: Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of
+Duluth.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Especially the Château de Ramezay, where great underground
+vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New
+Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under Château de
+Ramezay.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS
+
+
+If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived
+lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a
+snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his
+quest and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was the great
+staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended.
+
+Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for wartime, sinew for bows,
+bone for the shaping of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and
+saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most
+important of all, food that could be kept in any climate for any length
+of time and combined the lightest weight with the greatest
+nourishment--all these were supplied by the buffalo.
+
+From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and from the Alleghanies to
+the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter what wheat is to the farmer.
+Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of a
+favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass the buffalo could thrive
+in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open
+ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the
+herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.
+
+Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the animal
+world, the buffalo had strength to defy all enemies. Of all the
+creatures that prey, only the full-grown grisly was a match against the
+buffalo; and according to old hunting legends, even the grisly held back
+from attacking a beast in the prime of its power and sneaked in the wake
+of the roving herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance
+of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling some
+poor old king worsted in battle and deposed from the leadership of the
+herd, or snapping up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of
+a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that
+made for the persistence of the species. When attacked by a beast of
+prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and
+trample life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excelling all
+foes, wonderful sagacity against attack--these were factors that partly
+explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roaming this continent.
+
+Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not
+be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in
+the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri,
+fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between
+the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west
+and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
+Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where
+the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places--trails
+trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth
+of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel. At fording-places on
+the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri,
+Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo
+have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot,
+virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.
+
+Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only
+running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes
+in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the
+calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring
+hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and
+their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who
+had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death
+ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another
+occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm
+the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a
+howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer
+forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a
+wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the
+fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the
+salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring,
+dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster
+cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths
+as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and
+ploughed as if for ramparts.
+
+The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has
+become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense. From
+Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the
+Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd
+exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen.
+
+What are the facts regarding the buffalo?
+
+In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its
+power, there were sent from St. Louis alone in a single year one hundred
+thousand robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. The hunter
+usually kept an ample supply for his own needs; so that for every robe
+bought by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains.
+St. Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quantities of robes were
+being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million
+would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
+and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for
+three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on
+the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night
+to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers
+related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the
+Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
+Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove
+of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the
+Santa Fé trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of
+thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward
+the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West
+Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a herd
+stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the
+ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo
+drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to
+seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And
+the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.
+
+To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United
+States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord
+Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
+railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the
+buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in
+the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
+pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could
+have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time
+immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds
+only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of
+another.
+
+Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;
+and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter
+who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
+Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the
+valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless
+quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
+savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man--who is the true
+type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the
+odds a hundred to one against himself, and the only advantages over
+brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.
+
+Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was
+worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the
+leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild
+stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on
+the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd
+overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was
+fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering
+over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw,
+and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench.
+
+In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth.
+Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror
+as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first
+intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of
+maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their
+existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a
+rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range
+of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for
+the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the
+point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a
+quick rip meant torture and death.
+
+Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to
+the rear! Then one of the boldest braces himself, circling and guarding
+and wheeling and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head of the
+older rival. That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows
+a bellowing like the rumbling of distant thunder, each keeping his eye
+on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's moves,
+like fencers with foils. When one charges, the other wheels to meet the
+charge straight in front; and with a crash the horns are locked. It is
+then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against
+dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury from sheer
+amazement at the younger's presumption. His guarded charges become blind
+rushes, and he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of piercing
+horns. As soon as the rumbling and pawing began, Colonel Bedson used to
+send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the
+contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does
+not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight no more; and if
+he is not killed, is likely to be mangled, a deposed king, whipped and
+broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he
+drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled.
+
+Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow
+of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is
+off. There is a stampede--myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the
+ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking
+dust of the far horizon--nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too
+weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,
+leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.
+
+After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact
+as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded
+the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a
+fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those
+vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to
+the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through
+the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill,
+always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down,
+scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a
+drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would
+not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But
+he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He
+invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last
+stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.
+
+But the end is inevitable.
+
+While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear;
+and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink
+powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he
+still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the
+rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till
+death comes to the victim.
+
+Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd
+half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo
+leader?
+
+Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains
+region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick
+death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's
+end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were
+always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the
+sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.
+
+In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On
+Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several
+hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than
+elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in
+shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this
+appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city
+parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,
+with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful
+enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the
+hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured
+two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to
+the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of
+idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
+when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores
+had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.
+
+In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June
+before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;
+fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
+were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate
+perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds
+many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual
+hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer--by still-hunting; for
+though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except
+sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long
+as he did not see its cause.
+
+Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper
+might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a
+moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.
+Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he
+could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too
+slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on
+snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A
+wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly;
+and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which
+the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.
+
+The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where
+hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a
+pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.
+But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound
+were a sort of _cheval-de-frise_ or corral converging at the inner end,
+it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming
+of the spring brigades.
+
+When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of
+the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field--not the
+indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest
+buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The greatest of
+these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where
+hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.
+Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort
+Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which
+barred out Canadian traders.
+
+At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used
+to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of
+the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field
+on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed
+away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned
+muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.
+
+The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led
+north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on
+their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them
+westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the
+captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as
+prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had
+closed near enough for the wild rush.
+
+At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to
+saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led
+through the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight
+usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces
+upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where
+the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with
+the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,
+vague, whitish forms--the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless
+as death.
+
+The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd
+scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the
+grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
+land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the
+roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the
+spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only
+emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh
+feeding-ground.
+
+Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered
+the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with
+leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;
+in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,
+marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop
+that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
+sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen
+water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and
+fringed dewlaps dripping--on and on and on--till the tidal wave of life
+had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there
+in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured
+buffalo, freaks in the animal world.
+
+The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a
+sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life
+one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the
+thermometer at forty below--a combination that is sufficient to set the
+teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo
+spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the
+worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,
+you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and
+fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon
+in August.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to ride for the herd.
+There was the trail to the watering-place. There were the salt-licks and
+the wallows and the crushed grass where two young fellows had been
+smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength. There were the bones
+of the poor old deposed king, picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps,
+the lonely outcast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened, a
+picture of dumb woe! To such the hunter's shot was a mercy stroke. Or,
+most interesting of all signs and surest proof that the herd was near--a
+little bundle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat under
+hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound, precisely the colour of
+its own hide.
+
+Poke it! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens! It is a buffalo calf
+left cached by the mother, who has gone to the watering-place or is
+pasturing with the drove. Lift it up! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let
+it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door-mat. The mother has
+told it how to escape the coyotes and wolverines; and the little rascal
+is "playing dead." But if you fondle it and warm it--the Indians say,
+breathe into its face--it forgets all about the mother's warning and
+follows like a pup.
+
+At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws parted from the
+cavalcade and all impedimenta remained behind. The best-equipped man was
+the man with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest buffalo
+from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that galloped swift as wind
+in pursuit, that jerked to a stop directly opposite the brute's
+shoulders and leaped from the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No
+sound came from the hunters till all were within close range. Then the
+captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved his hand, or fired a
+shot, and the hunters charged.
+
+Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered with the fusillade of
+artillery volleys. Bullets fell to earth with the dull ping of an aim
+glanced aside by the adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of
+the buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of "Ah--oh, ah--oh!" Here
+and there French voices screamed "Voilà! Les boeufs! Les boeufs!
+Sacré! Tonnerre! Tir--tir--tir--donc! By Gar!" And Missouri traders
+called out plain and less picturesque but more forcible English.
+
+Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the herd; but the second
+volley with the smell of powder and smoke and men started the stampede.
+Then followed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals of any other
+kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through
+sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to
+carry riders in a boundless land!
+
+[Illustration: The buffalo-hunt.
+
+After a contemporary print.]
+
+Riders were unseated and went down in the _mêlée_; horses caught on the
+horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown
+high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with
+dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; unwary
+hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo
+turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued
+and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.
+
+A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a
+Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the
+time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of
+fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the
+thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same
+gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian
+hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give
+him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly
+unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and
+buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and
+fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast
+covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding--closer and
+closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.
+
+"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the
+officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they
+went over the bluff."
+
+The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals--a
+persistent vindictiveness.
+
+In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.
+
+After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was
+first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every
+buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
+hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin,
+tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the
+Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
+thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo
+sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.
+
+The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the
+buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a
+death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
+whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along
+the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting
+stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the
+wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a
+great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.
+
+"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his
+rifle.
+
+The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled
+pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they
+stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.
+
+The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The
+colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened
+next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run
+till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.
+
+And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a
+stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MOUNTAINEERS
+
+
+It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax
+of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.
+
+The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from
+both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,
+and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of
+another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the
+first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific
+in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of
+the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a
+rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the
+American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the
+Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew
+Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor
+sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,
+and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the
+mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria
+captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of
+the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew
+Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free
+trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.
+
+Their captain came.
+
+Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British
+fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay
+and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's
+American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the
+Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond
+the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his
+force came a tremendous accession--all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers
+thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the
+Hudson's Bay.
+
+If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have
+been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.
+Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been
+jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had
+refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard
+chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of
+nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
+traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley
+and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger--subsequently
+known as the Rocky Mountain traders--swept up the Missouri with brigades
+of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning
+the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending
+line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was
+bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field
+which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.
+
+The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.
+
+It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It
+was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for
+supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
+_rendezvous_, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole
+farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with
+plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians
+met at the annual camp.
+
+Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be
+carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for
+canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain cañons with
+sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to
+interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide
+obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a
+blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.
+Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,
+noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting
+especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is
+black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and
+where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one
+for the trapper to shun.
+
+One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers
+found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the
+lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty
+years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before
+the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the
+Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first
+two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile
+Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of
+the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
+others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost
+to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would
+not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of
+trapping.
+
+Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"
+or _Pays d'en Haut_ as the French called it. The French trappers, for
+the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to
+the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the
+smug, indolent, laughing, chattering _voyageur_. The great silences of a
+life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man
+had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and
+elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.
+
+In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,
+carrying supplies enough for the season in a canoe, and drifting
+down-stream with a canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the
+mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies
+had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which
+Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to
+accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to
+the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack
+rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such
+party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
+might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen
+to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.
+
+That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last
+century.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and
+Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like
+foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one
+mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass
+much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all
+the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the
+fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,
+and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and
+the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till
+the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music--the voice of many
+waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool
+heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began
+retracing their way from valley to valley, gathering the furs cached
+during the winter hunt.
+
+Then the cavalcade set out for the _rendezvous_: grizzled men in
+tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,
+men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
+always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;
+long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a
+zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs
+barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
+between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened
+bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half
+a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
+slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for
+mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to
+right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the
+collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after
+the bolters with her ears laid flat.
+
+Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling
+torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that
+stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky
+green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in
+summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced
+masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of
+that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that
+little indurated line running up the side of the cliff--just a
+displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that
+winds in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and
+mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?
+
+"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says
+the mountaineer.
+
+Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been
+enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that
+track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has
+the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above
+tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long
+grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.
+
+Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where
+a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is
+a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
+mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.
+
+Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at
+such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper
+saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when
+she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up
+the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
+kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as
+pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it
+up, out of very sympathy went away.
+
+Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but
+as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead"--the thing jumped from
+side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and
+away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men
+hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."
+
+Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like
+stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are
+tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every
+climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at
+every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,
+or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.
+
+Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching
+themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the
+mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as
+wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden
+chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading
+ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--!
+
+Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous
+enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often
+followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
+These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like
+banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?
+
+A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain
+by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line
+rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the
+inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand
+feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was
+nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail
+from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen
+to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to
+regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.
+But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing
+as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no
+larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer
+looked back over his shoulder.
+
+"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the
+trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his
+words.
+
+"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?"
+
+"Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw
+bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the
+sound."
+
+"And when no sound comes back?"
+
+"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!
+People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the
+sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you
+chills!"
+
+So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon
+riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the
+lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
+mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on
+men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.
+
+If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the
+trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by
+the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
+laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar
+prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the
+hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle
+lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.
+
+Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley
+the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of
+bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
+tinkling.
+
+The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They
+seldom reached their _rendezvous_ before July or August. Three months
+travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a
+day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an
+hour--a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
+latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would
+make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.
+
+Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced
+together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious
+little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream
+often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the
+unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding
+mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a
+trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them afloat, and
+overlaying with moss to save the horses' feet.
+
+But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of
+enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable
+_cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush
+higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg
+where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses
+could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to
+force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,
+there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.
+
+And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the
+bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men
+leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company
+was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,
+and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders
+was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant
+of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for
+the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that
+created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because
+produced by purely American conditions.
+
+Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to
+Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the
+Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came
+the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable
+valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for
+transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white
+hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or
+Oriental fair.
+
+French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo
+down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the
+Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia
+to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America
+from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General
+Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from
+Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous
+gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or
+Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediæval lords--found
+themselves hobnobbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indian sachems,
+Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
+moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.
+
+Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and
+daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress
+occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
+earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.
+
+The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction
+to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the
+partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps,
+planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh
+information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all
+sections of the mountains for the different brigades.
+
+This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty
+to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On
+the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the
+Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were
+Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the
+Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
+Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew
+the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of
+life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the
+Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as
+successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.
+
+Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips
+had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
+hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in
+friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than
+rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger
+who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept
+over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had
+made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the
+newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when
+hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.
+
+When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the
+region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on
+the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
+beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the
+valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder
+River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to
+trap all through the valley.
+
+But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily
+foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in
+the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
+Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.
+beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be
+misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the
+hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the
+mountaineers to their secret retreats.
+
+Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.
+
+Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,
+Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the
+Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
+winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with
+their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River
+Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping
+from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the
+_rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle
+the spies by trapping from west to east.
+
+Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing
+southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom
+they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward
+on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in
+time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.
+
+Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at
+Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been
+notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;
+possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.
+
+Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers
+Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals
+could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the
+mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer
+dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten
+the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,
+explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under
+him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the _rendezvous_.
+
+But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain passes like cats at
+a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he
+knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to
+the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.
+The Indians still guarded the passes. They must have come upon him at a
+night camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the
+defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a
+single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged
+declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got
+across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of
+the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless--for his hat had
+been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the
+rocks--and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also
+bound for the _rendezvous_.
+
+The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.
+
+The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's
+Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry
+between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain
+men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and
+not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers
+for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great
+companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter
+confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur
+Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly
+Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got
+away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American
+Company.
+
+What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected
+the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what
+was done.
+
+Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked
+body of horsemen northward from Pierre's Hole.
+
+If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their
+hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the
+Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up
+somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay[34] had been so often
+"relieved" of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west,
+their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went
+north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.
+
+Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper
+swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the
+Three Forks of the Missouri.
+
+There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region; and Blackfeet hated
+Vanderburgh with deadly venom because he had once defeated them and
+slain a great warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the
+fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.
+
+But if the Rocky Mountain men could go unscathed among the Blackfeet,
+why, so could the American Fur Company!
+
+And Vanderburgh and Drips went!
+
+Rival traders might not commit murder. That led to the fearful ruin of
+the lawsuits that overtook Nor' Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only
+fifteen years before.
+
+But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet hated Henry Vanderburgh!
+
+Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long file of pack-horses had
+passed, fresh-chopped logs to make a way through blockades of fallen
+pine, the green moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at
+cloudline broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed that way,
+grazed bark where the pack-saddle had brushed a tree-trunk, muddy
+hoof-marks where the young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,
+scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged boot had
+stepped--all these told which way Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led their
+brigade.
+
+Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail! Here the ashes of a
+camp-fire! There a pile of rock placed a deal too carefully for nature's
+work--the cached furs of the fleeing rivals! Besides, what with cañon
+and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by which a cavalcade can pass
+through mountains that the simplest novice could have trailed
+Fitzpatrick and Bridger.
+
+Doubtless between the middle of August when Vanderburgh and Drips set
+out on the chase and the middle of September when they ran down the
+fugitives the American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at their own
+cleverness.
+
+They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in the valley of the
+Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds with game enough for two lines of
+traps, which Vanderburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight by
+forced marches this time! The mountaineers sat still for almost a week.
+Then they casually moved down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.
+
+The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the mountaineers leaving a
+trifle too soon? Should the Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh
+remained, moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his traps
+along the Madison. Drips followed the mountaineers.
+
+Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground probably suggested to
+Drips that even an animal will lead off on a false scent to draw the
+enemy away from the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the
+Jefferson.
+
+Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once turned back too, up the
+farthest valley, the Gallatin, then on the way to the first
+hunting-ground westward over a divide to the Madison, where--ill
+luck!--they again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!
+
+How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may guess!
+
+Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers!
+
+Should Vanderburgh stay or follow? Certainly the enemy had been bound
+back for the good hunting-grounds when they had turned to retrace their
+way up the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Vanderburgh
+would forestall the move. He crossed over to the valley where he had
+first found them.
+
+Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunting-grounds, a dead
+buffalo, from which the hunters had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh! If
+Vanderburgh laughed, his laugh was short; for there were signs that the
+buffalo had been slain by an Indian.
+
+The trappers refused to hunt where there were Blackfeet about.
+Vanderburgh refused to believe there was any danger of Blackfeet.
+Calling for volunteers, he rode forward with six men.
+
+First they found a fire. The marauders must be very near. Then a dead
+buffalo was seen, then fresh tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians.
+But buffalo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There could not be
+many Indians.
+
+Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vanderburgh pushed on, entered
+a heavily wooded gulch, paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent,
+descried nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, followed by the
+six volunteers.
+
+Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hundred hostiles sprang
+from ambush. Vanderburgh's horse went down. Three others cleared the
+ditch at a bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aiming his
+gun, and coolly calling out: "Don't run! Don't run!" Two men sent their
+horses back over the ditch to his call, a third was thrown to be slain
+on the spot, and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest Indian,
+when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted deadly vengeance for the
+warrior Vanderburgh had slain years before.
+
+Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the waiting brigade. Refuge
+was taken in the woods, where sentinels kept guard all night. The next
+morning, with scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously
+towards some of their caches. A second night was passed behind barriers
+of logs; and the third day a band of friendly Indians was encountered,
+who were sent to bury the dead.
+
+The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had been torn to pieces and his
+bones thrown into the river.
+
+So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.
+
+As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares;
+for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet,
+the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows
+from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade,
+which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own
+trickery.
+
+Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the
+Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he
+possessed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 32: This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were
+scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew
+Henry's party--had all been such wide-ranging foresters.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this
+year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fé.]
+
+[Footnote 34: By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from
+the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.
+But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs,
+which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.]
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER
+
+
+All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting
+for the signs.
+
+And now the signs had come.
+
+Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy
+with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward,
+leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
+Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant
+pools like layers of mica.
+
+Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a
+new presence--the trapper.
+
+Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress
+him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
+costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
+bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
+mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
+any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
+over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
+jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
+and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.
+
+Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
+takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
+ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
+for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
+thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
+And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
+suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
+of winter woods.
+
+This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
+training does not stop here.
+
+When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
+windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
+breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
+habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
+to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means
+that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
+field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
+and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
+field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
+mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
+closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
+the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
+statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.
+
+And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.
+
+One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
+the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of
+its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
+book of forest-lore.
+
+It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
+corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man,
+that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the
+forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and
+the Upper Missouri.
+
+His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, splits and seams,
+where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must be filled with rosin and
+pitch. A light sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to haul
+the canoe over still water, where the ice first forms. Sled, provisions,
+blanket, and fish-net are put in the canoe, not forgetting the most
+important part of his kit--the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
+point to point all winter, travelling light and taking nothing but
+absolute necessaries, or builds a central lodge, where he leaves full
+store and radiates out to the hunting-grounds, at least four things must
+be in his tool-bag: a woodman's axe; a gimlet to bore holes in his
+snow-shoe frame; a crooked knife--not the sheathed dagger of fiction,
+but a blade crooked hook-shape, somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one
+end--to smooth without splintering, as a carpenter's plane; and a small
+chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden contrivances that
+stretch the pelts.
+
+If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack, the hunter may take
+more tools; but the old trapper prefers to travel light. Fire-arms,
+ammunition, a common hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
+a large sheet of canvas, locally known as _abuckwan_, for a shed tent,
+complete the trapper's equipment. His dog is not part of the equipment:
+it is fellow-hunter and companion.
+
+From the moose must come the heavy filling for the snow-shoes; but the
+snow-shoes will not be needed for a month, and there is no haste about
+shooting an unfound moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and beaver
+are waiting to be trapped. With the dog showing his wisdom by sitting
+motionless as an Indian bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and
+pushes out.
+
+Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-place, where traps would
+be effective, the man paddles silently on. If he travels after
+nightfall, the chances are his craft will steal unawares close to a
+black head above a swimming body. With both wind and current meeting the
+canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches the scent of the sharp-nosed
+swimmer. Otter or beaver, it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over
+bow or stern--over his master's shoulder if necessary, but never
+sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset--the dog brings back his
+quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
+hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
+bales.
+
+While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
+large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
+to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
+and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
+scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
+by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.
+
+Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
+noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
+wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
+lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
+young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
+the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
+scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows--knows, perhaps,
+from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
+amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
+nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
+trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
+very act.
+
+All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
+one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
+at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
+before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
+pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
+found?
+
+Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
+trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
+their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
+peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
+the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
+three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
+after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
+use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
+self-protection. When cold weather comes the beaver is fair game to the
+trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
+strength, a gun, and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes are
+not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that familiarity with the
+woods to enable him to pursue, which the beaver has to enable it to
+escape. And he can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies off
+the scent, the way the beaver does.
+
+Now, as he paddles along the network of streams which interlace Northern
+forests, he will hardly be likely to stumble on the beaver-dam of last
+summer. Beavers do not build their houses, where passers-by will stumble
+upon them. But all the streams have been swollen by fall rains; and the
+trapper notices the markings on every chip and pole floating down the
+full current. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. He knows that the
+rains have floated it over the beaver-dam. Beavers never cut below their
+houses, but always above, so that the current will carry the poles
+down-stream to the dam.
+
+Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guardedly advances within
+sight of the dam. If any old beaver sentinel be swimming about, he
+quickly scents the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow of
+his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs danger to the whole
+community. He swims with his webbed hind feet, the little fore paws
+being used as carriers or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the
+faintest bit in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted question.
+The only definitely ascertained function of that bat-shaped appendage is
+to telegraph danger to comrades. The beaver neither carries things on
+his tail, nor plasters houses with it; for the simple reason that the
+joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only slight sidelong
+wigglings and a forward sweep between his hind legs, as if he might use
+it as a tray for food while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his
+fore paws.
+
+Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the trapper may proceed in
+different ways. He may, after the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake
+the stream across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lowering the
+water, break the conical crowns of the houses on the south side, which
+is thinnest, and slaughter the beavers indiscriminately as they rush
+out. But such hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
+explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some
+years. In the confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind
+clubbing of heads there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor
+and in prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed; and
+if one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under water
+or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
+from that country. Only the degenerate white man practises bad hunting.
+
+The skilled hunter has other methods.
+
+If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the beavers
+have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent pools. The
+trapper gets one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
+loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and drown him, he
+places the trap a few inches under water at the end of a runway or in
+one of the channels. He then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a
+substance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all traces of the
+man-smell. For it the beavers have a curious infatuation, licking
+everything touched by it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into
+a crazy stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own
+foot-tracks.
+
+Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the bank, he
+may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the beaver is still
+taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
+and bark--usually covered with snow--slanting to the ground on one side,
+the ends either posts or logs, and the front an opening between two logs
+wide enough to admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a
+rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the front log, is the
+bait. All traces of the hunter are smeared over with the elusive
+castoreum. One tug at the bait usually brings the front log crashing
+down across the animal's back, killing it instantly.
+
+But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly satisfactory. When
+the poor beaver comes sniffing along the castoreum trail to the
+steel-trap and on the first splash into the water feels a pair of iron
+jaws close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the shelter of
+his house. The log plunges after him, holding him down and back till he
+drowns; and his whereabouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.
+
+But several chances are in the beaver's favour. With the castoreum
+licks, which tell them of some other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate
+or lost cub, they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of the
+trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap, they may retreat back up
+the bank and amputate the imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a
+mutilated paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver may have
+gone entirely inside the snare before the front log falls; and an animal
+whose teeth saw through logs eighteen inches in diameter in less than
+half an hour can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap. Other
+things are against the hunter. A wolverine may arrive on the scene
+before the trapper and eat the finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper
+may discover that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
+ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for three or four years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the ice is thick enough
+for the trapper to cut trenches. Then he returns with a woodman's axe
+and his dog. By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes have
+been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives stakes to prevent the
+beaver taking refuge in the shore vaults. The runways and channels,
+where the beaver have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
+over; but the man and his dog will presently find them.
+
+The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough not to be frozen solid,
+and shallow enough for it to make a mud foundation for the house without
+too much work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would carry away
+any house the beaver could build. A trench across the upper stream or
+stakes through the ice prevent escape that way.
+
+The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling water warns the
+terrified colony that an enemy is near. It may be their greatest foe,
+the wolverine, whose claws will rip through the frost-hard wall as
+easily as a bear delves for gophers; but their land enemies cannot
+pursue them into water; so the panic-stricken family--the old parents,
+wise from many such alarms; the young three-year-olds, who were to go
+out and rear families for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old
+cubbies, big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and the baby
+kittens, just able to forage for themselves and know the soft alder rind
+from the tough old bark unpalatable as mud--pop pell-mell from the high
+platform of their houses into the water. The water is still falling.
+They will presently be high and dry. No use trying to escape up-stream.
+They see that in the first minute's wild scurry through the shallows.
+Besides, what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there by any
+beaver; for there is no bark on. If they only had time now they might
+cut a passage through; but no--this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has
+ditched the ice across.
+
+They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from above--a low,
+exultant, devilish whining. The man has left his dog on guard above the
+dam. At that the little beavers--always trembling, timid fellows--tumble
+over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way of the flowing water
+below the dam. But there a new terror assails them. A shadow is above
+the ice, a wraith of destruction--the figure of a man standing at the
+dam with his axe and club--waiting.
+
+Where to go now? They can't find their bank shelters, for the man has
+staked them up. The little fellows lose their presence of mind and their
+heads and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up the remaining
+open runway. It is a _cul-de-sac_. But what does that matter? They run
+almost to the end. They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes
+away. Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on. He will come
+to them afterward.
+
+The old beavers make no such mistake. They have tried the hollow-log
+trick with an enemy pursuing them to the blind end, and have escaped
+only because some other beaver was eaten.
+
+The old ones know that water alone is safety.
+
+That is the first and last law of beaver life. They, too, see that
+phantom destroyer above the ice; but a dash past is the last chance. How
+many of the beaver escape past the cut in the dam to the water below,
+depends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But certainly, for the
+most, one blow is the end; and that one blow is less cruel to them than
+the ravages of the wolf or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat
+before they kill.
+
+A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above the dam. Where is the
+runway in which the others are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly,
+but begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whimper. The man
+sees that the dog is on the trail of sagging snow, and the sag betrays
+ice settling down where a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole
+across the river end of the runway and drives down stakes. The young
+beavers are now prisoners.
+
+The human mind can't help wondering why the foolish youngsters didn't
+crouch below the ice above the dam and lie there in safe hiding till the
+monster went away. This may be done by the hermit beavers--fellows who
+have lost their mates and go through life inconsolable; or sick
+creatures, infested by parasites and turned off to house in the river
+holes; or fat, selfish ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a
+family. Whatever these solitaries are--naturalists and hunters
+differ--they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor little beavers
+rush right into the jaws of death. Why do they? For the same reason
+probably, if they could answer, that people trample each other to death
+when there is an alarm in a crowd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing at all about their hides
+being valued all the way from fifty cents to three dollars, according to
+the quality; nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm in
+the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets the value for mink,
+otter, marten, bear, and all other skins, one pound of tobacco, one
+kettle, five pounds of shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth;
+nothing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty of their
+hides for a scrap of iron and a great company sending one hundred
+thousand beaver-skins in a single year to make hats and cloaks for the
+courtiers of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding the
+killing of beaver till their number increase.
+
+All the little beaver remembers is that it opened its eyes to daylight
+in the time of soft, green grasses; and that as soon as it got strong
+enough on a milk diet to travel, the mother led the whole family of
+kittens--usually three or four--down the slanting doorway of their dim
+house for a swim; and that she taught them how to nibble the dainty,
+green shrubs along the bank; and then the entire colony went for the
+most glorious, pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
+sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass like a
+goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water all day, diving for the
+roots of the lily-pads. But the old mother is always on guard, for the
+wolves and bears are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
+hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their two-year-old
+brothers; and the wonderful thing is--if a tooth breaks, it grows into
+perfect shape inside of a week.
+
+By August the little fellows are great swimmers, and the colony begins
+the descent of the stream for their winter home. If unmolested, the old
+dam is chosen; but if the hated man-smell is there, new waterways are
+sought. Burrows and washes and channels and retreats are cleaned out.
+Trees are cut and a great supply of branches laid up for winter store
+near the lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just before the
+frost they begin building or repairing the dam. Each night's frost
+hardens the plastered clay till the conical wattled roof--never more
+than two feet thick--will support the weight of a moose.
+
+All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and not the tail. This has
+been finally determined by observing the Marquis of Bute's colony of
+beavers. If the family--the old parents and three seasons' offspring--be
+too large for the house, new chambers are added. In height the house is
+seldom more than five feet from the base, and the width varies. In
+building a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay, mixing
+this with stones and sticks for the walls, and hollowing out the dome as
+it rises, like a coffer-dam, except that man pumps out water and the
+beaver scoops out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer of clay
+till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have one door or two is
+disputed; but the door is always at the end of a sloping incline away
+from the land side, with a shelf running round above, which serves as
+the living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below water, two
+doors instead of one, platforms like an oven instead of a shelf, are
+probably explained by the continual abrasion of the current. By the time
+the ice forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the winter,
+only coming out to feed on their winter stores and get an airing.
+
+But this terrible thing has happened; and the young beavers huddle
+together under the ice of the canal, bleating with the cry of a child.
+They are afraid to run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
+are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with a glee that is
+fiendish to the little beavers. Then a gust of cold air comes from the
+rear and a pole prods forward.
+
+The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding beavers are, and with
+little terrified yelps they scuttle to the very end of the runway. By
+this time the dog is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
+boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent by scratching with
+a zeal that would burrow to the middle of earth.
+
+The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind end of the channel,
+and cuts a hole above the prison of the beaver. He puts down his arm.
+One by one they are dragged out by the tail; and that finishes the
+little beaver--sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rabbits of
+bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities of man. Only, this
+death is swifter and less painful. A prolonged death-struggle with the
+beaver would probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very often
+the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If the dog attempts to
+capture the frightened runaways by catching at the conspicuous appendage
+to the rear, that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
+tail, while the beaver runs off with two.
+
+Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kittens which they take
+home as pets. When young they are as easily domesticated as a cat, and
+become a nuisance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to the
+hunter, comes what the Indians call "the-sickness-of-long-thinking," the
+gipsy yearning for the wilds. Then extraordinary things happen. The
+beaver are apt to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trapper
+of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers became so restless, he
+feared their escape and put them in cages. They bit their way out with
+absurd ease.
+
+He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole through in a night.
+Thinking to get wire caging, he took them into his lodge, and they
+seemed contented enough while he was about; but one morning he wakened
+to find a hole eaten through the door, and the entire round of
+birch-bark, which he had staked out ready for the gunwales and ribbing
+of his canoe--bark for which he had travelled forty miles--chewed into
+shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream, which is their habit in
+spring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS
+
+
+It is a grim joke of the animal world that the lazy moose is the moose
+that gives wings to the feet of the pursuer. When snow comes the trapper
+must have snow-shoes and moccasins. For both, moose supplies the best
+material.
+
+Bees have their drones, beaver their hermits, and moose a ladified
+epicure who draws off from the feeding-yards of the common herd, picks
+out the sweetest browse of the forest, and gorges herself till fat as a
+gouty voluptuary. While getting the filling for his snow-shoes, the
+trapper also stocks his larder; and if he can find a spinster moose, he
+will have something better than shredded venison and more delicately
+flavoured than finest teal.
+
+Sledding his canoe across shallow lakelets, now frozen like rock, still
+paddling where there is open way, the trapper continues to guide his
+course up the waterways. Big game, he knows, comes out to drink at
+sunrise and sunset; and nearly all the small game frequents the banks of
+streams either to fish or to prey on the fisher.
+
+Each night he sleeps in the open with his dog on guard; or else puts up
+the cotton tepee, the dog curling outside the tent flap, one ear awake.
+And each night a net is set for the white-fish that are to supply
+breakfast, feed the dog, and provide heads for the traps placed among
+rocks in mid-stream, or along banks where dainty footprints were in the
+morning's hoar-frost. Brook trout can still be got in the pools below
+waterfalls; but the trapper seldom takes time now to use the line,
+depending on his gun and fish-net.
+
+During the Indian's white-fish month--the white man's November--the
+weather has become colder and colder; but the trapper never indulges in
+the big log fire that delights the heart of the amateur hunter. That
+would drive game a week's tracking from his course. Unless he wants to
+frighten away nocturnal prowlers, a little, chip fire, such as the
+fishermen of the Banks use in their dories, is all the trapper allows
+himself.
+
+First snow silences the rustling leaves. First frost quiets the flow of
+waters. Except for the occasional splitting of a sap-frozen tree, or the
+far howl of a wolf-pack, there is the stillness of death. And of all
+quiet things in the quiet forest, the trapper is the quietest.
+
+As winter closes in the ice-skim of the large lakes cuts the bark canoe
+like a knife. The canoe is abandoned for snow-shoes and the cotton tepee
+for more substantial shelter.
+
+If the trapper is a white man he now builds a lodge near the best
+hunting-ground he has found. Around this he sets a wide circle of traps
+at such distances their circuit requires an entire day, and leads the
+trapper out in one direction and back in another, without retracing the
+way. Sometimes such lodges run from valley to valley. Each cabin is
+stocked; and the hunter sleeps where night overtakes him. But this plan
+needs two men; for if the traps are not closely watched, the wolverine
+will rifle away a priceless fox as readily as he eats a worthless
+musk-rat. The stone fire-place stands at one end. Moss, clay, and snow
+chink up the logs. Parchment across a hole serves as window. Poles and
+brush make the roof, or perhaps the remains of the cotton tent stretched
+at a steep angle to slide off the accumulating weight of snow.
+
+But if the trapper is an Indian, or the white man has a messenger to
+carry the pelts marked with his name to a friendly trading-post, he may
+not build a lodge; but move from hunt to hunt as the game changes
+feeding-ground. In this case he uses the _abuckwan_--canvas--for a shed
+tent, with one side sloping to the ground, banked by brush and snow, the
+other facing the fire, both tent and fire on such a slope that the smoke
+drifts out while the heat reflects in. Pine and balsam boughs, with the
+wood end pointing out like sheaves in a stook, the foliage converging to
+a soft centre, form the trapper's bed.
+
+The snow is now too deep to travel without snow-shoes. The frames for
+these the trapper makes of ash, birch, or best of all, the
+_mackikwatick_--tamarack--curving the easily bent green wood up at one
+end, canoe shape, and smoothing the barked wood at the bend, like a
+sleigh runner, by means of the awkward _couteau croche_, as the French
+hunter calls his crooked knife.
+
+In style, the snow-shoe varies with the hunting-ground. On forested,
+rocky, hummocky land, the shoe is short to permit short turns without
+entanglement. Oval and broad, rather than long and slim, it makes up in
+width what it lacks in length to support the hunter's weight above the
+snow. And the toe curve is slight; for speed is impossible on bad
+ground. To save the instep from jars, the slip noose may be padded like
+a cowboy's stirrup.
+
+On the prairie, where the snowy reaches are unbroken as air, snow-shoes
+are wings to the hunter's heels. They are long, and curved, and narrow,
+and smooth enough on the runners for the hunter to sit on their rear
+ends and coast downhill as on a toboggan. If a snag is struck midway,
+the racquets may bounce safely over and glissade to the bottom; or the
+toe may catch, heels fly over head, and the hunter land with his feet
+noosed in frames sticking upright higher than his neck.
+
+Any trapper can read the story of a hunt from snow-shoes. Bound and
+short: east of the Great Lakes. Slim and long: from the prairie. Padding
+for the instep: either rock ground or long runs. Filling of hide strips
+with broad enough interspaces for a small foot to slip through: from the
+wet, heavily packed, snow region of the Atlantic coast, for trapping
+only, never the chase, small game, not large. Lace ties, instead of a
+noose to hold the foot: the amateur hunter. _Atibisc_, a fine filling
+taken from deer or caribou for the heel and toe; with _askimoneiab_,
+heavy, closely interlaced, membraneous filling from the moose across the
+centre to bear the brunt of wear; long enough for speed, short enough to
+turn short: the trapper knows he is looking at the snow-shoe of the
+craftsman. This is the sort he must have for himself.
+
+The first thing, then--a moose for the heavy filling; preferably a
+spinster moose; for she is too lazy to run from a hunter who is not yet
+a Mercury; and she will furnish him with a banquet fit for kings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither moose call nor birch horn, of which wonders are told, will avail
+now. The mating season is well past. Even if an old moose responded to
+the call, the chances are his flesh would be unfit for food. It would be
+a wasted kill, contrary to the principles of the true trapper.
+
+Every animal has a sign language as plain as print. The trapper has
+hardly entered the forest before he begins to read this language. Broad
+hoof-marks are on the muskeg--quaking bog, covered with moss--over which
+the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where a horse would sink to the
+saddle. Park-like glades at the heads of streams, where the moose have
+spent the summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water holes to get
+rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and stripped twigs and rubbed
+bark.
+
+Coming suddenly on a grove of quaking aspens, a saucy jay has fluttered
+up with a noisy call--an alarm note; and something is bounding off to
+hiding in a thicket on the far side of the grove. The _wis-kat-jan_, or
+whisky jack, as the white men call it, who always hangs about the moose
+herds, has seen the trapper and sounded the alarm.
+
+In August, when the great, palmated horns, which budded out on the male
+in July, are yet in the velvet, the trapper finds scraps of furry hair
+sticking to young saplings. The vain moose has been polishing his
+antlers, preparatory to mating. Later, there is a great whacking of
+horns among the branches. The moose, spoiling for a fight, in moose
+language is challenging his rivals to battle. Wood-choppers have been
+interrupted by the apparition of a huge, palmated head through a
+thicket. Mistaking the axe for his rival's defiance, the moose arrives
+on the scene in a mood of blind rage that sends the chopper up a tree,
+or back to the shanty for his rifle.
+
+But the trapper allows these opportunities to pass. He is not ready for
+his moose until winter compels the abandoning of the canoe. Then the
+moose herds are yarding up in some sheltered feeding-ground.
+
+It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard. There is the
+tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There are the cast-off antlers
+after the battles have been fought--the female moose being without horns
+and entirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for protection.
+There is the stripped, overhead twig, where a moose has reared on hind
+legs and nibbled a branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
+which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then held down with his
+feet while he browsed. This and more sign language of the woods--too
+fine for the language of man--lead the trapper close on the haunts of a
+moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary moose. He is keen for the
+solitary track of a haughty spinster. And he probably comes on the print
+when he has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one of the herd
+below the hill, where he hides. He knows the trail is that of a
+spinster. It is unusually heavy; and she is always fat. It drags
+clumsily over the snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
+away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she loiters to feed
+and dawdle out of pure indolence.
+
+And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot scent feels. He may win
+his prize with the ease of putting out his hand and taking it--sighting
+his rifle and touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
+breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a week and come back
+empty at his cartridge-belt, empty below his cartridge-belt, empty of
+hand, and full, full of rage at himself, though his words curse the
+moose. He may win his prize in one of two ways: (1) by running the game
+to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or by a still hunt.
+
+The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the man than the moose. Even
+a fat spinster can outdistance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his
+perseverance lasts longer than her strength--for though a moose swings
+out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily tired--the exhausted
+moose is a moose at bay; and a moose at bay rears on her hind legs and
+does defter things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than an
+exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a cleft hoof means
+something sharply split, wherever that spreading hoof lands. And if the
+something wriggles on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon it
+with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she goes on her way
+with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair bristling.
+
+The contest was even and the moose won.
+
+Apart from the hazard, there is a barbarism about this straightaway
+chase, which repels the trapper. It usually succeeds by bogging the
+moose in crusted snow, or a waterhole--and then, Indian fashion, a
+slaughter; and no trapper kills for the sake of killing, for the simple
+practical reason that his own life depends on the preservation of game.
+
+A slight snowfall and the wind in his face are ideal conditions for a
+still hunt. One conceals him. The other carries the man-smell from the
+game.
+
+Which way does the newly-discovered footprint run? More flakes are in
+one hole than the other. He follows the trail till he has an idea of the
+direction the moose is taking; for the moose runs straightaway, not
+circling and doubling back on cold tracks like the deer, but marching
+direct to the objective point, where it turns, circles slightly--a loop
+at the end of a line--and lies down a little off the trail. When the
+pursuer, following the cold scent, runs past, the moose gets wind and is
+off in the opposite direction like a vanishing streak.
+
+Having ascertained the lie of the land, the trapper leaves the line of
+direct trail and follows in a circling detour. Here, he finds the print
+fresher, not an hour old. The moose had stopped to browse and the
+markings are moist on a twig. The trapper leaves the trail, advancing
+always by a detour to leeward. He is sure, now, that it is a spinster.
+If it had been any other, the moose would not have been alone. The rest
+would be tracking into the leader's steps; and by the fresh trail he
+knows for a certainty there is only one. But his very nearness increases
+the risk. The wind may shift. The snowfall is thinning. This time, when
+he comes back to the trail, it is fresher still. The hunter now gets his
+rifle ready. He dare not put his foot down without testing the snow,
+lest a twig snap. He parts a way through the brush with his hand and
+replaces every branch. And when next he comes back to the line of the
+moose's travel, there is no trail. This is what he expected. He takes
+off his coat; his leggings, if they are loose enough to rub with a
+leathery swish; his musk-rat fur cap, if it has any conspicuous colour;
+his boots, if they are noisy and given to crunching. If only he aim
+true, he will have moccasins soon enough. Leaving all impedimenta, he
+follows back on his own steps to the place where he last saw the trail.
+Perhaps the saucy jay cries with a shrill, scolding shriek that sends
+cold shivers down the trapper's spine. He wishes he could get his hands
+on its wretched little neck; and turning himself to a statue, he stands
+stone-still till the troublesome bird settles down. Then he goes on.
+
+Here is the moose trail!
+
+He dare not follow direct. That would lead past her hiding-place and she
+would bolt. He resorts to artifice; but, for that matter, so has the
+moose resorted to artifice. The trapper, too, circles forward, cutting
+the moose's magic guard with transverse zigzags. But he no longer walks.
+He crouches, or creeps, or glides noiselessly from shelter to shelter,
+very much the way a cat advances on an unwary mouse. He sinks to his
+knees and feels forward for snow-pads every pace. Then he is on
+all-fours, still circling. His detour has narrowed and narrowed till he
+knows she must be in that aspen thicket. The brush is sparser. She has
+chosen her resting-ground wisely. The man falls forward on his face,
+closing in, closing in, wiggling and watching till--he makes a horrible
+discovery. That jay is perched on the topmost bough of the grove; and
+the man has caught a glimpse of something buff-coloured behind the
+aspens. It may be a moose, or only a log. The untried hunter would fire.
+Not so the trapper. Hap-hazard aim means fighting a wounded moose, or
+letting the creature drag its agony off to inaccessible haunts. The man
+worms his way round the thicket, sighting the game with the noiseless
+circling of a hawk before the drop. An ear blinks. But at that instant
+the jay perks his head to one side with a curious look at this strange
+object on the ground. In another second it will be off with a call and
+the moose up.
+
+His rifle is aimed!
+
+A blinding swish of aspen leaves and snow and smoke! The jay is off with
+a noisy whistle. And the trapper has leather for moccasins, and heavy
+filling for his snow-shoes, and meat for his larder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But he must still get the fine filling for heel and toe; and this comes
+from caribou or deer. The deer, he will still hunt as he has still
+hunted the moose, with this difference: that the deer runs in circles,
+jumping back in his own tracks leaving the hunter to follow a cold
+scent, while it, by a sheer bound--five--eight--twenty feet off at a new
+angle, makes for the hiding of dense woods. No one but a barbarian would
+attempt to run down a caribou; for it can only be done by the shameless
+trick of snaring in crusted snow, or intercepting while swimming, and
+then--butchery.
+
+The caribou doesn't run. It doesn't bound. It floats away into space.
+
+One moment a sandy-coloured form, with black nose, black feet, and a
+glory of white statuary above its head, is seen against the far reaches
+of snow. The next, the form has shrunk--and shrunk--and shrunk, antlers
+laid back against its neck, till there is a vanishing speck on the
+horizon. The caribou has not been standing at all. It has skimmed out of
+sight; and if there is any clear ice across the marshes, it literally
+glides beyond vision from very speed. But, provided no man-smell crosses
+its course, the caribou is vulnerable in its habits. Morning and
+evening, it comes back to the same watering-place; and it returns to the
+same bed for the night. If the trapper can conceal himself without
+crossing its trail, he easily obtains the fine filling for his
+snow-shoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Moccasins must now be made.
+
+The trapper shears off the coarse hair with a sharp knife. The hide is
+soaked; and a blunter blade tears away the remaining hairs till the skin
+is white and clean. The flesh side is similarly cleaned and the skin
+rubbed with all the soap and grease it will absorb. A process of beating
+follows till the hide is limber. Carelessness at this stage makes
+buckskin soak up water like a sponge and dry to a shapeless board. The
+skin must be stretched and pulled till it will stretch no more. Frost
+helps the tanning, drying all moisture out; and the skin becomes as soft
+as down, without a crease. The smoke of punk from a rotten tree gives
+the dark yellow colour to the hide and prevents hardening. The skin is
+now ready for the needle; and all odd bits are hoarded away.
+
+Equipped with moccasins and snow-shoes, the trapper is now the winged
+messenger of the tragic fates to the forest world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE INDIAN TRAPPER
+
+
+It is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.
+
+In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with
+a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the
+gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists
+of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like
+clouds of steam, will have cleared; and there will be nothing from
+sky-line to sky-line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.
+
+The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid-day. Then the sun
+casts no man-shadow to scare game from his snares. Black is the flag of
+betrayal in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye, glistening
+on the snow like a black marble, that the trapper detects the white
+hare; and a jet tail-tip streaking over the white wastes in dots and
+dashes tells him the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
+coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts and diving
+below the snow with the forward wriggling of a snake under cover. But
+the moving man-shadow is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's
+eye or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out in the gray
+darkness of morning and must reach his hunting-grounds before high
+noon.
+
+With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts in swift, coasting
+strides, he swings out in that easy, ambling, Indian trot, which gives
+never a jar to the runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
+beneath his tread.
+
+The old musket, which he got in trade from the fur post, is over his
+shoulder, or swinging lightly in one hand. A hunter's knife and
+short-handled woodman's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
+his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy musk-rat gantlets are
+attached to the cord about his neck; so without losing either he can
+fight bare-handed, free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And
+somewhere, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
+_skipertogan_--a skin bag with amulet against evil, matches, touchwood,
+and a scrap of pemmican. As he grows hot, he throws back his hood,
+running bareheaded and loose about the chest.
+
+Each breath clouds to frost against his face till hair and brows and
+lashes are fringed with frozen moisture. The white man would hugger his
+face up with scarf and collar the more for this; but the Indian knows
+better. Suddenly chilled breath would soak scarf and collar wet to his
+skin; and his face would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
+with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the keenest cold; so he
+loosens his coat and runs the faster.
+
+As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in the gray haze. Pine
+groves emerge from the dark, wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and
+domes and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spreading larch
+boughs. Evergreens are edged with white. Naked trees stand like limned
+statuary with an antlered crest etched against the white glare. The
+snow stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that seem to
+heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
+skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
+against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
+circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
+proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.
+
+When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
+Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
+the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
+Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
+arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
+about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
+But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
+length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
+Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
+coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
+talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
+the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
+it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
+the Northern Lights. He does not _see_ these things with the gabbling
+exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
+nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
+description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
+squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist like a
+sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
+months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
+music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
+gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
+tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
+and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.
+
+Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
+mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
+Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
+has seen; though he has not understood.
+
+But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
+of the Great Lakes, in the cañons of the Rockies, and across that
+northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
+east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay regions that the
+Indian trapper will find his last hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes
+the white man, and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring
+before Columbus opened the doors of the New World to the hordes of the
+Old; and here Indian trappers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When
+there is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed; but that day is far
+distant for the Hudson Bay region.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is midwinter; and by
+December there is a curious lull in the hunting. All the streams are
+frozen like rock; but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
+yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some foolish fish
+always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice shuts them in. Then a strange
+thing is seen--a kettle of living fish; fish gasping and panting in
+ice-hemmed water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost freezes
+another layer to the ice walls of their prison. The banks of such a pond
+hole are haunted by the otter and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when
+the pond is exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank and
+forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.
+
+The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and fastidious
+choosing--for in trapper vernacular the bear takes a long time to please
+himself--bruin found an upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
+grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes and went to sleep
+under a snow blanket of gathering depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too,
+have gone off to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by a
+wolf-pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to move till this
+ground is eaten over. Nor are many beaver seen now. They have long since
+snuggled into their warm houses, where they will stay till their winter
+store is all used; and their houses are now hidden under great depths of
+deepening snow. But the fox and the hare and the ermine are at run; and
+as long as they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx and
+the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from the scarcity of other
+game and greedy as spring crows.
+
+That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's heels. The pelt of a
+coyote--or prairie wolf--would scarcely be worth the taking. Even the
+big, gray timber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot, except
+for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic wolf would bring better
+price. The enormous black or brown arctic wolf would be more valuable;
+but the value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all these
+worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps as keenly as the
+trapper does; and would eat up a silver fox, that would be the fortune
+of any hunter.
+
+The Indian comes to the brush where he has set his rabbit snares across
+a runway. His dog sniffs the ground, whining. The crust of the snow is
+broken by a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit fur is
+fluffed about. The game has been rifled away. The Indian notices several
+things. The rabbit has been devoured on the spot. That is unlike the
+wolverine. He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a guzzle
+in his own lair. The footprints have the appearance of having been
+brushed over; so the thief had a bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There
+is no trail away from the snare. The marauder has come with a long leap
+and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his dog make a circuit of the
+snare till they come on the trail of the intruder; and its size tells
+the Indian whether his enemy be fox or wolf.
+
+He sets no more snares across that runway, for the rabbits have had
+their alarm. Going through the brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a
+new snare.
+
+Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the drifts to the next trap. It
+is a deadfall. Nothing is in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left
+undisturbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to atoms from very
+wickedness, chewed the bait in two, and spat it out lest there should be
+poison. The fox would have gone in and had his back broken by the front
+log. And there is the same brush work over the trampled snow, as if the
+visitor had tried to sweep out his own trail; and the same long leap
+away, clearing obstruction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
+scent. This time the Indian makes two or three circuits; but the snow is
+so crusted it is impossible to tell whether the scratchings lead out to
+the open or back to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal had
+followed the line of the traps by running just inside the brush, the
+Indian would know. But the midwinter day is short, and he has no time to
+explore the border of the thicket.
+
+Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that number he hardly
+expects game in more than a dozen. If six have a prize, he has done
+well. Each time he stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
+trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with castoreum, or
+pomatum, or bears' grease; sweeping the snow over every spot touched by
+his hand; dragging the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.
+
+Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and the Indian trapper has
+found not a thing in his traps. He only knows that some daring enemy has
+dogged the circle of his snares. That means he must kill the marauder,
+or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt about swift vengeance for
+the loss of a rabbit, he has none when he comes to the next trap. He
+sees what is too much for words: what entails as great loss to the poor
+Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white man. One of his best
+steel-traps lies a little distance from the pole to which it was
+attached. It has been jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
+the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained and covered with
+gray fur as soft and silvery as chinchilla. In the trap is a little paw,
+fresh cut, scarcely frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of
+which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and speculators of stocks,
+and actors of fame. But the wolves, the great, black wolves of the Far
+North, with eyes full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
+had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not an hour before the
+trapper came.
+
+He knows now what his enemy is; for he has come so suddenly on their
+trail he can count four different footprints, and claw-marks of
+different length. They have fought about the little fox; and some of the
+smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the blood-marks, he can
+tell they have got under cover of the shrub growth to the right.
+
+The Indian says none of the words which the white man might say; but
+that is nothing to his credit; for just now no words are adequate. But
+he takes prompt resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
+which somehow is written on the very face of the wilderness as one of
+its necessities, he decides that only life for life will compensate such
+loss. The danger of hunting the big, brown wolf--he knows too well to
+attempt it without help. He will bait his small traps with poison; take
+out his big, steel wolf traps to-morrow; then with a band of young
+braves follow the wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting
+season.
+
+But the animal world knows that old trick of drawing a herring scent
+across the trail of wise intentions; and of all the animal world, none
+knows it better than the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
+of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the same pricking
+forward of sharp, erect ears, the same crouching trot, the same
+sneaking, watchful green eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to
+brush out every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop of the
+gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among wolves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keeping to the open, where
+he can travel fast on the long snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap.
+The man-shadow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then all the
+shadows merge into the purple gloom of early evening; but the Indian
+travels on; for the circuit of traps leads back to his lodge.
+
+The wolf thief may not be far off; so the man takes his musket from the
+case. He may chance a shot at the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves
+run under cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward. The wind
+carries scent of danger from the open, and the brush forms an ambuscade.
+Man tracks, where man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
+clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if he can; and if he
+can't, crouches low till he has passed the exposure.
+
+The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides, wasting not an
+inch of ground, deviating neither to right nor left by as much space as
+a white man takes to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog
+utters a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward towards the
+brush. At the same moment the Indian, who has been keeping his eyes on
+the woods, sees a form rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is
+not surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and the fox trap
+could not have been robbed more than an hour ago. The man thinks he has
+come on the thieves going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means
+him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as he looks the form
+fades into the gloom, and he decides to run on parallel to the
+brushwood, with his gun ready. Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery.
+At the clearing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he is
+heading home there is little danger.
+
+But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes off to the woods
+with wild barking, and the trapper scans the long, white stretch leading
+back between the bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
+grays of twilight.
+
+Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
+wolfish figure looms black against the snow--and stands! The dog prances
+round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
+and the Indian calculates--" After all, there is only one."
+
+What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
+traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
+points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
+mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
+wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.
+
+One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
+through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
+the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
+finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
+meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
+advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
+sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
+The man runs faster now, determined to get abreast of the wolf and
+utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
+distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
+front and shoot.
+
+But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
+wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
+wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
+ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
+thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
+the very real substance of that fox.
+
+The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
+while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
+through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
+lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
+with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
+the trapper's very feet.
+
+Then the man knows that he has been tricked.
+
+The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
+sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
+and prairie hold in deadly fear--fire. Two or three shots ring into the
+darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells him there is one wolf
+less, and the others will hold off at a safe distance. Contrary to the
+woodman's traditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian whips
+out his axe and chops with all his might till he has wood enough for a
+roaring fire. That will keep the rascals away till the pack goes off in
+full cry, or daylight comes.
+
+Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the Indian hastily makes a
+bow, and shoots arrow after arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air,
+hoping to signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear. The sky
+is silver with stars, and moonlight and reflected snowglare, and the
+Northern Lights flicker and wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy
+that dims the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising from his
+fire in a straight column falls at the height of the trees, for the
+frost lies on the land heavy, palpable, impenetrable. And for all the
+frost is thick to the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
+That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air seems to become
+absolutely compressed with the cold; but that same cold freezes out and
+precipitates every particle of floating moisture till earth and sky,
+moon and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.
+
+A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a gale, comes
+through the tightening silence. The intelligent half-breed says this is
+from the Northern Lights. The white man says it is electric activity in
+compressed air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter the
+words of the braves in death chant:
+
+  "If I die, I die valiant,
+  I go to death fearless.
+  I die a brave man.
+  I go to those heroes who died without fear."
+
+Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire arrows into the air. He
+heaps his fire and watches, musket in hand. The light of the moon is
+white like statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-edged trees
+are chiselled clear like statuary; and the silence is of stone. Only
+the snap of the blaze, the crackling of the frosted air, the break of a
+twig back among the brush, where something has moved, and the little,
+low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases; and the dog at last
+lowers his ears and lies quiet. The trapper throws a stick into the
+woods and sends the dog after it. The dog comes back without any
+barkings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have drawn off. Will he
+wait out that long Northern night? He has had nothing to eat but the
+piece of pemmican. The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
+if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run will carry him
+home; but to make speed with the snow-shoes he must run in the open,
+exposed to all watchers.
+
+When an Indian balances motives, the motive of hunger invariably
+prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting in the caribou coat and kicking
+up the dog, the trapper strikes out for the open way leading back to the
+line of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been built for
+shelter against wind. There is another reason for building lodges in a
+hollow. Sound of the hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
+sound of the game carry to the hunter.
+
+And if the game should turn hunter and the man turn hunted! The trapper
+speeds down the snowy slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over
+hummocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping rather than
+running. The frosty air acts as a conductor to sound, and the frost
+films come in stings against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and
+touch are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the first
+breath of peril, uttering a smothered "_woo! woo!_" The trapper tries to
+persuade himself the alarm was only the far scream of a wolf-hunted
+lynx; but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a dome. One
+glance over his shoulder shows him black forms on the snow-crest against
+the sky.
+
+He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox feels before the dogs
+in full cry.
+
+The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted thing with terror crazing
+his blood and the sleuth-hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something
+goes wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-strings, he
+sees that the dog's feet have been cut by the snow crust and are
+bleeding. It is life for life now; the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law,
+that has no new dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
+that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.
+
+One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.
+
+The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exultant bay. The wolf-pack
+are in full cry. The man has rounded the open alley between the trees
+and is speeding down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the pack
+pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite. The moon is behind,
+and the man-shadow flits before on the snow like an enemy heading him
+back. The deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer! He
+feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause. A great drift thrusts
+across his way and the shadow in front runs slower. They are gaining on
+him. He hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings for breath
+are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest of the drift he braces
+himself and goes to the bottom with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.
+
+The slant moonlight throws another shadow on the snow at his heels.
+
+It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and tosses up his arms--an
+Indian trick to stop pursuit. Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man
+that has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with a piercing
+howl.
+
+The man is off and away.
+
+If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men and a body-guard of
+guides hunt down a single quarry, he would be safe enough now. But the
+old musket is slow loading, and speed will serve him better than another
+shot.
+
+Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his instep to his ankle,
+throwing the racquet on edge and clogging him back. Before he can right
+it they are upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face and fight
+to the last breath. His hood falls back, and he wheels with the
+moonlight full in his eyes and the Northern Lights waving their mystic
+flames high overhead. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
+lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-wreathed trees, like
+funeral watchers--watchers of how many brave deaths in a desolate,
+lonely land where no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
+without fear!
+
+The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by burying the red-gummed
+fangs in the victim's throat; in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the
+runner's legs--called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
+ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teaches the Indian to be
+as merciless as he is brave--hunger!
+
+[Illustration: They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm.]
+
+Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the snapping red mouths
+with the butt of his weapon; and the foremost beasts roll under.
+
+But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase now, as much as from
+hunger. Leaping over their dead fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of
+the uplifted arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching for
+the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks to the rear of the
+hunter's fighting shadow. When the man swings his arm and draws back to
+strike, this miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
+dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.
+
+Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf has bitten the knee
+sinews to the bone. The pack leap up, and the man goes down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the heavy snow that fell
+over the northland that night, the Indians travelling to their summer
+hunting-grounds found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones of
+three dead wolves; and farther up the hill were the bleaching remains of
+a fourth.[35]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 35: A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay
+occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few
+years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the
+dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt--which
+tells its own story.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER
+
+
+The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a body-guard of armed guides in
+a field where the hunted have been on the run from the hunter for a
+century, gets a very tame idea of the natural bear in its natural state.
+Bears that have had the fear of man inculcated with longe-range
+repeaters lose confidence in the prowess of an aggressive onset against
+invisible foes. The city man comes back from the wilds with a legend of
+how harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild
+animal ever attacks unless it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear
+would go on its life-long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not
+compel it, or if repeated assault and battery from other animals did not
+teach the poor bear the art of self-defence.
+
+Grisly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the Western
+States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the forts of the
+Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, tell a different tale.
+Their hunting is done in a field where human presence is still so rare
+that it is unknown and the bear treats mankind precisely as he treats
+all other living beings from the moose and the musk-ox to mice and
+ants--as fair game for his own insatiable maw.
+
+Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns--"liars" the city man calls
+them--but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round the fur company
+forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in the artificial ridge of
+a deformed nose that the bear which he slew was a real one with an
+epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
+considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.[36] And the Kootenay
+hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
+of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
+dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
+eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
+other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
+blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
+twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
+wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
+that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
+altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
+girls through fairy books.
+
+That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
+and weaving at the grasses--weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
+mat--without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
+wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
+frill of a sun-bonnet, coming over the face as well as the neck--"to
+keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
+that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
+would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
+the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
+excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
+begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
+of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
+hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
+never lifting the thick frill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
+Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
+south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
+did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
+stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
+building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
+when they made a long overland _portage_, they were three weeks north of
+the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
+travelling light-handed. That is, they were carrying only a little salt
+and tea and tobacco. For the rest, they were depending on their muskets.
+Game had not been plentiful.
+
+Between the prairie and "the Mountains of the Setting Sun"--as the
+Indians call the Rockies--a long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled
+sinuously over the crests of the foothills; and all game--bird and
+beast--will shun a prairie fire. There was no wind. It was the dead hazy
+calm of Indian summer in the late autumn with the sun swimming in the
+purplish smoke like a blood-red shield all day and the serpent line of
+flame flickering and darting little tongues of vermilion against the
+deep blue horizon all night, days filled with the crisp smell of
+withered grasses, nights as clear and cold as the echo of a bell. On a
+windless plain there is no danger from a prairie fire. One may travel
+for weeks without nearing or distancing the waving tide of fire against
+a far sky; and the four trappers, running short of rations, decided to
+try to flank the fire coming around far enough ahead to intercept the
+game that must be moving away from the fire line.
+
+Nearly all hunters, through some dexterity of natural endowment,
+unconsciously become specialists. One man sees beaver signs where
+another sees only deer. For Ba'tiste, the page of nature spelled
+_B-E-A-R_! Fifteen bear in a winter is a wonderfully good season's work
+for any trapper. Ba'tiste's record for one lucky winter was fifty-four.
+After that he was known as the bear hunter. Such a reputation affects
+keen hunters differently. The Indian grows cautious almost to cowardice.
+Ba'tiste grew rash. He would follow a wounded grisly to cover. He would
+afterward laugh at the episode as a joke if the wounded brute had treed
+him. "For sure, good t'ing dat was not de prairie dat tam," he would
+say, flinging down the pelt of his foe. The other trappers with Indian
+blood in their veins might laugh, but they shook their heads when his
+back was turned.
+
+Flanking the fire by some of the great gullies that cut the foothills
+like trenches, the hunters began to find the signs they had been
+seeking. For Ba'tiste, the many different signs had but one meaning.
+Where some summer rain pool had dried almost to a soft mud hole, the
+other trappers saw little cleft foot-marks that meant deer, and prints
+like a baby's fingers that spelled out the visit of some member of the
+weasel family, and broad splay-hoof impressions that had spread under
+the weight as some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
+bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
+length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
+toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
+had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
+crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
+it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
+prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
+not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
+plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
+not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
+off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
+the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
+other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
+knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
+grasses thinned.
+
+Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
+raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things--stories of many bears,
+of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great slabs
+of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
+the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
+earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
+ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
+or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
+creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
+cliffs.
+
+Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
+other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
+beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
+russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
+flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
+thorny brush.
+
+The hawk soaring and dropping--lilting and falling and lifting
+again--might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
+bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
+blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
+down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.
+
+These things might interest the others. They did not interest Ba'tiste.
+Ba'tiste's eyes were for lairs of grass crushed so recently that the
+spear leaves were even now rising; for holes in the black mould where
+great ripping claws had been tearing up roots; for hollow logs and
+rotted stumps where a black bear might have crawled to take his
+afternoon siesta; for punky trees which a grisly might have torn open to
+gobble ants' eggs; for scratchings down the bole of poplar or cottonwood
+where some languid bear had been sharpening his claws in midsummer as a
+cat will scratch chair-legs; for great pits deep in the clay banks,
+where some silly badger or gopher ran down to the depths of his burrow
+in sheer terror only to have old bruin come ripping and tearing to the
+innermost recesses, with scattered fur left that told what had happened.
+
+Some soft oozy moss-padded lair, deep in the marsh with the reeds of the
+brittle cat-tails lifting as if a sleeper had just risen, sets
+Ba'tiste's pulse hopping--jumping--marking time in thrills like the
+lithe bounds of a pouncing mountain-cat. With tread soft as the velvet
+paw of a panther, he steals through the cane-brake parting the reeds
+before each pace, brushing aside softly--silently what might
+crush!--snap!--sound ever so slight an alarm to the little pricked ears
+of a shaggy head tossing from side to side--jerk--jerk--from right to
+left--from left to right--always on the listen!--on the listen!--for
+prey!--for prey!
+
+"Oh, for sure, that Ba'tiste, he was but a fool-hunter," as his comrades
+afterward said (it is always so very plain afterward); "that Ba'tiste,
+he was a fool! What man else go step--step--into the marsh after a
+bear!"
+
+But the truth was that Ba'tiste, the cunning rascal, always succeeded in
+coming out of the marsh, out of the bush, out of the windfall, sound as
+a top, safe and unscratched, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, the
+head swinging pendant to show what sort of fellow he had mastered.
+
+"Dat wan!--ah!--diable!--he has long sharp nose--he was thin--thin as a
+barrel all gone but de hoops--ah!--voilà!--he was wan ugly garçon, was
+dat bear!"
+
+Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage brush, bits of skin on
+the spined cactus, the others might vow coyotes had worried a badger.
+Ba'tiste would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. The
+cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant bear; for the bear is an
+epicure that would have meat gamey. To that the others would agree.
+
+And so the shortening autumn days with the shimmering heat of a crisp
+noon and the noiseless chill of starry twilights found the trappers
+canoeing leisurely up-stream from the northern tributaries of the
+Missouri nearing the long overland trail that led to the hunting-fields
+in Canada.
+
+One evening they came to a place bounded by high cliff banks with the
+flats heavily wooded by poplar and willow. Ba'tiste had found signs that
+were hot--oh! so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so fresh
+that it had not yet dried. This was not a region of timber-wolves. What
+had dug that hole? Not the small, skulking coyote--the vagrant of
+prairie life! Oh!--no!--the coyote like other vagrants earns his living
+without work, by skulking in the wake of the business-like badger; and
+when the badger goes down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands
+nearby and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to escape the
+invading badger.[37] What had dug the hole? Ba'tiste thinks that he
+knows.
+
+That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is another kind of
+hole--a roundish pit dug between moss-covered logs and earth wall, a
+pit with grass clawed down into it, snug and hidden and sheltered as a
+bird's nest. If the pit is what Ba'tiste thinks, somewhere on the banks
+of the stream should be a watering-place. He proposes that they beach
+the canoes and camp here. Twilight is not a good time to still hunt an
+unseen bear. Twilight is the time when the bear himself goes still
+hunting. Ba'tiste will go out in the early morning. Meantime if he
+stumbles on what looks like a trail to the watering-place, he will set a
+trap.
+
+Camp is not for the regular trapper what it is for the amateur hunter--a
+time of rest and waiting while others skin the game and prepare supper.
+
+One hunter whittles the willow sticks that are to make the camp fire.
+Another gathers moss or boughs for a bed. If fish can be got, some one
+has out a line. The kettle hisses from the cross-bar between notched
+sticks above the fire, and the meat sizzling at the end of a forked twig
+sends up a flavour that whets every appetite. Over the upturned canoes
+bend a couple of men gumming afresh all the splits and seams against
+to-morrow's voyage. Then with a flip-flop that tells of the other side
+of the flap-jacks being browned, the cook yodels in crescendo that
+"Sup--per!--'s--read--ee!"
+
+Supper over, a trap or two may be set in likely places. The men may take
+a plunge; for in spite of their tawny skins, these earth-coloured
+fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
+indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
+fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
+Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
+"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.
+
+On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
+Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
+spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
+wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
+whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
+crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
+hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
+he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
+with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering <big>V</big> lines, wing
+geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
+great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
+wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
+flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
+overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
+mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
+autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
+fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.
+
+Unless it is raining, the _voyageurs_ do not erect their tent; for they
+will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
+the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
+And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
+of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
+chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
+able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
+care. When the hunter came suddenly on them, over the old hen went,
+flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
+for shelter--when--lo!--of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
+she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
+stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
+fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
+they died of starvation and their bones bleached in the rusted steel.
+
+That story has such small relish for Ba'tiste that he hitches farther
+away from the others and lies back flat on the ground close to the
+willow under-tangle with his head on his hand.
+
+"For sure," says Ba'tiste contemptuously, "nobody doesn't need no tree
+to climb here! Sacré!--cry wolf!--wolf!--and for sure!--diable!--de beeg
+loup-garou will eat you yet!"
+
+Down somewhere from those stars overhead drops a call silvery as a
+flute, clear as a piccolo--some night bird lilting like a mote on the
+far oceans of air. The trappers look up with a movement that in other
+men would be a nervous start; for any shrill cry pierces the silence of
+the prairie in almost a stab. Then the men go on with their yarn telling
+of how the Blackfeet murdered some traders on this very ground not long
+ago till the gloom gathering over willow thicket and encircling cliffs
+seems peopled with those marauding warriors. One man rises, saying that
+he is "goin' to turn in" and is taking a step through the dark to his
+canoe when there is a dull pouncing thud. For an instant the trappers
+thought that their comrade had stumbled over his boat. But a heavy
+groan--a low guttural cry--a shout of "Help--help--help Ba'tiste!" and
+the man who had risen plunged into the crashing cane-brake, calling out
+incoherently for them to "help--help Ba'tiste!"
+
+In the confusion of cries and darkness, it was impossible for the other
+two trappers to know what had happened. Their first thought was of the
+Indians whose crimes they had been telling. Their second was for their
+rifles--and they had both sprung over the fire where they saw the third
+man striking--striking--striking wildly at something in the dark. A low
+worrying growl--and they descried the Frenchman rolling over and over,
+clutched by or clutching a huge furry form--hitting--plunging with his
+knife--struggling--screaming with agony.
+
+"It's Ba'tiste! It's a bear!" shouted the third man, who was attempting
+to drive the brute off by raining blows on its head.
+
+Man and bear were an indistinguishable struggling mass. Should they
+shoot in the half-dark? Then the Frenchman uttered the scream of one in
+death-throes: "Shoot!--shoot!--shoot quick! She's striking my
+face!--she's striking my face----"
+
+And before the words had died, sharp flashes of light cleft the
+dark--the great beast rolled over with a coughing growl, and the
+trappers raised their comrade from the ground.
+
+The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
+piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
+uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
+fore paw.
+
+Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.
+
+"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done
+to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"
+
+Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
+fainted because of what his hands felt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
+those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
+how many others whose treachery will never be known.
+
+But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
+flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
+foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
+in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
+of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
+doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
+was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
+post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
+set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.
+
+Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
+attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
+creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
+ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
+baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:
+
+"S--s--sz!--" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear--it is an
+animal!--the bear!--it is a beast!--toujours!--the bear!--it is a
+beast!--always--always!" And his hands clinch.
+
+Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
+sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.
+
+Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
+the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
+death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbé Dugast, of St. Boniface,
+Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
+Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
+overdrawn, I quote the Abbé's words:
+
+"At a little distance Madame Lajimoniere and the other women were
+preparing the tents for the night, when all at once Bouvier gave a cry
+of distress and called to his companions to help him. At the first
+shout, each hunter seized his gun and prepared to defend himself against
+the attack of an enemy; they hurried to the other side of the ditch to
+see what was the matter with Bouvier, and what he was struggling with.
+They had no idea that a wild animal would come near the fire to attack a
+man even under cover of night; for fire usually has the effect of
+frightening wild beasts. However, almost before the four hunters knew
+what had happened, they saw their unfortunate companion dragged into the
+woods by a bear followed by her two cubs. She held Bouvier in her claws
+and struck him savagely in the face to stun him. As soon as she saw the
+four men in pursuit, she redoubled her fury against her prey, tearing
+his face with her claws. M. Lajimoniere, who was an intrepid hunter,
+baited her with the butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as
+he dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while trying to save
+him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being choked, cried with all his
+strength: 'Shoot; I would rather be shot than eaten alive!' M.
+Lajimoniere pulled the trigger as close to the bear as possible,
+wounding her mortally. She let go Bouvier and before her strength was
+exhausted made a wild attack upon M. Lajimoniere, who expected this and
+as his gun had only one barrel loaded, he ran towards the canoe, where
+he had a second gun fully charged. He had hardly seized it before the
+bear reached the shore and tried to climb into the canoe, but fearing no
+longer to wound his friend, M. Lajimoniere aimed full at her breast and
+this time she was killed instantly. As soon as the bear was no longer to
+be feared, Madame Lajimoniere, who had been trembling with fear during
+the tumult, went to raise the unfortunate Bouvier, who was covered with
+wounds and nearly dead. The bear had torn the skin from his face with
+her nails from the roots of his hair to the lower part of his chin. His
+eyes and nose were gone--in fact his features were indiscernible--but he
+was not mortally injured. His wounds were dressed as well as the
+circumstances would permit, and thus crippled he was carried to the Fort
+of the Prairies, Madame Lajimoniere taking care of him all through the
+journey. In time his wounds were successfully healed, but he was blind
+and infirm to the end of his life. He dwelt at the Fort of the Prairies
+for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
+1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
+priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
+time during the last years of his life in making crosses and crucifixes
+blind as he was, but he never made any _chefs d'oeuvre_."
+
+Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
+things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
+the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
+I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
+1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
+only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
+death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
+country--and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
+ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
+whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not--whether, in a word, it
+is altogether _humane to hunt bears_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 36: In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
+factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
+when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
+When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
+the pelt.]
+
+[Footnote 37: This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
+writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
+any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
+field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
+badgers are running.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER
+
+
+Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.
+
+The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
+tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
+with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.
+
+The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
+nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.
+
+Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
+Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
+stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
+the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
+ice, the rush of whirlpools through the blackness of some far cañon, the
+crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
+multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
+startling the silences--these things filled the Indian with
+superstitious fears.
+
+The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"--great pillars of
+sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
+floods--were to the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
+awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
+quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
+The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
+echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
+swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.
+
+Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.
+
+Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
+every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
+in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
+east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
+stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
+the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
+the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
+camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
+down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
+the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
+cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
+white man's language, mystery.
+
+Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
+the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
+in safety.
+
+Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
+built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
+covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
+prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so sharp that French
+_voyageurs_ gave this queer craft the name "_canot à bec
+d'esturgeon_"--that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
+American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
+would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed cañons of the mountain
+streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
+other light timber, with such an angular narrow prow that it could take
+the sheerest dip and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat
+would fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men pushed
+out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now on that, using
+the reversible double-bladed paddles which only an amphibious boatman
+can manage. The two men shot out in mid-stream, where the mists would
+hide them from each shore; a moment later the white fog had enfolded
+them, and there was no trace of human presence but the trail of dimpling
+ripples in the wake of the canoe.
+
+No talking, no whistling, not a sound to betray them. And there were
+good reasons why these men did not wish their presence known. One was
+Potts, the other John Colter. Both had been with the Lewis and Clark
+exploring party of 1804-'05, when a Blackfoot brave had been slain for
+horse-thieving by the first white men to cross the Upper Missouri.
+Besides, the year before coming to the Jefferson, Colter had been with
+the Missouri Company's fur brigade under Manuel Lisa, and had gone to
+the Crows as an emissary from the fur company. While with the Crows, a
+battle had taken place against the Blackfeet, in which they suffered
+heavy loss owing to Colter's prowess. That made the Blackfeet sworn
+enemies to Colter.
+
+Turning off the Jefferson, the trappers headed their canoe up a side
+stream, probably one of those marshy reaches where beavers have formed a
+swamp by damming up the current of a sluggish stream. Such quiet waters
+are favourite resorts for beaver and mink and marten and pekan. Setting
+their traps only after nightfall, the two men could not possibly have
+put out more than forty or fifty. Thirty traps are a heavy day's work
+for one man. Six prizes out of thirty are considered a wonderful run of
+luck; but the empty traps must be examined as carefully as the
+successful ones. Many that have been mauled, "scented" by a beaver scout
+and left, must be replaced. Others must have fresh bait; others, again,
+carried to better grounds where there are more game signs.
+
+Either this was a very lucky morning and the men were detained taking
+fresh pelts, or it was a very unlucky morning and the men had decided to
+trap farther up-stream; for when the mists began to rise, the hunters
+were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver meadow, they continued
+paddling up-stream away from the Jefferson. A more hidden water-course
+they could hardly have found. The swampy beaver-runs narrowed, the
+shores rose higher and higher into rampart walls, and the dark-shadowed
+waters came leaping down in the lumpy, uneven runnels of a small cañon.
+You can always tell whether the waters of a cañon are compressed or not,
+whether they come from broad, swampy meadows or clear snow streams
+smaller than the cañon. The marsh waters roll down swift and black and
+turbid, raging against the crowding walls; the snow streams leap clear
+and foaming as champagne, and are in too great a hurry to stop and
+quarrel with the rocks. It is altogether likely these men recognised
+swampy water, and were ascending the cañon in search of a fresh
+beaver-marsh; or they would not have continued paddling six miles above
+the Jefferson with daylight growing plainer at every mile. First the
+mist rose like a smoky exhalation from the river; then it flaunted
+across the rampart walls in banners; then the far mountain peaks took
+form against the sky, islands in a sea of fog; then the cloud banks were
+floating in mid-heaven blindingly white from a sun that painted each
+cañon wall in the depths of the water.
+
+How much farther would the cañon lead? Should they go higher up or not?
+Was it wooded or clear plain above the walls? The man paused. What was
+that noise?
+
+"Like buffalo," said Potts.
+
+"Might be Blackfeet," answered Colter.
+
+No. What would Blackfeet be doing, riding at a pace to make such thunder
+so close to a cañon? It was only a buffalo herd stampeding on the annual
+southern run. Again Colter urged that the noise _might_ be from Indians.
+It would be safer for them to retreat at once. At which Potts wanted to
+know if Colter were afraid, using a stronger word--"coward."
+
+Afraid? Colter afraid? Colter who had remained behind Lewis and Clark's
+men to trap alone in the wilds for nearly two years, who had left Manuel
+Lisa's brigade to go alone among the thieving Crows, whose leadership
+had helped the Crows to defeat the Blackfeet?
+
+Anyway, it would now be as dangerous to go back as forward. They plainly
+couldn't land here. Let them go ahead where the walls seemed to slope
+down to shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an elbow of
+rock into the narrow course of a creek. Instantly out sprang five or six
+hundred Blackfeet warriors with weapons levelled guarding both sides of
+the stream.
+
+An Indian scout had discovered the trail of the white men and sent the
+whole band scouring ahead to intercept them at this narrow pass. The
+chief stepped forward, and with signals that were a command beckoned the
+hunters ashore.
+
+As is nearly always the case, the rash man was the one to lose his head,
+the cautious man the one to keep his presence of mind. Potts was for an
+attempt at flight, when every bow on both sides of the river would have
+let fly a shot. Colter was for accepting the situation, trusting to his
+own wit for subsequent escape.
+
+Colter, who was acting as steersman, sent the canoe ashore. Bottom had
+not grated before a savage snatched Potts's rifle from his hands.
+Springing ashore, Colter forcibly wrested the weapon back and coolly
+handed it to Potts.
+
+But Potts had lost all the rash courage of a moment before, and with one
+push sent the canoe into mid-stream. Colter shouted at him to come
+back--come back! Indians have more effective arguments. A bow-string
+twanged, and Potts screamed out, "Colter, I am wounded!"
+
+Again Colter urged him to land. The wound turned Pott's momentary fright
+to a paroxysm of rage. Aiming his rifle, he shot his Indian assailant
+dead. If it was torture that he feared, that act assured him at least a
+quick death; for, in Colter's language, man and boat were
+instantaneously "made a riddle of."
+
+No man admires courage more than the Indian; and the Blackfeet
+recognised in their captive one who had been ready to defend his comrade
+against them all, and who had led the Crows to victory against their own
+band.
+
+The prisoner surrendered his weapons. He was stripped naked, but neither
+showed sign of fear nor made a move to escape. Evidently the Blackfeet
+could have rare sport with this game white man. His life in the Indian
+country had taught him a few words of the Blackfoot language. He heard
+them conferring as to how he should be tortured to atone for all that
+the Blackfeet had suffered at white men's hands. One warrior suggested
+that the hunter be set up as a target and shot at. Would he then be so
+brave?
+
+But the chief shook his head. That was not game enough sport for
+Blackfeet warriors. That would be letting a man die passively. And how
+this man could fight if he had an opportunity! How he could resist
+torture if he had any chance of escaping the torture!
+
+But Colter stood impassive and listened. Doubtless he regretted having
+left the well-defended brigades of the fur companies to hunt alone in
+the wilderness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gambler's
+vice--the more a man has, the more he wants. Had not Colter crossed the
+Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
+fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
+revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
+that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
+more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
+coming up the Missouri with a brigade of hunters, and for the third
+time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
+Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
+by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
+instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
+things--to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
+wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The free trappers formed a class by themselves.
+
+Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
+on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
+like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
+boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
+free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
+where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
+but the one that paid the highest prices. For the _mangeurs de lard_, as
+they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
+the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
+or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
+had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.
+
+The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
+He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
+Indian--whisky--among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
+terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
+Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
+Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame,
+might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
+these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
+companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
+Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
+among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the
+term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
+Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
+in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
+for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
+dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
+Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day--before they joined
+the Astorians--and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
+the true type of free trapper.
+
+The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
+behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
+might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
+Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
+region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
+dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
+Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
+years before the Astorians came in 1811.
+
+One crime the free trappers may be charged with--a reckless waste of
+precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
+hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
+hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest game while the mothers
+were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
+follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
+away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
+of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
+game.
+
+Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
+Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
+classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
+After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
+permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
+"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
+wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
+passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
+where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
+ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
+very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
+held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the company,
+was able to say only two years ago, "the fur trade is quite as large as
+ever it was."
+
+Among free hunters, Canada had only one commanding figure--John Johnston
+of the Soo, who settled at La Pointe on Lake Superior in 1792, formed
+league with Wabogish, "the White Fisher," and became the most famous
+trader of the Lakes. His life, too, was almost as eventful as Colter's.
+A member of the Irish nobility, some secret which he never chose to
+reveal drove him to the wilds. Wabogish, the "White Fisher," had a
+daughter who refused the wooings of all her tribe's warriors. In vain
+Johnston sued for her hand. Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his
+Irish estates and prove his devotion by buying as vast estates in
+America. Johnston took the old chief at his word, and married the
+haughty princess of the Lake. When the War of 1812 set all the tribes by
+the ears, Johnston and his wife had as thrilling adventures as ever
+Colter knew among the Blackfeet.
+
+Many a free trapper, and partner of the fur companies as well, secured
+his own safety by marrying the daughter of a chief, as Johnston had.
+These were not the lightly-come, lightly-go affairs of the vagrant
+adventurer. If the husband had not cast off civilization like a garment,
+the wife had to put it on like a garment; and not an ill-fitting garment
+either, when one considers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted
+the wilderness like oases in a desert almost contemporaneous with the
+fur trade. If the trapper had not sunk to the level of the savages, the
+little daughter of the chief was educated by the nuns for her new
+position. I recall several cases where the child was sent across the
+Atlantic to an English governess so that the equality would be literal
+and not a sentimental fiction. And yet, on no subject has the western
+fur trader received more persistent and unjust condemnation. The heroism
+that culminated in the union of Pocahontas with a noted Virginian won
+applause, and almost similar circumstances dictated the union of fur
+traders with the daughters of Indian chiefs; but because the fur trader
+has not posed as a sentimentalist, he has become more or less of a
+target for the index finger of the Pharisee.[38]
+
+North of the boundary the free trapper had small chance against the
+Hudson's Bay Company. As long as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself
+chiefly recruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the
+Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of the Mississippi;
+but after the Mackinaw was absorbed by the aggressive American Fur
+Company, the free hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Missouri
+competition raged from 1810, so that circumstances drove the free
+trapper westward to the mountains, where he is hunting in the twentieth
+century as his prototype hunted two hundred years ago.
+
+In Canada--of course after 1870--he entered the mountains chiefly by
+three passes: (1) Yellow Head Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the
+narrow gap where the Bow emerges to the plains--that is, the river where
+the Indians found the best wood for the making of bows; (3) north of the
+boundary, through that narrow defile overtowered by the lonely
+flat-crowned peak called Crows Nest Mountain--that is, where the
+fugitive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet.
+
+In the United States, the free hunters also approached the mountains by
+three main routes: (1) Up the Platte; (2) westward from the Missouri
+across the plains; (3) by the Three Forks of the Missouri. For instance,
+it was coming down the Platte that poor Scott's canoe was overturned,
+his powder lost, and his rifles rendered useless. Game had retreated to
+the mountains with spring's advance. Berries were not ripe by the time
+trappers were descending with their winter's hunt. Scott and his
+famishing men could not find edible roots. Each day Scott weakened.
+There was no food. Finally, Scott had strength to go no farther. His men
+had found tracks of some other hunting party far to the fore. They
+thought that, in any case, he could not live. What ought they to do?
+Hang back and starve with him, or hasten forward while they had
+strength, to the party whose track they had espied? On pretence of
+seeking roots, they deserted the helpless man. Perhaps they did not come
+up with the advance party till they were sure that Scott must have died;
+for they did not go back to his aid. The next spring when these same
+hunters went up the Platte, they found the skeleton of poor Scott sixty
+miles from the place where they had left him. The terror that spurred
+the emaciated man to drag himself all this weary distance can barely be
+conceived; but such were the fearful odds taken by every free trapper
+who went up the Platte, across the parched plains, or to the head waters
+of the Missouri.
+
+The time for the free trappers to go out was, in Indian language, "when
+the leaves began to fall." If a mighty hunter like Colter, the trapper
+was to the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant of woods
+and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
+red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
+slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
+questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
+of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
+important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
+the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
+hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
+all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
+provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
+to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
+was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
+the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.
+
+Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
+himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
+thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
+squaw all the pemmican white men could use.
+
+Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
+trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
+the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
+piece of string--_babiche_ (leather cord, called by the Indians
+_assapapish_)--fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
+dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
+marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher--a
+hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for his next year's
+canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood--some man wanted this tree
+for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
+beaver-marsh--some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
+other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
+told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
+could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
+were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
+If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
+tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
+the inside of a punky trunk and the shooting flames were a rallying
+call.
+
+In the most perilous regions the trapper travelled only after nightfall
+with muffled paddles--that is, muffled where the handle might strike the
+gunwale. Camp-fires warned him which side of the river to avoid; and
+often a trapper slipping past under the shadow of one bank saw hobgoblin
+figures dancing round the flames of the other bank--Indians celebrating
+their scalp dance. In these places the white hunter ate cold meals to
+avoid lighting a fire; or if he lighted a fire, after cooking his meal
+he withdrew at once and slept at a distance from the light that might
+betray him.
+
+The greatest risk of travelling after dark during the spring floods
+arose from what the _voyageurs_ called _embarras_--trees torn from the
+banks sticking in the soft bottom like derelicts with branches to
+entangle the trapper's craft; but the _embarras_ often befriended the
+solitary white man. Usually he slept on shore rolled in a buffalo-robe;
+but if Indian signs were fresh, he moored his canoe in mid-current and
+slept under hiding of the driftwood. Friendly Indians did not conceal
+themselves, but came to the river bank waving a buffalo-robe and
+spreading it out to signal a welcome to the white man; when the trapper
+would go ashore, whiff pipes with the chiefs and perhaps spend the night
+listening to the tales of exploits which each notch on the calumet
+typified. Incidents that meant nothing to other men were full of
+significance to the lone _voyageur_ through hostile lands. Always the
+spring floods drifted down numbers of dead buffalo; and the carrion
+birds sat on the trees of the shore with their wings spread out to dry
+in the sun. The sudden flacker of a rising flock betrayed something
+prowling in ambush on the bank; so did the splash of a snake from
+overhanging branches into the water.
+
+Different sorts of dangers beset the free trapper crossing the plains to
+the mountains. The fur company brigades always had escort of armed guard
+and provision packers. The free trappers went alone or in pairs,
+picketing horses to the saddle overlaid with a buffalo-robe for a
+pillow, cooking meals on chip fires, using a slow-burning wormwood bark
+for matches, and trusting their horses or dog to give the alarm if the
+bands of coyotes hovering through the night dusk approached too near. On
+the high rolling plains, hostiles could be descried at a distance,
+coming over the horizon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or
+emerging from the "coolies"--dried sloughs--like wolves from the earth.
+Enemies could be seen soon enough; but where could the trapper hide on
+bare prairie? He didn't attempt to hide. He simply set fire to the
+prairie and took refuge on the lee side. That device failing, he was at
+his enemies' mercy.
+
+On the plains, the greatest danger was from lack of water. At one season
+the trapper might know where to find good camping streams. The next year
+when he came to those streams they were dry.
+
+     "After leaving the buffalo meadows a dreadful scarcity of water
+     ensued," wrote Charles MacKenzie, of the famous MacKenzie clan. He
+     was journeying north from the Missouri. "We had to alter our course
+     and steer to a distant lake. When we got there we found the lake
+     dry. However, we dug a pit which produced a kind of stinking liquid
+     which we all drank. It was salt and bitter, caused an inflammation
+     of the mouth, left a disagreeable roughness of the throat, and
+     seemed to increase our thirst.... We passed the night under great
+     uneasiness. Next day we continued our journey, but not a drop of
+     water was to be found, ... and our distress became
+     insupportable.... All at once our horses became so unruly that we
+     could not manage them. We observed that they showed an inclination
+     towards a hill which was close by. It struck me that they might
+     have scented water.... I ascended to the top, where, to my great
+     joy, I discovered a small pool.... My horse plunged in before I
+     could prevent him, ... and all the horses drank to excess."
+
+"_The plains across_"--which was a western expression meaning the end of
+that part of the trip--there rose on the west rolling foothills and dark
+peaked profiles against the sky scarcely to be distinguished from gray
+cloud banks. These were the mountains; and the real hazards of free
+trapping began. No use to follow the easiest passes to the most
+frequented valleys. The fur company brigades marched through these,
+sweeping up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers sought out the
+hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where neither pack horse nor _canot
+à bec d'esturgeon_ could follow. How did they do it? Very much the way
+Simon Fraser's hunters crawled down the river-course named after him.
+"Our shoes," said one trapper, "did not last a single day."
+
+     "We had to plunge our daggers into the ground, ... otherwise we
+     would slide into the river," wrote Fraser. "We cut steps into the
+     declivity, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, with which
+     some of the men ascended in order to haul it up. .. Our lives hung,
+     as it were, upon a thread, as the failure of the line or the false
+     step of the man might have hurled us into eternity.... We had to
+     pass where no human being should venture.... Steps were formed like
+     a ladder on the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another
+     and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended
+     from the top to the foot of immense precipices, and fastened at
+     both extremities to stones and trees."
+
+He speaks of the worst places being where these frail swaying ladders
+led up to the overhanging ledge of a shelving precipice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such were the very real adventures of the trapper's life, a life whose
+fascinations lured John Colter from civilization to the wilds again and
+again till he came back once too often and found himself stripped,
+helpless, captive, in the hands of the Blackfeet.
+
+It would be poor sport torturing a prisoner who showed no more fear than
+this impassive white man coolly listening and waiting for them to
+compass his death. So the chief dismissed the suggestion to shoot at
+their captive as a target. Suddenly the Blackfoot leader turned to
+Colter. "Could the white man run fast?" he asked. In a flash Colter
+guessed what was to be his fate. He, the hunter, was to be hunted. No,
+he cunningly signalled, he was only a poor runner.
+
+Bidding his warriors stand still, the chief roughly led Colter out
+three hundred yards. Then he set his captive free, and the exultant
+shriek of the running warriors told what manner of sport this was to be.
+It was a race for life.
+
+The white man shot out with all the power of muscles hard as iron-wood
+and tense as a bent bow. Fear winged the man running for his life to
+outrace the winged arrows coming from the shouting warriors three
+hundred yards behind. Before him stretched a plain six miles wide, the
+distance he had so thoughtlessly paddled between the rampart walls of
+the cañon but a few hours ago. At the Jefferson was a thick forest
+growth where a fugitive might escape. Somewhere along the Jefferson was
+his own hidden cabin.
+
+Across this plain sped Colter, pursued by a band of six hundred
+shrieking demons. Not one breath did he waste looking back over his
+shoulder till he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
+from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
+was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
+redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
+who was only a hundred yards behind.
+
+There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
+renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
+spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
+more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
+every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
+He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
+man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!
+
+This is an Indian _ruse_ to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
+of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
+of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
+his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
+pinned the savage through the body to the earth.
+
+That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
+rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.
+
+In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
+where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
+up with his head among branches of trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
+log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
+man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
+wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
+country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
+Bighorn River.
+
+Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
+subsisted entirely on roots and berries.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
+Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
+were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
+that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
+in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
+episode for history in a small-type foot-note to his book published in
+London in 1817.
+
+Two other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
+Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
+the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
+of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
+beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.
+
+And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
+Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
+wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
+to his life--he had taken to himself a bride.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 38: Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
+if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
+Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
+had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
+of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
+they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
+and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
+the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
+Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
+proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
+_Bois-Brûlés_? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
+and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
+single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD
+
+
+In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
+empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
+lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
+corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
+stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
+armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
+three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
+long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
+of silent achievement.
+
+Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
+Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.[39] Such is the Hudson's
+Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
+the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
+trade to his cousin Prince Rupert.
+
+Governors and chief factors have changed with the changing centuries;
+but the character of the company's personnel has never changed. Prince
+Rupert, the first governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James
+II); and the royal governor by a long line of distinguished public men
+down to Lord Strathcona, the present governor, and C. C. Chipman, the
+chief commissioner or executive officer. All have been men of noted
+achievement, often in touch with the Crown, always with that passion for
+executive and mastery of difficulty which exults most when the conflict
+is keenest.
+
+Pioneers face the unknown when circumstances push them into it.
+Adventurers rush into the unknown for the zest of conquering it. It has
+been to the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged.
+
+Radisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who first brought back word
+of the great wealth in furs round the far northern sea, had been
+gentlemen adventurers--"rascals" their enemies called them. Prince
+Rupert, who leagued himself with the Frenchmen to obtain a charter for
+his fur trade, had been an adventurer of the high seas--"pirate" we
+would say--long before he became first governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, the company's third governor, was
+as great an adventurer as he was a general.
+
+Latterly the word "adventurer" has fallen in such evil repute, it may
+scarcely be applied to living actors. But using it in the old-time sense
+of militant hero, what cavalier of gold braid and spurs could be more of
+an adventurer than young Donald Smith who traded in the desolate wastes
+of Labrador, spending seventeen years in the hardest field of the fur
+company, tramping on snow-shoes half the width of a continent, camping
+where night overtook him under blanketing of snow-drifts, who rose step
+by step from trader on the east coast to commissioner in the west? And
+this Donald Smith became Lord Strathcona, the governor of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.
+
+Men bold in action and conservative in traditions have ruled the
+company. The governor resident in England is now represented by the
+chief commissioner, who in turn is represented at each of the many
+inland forts by a chief factor of the district. Nominally, the
+fur-trader's northern realm is governed by the Parliament of Canada.
+Virtually, the chief factor rules as autocratically to-day as he did
+before the Canadian Government took over the proprietary rights of the
+fur company.
+
+How did these rulers of the wilds, these princes of the fur trade, live
+in lonely forts and mountain fastnesses? Visit one of the northern forts
+as it exists to-day.
+
+The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The farther north the fort,
+the more typical it is of the fur-trader's realm.
+
+For six, seven, eight months of the year, the fur-trader's world is a
+white wilderness of snow; snow water-waved by winds that sweep from the
+pole; snow drifted into ramparts round the fort stockades till the
+highest picket sinks beneath the white flood and the corner bastions are
+almost submerged and the entrance to the central gate resembles the
+cutting of a railway tunnel; snow that billows to the unbroken reaches
+of the circling sky-line like a white sea. East, frost-mist hides the
+low horizon in clouds of smoke, for the sun which rises from the east in
+other climes rises from the south-east here; and until the spring
+equinox, bringing summer with a flood-tide of thaw, gray darkness hangs
+in the east like a fog. South, the sun moves across the snowy levels in
+a wheel of fire, for it has scarcely risen full sphered above the
+sky-line before it sinks again etching drift and tip of half-buried
+brush in long lonely fading shadows. The west shimmers in warm purplish
+grays, for the moist Chinook winds come over the mountains melting the
+snow by magic. North, is the cold steel of ice by day; and at night
+Northern Lights darting through the polar dark like burnished spears.
+
+Christmas day is welcomed at the northern fur posts by a firing of
+cannon from the snow-muffled bastions. Before the stars have faded,
+chapel services begin. Frequently on either Christmas or New Year's day,
+a grand feast is given the tawny-skinned _habitués_ of the fort, who
+come shuffling to the main mess-room with no other announcement than the
+lifting of the latch, and billet themselves on the hospitality of a host
+that has never turned hungry Indians from its doors.
+
+For reasons well-known to the woodcraftsman, a sudden lull falls on
+winter hunting in December, and all the trappers within a week's journey
+from the fort, all the half-breed guides who add to the instinct of
+native craft the reasoning of the white, all the Indian hunters ranging
+river-course and mountain have come by snow-shoes and dog train to spend
+festive days at the fort. A great jangling of bells announces the
+huskies (dog trains) scampering over the crusted snow-drifts. A babel of
+barks and curses follows, for the huskies celebrate their arrival by
+tangling themselves up in their harness and enjoying a free fight.
+
+Dogs unharnessed, in troop the trappers to the banquet-hall, flinging
+packs of tightly roped peltries down promiscuously, to be sorted next
+day. One Indian enters just as he has left the hunting-field, clad from
+head to heel in white caribou with the antlers left on the capote as a
+decoy. His squaw has togged out for the occasion in a comical medley of
+brass bracelets and finger-rings, with a bear's claw necklace and ermine
+ruff which no city connoisseur could possibly mistake for rabbit. If a
+daughter yet remain unappropriated she will display the gayest
+attire--red flannel galore, red shawl, red scarf, with perhaps an apron
+of white fox-skin and moccasins garnished in coloured grasses. The
+braves outdo even a vain young squaw. Whole fox, mink, or otter skins
+have been braided to the end of their hair, and hang down in two plaits
+to the floor. Whitest of buckskin has been ornamented with brightest of
+beads, and over all hangs the gaudiest of blankets, it may be a
+musk-ox-skin with the feats of the warrior set forth in rude drawings on
+the smooth side.
+
+Children and old people, too, come to the feast, for the Indian's
+stomach is the magnet that draws his soul. Grotesque little figures the
+children are, with men's trousers shambling past their heels,
+rabbit-skin coats with the fur turned in, and on top of all some old
+stovepipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to the urchin's
+neck. The old people have more resemblance to parchment on gnarled
+sticks than to human beings. They shiver under dirty blankets with every
+sort of cast-off rag tied about their limbs, hobbling lame from frozen
+feet or rheumatism, mumbling toothless requests for something to eat or
+something to wear, for tobacco, the solace of Indian woes, or what is
+next best--tea.
+
+Among so many guests are many needs. One half-breed from a far wintering
+outpost, where perhaps a white man and this guide are living in a
+chinked shack awaiting a hunting party's return, arrives at the fort
+with frozen feet. Little Labree's feet must be thawed out, and sometimes
+little Labree dies under the process, leaving as a legacy to the chief
+factor the death-bed pledge that the corpse be taken to a distant tribal
+burying-ground. And no matter how inclement the winter, the chief factor
+keeps his pledge, for the integrity of a promise is the only law in the
+fur-trader's realm. Special attentions, too, must be paid those old
+retainers who have acted as mentors of the fort in times of trouble.
+
+A few years ago it would not have been safe to give this treat inside
+the fort walls. Rations would have been served through loop-holes and
+the feast held outside the gates; but so faithfully have the Indians
+become bound to the Hudson's Bay Company there are not three forts in
+the fur territory where Indians must be excluded.
+
+Of the feast little need be said. Like the camel, the Indian lays up
+store for the morrow, judging from his capacity for weeks of morrows.
+His benefactor no more dines with him than a plantation master of the
+South would have dined with feasting slaves. Elsewhere a bell calls the
+company officers to breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 1, supper at 7.
+Officers dine first, white hunters and trappers second, that difference
+between master and servant being maintained which is part of the
+company's almost military discipline. In the large forts are libraries,
+whither resort the officers for the long winter nights. But over the
+feast wild hilarity reigns.
+
+A French-Canadian fiddler strikes up a tuneless jig that sets the
+Indians pounding the floor in figureless dances with moccasined heels
+till midday glides into midnight and midnight to morning. I remember
+hearing of one such midday feast in Red River settlement that prolonged
+itself past four of the second morning. Against the walls sit old folks
+spinning yarns of the past. There is a print of Sir George Simpson
+behind one _raconteur's_ head. Ah! yes, the oldest guides all remember
+Sir George, though half a century has passed since his day. He was the
+governor who travelled with flags flying from every prow, and cannon
+firing when he left the forts, and men drawn up in procession like
+soldiers guarding an emperor when he entered the fur posts with
+_coureurs_ and all the flourish of royal state. Then some story-teller
+recalls how he has heard the old guides tell of the imperious governor
+once provoking personal conflict with an equally imperious steersman,
+who first ducked the governor into a lake they were traversing and then
+ducked into the lake himself to rescue the governor.
+
+And there is a crucifix high on the wall left by Père Lacomb the last
+time the famous missionary to the red men of the Far North passed this
+way; and every Indian calls up some kindness done, some sacrifice by
+Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old muskets and Indian masks and
+scalp-locks, bringing back the days when Russian traders instigated a
+massacre at this fort and when white traders flew at each other's
+throats as Nor' Westers struggled with Hudson's Bay for supremacy in the
+fur trade.
+
+"Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fighters, they did not know
+how to stop. Mais, sacré, they were fools, those white men after all!
+Instead of hiding in ambush to catch the foe, those white men measured
+off paces, stood up face to face and fired blank--oui--fired blank! Ugh!
+Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, most like, he was
+wound'! Ugh, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?"[40]
+
+Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless. That enormous
+bear-skin stretched to four pegs on the wall brings up Montagnais, the
+Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest
+bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one
+hand dragging the enormous skin and the other holding the place which
+his nose no longer graced.
+
+"Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez
+ici--bien--so--I tole you 'bout heem," begins some French-Canadian
+trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
+"Bigosh! He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go
+stumble t'rough snow--how you call dat?--hill, steep--steep! Oui, by
+Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de--de gran'
+rapeed, see?" emphasizing the snow-slide with illustrative gesture.
+"Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem
+fall--so--see? Tonnerre! Bigosh! for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
+Sacré! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg ol' bear sleep in snow.
+Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear--diable!
+'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg
+loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man--he not scare--he say wan leetle
+prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'--sacré--dat grab hees
+knife out hees belt--sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her
+breat'--diable!--for sure he fin' de place her heart beat--Tonnerre!
+Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat
+bear! Dat bes' t'ing do--for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best
+t'ing do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she
+no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over
+too--leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
+dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"
+
+And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
+credit of Montagnais's heroism.
+
+But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
+the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
+of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
+peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
+spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
+plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
+frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
+beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
+a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
+chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
+can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
+musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
+season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
+prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
+heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.
+
+The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
+arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
+hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
+the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
+beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
+gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
+the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
+more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
+effected.
+
+But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
+dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.
+
+South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
+beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
+shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
+stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
+1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.
+
+First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
+five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth
+from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox
+worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's
+Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000
+blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the
+trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and
+white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against
+the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other
+game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur
+taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be
+that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the
+hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the
+Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the
+white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and
+seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares
+the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is
+plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.
+
+Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to
+the store counter where begins interminable dickering. Montagnais's
+squaw has only fifty "beaver" coin, and her desires are a hundredfold
+what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating
+down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk
+a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to
+have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At
+the termination of each bargain, so many coins pass across the counter.
+Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver
+enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of
+Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
+The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many "beaver"
+against the trapper's next hunt.
+
+Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a
+disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an
+easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor
+the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no competition,
+whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer,
+for which the Indian has as keen an appetite, both for the exigencies of
+hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first
+thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
+the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
+The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they
+considered the more dangerous.
+
+Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
+coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
+according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
+the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
+ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
+Christmas.
+
+Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
+steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
+constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
+light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
+but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
+handled differently.
+
+Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
+like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
+slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
+quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snowbird or
+rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
+forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
+snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
+unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
+the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
+full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
+suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
+down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
+springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
+strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
+bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.
+
+If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
+the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
+which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
+dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
+worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
+the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
+ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its
+spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his
+hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little
+ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the
+knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been
+teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its
+tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that
+frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like
+ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife. But alas for the
+resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm
+tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little
+stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper
+comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble
+up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the
+ermine.
+
+Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
+a leading fort would amount to:
+
+  Bear of all varieties      400
+  Ermine, medium             200
+  Blue fox                     4
+  Red fox                     91
+  Silver fox                   3
+  Marten                   2,000
+  Musk-rat               200,000
+  Mink                     8,000
+  Otter                      500
+  Skunk                        6
+  Wolf                       100
+  Beaver                   5,000
+  Pekan (fisher)              50
+  Cross fox                   30
+  White fox                  400
+  Lynx                       400
+  Wolverine                  200
+
+The value of these furs in "beaver" currency varied with the fashions of
+the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the
+locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver
+equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500
+rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no
+set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the
+annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.
+
+To understand the values of these furs to the Indian, "beaver" currency
+must be compared to merchandise, one beaver buying such a red
+handkerchief as trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunters
+not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two an axe, from eight to
+twenty a gun or rifle, according to its quality. And in one old trading
+list I found--vanity of vanities--"one beaver equals looking-glass."
+
+Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
+which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
+on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
+and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
+fort with the harvest of winter furs.
+
+Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
+trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
+the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
+trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
+river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
+drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
+have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
+forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
+mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
+falls--falls--falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
+mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
+notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
+to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
+woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
+of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
+the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
+of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
+the shady side--that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
+that a wanderer use his eyes--which the white man seldom does--the limbs
+of the northern trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
+be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
+grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
+timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
+with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.
+
+One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
+Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
+hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
+allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
+chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
+was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in the lodge.
+Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
+placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
+through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
+enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
+half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
+Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
+older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
+by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
+dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
+stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
+her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
+fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
+withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
+explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had
+been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
+the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
+dead.[41]
+
+The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
+monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
+habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
+the outside world.
+
+Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
+railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
+canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
+the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
+scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
+across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
+the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
+bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
+the leagueless world of the Far North.
+
+Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
+a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
+crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
+bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
+the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
+the huskies can gallop.
+
+Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
+ox-carts that used to screech and creak and jolt over the rutted prairie
+roads between Winnipeg and St. Paul. More than 1,500 Hudson's Bay
+Company carts manned by 500 traders with tawny spouses and black-eyed
+impish children, squatted on top of the load, left Canada for St. Paul
+in August and returned in October. The carts were made without a rivet
+of iron. Bent wood formed the tires of the two wheels. Hardwood axles
+told their woes to the world in the scream of shrill bagpipes. Wooden
+racks took the place of cart box. In the shafts trod a staid old ox
+guided from the horns or with a halter, drawing the load with collar
+instead of a yoke. The harness was of skin thongs. In place of the ox
+sometimes was a "shagganippy" pony, raw and unkempt, which the imps
+lashed without mercy or the slightest inconvenience to the horse.
+
+A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white decorated the leading
+cart. During the Sioux massacres the fur caravans were unmolested, for
+the Indians recognised the flags and wished to remain on good terms with
+the fur traders.
+
+Ox-carts still bring furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts, and screech
+over the corduroyed swamps of the MacKenzie; but the railway has
+replaced the caravan as a carrier of freight.
+
+[Illustration: Carrying goods over long _portage_ in MacKenzie River
+region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts.]
+
+Hudson's Bay Company steamers now ply on the largest of the inland
+rivers with long lines of fur-laden barges in tow; but the canoe
+brigades still bring the winter's hunt to the forts in spring. Five to
+eight craft make a brigade, each manned by eight paddlers with an
+experienced steersman, who is usually also guide. But the one ranking
+first in importance is the bowman, whose quick eye must detect signs of
+nearing rapids, whose steel-shod pole gives the cue to the other
+paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The bowman it is who
+leaps out first when there is "tracking"--pulling the craft up-stream by
+tow-line--who stands waist high in ice water steadying the rocking bark
+lest a sudden swirl spill furs to the bottom, who hands out the packs to
+the others when the waters are too turbulent for "tracking" and there
+must be a "_portage_," and who leads the brigade on a run--half trot,
+half amble--overland to the calmer currents. "Pipes" are the measure of
+a _portage_--that is, the pipes smoked while the _voyageurs_ are on the
+run. The bowman it is who can thread a network of water-ways by day or
+dark, past rapids or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
+mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
+meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
+pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.
+
+The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
+these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.
+
+Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
+vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
+and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
+meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
+whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
+wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
+structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
+the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
+servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
+one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.
+
+Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
+Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
+arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
+string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
+befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
+Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
+right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
+ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
+Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
+soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
+the letters H. B. C.[42] Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
+court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
+presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
+hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
+made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
+assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
+harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
+diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
+post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
+of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
+and rampart.
+
+Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
+an American Siberia--the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
+waterway, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
+winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
+think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
+mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
+not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
+was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
+world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
+a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
+Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
+dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
+without raising a sand bar.
+
+The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
+of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
+Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.
+
+Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.
+
+Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
+after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
+curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
+surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
+only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
+Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
+company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
+shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
+principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
+probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one
+hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
+in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
+Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
+employed as traders, packers, _coureurs_, canoe men, hunters, and
+guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
+Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
+wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
+life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
+this power was seldom abused.[43] Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
+might use lash and triangle and branding along the northern coast; but
+officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
+terms of justice with their men.
+
+The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
+than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
+company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
+Times without number under the old _régime_ has a Hudson's Bay officer
+set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
+to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
+unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
+savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.
+
+Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
+when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
+But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
+unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt
+to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
+within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
+before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
+vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
+the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says
+the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
+eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
+skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.
+
+And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?
+
+Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
+whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
+and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
+from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
+domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
+desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
+glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
+Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
+that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
+and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
+tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
+them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
+tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies--splendid types of manhood
+because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains;
+coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot--low and lazy because the great
+rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work.
+
+Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay
+Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life
+in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a
+single year.
+
+Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been
+assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten,
+twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But,
+then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single
+year.
+
+When fighting rivals long ago, it is true that the Hudson's Bay Company
+recognised neither human nor divine law. Grant the charge and weigh it
+against the benefits of the company's rule. When Hearne visited
+Chippewyans two centuries ago he found the Indians in a state
+uncontaminated by the trader; and that state will give the ordinary
+reader cold shivers of horror at the details of massacre and
+degradation. Every visitor since has reported the same tribe improved in
+standard of living under Hudson's Bay rule. Recently a well-known
+Canadian governor making an itinerary of the territory round the bay
+found the Indians such devout Christians that they put his white retinue
+to shame. Returning to civilization, the governor was observed attending
+the services of his own denomination with a greater fury than was his
+wont. Asked the reason, he confided to a club friend that he would be
+_blanked_ if he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians than
+he was.
+
+Some of the shiftless Indians may be hopelessly in debt to the company
+for advanced provisions, but if the company had not made these advances
+the Indians would have starved, and the debt is never exacted by seizure
+of the hunt that should go to feed a family.
+
+Of how many other creditors may that be said? Of how many companies that
+it has cared for the sick, sought the lost, fed the starving, housed the
+homeless? With all its faults, that is the record of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 39: The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter
+seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the
+apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.]
+
+[Footnote 40: To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white
+traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.]
+
+[Footnote 41: It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
+and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
+the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.]
+
+[Footnote 42: The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
+there would be no trade.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
+conspicuous for his brutality.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT
+
+
+Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
+to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
+disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
+liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
+misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
+that he _feels_ his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
+as _that_--jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
+gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
+instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
+when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
+storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.
+
+So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
+steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
+of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
+valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
+destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
+still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
+valley--but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
+and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first _explored_ the
+Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
+trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
+Company was the first Canadian to _explore_ the lower Columbia; but
+before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
+ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
+wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
+mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
+the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
+on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
+her young?
+
+Something, which may be the result of generations of accumulated
+observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
+the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
+guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
+and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
+reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
+brute. It is not sharp-sightedness--though no man is sharper of sight
+than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing--though the trapper
+learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
+is not touch--in the sense of tactile contact--any more than it is touch
+that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
+presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
+senses, a sixth sense--a sense of _feel_, without contact--a sense on
+which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
+This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of _feel_, his weapon
+against the instinct of the brute. What part it plays in the life of
+every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
+found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
+trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
+and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
+from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
+trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
+hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
+coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
+supplied by "wahboos--little white chap," which is the Indian name for
+rabbit.
+
+And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
+chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
+runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
+of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
+and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
+the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
+and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
+so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
+sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimming over the snow for all
+the world like a bouncing football done up in gray fur--all members of
+the cat tribe running wherever the "little white chaps" run.
+
+So when the lull fell on the hunt and the mink trapping was well over
+and marten had not yet begun, Koot gathered up his traps, and getting a
+supply of provisions at the fur post, crossed the white wastes of
+prairie to lonely swamp ground where dwarf alder and willow and
+cottonwood and poplar and pine grew in a tangle. A few old logs
+dovetailed into a square made the wall of a cabin. Over these he
+stretched the canvas of his tepee for a roof at a sharp enough angle to
+let the heavy snow-fall slide off from its own weight. Moss chinked up
+the logs. Snow banked out the wind. Pine boughs made the floor, two logs
+with pine boughs, a bed. An odd-shaped stump served as chair or table;
+and on the logs of the inner walls hung wedge-shaped slabs of cedar to
+stretch the skins. A caribou curtain or bear-skin across the entrance
+completed Koot's winter quarters for the rabbit-hunt.
+
+Koot's genealogy was as vague as that of all old trappers hanging round
+fur posts. Part of him--that part which served best when he was on the
+hunting-field--was Ojibway. The other part, which made him improvise
+logs into chair and table and bed, was white man; and that served him
+best when he came to bargain with the chief factor over the pelts. At
+the fur post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field,
+when suddenly menaced by some great danger, he would cry out in the
+Indian tongue words that meant "O Great Spirit!" And it is altogether
+probable that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was
+worshipping the same Being. When he swore--strange commentary on
+civilization--he always used white man's oaths, French _patois_ or
+straight English.
+
+Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the Rockies,
+Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not usually go to the
+wilds alone; but there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that
+Koot had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog that had drawn
+his provisions from the fort on a sort of toboggan sleigh.
+
+The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write their daily
+record for those who can read. All over the white swamp were little deep
+tracks; here, holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks as
+from the bound--bound--bound of something soft; then, again, where the
+thicket was like a hedge with only one breach through, the footprints
+had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
+have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
+form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
+from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light--the
+rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
+which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
+trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
+pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
+countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
+Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
+and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
+for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
+from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
+up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.
+
+All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
+choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
+take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his
+cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
+to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful--as they always were
+in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
+epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest--Koot's circuit of snares
+would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
+out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
+numerous, the foragers that prey--wolf and wolverine and lynx and
+bob-cat--will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
+snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon--the Indian's hour of the
+short shadow--is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
+of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
+to his cabin, and in it--instead of caching in a tree--keeps fish or
+bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
+his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.
+
+Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
+Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
+with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
+twine, and traps, and set out in the evening to make the round of his
+snares, unaccompanied by the dog. Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and
+white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in
+the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his
+shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin
+when that strange sense of _feel_ told him that he was being followed.
+What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled--he called it by name.
+
+In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet
+as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall.
+By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, or the snowbuntings
+chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to hedge-top, or the saucy
+jay shriek some scolding impudence. A squirrel may chatter out his noisy
+protest at some thief for approaching the nuts which lie cached under
+the rotten leaves at the foot of the tree, or the sun-warmth may set the
+melting snow showering from the swan's-down branches with a patter like
+rain. But at nightfall the frost has stilled the drip of thaw. Squirrel
+and bird are wrapped in the utter quiet of a gray darkness. And the
+marauders that fill midnight with sharp bark, shrill trembling scream,
+deep baying over the snow are not yet abroad in the woods. All is
+shadowless--stillness--a quiet that is audible.
+
+Koot turned sharply and whistled and called his dog. There wasn't a
+sound. Later when the frost began to tighten, sap-frozen twigs would
+snap. The ice of the swamp, frozen like rock, would by-and-bye crackle
+with the loud echo of a pistol-shot--crackle--and strike--and break as
+if artillery were firing a fusillade and infantry shooters answering
+sharp. By-and-bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the
+shadows dancing; and the wail of the cougar would be echoed by the
+lifting scream of its mate. But now, was not a sound, not a motion, not
+a shadow, only the noiseless stillness, the shadowless quiet, and the
+_feel_, the _feel_ of something back where the darkness was gathering
+like a curtain in the bush.
+
+It might, of course, be only a silly long-ears loping under cover
+parallel to the man, looking with rabbit curiosity at this strange
+newcomer to the swamp home of the animal world. Koot's sense of _feel_
+told him that it wasn't a rabbit; but he tried to persuade himself that
+it was, the way a timid listener persuades herself that creaking floors
+are burglars. Thinking of his many snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
+Then it came again, that _feel_ of something coursing behind the
+underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
+short--and listened--and listened--listened to a snow-muffled silence,
+to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
+waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.
+
+The sense of _feel_ that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
+impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
+and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
+shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
+was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
+courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
+to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
+bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
+rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
+log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.
+
+That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
+logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
+fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
+the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
+broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
+lodge. Once his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
+the sniff--sniff--sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
+smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
+traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
+fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
+fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
+and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
+answering scream--a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.
+
+"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
+the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
+knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
+conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
+rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
+hour of the short shadow.
+
+It did not surprise the trapper after he had heard the lifting wail from
+the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
+untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
+lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
+But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
+torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
+rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
+ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of _feel_, but he couldn't
+make this thing out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
+padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
+from the sky and gone back to the sky.
+
+Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
+circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
+mark like that shuffling padded print.
+
+"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
+Koot told himself.
+
+The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
+as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
+strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
+snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
+indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
+white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
+scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
+readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
+world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
+as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
+ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
+and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
+glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
+grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
+benighted hunters.
+
+This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
+as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
+there--oh!--I'll be _on_ to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
+dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
+and his ears failed to localize, to _real_-ize, to visualize what those
+little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
+the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he marched off very matter
+of fact to the next snare.
+
+But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of _feel_ and he had
+glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just above the
+snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade
+something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear-tufts
+caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow-crust. Then
+the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form hardly differing
+from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed to a tiny
+blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell-tale light. The big round
+body mottled gray and white like the snowy tree
+widened--stretched---flattened till it was almost a part of the tossing
+pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had passed far
+beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward and the owl eyes open and
+the big body bunch out like a cat with elevated haunches ready to
+spring.
+
+But by-and-bye the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. They grew
+scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew
+hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming across the
+billowy drifts, something black far ahead bounced up, caught a bunting
+on the wing, and with another bounce disappeared among the trees.
+
+Koot said one word--"Cat!"--and the dog was off full cry.
+
+Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, he had
+known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still hunters
+among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail of their ravages,
+rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even the remains of a fox
+or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from the printings on the white
+page that the still hunter had been hunted full cry by coyote or
+timber-wolf. Against these wolfish foes the cat had one sure refuge
+always--a tree. The hungry coyote might try to starve the bob-cat into
+surrender; but just as often, the bob-cat could starve the coyote into
+retreat; for if a foolish rabbit darted past, what hungry coyote could
+help giving chase? The tree had even defeated both dog and man that
+first week when Koot could not find the cat. But a dog in full chase
+could follow the trail to a tree, and a man could shoot into the tree.
+
+As the rabbits decreased, Koot set out many traps for the bob-cats now
+reckless with hunger, steel-traps and deadfalls and pits and log pens
+with a live grouse clucking inside. The midwinter lull was a busy season
+for Koot.
+
+Towards March, the sun-glare has produced a crust on the snow that is
+almost like glass. For Koot on his snow-shoes this had no danger; but
+for the mongrel that was to draw the pelts back to the fort, the snow
+crust was more troublesome than glass. Where the crust was thick, with
+Koot leading the way snow-shoes and dog and toboggan glided over the
+drifts as if on steel runners. But in midday the crust was soft and the
+dog went floundering through as if on thin ice, the sharp edge cutting
+his feet. Koot tied little buckskin sacks round the dog's feet and made
+a few more rounds of the swamp; but the crust was a sign that warned
+him it was time to prepare for the marten-hunt. To leave his furs at the
+fort, he must cross the prairie while it was yet good travelling for the
+dog. Dismantling the little cabin, Koot packed the pelts on the
+toboggan, roped all tightly so there could be no spill from an upset,
+and putting the mongrel in the traces, led the way for the fort one
+night when the snow-crust was hard as ice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moon came up over the white fields in a great silver disk. Between
+the running man and the silver moon moved black skulking forms--the
+foragers on their night hunt. Sometimes a fox loped over a drift, or a
+coyote rose ghostly from the snow, or timber-wolves dashed from wooded
+ravines and stopped to look till Koot fired a shot that sent them
+galloping.
+
+In the dark that precedes daylight, Koot camped beside a grove of
+poplars--that is, he fed the dog a fish, whittled chips to make a fire
+and boil some tea for himself, then digging a hole in the drift with his
+snow-shoe, laid the sleigh to windward and cuddled down between
+bear-skins with the dog across his feet.
+
+Daylight came in a blinding glare of sunshine and white snow. The way
+was untrodden. Koot led at an ambling run, followed by the dog at a fast
+trot, so that the trees were presently left far on the offing and the
+runners were out on the bare white prairie with never a mark, tree or
+shrub, to break the dazzling reaches of sunshine and snow from horizon
+to horizon. A man who is breaking the way must keep his eyes on the
+ground; and the ground was so blindingly bright that Koot began to see
+purple and yellow and red patches dancing wherever he looked on the
+snow. He drew his capote over his face to shade his eyes; but the pace
+and the sun grew so hot that he was soon running again unprotected from
+the blistering light.
+
+Towards the afternoon, Koot knew that something had gone wrong. Some
+distance ahead, he saw a black object against the snow. On the unbroken
+white, it looked almost as big as a barrel and seemed at least a mile
+away. Lowering his eyes, Koot let out a spurt of speed, and the next
+thing he knew he had tripped his snow-shoe and tumbled. Scrambling up,
+he saw that a stick had caught the web of his snow-shoe; but where was
+the barrel for which he had been steering? There wasn't any barrel at
+all--the barrel was this black stick which hadn't been fifty yards away.
+Koot rubbed his eyes and noticed that black and red and purple patches
+were all over the snow. The drifts were heaving and racing after each
+other like waves on an angry sea. He did not go much farther that day;
+for every glint of snow scorched his eyes like a hot iron. He camped at
+the first bluff and made a poultice of cold tea leaves which he laid
+across his blistered face for the night.
+
+Any one who knows the tortures of snow-blindness will understand why
+Koot did not sleep that night. It was a long night to the trapper, such
+a very long night that the sun had been up for two hours before its heat
+burned through the layers of his capote into his eyes and roused him
+from sheer pain. Then he sprang up, put up an ungantled hand and knew
+from the heat of the sun that it was broad day. But when he took the
+bandage off his eyes, all he saw was a black curtain one moment,
+rockets and wheels and dancing patches of purple fire the next.
+
+Koot was no fool to become panicky and feeble from sudden peril. He knew
+that he was snow-blind on a pathless prairie at least two days away from
+the fort. To wait until the snow-blindness had healed would risk the few
+provisions that he had and perhaps expose him to a blizzard. The one
+rule of the trapper's life is to go ahead, let the going cost what it
+may; and drawing his capote over his face, Koot went on.
+
+The heat of the sun told him the directions; and when the sun went down,
+the crooning west wind, bringing thaw and snow-crust, was his compass.
+And when the wind fell, the tufts of shrub-growth sticking through the
+snow pointed to the warm south. Now he tied himself to his dog; and when
+he camped beside trees into which he had gone full crash before he knew
+they were there, he laid his gun beside the dog and sleigh. Going out
+the full length of his cord, he whittled the chips for his fire and
+found his way back by the cord.
+
+On the second day of his blindness, no sun came up; nor could he guide
+himself by the feel of the air, for there was no wind. It was one of the
+dull dead gray days that precedes storms. How would he get his
+directions to set out? Memory of last night's travel might only lead him
+on the endless circling of the lost. Koot dug his snow-shoe to the base
+of a tree, found moss, felt it growing on only one side of the tree,
+knew that side must be the shady cold side, and so took his bearings
+from what he thought was the north.
+
+Koot said the only time that he knew any fear was on the evening of the
+last day. The atmosphere boded storm. The fort lay in a valley.
+Somewhere between Koot and that valley ran a trail. What if he had
+crossed the trail? What if the storm came and wiped out the trail before
+he could reach the fort? All day, whisky-jack and snow-bunting and fox
+scurried from his presence; but this night in the dusk when he felt
+forward on his hands and knees for the expected trail, the wild
+creatures seemed to grow bolder. He imagined that he felt the coyotes
+closer than on the other nights. And then the fearful thought came that
+he might have passed the trail unheeding. Should he turn back?
+
+Afraid to go forward or back, Koot sank on the ground, unhooded his face
+and tried to _force_ his eyes to see. The pain brought biting salty
+tears. It was quite useless. Either the night was very dark, or the eyes
+were very blind.
+
+And then white man or Indian--who shall say which came uppermost?--Koot
+cried out to the Great Spirit. In mockery back came the saucy scold of a
+jay.
+
+But that was enough for Koot--it was prompt answer to his prayer; for
+where do the jays quarrel and fight and flutter but on the trail?
+Running eagerly forward, the trapper felt the ground. The rutted marks
+of a "jumper" sleigh cut the hard crust. With a shout, Koot headed down
+the sloping path to the valley where lay the fur post, the low hanging
+smoke of whose chimneys his eager nostrils had already sniffed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT--BEING AN ACCOUNT
+     OF MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT, SIKAK THE SKUNK, WENUSK THE BADGER, AND
+     OTHERS
+
+
+I
+
+_Musquash the Musk-rat_
+
+Every chapter in the trapper's life is not a "stunt."
+
+There are the uneventful days when the trapper seems to do nothing but
+wander aimlessly through the woods over the prairie along the margin of
+rush-grown marshy ravines where the stagnant waters lap lazily among the
+flags, though a feathering of ice begins to rim the quiet pools early in
+autumn. Unless he is duck-shooting down there in the hidden slough where
+is a great "quack-quack" of young teals, the trapper may not uncase his
+gun. For a whole morning he lies idly in the sunlight beside some river
+where a roundish black head occasionally bobs up only to dive under when
+it sees the man. Or else he sits by the hour still as a statue on the
+mossy log of a swamp where a long wriggling--wriggling trail marks the
+snaky motion of some creature below the amber depths.
+
+To the city man whose days are regulated by clockwork and electric trams
+with the ceaseless iteration of gongs and "step fast there!" such a
+life seems the type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are
+those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures come unsought.
+Perhaps when the great profit-and-loss account of the hereafter is cast
+up, the trapper may be found to have a greater sum total of happiness,
+of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi-millionaire whose life
+was one buzzing round of drive and worry and grind. Usually the busy
+city man has spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his youth
+in study and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's
+work. The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering
+through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand.
+And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without
+bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her
+realm.
+
+On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching so
+lazily over the prarie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp autumn
+air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper at once
+heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as if the light
+green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank bank. But ravines are
+not dank in the clear fall days; and by October the musk-plant has
+wilted dry. This is a fresh living odour with all the difference between
+it and dead leaves that there is between June roses and the dried dust
+of a rose jar. The wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of
+swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere
+in these prairie ravines; and a sense that is part _feel_, part
+intuition, part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell,
+leads his footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bottom of a
+slough.
+
+A covey of teals--very young, or they would not be so bold--flackers up,
+wings about with a clatter, then settles again a space farther ahead
+when the ducks see that the intruder remains so still. The man parts the
+flags, sits down on a log motionless as the log itself--and watches!
+Something else had taken alarm from the crunch of the hunter's moccasins
+through the dry reeds; for a wriggling trail is there, showing where a
+creature has dived below and is running among the wet under-tangle. Not
+far off on another log deep in the shade of the highest flags solemnly
+perches a small prairie-owl. It is almost the russet shade of the dead
+log. It hunches up and blinks stupidly at all this noise in the swamp.
+
+"Oho," thinks the trapper, "so I've disturbed a still hunt," and he sits
+if anything stiller than ever, only stooping to lay his gun down and
+pick up a stone.
+
+At first there is nothing but the quacking of the ducks at the far end
+of the swamp. A lapping of the water against the brittle flags and a
+water-snake has splashed away to some dark haunt. The whisky-jack calls
+out officious note from a topmost bough, as much as to say: "It's all
+right! Me--me!--I'm always there!--I've investigated!--it's all
+right!--he's quite harmless!" And away goes the jay on business of state
+among the gopher mounds.
+
+Then the interrupted activity of the swamp is resumed, scolding mother
+ducks reading the riot act to young teals, old geese coming craning and
+craning their long necks to drink at the water's edge, lizards and
+water-snakes splashing down the banks, midgets and gnats sunning
+themselves in clouds during the warmth of the short autumn days, with a
+feel in the air as of crisp ripeness, drying fruit, the harvest-home of
+the year. In all the prairie region north and west of Minnesota--the
+Indian land of "sky-coloured water"--the sloughs lie on the prairie
+under a crystal sky that turns pools to silver. On this almost
+motionless surface are mirrored as if by an etcher's needle the sky
+above, feathered wind clouds, flag stems, surrounding cliffs, even the
+flight of birds on wing. As the mountains stand for majesty, the
+prairies for infinity, so the marsh lands are types of repose.
+
+But it is not a lifeless repose. Barely has the trapper settled himself
+when a little sharp black nose pokes up through the water at the fore
+end of the wriggling trail. A round rat-shaped head follows this
+twitching proboscis. Then a brownish earth-coloured body swims with a
+wriggling sidelong movement for the log, where roosts the blinking
+owlet. A little noiseless leap! and a dripping musk-rat with long flat
+tail and webbed feet scrabbles up the moss-covered tree towards the
+stupid bird. Another moment, and the owl would have toppled into the
+water with a pair of sharp teeth clutched to its throat. Then the man
+shies a well-aimed stone!
+
+Splash! Flop! The owl is flapping blindly through the flags to another
+hiding-place, while the wriggle-wriggle of the waters tells where the
+marsh-rat has darted away under the tangled growth. From other idle days
+like these, the trapper has learned that musk-rats are not solitary but
+always to be found in colonies. Now if the musk-rat were as wise as the
+beaver to whom the Indians say he is closely akin, that alarmed
+marauder would carry the news of the man-intruder to the whole swamp.
+Perhaps if the others remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash
+of a gun what man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight
+of every musk-rat from the marsh. But musquash--little beaver, as the
+Indians call him--is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened
+from his home as _amisk_,[44] the beaver. In fact, nature's provision
+for the musk-rat's protection seems to have emboldened the little rodent
+almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of that burnt umber shade
+hardly to be distinguished from the earth. At one moment his sharp nose
+cuts the water, at the next he is completely hidden in the soft clay of
+the under-tangle; and while you are straining for a sight of him
+through the pool, he has scurried across a mud bank to his burrow.
+
+Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws wading through
+swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting from the Chesapeake and
+the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky-coloured water" on the far prairie,
+little musquash still yields 6,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of
+diminishing. A hundred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held
+in esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of Canada sent out
+only 17,000 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did musk-rat grow in
+favour as a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual
+thing for 200,000 musk-rat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay
+Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier furs than
+in the United States, so that the all-fur coat is in greater demand than
+the fur-lined; but in Canada, not less than 2,000,000 musk-rat furs are
+taken every year. In the United States the total is close on 4,000,000.
+In one city alone, St. Paul, 50,000 musk-rat-skins are cured every year.
+A single stretch of good marsh ground has yielded that number of skins
+year after year without a sign of the hunt telling on the prolific
+little musquash. Multiply 50,000 by prices varying from 7 cents to 75
+cents and the value of the musk-rat-hunt becomes apparent.
+
+What is the secret of the musk-rat's survival while the strong creatures
+of the chase like buffalo and timber-wolf have been almost exterminated?
+In the first place, settlers can't farm swamps; so the musk-rat thrives
+just as well in the swamps of New Jersey to-day as when the first white
+hunter set foot in America. Then musquash lives as heartily on owls and
+frogs and snakes as on water mussels and lily-pads. If one sort of food
+fails, the musk-rat has as omnivorous powers of digestion as the bear
+and changes his diet. Then he can hide as well in water as on land. And
+most important of all, musk-rat's family is as numerous as a cat's, five
+to nine rats in a litter, and two or three litters a year. These are the
+points that make for little musquash's continuance in spite of all that
+shot and trap can do.
+
+Having discovered what the dank whiff, half animal, half vegetable,
+signified, the trapper sets about finding the colony. He knows there is
+no risk of the little still-hunter carrying alarm to the other
+musk-rats. If he waits, it is altogether probable that the fleeing
+musk-rat will come up and swim straight for the colony. On the other
+hand, the musk-rat may have scurried overland through the rushes.
+Besides, the trapper observed tracks, tiny leaf-like tracks as of little
+webbed feet, over the soft clay of the marsh bank. These will lead to
+the colony, so the trapper rises and parting the rushes not too noisily,
+follows the little footprint along the margin of the swamp.
+
+Here the track is lost at the narrow ford of an inflowing stream, but
+across the creek lies a fallen poplar littered with--what? The feathers
+and bones of a dead owlet. Balancing himself--how much better the
+moccasins cling than boots!--the trapper crosses the log and takes up
+the trail through the rushes. But here musquash has dived off into the
+water for the express purpose of throwing a possible pursuer off the
+scent. But the tracks betrayed which way musquash was travelling; so the
+trapper goes on, knowing if he does not find the little haycock houses
+on this side, he can cross to the other.
+
+[Illustration: Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
+Hudson's Bay Company, beyond tree line; hence the houses are built of
+imported timber, with thatch roofs.]
+
+Presently, he almost stumbles over what sent the musk-rat diving just at
+this place. It is the wreck of a wolverine's ravage--a little wattled
+dome-shaped house exposed to that arch-destroyer by the shrinking of the
+swamp. So shallow has the water become, that a wolverine has easily
+waded and leaped clear across to the roof of the musk-rat's house. A
+beaver-dam two feet thick cannot resist the onslaught of the wolverine's
+claws; how much less will this round nest of reeds and grass and
+mosses cemented together with soft clay? The roof has been torn from the
+domed house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the domestic
+economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round walls inside, a floor or
+gallery of sticks and grasses, where the family had lived in an air
+chamber above the water, rough walls below the water-line and two or
+three little openings that must have been safely under water before the
+swamp receded. Perhaps a mussel or lily bulb has been left in the
+deserted larder. From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the
+topmost wall will not measure more than two or three feet. If the
+swamp had not dried here, the stupid little musk-rats that escaped the
+ravager's claws would probably have come back to the wrecked house,
+built up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till another
+wolverine came. But a water doorway the musk-rat must have. That he has
+learned by countless assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh
+retreated the musk-rats abandoned their house.
+
+All about the deserted house are runways, tiny channels across oozy
+peninsulas and islands of the musk-rat's diminutive world such as a very
+small beaver might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry patch or
+mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and prods an earth bank with a
+stick. It is as he thought--hollow; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the
+clay wall where the refugees from this house had scuttled from the
+wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water has shrunk--that was the
+danger signal to the musk-rat; and there had been a grand moving to a
+deeper part of the swamp. Perhaps, after all, this is a very old house
+not used since last winter.
+
+Going back to the bank, the trapper skirts through the crush of brittle
+rushes round the swamp. Coming sharply on deeper water, a dank, stagnant
+bayou, heavy with the smell of furry life, the trapper pushes aside the
+flags, peers out and sees what resembles a prairie-dog town on
+water--such a number of wattled houses that they had shut in the water
+as with a dam. Too many flags and willows lie over the colony for a
+glimpse of the tell-tale wriggling trail across the water; but from the
+wet tangle of grass and moss comes an oozy pattering.
+
+If it were winter, the trapper could proceed as he would against a
+beaver colony, staking up the outlet from the swamp, trenching the ice
+round the different houses, breaking open the roofs and penning up any
+fugitives in their own bank burrows till he and his dog and a spear
+could clear out the gallery. But in winter there is more important work
+than hunting musk-rat. Musk-rat-trapping is for odd days before the
+regular hunt.
+
+Opening the sack which he usually carries on his back, the trapper draws
+out three dozen small traps no larger than a rat or mouse trap. Some of
+these he places across the runways without any bait; for the musk-rat
+must pass this way. Some he smears with strong-smelling pomatum. Some he
+baits with carrot or apple. Others he does not bait at all, simply
+laying them on old logs where he knows the owlets roost by day. But each
+of the traps--bait or no bait--he attaches to a stake driven into the
+water so that the prisoner will be held under when he plunges to escape
+till he is drowned. Otherwise, he would gnaw his foot free of the trap
+and disappear in a burrow.
+
+If the marsh is large, there will be more than one musk-rat colony.
+Having exhausted his traps on the first, the trapper lies in wait at the
+second. When the moon comes up over the water, there is a great
+splashing about the musk-rat nests; for autumn is the time for
+house-building and the musk-rats work at night. If the trapper is an
+Eastern man, he will wade in as they do in New Jersey; but if he is a
+type of the Western hunter, he lies on the log among the rushes, popping
+a shot at every head that appears in the moonlit water. His dog swims
+and dives for the quarry. By the time the stupid little musk-rats have
+taken alarm and hidden, the man has twenty or thirty on the bank. Going
+home, he empties and resets the traps.
+
+Thirty marten traps that yield six martens do well. Thirty musk-rat
+traps are expected to give thirty musk-rats. Add to that the twenty
+shot, and what does the day's work represent? Here are thirty skins of a
+coarse light reddish hair, such as lines the poor man's overcoat. These
+will sell for from 7 to 15 cents each. They may go roughly for $3 at the
+fur post. Here are ten of the deeper brown shades, with long soft fur
+that lines a lady's cloak. They are fine enough to pass for mink with a
+little dyeing, or imitation seal if they are properly plucked. These
+will bring 25 or 30 cents--say $2.50 in all. But here are ten skins,
+deep, silky, almost black, for which a Russian officer will pay high
+prices, skins that will go to England, and from England to Paris, and
+from Paris to St. Petersburg with accelerating cost mark till the
+Russian grandee is paying $1 or more for each pelt. The trapper will ask
+30, 40, 50 cents for these, making perhaps $3.50 in all. Then this idle
+fellow's day has totaled up to $9, not a bad day's work, considering he
+did not go to the university for ten years to learn his craft, did not
+know what wear and tear and drive meant as he worked, did not spend more
+than a few cents' worth of shot. But for his musk-rat-pelts the man will
+not get $9 in coin unless he lives very near the great fur markets. He
+will get powder and clothing and food and tobacco whose first cost has
+been increased a hundredfold by ship rates and railroad rates, by
+keel-boat freight and pack-horse expenses and _portage_ charges past
+countless rapids. But he will get all that he needs, all that he wants,
+all that his labour is worth, this "lazy vagabond" who spends half his
+time idling in the sun. Of how many other men can that be said?
+
+But what of the ruthless slaughter among the little musk-rats? Does
+humanity not revolt at the thought? Is this trapping not after all
+brutal butchery?
+
+Animal kindliness--if such a thing exists among musk-rats--could hardly
+protest against the slaughter, seeing the musk-rats themselves wage as
+ruthless a war against water-worm and owlet as man wages against
+musk-rats. It is the old question, should animal life be sacrificed to
+preserve human life? To that question there is only one answer. Linings
+for coats are more important life-savers than all the humane societies
+of the world put together. It is probable that the first thing the
+prehistoric man did to preserve his own life when he realized himself
+was to slay some destructive animal and appropriate its coat.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 44: _Amisk_, the Chippewyan, _umisk_, the Cree, with much the
+same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he considered the
+variation in Indian language more a matter of dialect than difference in
+meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had any
+difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan,
+and Assiniboine. For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is
+_wahboos_ on the Upper Ottawa, _wapus_ on the Saskatchewan, _wapauce_ on
+the MacKenzie.]
+
+
+II
+
+_Sikak the Skunk_
+
+Sikak the skunk it is who supplies the best imitations of sable. But
+cleanse the fur never so well, on a damp day it still emits the heavy
+sickening odour that betrays its real nature. That odour is sikak's
+invincible defence against the white trapper. The hunter may follow the
+little four-abreast galloping footprints that lead to a hole among
+stones or to rotten logs, but long before he has reached the
+nesting-place of his quarry comes a stench against which white blood is
+powerless. Or the trapper may find an unexpected visitor in one of the
+pens which he has dug for other animals--a little black creature the
+shape of a squirrel and the size of a cat with white stripings down his
+back and a bushy tail. It is then a case of a quick deadly shot, or the
+man will be put to rout by an odour that will pollute the air for miles
+around and drive him off that section of the hunting-field. The
+cuttlefish is the only other creature that possesses as powerful means
+of defence of a similar nature, one drop of the inky fluid which it
+throws out to hide it from pursuers burning the fisherman's eyes like
+scalding acid. As far as white trappers are concerned, sikak is only
+taken by the chance shots of idle days. Yet the Indian hunts the skunk
+apparently utterly oblivious of the smell. Traps, poison, deadfalls,
+pens are the Indian weapons against the skunk; and a Cree will
+deliberately skin and stretch a pelt in an atmosphere that is blue with
+what is poison to the white man.
+
+The only case I ever knew of white trappers hunting the skunk was of
+three men on the North Saskatchewan. One was an Englishman who had been
+long in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company and knew all the animals
+of the north. The second was the guide, a French-Canadian, and the third
+a Sandy, fresh "frae oot the land o' heather." The men were wakened one
+night by the noise of some animal scrambling through the window into
+their cabin and rummaging in the dark among the provisions. The
+Frenchman sprang for a light and Sandy got hold of his gun.
+
+"Losh, mon, it's a wee bit beastie a' strip't black and white wi' a tail
+like a so'dier's cocade!"
+
+That information brought the Englishman to his feet howling, "Don't
+shoot it! Don't shoot it! Leave that thing alone, I tell you!"
+
+But Sandy being a true son of Scotia with a Presbyterian love of
+argument wished to debate the question.
+
+"An' what for wu'd a leave it eating a' the oatmeal? I'll no leave it
+rampagin' th' eatables--I wull be pokin' it oot!--shoo!--shoo!"
+
+At that the Frenchman flung down the light and bolted for the door,
+followed by the English trader cursing between set teeth that before
+"that blundering blockhead had argued the matter" something would
+happen.
+
+Something did happen.
+
+Sandy came through the door with such precipitate haste that the topmost
+beam brought his head a mighty thwack, roaring out at the top of his
+voice that the deil was after him for a' the sins that iver he had
+committed since he was born.
+
+
+III
+
+_Wenusk the Badger_
+
+Badger, too, is one of the furs taken by the trapper on idle days. East
+of St. Paul and Winnipeg, the fur is comparatively unknown, or if known,
+so badly prepared that it is scarcely recognisable for badger. This is
+probably owing to differences in climate. Badger in its perfect state is
+a long soft fur, resembling wood marten, with deep overhairs almost the
+length of one's hand and as dark as marten, with underhairs as thick and
+soft and yielding as swan's-down, shading in colour from fawn to grayish
+white. East of the Mississippi, there is too much damp in the atmosphere
+for such a long soft fur. Consequently specimens of badger seen in the
+East must either be sheared of the long overhairs or left to mat and
+tangle on the first rainy day. In New York, Quebec, Montreal, and
+Toronto--places where the finest furs should be on sale if anywhere--I
+have again and again asked for badger, only to be shown a dull matted
+short fawnish fur not much superior to cheap dyed furs. It is not
+surprising there is no demand for such a fur and Eastern dealers have
+stopped ordering it. In the North-West the most common mist during the
+winter is a frost mist that is more a snow than a rain, so there is
+little injury to furs from moisture. Here the badger is prime, long,
+thick, and silky, almost as attractive as ermine if only it were
+enhanced by as high a price. Whether badger will ever grow in favour
+like musk-rat or 'coon, and play an important part in the returns of the
+fur exporters, is doubtful. The world takes its fashions from European
+capitals; and European capitals are too damp for badger to be in
+fashion with them. Certainly, with the private dealers of the North and
+West, badger is yearly becoming more important.
+
+Like the musk-rat, badger is prime in the autumn. Wherever the
+hunting-grounds of the animals are, there will the hunting-grounds of
+the trapper be. Badgers run most where gophers sit sunning themselves on
+the clay mounds, ready to bolt down to their subterranean burrows on the
+first approach of an enemy. Eternal enemies these two are, gopher and
+badger, though they both live in ground holes, nest their lairs with
+grasses, run all summer and sleep all winter, and alike prey on the
+creatures smaller than themselves--mice, moles, and birds. The gopher,
+or ground squirrel, is smaller than the wood squirrel, while the badger
+is larger than a Manx cat, with a shape that varies according to the
+exigencies of the situation. Normally, he is a flattish, fawn-coloured
+beast, with a turtle-shaped body, little round head, and small legs with
+unusually strong claws. Ride after the badger across the prairie and he
+stretches out in long, lithe shape, resembling a baby cougar, turning at
+every pace or two to snap at your horse, then off again at a hulking
+scramble of astonishing speed. Pour water down his burrow to compel him
+to come up or down, and he swells out his body, completely filling the
+passage, so that his head, which is downward, is in dry air, while his
+hind quarters alone are in the water. In captivity the badger is a
+business-like little body, with very sharp teeth, of which his keeper
+must beware, and some of the tricks of the skunk, but inclined, on the
+whole, to mind his affairs if you will mind yours. Once a day regularly
+every afternoon out of his lair he emerges for the most comical sorts of
+athletic exercises. Hour after hour he will trot diagonally--because
+that gives him the longest run--from corner to corner of his pen,
+rearing up on his hind legs as he reaches one corner, rubbing the back
+of his head, then down again and across to the other corner, where he
+repeats the performance. There can be no reason for the badger doing
+this, unless it was his habit in the wilds when he trotted about leaving
+dumb signs on mud banks and brushwood by which others of his kind might
+know where to find him at stated times.
+
+Sunset is the time when he is almost sure to be among the gopher
+burrows. In vain the saucy jay shrieks out a warning to the gophers. Of
+all the prairie creatures, they are the stupidest, the most beset with
+curiosity to know what that jay's shriek may mean. Sunning themselves in
+the last rays of daylight, the gophers perch on their hind legs to wait
+developments of what the jay announced. But the badger's fur and the
+gopher mounds are almost the same colour. He has pounced on some playful
+youngsters before the rest see him. Then there is a wild scuttling down
+to the depths of the burrows. That, too, is vain; for the badger begins
+ripping up the clay bank like a grisly, down--down--in pursuit, two,
+three, five feet, even twelve.
+
+Then is seen one of the most curious freaks in all the animal life of
+the prairie. The underground galleries of the gophers connect and lead
+up to different exits. As the furious badger comes closer and closer on
+the cowering gophers, the little cowards lose heart, dart up the
+galleries to open doors, and try to escape through the grass of the
+prairie. But no sooner is the badger hard at work than a gray form seems
+to rise out of the earth, a coyote who had been slinking to the rear all
+the while; and as the terrified gophers scurry here, scurry there,
+coyote's white teeth snap!--snap! He is
+here--there--everywhere--pouncing--jumping--having the fun of his life,
+gobbling gophers as cats catch mice. Down in the bottom of the burrow,
+the badger may get half a dozen poor cooped huddling prisoners; but the
+coyote up on the prairie has devoured a whole colony.
+
+Do these two, badger and coyote, consciously hunt together? Some old
+trappers vow they do--others just as vehemently that they don't. The
+fact remains that wherever the badger goes gopher-hunting on an
+unsettled prairie, there the coyote skulks reaping reward of all the
+badger's work. The coincidence is no stranger than the well-known fact
+that sword-fish and thrasher--two different fish--always league together
+to attack the whale.
+
+One thing only can save the gopher colony, and that is the gun barrel
+across yon earth mound where a trapper lies in wait for the coming of
+the badger.
+
+
+IV
+
+_The 'Coon_
+
+Sir Alexander MacKenzie reported that in 1798 the North-West Company
+sent out only 100 raccoon from the fur country. Last year the city of
+St. Paul alone cured 115,000 'coon-skins. What brought about the change?
+Simply an appreciation of the qualities of 'coon, which combines the
+greatest warmth with the lightest weight and is especially adapted for
+a cold climate and constant wear. What was said of badger applies with
+greater force to 'coon. The 'coon in the East is associated in one's
+mind with cabbies, in the West with fashionably dressed men and women.
+And there is just as wide a difference in the quality of the fur as in
+the quality of the people. The cabbies' 'coon coat is a rough yellow fur
+with red stripes. The Westerner's 'coon is a silky brown fur with black
+stripes. One represents the fall hunt of men and boys round hollow logs,
+the other the midwinter hunt of a professional trapper in the Far North.
+A dog usually bays the 'coon out of hiding in the East. Tiny tracks,
+like a child's hand, tell the Northern hunter where to set his traps.
+
+Wahboos the rabbit, musquash the musk-rat, sikak the skunk, wenusk the
+badger, and the common 'coon--these are the little chaps whose hunt
+fills the idle days of the trapper's busy life. At night, before the
+rough stone hearth which he has built in his cabin, he is still busy by
+fire-light preparing their pelts. Each skin must be stretched and cured.
+Turning the skin fur side in, the trapper pushes into the pelt a
+wedge-shaped slab of spliced cedar. Into the splice he shoves another
+wedge of wood which he hammers in, each blow widening the space and
+stretching the skin. All pelts are stretched fur in but the fox. Tacking
+the stretched skin on a flat board, the trapper hangs it to dry till he
+carries all to the fort; unless, indeed, he should need a garment for
+himself--cap, coat, or gantlets--in which case he takes out a square
+needle and passes his evenings like a tailor, sewing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+     THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES SAKWASEW THE MINK, NEKIK THE
+     OTTER, WUCHAK THE FISHER, AND WAPISTAN THE MARTEN
+
+
+I
+
+_Sakwasew the Mink_
+
+There are other little chaps with more valuable fur than musquash, whose
+skin seldom attains higher honour than inside linings, and wahboos,
+whose snowy coat is put to the indignity of imitating ermine with a
+dotting of black cat for the ermine's jet tip. There are mink and otter
+and fisher and fox and ermine and sable, all little fellows with pelts
+worth their weight in coin of the realm.
+
+On one of those idle days when the trapper seems to be doing nothing but
+lying on his back in the sun, he has witnessed a curious, but common,
+battle in pantomime between bird and beast. A prairie-hawk circles and
+drops, lifts and wheels again with monotonous silent persistence above
+the swamp. What quarry does he seek, this lawless forager of the upper
+airs still hunting a hidden nook of the low prairie? If he were out
+purely for exercise, like the little badger when it goes rubbing the
+back of its head from post to post, there would be a buzzing of wings
+and shrill lonely callings to an unseen mate.
+
+But the circling hawk is as silent as the very personification of death.
+Apparently he can't make up his mind for the death-drop on some rat or
+frog down there in the swamp. The trapper notices that the hawk keeps
+circling directly above the place where the waters of the swamp tumble
+from the ravine in a small cataract to join a lower river. He knows,
+too, from the rich orange of the plumage that the hawk is young. An
+older fellow would not be advertising his intentions in this fashion.
+Besides, an older hawk would have russet-gray feathering. Is the
+rascally young hawk meditating a clutch of talons round some of the
+unsuspecting trout that usually frequent the quiet pools below a
+waterfall. Or does he aim at bigger game? A young hawk is bold with the
+courage that has not yet learned the wisdom of caution. That is why
+there are so many more of the brilliant young red hawks in our museums
+than old grizzled gray veterans whose craft circumvents the specimen
+hunter's cunning. Now the trapper comes to have as keen a sense of
+_feel_ for all the creatures of the wilds as the creatures of the wilds
+have for man; so he shifts his position that he may find what is
+attracting the hawk.
+
+Down on the pebbled beach below the waterfalls lies an auburn bundle of
+fur, about the size of a very long, slim, short-legged cat, still as a
+stone--some member of the weasel family gorged torpid with fish,
+stretched out full length to sleep in the sun. To sleep, ah, yes, and as
+the Danish prince said, "perchance to dream"; for all the little fellows
+of river and prairie take good care never to sleep where they are
+exposed to their countless enemies. This sleep of the weasel arouses
+the man's suspicion. The trapper draws out his field-glass. The sleeper
+is a mink, and its sleep is a sham with beady, red eyes blinking a deal
+too lively for real death. Why does it lie on its back rigid and
+straight as if it were dead with all four tiny paws clutched out stiff?
+The trapper scans the surface of the swamp to see if some foolish
+musk-rat is swimming dangerously near the sleeping mink.
+
+Presently the hawk circles lower--lower!--Drop, straight as a stone! Its
+talons are almost in the mink's body, when of a sudden the sleeper
+awakens--awakens--with a leap of the four stiff little feet and a
+darting spear-thrust of snapping teeth deep in the neck of the hawk! At
+first the hawk rises tearing furiously at the clinging mink with its
+claws. The wings sag. Down bird and beast fall. Over they roll on the
+sandy beach, hawk and mink, over and over with a thrashing of the hawk's
+wings to beat the treacherous little vampire off. Now the blood-sucker
+is on top clutching--clutching! Now the bird flounders up craning his
+neck from the death-grip. Then the hawk falls on his back. His wings are
+prone. They cease to flutter.
+
+Running to the bank the trapper is surprised to see the little
+blood-sucker making off with the prey instead of deserting it as all
+creatures akin to the weasel family usually do. That means a family of
+mink somewhere near, to be given their first lesson in bird-hunting, in
+mink-hawking by the body of this poor, dead, foolish gyrfalcon.
+
+By a red mark here, by a feather there, crushed grass as of something
+dragged, a little webbed footprint on the wet clay, a tiny marking of
+double dots where the feet have crossed a dry stone, the trapper slowly
+takes up the trail of the mink. Mink are not prime till the late fall.
+Then the reddish fur assumes the shades of the russet grasses where they
+run until the white of winter covers the land. Then--as if nature were
+to exact avengement for all the red slaughter the mink has wrought
+during the rest of the year--his coat becomes dark brown, almost black,
+the very shade that renders him most conspicuous above snow to all the
+enemies of the mink world. But while the trapper has no intention of
+destroying what would be worthless now but will be valuable in the
+winter, it is not every day that even a trapper has a chance to trail a
+mink back to its nest and see the young family.
+
+But suddenly the trail stops. Here is a sandy patch with some tumbled
+stones under a tangle of grasses and a rivulet not a foot away.
+Ah--there it is--a nest or lair, a tiny hole almost hidden by the
+rushes! But the nest seems empty. Fast as the trapper has come, the mink
+came faster and hid her family. To one side, the hawk had been dropped
+among the rushes. The man pokes a stick in the lair but finds nothing.
+Putting in his hand, he is dragging out bones, feathers, skeleton
+musk-rats, putrid frogs, promiscuous remnants of other quarries brought
+to the burrow by the mink, when a little cattish _s-p-i-t!_ almost
+touches his hand. His palm closes over something warm, squirming,
+smaller than a kitten with very downy fur, on a soft mouse-like skin,
+eyes that are still blind and a tiny mouth that neither meows nor
+squeaks, just _spits!--spits!--spits!_--in impotent viperish fury. All
+the other minklets, the mother had succeeded in hiding under the
+grasses, but somehow this one had been left. Will he take it home and
+try the experiment of rearing a young mink with a family of kittens?
+
+The trapper calls to mind other experiments. There was the little beaver
+that chewed up his canoe and gnawed a hole of escape through the door.
+There were the three little bob-cats left in the woods behind his cabin
+last year when he refrained from setting out traps and tied up his dog
+to see if he could not catch the whole family, mother and kittens, for
+an Eastern museum. Furtively at first, the mother had come to feed her
+kittens. Then the man had put out rugs to keep the kittens warm and lain
+in wait for the mother; but no sooner did she see her offspring
+comfortably cared for, than she deserted them entirely, evidently acting
+on the proverb that the most gracious enemy is the most dangerous, or
+else deciding that the kits were so well off that she was not needed.
+Adopting the three little wild-cats, the trapper had reared them past
+blind-eyes, past colic and dumps and all the youthful ills to which live
+kittens are heirs, when trouble began. The longing for the wilds came.
+Even catnip green and senna tea boiled can't cure that. So keenly did
+the gipsy longing come to one little bob that he perished escaping to
+the woods by way of the chimney flue. The second little bob succeeded in
+escaping through a parchment stop-gap that served the trapper as a
+window. And the third bobby dealt such an ill-tempered gash to the dog's
+nose that the combat ended in instant death for the cat.
+
+Thinking over these experiments, the trapper wisely puts the mink back
+in the nest with words which it would have been well for that litle ball
+of down to have understood. He told it he would come back for it next
+winter and to be sure to have its best black coat on. For the little
+first-year minks wear dark coats, almost as fine as Russian sable.
+Yes--he reflects, poking it back to the hole and retreating quickly so
+that the mother will return--better leave it till the winter; for wasn't
+it Koot who put a mink among his kittens, only to have the little viper
+set on them with tooth and claw as soon as its eyes opened? Also mink
+are bad neighbours to a poultry-yard. Forty chickens in a single night
+will the little mink destroy, not for food but--to quote man's
+words--for the zest of the sport. The mink, you must remember, like
+other pot-hunters, can boast of a big bag.
+
+The trapper did come back next fall. It was when he was ranging all the
+swamp-lands for beaver-dams. Swamp lands often mean beaver-dams; and
+trappers always note what stops the current of a sluggish stream.
+Frequently it is a beaver colony built across a valley in the mountains,
+or stopping up the outlet of a slough. The trapper was sleeping under
+his canoe on the banks of the river where the swamp tumbled out from the
+ravine. Before retiring to what was a boat by day and a bed by night, he
+had set out a fish net and some loose lines--which the flow of the
+current would keep in motion--below the waterfall. Carelessly, next day,
+he threw the fish-heads among the stones. The second morning he found
+such a multitude of little tracks dotting the rime of the hoar frost
+that he erected a tent back from the waterfalls, and decided to stay
+trapping there till the winter. The fish-heads were no longer thrown
+away. They were left among the stones in small steel-traps weighted with
+other stones, or attached to a loose stick that would impede flight.
+And if the poor gyrfalcon could have seen the mink held by the jaws of a
+steel-trap, hissing, snarling, breaking its teeth on the iron, spitting
+out all the rage of its wicked nature, the bird would have been avenged.
+
+And as winter deepened, the quality of minks taken from the traps became
+darker, silkier, crisper, almost brown black in some of the young, but
+for light fur on the under lip. The Indians say that sakwasew the mink
+would sell his family for a fish, and as long as fish lay among the
+stones, the trapper gathered his harvest of fur: reddish mink that would
+be made into little neck ruffs and collar pieces, reddish brown mink
+that would be sewed into costly coats and cloaks, rare brownish black
+mink that would be put into the beautiful flat scarf collars almost as
+costly as a full coat. And so the mink-hunt went on merrily for the man
+till the midwinter lull came at Christmas. For that year the mink-hunt
+was over.
+
+
+II
+
+_Nekik the Otter_
+
+Sakwasew was not the only fisher at the pool below the falls. On one of
+those idle days when the trapper sat lazily by the river side, a round
+head slightly sunburned from black to russet had hobbled up to the
+surface of the water, peered sharply at the man sitting so still,
+paddled little flipper-like feet about, then ducked down again.
+Motionless as the mossed log under him sits the man; and in a moment up
+comes the little black head again, round as a golf ball, about the size
+of a very large cat, followed by three other little bobbing heads--a
+mother otter teaching her babies to dive and swim and duck from the
+river surface to the burrows below the water along the river bank.
+Perhaps the trapper has found a dead fish along this very bank with only
+the choice portions of the body eaten--a sure sign that nekik the otter,
+the little epicure of the water world, has been fishing at this river.
+
+With a scarcely perceptible motion, the man turns his head to watch the
+swimmers. Instantly, down they plunge, mother and babies, to come to the
+surface again higher up-stream, evidently working up-current like the
+beaver in spring for a glorious frolic in the cold clear waters of the
+upper sources. At one place on the sandy beach they all wade ashore. The
+man utters a slight "Hiss!" Away they scamper, the foolish youngsters,
+landward instead of to the safe water as the hesitating mother would
+have them do, all the little feet scrambling over the sand with the
+funny short steps of a Chinese lady in tight boots. Maternal care proves
+stronger than fear. The frightened mother follows the young otter and
+will no doubt read them a sound lecture on land dangers when she has
+rounded them back to the safe water higher up-stream.
+
+Of all wild creatures, none is so crafty in concealing its lairs as the
+otter. Where did this family come from? They had not been swimming
+up-stream; for the man had been watching on the river bank long before
+they appeared on the surface. Stripping, the trapper dives in
+mid-stream, then half wades, half swims along the steepest bank, running
+his arm against the clay cliff to find a burrow. On land he could not do
+this at the lair of the otter; for the smell of the man-touch would be
+left on his trail, and the otter, keener of scent and fear than the
+mink, would take alarm. But for the same reason that the river is the
+safest refuge for the otter, it is the surest hunting for the man--water
+does not keep the scent of a trail. So the man runs his arm along the
+bank. The river is the surest hunting for the man, but not the safest.
+If an old male were in the bank burrow now, or happened to be emerging
+from grass-lined subterranean air chambers above the bank gallery, it
+might be serious enough for the exploring trapper. One bite of nekik the
+otter has crippled many an Indian. Knowing from the remnants of
+half-eaten fish and from the holes in the bank that he has found an
+otter runway, the man goes home as well satisfied as if he had done a
+good day's work.
+
+And so that winter when he had camped below the swamp for the mink-hunt,
+the trapper was not surprised one morning to find a half-eaten fish on
+the river bank. Sakwasew the mink takes good care to leave no remnants
+of his greedy meal. What he cannot eat he caches. Even if he has
+strangled a dozen water-rats in one hunt, they will be dragged in a heap
+and covered. The half-eaten fish left exposed is not mink's work. Otter
+has been here and otter will come back; for as the frost hardens, only
+those pools below the falls keep free from ice. No use setting traps
+with fish-heads as long as fresh fish are to be had for the taking.
+Besides, the man has done nothing to conceal his tracks; and each
+morning the half-eaten fish lie farther off the line of the man-trail.
+
+By-and-bye the man notices that no more half-eaten fish are on his side
+of the river. Little tracks of webbed feet furrowing a deep rut in the
+soft snow of the frozen river tell that nekik has taken alarm and is
+fishing from the other side. And when Christmas comes with a dwindling
+of the mink-hunt, the man, too, crosses to the other side. Here he finds
+that the otter tracks have worn a path that is almost a toboggan slide
+down the crusted snow bank to the iced edge of the pool. By this time
+nekik's pelt is prime, almost black, and as glossy as floss. By this
+time, too, the fish are scarce and the epicure has become ravenous as a
+pauper. One night when the trapper was reconnoitring the fish hole, he
+had approached the snow bank so noiselessly that he came on a whole
+colony of otters without their knowledge of his presence. Down the snow
+bank they tumbled, head-first, tail-first, slithering through the snow
+with their little paws braced, rolling down on their backs like lads
+upset from a toboggan, otter after otter, till the man learned that the
+little beasts were not fishing at all, but coasting the snow bank like
+youngsters on a night frolic. No sooner did one reach the bottom than up
+he scampered to repeat the fun; and sometimes two or three went down in
+a rolling bunch mixed up at the foot of a slide as badly as a couple of
+toboggans that were unpremeditatedly changing their occupants. Bears
+wrestle. The kittens of all the cat tribe play hide and seek. Little
+badger finds it fun to run round rubbing the back of his head on things;
+and here was nekik the otter at the favourite amusement of his
+kind--coasting down a snow bank.
+
+If the trapper were an Indian, he would lie in wait at the landing-place
+and spear the otter as they came from the water. But the white man's
+craft is deeper. He does not wish to frighten the otter till the last
+had been taken. Coming to the slide by day, he baits a steel-trap with
+fish and buries it in the snow just where the otter will be coming down
+the hill or up from the pool. Perhaps he places a dozen such traps
+around the hole with nothing visible but the frozen fish lying on the
+surface. If he sets his traps during a snow-fall, so much the better.
+His own tracks will be obliterated and the otter's nose will discover
+the fish. Then he takes a bag filled with some substance of animal
+odour, pomatum, fresh meat, pork, or he may use the flesh side of a
+fresh deer-hide. This he drags over the snow where he has stepped. He
+may even use a fresh hide to handle the traps, as a waiter uses a
+serviette to pass plates. There must be no man-smell, no man-track near
+the otter traps.
+
+While the mink-hunt is fairly over by midwinter, otter-trapping lasts
+from October to May. The value of all rare furs, mink, otter, marten,
+ermine, varies with two things: (1) the latitude of the hunting-field;
+(2) the season of the hunt. For instance, ask a trapper of Minnesota or
+Lake Superior what he thinks of the ermine, and he will tell you that it
+is a miserable sort of weasel of a dirty drab brown not worth
+twenty-five cents a skin. Ask a trapper of the North Saskatchewan what
+he thinks of ermine; and he will tell you it is a pretty little whitish
+creature good for fur if trapped late enough in the winter and always
+useful as a lining. But ask a trapper of the Arctic about the ermine,
+and he describes it as the finest fur that is taken except the silver
+fox, white and soft as swan's-down, with a tail-tip like black onyx.
+This difference in the fur of the animal explains the wide variety of
+prices paid. Ermine not worth twenty-five cents in Wisconsin might be
+worth ten times as much on the Saskatchewan.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Fur press in use
+  at Fort Good
+  Hope, at the
+  extreme north
+  of Hudson's
+  Bay Company's
+  territory.
+
+  Old wedge press
+  in use at Fort
+  Resolution, of
+  the sub-Arctics.
+
+  Types of Fur Presses.]
+
+So it is with the otter. All trapped between latitude thirty-five and
+sixty is good fur; and the best is that taken toward the end of winter
+when scarcely a russet hair should be found in the long over-fur of
+nekik's coat.
+
+
+III
+
+_Wuchak the Fisher, or Pekan_
+
+Wherever the waste of fish or deer is thrown, there will be found lines
+of double tracks not so large as the wild-cat's, not so small as the
+otter's, and without the same webbing as the mink's. This is wuchak the
+fisher, or pekan, commonly called "the black cat"--who, in spite of his
+fishy name, hates water as cats hate it. And the tracks are double
+because pekan travel in pairs. He is found along the banks of streams
+because he preys on fish and fisher, on mink and otter and musk-rat, on
+frogs and birds and creatures that come to drink. He is, after all, a
+very greedy fellow, not at all particular about his diet, and, like all
+gluttons, easily snared. While mink and otter are about, the trapper
+will waste no steel-traps on pekan. A deadfall will act just as
+effectively; but there is one point requiring care. Pekan has a sharp
+nose. It is his nose that brings him to all carrion just as surely as
+hawks come to pick dead bones. But that same nose will tell him of man's
+presence. So when the trapper has built his pen of logs so that the
+front log or deadfall will crush down on the back of an intruder tugging
+at the bait inside, he overlays all with leaves and brush to quiet the
+pekan's suspicions. Besides, the pekan has many tricks akin to the
+wolverine. He is an inveterate thief. There is a well-known instance of
+Hudson's Bay trappers having a line of one hundred and fifty marten
+traps stretching for fifty miles robbed of their bait by pekan. The men
+shortened the line to thirty miles and for six times in succession did
+pekan destroy the traps. Then the men set themselves to trap the robber.
+He will rifle a deadfall from the slanting back roof where there is no
+danger; so the trapper overlays the back with heavy brush.
+
+Pekan do not yield a rare fur; but they are always at run where the
+trapper is hunting the rare furs, and for that reason are usually snared
+at the same time as mink and otter.
+
+
+IV
+
+_Wapistan the Marten_
+
+When Koot went blind on his way home from the rabbit-hunt, he had
+intended to set out for the pine woods. Though blizzards still howl over
+the prairie, by March the warm sun of midday has set the sap of the
+forests stirring and all the woodland life awakens from its long winter
+sleep. Cougar and lynx and bear rove through the forest ravenous with
+spring hunger. Otter, too, may be found where the ice mounds of a
+waterfall are beginning to thaw. But it is not any of these that the
+trapper seeks. If they cross his path, good--they, too, will swell his
+account at the fur post. It is another of the little chaps that he
+seeks, a little, long, low-set animal whose fur is now glistening bright
+on the deep dark overhairs, soft as down in the thick fawn underhairs,
+wapistan the marten.
+
+When the forest begins to stir with the coming of spring, wapistan stirs
+too, crawling out from the hollow of some rotten pine log, restless with
+the same blood-thirst that set the little mink playing his tricks on
+the hawk. And yet the marten is not such a little viper as the mink.
+Wapistan will eat leaves and nuts and roots if he can get vegetable
+food, but failing these, that ravenous spring hunger of his must be
+appeased with something else. And out he goes from his log hole
+hunger-bold as the biggest of all other spring ravagers. That boldness
+gives the trapper his chance at the very time when wapistan's fur is
+best. All winter the trapper may have taken marten; but the end of
+winter is the time when wapistan wanders freely from cover. Thus the
+trapper's calendar would have months of musk-rat first, then beaver and
+mink and pekan and bear and fox and ermine and rabbit and lynx and
+marten, with a long idle midsummer space when he goes to the fort for
+the year's provisions and gathers the lore of his craft.
+
+Wapistan is not hard to track. Being much longer and heavier than a cat
+with very short legs and small feet, his body almost drags the ground
+and his tracks sink deep, clear, and sharp. His feet are smaller than
+otter's and mink's, but easily distinguishable from those two fishers.
+The water animal leaves a spreading footprint, the mark of the webbed
+toes without any fur on the padding of the toe-balls. The land animal of
+the same size has clear cut, narrower, heavier marks. By March, these
+dotting foot-tracks thread the snow everywhere.
+
+Coming on marten tracks at a pine log, the trapper sends in his dog or
+prods with a stick. Finding nothing, he baits a steel-trap with
+pomatum, covers it deftly with snow, drags the decoy skin about to
+conceal his own tracks, and goes away in the hope that the marten will
+come back to this log to guzzle on his prey and sleep.
+
+If the track is much frequented, or the forest over-run with marten
+tracks, the trapper builds deadfalls, many of them running from tree to
+tree for miles through the forest in a circle whose circuit brings him
+back to his cabin. Remnants of these log traps may be seen through all
+parts of the Rocky Mountain forests. Thirty to forty traps are
+considered a day's work for one man, six or ten marten all that he
+expects to take in one round; but when marten are plentiful, the unused
+traps of to-day may bring a prize to-morrow.
+
+The Indian trapper would use still another kind of trap. Where the
+tracks are plainly frequently used runways to watering-places or lair in
+hollow tree, the Indian digs a pit across the marten's trail. On this he
+spreads brush in such roof fashion that though the marten is a good
+climber, if once he falls in, it is almost impossible for him to
+scramble out. If a poor cackling grouse or "fool-hen" be thrust into the
+pit, the Indian is almost sure to find a prisoner. This seems to the
+white man a barbarous kind of trapping; but the poor "fool-hen," hunted
+by all the creatures of the forest, never seems to learn wisdom, but
+invites disaster by popping out of the brush to stare at every living
+thing that passes. If she did not fall a victim in the pit, she
+certainly would to her own curiosity above ground. To the steel-trap the
+hunter attaches a piece of log to entangle the prisoner's flight as he
+rushes through the underbush. Once caught in the steel jaws, little
+wapistan must wait--wait for what? For the same thing that comes to the
+poor "fool-hen" when wapistan goes crashing through the brush after her;
+for the same thing that comes to the baby squirrels when wapistan climbs
+a tree to rob the squirrel's nest, eat the young, and live in the rifled
+house; for the same thing that comes to the hoary marmot whistling his
+spring tune just outside his rocky den when wapistan, who has climbed
+up, pounces down from above. Little death-dealer he has been all his
+life; and now death comes to him for a nobler cause than the stuffing of
+a greedy maw--for the clothing of a creature nobler than himself--man.
+
+The otter can protect himself by diving, even diving under snow. The
+mink has craft to hide himself under leaves so that the sharpest eyes
+cannot detect him. Both mink and otter furs have very little of that
+animal smell which enables the foragers to follow their trail. What gift
+has wapistan, the marten, to protect himself against all the powers that
+prey? His strength and his wisdom lie in the little stubby feet. These
+can climb.
+
+A trapper's dog had stumbled on a marten in a stump hole. A snap of the
+marten's teeth sent the dog back with a jump. Wapistan will hang on to
+the nose of a dog to the death; and trappers' dogs grow cautious. Before
+the dog gathered courage to make another rush, the marten escaped by a
+rear knot-hole, getting the start of his enemy by fifty yards. Off they
+raced, the dog spending himself in fury, the marten keeping under the
+thorny brush where his enemy could not follow, then across open snow
+where the dog gained, then into the pine woods where the trail ended on
+the snow. Where had the fugitive gone? When the man came up, he first
+searched for log holes. There were none. Then he lifted some of the
+rocks. There was no trace of wapistan. But the dog kept baying a special
+tree, a blasted trunk, bare as a mast pole and seemingly impossible for
+any animal but a squirrel to climb. Knowing the trick by which creatures
+like the bob-cat can flatten their body into a resemblance of a tree
+trunk, the trapper searched carefully all round the bare trunk. It was
+not till many months afterward when a wind storm had broken the tree
+that he discovered the upper part had been hollow. Into this eerie nook
+the pursued marten had scrambled and waited in safety till dog and man
+retired.
+
+In one of his traps the man finds a peculiarly short specimen of the
+marten. In the vernacular of the craft this marten's bushy tail will not
+reach as far back as his hind legs can stretch. Widely different from
+the mink's scarcely visible ears, this fellow's ears are sharply
+upright, keenly alert. He is like a fox, where the mink resembles a
+furred serpent. Marten moves, springs, jumps like an animal. Mink glides
+like a snake. Marten has the strong neck of an animal fighter. Mink has
+the long, thin, twisting neck which reptiles need to give them striking
+power for their fangs. Mink's under lip has a mere rim of white or
+yellow. Marten's breast is patched sulphur. But this short marten with a
+tail shorter than other marten differs from his kind as to fur. Both
+mink and marten fur are reddish brown; but this short marten's fur is
+almost black, of great depth, of great thickness, and of three
+qualities: (1) There are the long dark overhairs the same as the
+ordinary marten, only darker, thicker, deeper; (2) there is the soft
+under fur of the ordinary marten, usually fawn, in this fellow deep
+brown; (3) there is the skin fur resembling chicken-down, of which this
+little marten has such a wealth--to use a technical expression--you
+cannot find his scalp. Without going into the old quarrel about species,
+when a marten has these peculiarities, he is known to the trapper as
+sable.
+
+Whether he is the American counterpart to the Russia sable is a disputed
+point. Whether his superior qualities are owing to age, climate,
+species, it is enough for the trapper to know that short, dark marten
+yields the trade--sable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+     UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN
+
+
+I
+
+_Of Foxes, Many and Various--Red, Cross, Silver, Black, Prairie, Kit or
+Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray_
+
+Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and there will
+the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a fox-skin may be as a
+specimen, it has value as a fur only when it belongs to one of three
+varieties--Arctic, black, and silver. Other foxes--red, cross, prairie,
+swift, and gray--the trapper will take when they cross his path and sell
+them in the gross at the fur post, as he used to barter buffalo-hides.
+But the hunter who traps the fox for its own sake, and not as an
+uncalculated extra to the mink-hunt or the beaver total, must go to the
+Far North, to the land of winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the
+best fox-skins.
+
+It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run
+among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most
+shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz
+dog, ears alert as a terrier's and a brush, more like a lady's gray
+feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's fur is
+a grizzled gray shading to mottled fawn. The hairs are coarse, horsey,
+indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value to the trader; so
+dainty little swift, who looks as if nature made him for a pet dog
+instead of a fox, is slighted by the hunter, unless kit persists in
+tempting a trap. Rufus the red fellow, with his grizzled gray head and
+black ears and whitish throat and flaunting purplish tinges down his
+sides like a prince royal, may make a handsome mat; but as a fur he is
+of little worth. His cousin with the black fore feet, the prairie fox,
+who is the largest and strongest and scientifically finest of all his
+kind, has more value as a fur. The colour of the prairie fox shades
+rather to pale ochre and yellow that the nondescript grizzled gray that
+is of so little value as a fur. Of the silver-gray fox little need be
+said. He lives too far south--California and Texas and Mexico--to
+acquire either energy or gloss. He is the one indolent member of the fox
+tribe, and his fur lacks the sheen that only winter cold can give. The
+value of the cross fox depends on the markings that give him his name.
+If the bands, running diagonally over his shoulders in the shape of a
+cross, shade to grayish blue he is a prize, if to reddish russet, he is
+only a curiosity.
+
+The Arctic and black and silver foxes have the pelts that at their worst
+equal the other rare furs, at their best exceed the value of all other
+furs by so much that the lucky trapper who takes a silver fox has made
+his fortune. These, then, are the foxes that the trapper seeks and these
+are to be found only on the white wastes of the polar zone.
+
+That brings up the question--what is a silver fox? Strange as it may
+seem, neither scientist nor hunter can answer that question. Nor will
+study of all the park specimens in the world tell the secret, for the
+simple reason that only an Arctic climate can produce a silver fox; and
+parks are not established in the Arctics yet. It is quite plain that the
+prairie fox is in a class by himself. The uniformity of his size, his
+strength, his habits, his appearance, distinguish him from other foxes.
+It is quite plain that the little kit fox or swift is of a kind distinct
+from other foxes. His smallness, the shape of his bones, the cast of his
+face, the trick of sitting rather than lying, that wonderful big bushy
+soft tail of which a peacock might be vain--all differentiate him from
+other foxes. The same may be said of the Arctic fox with a pelt that is
+more like white wool than hairs of fur. He is much smaller than the red.
+His tail is bushier and larger than the swift, and like all Arctic
+creatures, he has the soles of his feet heavily furred. All this is
+plain and simple classification. But how about Mr. Blue Fox of the same
+size and habit as the white Arctic? Is he the Arctic fox in summer
+clothing? Yes, say some trappers; and they show their pelts of an Arctic
+fox taken in summer of a rusty white. But no, vow other trappers--that
+is impossible, for here are blue fox-skins captured in the depths of
+midwinter with not a white hair among them. Look closely at the skins.
+The ears of one blue fox are long, perfect, unbitten by frost or foe--he
+was a young fellow; and he is blue. Here is another with ears almost
+worn to stubs by fights and many winters' frosts--he is an old fellow;
+and he, too, is blue. Well, then, the blue fox may sometimes be the
+white Arctic fox in summer dress; but the blue fox who is blue all the
+year round, varying only in the shades of blue with the seasons, is
+certainly not the white Arctic fox.
+
+The same difficulty besets distinction of silver fox from black. The old
+scientists classified these as one and the same creature. Trappers know
+better. So do the later scientists who almost agree with the unlearned
+trapper's verdict--there are as many species as there are foxes. Black
+fox is at its best in midwinter, deep, brilliantly glossy, soft as
+floss, and yet almost impenetrable--the very type of perfection of its
+kind. But with the coming of the tardy Arctic spring comes a change. The
+snows are barely melted in May when the sheen leaves the fur. By June,
+the black hairs are streaked with gray; and the black fox is a gray fox.
+Is it at some period of the transition that the black fox becomes a
+silver fox, with the gray hairs as sheeny as the black and each gray
+hair delicately tipped with black? That question, too, remains
+unanswered; for certainly the black fox trapped when in his gray summer
+coat is not the splendid silver fox of priceless value. Black fox
+turning to a dull gray of midsummer may not be silver fox; but what
+about gray fox turning to the beautiful glossy black of midwinter? Is
+that what makes silver fox? Is silver fox simply a fine specimen of
+black caught at the very period when he is blooming into his greatest
+beauty? The distinctive difference between gray fox and silver is that
+gray fox has gray hairs among hairs of other colour, while silver fox
+has silver hair tipped with glossiest black on a foundation of downy
+gray black.
+
+Even greater confusion surrounds the origin of cross and red and gray.
+Trappers find all these different cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs
+grow, those pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red becomes
+cross; and what they become at maturity, that they remain, varying only
+with the seasons.[45] It takes many centuries to make one perfect rose.
+Is it the same with the silver fox? Is he a freak or a climax or the
+regular product of yearly climatic changes caught in the nick of time by
+some lucky trapper? Ask the scientist that question, and he theorizes.
+Ask the trapper, and he tells you if he could only catch enough silver
+foxes to study that question, he would quit trapping. In all the maze of
+ignorance and speculation, there is one anchored fact. While animals
+turn a grizzled gray with age, the fine gray coats are not caused by
+age. Young animals of the rarest furs--fox and ermine--are born in ashy
+colour that turns to gray while they are still in their first nest.
+
+To say that silver fox is costly solely because it is rare is sheerest
+nonsense. It would be just as sensible to say that labradorite, which is
+rare, should be as costly as diamonds. It is the intrinsic beauty of the
+fur, as of the diamonds, that constitutes its first value. The facts
+that the taking of a silver fox is always pure luck, that the luck comes
+seldom, that the trapper must have travelled countless leagues by
+snow-shoe and dog train over the white wastes of the North, that
+trappers in polar regions are exposed to more dangers and hardships than
+elsewhere and that the fur must have been carried a long distance to
+market--add to the first high value of silver fox till it is not
+surprising that little pelts barely two feet long have sold for prices
+ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the trapper the way to the fortune of
+a silver fox is the same as the road to fortune for all other men--by
+the homely trail of every-day work. Cheers from the fort gates bid
+trappers setting out for far Northern fields God-speed. Long ago there
+would have been a firing of cannon when the Northern hunters left for
+their distant camping-grounds; but the cannon of Churchill lie rusting
+to-day and the hunters who go to the sub-Arctics and the Arctics no
+longer set out from Churchill on the bay, but from one of the little
+inland MacKenzie River posts. If the fine powdery snow-drifts are
+glossed with the ice of unbroken sun-glare, the runners strap iron
+crampets to their snow-shoes, and with a great jingling of the
+dog-bells, barking of the huskies, and yelling of the drivers, coast
+away for the leagueless levels of the desolate North. Frozen river-beds
+are the only path followed, for the high cliffs--almost like ramparts on
+the lower MacKenzie--shut off the drifting east winds that heap
+barricades of snow in one place and at another sweep the ground so clear
+that the sleighs pull heavy as stone. Does a husky fag? A flourish of
+whips and off the laggard scampers, keeping pace with the others in the
+traces, a pace that is set for forty miles a day with only one feeding
+time, nightfall when the sleighs are piled as a wind-break and the
+frozen fish are doled out to the ravenous dogs. Gun signals herald the
+hunter's approach to a chance camp; and no matter how small and mean the
+tepee, the door is always open for whatever visitor, the meat pot set
+simmering for hungry travellers. When the snow crust cuts the dogs'
+feet, buckskin shoes are tied on the huskies; and when an occasional dog
+fags entirely, he is turned adrift from the traces to die. Relentless
+as death is Northern cold; and wherever these long midwinter journeys
+are made, gruesome traditions are current of hunter and husky.
+
+I remember hearing of one old husky that fell hopelessly lame during the
+north trip. Often the drivers are utter brutes to their dogs, speaking
+in curses which they say is the only language a husky can understand,
+emphasized with the blows of a club. Too often, as well, the huskies are
+vicious curs ready to skulk or snap or bolt or fight, anything but work.
+But in this case the dog was an old reliable that kept the whole train
+in line, and the driver had such an affection for the veteran husky that
+when rheumatism crippled the dog's legs the man had not the heart to
+shoot such a faithful servant. The dog was turned loose from the traces
+and hobbled lamely behind the scampering teams. At last he fell behind
+altogether, but at night limped into camp whining his joy and asking
+dumbly for the usual fish. In the morning when the other teams set out,
+the old husky was powerless to follow. But he could still whine and wag
+his tail. He did both with all his might, so that when the departing
+driver looked back over his shoulder, he saw a pair of eyes pleading, a
+head with raised alert ears, shoulders straining to lift legs that
+refused to follow, and a bushy tail thwacking--thwacking--thwacking the
+snow!
+
+"You ought to shoot him," advised one driver.
+
+"You do it--you're a dead sure aim," returned the man who had owned the
+dog.
+
+But the other drivers were already coasting over the white wastes. The
+owner looked at his sleighs as if wondering whether they would stand an
+additional burden. Then probably reflecting that old age is not
+desirable for a suffering dog in a bitingly keen frost, he turned
+towards the husky with his hand in his belt. Thwack--thwack went the
+tail as much as to say: "Of course he wouldn't desert me after I've
+hauled his sleigh all my life! Thwack--thwack! I'd get up and jump all
+around him if I could; there isn't a dog-gone husky in all polar land
+with half as good a master as I have!"
+
+The man stopped. Instead of going to the dog he ran back to his sleigh,
+loaded his arms full of frozen fish and threw them down before the dog.
+Then he put one caribou-skin under the old dog, spread another over him
+and ran away with his train while the husky was still guzzling. The fish
+had been poisoned to be thrown out to the wolves that so often pursue
+Northern dog trains.
+
+Once a party of hunters crossing the Northern Rockies came on a dog
+train stark and stiff. Where was the master who had bidden them stand
+while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a blizzard for
+the lost path? In the middle of the last century, one of that famous
+family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown to go north to Red
+River in Canada. He never went back to Georgetown and he never reached
+Red River; but his coat was found fluttering from a tree, a death signal
+to attract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was
+discovered not far off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit
+pest and the rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves
+seldom give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains,
+licking up the stains of the bleeding feet, or hanging spectrally on
+the dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they
+seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where the wolves
+followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family from the North
+down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would
+follow so far?
+
+The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the days, till
+at last the sun, which has rolled across the south in a wheel of fire,
+dwindles to a disk, the disk to a rim--then no rim at all comes up, and
+it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of endless
+unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the starlight
+brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts
+and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire--all brighten the
+polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the region chiefly
+hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and Chippewyan half-breeds.
+The regular Northern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose
+their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of "little sticks," meaning
+the land where timber growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs.
+
+The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written across the
+white page of the snow. If there are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern
+grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; for
+the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of feet feathers have a
+habit of floundering under the powdery snow; and up through that powdery
+snow darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel-hunter of birds. If
+there are the deep plunges of the white hare, lynx and fox and mink and
+marten and pekan will be plentiful; for the poor white hare feeds all
+the creatures of the Northern wastes, man and beast. If there are little
+dainty tracks--oh, such dainty tracks that none but a high-stepping,
+clear-cut, clean-limbed, little thoroughbred could make them!--tracks of
+four toes and a thumb claw much shorter than the rest, with a padding of
+five basal foot-bones behind the toes, tracks that show a fluff on the
+snow as of furred foot-soles, tracks that go in clean, neat, clear long
+leaps and bounds--the hunter knows that he has found the signs of the
+Northern fox.
+
+Here, then, he will camp for the winter. Camping in the Far North means
+something different from the hastily pitched tent of the prairie. The
+north wind blows biting, keen, unbroken in its sweep. The hunter must
+camp where that wind will not carry scent of his tent to the animal
+world. For his own sake, he must camp under shelter from that wind,
+behind a cairn of stones, below a cliff, in a ravine. Poles have been
+brought from the land of trees on the dog sleigh. These are put up,
+criss-crossed at top, and over them is laid, not the canvas tent, but a
+tent of skins, caribou, wolf, moose, at a sharp enough angle to let the
+snow slide off. Then snow is banked deep, completely round the tent. For
+fire, the Eskimo depends on whale-oil and animal grease. The white man
+or half-breed from the South hoards up chips and sticks. But mainly he
+depends on exercise and animal food for warmth. At night he sleeps in a
+fur bag. In the morning that bag is frozen stiff as boards by the
+moisture of his own breath. Need one ask why the rarest furs, which can
+only be produced by the coldest of climates, are so costly?
+
+Having found the tracks of the fox, the hunter sets out his traps baited
+with fish or rabbit or a bird-head. If the snow be powdery enough, and
+the trapper keen in wild lore, he may even know what sort of a fox to
+expect. In the depths of midwinter, the white Arctic fox has a wool fur
+to his feet like a brahma chicken. This leaves its mark in the fluffy
+snow. A ravenous fellow he always is, this white fox of the hungry
+North, bold from ignorance of man, but hard to distinguish from the snow
+because of his spotless coat. The blue fox being slightly smaller than
+the full-grown Arctic, lopes along with shorter leaps by which the
+trapper may know the quarry; but the blue fox is just as hard to
+distinguish from the snow as his white brother. The gray frost haze is
+almost the same shade as his steel-blue coat; and when spring comes,
+blue fox is the same colour as the tawny moss growth. Colour is blue
+fox's defence. Consequently blue foxes show more signs of age than
+white--stubby ears frozen low, battle-worn teeth, dulled claws.
+
+The chances are that the trapper will see the black fox himself almost
+as soon as he sees his tracks; for the sheeny coat that is black fox's
+beauty betrays him above the snow. Bushy tail standing straight out,
+every black hair bristling erect with life, the white tail-tip flaunting
+a defiance, head up, ears alert, fore feet cleaving the air with the
+swift ease of some airy bird--on he comes, jump--jump--jump--more of a
+leap than a lope, galloping like a wolf, altogether different from the
+skulking run of little foxes, openly exulting in his beauty and his
+strength and his speed! There is no mistaking black fox. If the trapper
+does not see the black fox scurrying over the snow, the tell-tale
+characteristics of the footprints are the length and strength of the
+leaps. Across these leaps the hunter leaves his traps. Does he hope for
+a silver fox? Does every prospector expect to find gold nuggets? In the
+heyday of fur company prosperity, not half a dozen true silver foxes
+would be sent out in a year. To-day I doubt if more than one good silver
+fox is sent out in half a dozen years. But good white fox and black and
+blue are prizes enough in themselves, netting as much to the trapper as
+mink or beaver or sable.
+
+
+II
+
+_The White Ermine_
+
+All that was said of the mystery of fox life applies equally to ermine.
+Why is the ermine of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Dakota a dirty little
+weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a night, wearing a
+mahogany-coloured coat with a sulphur strip down his throat, while the
+ermine of the Arctics is as white as snow, noted for his courage,
+wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, yes, and take from him? For a
+long time the learned men who study animal life from museums held that
+the ermine's coat turned white from the same cause as human hair, from
+senility and debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying
+climate. But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby
+ermine born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the
+mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat something
+like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. They told
+of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a fresh layer of
+iron-gray fur that turned sulphur white within a few days. They told of
+the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine with the softest and
+whitest coats. That disposed of the senility theory. All the trapper
+knows is that the whitest ermine is taken when the cold is most intense
+and most continuous, that just as the cold slackens the ermine coat
+assumes the sulphur tinges, deepening to russet and brown, and that the
+whitest ermine instead of showing senility, always displays the most
+active and courageous sort of deviltry.
+
+Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is constantly surrounded by
+ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks almost like
+frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest of a poor
+grouse--eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest fouled so that it
+emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen lying dead from a wound
+in her throat. There is the frightened rabbit loping across the fields
+in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe-begone leaps, trying to shake
+something off that is clinging to his throat till over he tumbles--the
+prey of a hunter that is barely the size of rabbit's paw. There is the
+water-rat flitting across the rocks in blind terror, regardless of the
+watching trapper, caring only to reach safety--water--water! Behind
+comes the pursuer--this is no still hunt but a straight open chase--a
+little creature about the length of a man's hand, with a tail almost as
+long, a body scarcely the thickness of two fingers, a mouth the size of
+a bird's beak, and claws as small as a sparrow's. It gallops in lithe
+bounds with its long neck straight up and its beady eyes fastened on the
+flying water-rat. Splash--dive--into the water goes the rat!
+Splash--dive--into the water goes the ermine! There is a great stirring
+up of the muddy bottom. The water-rat has tried to hide in the
+under-tangle; and the ermine has not only dived in pursuit but headed
+the water-rat back from the safe retreat of his house. Up comes a black
+nose to the surface of the water. The rat is foolishly going to try a
+land race. Up comes a long neck like a snake's, the head erect, the
+beady eyes on the fleeing water-rat--then with a splash they race
+overland. The water-rat makes for a hole among the rocks. Ermine sees
+and with a spurt of speed is almost abreast when the rat at bay turns
+with a snap at his pursuer. But quick as flash, the ermine has
+pirouetted into the air. The long writhing neck strikes like a serpent's
+fangs and the sharp fore teeth have pierced the brain of the rat. The
+victim dies without a cry, without a struggle, without a pain. That long
+neck was not given the ermine for nothing. Neither were those muscles
+massed on either side of his jaws like bulging cheeks.
+
+In winter the ermine's murderous depredations are more apparent. Now the
+ermine, too, sets itself to reading the signs of the snow. Now the
+ermine becomes as keen a still hunter as the man. Sometimes a whirling
+snow-fall catches a family of grouse out from furze cover. The trapper,
+too, is abroad in the snow-storm; for that is the time when he can set
+his traps undetected. The white whirl confuses the birds. They run here,
+there, everywhere, circling about, burying themselves in the snow till
+the storm passes over. The next day when the hunter is going the rounds
+of these traps, along comes an ermine. It does not see him. It is
+following a scent, head down, body close to ground, nose here, there,
+threading the maze which the crazy grouse had run. But stop, thinks the
+trapper, the snow-fall covered the trail. Exactly--that is why the
+little ermine dives under snow just as it would under water, running
+along with serpentine wavings of the white powdery surface till up it
+comes again where the wind has blown the snow-fall clear. Along it runs,
+still intent, quartering back where it loses the scent--along again till
+suddenly the head lifts--that motion of the snake before it strikes! The
+trapper looks. Tail feathers, head feathers, stupid blinking eyes poke
+through the fluffy snow-drift. And now the ermine no longer runs openly.
+There are too many victims this time--it may get all the foolish hidden
+grouse; so it dives and if the man had not alarmed the stupid grouse,
+ermine would have darted up through the snow with a finishing stab for
+each bird.
+
+By still hunt and open hunt, by nose and eye, relentless as doom, it
+follows its victims to the death. Does the bird perch on a tree? Up goes
+the ermine, too, on the side away from the bird's head. Does the mouse
+thread a hundred mazes and hide in a hole? The ermine threads every
+maze, marches into the hidden nest and takes murderous possession. Does
+the rat hide under rock? Under the rock goes the ermine. Should the
+trapper follow to see the outcome of the contest, the ermine will
+probably sit at the mouth of the rat-hole, blinking its beady eyes at
+him. If he attacks, down it bolts out of reach. If he retires, out it
+comes looking at this strange big helpless creature with bold contempt.
+
+The keen scent, the keen eyes, the keen ears warn it of an enemy's
+approach. Summer and winter, its changing coat conceals it. The furze
+where it runs protects it from fox and lynx and wolverine. Its size
+admits it to the tiniest of hiding-places. All that the ermine can do to
+hunt down a victim, it can do to hide from an enemy. These qualities
+make it almost invincible to other beasts of the chase. Two joints in
+the armour of its defence has the little ermine. Its black tail-tip
+moving across snow betrays it to enemies in winter: the very intentness
+on prey, its excess of self-confidence, leads it into danger; for
+instance, little ermine is royally contemptuous of man's tracks. If the
+man does not molest it, it will follow a scent and quarter and circle
+under his feet; so the man has no difficulty in taking the little beast
+whose fur is second only to that of the silver fox. So bold are the
+little creatures that the man may discover their burrows under brush, in
+rock, in sand holes, and take the whole litter before the game mother
+will attempt to escape. Indeed, the plucky little ermine will follow the
+captor of her brood. Steel rat traps, tiny deadfalls, frosted bits of
+iron smeared with grease to tempt the ermine's tongue which the frost
+will hold like a vice till the trapper comes, and, most common of all,
+twine snares such as entrap the rabbit, are the means by which the
+ermine comes to his appointed end at the hands of men.
+
+The quality of the pelt shows as wide variety as the skin of the fox;
+and for as mysterious reasons. Why an ermine a year old should have a
+coat like sulphur and another of the same age a coat like swan's-down,
+neither trapper nor scientist has yet discovered. The price of the
+perfect ermine-pelt is higher than any other of the rare furs taken in
+North America except silver fox; but it no longer commands the fabulous
+prices that were certainly paid for specimen ermine-skins in the days
+of the Georges in England and the later Louis in France. How were those
+fabulously costly skins prepared? Old trappers say no perfectly downy
+pelt is ever taken from an ermine, that the downy effect is produced by
+a trick of the trade--scraping the flesh side so deftly that all the
+coarse hairs will fall out, leaving only the soft under-fur.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 45: That is, as far as trappers yet know.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR
+
+
+Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of nature's most
+harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of nature's most
+destructive agents, against traders who were rivals and Indians who were
+hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be himself a type of nature's
+arch-destroyer.
+
+Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and
+mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the most
+skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the crack of the
+trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his trap, seem the
+only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence that riots with a
+very fulness of life. But such a world is only a dream. The reality is
+cruel as death. Of all the creatures that prey, man is the most
+merciful.
+
+Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. There
+are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating capacity and
+penned off from the possibility of harming anything weaker than
+themselves. There are the private pets fed equally well, pampered and
+chained safely from harming or being harmed. There are the wild
+creatures roaming natural haunts, some two or three days' travel from
+civilization, whose natures have been gradually modified generation by
+generation from being constantly hunted with long-range repeaters.
+Judging from these sorts of wild animals, it certainly seems that the
+brute creation has been sadly maligned. The bear cubs lick each other's
+paws with an amatory singing that is something between the purr of a cat
+and the grunt of a pig. The old polars wrestle like boys out of school,
+flounder in grotesque gambols that are laughably clumsy, good-naturedly
+dance on their hind legs, and even eat from their keeper's hand. And all
+the deer family can be seen nosing one another with the affection of
+turtle-doves. Surely the worst that can be said of these animals is that
+they shun the presence of man. Perhaps some kindly sentimentalist
+wonders if things hadn't gone so badly out of gear in a certain historic
+garden long ago, whether mankind would not be on as friendly relations
+with the animal world as little boys and girls are with bears and
+baboons in the fairy books. And the scientist goes a step further, and
+soberly asks whether these wild things of the woods are not kindred of
+man after all; for have not man and beast ascended the same scale of
+life? Across the centuries, modern evolution shakes hands with
+old-fashioned transmigration.
+
+To be sure, members of the deer family sometimes kill their mates in
+fits of blind rage, and the innocent bear cubs fall to mauling their
+keeper, and the old bears have been known to eat their young. These
+things are set down as freaks in the animal world, and in nowise allowed
+to upset the influences drawn from animals living in unnatural
+surroundings, behind iron bars, or in haunts where long-range rifles
+have put the fear of man in the animal heart.
+
+Now the trapper studies animal life where there is neither a pen to keep
+the animal from doing what it wants to do, nor any rifle but his own to
+teach wild creatures fear. Knowing nothing of science and sentiment, he
+never clips facts to suit his theory. On the truthfulness of his eyes
+depends his own life, so that he never blinks his eyes to disagreeable
+facts.
+
+Looking out on the life of the wilds clear-visioned as his mountain air,
+the trapper sees a world beautiful as a dream but cruel as death. He
+sees a world where to be weak, to be stupid, to be dull, to be slow, to
+be simple, to be rash are the unpardonable crimes; where the weak must
+grow strong, keen of eye and ear and instinct, sharp, wary, swift, wise,
+and cautious; where in a word the weak must grow fit to survive
+or--perish!
+
+The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into the soft fur
+of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch the swooping
+talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself overland risks
+bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home colony. Bird preys on
+worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf on lynx, and bear on all
+creatures that live from men and moose down to the ant and the embryo
+life in the ant's egg. But the vision of ravening destruction does not
+lead the trapper to morbid conclusions on life as it leads so many
+housed thinkers in the walled cities; for the same world that reveals to
+him such ravening slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest
+and the strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of
+cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight,
+of semblance, of death--that will defend it from all enemies. The
+ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw an enemy
+off the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one of the most
+helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from foes of the
+air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind the breath of a
+pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a harrying eagle flopping
+head over heels on the ground, and simulate the stillness of inanimate
+objects surrounding it so truly that the passer-by can scarcely
+distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the russet bark of a log. And the
+rabbit's big eyes and ears are not given it for nothing.
+
+Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same reason. Both
+seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it is; and the world
+that they see is red in tooth and claw. But neither grows morbid from
+his vision; for that same vision shows each that the ravening
+destruction is only a weeding out of the unfit. There is too much
+sunlight in the trapper's world, too much fresh air in his lungs, too
+much red blood in his veins for the morbid miasmas that bring bilious
+fumes across the mental vision of the housed city man.
+
+And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper occupy?
+Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red-dyed monster,
+excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the hunter to slay, but
+after all only the most highly developed of the creatures that prey. Is
+this true? Arch-destroyer he may be; but it should be remembered that he
+is the destroyer of destroyers.
+
+Animals kill young and old, male and female.
+
+The true trapper does not kill the young; for that would destroy his
+next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with the
+young. He kills the grown males which--it can be safely said--have
+killed more of each other than man has killed in all the history of
+trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the pot-hunter, whether
+the sportsman for amusement or the settler supplying his larder, game
+has been exterminated. This is illustrated by all the stretch of country
+between the Platte and the Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been
+hunted only by the trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been.
+This is illustrated by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land
+south of Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come
+destroying grisly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and
+mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have increased.
+
+But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, something
+more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys _animal_ life--a
+life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and rapine and
+cruelty--in order that _human_ life may be preserved, may be rendered
+independent of the elemental powers that wage war against it.
+
+It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against the
+elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors
+conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing Fenris
+wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets of
+life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha hunting
+beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the trapper stands
+forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the
+obstacles that earth can offer to human will under his feet, finding
+paths through the wilderness for the explorer who was to come after him,
+opening doors of escape from stifled life in crowded centres of
+population, preparing a highway for the civilization that was to follow
+his own wandering trail through the wilds.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the
+entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life.
+It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian
+mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the
+diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she
+lived at Hamilton Inlet. Having related how she shot a deer, skinning it
+herself, made her snow-shoes and set her rabbit snares, she closes her
+first entry with:
+
+"Well, as I sed, I can't write much at a time now, for i am getting
+blind and some mist rises up before me if i sew, read or write a little
+while."
+
+Lydia Campbell's mother was captured by Eskimo. She ran away when she
+had grown up, to quote her own terse diary, "crossed a river on drift
+sticks, wading in shallows, through woods, meeting bears, sleeping under
+trees--seventy miles flight--saw a French boat--took off skirt and waved
+it to them--came--took my mother on board--worked for them--with the
+sealers--camped on the ice.
+
+"As there was no other kind of women to marrie hear, the few English men
+each took a wife of that sort and they never was sorry that they took
+them, for they was great workers and so it came to pass that I was one
+of the youngest of them." [Meaning, of course, that she was the daughter
+of one of these marriages.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Our young man pretended to spark the two daughters of Tomas. He was a
+one-armed man, for he had shot away one arm firing at a large bird....
+He double-loaded his gun in his fright, so the por man lost one of his
+armes,... he was so smart with his gun that he could bring down a bird
+flying past him, or a deer running past he would be the first to bring
+it down."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They was holden me hand and telling me that I must be his mother now as
+his own mother is dead and she was a great friend of mine although we
+could not understand each other's language sometimes, still we could
+make it out with sins and wonders."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"April 7, 1894.--Since I last wrote on this book, I have been what
+people call cruising about here. I have been visiting some of my
+friends, though scattered far apart, with my snow-shoes and axe on my
+shoulders. The nearest house to this place is about five miles up a
+beautiful river, and then through woods, what the french calls a
+portage--it is what I call pretty. Many is the time that I have been
+going with dogs and komatick 40 or 50 years ago with my husband and
+family to N. W. River, to the Hon. Donald A. Smith and family to keep N.
+Year or Easter."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My dear old sister Hannah Mishlin who is now going on for 80 years old
+and she is smart yet, she hunts fresh meat and chops holes in the 3 foot
+ice this very winter and catches trout with her hook, enough for her
+household, her husband not able to work, he has a bad complaint."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You must please excuse my writing and spelling for I have never been to
+school, neither had I a spelling book in my young day--me a native of
+this country, Labrador, Hamilton's Inlet, Esquimaux Bay--if you wish to
+know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Lydia Brooks, then
+Blake, after Blake, now Campbell. So you see ups and downs has been my
+life all through, and now I am what I am--prais the Lord."
+
+"I have been hunting most every day since Easter, and to some of my
+rabbit snares and still traps, cat traps and mink traps. I caught 7
+rabbits and 1 marten and I got a fix and 4 partridges, about 500 trout
+besides household duties--never leave out morning and Evening prayers
+and cooking and baking and washing for 5 people--3 motherless little
+children--with so much to make for sale out of seal skin and deer skin
+shoes, bags and pouches and what not.... You can say well done old
+half-breed woman in Hamilton's Inlet. Good night, God bless us all and
+send us prosperity.
+
+  "Yours ever true,
+
+  "LYDIA CAMPBELL."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We are going to have an evening worship, my poor old man is tired, he
+has been a long way to-day and he shot 2 beautyful white partridges. Our
+boy heer shot once spruce partridge."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Caplin so plentiful boats were stopped, whales, walrusses and white
+bears."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Muligan River, May 24, 1894.--They say that once upon a time the world
+was drowned and that all the Esquimaux were drownded but one family and
+he took his family and dogs and chattels and his seal-skin boat and Kiak
+and Komaticks and went on the highest hill that they could see, and
+stayed there till the rain was over and when the water dried up they
+descended down the river and got down to the plains and when they could
+not see any more people, they took off the bottoms of their boots and
+took some little white [seal] pups and sent the poor little things off
+to sea and they drifted to some islands far away and became white
+people. Then they done the same as the others did and the people spread
+all over the world. Such was my poor father's thought.... There is up
+the main river a large fall, the same that the American and English
+gentlemen have been up to see. [Referring to Mr. Bryant, of
+Philadelphia, who visited Grand Falls.] Well there is a large whirlpool
+or hole at the bottom of the fall. The Indians that frequent the place
+say that there is three women--Indians--that lives under that place or
+near to it I am told, and at times they can hear them speaking to each
+other louder than the roar of the falls." [The Indians always think the
+mist of a waterfall signifies the presence of ghosts.]
+
+"I have been the cook of that great Sir D. D. Smith that is in Canada at
+this time. [In the days when Lord Strathcona was chief trader at
+Hamilton Inlet.] He was then at Rigolet Post, a chief trader only, now
+what is he so great! He was seen last winter by one of the women that
+belong to this bay. She went up to Canada ... and he is gray headed and
+bended, that is Sir D. D. Smith."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"August 1, 1894.--My dear friends, you will please excuse my writing and
+spelling--the paper sweems by me, my eyesight is dim now----"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Story of the Trapper, by A C Laut.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Trapper, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Trapper
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Illustrator: Arthur Heming
+
+Release Date: May 3, 2010 [EBook #32236]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreaders at
+http://www.fadedpage.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 397px;">
+
+<img src="images/illus-cvr.jpg" width="397" height="600" alt="" title="cover" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 375px;">
+<a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-fpc.jpg" width="375" height="550" alt="With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on." title="" />
+<span class="caption">With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on.<br /> (See
+page <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>.)</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><i>THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES</i></h3>
+
+<h3><i>EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK</i></h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="centerbox bbox">
+<h3>The Story of the West Series.</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK.</span></h4>
+
+<p class="center">Each Illustrated, 12mo, Cloth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Railroad.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By <span class="smcap">Cy Warman</span>, Author of "The Express Messenger." $1.50.</span></p>
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Cowboy.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By <span class="smcap">E. Hough</span>. Illustrated by William L. Wells and C. M. Russell. $1.50.</span></p>
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Mine.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada.</span>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Charles Howard Shinn</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Indian.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By <span class="smcap">George Bird Grinnell</span>, Author of "Pawnee Hero Stories," "Blackfoot
+Lodge Tales," etc. $1.50.</span></p>
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Soldier.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By Brevet Brigadier-General <span class="smcap">George A. Forsyth</span>, U. S. A. (retired).
+Illustrated by R. F. Zogbaum. $1.50.</span></p>
+
+<p><b>The Story of the Trapper.</b></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By <span class="smcap">A. C. Laut</span>, Author of "Heralds of Empire." Illustrated by Hemment.
+$1.25 net; postage, 12 cents additional.</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p class="center">D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+  <h1>THE STORY<br />
+  OF THE TRAPPER</h1>
+
+  <h4>BY</h4>
+
+  <h2>A. C. LAUT</h2>
+
+  <p class="center">AUTHOR OF HERALDS OF EMPIRE<br />
+  AND LORDS OF THE NORTH</p>
+
+  <h4><i>ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR HEMING
+  AND OTHERS</i></h4>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width: 201px;">
+<img src="images/illus-tpg.jpg" width="201" height="400" alt="" title="dedication decoration" />
+</div>
+
+ <p class="center"> NEW YORK AND LONDON<br />
+
+  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br />
+
+  1916<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span>
+
+
+
+
+<span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1902<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Printed in the United States of America<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><br /><br />TO ALL WHO KNOW<br />
+
+THE GIPSY YEARNING FOR THE WILDS<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span><br /><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="EDITORS_PREFACE" id="EDITORS_PREFACE"></a>EDITOR'S PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>The picturesque figure of the trapper follows close behind the Indian in
+the unfolding of the panorama of the West. There is the explorer, but
+the trapper himself preceded the explorers&mdash;witness Lewis's and Clark's
+meetings with trappers on their journey. The trapper's hard-earned
+knowledge of the vast empire lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by
+later comers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occasional
+records in the documents of fur companies, or reports of military
+expeditions, or here and there in the name of a pass, a stream, a
+mountain, or a fort. His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the
+woods and streams was the expression of a primitive instinct old as the
+history of mankind. The development of the motives which led the first
+pioneer trappers afield from the days of the first Eastern settlements,
+the industrial organizations which followed, the commanding commercial
+results which were evolved from the trafficking of Radisson and
+Groseillers in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,
+and the American enterprise which led, among other results, to the
+foundation of the Astor fortunes, would form no inconsiderable part of a
+history of North America. The present volume aims simply to show the
+type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch in a series of
+pictures the checkered life of this adventurer of the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper of the early West was a composite figure. From the Northeast
+came a splendid succession of French explorers like La Vérendrye, with
+<i>coureurs des bois</i>, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders
+pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard, illustrated in
+figures like Garces and others, held out hands which rarely grasped the
+waiting commerce. From the north and northeast there was the steady
+advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in the deeds of the
+Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the leaders of the organized fur trade,
+explorers, traders, captains of industry, carrying the flags of the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern America to the
+Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast the Russian appeared as fur
+trader in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the close of the
+century saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of the fur
+traffic of that coast. The American trapper becomes a conspicuous figure
+in the early years of the nineteenth century. The emporium of his
+traffic was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance and
+prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase and continued for
+forty years. The complete history of the American fur trade of the far
+West has been written by Captain H. M. Chittenden in volumes which will
+be included among the classics of early Western history. Although his
+history is a publication designed for limited circulation, no student or
+specialist in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his
+faithful and comprehensive work.</p>
+
+<p>In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for the general reader a
+vivid picture of an adventurous figure, which is painted with a
+singleness of purpose and a distinctness impossible of realization in
+the large and detailed histories of the American fur trade and the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the various special relations
+and journals and narratives. The author's wilderness lore and her
+knowledge of the life, added to her acquaintance with its literature,
+have borne fruit in a personification of the Western and Northern
+trappers who live in her pages. It is the man whom we follow not merely
+in the evolution of the Western fur traffic, but also in the course of
+his strange life in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his
+craft against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most picturesque figure
+which is sketched in these pages with the etcher's art that selects
+essentials while boldly disregarding details. This figure as it is
+outlined here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and
+the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own appeal. A strange
+chapter in history is outlined for those who would gain an insight into
+the factors which had to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft,
+exemplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is painted in
+pictures which breathe the very atmosphere of that life of stream and
+forest which has not lost its appeal even in these days of urban
+centralization. The flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the
+stealthy tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man against
+brute and savage, may be followed throughout a narrative which is
+constant in its fresh and personal interest.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and there is still an
+American fur trade; but the golden days are past, and the heroic age of
+the American trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even more
+than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly realized by his
+successors. It is time to tell his story, to show what manner of man he
+was, and to preserve for a different age the adventurous character of a
+Romany of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesqueness and daring
+of his primeval life, and also, judged by more practical standards, a
+figure of serious historical import in his relations to exploration and
+commerce, and even affairs of politics and state.</p>
+
+<p>If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span> in the early
+exploitation of an empire, his larger significance may be held of far
+more consequence to us than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in
+his life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple. The record of his
+dealings with the red man and with white competitors is darkened by many
+stains. His return from his lonely journeys afield brought an outbreak
+of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the range, but with all
+this the stern life of the old frontier bred a race of men who did their
+work. That work was the development of the only natural resources of
+vast regions in this country and to the Northward, which were utilized
+for long periods. There was also the task of exploration, the breaking
+the way for others, and as pioneer and as builder of commerce the
+trapper's part in our early history has a significance which cloaks the
+frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden wilds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align="right">&nbsp;</td><td align="left">CHAPTER</td><td align="right">PAGE<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Gamesters of the wilderness</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Three companies in conflict</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_8'>8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The Nor' Westers' coup</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_22'>22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The ancient Hudson's Bay Company wakens up</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_28'>28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Mr. Astor's company encounters new opponents</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_38'>38</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The French trapper</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_50'>50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The buffalo-runners</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_65'>65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The mountaineers</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_81'>81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The taking of the beaver</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_102'>102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The making of the moccasins</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_117'>117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The Indian trapper</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_128'>128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Ba'tiste, the bear hunter</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_144'>144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">John Colter--Free trapper</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_160'>160</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIV.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The greatest fur company of the world</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_181'>181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XV.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Koot and the bob-cat</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_206'>206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVI.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Other little animals besides Wahboos the Rabbit</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_222'>222</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">The rare furs--How the trapper takes them</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_240'>240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVIII.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">Under the North Star--Where fox and ermine run</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_258'>258</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIX.</td><td align="left">--<span class="smcap">What the trapper stands for</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_275'>275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">&nbsp;</td><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0.8em;"><span class="smcap">Appendix</span></span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_281'>281</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="ILLUSTRATIONS">
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="right">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#frontis'><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Indian <i>voyageurs</i> "packing" over long <i>portage</i></span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_30'>30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_57'>57</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The buffalo-hunt</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_78'>78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_143'>143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Carrying goods over long <i>portage</i> with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_198'>198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Fort MacPherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay Company</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_228'>228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Types of fur presses</span></td><td align="right"><a href='#Page_250'>250</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><br /><br /><a name="THE_STORY_OF_THE_TRAPPER" id="THE_STORY_OF_THE_TRAPPER"></a>THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PART I<br /><br /></h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Fearing nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no law, ruling his
+stronghold of the wilds like a despot, checkmating rivals with a
+deviltry that beggars parallel, wassailing with a shamelessness that
+might have put Rome's worst deeds to the blush,
+fighting&mdash;fighting&mdash;fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew
+no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever stand as a type of
+the worst and the best in the militant heroes of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon won victories that
+upset the geography of earth. The fur traders never at any time exceeded
+a few thousands in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sallied
+out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent that has bred a new
+race.</p>
+
+<p>Like John Colter,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> whom Manuel Lisa met coming from the wilds a
+hundred years ago, the trapper strapped a pack to his back, slung a
+rifle over his shoul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>der, and, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped
+into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else, like Williams of
+the Arkansas, the trapper left the moorings of civilization in a canoe,
+hunted at night, hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding
+down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-current screened by the
+branches of driftwood, and if a sudden halloo of marauders came from the
+distance, cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got away
+under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert
+set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often
+compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
+Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the
+Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who
+brought down their pelts to the mountain <i>rendezvous</i> of Pierre's Hole,
+or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur
+Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling cañon walls
+where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too
+sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the
+haft.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur
+traders clubbed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of
+the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.
+Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted
+antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
+River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day
+think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut
+off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland
+route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at
+all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,
+Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.</p>
+
+<p>The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence&mdash;to go ahead
+without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's
+life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of
+the most thrilling pages in history.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart
+Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed
+the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward
+to the region of Hudson Bay.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Returning with tales of fabulous wealth
+to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by
+members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence
+secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and
+honourable body&mdash;as the company was called&mdash;reaped enormous profits from
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,
+half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and
+Severn Rivers, or at York Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of
+Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number
+of licenses for the fur trade in Canada; and the old English company had
+no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but
+waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts
+on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> might march overland from
+Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the
+stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off
+like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient
+company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable
+adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost
+furs.</p>
+
+<p>But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously
+in all parts of the east.</p>
+
+<p>This resulted from two events&mdash;England's victory over France at Quebec,
+and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of
+French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which
+limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army
+of some two thousand men&mdash;<i>voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> de
+lard</i>,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> famous hunters, traders, and trappers&mdash;on their own resources.
+The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and
+MacTavishes&mdash;Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal&mdash;were quick to
+seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company
+and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off
+Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to
+the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old
+French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against
+all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the
+larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor'
+Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous
+ubiquity.</p>
+
+<p>But at that stage came the other factor&mdash;American Independence. Locked
+in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could
+France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles
+and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and
+Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the
+Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase,
+and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its
+fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours
+had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the
+west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for
+furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report
+of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had
+stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty
+Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.</p>
+
+<p>Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its
+eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>
+Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river
+named after him,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> and forced his way across the northern Rockies to
+the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's
+lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At
+Michilimackinac&mdash;one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur
+posts&mdash;was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old
+French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes
+to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily
+pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado&mdash;the fur
+country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by
+the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get
+possession first.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at
+the same time and in the same light. And the war began.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the
+Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out
+of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent
+state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening
+that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were
+not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what
+was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America
+and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of
+New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes,
+was not asleep.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT</h3>
+
+
+<p>If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur
+country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become
+international history; but three companies were at strife for possession
+of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was
+"beaver"&mdash;not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all
+means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth
+company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the
+mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York,
+Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory
+west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur
+trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues
+to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company
+lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling
+heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in
+the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not
+yet come.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and
+Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,
+Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as
+interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the
+spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the
+full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or
+"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by
+means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.
+Where the water was shallow the <i>voyageurs</i> poled single file, facing
+the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars
+were used.</p>
+
+<p>Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the
+wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they
+were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring
+the deserter back dead or alive&mdash;orders that were filled to the letter,
+for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.
+Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
+man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this
+lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their
+return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine
+the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for
+three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
+promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.</p>
+
+<p>Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been
+buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit
+might see the canoes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> of the French <i>voyageurs</i> going up and down the
+river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> whose death, like that of many
+a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of
+empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in
+vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from
+rival traders;<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;
+past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank with weapons
+ready; up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn&mdash;went Lisa,
+stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those thieves and pirates
+and marauders of the western wilderness. Stockades were hastily stuck in
+the ground, banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the two
+usual bastions that could send a raking fire along all four walls; and
+Lisa was ready for trade.</p>
+
+<p>In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded to the water-line
+with furs. The Missouri Company was formally organized,<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> and yearly
+expeditions were sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks of
+the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of the two hundred and
+fifty men employed, fifty were trained riflemen for the defence of the
+trappers; but this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their
+lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years. Among the victims
+was Drouillard, struck down wheel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>ing his horse round and round as a
+shield, literally torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten
+according to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a brave man
+imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing, ammunition, and peltries
+were carried to the Nor' Westers' trading posts north of the
+boundary.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Not if the West were to be baptized in blood would the
+traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Missouri men under Andrew
+Henry's leadership moved south-west over the mountains into the region
+that was to become famous as Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor remained idle. The same
+year that Lisa organized his Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a
+charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. To
+lessen competition in the great scheme gradually framing itself in his
+mind, he bought out that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> which
+was within the United States, the posts in the British dominions falling
+into the hands of the all-powerful Nor' Westers. Intimate with the
+leading partners of the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid
+rivalry on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third interest in
+his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.</p>
+
+<p>Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected Mr. Astor's proposal
+with a scorn born of unshaken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> confidence, and at once prepared to
+anticipate American possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor countered
+by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' Westers for his Pacific
+Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall, a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with
+a bumptious idea of authority which was always making other eyes smart,
+was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to round the Horn and at the
+headquarters of the company on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a
+relative of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have left the
+northern traders from some momentary pique; for he soon went back to the
+Canadian companies, became chief factor at Fort Garry,<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> the
+headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time governor of
+Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied Sir Alexander MacKenzie on
+his famous northern trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor
+with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a rollicking winterer
+from The Labrador, with the hail-fellow-well-met-air of an equal among
+the mercurial French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the game,
+independent spirit that made Nor' Westers famous.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn&mdash;with its crew of twenty, and
+choleric Captain Thorn, and four<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> partners headed by the fussy little
+MacDougall in mutiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks
+always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sailors' way, and
+thirteen <i>voyageurs</i> ever grumbling at the ocean swell that gave them
+qualms unknown on inland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> waters&mdash;little need be said. Washington Irving
+has told this story; and what Washington Irving leaves untold, Captain
+Chittenden has recently unearthed from the files of the Missouri
+archives.</p>
+
+<p>The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6, 1810. The captain had
+been a naval officer, and cursed the partners for their easy familiarity
+with the men before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot of
+scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick <i>voyageurs</i> for a set of
+fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's amiable feelings were
+reciprocated by every Nor' Wester on board.</p>
+
+<p>Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii sighted in February, some
+thirty Sandwich Islanders engaged for service in the new company, and
+the Columbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives were lost
+attempting to run small boats against the turbulent swell of tide and
+current. The place to land, the site to build, details of the new fort,
+Astoria&mdash;all were subjects for the jangling that went on between the
+fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain Thorn, till the Tonquin
+weighed anchor on the 1st of June and sailed away to trade on the north
+coast, accompanied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay, and one clerk,
+James Lewis.</p>
+
+<p>The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn continued to dictate a
+wrong-headed course. In spite of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians
+off the ship and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were
+treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over his decks. Once,
+when MacKay was on shore, Thorn lost his temper, struck an impertinent
+chief in the face with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had happened, he
+warned the captain of Indian vengeance and urged him to leave the
+harbour. These warnings the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians,
+and no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost servile.</p>
+
+<p>One morning, when Thorn, and MacKay were yet asleep, a pirogue with
+twenty Indians approached the ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held
+up furs to trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe glided near
+and another band mounted the ship's ladder. Soon the vessel was
+completely surrounded with canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs,
+the squaws laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the ship's
+side. This day the Indians were neither pertinacious nor impertinent in
+their trade. Matters went swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew
+noticed with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and other
+weapons in exchange for their furs and that groups were casually
+stationing themselves at positions of wonderful advantage on the deck.
+MacKay and Thorn were quickly called.</p>
+
+<p>This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.</p>
+
+<p>MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation and again warned the
+captain. Again Thorn slighted the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The
+Indians thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade. Then the
+dour-headed Thorn understood. With a shout he ordered the decks cleared.
+His shout was answered by a counter-shout&mdash;the wild, shrill shriekings
+of the Indian war-cry! All the newly-bought weapons flashed in the
+morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first, bending over a pile of goods,
+and rolled down the com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>panion-way with a mortal stab in his back.
+MacKay was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club and
+pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws received him on their
+knives. Thorn had been roused so suddenly that he had no weapon but his
+pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms
+of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the
+wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard
+to the knives of the squaws.</p>
+
+<p>While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and
+Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men
+who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
+and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell
+down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the
+cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This
+sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The
+survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which
+drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.</p>
+
+<p>All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;
+but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the
+Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
+below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians
+launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man&mdash;one of
+those who had fallen down the hatch wounded&mdash;staggered up to the deck,
+waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of
+booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of
+carrion-birds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with
+a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to
+atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants
+of what had been living men but a moment before.</p>
+
+<p>The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> had
+determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to
+escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a
+match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better
+have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where
+they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty
+that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this
+disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
+with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of
+the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri
+and Columbia.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men building a fort
+on the Upper Columbia. If these had been the overland party, they would
+have come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who had himself been
+a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador
+was preparing to go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific
+Company; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the apparition of nine
+white men in a canoe flying a British flag.</p>
+
+<p>The North-West Company arrived just three months too late!</p>
+
+<p>David Thompson, the partner at the head of the newcomers, had been
+delayed in the mountains by the desertion of his guides. Much to the
+disgust of Labrador Stuart, who might change masters often but was loyal
+to only one master at a time, MacDougall and Thompson hailed each other
+as old friends. Every respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to
+the Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading rivalry, he
+should have been nothing more than a North-West spy, to be guardedly
+received in a Pacific Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed
+with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with a supply of
+Astoria provisions.</p>
+
+<p>History is not permitted to jump at conclusions, but unanswered
+questions will always cling round Thompson's visit. Did he bear some
+message from the Nor' Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an
+honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon that he shook free of
+Thompson's company on their way back up the Columbia? Why did MacDougall
+lose his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> How could the
+next party of Nor' Westers take him back into the fold and grant him a
+partnership <i>ostensibly</i> without the knowledge of the North-West annual
+council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?</p>
+
+<p>Early in August wandering tribes brought news of the Tonquin's
+destruction, and Astoria bestirred itself to strengthen pickets, erect
+bastions, mount four-pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's
+North-West training now came out, and he entered on a policy of
+conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his marrying Comcomly's
+daughter. He also perpetrated the world-famous threat of letting
+small-pox out of a bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained
+good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the schooner Dolly was
+built, and New Year's Day of 1812 ushered in with a firing of cannon and
+festive allowance of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of the
+overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale of blundering and
+mismanagement that must have been gall to MacKenzie, the old Nor' Wester
+accompanying them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria in February,
+and two other detachments later.</p>
+
+<p>The management of the overlanders had been intrusted to Wilson Price
+Hunt of New Jersey, who at once proceeded to Montreal with Donald
+MacKenzie, the Nor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-West Company
+was first felt. Rum, threats, promises, and sudden orders whisking them
+away prevented capable <i>voyageurs</i> from enlisting under the Pacific
+Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged, which explains in part
+why these empty braggarts so often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the
+Ottawa in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake to
+Michilimackinac.</p>
+
+<p>Here the hand of the North-West Company was again felt. Tattlers went
+from man to man telling yarns of terror to frighten <i>engagés</i> back. Did
+a man enlist? Sudden debts were remembered or manufactured, and the bill
+presented to Hunt. Was a <i>voyageur</i> on the point of embarking? A swarm
+of naked brats with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt
+finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr. Ramsay Crooks, a
+distinguished Nor' Wester, who afterward became famous as the president
+of the American Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay and the
+Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where the machinations of another
+rival were put to work.</p>
+
+<p>Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part in the Pacific
+Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Missouri traders did not propose to see
+his field invaded. The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis
+in engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was finally ready in
+March, 1811, to set out with his sixty men up the Missouri, Lisa
+resurrected a liquor debt against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter,
+with the fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten dollars a
+quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going overland through the woods
+and meeting Hunt's party farther up-stream, beyond the law.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a search party of twenty
+picked <i>voyageurs</i> to go up the Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew
+Henry who had fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake River.
+Traders too often secured safe passage through hostile territory in
+those lawless days by giving the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> savages muskets enough to blow out the
+brains of the next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by Crooks
+and MacLellan.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> Perhaps that was his reason for pushing ahead at all
+speed to overtake Hunt before either party had reached Sioux territory.</p>
+
+<p>Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa came, the harder Hunt
+fled. This curious race lasted for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa
+coming up with the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Spaniard
+tampered with Dorion. Had not two English travellers intervened, Hunt
+and Lisa would have settled their quarrel with pistols for two.
+Thereafter the rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping
+to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>That overland journey was one of the most pitiful, fatuous, mismanaged
+expeditions in the fur trade. Why a party of sixty-four well-armed,
+well-provisioned men failed in doing what any two <i>voyageurs</i> or
+trappers were doing every day, can only be explained by comparison to a
+bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild prairie creature the bit, and
+it will carry its rider through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left,
+east, and west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as
+helpless as the rider. So with the <i>voyageur</i>. Crossing the mountains
+alone in his own way, he could evade famine and danger and attack by
+lifting a brother trader's cache&mdash;hidden provisions&mdash;or tarrying in
+Indian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the daughter of a
+hostile chief, or creeping so quietly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> through the woods neither game
+nor Indian scout could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of
+sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into detachments, weak,
+emaciated, stripped naked, on the verge of dementia and cannibalism, now
+shouting to each other across a roaring cañon, now sinking in despair
+before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached Astoria after
+nearly a year's wanderings.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with re-enforcements of men
+and provisions. More posts were established inland. After several futile
+attempts, despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under direction of
+Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska to trade with the Russians. Word
+came from the North-West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with
+England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was wrecked. Astoria was now
+altogether in the hands of men who had been Nor' Westers.</p>
+
+<p>And what was the alert North-West Company doing?<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP</h3>
+
+
+<p>"<i>It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should
+send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had
+established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William
+(overland) to meet the ship on the coast</i>," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a
+North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.</p>
+
+<p>This was decided at the North-West council of 1812, held annually on the
+shores of Lake Superior. It was just a year from the time that Thompson
+had discovered the American fort in the hands of former Nor' Westers. At
+this meeting Thompson's report must have been read.</p>
+
+<p>The overland party was to be led by the two partners, John George
+MacTavish and Alexander Henry, the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by
+Donald MacTavish, who had actually been appointed governor of the
+American fort in anticipation of victory. On the Isaac Todd also went
+MacDonald of Garth.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<p>The overland expedition was to thread that labyrinth of water-ways
+connecting Lake Superior and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> Saskatchewan, thence across the plains
+to Athabasca, over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through
+Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the Columbia through
+Kootenay plains to Astoria. One has only to recall the roaring cañons of
+the northern Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless
+precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this route was than that
+followed by Hunt from St. Louis to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the
+plains and the width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did this,
+but passed down the middle of the Rockies for nearly a thousand miles.</p>
+
+<p>Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to
+England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naïve assurance of
+victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger,
+difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the
+terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's
+mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their
+ship. "<i>A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew</i>," writes
+MacDonald of Garth, "<i>a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and
+a rascally crew</i>." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British
+convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay
+barmaid Jane<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the
+rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency.
+"<i>We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were
+driven half-way to the Cape of Good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> Hope; ... at last doubled the cape
+under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our
+sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale</i>,"
+wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months
+after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness
+were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the
+Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a
+month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the
+Isaac Todd.</p>
+
+<p>And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army
+of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself
+into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the
+Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving
+rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not
+decamp.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor'
+Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the
+bragging <i>voyageurs</i> told those quaking Astorians terrible things of
+what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and
+captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne
+alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns,
+knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant
+courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran
+up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above
+Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at
+forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>science with the
+excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the
+Raccoon.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of November a large ship was sighted standing in over the bar
+with all sails spread but no ensign out. Three shots were fired from
+Astoria. There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost Mr. Hunt
+coming back from Alaskan trade on the Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers
+hastily packed their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their
+<i>voyageurs</i> scampering up-stream to hide and await a signal. But
+MacDougall was equal to the emergency. He launched out for the ship,
+prepared to be an American if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'
+Wester if it were the Raccoon with a company partner.</p>
+
+<p>It was the Raccoon, and the British captain addressed the Astorians in
+words that have become historic: "<i>Is this the fort I've heard so much
+about? D&mdash;&mdash; me, I could batter it down in two hours with a
+four-pounder!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above Astoria, with traders
+and marines drawn up under arms to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira
+was broken against the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British
+possession by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired from the
+bastions.</p>
+
+<p>At this stage all accounts, particularly American accounts, have rung
+down the curtain on the catastrophe, leaving the Nor' Westers
+intoxicated with success. But another act was to complete the disasters
+of Astoria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift judgment
+on the revelling Nor' Westers.</p>
+
+<p>The Raccoon left on the last day of 1813. MacDougall had been appointed
+partner in the North-West<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Company, and the other Canadians re-engaged
+under their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the Pedler, which he
+had chartered after the wreck of Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it
+was too late to do more than carry away those Americans still loyal to
+Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence he made his way to
+Europe. The others were captured off California and they afterward
+scattered to all parts of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of
+Nor' Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger MacTavish, set
+out for the long journey across the mountains and prairie to the
+company's headquarters at Port William. In the flotilla of ten canoes
+went many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came the belated
+Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white flag at its foretop and the
+dissolute old Governor MacTavish holding a high carnival of riot in the
+cabin.</p>
+
+<p>No darker picture exists than that of Astoria&mdash;or Fort George, as the
+British called it&mdash;under Governor MacTavish's <i>régime</i>. The picture is
+from the hand of a North-West partner himself. <i>"Not in bed till 2 <span class="smcap">A.
+M.</span>; ... the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... famous fellows for
+grog they are; ... diced for articles belonging to Mr. M.,"</i> Alexander
+Henry had written when the Raccoon was in port; and now under Governor
+MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to decency was discarded.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Avec les loups il faut hurler</i>" was a common saying among Nor'
+Westers, and perhaps that very assimilation to the native races which
+contributed so much to success also contributed to the trader's undoing.
+White men and Indians vied with each other in mutual debasement. Chinook
+and Saxon and Frenchmen alike<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> lay on the sand sodden with corruption;
+and if one died from carousals, companions weighted neck and feet with
+stones and pushed the corpse into the river. Quarrels broke out between
+the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the
+underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the
+gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; <i>seven hours
+rowing one mile</i>, innocently states the record of another day, <i>the tide
+running seven feet high past the fort</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled
+horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running
+its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of
+countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.
+Governor MacTavish<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> and Alexander Henry had embarked with six
+<i>voyageurs</i> to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A
+tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of
+the fort.</p>
+
+<p>So perished the conquerors of Astoria!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP</h3>
+
+
+<p>Those eighty<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their
+ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many
+dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort
+George.</p>
+
+<p>Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed
+the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their
+towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia
+where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial
+sediment, now raving through a narrow cañon, now teased into a white
+whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
+forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,
+and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille</i>," wrote the mighty
+MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old
+trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "<i>Nearing the mountains we
+got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here</i> (at the
+Great Bend) <i>we left canoes and be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>gan a mountain pass</i> (Yellow Head
+Pass).... <i>The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding
+by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in,
+frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in,
+... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four
+days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the
+Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires
+we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the
+morning."</i></p>
+
+<p>They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled
+down-stream to the <i>portage</i> between Athabasca River and the
+Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus
+(Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and
+the <i>voyageurs</i> launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand
+miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort
+William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.</p>
+
+<p>Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a
+million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed
+guard of three hundred men.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> Coasting along the north shore of Lake
+Superior, the <i>voyageurs</i> came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's
+establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the
+greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the
+Lakes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 388px;">
+<img src="images/illus-030.jpg" width="388" height="550" alt="Indian voyageurs &quot;packing&quot; over long portage, each packet containing from fifty to one hundred pounds." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Indian <i>voyageurs</i> &quot;packing&quot; over long <i>portage</i>, each packet containing from fifty to one hundred pounds.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"<i>Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four
+Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps</i>," writes MacDonald, showing
+to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were
+overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The
+strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had
+been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore
+bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich
+prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under
+the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to
+Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River.
+William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence
+of the furs.</p>
+
+<p>Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was hovering about the
+Sault, the other cruising into the countless recesses of the north
+shore. Against the latter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces,
+boarding her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness, "<i>pinning
+the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck</i>." Lying snugly at anchor, the
+victors awaited the coming of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her
+cast anchor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and took both
+schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all apprehension of capture, the
+North-West brigade proceeded eastward to the Ottawa River, and without
+further adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confusion from
+another cause.</p>
+
+<p>At the very time when war endangered the entire route of the Nor'
+Westers from Montreal to the Pacific, the Hudson's Bay Company awakened
+from its long<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in the
+United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans for the control of all
+Canada's fur trade. Like Mr. Astor, he too had been the guest at the
+North-West banquets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard fabulous
+things from those magnates of the north about wealth made in the fur
+trade. Returning to England, Lord Selkirk bought up enough stock of the
+Hudson's Bay Company to give him full control, and secured from the
+shareholders an enormous grant of land surrounding the mouths of the Red
+and Assiniboine rivers.</p>
+
+<p>Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were situated Fort Douglas
+(later Fort Garry, now Winnipeg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay
+Company, and Fort Gibraltar, the North-West post whence supplies were
+sent all the way from the Mandans on the Missouri to the Eskimo in the
+arctics.</p>
+
+<p>Not satisfied with this <i>coup</i>, Lord Selkirk engaged Colin Robertson, an
+old Nor' Wester, to gather a brigade of <i>voyageurs</i> two hundred strong
+at Montreal and proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca,
+MacKenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy, blustering,
+bragging company of gaily-bedizened fellows that had turned the streets
+of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end
+of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy revellers! Eighteen of
+them died of starvation in the far, cold north, owing to the conflict
+between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his
+newly-acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson
+Bay. These<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> people were given lands, and in return expected to defend
+the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers. The Nor' Westers struck back
+by discouraging the colonists, shipping them free out of the country,
+and getting possession of their arms.</p>
+
+<p>Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regiment, New York,
+governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Douglas, at once issued
+proclamations forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers and
+ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the strength of these
+proclamations two or three outlying North-West forts were destroyed and
+North-West fur brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> the North-West
+partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his <i>Bois-Brûlés</i>, a
+ragged half-breed army of wild plain rangers under Cuthbert Grant,
+canter across the two miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a
+volley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To save the post for the
+Hudson's Bay Company, Miles MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped
+out of the country.</p>
+
+<p>But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time till the valiant
+North-West defenders had scattered to their winter posts. Then an armed
+party seized Duncan Cameron not far from the North-West fort, and with
+pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the Nor' Wester.
+Afterward, when Semple, the new Hudson's Bay governor, was absent from
+Fort Douglas and could not therefore be held responsible for
+consequences, the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> who
+had brought the large brigade from Montreal, marched across the prairie
+to Fort Gibraltar, captured Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers'
+stores, and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retaliation for
+MacDonell's expulsion, the North-West partner was shipped down to Hudson
+Bay, where he might as well have been on Devil's Island for all the
+chance of escape.</p>
+
+<p>One company at fault as often as the other, similar outrages were
+perpetrated in all parts of the north fur country, the blood of rival
+traders being spilt without a qualm of conscience or thought of results.
+The effect of this conflict among white men on the bloodthirsty
+red-skins one may guess. The <i>Bois-Brûlés</i> were clamouring for Cuthbert
+Grant's permission to wipe the English&mdash;meaning the Hudson's Bay
+men&mdash;off the earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux under Chief
+Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let them defend the Hudson's
+Bay&mdash;meaning kill the Nor' Westers.</p>
+
+<p>The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of Fort Gibraltar. That
+post had sent all supplies to North-West forts. If Fort Douglas of the
+Hudson's Bay Company, past which North-West canoes must paddle to turn
+westward to the plains, should intercept the incoming brigade of Nor'
+Westers' supplies, what would become of the two thousand North-West
+traders and <i>voyageurs</i> and <i>engagés</i> inland? Whether the Hudson's Bay
+had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers were determined to prevent
+the possibility.</p>
+
+<p>Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms, scouts went
+scouring across the plains to rally the <i>Bois-Brûlés</i> from Portage la
+Prairie and Souris and Qu'Ap<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>pelle.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> Led by Cuthbert Grant, they
+skirted north of the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies
+above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers to mistake this
+armed cavalcade, red with paint and chanting war-songs, for hostiles.</p>
+
+<p>Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the alarm. Ordering a
+field-piece to follow, Governor Semple marched out with a little army of
+twenty-eight Hudson's Bay men. The Nor' Westers thought that he meant to
+obstruct their way till his other forces had captured their coming
+canoes. The Hudson's Bay thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the
+Selkirk settlers.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two parties met at the edge
+of a swamp beside a cluster of trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor'
+Westers say that Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and
+tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay say that the
+governor had no sooner got within range than the half-breed scout leaped
+down and fired from the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.</p>
+
+<p>It is well known how the first blood of battle has the same effect on
+all men of whatever race. The human is eclipsed by that brute savagery
+which comes down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In a trice
+twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead. While Grant had turned to
+obtain carriers to bear the wounded governor off the field, poor Semple
+was bru<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>tally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who ran from body
+to body, perpetrating the crimes of ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to
+expostulate. The wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft
+velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds crooning the sad
+monotone of a limitless sea, closed over a scene of savages drunk with
+slaughter, of men gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors
+thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the slain.</p>
+
+<p>Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them down-stream to Lake
+Winnipeg, where dwelt the friendly Chief Peguis. On the river they met
+the indomitable Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He
+brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved by the expelled
+governor's account of disorders, Lord Selkirk was hastening north, armed
+with the authority of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in
+full regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted on his barges
+and stores of munition that ill agreed with the professions of a
+peaceful justice.</p>
+
+<p>The time has gone past for quibbling as to the earl's motives in pushing
+north armed like a lord of war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with
+his army of Des Meurons<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> at the Sault. In August Lord Selkirk
+appeared before Port William with uniformed soldiers in eleven boats.
+The justice of the peace set his soldiers digging trenches opposite the
+Nor' Westers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had enough of
+blood. They capitulated without one blow. Selkirk took full possession.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the rivers, he sent Captain
+d'Orsennens overland westward to Red River, where Fort Douglas was
+captured back one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the fort
+walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had been just as ruthless on
+the Saskatchewan. Nor' Westers were captured as they disembarked to pass
+Grand Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where Franklin the
+explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreated. One of them was the same John
+George MacTavish who had helped to capture Astoria; another, Frobisher,
+a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse. The Deschamps
+murderers of Seven Oaks fled south, where their crimes brought terrible
+vengeance from American traders.</p>
+
+<p>Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay Company were in a
+curious quandary. Suits enough were pressing in the courts to ruin both
+companies; and for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hudson
+Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth told and the crimes
+probed. There was only one way out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the
+companies amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In April,
+1822, a new fort was built half-way between the sites of Gibraltar and
+Fort Douglas, and given the new name of Fort Garry by Sir George
+Simpson, the governor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thousand
+men thrown out of employment by the union at once crossed the line and
+enlisted with American traders.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength that comes from
+victorious conflict&mdash;so strong, indeed, that it not only held the
+Canadian field, but in spite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> of the American law<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> forbidding British
+traders in the United States, reached as far south as Utah and the
+Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with lusty rivals.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS</h3>
+
+
+<p>That Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when he pursued the Astorians up
+the Missouri continued to be dogged by misfortune on the west side of
+the mountains. Game was scarce and his half-starving followers were
+scattered, some to the British posts in the north, some to the Spaniards
+in the south, and some to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry
+forced his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Aricara country.
+The British war broke out and the Missouri Company were compelled to
+abandon the dangerous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase
+arms from the British traders, raid the Americans, and scurry back to
+Canada.</p>
+
+<p>When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred Missouri men were again
+in the mountains; but they suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's
+party were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who succeeded to
+Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed over to the Columbia, had all
+his supplies stolen, reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville,
+almost destitute. The British rivals received him with that hospitality
+for which they were renowned when trade was not involved, and gave him
+escort up the Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> Red
+River, thence overland to the Mandan country and St. Louis.</p>
+
+<p>These two disasters marked the wane of the Missouri Company.</p>
+
+<p>But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on land than he must to
+sea again, the indomitable Andrew Henry linked his fortunes with General
+Ashley of St. Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell, Bridger,
+Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sublettes&mdash;men who made the Rocky
+Mountain trade famous&mdash;Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to the
+mountains the first year and two hundred the next. In that time not less
+than twenty-five lives were lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts
+were obtained and the expeditions were a loss.</p>
+
+<p>But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's Bay trappers loaded with
+beaver pelts in the Columbia basin, west of the Rockies. They had become
+separated from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian. Details of
+this bargain will never be known; but when Smith came east he had the
+Hudson's Bay furs. This was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men
+and the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.</p>
+
+<p>Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met their supplies
+annually at a <i>rendezvous</i> in the mountains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad
+valley below the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or
+Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been
+massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin; but that did not
+deter General Ashley himself from going up the Platte, across the divide
+to Salt Lake. Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper, with an
+enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hud<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>son's Bay man left Salt
+Lake, he had no furs; and when General Ashley came away, his packers
+were laden with a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This was
+the second brush between Rocky Mountain and Hudson's Bay, and again the
+mountaineers scored.</p>
+
+<p>The third encounter was more to the credit of both companies. After
+three years' wanderings, Smith found himself stranded and destitute at
+the British post of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,
+his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay sent a punitive
+force to recover his property, gave him a $20,000 draft for the full
+value of the recovered furs, and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth
+Rocky Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each other's rights
+in the valley of the Columbia, but southward the old code prevailed.
+Fitzpatrick, a Rocky Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogden
+at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once plied the argument of
+whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the
+mountains to St. Louis.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution
+seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.</p>
+
+<p>Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down
+before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of
+their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of
+Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the
+Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
+rank outrage&mdash;particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West
+partners were seized, manacled, and sent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> to a wilderness&mdash;and now the
+Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain
+trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival
+that could outcheat their cheatery.</p>
+
+<p>In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of
+America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who
+have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to
+the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for
+their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away
+from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> There were half-wild
+Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off
+civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with
+the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were
+lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong
+of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
+Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long
+beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from
+ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
+adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his
+luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet
+weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
+themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,
+tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every
+trail of the wilds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and should be good pilots to the best
+hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed,
+and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of
+the hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the
+valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each
+party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky
+Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even
+now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's
+Bay hunters.</p>
+
+<p>The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance
+gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of
+comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky
+Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.</p>
+
+<p>No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never
+lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers
+sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with
+Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a
+kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the
+clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The
+powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the
+Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches,
+and shot from cover.</p>
+
+<p>All the trappers at the <i>rendezvous</i> spurred to the fight, priming guns,
+casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle
+lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew,
+twelve men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded;
+and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe
+exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of
+Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky
+fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds
+than the strangers who had shadowed them at the <i>rendezvous</i> came up.
+Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and
+unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by
+tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing
+packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on
+persistently for three months.</p>
+
+<p>Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a
+dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers
+the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become
+serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the
+dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
+leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into
+the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this
+escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs
+and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated
+by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of
+the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.</p>
+
+<p>The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to
+through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks
+and Farn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>ham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in
+Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to
+enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company
+all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing
+the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in
+1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the
+American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown
+out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the
+Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
+had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American
+to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.</p>
+
+<p>This organization<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> the American Fur Company bought out, placing
+MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and
+became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his
+ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,
+"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,
+for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.</p>
+
+<p>Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the
+artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion
+Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur
+company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union
+in MacKenzie's reign.</p>
+
+<p>Once a free trapper came floating down the Mis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>souri with his canoe full
+of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be
+obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a
+French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately
+vain. Strutting about the court-yard, feeling himself a very prince of
+importance, he saw MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the
+other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than it was wise. The
+<i>dénouement</i> was a vision of the flaxen-haired Siegfried sprinting at
+the top of his speed through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie
+flourishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here. The
+outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on sight, and haunted the
+fort gates with a loaded rifle till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a
+mulatto servant to "wing" the fellow with a shot in the shoulder, when
+he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and sent away.</p>
+
+<p>At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built an opposition fort
+just below Union and lay in wait for the coming of the Blackfeet to
+trade with the American Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his
+bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out sallied from Fort
+Union a band in full regalia, with drum and trumpet and piccolo and
+fife&mdash;wonders that would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.
+Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages, and what was not
+supposed to be in the Indian country&mdash;liquor. When these methods failed
+to outbuy rivals, MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for a
+beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain trappers were forced to
+capitulate, and their post passed over to the American Fur Company.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting <i>finale</i> to the
+turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The Deschamps family, who
+had perpetrated the worst butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the
+fight between Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as interpreters
+for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boastful of their murderous record in
+Canada, the father, mother, and eight grown children were usually so
+violent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English gentleman, used to
+quiet their outrage and prevent trouble by dropping laudanum in their
+cups. Once they slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest
+their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came to life defiant
+as ever. At Union was a very handsome young half-breed fellow by the
+name of Gardepie, whose life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take
+from sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free trappers,
+Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one morning at breakfast with all
+the gruesome mutilation of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a
+younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and nerved to the deed with
+alcohol, the Deschamps undertook to avenge their father's death by
+killing all the whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the
+alarm was carried to Fort Union.</p>
+
+<p>Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union. Many trappers had been
+assassinated by a Deschamps. Indians had been flogged by them for no
+other purpose than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort
+Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the Deschamps were
+on the war-path.</p>
+
+<p>The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands and took an oath to
+exterminate the murderous clan.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's
+control. Seizing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the prairie
+to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain trappers, where the
+murderers were intrenched. All valuables were removed from the fort.
+Time was given for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns were
+turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of crime, the mother,
+rushed out, holding forward the Indian pipe of peace and begging for
+mercy.</p>
+
+<p>She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and fell shot through the
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter and learn if the
+Deschamps were all dead? Treachery was feared. The assailants set fire
+to the fort. In the light of the flames one man was espied crouching in
+the bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot the last of the
+Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion sent him leaping five feet into
+the air to fall back dead, and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the
+burning tower.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>
+
+<p>Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the
+fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found François Deschamps
+backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all
+ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and
+his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without
+shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally
+wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict
+among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were
+rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the
+militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured
+furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander
+through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a
+year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers
+who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper
+Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast
+hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the
+fences of settlers.</p>
+
+<p>In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict&mdash;once in the
+seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis
+against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and
+again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the
+Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the
+Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the
+conflict waged round their forts.</p>
+
+<p>In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort
+Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in
+savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In
+the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort
+Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.
+MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
+breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could
+not follow. The children of the fam<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>ily had been in the habit of bribing
+old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the
+friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in
+all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of
+the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young
+children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of
+defence till all were safely back among the whites.</p>
+
+<p>This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway
+of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the
+Saskatchewan.</p>
+
+<p>Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks
+only at the black spot.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the
+trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a
+thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
+have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FRENCH TRAPPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the
+town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow&mdash;such was the life of the
+most picturesque figure in America's history.</p>
+
+<p>Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of
+Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was
+the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you
+may point, the answer is the same&mdash;the French trapper.</p>
+
+<p>Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to
+freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the
+young French <i>noblesse</i> the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom
+from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living
+all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the
+farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.
+Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with
+provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to
+$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade
+enough for two years.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of that time the sponsors looked for re<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>turns in furs to the
+value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original
+investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
+trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when
+twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see
+a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
+share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only
+beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from
+Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.</p>
+
+<p>Two partners<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from
+the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the
+Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.
+The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship
+was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
+by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even
+death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of
+the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in
+the wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off punishment, or till
+he had lost taste for civilized life and remained in the wilderness,
+<i>coureur des bois</i>, <i>voyageur</i>, or leader of a band of half-wild
+retainers whom he ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious
+connecting link between the savagery of the New World and the <i>noblesse</i>
+of the Old.</p>
+
+<p>Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>sissippi; Le Moyne
+d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana to Hudson Bay; La Mothe Cadillac in
+Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Louisiana; La Vérendrye exploring from
+Lake Superior to the Rockies; Radisson on Hudson Bay&mdash;all won their fame
+as explorers and discoverers in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred
+years before any English mind knew of the Missouri, French <i>voyageurs</i>
+had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the regions now called
+Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin were known to New Englanders, the
+French were trapping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two
+centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went to New Mexico to
+spy on Spanish trade.</p>
+
+<p>East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom the French trapper
+shunned&mdash;the English colonists and the Iroquois. North of the St.
+Lawrence was a power that he shunned still more&mdash;the French governor,
+who had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded and
+trapped without license. But between St. Louis and MacKenzie River was a
+great unclaimed wilderness, whence came the best furs.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the French trapper.</p>
+
+<p>There were four ways by which he entered his hunting-ground: (1) Sailing
+from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, he ascended the river in
+pirogue or dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with means
+to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit overland to the Illinois,
+or Ohio, which he rafted down to the Mississippi, and then taking to
+canoe turned north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always a grand
+<i>rendezvous</i> for the French and Indian hunters, to Green Bay on Lake
+Michigan, thence up-stream to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> Fox River, overland to the Wisconsin, and
+down-stream to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the Soo" to
+Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-ground. Whichever way he went
+his course was mainly up-stream and north: hence the name <i>Pays d'en
+Haut</i> vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay between the
+Missouri and the MacKenzie River.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as
+the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the
+Missouri to St. Louis, or from the <i>Pays d'en Haut</i> to Montreal, few
+escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves
+his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the
+fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to
+exist to the opening of the next hunting season.</p>
+
+<p>It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the
+preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,
+whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the
+green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down
+each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great
+things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the
+proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the
+inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the
+bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw&mdash;for the Pierre
+adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an
+Indian wife&mdash;design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay
+moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu
+of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned
+head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made
+of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or
+musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.</p>
+
+<p>None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to
+the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of
+the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.
+He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that
+he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,
+while he attends to the trapping that is <i>gain</i> rather than <i>game</i>. For
+clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,
+like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly
+deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
+her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the
+marriage means that he has cast off the last vestige of civilization and
+henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.</p>
+
+<p>After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of
+Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,
+he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
+English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,
+he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed
+out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to
+Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of pel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>tries on his rafts and
+canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,
+two, and three hundred dollars a year.</p>
+
+<p>It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,
+with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become <i>coureur des
+bois</i> and <i>voyageur</i>, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the
+Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four
+companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the
+Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
+Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and
+the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the
+American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers
+and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English
+Hudson's Bay Company.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the
+French trapper still saw life through the glamour of <i>la gloire</i> and
+<i>noblesse</i>, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
+starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at
+hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his <i>chansons</i> brought
+over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
+at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a
+prayer to Sainte Anne, the <i>voyageurs'</i> saint, just before his canoe
+took the plunge.</p>
+
+<p>Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
+Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of
+figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded
+banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of
+wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,
+clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between
+like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the
+<i>voyageurs</i> hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze
+like a seagull.</p>
+
+<p>Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and
+racing leaps each <i>voyageur</i> knows what to expect. No man asks
+questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod
+pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the
+green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It
+vaults&mdash;springs&mdash;bounds, with a shiver of live waters under the keel and
+a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as
+wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push
+of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the
+danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another
+lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar
+becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The
+lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;
+and the <i>voyageurs</i> are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.
+Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to <i>sauter
+les rapides</i>, as the <i>voyageurs</i> say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps,
+some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> crew, got
+his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.
+One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/illus-057.jpg" width="600" height="408" alt="Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids
+of Slave River without unloading." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids
+of Slave River without unloading.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a <i>portage</i>. Coming back this
+way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.
+If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high
+above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the
+water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is
+"tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all
+dangerous, each <i>voyageur</i> lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps
+across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long <i>portage</i> is
+measured by the number of pipes the <i>voyageur</i> smokes, each lighting up
+meaning a brief rest; and a <i>portage</i> of many "pipes" will be taken at a
+running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine
+miles is the length of one famous <i>portage</i> opposite the Chaudière Falls
+on the Ottawa.</p>
+
+<p>In winter the <i>voyageur</i> becomes <i>coureur des bois</i> to his new masters.
+Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests
+wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or
+rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow
+steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick;
+sometimes to the <i>marche donc! marche donc!</i> of the driver, with crisp
+tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled
+to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the
+northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a
+belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> warmth and wrapping
+his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.</p>
+
+<p>These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.</p>
+
+<p>At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining&mdash;the
+Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two
+important centres of trade in furs which are not imported&mdash;St. Paul and
+St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the
+Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for
+the great companies a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and
+Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes
+seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class
+who used to stalk through the baronial halls<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> of Montreal's governor
+like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber
+ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a
+by-word.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something
+of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer
+going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound
+from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the
+captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as
+usual!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those <i>chansons populaires</i>, which
+have been sung by every generation of <i>voyageurs</i> since Frenchmen came
+to America, <i>A La Claire Fontaine</i>, a song which the French trappers'
+ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle
+lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then&mdash;was it
+possible?&mdash;these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were
+singing&mdash;what? A song of the <i>Grand Monarque</i> which has led armies to
+battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern
+wilds&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was
+from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival
+traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself
+more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in
+doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known
+outside the range of human criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered
+fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carcass. He
+recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to
+bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The
+man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of
+approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of
+man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across
+the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He
+may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.
+Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager;
+so the man sets a circle of traps round the carcass.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer
+remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been
+there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up,
+sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and
+dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had
+been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind
+and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full
+stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length
+away.</p>
+
+<p>The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on <i>le sacré carcajou</i>.
+Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes
+grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved
+himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and
+spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer
+but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again
+he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the
+deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.</p>
+
+<p>Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or
+wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is
+nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine
+will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> been scented.
+Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on
+doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which
+characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much
+fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the
+badger's or the fox's.</p>
+
+<p>Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker
+and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to
+save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
+wounded, weaklings, and laggards&mdash;the wolverine has the nose of a fox,
+with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for
+tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
+intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one
+trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,
+he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,
+but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout
+of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was
+more than he could stand.</p>
+
+<p>In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one
+design&mdash;destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock
+yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the
+musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and
+buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to
+the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached
+provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees
+and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the
+wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,
+like a shark<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there
+will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the
+lodge when the man is at the traps.</p>
+
+<p>But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be
+snared&mdash;gluttony and curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds that the wolverine has
+been making as regular rounds of the traps as he has himself. It is then
+a question whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the
+hunting-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on James Bay, of
+an Indian hunter and his wife who were literally brought to the verge of
+starvation by a wolverine that nightly destroyed their traps. The
+contest ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred miles from
+the haunts of that "bad devil&mdash;oh&mdash;he&mdash;bad devil&mdash;carcajou!" Remembering
+the curiosity and gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest
+steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon or fish, and
+places it where the wolverine tracks run. Around this he sets a circle
+of his traps, tying them securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In
+all likelihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which will cover
+traces of the man-smell.</p>
+
+<p>Night passes. In the morning the man comes to his traps. The meat has
+been taken. All else is as before. Not a track marks the snow; but in
+midwinter meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels for the
+hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the stakes has been pulled up
+and carried off. That is a sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is
+as he thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolverine; but the
+cunning beast had pulled with all his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> strength, snapped the attached
+sapling, and escaped. A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned
+limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth and hobbles as
+hard as three legs will carry him to the hiding of a bush, or better
+still, to the frozen surface of a river, hidden by high banks, with
+glare ice which will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds
+only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper shape, with the
+spring opened to release the imprisoned leg.</p>
+
+<p>The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the river to study out
+the problem of unclinching the spring.</p>
+
+<p>One more device remains to the man. It is a gun trick. The loaded weapon
+is hidden full-cock under leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel
+is the bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger. The first
+pull will blow the thief's head off.</p>
+
+<p>The trap experience would have frightened any other animals a week's run
+from man's tracks; but the wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows
+he will find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have the cord gnawed
+through and the bait stolen. A wolverine is not to be easily tricked;
+but its gluttony and curiosity bring it within man's reach.</p>
+
+<p>The man watches until he knows the part of the woods where the wolverine
+nightly gallops. He then procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough
+to balance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off. The gun is
+suspended from some dense evergreen, which will hide the weapon. The
+bait hangs from the trigger above the wolverine's reach.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then a curious game begins.</p>
+
+<p>One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks round and round the
+tree as if determined to ferret out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning the tracks have come to a stand below the meat. If the
+wolverine could only get up to the bait, one whiff would tell him
+whether the man-smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his
+mark is deep printed in the snow.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.</p>
+
+<p>The rascal may become so bold in his predatory visits that the man may
+be tempted to chance a shot without waiting.</p>
+
+<p>But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of the cord. There comes a
+night when the wolverine's curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A
+quick clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke blows the
+robber's head into space.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.</p>
+
+<p>He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a solitary man ever had;
+but for the consolation of those whose sympathies are keener for the
+animal than the man, it may be said that in the majority of such
+contests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived
+lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a
+snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his
+quest and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was the great
+staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended.</p>
+
+<p>Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for wartime, sinew for bows,
+bone for the shaping of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and
+saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most
+important of all, food that could be kept in any climate for any length
+of time and combined the lightest weight with the greatest
+nourishment&mdash;all these were supplied by the buffalo.</p>
+
+<p>From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and from the Alleghanies to
+the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter what wheat is to the farmer.
+Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of a
+favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass the buffalo could thrive
+in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open
+ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the
+herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the animal
+world, the buffalo had strength to defy all enemies. Of all the
+creatures that prey, only the full-grown grisly was a match against the
+buffalo; and according to old hunting legends, even the grisly held back
+from attacking a beast in the prime of its power and sneaked in the wake
+of the roving herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance
+of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling some
+poor old king worsted in battle and deposed from the leadership of the
+herd, or snapping up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of
+a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that
+made for the persistence of the species. When attacked by a beast of
+prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and
+trample life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excelling all
+foes, wonderful sagacity against attack&mdash;these were factors that partly
+explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roaming this continent.</p>
+
+<p>Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not
+be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in
+the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri,
+fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between
+the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west
+and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
+Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where
+the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places&mdash;trails
+trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth
+of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> At fording-places on
+the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri,
+Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo
+have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot,
+virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only
+running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes
+in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the
+calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring
+hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and
+their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who
+had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death
+ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another
+occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm
+the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a
+howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer
+forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a
+wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the
+fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the
+salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring,
+dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster
+cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths
+as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and
+ploughed as if for ramparts.</p>
+
+<p>The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has
+become almost commonplace; but it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> is the sheerest nonsense. From
+Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the
+Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd
+exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen.</p>
+
+<p>What are the facts regarding the buffalo?</p>
+
+<p>In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its
+power, there were sent from St. Louis alone in a single year one hundred
+thousand robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. The hunter
+usually kept an ample supply for his own needs; so that for every robe
+bought by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains.
+St. Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quantities of robes were
+being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million
+would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
+and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for
+three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on
+the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night
+to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers
+related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the
+Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
+Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove
+of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the
+Santa Fé trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of
+thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward
+the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West
+Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> herd
+stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the
+ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo
+drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to
+seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And
+the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.</p>
+
+<p>To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United
+States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord
+Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
+railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the
+buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in
+the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
+pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could
+have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time
+immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds
+only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;
+and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter
+who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
+Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the
+valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless
+quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
+savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man&mdash;who is the true
+type of the buffalo-runner&mdash;entered the lists on a fair field with the
+odds a hundred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> to one against himself, and the only advantages over
+brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.</p>
+
+<p>Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was
+worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the
+leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild
+stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on
+the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd
+overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was
+fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering
+over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw,
+and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench.</p>
+
+<p>In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth.
+Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror
+as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first
+intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of
+maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their
+existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a
+rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range
+of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for
+the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the
+point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn&mdash;the soft flank where a
+quick rip meant torture and death.</p>
+
+<p>Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to
+the rear! Then one of the boldest braces himself, circling and guarding
+and wheeling and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> of the
+older rival. That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows
+a bellowing like the rumbling of distant thunder, each keeping his eye
+on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's moves,
+like fencers with foils. When one charges, the other wheels to meet the
+charge straight in front; and with a crash the horns are locked. It is
+then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against
+dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury from sheer
+amazement at the younger's presumption. His guarded charges become blind
+rushes, and he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of piercing
+horns. As soon as the rumbling and pawing began, Colonel Bedson used to
+send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the
+contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does
+not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight no more; and if
+he is not killed, is likely to be mangled, a deposed king, whipped and
+broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he
+drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled.</p>
+
+<p>Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow
+of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is
+off. There is a stampede&mdash;myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the
+ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking
+dust of the far horizon&mdash;nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too
+weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,
+leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.</p>
+
+<p>After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact
+as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded
+the calves from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a
+fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those
+vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to
+the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through
+the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill,
+always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down,
+scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a
+drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would
+not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But
+he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He
+invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last
+stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.</p>
+
+<p>But the end is inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear;
+and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink
+powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he
+still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the
+rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till
+death comes to the victim.</p>
+
+<p>Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd
+half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo
+leader?</p>
+
+<p>Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains
+region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick
+death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's
+end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were
+always parted before either was disabled;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> but it was always at the
+sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.</p>
+
+<p>In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On
+Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several
+hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than
+elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in
+shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this
+appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city
+parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,
+with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful
+enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the
+hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured
+two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to
+the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of
+idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
+when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores
+had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.</p>
+
+<p>In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June
+before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;
+fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
+were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate
+perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds
+many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer&mdash;by still-hunting; for
+though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except
+sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long
+as he did not see its cause.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper
+might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a
+moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.
+Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he
+could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too
+slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on
+snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A
+wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly;
+and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which
+the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where
+hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a
+pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.
+But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound
+were a sort of <i>cheval-de-frise</i> or corral converging at the inner end,
+it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming
+of the spring brigades.</p>
+
+<p>When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of
+the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field&mdash;not the
+indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest
+buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> greatest of
+these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where
+hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.
+Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort
+Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which
+barred out Canadian traders.</p>
+
+<p>At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used
+to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of
+the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field
+on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed
+away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned
+muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led
+north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on
+their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them
+westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the
+captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as
+prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had
+closed near enough for the wild rush.</p>
+
+<p>At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to
+saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led
+through the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight
+usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces
+upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where
+the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with
+the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+vague, whitish forms&mdash;the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless
+as death.</p>
+
+<p>The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd
+scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the
+grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
+land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the
+roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the
+spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only
+emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh
+feeding-ground.</p>
+
+<p>Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered
+the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with
+leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;
+in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,
+marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop
+that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
+sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen
+water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and
+fringed dewlaps dripping&mdash;on and on and on&mdash;till the tidal wave of life
+had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there
+in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured
+buffalo, freaks in the animal world.</p>
+
+<p>The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a
+sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life
+one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the
+thermometer at forty below&mdash;a combination that is suffi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>cient to set the
+teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo
+spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the
+worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,
+you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and
+fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon
+in August.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to ride for the herd.
+There was the trail to the watering-place. There were the salt-licks and
+the wallows and the crushed grass where two young fellows had been
+smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength. There were the bones
+of the poor old deposed king, picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps,
+the lonely outcast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened, a
+picture of dumb woe! To such the hunter's shot was a mercy stroke. Or,
+most interesting of all signs and surest proof that the herd was near&mdash;a
+little bundle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat under
+hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound, precisely the colour of
+its own hide.</p>
+
+<p>Poke it! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens! It is a buffalo calf
+left cached by the mother, who has gone to the watering-place or is
+pasturing with the drove. Lift it up! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let
+it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door-mat. The mother has
+told it how to escape the coyotes and wolverines; and the little rascal
+is "playing dead." But if you fondle it and warm it&mdash;the Indians say,
+breathe into its face&mdash;it forgets all about the mother's warning and
+follows like a pup.</p>
+
+<p>At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> parted from the
+cavalcade and all impedimenta remained behind. The best-equipped man was
+the man with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest buffalo
+from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that galloped swift as wind
+in pursuit, that jerked to a stop directly opposite the brute's
+shoulders and leaped from the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No
+sound came from the hunters till all were within close range. Then the
+captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved his hand, or fired a
+shot, and the hunters charged.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/illus-078.jpg" width="600" height="398" alt="The buffalo-hunt.
+" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The buffalo-hunt.<br />
+
+After a contemporary print.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered with the fusillade of
+artillery volleys. Bullets fell to earth with the dull ping of an aim
+glanced aside by the adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of
+the buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of "Ah&mdash;oh, ah&mdash;oh!" Here
+and there French voices screamed "Voilà! Les b[oe]ufs! Les b[oe]ufs!
+Sacré! Tonnerre! Tir&mdash;tir&mdash;tir&mdash;donc! By Gar!" And Missouri traders
+called out plain and less picturesque but more forcible English.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the herd; but the second
+volley with the smell of powder and smoke and men started the stampede.
+Then followed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals of any other
+kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through
+sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to
+carry riders in a boundless land!</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Riders were unseated and went down in the <i>mêlée</i>; horses caught on the
+horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown
+high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with
+dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; un<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>wary
+hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo
+turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued
+and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.</p>
+
+<p>A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a
+Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the
+time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of
+fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the
+thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same
+gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian
+hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give
+him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly
+unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and
+buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and
+fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast
+covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding&mdash;closer and
+closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.</p>
+
+<p>"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the
+officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they
+went over the bluff."</p>
+
+<p>The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals&mdash;a
+persistent vindictiveness.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.</p>
+
+<p>After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was
+first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every
+buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
+hunters have been accused of waste, because they used<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> only the skin,
+tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the
+Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
+thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo
+sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.</p>
+
+<p>The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the
+buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a
+death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
+whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along
+the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting
+stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the
+wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a
+great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his
+rifle.</p>
+
+<p>The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled
+pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they
+stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The
+colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened
+next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run
+till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.</p>
+
+<p>And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a
+stone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MOUNTAINEERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax
+of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.</p>
+
+<p>The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from
+both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,
+and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of
+another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the
+first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific
+in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of
+the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a
+rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the
+American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the
+Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew
+Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor
+sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,
+and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the
+mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria
+captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of
+the world, Lisa driven down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew
+Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free
+trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.</p>
+
+<p>Their captain came.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British
+fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay
+and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's
+American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the
+Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond
+the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his
+force came a tremendous accession&mdash;all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers
+thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the
+Hudson's Bay.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have
+been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.
+Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been
+jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had
+refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard
+chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of
+nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
+traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley
+and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger&mdash;subsequently
+known as the Rocky Mountain traders&mdash;swept up the Missouri with brigades
+of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning
+the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending
+line of forts had reached as far west as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> Yellowstone. A clash was
+bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field
+which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.</p>
+
+<p>It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It
+was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for
+supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
+<i>rendezvous</i>, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole
+farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with
+plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians
+met at the annual camp.</p>
+
+<p>Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be
+carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for
+canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain cañons with
+sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to
+interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide
+obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a
+blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.
+Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,
+noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting
+especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is
+black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and
+where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one
+for the trapper to shun.</p>
+
+<p>One, two, three seasons have often slipped away be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>fore the mountaineers
+found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the
+lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty
+years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before
+the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the
+Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first
+two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile
+Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of
+the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
+others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost
+to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would
+not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of
+trapping.</p>
+
+<p>Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"
+or <i>Pays d'en Haut</i> as the French called it. The French trappers, for
+the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to
+the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the
+smug, indolent, laughing, chattering <i>voyageur</i>. The great silences of a
+life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man
+had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and
+elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.</p>
+
+<p>In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,
+carrying supplies enough for the season in a canoe, and drifting
+down-stream with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the
+mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies
+had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which
+Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to
+accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to
+the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack
+rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such
+party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
+might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen
+to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.</p>
+
+<p>That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last
+century.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and
+Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like
+foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one
+mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass
+much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all
+the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the
+fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,
+and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and
+the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till
+the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music&mdash;the voice of many
+waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool
+heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began
+retracing their way from valley to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> valley, gathering the furs cached
+during the winter hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Then the cavalcade set out for the <i>rendezvous</i>: grizzled men in
+tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,
+men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
+always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;
+long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a
+zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs
+barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
+between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened
+bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half
+a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
+slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for
+mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to
+right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the
+collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after
+the bolters with her ears laid flat.</p>
+
+<p>Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling
+torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that
+stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky
+green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in
+summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced
+masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of
+that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that
+little indurated line running up the side of the cliff&mdash;just a
+displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that
+winds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and
+mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?</p>
+
+<p>"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says
+the mountaineer.</p>
+
+<p>Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been
+enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that
+track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has
+the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above
+tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long
+grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where
+a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is
+a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
+mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.</p>
+
+<p>Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at
+such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper
+saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when
+she scented human presence she went jump&mdash;jump&mdash;jump&mdash;up and up and up
+the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
+kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as
+pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it
+up, out of very sympathy went away.</p>
+
+<p>Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but
+as fast as he sighted his rifle&mdash;"drew the bead"&mdash;the thing jumped from
+side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above dan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>ger and
+away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men
+hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."</p>
+
+<p>Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like
+stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are
+tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every
+climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at
+every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,
+or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.</p>
+
+<p>Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching
+themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the
+mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as
+wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden
+chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading
+ceaseless prolonged h&mdash;u&mdash;s&mdash;h&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous
+enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often
+followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
+These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like
+banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain
+by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line
+rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the
+inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness&mdash;seven thousand
+feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was
+nearer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail
+from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen
+to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to
+regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.
+But down&mdash;down&mdash;down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing
+as it struck against the precipice wall&mdash;down&mdash;down&mdash;down till it was no
+larger than a spool&mdash;then out of sight&mdash;and silence! The mountaineer
+looked back over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the
+trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his
+words.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?"</p>
+
+<p>"Get off&mdash;knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is&mdash;throw
+bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the
+sound."</p>
+
+<p>"And when no sound comes back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!
+People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the
+sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you
+chills!"</p>
+
+<p>So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon
+riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the
+lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
+mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on
+men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.</p>
+
+<p>If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> mountain night, the
+trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by
+the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
+laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar
+prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the
+hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle
+lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.</p>
+
+<p>Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley
+the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of
+bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
+tinkling.</p>
+
+<p>The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They
+seldom reached their <i>rendezvous</i> before July or August. Three months
+travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a
+day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an
+hour&mdash;a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
+latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would
+make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.</p>
+
+<p>Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced
+together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious
+little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream
+often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the
+unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding
+mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a
+trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> afloat, and
+overlaying with moss to save the horses' feet.</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of
+enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable
+<i>cheval-de-frise</i>. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush
+higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg
+where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses
+could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to
+force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,
+there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.</p>
+
+<p>And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the
+bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men
+leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company
+was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,
+and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders
+was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant
+of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for
+the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that
+created a new type of trapper&mdash;the most purely American type, because
+produced by purely American conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Green River was the <i>rendezvous</i> for the mountaineers in 1831; and to
+Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the
+Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came
+the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable
+valley of the mountains native<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> tribes to barter furs, sell horses for
+transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white
+hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or
+Oriental fair.</p>
+
+<p>French-Canadian <i>voyageurs</i> who had come up to raft the season's cargo
+down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the
+Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia
+to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America
+from Labrador to Mexico.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> Merchants from St. Louis, like General
+Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from
+Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous
+gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or
+Baron Stuart&mdash;all with retinues of followers like mediæval lords&mdash;found
+themselves hobnobbing at the <i>rendezvous</i> with mighty Indian sachems,
+Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
+moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.</p>
+
+<p>Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and
+daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress
+occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
+earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.</p>
+
+<p>The partners&mdash;as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction
+to the <i>bourgeois</i> of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the
+partisans of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> American Fur Company&mdash;held confabs over crumpled maps,
+planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh
+information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all
+sections of the mountains for the different brigades.</p>
+
+<p>This year a new set of faces appeared at the <i>rendezvous</i>, from thirty
+to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On
+the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the
+Up-Country&mdash;A. F. C.&mdash;American Fur Company. Leading these men were
+Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the
+Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
+Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew
+the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of
+life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the
+Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as
+successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.</p>
+
+<p>Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips
+had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
+hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in
+friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than
+rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger
+who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept
+over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> who had
+made the Salt Lake region<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> his stamping-ground, might smile at the
+newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when
+hunters left the <i>rendezvous</i> for the hills.</p>
+
+<p>When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the
+region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on
+the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
+beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the
+valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder
+River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to
+trap all through the valley.</p>
+
+<p>But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily
+foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in
+the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
+Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.
+beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be
+misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the
+hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the
+mountaineers to their secret retreats.</p>
+
+<p>Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.</p>
+
+<p>Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,
+Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the
+Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
+winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with
+their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River
+Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping
+from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the
+<i>rendezvous</i> would lead past the caches,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> Fitzpatrick thought to baffle
+the spies by trapping from west to east.</p>
+
+<p>Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing
+southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom
+they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward
+on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in
+time for the summer <i>rendezvous</i> at Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<p>Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at
+Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been
+notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;
+possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.</p>
+
+<p>Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers
+Vanderburgh and Drips were at the <i>rendezvous</i>. Neither of the rivals
+could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the
+mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer
+dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten
+the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,
+explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under
+him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the <i>rendezvous</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain passes like cats at
+a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he
+knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to
+the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.
+The Indians still guarded the passes. They must have come upon him at a
+night<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the
+defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a
+single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged
+declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got
+across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of
+the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless&mdash;for his hat had
+been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the
+rocks&mdash;and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also
+bound for the <i>rendezvous</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<p>The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's
+Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry
+between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain
+men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and
+not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers
+for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great
+companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter
+confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur
+Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly
+Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got
+away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American
+Company.</p>
+
+<p>What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected
+the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what
+was done.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked
+body of horsemen northward from Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<p>If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their
+hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the
+Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up
+somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> had been so often
+"relieved" of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west,
+their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went
+north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper
+swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the
+Three Forks of the Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region; and Blackfeet hated
+Vanderburgh with deadly venom because he had once defeated them and
+slain a great warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the
+fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.</p>
+
+<p>But if the Rocky Mountain men could go unscathed among the Blackfeet,
+why, so could the American Fur Company!</p>
+
+<p>And Vanderburgh and Drips went!</p>
+
+<p>Rival traders might not commit murder. That led to the fearful ruin of
+the lawsuits that overtook Nor'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only
+fifteen years before.</p>
+
+<p>But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet hated Henry Vanderburgh!</p>
+
+<p>Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long file of pack-horses had
+passed, fresh-chopped logs to make a way through blockades of fallen
+pine, the green moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at
+cloudline broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed that way,
+grazed bark where the pack-saddle had brushed a tree-trunk, muddy
+hoof-marks where the young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,
+scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged boot had
+stepped&mdash;all these told which way Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led their
+brigade.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail! Here the ashes of a
+camp-fire! There a pile of rock placed a deal too carefully for nature's
+work&mdash;the cached furs of the fleeing rivals! Besides, what with cañon
+and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by which a cavalcade can pass
+through mountains that the simplest novice could have trailed
+Fitzpatrick and Bridger.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless between the middle of August when Vanderburgh and Drips set
+out on the chase and the middle of September when they ran down the
+fugitives the American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at their own
+cleverness.</p>
+
+<p>They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in the valley of the
+Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds with game enough for two lines of
+traps, which Vanderburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight by
+forced marches this time! The mountaineers sat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> still for almost a week.
+Then they casually moved down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the mountaineers leaving a
+trifle too soon? Should the Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh
+remained, moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his traps
+along the Madison. Drips followed the mountaineers.</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground probably suggested to
+Drips that even an animal will lead off on a false scent to draw the
+enemy away from the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the
+Jefferson.</p>
+
+<p>Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once turned back too, up the
+farthest valley, the Gallatin, then on the way to the first
+hunting-ground westward over a divide to the Madison, where&mdash;ill
+luck!&mdash;they again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!</p>
+
+<p>How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may guess!</p>
+
+<p>Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers!</p>
+
+<p>Should Vanderburgh stay or follow? Certainly the enemy had been bound
+back for the good hunting-grounds when they had turned to retrace their
+way up the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Vanderburgh
+would forestall the move. He crossed over to the valley where he had
+first found them.</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunting-grounds, a dead
+buffalo, from which the hunters had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh! If
+Vanderburgh laughed, his laugh was short; for there were signs that the
+buffalo had been slain by an Indian.</p>
+
+<p>The trappers refused to hunt where there were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> Blackfeet about.
+Vanderburgh refused to believe there was any danger of Blackfeet.
+Calling for volunteers, he rode forward with six men.</p>
+
+<p>First they found a fire. The marauders must be very near. Then a dead
+buffalo was seen, then fresh tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians.
+But buffalo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There could not be
+many Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vanderburgh pushed on, entered
+a heavily wooded gulch, paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent,
+descried nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, followed by the
+six volunteers.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hundred hostiles sprang
+from ambush. Vanderburgh's horse went down. Three others cleared the
+ditch at a bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aiming his
+gun, and coolly calling out: "Don't run! Don't run!" Two men sent their
+horses back over the ditch to his call, a third was thrown to be slain
+on the spot, and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest Indian,
+when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted deadly vengeance for the
+warrior Vanderburgh had slain years before.</p>
+
+<p>Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the waiting brigade. Refuge
+was taken in the woods, where sentinels kept guard all night. The next
+morning, with scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously
+towards some of their caches. A second night was passed behind barriers
+of logs; and the third day a band of friendly Indians was encountered,
+who were sent to bury the dead.</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> been torn to pieces and his
+bones thrown into the river.</p>
+
+<p>So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.</p>
+
+<p>As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares;
+for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet,
+the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows
+from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade,
+which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own
+trickery.</p>
+
+<p>Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the
+Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he
+possessed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><br /><br /><a name="PART_II" id="PART_II"></a>PART II<br /><br /></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER</h3>
+
+
+<p>All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting
+for the signs.</p>
+
+<p>And now the signs had come.</p>
+
+<p>Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy
+with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward,
+leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
+Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant
+pools like layers of mica.</p>
+
+<p>Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a
+new presence&mdash;the trapper.</p>
+
+<p>Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress
+him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
+costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
+bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
+mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
+any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
+over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
+jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
+and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
+takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
+ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
+for midwinter&mdash;except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
+thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
+And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
+suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
+of winter woods.</p>
+
+<p>This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
+training does not stop here.</p>
+
+<p>When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
+windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
+breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
+habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
+to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell&mdash;which means
+that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
+field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
+and seeing&mdash;discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
+field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
+mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
+closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
+the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
+statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.</p>
+
+<p>And these things are only the <i>a b c</i> of the trapper's woodcraft.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
+the more he thought every animal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> different enough from the fellows of
+its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
+book of forest-lore.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
+corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man,
+that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the
+forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and
+the Upper Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, splits and seams,
+where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must be filled with rosin and
+pitch. A light sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to haul
+the canoe over still water, where the ice first forms. Sled, provisions,
+blanket, and fish-net are put in the canoe, not forgetting the most
+important part of his kit&mdash;the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
+point to point all winter, travelling light and taking nothing but
+absolute necessaries, or builds a central lodge, where he leaves full
+store and radiates out to the hunting-grounds, at least four things must
+be in his tool-bag: a woodman's axe; a gimlet to bore holes in his
+snow-shoe frame; a crooked knife&mdash;not the sheathed dagger of fiction,
+but a blade crooked hook-shape, somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one
+end&mdash;to smooth without splintering, as a carpenter's plane; and a small
+chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden contrivances that
+stretch the pelts.</p>
+
+<p>If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack, the hunter may take
+more tools; but the old trapper prefers to travel light. Fire-arms,
+ammunition, a common hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
+a large sheet of canvas, locally known as <i>abuckwan</i>, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> a shed tent,
+complete the trapper's equipment. His dog is not part of the equipment:
+it is fellow-hunter and companion.</p>
+
+<p>From the moose must come the heavy filling for the snow-shoes; but the
+snow-shoes will not be needed for a month, and there is no haste about
+shooting an unfound moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and beaver
+are waiting to be trapped. With the dog showing his wisdom by sitting
+motionless as an Indian bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and
+pushes out.</p>
+
+<p>Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-place, where traps would
+be effective, the man paddles silently on. If he travels after
+nightfall, the chances are his craft will steal unawares close to a
+black head above a swimming body. With both wind and current meeting the
+canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches the scent of the sharp-nosed
+swimmer. Otter or beaver, it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over
+bow or stern&mdash;over his master's shoulder if necessary, but never
+sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset&mdash;the dog brings back his
+quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
+hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
+bales.</p>
+
+<p>While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
+large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
+to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
+and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
+scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
+by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
+noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
+wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
+lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
+young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
+the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
+scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows&mdash;knows, perhaps,
+from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
+amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
+nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
+trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
+very act.</p>
+
+<p>All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
+one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
+at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
+before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
+pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
+found?</p>
+
+<p>Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
+trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
+their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
+peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
+the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
+three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
+after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
+use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
+self-protection. When cold weather comes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> the beaver is fair game to the
+trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
+strength, a gun, and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes are
+not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that familiarity with the
+woods to enable him to pursue, which the beaver has to enable it to
+escape. And he can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies off
+the scent, the way the beaver does.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as he paddles along the network of streams which interlace Northern
+forests, he will hardly be likely to stumble on the beaver-dam of last
+summer. Beavers do not build their houses, where passers-by will stumble
+upon them. But all the streams have been swollen by fall rains; and the
+trapper notices the markings on every chip and pole floating down the
+full current. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. He knows that the
+rains have floated it over the beaver-dam. Beavers never cut below their
+houses, but always above, so that the current will carry the poles
+down-stream to the dam.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guardedly advances within
+sight of the dam. If any old beaver sentinel be swimming about, he
+quickly scents the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow of
+his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs danger to the whole
+community. He swims with his webbed hind feet, the little fore paws
+being used as carriers or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the
+faintest bit in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted question.
+The only definitely ascertained function of that bat-shaped appendage is
+to telegraph danger to comrades. The beaver neither carries things on
+his tail, nor plasters houses with it; for the simple reason that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> the
+joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only slight sidelong
+wigglings and a forward sweep between his hind legs, as if he might use
+it as a tray for food while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his
+fore paws.</p>
+
+<p>Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the trapper may proceed in
+different ways. He may, after the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake
+the stream across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lowering the
+water, break the conical crowns of the houses on the south side, which
+is thinnest, and slaughter the beavers indiscriminately as they rush
+out. But such hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
+explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some
+years. In the confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind
+clubbing of heads there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor
+and in prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed; and
+if one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under water
+or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
+from that country. Only the degenerate white man practises bad hunting.</p>
+
+<p>The skilled hunter has other methods.</p>
+
+<p>If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the beavers
+have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent pools. The
+trapper gets one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
+loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and drown him, he
+places the trap a few inches under water at the end of a runway or in
+one of the channels. He then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a
+substance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> traces of the
+man-smell. For it the beavers have a curious infatuation, licking
+everything touched by it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into
+a crazy stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own
+foot-tracks.</p>
+
+<p>Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the bank, he
+may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the beaver is still
+taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
+and bark&mdash;usually covered with snow&mdash;slanting to the ground on one side,
+the ends either posts or logs, and the front an opening between two logs
+wide enough to admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a
+rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the front log, is the
+bait. All traces of the hunter are smeared over with the elusive
+castoreum. One tug at the bait usually brings the front log crashing
+down across the animal's back, killing it instantly.</p>
+
+<p>But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly satisfactory. When
+the poor beaver comes sniffing along the castoreum trail to the
+steel-trap and on the first splash into the water feels a pair of iron
+jaws close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the shelter of
+his house. The log plunges after him, holding him down and back till he
+drowns; and his whereabouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.</p>
+
+<p>But several chances are in the beaver's favour. With the castoreum
+licks, which tell them of some other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate
+or lost cub, they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of the
+trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap, they may retreat back up
+the bank and amputate the imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a
+mutilated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver may have
+gone entirely inside the snare before the front log falls; and an animal
+whose teeth saw through logs eighteen inches in diameter in less than
+half an hour can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap. Other
+things are against the hunter. A wolverine may arrive on the scene
+before the trapper and eat the finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper
+may discover that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
+ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for three or four years.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the ice is thick enough
+for the trapper to cut trenches. Then he returns with a woodman's axe
+and his dog. By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes have
+been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives stakes to prevent the
+beaver taking refuge in the shore vaults. The runways and channels,
+where the beaver have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
+over; but the man and his dog will presently find them.</p>
+
+<p>The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough not to be frozen solid,
+and shallow enough for it to make a mud foundation for the house without
+too much work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would carry away
+any house the beaver could build. A trench across the upper stream or
+stakes through the ice prevent escape that way.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling water warns the
+terrified colony that an enemy is near. It may be their greatest foe,
+the wolverine, whose claws will rip through the frost-hard wall as
+easily as a bear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> delves for gophers; but their land enemies cannot
+pursue them into water; so the panic-stricken family&mdash;the old parents,
+wise from many such alarms; the young three-year-olds, who were to go
+out and rear families for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old
+cubbies, big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and the baby
+kittens, just able to forage for themselves and know the soft alder rind
+from the tough old bark unpalatable as mud&mdash;pop pell-mell from the high
+platform of their houses into the water. The water is still falling.
+They will presently be high and dry. No use trying to escape up-stream.
+They see that in the first minute's wild scurry through the shallows.
+Besides, what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there by any
+beaver; for there is no bark on. If they only had time now they might
+cut a passage through; but no&mdash;this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has
+ditched the ice across.</p>
+
+<p>They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from above&mdash;a low,
+exultant, devilish whining. The man has left his dog on guard above the
+dam. At that the little beavers&mdash;always trembling, timid fellows&mdash;tumble
+over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way of the flowing water
+below the dam. But there a new terror assails them. A shadow is above
+the ice, a wraith of destruction&mdash;the figure of a man standing at the
+dam with his axe and club&mdash;waiting.</p>
+
+<p>Where to go now? They can't find their bank shelters, for the man has
+staked them up. The little fellows lose their presence of mind and their
+heads and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up the remaining
+open runway. It is a <i>cul-de-sac</i>. But what does that matter? They run
+almost to the end.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes
+away. Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on. He will come
+to them afterward.</p>
+
+<p>The old beavers make no such mistake. They have tried the hollow-log
+trick with an enemy pursuing them to the blind end, and have escaped
+only because some other beaver was eaten.</p>
+
+<p>The old ones know that water alone is safety.</p>
+
+<p>That is the first and last law of beaver life. They, too, see that
+phantom destroyer above the ice; but a dash past is the last chance. How
+many of the beaver escape past the cut in the dam to the water below,
+depends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But certainly, for the
+most, one blow is the end; and that one blow is less cruel to them than
+the ravages of the wolf or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat
+before they kill.</p>
+
+<p>A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above the dam. Where is the
+runway in which the others are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly,
+but begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whimper. The man
+sees that the dog is on the trail of sagging snow, and the sag betrays
+ice settling down where a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole
+across the river end of the runway and drives down stakes. The young
+beavers are now prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The human mind can't help wondering why the foolish youngsters didn't
+crouch below the ice above the dam and lie there in safe hiding till the
+monster went away. This may be done by the hermit beavers&mdash;fellows who
+have lost their mates and go through life inconsolable; or sick
+creatures, infested by parasites and turned off to house in the river
+holes; or fat, selfish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a
+family. Whatever these solitaries are&mdash;naturalists and hunters
+differ&mdash;they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor little beavers
+rush right into the jaws of death. Why do they? For the same reason
+probably, if they could answer, that people trample each other to death
+when there is an alarm in a crowd.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing at all about their hides
+being valued all the way from fifty cents to three dollars, according to
+the quality; nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm in
+the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets the value for mink,
+otter, marten, bear, and all other skins, one pound of tobacco, one
+kettle, five pounds of shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth;
+nothing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty of their
+hides for a scrap of iron and a great company sending one hundred
+thousand beaver-skins in a single year to make hats and cloaks for the
+courtiers of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding the
+killing of beaver till their number increase.</p>
+
+<p>All the little beaver remembers is that it opened its eyes to daylight
+in the time of soft, green grasses; and that as soon as it got strong
+enough on a milk diet to travel, the mother led the whole family of
+kittens&mdash;usually three or four&mdash;down the slanting doorway of their dim
+house for a swim; and that she taught them how to nibble the dainty,
+green shrubs along the bank; and then the entire colony went for the
+most glorious, pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
+sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass like a
+goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> all day, diving for the
+roots of the lily-pads. But the old mother is always on guard, for the
+wolves and bears are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
+hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their two-year-old
+brothers; and the wonderful thing is&mdash;if a tooth breaks, it grows into
+perfect shape inside of a week.</p>
+
+<p>By August the little fellows are great swimmers, and the colony begins
+the descent of the stream for their winter home. If unmolested, the old
+dam is chosen; but if the hated man-smell is there, new waterways are
+sought. Burrows and washes and channels and retreats are cleaned out.
+Trees are cut and a great supply of branches laid up for winter store
+near the lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just before the
+frost they begin building or repairing the dam. Each night's frost
+hardens the plastered clay till the conical wattled roof&mdash;never more
+than two feet thick&mdash;will support the weight of a moose.</p>
+
+<p>All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and not the tail. This has
+been finally determined by observing the Marquis of Bute's colony of
+beavers. If the family&mdash;the old parents and three seasons' offspring&mdash;be
+too large for the house, new chambers are added. In height the house is
+seldom more than five feet from the base, and the width varies. In
+building a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay, mixing
+this with stones and sticks for the walls, and hollowing out the dome as
+it rises, like a coffer-dam, except that man pumps out water and the
+beaver scoops out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer of clay
+till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have one door or two is
+disputed; but the door is always at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> the end of a sloping incline away
+from the land side, with a shelf running round above, which serves as
+the living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below water, two
+doors instead of one, platforms like an oven instead of a shelf, are
+probably explained by the continual abrasion of the current. By the time
+the ice forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the winter,
+only coming out to feed on their winter stores and get an airing.</p>
+
+<p>But this terrible thing has happened; and the young beavers huddle
+together under the ice of the canal, bleating with the cry of a child.
+They are afraid to run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
+are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with a glee that is
+fiendish to the little beavers. Then a gust of cold air comes from the
+rear and a pole prods forward.</p>
+
+<p>The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding beavers are, and with
+little terrified yelps they scuttle to the very end of the runway. By
+this time the dog is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
+boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent by scratching with
+a zeal that would burrow to the middle of earth.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind end of the channel,
+and cuts a hole above the prison of the beaver. He puts down his arm.
+One by one they are dragged out by the tail; and that finishes the
+little beaver&mdash;sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rabbits of
+bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities of man. Only, this
+death is swifter and less painful. A prolonged death-struggle with the
+beaver would probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> often
+the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If the dog attempts to
+capture the frightened runaways by catching at the conspicuous appendage
+to the rear, that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
+tail, while the beaver runs off with two.</p>
+
+<p>Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kittens which they take
+home as pets. When young they are as easily domesticated as a cat, and
+become a nuisance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to the
+hunter, comes what the Indians call "the-sickness-of-long-thinking," the
+gipsy yearning for the wilds. Then extraordinary things happen. The
+beaver are apt to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trapper
+of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers became so restless, he
+feared their escape and put them in cages. They bit their way out with
+absurd ease.</p>
+
+<p>He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole through in a night.
+Thinking to get wire caging, he took them into his lodge, and they
+seemed contented enough while he was about; but one morning he wakened
+to find a hole eaten through the door, and the entire round of
+birch-bark, which he had staked out ready for the gunwales and ribbing
+of his canoe&mdash;bark for which he had travelled forty miles&mdash;chewed into
+shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream, which is their habit in
+spring.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is a grim joke of the animal world that the lazy moose is the moose
+that gives wings to the feet of the pursuer. When snow comes the trapper
+must have snow-shoes and moccasins. For both, moose supplies the best
+material.</p>
+
+<p>Bees have their drones, beaver their hermits, and moose a ladified
+epicure who draws off from the feeding-yards of the common herd, picks
+out the sweetest browse of the forest, and gorges herself till fat as a
+gouty voluptuary. While getting the filling for his snow-shoes, the
+trapper also stocks his larder; and if he can find a spinster moose, he
+will have something better than shredded venison and more delicately
+flavoured than finest teal.</p>
+
+<p>Sledding his canoe across shallow lakelets, now frozen like rock, still
+paddling where there is open way, the trapper continues to guide his
+course up the waterways. Big game, he knows, comes out to drink at
+sunrise and sunset; and nearly all the small game frequents the banks of
+streams either to fish or to prey on the fisher.</p>
+
+<p>Each night he sleeps in the open with his dog on guard; or else puts up
+the cotton tepee, the dog curling outside the tent flap, one ear awake.
+And each<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> night a net is set for the white-fish that are to supply
+breakfast, feed the dog, and provide heads for the traps placed among
+rocks in mid-stream, or along banks where dainty footprints were in the
+morning's hoar-frost. Brook trout can still be got in the pools below
+waterfalls; but the trapper seldom takes time now to use the line,
+depending on his gun and fish-net.</p>
+
+<p>During the Indian's white-fish month&mdash;the white man's November&mdash;the
+weather has become colder and colder; but the trapper never indulges in
+the big log fire that delights the heart of the amateur hunter. That
+would drive game a week's tracking from his course. Unless he wants to
+frighten away nocturnal prowlers, a little, chip fire, such as the
+fishermen of the Banks use in their dories, is all the trapper allows
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>First snow silences the rustling leaves. First frost quiets the flow of
+waters. Except for the occasional splitting of a sap-frozen tree, or the
+far howl of a wolf-pack, there is the stillness of death. And of all
+quiet things in the quiet forest, the trapper is the quietest.</p>
+
+<p>As winter closes in the ice-skim of the large lakes cuts the bark canoe
+like a knife. The canoe is abandoned for snow-shoes and the cotton tepee
+for more substantial shelter.</p>
+
+<p>If the trapper is a white man he now builds a lodge near the best
+hunting-ground he has found. Around this he sets a wide circle of traps
+at such distances their circuit requires an entire day, and leads the
+trapper out in one direction and back in another, without retracing the
+way. Sometimes such lodges run from valley to valley. Each cabin is
+stocked; and the hunter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> sleeps where night overtakes him. But this plan
+needs two men; for if the traps are not closely watched, the wolverine
+will rifle away a priceless fox as readily as he eats a worthless
+musk-rat. The stone fire-place stands at one end. Moss, clay, and snow
+chink up the logs. Parchment across a hole serves as window. Poles and
+brush make the roof, or perhaps the remains of the cotton tent stretched
+at a steep angle to slide off the accumulating weight of snow.</p>
+
+<p>But if the trapper is an Indian, or the white man has a messenger to
+carry the pelts marked with his name to a friendly trading-post, he may
+not build a lodge; but move from hunt to hunt as the game changes
+feeding-ground. In this case he uses the <i>abuckwan</i>&mdash;canvas&mdash;for a shed
+tent, with one side sloping to the ground, banked by brush and snow, the
+other facing the fire, both tent and fire on such a slope that the smoke
+drifts out while the heat reflects in. Pine and balsam boughs, with the
+wood end pointing out like sheaves in a stook, the foliage converging to
+a soft centre, form the trapper's bed.</p>
+
+<p>The snow is now too deep to travel without snow-shoes. The frames for
+these the trapper makes of ash, birch, or best of all, the
+<i>mackikwatick</i>&mdash;tamarack&mdash;curving the easily bent green wood up at one
+end, canoe shape, and smoothing the barked wood at the bend, like a
+sleigh runner, by means of the awkward <i>couteau croche</i>, as the French
+hunter calls his crooked knife.</p>
+
+<p>In style, the snow-shoe varies with the hunting-ground. On forested,
+rocky, hummocky land, the shoe is short to permit short turns without
+entanglement. Oval and broad, rather than long and slim, it makes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> up in
+width what it lacks in length to support the hunter's weight above the
+snow. And the toe curve is slight; for speed is impossible on bad
+ground. To save the instep from jars, the slip noose may be padded like
+a cowboy's stirrup.</p>
+
+<p>On the prairie, where the snowy reaches are unbroken as air, snow-shoes
+are wings to the hunter's heels. They are long, and curved, and narrow,
+and smooth enough on the runners for the hunter to sit on their rear
+ends and coast downhill as on a toboggan. If a snag is struck midway,
+the racquets may bounce safely over and glissade to the bottom; or the
+toe may catch, heels fly over head, and the hunter land with his feet
+noosed in frames sticking upright higher than his neck.</p>
+
+<p>Any trapper can read the story of a hunt from snow-shoes. Bound and
+short: east of the Great Lakes. Slim and long: from the prairie. Padding
+for the instep: either rock ground or long runs. Filling of hide strips
+with broad enough interspaces for a small foot to slip through: from the
+wet, heavily packed, snow region of the Atlantic coast, for trapping
+only, never the chase, small game, not large. Lace ties, instead of a
+noose to hold the foot: the amateur hunter. <i>Atibisc</i>, a fine filling
+taken from deer or caribou for the heel and toe; with <i>askimoneiab</i>,
+heavy, closely interlaced, membraneous filling from the moose across the
+centre to bear the brunt of wear; long enough for speed, short enough to
+turn short: the trapper knows he is looking at the snow-shoe of the
+craftsman. This is the sort he must have for himself.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing, then&mdash;a moose for the heavy filling; preferably a
+spinster moose; for she is too lazy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> to run from a hunter who is not yet
+a Mercury; and she will furnish him with a banquet fit for kings.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Neither moose call nor birch horn, of which wonders are told, will avail
+now. The mating season is well past. Even if an old moose responded to
+the call, the chances are his flesh would be unfit for food. It would be
+a wasted kill, contrary to the principles of the true trapper.</p>
+
+<p>Every animal has a sign language as plain as print. The trapper has
+hardly entered the forest before he begins to read this language. Broad
+hoof-marks are on the muskeg&mdash;quaking bog, covered with moss&mdash;over which
+the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where a horse would sink to the
+saddle. Park-like glades at the heads of streams, where the moose have
+spent the summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water holes to get
+rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and stripped twigs and rubbed
+bark.</p>
+
+<p>Coming suddenly on a grove of quaking aspens, a saucy jay has fluttered
+up with a noisy call&mdash;an alarm note; and something is bounding off to
+hiding in a thicket on the far side of the grove. The <i>wis-kat-jan</i>, or
+whisky jack, as the white men call it, who always hangs about the moose
+herds, has seen the trapper and sounded the alarm.</p>
+
+<p>In August, when the great, palmated horns, which budded out on the male
+in July, are yet in the velvet, the trapper finds scraps of furry hair
+sticking to young saplings. The vain moose has been polishing his
+antlers, preparatory to mating. Later, there is a great whacking of
+horns among the branches. The moose, spoiling for a fight, in moose
+language is challenging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> his rivals to battle. Wood-choppers have been
+interrupted by the apparition of a huge, palmated head through a
+thicket. Mistaking the axe for his rival's defiance, the moose arrives
+on the scene in a mood of blind rage that sends the chopper up a tree,
+or back to the shanty for his rifle.</p>
+
+<p>But the trapper allows these opportunities to pass. He is not ready for
+his moose until winter compels the abandoning of the canoe. Then the
+moose herds are yarding up in some sheltered feeding-ground.</p>
+
+<p>It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard. There is the
+tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There are the cast-off antlers
+after the battles have been fought&mdash;the female moose being without horns
+and entirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for protection.
+There is the stripped, overhead twig, where a moose has reared on hind
+legs and nibbled a branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
+which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then held down with his
+feet while he browsed. This and more sign language of the woods&mdash;too
+fine for the language of man&mdash;lead the trapper close on the haunts of a
+moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary moose. He is keen for the
+solitary track of a haughty spinster. And he probably comes on the print
+when he has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one of the herd
+below the hill, where he hides. He knows the trail is that of a
+spinster. It is unusually heavy; and she is always fat. It drags
+clumsily over the snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
+away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she loiters to feed
+and dawdle out of pure indolence.</p>
+
+<p>And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> scent feels. He may win
+his prize with the ease of putting out his hand and taking it&mdash;sighting
+his rifle and touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
+breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a week and come back
+empty at his cartridge-belt, empty below his cartridge-belt, empty of
+hand, and full, full of rage at himself, though his words curse the
+moose. He may win his prize in one of two ways: (1) by running the game
+to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or by a still hunt.</p>
+
+<p>The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the man than the moose. Even
+a fat spinster can outdistance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his
+perseverance lasts longer than her strength&mdash;for though a moose swings
+out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily tired&mdash;the exhausted
+moose is a moose at bay; and a moose at bay rears on her hind legs and
+does defter things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than an
+exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a cleft hoof means
+something sharply split, wherever that spreading hoof lands. And if the
+something wriggles on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon it
+with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she goes on her way
+with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair bristling.</p>
+
+<p>The contest was even and the moose won.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the hazard, there is a barbarism about this straightaway
+chase, which repels the trapper. It usually succeeds by bogging the
+moose in crusted snow, or a waterhole&mdash;and then, Indian fashion, a
+slaughter; and no trapper kills for the sake of killing, for the simple
+practical reason that his own life depends on the preservation of game.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A slight snowfall and the wind in his face are ideal conditions for a
+still hunt. One conceals him. The other carries the man-smell from the
+game.</p>
+
+<p>Which way does the newly-discovered footprint run? More flakes are in
+one hole than the other. He follows the trail till he has an idea of the
+direction the moose is taking; for the moose runs straightaway, not
+circling and doubling back on cold tracks like the deer, but marching
+direct to the objective point, where it turns, circles slightly&mdash;a loop
+at the end of a line&mdash;and lies down a little off the trail. When the
+pursuer, following the cold scent, runs past, the moose gets wind and is
+off in the opposite direction like a vanishing streak.</p>
+
+<p>Having ascertained the lie of the land, the trapper leaves the line of
+direct trail and follows in a circling detour. Here, he finds the print
+fresher, not an hour old. The moose had stopped to browse and the
+markings are moist on a twig. The trapper leaves the trail, advancing
+always by a detour to leeward. He is sure, now, that it is a spinster.
+If it had been any other, the moose would not have been alone. The rest
+would be tracking into the leader's steps; and by the fresh trail he
+knows for a certainty there is only one. But his very nearness increases
+the risk. The wind may shift. The snowfall is thinning. This time, when
+he comes back to the trail, it is fresher still. The hunter now gets his
+rifle ready. He dare not put his foot down without testing the snow,
+lest a twig snap. He parts a way through the brush with his hand and
+replaces every branch. And when next he comes back to the line of the
+moose's travel, there is no trail. This is what he expected. He takes
+off his coat; his leggings,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> if they are loose enough to rub with a
+leathery swish; his musk-rat fur cap, if it has any conspicuous colour;
+his boots, if they are noisy and given to crunching. If only he aim
+true, he will have moccasins soon enough. Leaving all impedimenta, he
+follows back on his own steps to the place where he last saw the trail.
+Perhaps the saucy jay cries with a shrill, scolding shriek that sends
+cold shivers down the trapper's spine. He wishes he could get his hands
+on its wretched little neck; and turning himself to a statue, he stands
+stone-still till the troublesome bird settles down. Then he goes on.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the moose trail!</p>
+
+<p>He dare not follow direct. That would lead past her hiding-place and she
+would bolt. He resorts to artifice; but, for that matter, so has the
+moose resorted to artifice. The trapper, too, circles forward, cutting
+the moose's magic guard with transverse zigzags. But he no longer walks.
+He crouches, or creeps, or glides noiselessly from shelter to shelter,
+very much the way a cat advances on an unwary mouse. He sinks to his
+knees and feels forward for snow-pads every pace. Then he is on
+all-fours, still circling. His detour has narrowed and narrowed till he
+knows she must be in that aspen thicket. The brush is sparser. She has
+chosen her resting-ground wisely. The man falls forward on his face,
+closing in, closing in, wiggling and watching till&mdash;he makes a horrible
+discovery. That jay is perched on the topmost bough of the grove; and
+the man has caught a glimpse of something buff-coloured behind the
+aspens. It may be a moose, or only a log. The untried hunter would fire.
+Not so the trapper. Hap-hazard aim means fighting a wounded moose, or
+letting the creature drag its agony off to inaccessible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> haunts. The man
+worms his way round the thicket, sighting the game with the noiseless
+circling of a hawk before the drop. An ear blinks. But at that instant
+the jay perks his head to one side with a curious look at this strange
+object on the ground. In another second it will be off with a call and
+the moose up.</p>
+
+<p>His rifle is aimed!</p>
+
+<p>A blinding swish of aspen leaves and snow and smoke! The jay is off with
+a noisy whistle. And the trapper has leather for moccasins, and heavy
+filling for his snow-shoes, and meat for his larder.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But he must still get the fine filling for heel and toe; and this comes
+from caribou or deer. The deer, he will still hunt as he has still
+hunted the moose, with this difference: that the deer runs in circles,
+jumping back in his own tracks leaving the hunter to follow a cold
+scent, while it, by a sheer bound&mdash;five&mdash;eight&mdash;twenty feet off at a new
+angle, makes for the hiding of dense woods. No one but a barbarian would
+attempt to run down a caribou; for it can only be done by the shameless
+trick of snaring in crusted snow, or intercepting while swimming, and
+then&mdash;butchery.</p>
+
+<p>The caribou doesn't run. It doesn't bound. It floats away into space.</p>
+
+<p>One moment a sandy-coloured form, with black nose, black feet, and a
+glory of white statuary above its head, is seen against the far reaches
+of snow. The next, the form has shrunk&mdash;and shrunk&mdash;and shrunk, antlers
+laid back against its neck, till there is a vanishing speck on the
+horizon. The caribou has not been standing at all. It has skimmed out of
+sight; and if there is any clear ice across the marshes, it literally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+glides beyond vision from very speed. But, provided no man-smell crosses
+its course, the caribou is vulnerable in its habits. Morning and
+evening, it comes back to the same watering-place; and it returns to the
+same bed for the night. If the trapper can conceal himself without
+crossing its trail, he easily obtains the fine filling for his
+snow-shoes.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Moccasins must now be made.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper shears off the coarse hair with a sharp knife. The hide is
+soaked; and a blunter blade tears away the remaining hairs till the skin
+is white and clean. The flesh side is similarly cleaned and the skin
+rubbed with all the soap and grease it will absorb. A process of beating
+follows till the hide is limber. Carelessness at this stage makes
+buckskin soak up water like a sponge and dry to a shapeless board. The
+skin must be stretched and pulled till it will stretch no more. Frost
+helps the tanning, drying all moisture out; and the skin becomes as soft
+as down, without a crease. The smoke of punk from a rotten tree gives
+the dark yellow colour to the hide and prevents hardening. The skin is
+now ready for the needle; and all odd bits are hoarded away.</p>
+
+<p>Equipped with moccasins and snow-shoes, the trapper is now the winged
+messenger of the tragic fates to the forest world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE INDIAN TRAPPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.</p>
+
+<p>In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with
+a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the
+gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists
+of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like
+clouds of steam, will have cleared; and there will be nothing from
+sky-line to sky-line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid-day. Then the sun
+casts no man-shadow to scare game from his snares. Black is the flag of
+betrayal in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye, glistening
+on the snow like a black marble, that the trapper detects the white
+hare; and a jet tail-tip streaking over the white wastes in dots and
+dashes tells him the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
+coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts and diving
+below the snow with the forward wriggling of a snake under cover. But
+the moving man-shadow is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's
+eye or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out in the gray
+darkness of morning and must reach his hunting-grounds before high
+noon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts in swift, coasting
+strides, he swings out in that easy, ambling, Indian trot, which gives
+never a jar to the runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
+beneath his tread.</p>
+
+<p>The old musket, which he got in trade from the fur post, is over his
+shoulder, or swinging lightly in one hand. A hunter's knife and
+short-handled woodman's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
+his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy musk-rat gantlets are
+attached to the cord about his neck; so without losing either he can
+fight bare-handed, free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And
+somewhere, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
+<i>skipertogan</i>&mdash;a skin bag with amulet against evil, matches, touchwood,
+and a scrap of pemmican. As he grows hot, he throws back his hood,
+running bareheaded and loose about the chest.</p>
+
+<p>Each breath clouds to frost against his face till hair and brows and
+lashes are fringed with frozen moisture. The white man would hugger his
+face up with scarf and collar the more for this; but the Indian knows
+better. Suddenly chilled breath would soak scarf and collar wet to his
+skin; and his face would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
+with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the keenest cold; so he
+loosens his coat and runs the faster.</p>
+
+<p>As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in the gray haze. Pine
+groves emerge from the dark, wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and
+domes and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spreading larch
+boughs. Evergreens are edged with white. Naked trees stand like limned
+statuary with an ant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>lered crest etched against the white glare. The
+snow stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that seem to
+heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
+skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
+against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
+circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
+proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.</p>
+
+<p>When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
+Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
+the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
+Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
+arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
+about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
+But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
+length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
+Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
+coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
+talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
+the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
+it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
+the Northern Lights. He does not <i>see</i> these things with the gabbling
+exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
+nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
+description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
+squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> like a
+sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
+months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
+music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
+gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
+tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
+and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.</p>
+
+<p>Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
+mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
+Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
+has seen; though he has not understood.</p>
+
+<p>But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
+of the Great Lakes, in the cañons of the Rockies, and across that
+northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
+east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay regions that the
+Indian trapper will find his last hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes
+the white man, and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring
+before Columbus opened the doors of the New World to the hordes of the
+Old; and here Indian trappers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When
+there is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed; but that day is far
+distant for the Hudson Bay region.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is midwinter; and by
+December there is a curious lull in the hunting. All the streams are
+frozen like rock; but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
+yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some foolish fish
+always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> shuts them in. Then a strange
+thing is seen&mdash;a kettle of living fish; fish gasping and panting in
+ice-hemmed water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost freezes
+another layer to the ice walls of their prison. The banks of such a pond
+hole are haunted by the otter and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when
+the pond is exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank and
+forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.</p>
+
+<p>The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and fastidious
+choosing&mdash;for in trapper vernacular the bear takes a long time to please
+himself&mdash;bruin found an upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
+grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes and went to sleep
+under a snow blanket of gathering depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too,
+have gone off to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by a
+wolf-pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to move till this
+ground is eaten over. Nor are many beaver seen now. They have long since
+snuggled into their warm houses, where they will stay till their winter
+store is all used; and their houses are now hidden under great depths of
+deepening snow. But the fox and the hare and the ermine are at run; and
+as long as they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx and
+the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from the scarcity of other
+game and greedy as spring crows.</p>
+
+<p>That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's heels. The pelt of a
+coyote&mdash;or prairie wolf&mdash;would scarcely be worth the taking. Even the
+big, gray timber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot, except
+for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic wolf would bring better
+price. The enormous black or brown arctic wolf would be more valuable;
+but the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all these
+worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps as keenly as the
+trapper does; and would eat up a silver fox, that would be the fortune
+of any hunter.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian comes to the brush where he has set his rabbit snares across
+a runway. His dog sniffs the ground, whining. The crust of the snow is
+broken by a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit fur is
+fluffed about. The game has been rifled away. The Indian notices several
+things. The rabbit has been devoured on the spot. That is unlike the
+wolverine. He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a guzzle
+in his own lair. The footprints have the appearance of having been
+brushed over; so the thief had a bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There
+is no trail away from the snare. The marauder has come with a long leap
+and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his dog make a circuit of the
+snare till they come on the trail of the intruder; and its size tells
+the Indian whether his enemy be fox or wolf.</p>
+
+<p>He sets no more snares across that runway, for the rabbits have had
+their alarm. Going through the brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a
+new snare.</p>
+
+<p>Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the drifts to the next trap. It
+is a deadfall. Nothing is in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left
+undisturbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to atoms from very
+wickedness, chewed the bait in two, and spat it out lest there should be
+poison. The fox would have gone in and had his back broken by the front
+log. And there is the same brush work over the trampled snow, as if the
+visitor had tried to sweep out his own trail; and the same long leap
+away, clearing ob<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>struction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
+scent. This time the Indian makes two or three circuits; but the snow is
+so crusted it is impossible to tell whether the scratchings lead out to
+the open or back to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal had
+followed the line of the traps by running just inside the brush, the
+Indian would know. But the midwinter day is short, and he has no time to
+explore the border of the thicket.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that number he hardly
+expects game in more than a dozen. If six have a prize, he has done
+well. Each time he stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
+trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with castoreum, or
+pomatum, or bears' grease; sweeping the snow over every spot touched by
+his hand; dragging the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.</p>
+
+<p>Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and the Indian trapper has
+found not a thing in his traps. He only knows that some daring enemy has
+dogged the circle of his snares. That means he must kill the marauder,
+or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt about swift vengeance for
+the loss of a rabbit, he has none when he comes to the next trap. He
+sees what is too much for words: what entails as great loss to the poor
+Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white man. One of his best
+steel-traps lies a little distance from the pole to which it was
+attached. It has been jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
+the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained and covered with
+gray fur as soft and silvery as chinchilla. In the trap is a little paw,
+fresh cut, scarcely frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and speculators of stocks,
+and actors of fame. But the wolves, the great, black wolves of the Far
+North, with eyes full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
+had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not an hour before the
+trapper came.</p>
+
+<p>He knows now what his enemy is; for he has come so suddenly on their
+trail he can count four different footprints, and claw-marks of
+different length. They have fought about the little fox; and some of the
+smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the blood-marks, he can
+tell they have got under cover of the shrub growth to the right.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian says none of the words which the white man might say; but
+that is nothing to his credit; for just now no words are adequate. But
+he takes prompt resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
+which somehow is written on the very face of the wilderness as one of
+its necessities, he decides that only life for life will compensate such
+loss. The danger of hunting the big, brown wolf&mdash;he knows too well to
+attempt it without help. He will bait his small traps with poison; take
+out his big, steel wolf traps to-morrow; then with a band of young
+braves follow the wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting
+season.</p>
+
+<p>But the animal world knows that old trick of drawing a herring scent
+across the trail of wise intentions; and of all the animal world, none
+knows it better than the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
+of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the same pricking
+forward of sharp, erect ears, the same crouching trot, the same
+sneaking, watchful green eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to
+brush out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop of the
+gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among wolves.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keeping to the open, where
+he can travel fast on the long snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap.
+The man-shadow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then all the
+shadows merge into the purple gloom of early evening; but the Indian
+travels on; for the circuit of traps leads back to his lodge.</p>
+
+<p>The wolf thief may not be far off; so the man takes his musket from the
+case. He may chance a shot at the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves
+run under cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward. The wind
+carries scent of danger from the open, and the brush forms an ambuscade.
+Man tracks, where man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
+clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if he can; and if he
+can't, crouches low till he has passed the exposure.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides, wasting not an
+inch of ground, deviating neither to right nor left by as much space as
+a white man takes to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog
+utters a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward towards the
+brush. At the same moment the Indian, who has been keeping his eyes on
+the woods, sees a form rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is
+not surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and the fox trap
+could not have been robbed more than an hour ago. The man thinks he has
+come on the thieves going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as he looks the form
+fades into the gloom, and he decides to run on parallel to the
+brushwood, with his gun ready. Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery.
+At the clearing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he is
+heading home there is little danger.</p>
+
+<p>But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes off to the woods
+with wild barking, and the trapper scans the long, white stretch leading
+back between the bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
+grays of twilight.</p>
+
+<p>Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
+wolfish figure looms black against the snow&mdash;and stands! The dog prances
+round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
+and the Indian calculates&mdash;" After all, there is only one."</p>
+
+<p>What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
+traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
+points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
+mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
+wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.</p>
+
+<p>One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
+through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
+the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
+finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
+meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
+advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
+sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
+The man runs faster now, determined to get<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> abreast of the wolf and
+utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
+distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
+front and shoot.</p>
+
+<p>But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
+wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
+wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
+ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
+thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
+the very real substance of that fox.</p>
+
+<p>The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
+while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
+through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
+lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
+with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
+the trapper's very feet.</p>
+
+<p>Then the man knows that he has been tricked.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
+sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
+and prairie hold in deadly fear&mdash;fire. Two or three shots ring into the
+darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells him there is one wolf
+less, and the others will hold off at a safe distance. Contrary to the
+woodman's traditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian whips
+out his axe and chops with all his might till he has wood enough for a
+roaring fire. That will keep the rascals away till the pack goes off in
+full cry, or daylight comes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the Indian hastily makes a
+bow, and shoots arrow after arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air,
+hoping to signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear. The sky
+is silver with stars, and moonlight and reflected snowglare, and the
+Northern Lights flicker and wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy
+that dims the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising from his
+fire in a straight column falls at the height of the trees, for the
+frost lies on the land heavy, palpable, impenetrable. And for all the
+frost is thick to the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
+That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air seems to become
+absolutely compressed with the cold; but that same cold freezes out and
+precipitates every particle of floating moisture till earth and sky,
+moon and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.</p>
+
+<p>A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a gale, comes
+through the tightening silence. The intelligent half-breed says this is
+from the Northern Lights. The white man says it is electric activity in
+compressed air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter the
+words of the braves in death chant:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"If I die, I die valiant,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I go to death fearless.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I die a brave man.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I go to those heroes who died without fear."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire arrows into the air. He
+heaps his fire and watches, musket in hand. The light of the moon is
+white like statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-edged trees
+are chiselled clear like statuary; and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> silence is of stone. Only
+the snap of the blaze, the crackling of the frosted air, the break of a
+twig back among the brush, where something has moved, and the little,
+low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases; and the dog at last
+lowers his ears and lies quiet. The trapper throws a stick into the
+woods and sends the dog after it. The dog comes back without any
+barkings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have drawn off. Will he
+wait out that long Northern night? He has had nothing to eat but the
+piece of pemmican. The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
+if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run will carry him
+home; but to make speed with the snow-shoes he must run in the open,
+exposed to all watchers.</p>
+
+<p>When an Indian balances motives, the motive of hunger invariably
+prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting in the caribou coat and kicking
+up the dog, the trapper strikes out for the open way leading back to the
+line of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been built for
+shelter against wind. There is another reason for building lodges in a
+hollow. Sound of the hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
+sound of the game carry to the hunter.</p>
+
+<p>And if the game should turn hunter and the man turn hunted! The trapper
+speeds down the snowy slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over
+hummocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping rather than
+running. The frosty air acts as a conductor to sound, and the frost
+films come in stings against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and
+touch are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> first
+breath of peril, uttering a smothered "<i>woo! woo!</i>" The trapper tries to
+persuade himself the alarm was only the far scream of a wolf-hunted
+lynx; but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a dome. One
+glance over his shoulder shows him black forms on the snow-crest against
+the sky.</p>
+
+<p>He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox feels before the dogs
+in full cry.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted thing with terror crazing
+his blood and the sleuth-hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something
+goes wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-strings, he
+sees that the dog's feet have been cut by the snow crust and are
+bleeding. It is life for life now; the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law,
+that has no new dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
+that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.</p>
+
+<p>One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.</p>
+
+<p>The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exultant bay. The wolf-pack
+are in full cry. The man has rounded the open alley between the trees
+and is speeding down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the pack
+pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite. The moon is behind,
+and the man-shadow flits before on the snow like an enemy heading him
+back. The deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer! He
+feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause. A great drift thrusts
+across his way and the shadow in front runs slower. They are gaining on
+him. He hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings for breath
+are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest of the drift he braces
+himself and goes to the bottom with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The slant moonlight throws another shadow on the snow at his heels.</p>
+
+<p>It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and tosses up his arms&mdash;an
+Indian trick to stop pursuit. Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man
+that has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with a piercing
+howl.</p>
+
+<p>The man is off and away.</p>
+
+<p>If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men and a body-guard of
+guides hunt down a single quarry, he would be safe enough now. But the
+old musket is slow loading, and speed will serve him better than another
+shot.</p>
+
+<p>Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his instep to his ankle,
+throwing the racquet on edge and clogging him back. Before he can right
+it they are upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face and fight
+to the last breath. His hood falls back, and he wheels with the
+moonlight full in his eyes and the Northern Lights waving their mystic
+flames high overhead. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
+lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-wreathed trees, like
+funeral watchers&mdash;watchers of how many brave deaths in a desolate,
+lonely land where no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
+without fear!</p>
+
+<p>The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by burying the red-gummed
+fangs in the victim's throat; in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the
+runner's legs&mdash;called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
+ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teaches the Indian to be
+as merciless as he is brave&mdash;hunger!</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> snapping red mouths
+with the butt of his weapon; and the foremost beasts roll under.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 416px;">
+<img src="images/illus-143.jpg" width="416" height="600" alt="They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm." title="" />
+<span class="caption">They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase now, as much as from
+hunger. Leaping over their dead fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of
+the uplifted arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching for
+the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks to the rear of the
+hunter's fighting shadow. When the man swings his arm and draws back to
+strike, this miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
+dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.</p>
+
+<p>Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf has bitten the knee
+sinews to the bone. The pack leap up, and the man goes down.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the heavy snow that fell
+over the northland that night, the Indians travelling to their summer
+hunting-grounds found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones of
+three dead wolves; and farther up the hill were the bleaching remains of
+a fourth.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a body-guard of armed guides in
+a field where the hunted have been on the run from the hunter for a
+century, gets a very tame idea of the natural bear in its natural state.
+Bears that have had the fear of man inculcated with longe-range
+repeaters lose confidence in the prowess of an aggressive onset against
+invisible foes. The city man comes back from the wilds with a legend of
+how harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild
+animal ever attacks unless it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear
+would go on its life-long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not
+compel it, or if repeated assault and battery from other animals did not
+teach the poor bear the art of self-defence.</p>
+
+<p>Grisly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the Western
+States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the forts of the
+Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, tell a different tale.
+Their hunting is done in a field where human presence is still so rare
+that it is unknown and the bear treats mankind precisely as he treats
+all other living beings from the moose and the musk-ox to mice and
+ants&mdash;as fair game for his own insatiable maw.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns&mdash;"liars" the city man calls
+them&mdash;but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round the fur company
+forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in the artificial ridge of
+a deformed nose that the bear which he slew was a real one with an
+epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
+considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> And the Kootenay
+hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
+of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
+dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
+eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
+other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
+blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
+twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
+wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
+that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
+altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
+girls through fairy books.</p>
+
+<p>That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
+and weaving at the grasses&mdash;weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
+mat&mdash;without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
+wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
+frill of a sun-bonnet,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> coming over the face as well as the neck&mdash;"to
+keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
+that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
+would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
+the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
+excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
+begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
+of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
+hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
+never lifting the thick frill.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
+Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
+south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
+did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
+stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
+building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
+when they made a long overland <i>portage</i>, they were three weeks north of
+the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
+travelling light-handed. That is, they were carrying only a little salt
+and tea and tobacco. For the rest, they were depending on their muskets.
+Game had not been plentiful.</p>
+
+<p>Between the prairie and "the Mountains of the Setting Sun"&mdash;as the
+Indians call the Rockies&mdash;a long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled
+sinuously over the crests of the foothills; and all game&mdash;bird and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+beast&mdash;will shun a prairie fire. There was no wind. It was the dead hazy
+calm of Indian summer in the late autumn with the sun swimming in the
+purplish smoke like a blood-red shield all day and the serpent line of
+flame flickering and darting little tongues of vermilion against the
+deep blue horizon all night, days filled with the crisp smell of
+withered grasses, nights as clear and cold as the echo of a bell. On a
+windless plain there is no danger from a prairie fire. One may travel
+for weeks without nearing or distancing the waving tide of fire against
+a far sky; and the four trappers, running short of rations, decided to
+try to flank the fire coming around far enough ahead to intercept the
+game that must be moving away from the fire line.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all hunters, through some dexterity of natural endowment,
+unconsciously become specialists. One man sees beaver signs where
+another sees only deer. For Ba'tiste, the page of nature spelled
+<i>B-E-A-R</i>! Fifteen bear in a winter is a wonderfully good season's work
+for any trapper. Ba'tiste's record for one lucky winter was fifty-four.
+After that he was known as the bear hunter. Such a reputation affects
+keen hunters differently. The Indian grows cautious almost to cowardice.
+Ba'tiste grew rash. He would follow a wounded grisly to cover. He would
+afterward laugh at the episode as a joke if the wounded brute had treed
+him. "For sure, good t'ing dat was not de prairie dat tam," he would
+say, flinging down the pelt of his foe. The other trappers with Indian
+blood in their veins might laugh, but they shook their heads when his
+back was turned.</p>
+
+<p>Flanking the fire by some of the great gullies that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> cut the foothills
+like trenches, the hunters began to find the signs they had been
+seeking. For Ba'tiste, the many different signs had but one meaning.
+Where some summer rain pool had dried almost to a soft mud hole, the
+other trappers saw little cleft foot-marks that meant deer, and prints
+like a baby's fingers that spelled out the visit of some member of the
+weasel family, and broad splay-hoof impressions that had spread under
+the weight as some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
+bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
+length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
+toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
+had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
+crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
+it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
+prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
+not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
+plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
+not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
+off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
+the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
+other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
+knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
+grasses thinned.</p>
+
+<p>Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
+raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things&mdash;stories of many bears,
+of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> slabs
+of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
+the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
+earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
+ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
+or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
+creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
+cliffs.</p>
+
+<p>Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
+other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
+beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
+russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
+flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
+thorny brush.</p>
+
+<p>The hawk soaring and dropping&mdash;lilting and falling and lifting
+again&mdash;might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
+bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
+blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
+down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.</p>
+
+<p>These things might interest the others. They did not interest Ba'tiste.
+Ba'tiste's eyes were for lairs of grass crushed so recently that the
+spear leaves were even now rising; for holes in the black mould where
+great ripping claws had been tearing up roots; for hollow logs and
+rotted stumps where a black bear might have crawled to take his
+afternoon siesta; for punky trees which a grisly might have torn open to
+gobble ants' eggs; for scratchings down the bole of poplar or cottonwood
+where some languid bear had been sharp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>ening his claws in midsummer as a
+cat will scratch chair-legs; for great pits deep in the clay banks,
+where some silly badger or gopher ran down to the depths of his burrow
+in sheer terror only to have old bruin come ripping and tearing to the
+innermost recesses, with scattered fur left that told what had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Some soft oozy moss-padded lair, deep in the marsh with the reeds of the
+brittle cat-tails lifting as if a sleeper had just risen, sets
+Ba'tiste's pulse hopping&mdash;jumping&mdash;marking time in thrills like the
+lithe bounds of a pouncing mountain-cat. With tread soft as the velvet
+paw of a panther, he steals through the cane-brake parting the reeds
+before each pace, brushing aside softly&mdash;silently what might
+crush!&mdash;snap!&mdash;sound ever so slight an alarm to the little pricked ears
+of a shaggy head tossing from side to side&mdash;jerk&mdash;jerk&mdash;from right to
+left&mdash;from left to right&mdash;always on the listen!&mdash;on the listen!&mdash;for
+prey!&mdash;for prey!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, for sure, that Ba'tiste, he was but a fool-hunter," as his comrades
+afterward said (it is always so very plain afterward); "that Ba'tiste,
+he was a fool! What man else go step&mdash;step&mdash;into the marsh after a
+bear!"</p>
+
+<p>But the truth was that Ba'tiste, the cunning rascal, always succeeded in
+coming out of the marsh, out of the bush, out of the windfall, sound as
+a top, safe and unscratched, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, the
+head swinging pendant to show what sort of fellow he had mastered.</p>
+
+<p>"Dat wan!&mdash;ah!&mdash;diable!&mdash;he has long sharp nose&mdash;he was thin&mdash;thin as a
+barrel all gone but de hoops&mdash;ah!&mdash;voilà!&mdash;he was wan ugly garçon, was
+dat bear!"</p>
+
+<p>Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> brush, bits of skin on
+the spined cactus, the others might vow coyotes had worried a badger.
+Ba'tiste would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. The
+cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant bear; for the bear is an
+epicure that would have meat gamey. To that the others would agree.</p>
+
+<p>And so the shortening autumn days with the shimmering heat of a crisp
+noon and the noiseless chill of starry twilights found the trappers
+canoeing leisurely up-stream from the northern tributaries of the
+Missouri nearing the long overland trail that led to the hunting-fields
+in Canada.</p>
+
+<p>One evening they came to a place bounded by high cliff banks with the
+flats heavily wooded by poplar and willow. Ba'tiste had found signs that
+were hot&mdash;oh! so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so fresh
+that it had not yet dried. This was not a region of timber-wolves. What
+had dug that hole? Not the small, skulking coyote&mdash;the vagrant of
+prairie life! Oh!&mdash;no!&mdash;the coyote like other vagrants earns his living
+without work, by skulking in the wake of the business-like badger; and
+when the badger goes down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands
+nearby and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to escape the
+invading badger.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> What had dug the hole? Ba'tiste thinks that he
+knows.</p>
+
+<p>That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is another kind of
+hole&mdash;a roundish pit dug between moss-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>covered logs and earth wall, a
+pit with grass clawed down into it, snug and hidden and sheltered as a
+bird's nest. If the pit is what Ba'tiste thinks, somewhere on the banks
+of the stream should be a watering-place. He proposes that they beach
+the canoes and camp here. Twilight is not a good time to still hunt an
+unseen bear. Twilight is the time when the bear himself goes still
+hunting. Ba'tiste will go out in the early morning. Meantime if he
+stumbles on what looks like a trail to the watering-place, he will set a
+trap.</p>
+
+<p>Camp is not for the regular trapper what it is for the amateur hunter&mdash;a
+time of rest and waiting while others skin the game and prepare supper.</p>
+
+<p>One hunter whittles the willow sticks that are to make the camp fire.
+Another gathers moss or boughs for a bed. If fish can be got, some one
+has out a line. The kettle hisses from the cross-bar between notched
+sticks above the fire, and the meat sizzling at the end of a forked twig
+sends up a flavour that whets every appetite. Over the upturned canoes
+bend a couple of men gumming afresh all the splits and seams against
+to-morrow's voyage. Then with a flip-flop that tells of the other side
+of the flap-jacks being browned, the cook yodels in crescendo that
+"Sup&mdash;per!&mdash;'s&mdash;read&mdash;ee!"</p>
+
+<p>Supper over, a trap or two may be set in likely places. The men may take
+a plunge; for in spite of their tawny skins, these earth-coloured
+fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
+indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
+fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
+Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
+"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
+Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
+spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
+wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
+whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
+crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
+hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
+he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
+with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering <big>V</big> lines, wing
+geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
+great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
+wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
+flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
+overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
+mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
+autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
+fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.</p>
+
+<p>Unless it is raining, the <i>voyageurs</i> do not erect their tent; for they
+will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
+the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
+And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
+of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
+chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
+able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
+care. When the hunter came suddenly on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> them, over the old hen went,
+flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
+for shelter&mdash;when&mdash;lo!&mdash;of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
+she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
+stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
+fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
+they died of starvation and their bones bleached in the rusted steel.</p>
+
+<p>That story has such small relish for Ba'tiste that he hitches farther
+away from the others and lies back flat on the ground close to the
+willow under-tangle with his head on his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"For sure," says Ba'tiste contemptuously, "nobody doesn't need no tree
+to climb here! Sacré!&mdash;cry wolf!&mdash;wolf!&mdash;and for sure!&mdash;diable!&mdash;de beeg
+loup-garou will eat you yet!"</p>
+
+<p>Down somewhere from those stars overhead drops a call silvery as a
+flute, clear as a piccolo&mdash;some night bird lilting like a mote on the
+far oceans of air. The trappers look up with a movement that in other
+men would be a nervous start; for any shrill cry pierces the silence of
+the prairie in almost a stab. Then the men go on with their yarn telling
+of how the Blackfeet murdered some traders on this very ground not long
+ago till the gloom gathering over willow thicket and encircling cliffs
+seems peopled with those marauding warriors. One man rises, saying that
+he is "goin' to turn in" and is taking a step through the dark to his
+canoe when there is a dull pouncing thud. For an instant the trappers
+thought that their comrade had stumbled over his boat. But a heavy
+groan&mdash;a low guttural cry&mdash;a shout of "Help&mdash;help&mdash;help Ba'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>tiste!" and
+the man who had risen plunged into the crashing cane-brake, calling out
+incoherently for them to "help&mdash;help Ba'tiste!"</p>
+
+<p>In the confusion of cries and darkness, it was impossible for the other
+two trappers to know what had happened. Their first thought was of the
+Indians whose crimes they had been telling. Their second was for their
+rifles&mdash;and they had both sprung over the fire where they saw the third
+man striking&mdash;striking&mdash;striking wildly at something in the dark. A low
+worrying growl&mdash;and they descried the Frenchman rolling over and over,
+clutched by or clutching a huge furry form&mdash;hitting&mdash;plunging with his
+knife&mdash;struggling&mdash;screaming with agony.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Ba'tiste! It's a bear!" shouted the third man, who was attempting
+to drive the brute off by raining blows on its head.</p>
+
+<p>Man and bear were an indistinguishable struggling mass. Should they
+shoot in the half-dark? Then the Frenchman uttered the scream of one in
+death-throes: "Shoot!&mdash;shoot!&mdash;shoot quick! She's striking my
+face!&mdash;she's striking my face&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And before the words had died, sharp flashes of light cleft the
+dark&mdash;the great beast rolled over with a coughing growl, and the
+trappers raised their comrade from the ground.</p>
+
+<p>The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
+piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
+uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
+fore paw.</p>
+
+<p>Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> hands, "what is done
+to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"</p>
+
+<p>Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
+fainted because of what his hands felt.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
+those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
+how many others whose treachery will never be known.</p>
+
+<p>But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
+flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
+foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
+in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
+of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
+doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
+was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
+post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
+set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.</p>
+
+<p>Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
+attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
+creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
+ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
+baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:</p>
+
+<p>"S&mdash;s&mdash;sz!&mdash;" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear&mdash;it is an
+animal!&mdash;the bear!&mdash;it is a beast<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>!&mdash;toujours!&mdash;the bear!&mdash;it is a
+beast!&mdash;always&mdash;always!" And his hands clinch.</p>
+
+<p>Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
+sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.</p>
+
+<p>Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
+the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
+death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbé Dugast, of St. Boniface,
+Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
+Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
+overdrawn, I quote the Abbé's words:</p>
+
+<p>"At a little distance Madame Lajimoniere and the other women were
+preparing the tents for the night, when all at once Bouvier gave a cry
+of distress and called to his companions to help him. At the first
+shout, each hunter seized his gun and prepared to defend himself against
+the attack of an enemy; they hurried to the other side of the ditch to
+see what was the matter with Bouvier, and what he was struggling with.
+They had no idea that a wild animal would come near the fire to attack a
+man even under cover of night; for fire usually has the effect of
+frightening wild beasts. However, almost before the four hunters knew
+what had happened, they saw their unfortunate companion dragged into the
+woods by a bear followed by her two cubs. She held Bouvier in her claws
+and struck him savagely in the face to stun him. As soon as she saw the
+four men in pursuit, she redoubled her fury against her prey, tearing
+his face with her claws. M. Lajimoniere, who was an intrepid hunter,
+baited her with the butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as
+he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while trying to save
+him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being choked, cried with all his
+strength: 'Shoot; I would rather be shot than eaten alive!' M.
+Lajimoniere pulled the trigger as close to the bear as possible,
+wounding her mortally. She let go Bouvier and before her strength was
+exhausted made a wild attack upon M. Lajimoniere, who expected this and
+as his gun had only one barrel loaded, he ran towards the canoe, where
+he had a second gun fully charged. He had hardly seized it before the
+bear reached the shore and tried to climb into the canoe, but fearing no
+longer to wound his friend, M. Lajimoniere aimed full at her breast and
+this time she was killed instantly. As soon as the bear was no longer to
+be feared, Madame Lajimoniere, who had been trembling with fear during
+the tumult, went to raise the unfortunate Bouvier, who was covered with
+wounds and nearly dead. The bear had torn the skin from his face with
+her nails from the roots of his hair to the lower part of his chin. His
+eyes and nose were gone&mdash;in fact his features were indiscernible&mdash;but he
+was not mortally injured. His wounds were dressed as well as the
+circumstances would permit, and thus crippled he was carried to the Fort
+of the Prairies, Madame Lajimoniere taking care of him all through the
+journey. In time his wounds were successfully healed, but he was blind
+and infirm to the end of his life. He dwelt at the Fort of the Prairies
+for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
+1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
+priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
+time during the last years of his life in mak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>ing crosses and crucifixes
+blind as he was, but he never made any <i>chefs d'[oe]uvre</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
+things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
+the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
+I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
+1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
+only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
+death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
+country&mdash;and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
+ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
+whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not&mdash;whether, in a word, it
+is altogether <i>humane to hunt bears</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>JOHN COLTER&mdash;FREE TRAPPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
+tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
+with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.</p>
+
+<p>The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
+nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.</p>
+
+<p>Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
+Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
+stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
+the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
+ice, the rush of whirlpools through the blackness of some far cañon, the
+crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
+multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
+startling the silences&mdash;these things filled the Indian with
+superstitious fears.</p>
+
+<p>The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"&mdash;great pillars of
+sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
+floods&mdash;were to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
+awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
+quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
+The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
+echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
+swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.</p>
+
+<p>Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.</p>
+
+<p>Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
+every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
+in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
+east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
+stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
+the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
+the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
+camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
+down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
+the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
+cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
+white man's language, mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
+the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
+in safety.</p>
+
+<p>Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
+built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
+covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
+prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> sharp that French
+<i>voyageurs</i> gave this queer craft the name "<i>canot à bec
+d'esturgeon</i>"&mdash;that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
+American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
+would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed cañons of the mountain
+streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
+other light timber, with such an angular narrow prow that it could take
+the sheerest dip and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat
+would fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men pushed
+out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now on that, using
+the reversible double-bladed paddles which only an amphibious boatman
+can manage. The two men shot out in mid-stream, where the mists would
+hide them from each shore; a moment later the white fog had enfolded
+them, and there was no trace of human presence but the trail of dimpling
+ripples in the wake of the canoe.</p>
+
+<p>No talking, no whistling, not a sound to betray them. And there were
+good reasons why these men did not wish their presence known. One was
+Potts, the other John Colter. Both had been with the Lewis and Clark
+exploring party of 1804-'05, when a Blackfoot brave had been slain for
+horse-thieving by the first white men to cross the Upper Missouri.
+Besides, the year before coming to the Jefferson, Colter had been with
+the Missouri Company's fur brigade under Manuel Lisa, and had gone to
+the Crows as an emissary from the fur company. While with the Crows, a
+battle had taken place against the Blackfeet, in which they suffered
+heavy loss owing to Colter's prowess. That made the Blackfeet sworn
+enemies to Colter.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Turning off the Jefferson, the trappers headed their canoe up a side
+stream, probably one of those marshy reaches where beavers have formed a
+swamp by damming up the current of a sluggish stream. Such quiet waters
+are favourite resorts for beaver and mink and marten and pekan. Setting
+their traps only after nightfall, the two men could not possibly have
+put out more than forty or fifty. Thirty traps are a heavy day's work
+for one man. Six prizes out of thirty are considered a wonderful run of
+luck; but the empty traps must be examined as carefully as the
+successful ones. Many that have been mauled, "scented" by a beaver scout
+and left, must be replaced. Others must have fresh bait; others, again,
+carried to better grounds where there are more game signs.</p>
+
+<p>Either this was a very lucky morning and the men were detained taking
+fresh pelts, or it was a very unlucky morning and the men had decided to
+trap farther up-stream; for when the mists began to rise, the hunters
+were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver meadow, they continued
+paddling up-stream away from the Jefferson. A more hidden water-course
+they could hardly have found. The swampy beaver-runs narrowed, the
+shores rose higher and higher into rampart walls, and the dark-shadowed
+waters came leaping down in the lumpy, uneven runnels of a small cañon.
+You can always tell whether the waters of a cañon are compressed or not,
+whether they come from broad, swampy meadows or clear snow streams
+smaller than the cañon. The marsh waters roll down swift and black and
+turbid, raging against the crowding walls; the snow streams leap clear
+and foaming as champagne, and are in too great a hurry to stop and
+quarrel with the rocks. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> altogether likely these men recognised
+swampy water, and were ascending the cañon in search of a fresh
+beaver-marsh; or they would not have continued paddling six miles above
+the Jefferson with daylight growing plainer at every mile. First the
+mist rose like a smoky exhalation from the river; then it flaunted
+across the rampart walls in banners; then the far mountain peaks took
+form against the sky, islands in a sea of fog; then the cloud banks were
+floating in mid-heaven blindingly white from a sun that painted each
+cañon wall in the depths of the water.</p>
+
+<p>How much farther would the cañon lead? Should they go higher up or not?
+Was it wooded or clear plain above the walls? The man paused. What was
+that noise?</p>
+
+<p>"Like buffalo," said Potts.</p>
+
+<p>"Might be Blackfeet," answered Colter.</p>
+
+<p>No. What would Blackfeet be doing, riding at a pace to make such thunder
+so close to a cañon? It was only a buffalo herd stampeding on the annual
+southern run. Again Colter urged that the noise <i>might</i> be from Indians.
+It would be safer for them to retreat at once. At which Potts wanted to
+know if Colter were afraid, using a stronger word&mdash;"coward."</p>
+
+<p>Afraid? Colter afraid? Colter who had remained behind Lewis and Clark's
+men to trap alone in the wilds for nearly two years, who had left Manuel
+Lisa's brigade to go alone among the thieving Crows, whose leadership
+had helped the Crows to defeat the Blackfeet?</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, it would now be as dangerous to go back as forward. They plainly
+couldn't land here. Let them go ahead where the walls seemed to slope
+down to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an elbow of
+rock into the narrow course of a creek. Instantly out sprang five or six
+hundred Blackfeet warriors with weapons levelled guarding both sides of
+the stream.</p>
+
+<p>An Indian scout had discovered the trail of the white men and sent the
+whole band scouring ahead to intercept them at this narrow pass. The
+chief stepped forward, and with signals that were a command beckoned the
+hunters ashore.</p>
+
+<p>As is nearly always the case, the rash man was the one to lose his head,
+the cautious man the one to keep his presence of mind. Potts was for an
+attempt at flight, when every bow on both sides of the river would have
+let fly a shot. Colter was for accepting the situation, trusting to his
+own wit for subsequent escape.</p>
+
+<p>Colter, who was acting as steersman, sent the canoe ashore. Bottom had
+not grated before a savage snatched Potts's rifle from his hands.
+Springing ashore, Colter forcibly wrested the weapon back and coolly
+handed it to Potts.</p>
+
+<p>But Potts had lost all the rash courage of a moment before, and with one
+push sent the canoe into mid-stream. Colter shouted at him to come
+back&mdash;come back! Indians have more effective arguments. A bow-string
+twanged, and Potts screamed out, "Colter, I am wounded!"</p>
+
+<p>Again Colter urged him to land. The wound turned Pott's momentary fright
+to a paroxysm of rage. Aiming his rifle, he shot his Indian assailant
+dead. If it was torture that he feared, that act assured him at least a
+quick death; for, in Colter's language, man and boat were
+instantaneously "made a riddle of."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No man admires courage more than the Indian; and the Blackfeet
+recognised in their captive one who had been ready to defend his comrade
+against them all, and who had led the Crows to victory against their own
+band.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner surrendered his weapons. He was stripped naked, but neither
+showed sign of fear nor made a move to escape. Evidently the Blackfeet
+could have rare sport with this game white man. His life in the Indian
+country had taught him a few words of the Blackfoot language. He heard
+them conferring as to how he should be tortured to atone for all that
+the Blackfeet had suffered at white men's hands. One warrior suggested
+that the hunter be set up as a target and shot at. Would he then be so
+brave?</p>
+
+<p>But the chief shook his head. That was not game enough sport for
+Blackfeet warriors. That would be letting a man die passively. And how
+this man could fight if he had an opportunity! How he could resist
+torture if he had any chance of escaping the torture!</p>
+
+<p>But Colter stood impassive and listened. Doubtless he regretted having
+left the well-defended brigades of the fur companies to hunt alone in
+the wilderness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gambler's
+vice&mdash;the more a man has, the more he wants. Had not Colter crossed the
+Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
+fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
+revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
+that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
+more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
+coming up the Missouri with a brigade of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> hunters, and for the third
+time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
+Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
+by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
+instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
+things&mdash;to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
+wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The free trappers formed a class by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
+on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
+like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
+boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
+free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
+where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
+but the one that paid the highest prices. For the <i>mangeurs de lard</i>, as
+they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
+the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
+or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
+had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.</p>
+
+<p>The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
+He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
+Indian&mdash;whisky&mdash;among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
+terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
+Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
+Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> fame,
+might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
+these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
+companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
+Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
+among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the
+term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
+Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
+in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
+for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
+dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
+Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day&mdash;before they joined
+the Astorians&mdash;and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
+the true type of free trapper.</p>
+
+<p>The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
+behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
+might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
+Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
+region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
+dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
+Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
+years before the Astorians came in 1811.</p>
+
+<p>One crime the free trappers may be charged with&mdash;a reckless waste of
+precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
+hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
+hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> game while the mothers
+were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
+follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
+away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
+of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
+game.</p>
+
+<p>Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
+Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
+classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
+After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
+permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
+"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
+wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
+passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
+where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
+ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
+very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
+held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the company,
+was able to say only two years ago, "the fur trade is quite as large as
+ever it was."</p>
+
+<p>Among free hunters, Canada had only one commanding figure&mdash;John Johnston
+of the Soo, who settled at La Pointe on Lake Superior in 1792, formed
+league with Wabogish, "the White Fisher," and became the most famous
+trader of the Lakes. His life, too, was almost as eventful as Colter's.
+A member of the Irish nobility, some secret which he never chose to
+reveal drove him to the wilds. Wabogish, the "White Fisher," had a
+daughter who refused the wooings of all her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> tribe's warriors. In vain
+Johnston sued for her hand. Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his
+Irish estates and prove his devotion by buying as vast estates in
+America. Johnston took the old chief at his word, and married the
+haughty princess of the Lake. When the War of 1812 set all the tribes by
+the ears, Johnston and his wife had as thrilling adventures as ever
+Colter knew among the Blackfeet.</p>
+
+<p>Many a free trapper, and partner of the fur companies as well, secured
+his own safety by marrying the daughter of a chief, as Johnston had.
+These were not the lightly-come, lightly-go affairs of the vagrant
+adventurer. If the husband had not cast off civilization like a garment,
+the wife had to put it on like a garment; and not an ill-fitting garment
+either, when one considers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted
+the wilderness like oases in a desert almost contemporaneous with the
+fur trade. If the trapper had not sunk to the level of the savages, the
+little daughter of the chief was educated by the nuns for her new
+position. I recall several cases where the child was sent across the
+Atlantic to an English governess so that the equality would be literal
+and not a sentimental fiction. And yet, on no subject has the western
+fur trader received more persistent and unjust condemnation. The heroism
+that culminated in the union of Pocahontas with a noted Virginian won
+applause, and almost similar circumstances dictated the union of fur
+traders with the daughters of Indian chiefs; but because the fur trader
+has not posed as a sentimentalist, he has become more or less of a
+target for the index finger of the Pharisee.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>North of the boundary the free trapper had small chance against the
+Hudson's Bay Company. As long as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself
+chiefly recruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the
+Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of the Mississippi;
+but after the Mackinaw was absorbed by the aggressive American Fur
+Company, the free hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Missouri
+competition raged from 1810, so that circumstances drove the free
+trapper westward to the mountains, where he is hunting in the twentieth
+century as his prototype hunted two hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>In Canada&mdash;of course after 1870&mdash;he entered the mountains chiefly by
+three passes: (1) Yellow Head Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the
+narrow gap where the Bow emerges to the plains&mdash;that is, the river where
+the Indians found the best wood for the making of bows; (3) north of the
+boundary, through that narrow defile overtowered by the lonely
+flat-crowned peak called Crows Nest Mountain&mdash;that is, where the
+fugitive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the United States, the free hunters also approached the mountains by
+three main routes: (1) Up the Platte; (2) westward from the Missouri
+across the plains; (3) by the Three Forks of the Missouri. For instance,
+it was coming down the Platte that poor Scott's canoe was overturned,
+his powder lost, and his rifles rendered useless. Game had retreated to
+the mountains with spring's advance. Berries were not ripe by the time
+trappers were descending with their winter's hunt. Scott and his
+famishing men could not find edible roots. Each day Scott weakened.
+There was no food. Finally, Scott had strength to go no farther. His men
+had found tracks of some other hunting party far to the fore. They
+thought that, in any case, he could not live. What ought they to do?
+Hang back and starve with him, or hasten forward while they had
+strength, to the party whose track they had espied? On pretence of
+seeking roots, they deserted the helpless man. Perhaps they did not come
+up with the advance party till they were sure that Scott must have died;
+for they did not go back to his aid. The next spring when these same
+hunters went up the Platte, they found the skeleton of poor Scott sixty
+miles from the place where they had left him. The terror that spurred
+the emaciated man to drag himself all this weary distance can barely be
+conceived; but such were the fearful odds taken by every free trapper
+who went up the Platte, across the parched plains, or to the head waters
+of the Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>The time for the free trappers to go out was, in Indian language, "when
+the leaves began to fall." If a mighty hunter like Colter, the trapper
+was to the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> of woods
+and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
+red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
+slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
+questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
+of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
+important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
+the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
+hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
+all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
+provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
+to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
+was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
+the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.</p>
+
+<p>Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
+himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
+thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
+squaw all the pemmican white men could use.</p>
+
+<p>Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
+trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
+the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
+piece of string&mdash;<i>babiche</i> (leather cord, called by the Indians
+<i>assapapish</i>)&mdash;fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
+dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
+marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher&mdash;a
+hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> his next year's
+canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood&mdash;some man wanted this tree
+for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
+beaver-marsh&mdash;some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
+other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
+told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
+could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
+were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
+If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
+tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
+the inside of a punky trunk and the shooting flames were a rallying
+call.</p>
+
+<p>In the most perilous regions the trapper travelled only after nightfall
+with muffled paddles&mdash;that is, muffled where the handle might strike the
+gunwale. Camp-fires warned him which side of the river to avoid; and
+often a trapper slipping past under the shadow of one bank saw hobgoblin
+figures dancing round the flames of the other bank&mdash;Indians celebrating
+their scalp dance. In these places the white hunter ate cold meals to
+avoid lighting a fire; or if he lighted a fire, after cooking his meal
+he withdrew at once and slept at a distance from the light that might
+betray him.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest risk of travelling after dark during the spring floods
+arose from what the <i>voyageurs</i> called <i>embarras</i>&mdash;trees torn from the
+banks sticking in the soft bottom like derelicts with branches to
+entangle the trapper's craft; but the <i>embarras</i> often befriended the
+solitary white man. Usually he slept on shore rolled in a buffalo-robe;
+but if Indian signs were fresh, he moored his canoe in mid-current and
+slept under hiding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> of the driftwood. Friendly Indians did not conceal
+themselves, but came to the river bank waving a buffalo-robe and
+spreading it out to signal a welcome to the white man; when the trapper
+would go ashore, whiff pipes with the chiefs and perhaps spend the night
+listening to the tales of exploits which each notch on the calumet
+typified. Incidents that meant nothing to other men were full of
+significance to the lone <i>voyageur</i> through hostile lands. Always the
+spring floods drifted down numbers of dead buffalo; and the carrion
+birds sat on the trees of the shore with their wings spread out to dry
+in the sun. The sudden flacker of a rising flock betrayed something
+prowling in ambush on the bank; so did the splash of a snake from
+overhanging branches into the water.</p>
+
+<p>Different sorts of dangers beset the free trapper crossing the plains to
+the mountains. The fur company brigades always had escort of armed guard
+and provision packers. The free trappers went alone or in pairs,
+picketing horses to the saddle overlaid with a buffalo-robe for a
+pillow, cooking meals on chip fires, using a slow-burning wormwood bark
+for matches, and trusting their horses or dog to give the alarm if the
+bands of coyotes hovering through the night dusk approached too near. On
+the high rolling plains, hostiles could be descried at a distance,
+coming over the horizon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or
+emerging from the "coolies"&mdash;dried sloughs&mdash;like wolves from the earth.
+Enemies could be seen soon enough; but where could the trapper hide on
+bare prairie? He didn't attempt to hide. He simply set fire to the
+prairie and took refuge on the lee side. That device failing, he was at
+his enemies' mercy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the plains, the greatest danger was from lack of water. At one season
+the trapper might know where to find good camping streams. The next year
+when he came to those streams they were dry.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"After leaving the buffalo meadows a dreadful scarcity of water
+ensued," wrote Charles MacKenzie, of the famous MacKenzie clan. He
+was journeying north from the Missouri. "We had to alter our course
+and steer to a distant lake. When we got there we found the lake
+dry. However, we dug a pit which produced a kind of stinking liquid
+which we all drank. It was salt and bitter, caused an inflammation
+of the mouth, left a disagreeable roughness of the throat, and
+seemed to increase our thirst.... We passed the night under great
+uneasiness. Next day we continued our journey, but not a drop of
+water was to be found, ... and our distress became
+insupportable.... All at once our horses became so unruly that we
+could not manage them. We observed that they showed an inclination
+towards a hill which was close by. It struck me that they might
+have scented water.... I ascended to the top, where, to my great
+joy, I discovered a small pool.... My horse plunged in before I
+could prevent him, ... and all the horses drank to excess."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"<i>The plains across</i>"&mdash;which was a western expression meaning the end of
+that part of the trip&mdash;there rose on the west rolling foothills and dark
+peaked profiles against the sky scarcely to be distinguished from gray
+cloud banks. These were the mountains; and the real hazards of free
+trapping began. No use to follow the easiest passes to the most
+frequented valleys. The fur company brigades marched through these,
+sweeping up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers sought out the
+hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where neither pack horse nor <i>canot
+à bec d'esturgeon</i> could follow. How did they do it? Very much the way<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+Simon Fraser's hunters crawled down the river-course named after him.
+"Our shoes," said one trapper, "did not last a single day."</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"We had to plunge our daggers into the ground, ... otherwise we
+would slide into the river," wrote Fraser. "We cut steps into the
+declivity, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, with which
+some of the men ascended in order to haul it up. .. Our lives hung,
+as it were, upon a thread, as the failure of the line or the false
+step of the man might have hurled us into eternity.... We had to
+pass where no human being should venture.... Steps were formed like
+a ladder on the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another
+and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended
+from the top to the foot of immense precipices, and fastened at
+both extremities to stones and trees."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>He speaks of the worst places being where these frail swaying ladders
+led up to the overhanging ledge of a shelving precipice.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Such were the very real adventures of the trapper's life, a life whose
+fascinations lured John Colter from civilization to the wilds again and
+again till he came back once too often and found himself stripped,
+helpless, captive, in the hands of the Blackfeet.</p>
+
+<p>It would be poor sport torturing a prisoner who showed no more fear than
+this impassive white man coolly listening and waiting for them to
+compass his death. So the chief dismissed the suggestion to shoot at
+their captive as a target. Suddenly the Blackfoot leader turned to
+Colter. "Could the white man run fast?" he asked. In a flash Colter
+guessed what was to be his fate. He, the hunter, was to be hunted. No,
+he cunningly signalled, he was only a poor runner.</p>
+
+<p>Bidding his warriors stand still, the chief roughly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> led Colter out
+three hundred yards. Then he set his captive free, and the exultant
+shriek of the running warriors told what manner of sport this was to be.
+It was a race for life.</p>
+
+<p>The white man shot out with all the power of muscles hard as iron-wood
+and tense as a bent bow. Fear winged the man running for his life to
+outrace the winged arrows coming from the shouting warriors three
+hundred yards behind. Before him stretched a plain six miles wide, the
+distance he had so thoughtlessly paddled between the rampart walls of
+the cañon but a few hours ago. At the Jefferson was a thick forest
+growth where a fugitive might escape. Somewhere along the Jefferson was
+his own hidden cabin.</p>
+
+<p>Across this plain sped Colter, pursued by a band of six hundred
+shrieking demons. Not one breath did he waste looking back over his
+shoulder till he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
+from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
+was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
+redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
+who was only a hundred yards behind.</p>
+
+<p>There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
+renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
+spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
+more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
+every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
+He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
+man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is an Indian <i>ruse</i> to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
+of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
+of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
+his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
+pinned the savage through the body to the earth.</p>
+
+<p>That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
+rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.</p>
+
+<p>In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
+where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
+up with his head among branches of trees.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
+log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
+man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
+wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
+country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
+Bighorn River.</p>
+
+<p>Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
+subsisted entirely on roots and berries.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
+Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
+were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
+that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
+in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
+episode for history in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> small-type foot-note to his book published in
+London in 1817.</p>
+
+<p>Two other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
+Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
+the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
+of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
+beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.</p>
+
+<p>And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
+Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
+wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
+to his life&mdash;he had taken to himself a bride.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
+empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
+lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
+corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
+stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
+armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
+three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
+long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
+of silent achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
+Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> Such is the Hudson's
+Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
+the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
+trade to his cousin Prince Rupert.</p>
+
+<p>Governors and chief factors have changed with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> changing centuries;
+but the character of the company's personnel has never changed. Prince
+Rupert, the first governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James
+II); and the royal governor by a long line of distinguished public men
+down to Lord Strathcona, the present governor, and C. C. Chipman, the
+chief commissioner or executive officer. All have been men of noted
+achievement, often in touch with the Crown, always with that passion for
+executive and mastery of difficulty which exults most when the conflict
+is keenest.</p>
+
+<p>Pioneers face the unknown when circumstances push them into it.
+Adventurers rush into the unknown for the zest of conquering it. It has
+been to the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged.</p>
+
+<p>Radisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who first brought back word
+of the great wealth in furs round the far northern sea, had been
+gentlemen adventurers&mdash;"rascals" their enemies called them. Prince
+Rupert, who leagued himself with the Frenchmen to obtain a charter for
+his fur trade, had been an adventurer of the high seas&mdash;"pirate" we
+would say&mdash;long before he became first governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, the company's third governor, was
+as great an adventurer as he was a general.</p>
+
+<p>Latterly the word "adventurer" has fallen in such evil repute, it may
+scarcely be applied to living actors. But using it in the old-time sense
+of militant hero, what cavalier of gold braid and spurs could be more of
+an adventurer than young Donald Smith who traded in the desolate wastes
+of Labrador, spending seventeen years in the hardest field of the fur
+company, tramping on snow-shoes half the width of a continent, camping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+where night overtook him under blanketing of snow-drifts, who rose step
+by step from trader on the east coast to commissioner in the west? And
+this Donald Smith became Lord Strathcona, the governor of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.</p>
+
+<p>Men bold in action and conservative in traditions have ruled the
+company. The governor resident in England is now represented by the
+chief commissioner, who in turn is represented at each of the many
+inland forts by a chief factor of the district. Nominally, the
+fur-trader's northern realm is governed by the Parliament of Canada.
+Virtually, the chief factor rules as autocratically to-day as he did
+before the Canadian Government took over the proprietary rights of the
+fur company.</p>
+
+<p>How did these rulers of the wilds, these princes of the fur trade, live
+in lonely forts and mountain fastnesses? Visit one of the northern forts
+as it exists to-day.</p>
+
+<p>The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The farther north the fort,
+the more typical it is of the fur-trader's realm.</p>
+
+<p>For six, seven, eight months of the year, the fur-trader's world is a
+white wilderness of snow; snow water-waved by winds that sweep from the
+pole; snow drifted into ramparts round the fort stockades till the
+highest picket sinks beneath the white flood and the corner bastions are
+almost submerged and the entrance to the central gate resembles the
+cutting of a railway tunnel; snow that billows to the unbroken reaches
+of the circling sky-line like a white sea. East, frost-mist hides the
+low horizon in clouds of smoke, for the sun which rises from the east in
+other climes rises from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> the south-east here; and until the spring
+equinox, bringing summer with a flood-tide of thaw, gray darkness hangs
+in the east like a fog. South, the sun moves across the snowy levels in
+a wheel of fire, for it has scarcely risen full sphered above the
+sky-line before it sinks again etching drift and tip of half-buried
+brush in long lonely fading shadows. The west shimmers in warm purplish
+grays, for the moist Chinook winds come over the mountains melting the
+snow by magic. North, is the cold steel of ice by day; and at night
+Northern Lights darting through the polar dark like burnished spears.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas day is welcomed at the northern fur posts by a firing of
+cannon from the snow-muffled bastions. Before the stars have faded,
+chapel services begin. Frequently on either Christmas or New Year's day,
+a grand feast is given the tawny-skinned <i>habitués</i> of the fort, who
+come shuffling to the main mess-room with no other announcement than the
+lifting of the latch, and billet themselves on the hospitality of a host
+that has never turned hungry Indians from its doors.</p>
+
+<p>For reasons well-known to the woodcraftsman, a sudden lull falls on
+winter hunting in December, and all the trappers within a week's journey
+from the fort, all the half-breed guides who add to the instinct of
+native craft the reasoning of the white, all the Indian hunters ranging
+river-course and mountain have come by snow-shoes and dog train to spend
+festive days at the fort. A great jangling of bells announces the
+huskies (dog trains) scampering over the crusted snow-drifts. A babel of
+barks and curses follows, for the huskies celebrate their arrival by
+tangling themselves up in their harness and enjoying a free fight.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dogs unharnessed, in troop the trappers to the banquet-hall, flinging
+packs of tightly roped peltries down promiscuously, to be sorted next
+day. One Indian enters just as he has left the hunting-field, clad from
+head to heel in white caribou with the antlers left on the capote as a
+decoy. His squaw has togged out for the occasion in a comical medley of
+brass bracelets and finger-rings, with a bear's claw necklace and ermine
+ruff which no city connoisseur could possibly mistake for rabbit. If a
+daughter yet remain unappropriated she will display the gayest
+attire&mdash;red flannel galore, red shawl, red scarf, with perhaps an apron
+of white fox-skin and moccasins garnished in coloured grasses. The
+braves outdo even a vain young squaw. Whole fox, mink, or otter skins
+have been braided to the end of their hair, and hang down in two plaits
+to the floor. Whitest of buckskin has been ornamented with brightest of
+beads, and over all hangs the gaudiest of blankets, it may be a
+musk-ox-skin with the feats of the warrior set forth in rude drawings on
+the smooth side.</p>
+
+<p>Children and old people, too, come to the feast, for the Indian's
+stomach is the magnet that draws his soul. Grotesque little figures the
+children are, with men's trousers shambling past their heels,
+rabbit-skin coats with the fur turned in, and on top of all some old
+stovepipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to the urchin's
+neck. The old people have more resemblance to parchment on gnarled
+sticks than to human beings. They shiver under dirty blankets with every
+sort of cast-off rag tied about their limbs, hobbling lame from frozen
+feet or rheumatism, mumbling toothless requests for something to eat or
+something to wear,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> for tobacco, the solace of Indian woes, or what is
+next best&mdash;tea.</p>
+
+<p>Among so many guests are many needs. One half-breed from a far wintering
+outpost, where perhaps a white man and this guide are living in a
+chinked shack awaiting a hunting party's return, arrives at the fort
+with frozen feet. Little Labree's feet must be thawed out, and sometimes
+little Labree dies under the process, leaving as a legacy to the chief
+factor the death-bed pledge that the corpse be taken to a distant tribal
+burying-ground. And no matter how inclement the winter, the chief factor
+keeps his pledge, for the integrity of a promise is the only law in the
+fur-trader's realm. Special attentions, too, must be paid those old
+retainers who have acted as mentors of the fort in times of trouble.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago it would not have been safe to give this treat inside
+the fort walls. Rations would have been served through loop-holes and
+the feast held outside the gates; but so faithfully have the Indians
+become bound to the Hudson's Bay Company there are not three forts in
+the fur territory where Indians must be excluded.</p>
+
+<p>Of the feast little need be said. Like the camel, the Indian lays up
+store for the morrow, judging from his capacity for weeks of morrows.
+His benefactor no more dines with him than a plantation master of the
+South would have dined with feasting slaves. Elsewhere a bell calls the
+company officers to breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 1, supper at 7.
+Officers dine first, white hunters and trappers second, that difference
+between master and servant being maintained which is part of the
+company's almost military discipline. In the large forts are libraries,
+whither resort the officers for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> long winter nights. But over the
+feast wild hilarity reigns.</p>
+
+<p>A French-Canadian fiddler strikes up a tuneless jig that sets the
+Indians pounding the floor in figureless dances with moccasined heels
+till midday glides into midnight and midnight to morning. I remember
+hearing of one such midday feast in Red River settlement that prolonged
+itself past four of the second morning. Against the walls sit old folks
+spinning yarns of the past. There is a print of Sir George Simpson
+behind one <i>raconteur's</i> head. Ah! yes, the oldest guides all remember
+Sir George, though half a century has passed since his day. He was the
+governor who travelled with flags flying from every prow, and cannon
+firing when he left the forts, and men drawn up in procession like
+soldiers guarding an emperor when he entered the fur posts with
+<i>coureurs</i> and all the flourish of royal state. Then some story-teller
+recalls how he has heard the old guides tell of the imperious governor
+once provoking personal conflict with an equally imperious steersman,
+who first ducked the governor into a lake they were traversing and then
+ducked into the lake himself to rescue the governor.</p>
+
+<p>And there is a crucifix high on the wall left by Père Lacomb the last
+time the famous missionary to the red men of the Far North passed this
+way; and every Indian calls up some kindness done, some sacrifice by
+Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old muskets and Indian masks and
+scalp-locks, bringing back the days when Russian traders instigated a
+massacre at this fort and when white traders flew at each other's
+throats as Nor' Westers struggled with Hudson's Bay for supremacy in the
+fur trade.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fighters, they did not know
+how to stop. Mais, sacré, they were fools, those white men after all!
+Instead of hiding in ambush to catch the foe, those white men measured
+off paces, stood up face to face and fired blank&mdash;oui&mdash;fired blank! Ugh!
+Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, most like, he was
+wound'! Ugh, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?"<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+
+<p>Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless. That enormous
+bear-skin stretched to four pegs on the wall brings up Montagnais, the
+Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest
+bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one
+hand dragging the enormous skin and the other holding the place which
+his nose no longer graced.</p>
+
+<p>"Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez
+ici&mdash;bien&mdash;so&mdash;I tole you 'bout heem," begins some French-Canadian
+trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
+"Bigosh! He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go
+stumble t'rough snow&mdash;how you call dat?&mdash;hill, steep&mdash;steep! Oui, by
+Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de&mdash;de gran'
+rapeed, see?" emphasizing the snow-slide with illustrative gesture.
+"Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem
+fall&mdash;so&mdash;see? Tonnerre! Bigosh! for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
+Sacré! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> ol' bear sleep in snow.
+Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear&mdash;diable!
+'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg
+loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man&mdash;he not scare&mdash;he say wan leetle
+prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'&mdash;sacré&mdash;dat grab hees
+knife out hees belt&mdash;sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her
+breat'&mdash;diable!&mdash;for sure he fin' de place her heart beat&mdash;Tonnerre!
+Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat
+bear! Dat bes' t'ing do&mdash;for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best
+t'ing do! De bear she roll over&mdash;over&mdash;dead's wan stone&mdash;c'est vrai! she
+no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over
+too&mdash;leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
+dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"</p>
+
+<p>And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
+credit of Montagnais's heroism.</p>
+
+<p>But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
+the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
+of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
+peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
+spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
+plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
+frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
+beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
+a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
+chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
+can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
+musk-rat-skins,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
+season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
+prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
+heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.</p>
+
+<p>The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
+arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
+hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
+the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
+beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
+gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
+the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
+more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
+effected.</p>
+
+<p>But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
+dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.</p>
+
+<p>South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
+beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
+shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
+stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
+1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
+five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth
+from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox
+worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's
+Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000
+blue, 100,000 red, half<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the
+trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and
+white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against
+the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other
+game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur
+taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be
+that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the
+hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the
+Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the
+white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and
+seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares
+the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is
+plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.</p>
+
+<p>Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to
+the store counter where begins interminable dickering. Montagnais's
+squaw has only fifty "beaver" coin, and her desires are a hundredfold
+what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating
+down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk
+a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to
+have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At
+the termination of each bargain, so many coins pass across the counter.
+Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver
+enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of
+Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
+The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many "beaver"
+against the trapper's next hunt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a
+disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an
+easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor
+the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no competition,
+whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer,
+for which the Indian has as keen an appetite, both for the exigencies of
+hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first
+thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
+the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
+The second thing was to bury ammunition&mdash;showing which influence they
+considered the more dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
+coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
+according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
+the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
+ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
+Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
+steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
+constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
+light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
+but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
+handled differently.</p>
+
+<p>Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
+like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
+slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
+quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>bird or
+rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
+forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
+snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
+unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
+the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
+full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
+suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
+down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
+springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
+strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
+bait&mdash;smeared grease, or a bit of meat.</p>
+
+<p>If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
+the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
+which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
+dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
+worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
+the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
+ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its
+spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his
+hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little
+ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the
+knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been
+teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its
+tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that
+frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like
+ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> But alas for the
+resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm
+tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little
+stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper
+comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble
+up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the
+ermine.</p>
+
+<p>Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
+a leading fort would amount to:</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="40%" cellspacing="0" summary="Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
+a leading fort would amount to">
+<tr><td align="left">Bear of all varieties</td><td align="right">400</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Ermine, medium</td><td align="right">200</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Blue fox</td><td align="right">4</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Red fox</td><td align="right">91</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Silver fox</td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Marten</td><td align="right">2,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Musk-rat</td><td align="right">200,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Mink</td><td align="right">8,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Otter</td><td align="right">500</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Skunk</td><td align="right">6</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Wolf</td><td align="right">100</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Beaver</td><td align="right">5,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Pekan (fisher)</td><td align="right">50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Cross fox</td><td align="right">30</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">White fox</td><td align="right">400</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Lynx</td><td align="right">400</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Wolverine</td><td align="right">200</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>The value of these furs in "beaver" currency varied with the fashions of
+the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the
+locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver
+equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500
+rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no
+set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the
+annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.</p>
+
+<p>To understand the values of these furs to the Indian, "beaver" currency
+must be compared to merchandise, one beaver buying such a red
+handkerchief as trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunters
+not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two an axe, from eight to
+twenty a gun or rifle, according<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> to its quality. And in one old trading
+list I found&mdash;vanity of vanities&mdash;"one beaver equals looking-glass."</p>
+
+<p>Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
+which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
+on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
+and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
+fort with the harvest of winter furs.</p>
+
+<p>Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
+trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
+the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
+trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
+river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
+drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
+have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
+forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
+mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
+falls&mdash;falls&mdash;falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
+mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
+notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
+to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
+woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
+of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
+the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
+of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
+the shady side&mdash;that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
+that a wanderer use his eyes&mdash;which the white man seldom does&mdash;the limbs
+of the northern<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
+be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
+grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
+timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
+with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.</p>
+
+<p>One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
+Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
+hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
+allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
+chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
+was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in the lodge.
+Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
+placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
+through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
+enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
+half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
+Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
+older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
+by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
+dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
+stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
+her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
+fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
+withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
+explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
+the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
+dead.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p>
+
+<p>The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
+monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
+habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
+the outside world.</p>
+
+<p>Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
+railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
+canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
+the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
+scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
+across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
+the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
+bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
+the leagueless world of the Far North.</p>
+
+<p>Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
+a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
+crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
+bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
+the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
+the huskies can gallop.</p>
+
+<p>Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
+ox-carts that used to screech and creak and jolt over the rutted prairie
+roads between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> Winnipeg and St. Paul. More than 1,500 Hudson's Bay
+Company carts manned by 500 traders with tawny spouses and black-eyed
+impish children, squatted on top of the load, left Canada for St. Paul
+in August and returned in October. The carts were made without a rivet
+of iron. Bent wood formed the tires of the two wheels. Hardwood axles
+told their woes to the world in the scream of shrill bagpipes. Wooden
+racks took the place of cart box. In the shafts trod a staid old ox
+guided from the horns or with a halter, drawing the load with collar
+instead of a yoke. The harness was of skin thongs. In place of the ox
+sometimes was a "shagganippy" pony, raw and unkempt, which the imps
+lashed without mercy or the slightest inconvenience to the horse.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/illus-198.jpg" width="600" height="388" alt="Carrying goods over long portage in MacKenzie River
+region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Carrying goods over long portage in MacKenzie River
+region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white decorated the leading
+cart. During the Sioux massacres the fur caravans were unmolested, for
+the Indians recognised the flags and wished to remain on good terms with
+the fur traders.</p>
+
+<p>Ox-carts still bring furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts, and screech
+over the corduroyed swamps of the MacKenzie; but the railway has
+replaced the caravan as a carrier of freight.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Hudson's Bay Company steamers now ply on the largest of the inland
+rivers with long lines of fur-laden barges in tow; but the canoe
+brigades still bring the winter's hunt to the forts in spring. Five to
+eight craft make a brigade, each manned by eight paddlers with an
+experienced steersman, who is usually also guide. But the one ranking
+first in importance is the bowman, whose quick eye must detect signs of
+nearing rapids, whose steel-shod pole gives the cue to the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The bowman it is who
+leaps out first when there is "tracking"&mdash;pulling the craft up-stream by
+tow-line&mdash;who stands waist high in ice water steadying the rocking bark
+lest a sudden swirl spill furs to the bottom, who hands out the packs to
+the others when the waters are too turbulent for "tracking" and there
+must be a "<i>portage</i>," and who leads the brigade on a run&mdash;half trot,
+half amble&mdash;overland to the calmer currents. "Pipes" are the measure of
+a <i>portage</i>&mdash;that is, the pipes smoked while the <i>voyageurs</i> are on the
+run. The bowman it is who can thread a network of water-ways by day or
+dark, past rapids or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
+mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
+meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
+pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.</p>
+
+<p>The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
+these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.</p>
+
+<p>Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
+vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
+and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
+meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
+whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
+wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
+structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
+the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
+servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
+one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
+Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
+arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
+string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
+befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
+Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
+right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
+ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
+Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
+soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
+the letters H. B. C.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
+court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
+presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
+hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
+made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
+assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
+harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
+diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
+post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
+of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
+and rampart.</p>
+
+<p>Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
+an American Siberia&mdash;the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
+water<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>way, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
+winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
+think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
+mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
+not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
+was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
+world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
+a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
+Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
+dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
+without raising a sand bar.</p>
+
+<p>The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
+of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
+Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
+after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
+curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
+surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
+only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
+Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
+company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
+shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
+principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
+probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> below one
+hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
+in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
+Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
+employed as traders, packers, <i>coureurs</i>, canoe men, hunters, and
+guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
+Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
+wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
+life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
+this power was seldom abused.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
+might use lash and triangle and branding along the northern coast; but
+officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
+terms of justice with their men.</p>
+
+<p>The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
+than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
+company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
+Times without number under the old <i>régime</i> has a Hudson's Bay officer
+set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
+to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
+unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
+savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.</p>
+
+<p>Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
+when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
+But just<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
+unbending, fearless white man will pursue&mdash;and pursue&mdash;and pursue guilt
+to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
+within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
+before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
+vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
+the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "<i>Pro pelle cutem</i>," says
+the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
+eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
+skin"&mdash;which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.</p>
+
+<p>And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?</p>
+
+<p>Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
+whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
+and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
+from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
+domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
+desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
+glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
+Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
+that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
+and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
+tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
+them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
+tribes&mdash;Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies&mdash;splendid types of manhood
+because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot&mdash;low and lazy because the great
+rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work.</p>
+
+<p>Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay
+Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life
+in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a
+single year.</p>
+
+<p>Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been
+assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten,
+twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But,
+then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single
+year.</p>
+
+<p>When fighting rivals long ago, it is true that the Hudson's Bay Company
+recognised neither human nor divine law. Grant the charge and weigh it
+against the benefits of the company's rule. When Hearne visited
+Chippewyans two centuries ago he found the Indians in a state
+uncontaminated by the trader; and that state will give the ordinary
+reader cold shivers of horror at the details of massacre and
+degradation. Every visitor since has reported the same tribe improved in
+standard of living under Hudson's Bay rule. Recently a well-known
+Canadian governor making an itinerary of the territory round the bay
+found the Indians such devout Christians that they put his white retinue
+to shame. Returning to civilization, the governor was observed attending
+the services of his own denomination with a greater fury than was his
+wont. Asked the reason, he confided to a club friend that he would be
+<i>blanked</i> if he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians than
+he was.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Some of the shiftless Indians may be hopelessly in debt to the company
+for advanced provisions, but if the company had not made these advances
+the Indians would have starved, and the debt is never exacted by seizure
+of the hunt that should go to feed a family.</p>
+
+<p>Of how many other creditors may that be said? Of how many companies that
+it has cared for the sick, sought the lost, fed the starving, housed the
+homeless? With all its faults, that is the record of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
+to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
+disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
+liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
+misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
+that he <i>feels</i> his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
+as <i>that</i>&mdash;jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
+gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
+instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
+when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
+storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
+steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
+of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
+valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
+destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
+still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
+valley&mdash;but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
+and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> <i>explored</i> the
+Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
+trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
+Company was the first Canadian to <i>explore</i> the lower Columbia; but
+before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
+ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
+wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
+mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
+the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
+on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
+her young?</p>
+
+<p>Something, which may be the result of generations of accumulated
+observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
+the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
+guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
+and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
+reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
+brute. It is not sharp-sightedness&mdash;though no man is sharper of sight
+than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing&mdash;though the trapper
+learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
+is not touch&mdash;in the sense of tactile contact&mdash;any more than it is touch
+that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
+presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
+senses, a sixth sense&mdash;a sense of <i>feel</i>, without contact&mdash;a sense on
+which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
+This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of <i>feel</i>, his weapon
+against the instinct of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> brute. What part it plays in the life of
+every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
+found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
+trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
+and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
+from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
+trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
+hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
+coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
+supplied by "wahboos&mdash;little white chap," which is the Indian name for
+rabbit.</p>
+
+<p>And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
+chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
+runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
+of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
+and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
+the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
+and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
+so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
+sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimming over the snow for all
+the world like a bouncing football done up in gray fur&mdash;all members of
+the cat tribe running wherever the "little white chaps" run.</p>
+
+<p>So when the lull fell on the hunt and the mink trapping was well over
+and marten had not yet begun, Koot gathered up his traps, and getting a
+supply of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> provisions at the fur post, crossed the white wastes of
+prairie to lonely swamp ground where dwarf alder and willow and
+cottonwood and poplar and pine grew in a tangle. A few old logs
+dovetailed into a square made the wall of a cabin. Over these he
+stretched the canvas of his tepee for a roof at a sharp enough angle to
+let the heavy snow-fall slide off from its own weight. Moss chinked up
+the logs. Snow banked out the wind. Pine boughs made the floor, two logs
+with pine boughs, a bed. An odd-shaped stump served as chair or table;
+and on the logs of the inner walls hung wedge-shaped slabs of cedar to
+stretch the skins. A caribou curtain or bear-skin across the entrance
+completed Koot's winter quarters for the rabbit-hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Koot's genealogy was as vague as that of all old trappers hanging round
+fur posts. Part of him&mdash;that part which served best when he was on the
+hunting-field&mdash;was Ojibway. The other part, which made him improvise
+logs into chair and table and bed, was white man; and that served him
+best when he came to bargain with the chief factor over the pelts. At
+the fur post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field,
+when suddenly menaced by some great danger, he would cry out in the
+Indian tongue words that meant "O Great Spirit!" And it is altogether
+probable that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was
+worshipping the same Being. When he swore&mdash;strange commentary on
+civilization&mdash;he always used white man's oaths, French <i>patois</i> or
+straight English.</p>
+
+<p>Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the Rockies,
+Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not usually go to the
+wilds alone; but there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that
+Koot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog that had drawn
+his provisions from the fort on a sort of toboggan sleigh.</p>
+
+<p>The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write their daily
+record for those who can read. All over the white swamp were little deep
+tracks; here, holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks as
+from the bound&mdash;bound&mdash;bound of something soft; then, again, where the
+thicket was like a hedge with only one breach through, the footprints
+had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
+have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
+form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
+from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light&mdash;the
+rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
+which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
+trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
+pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
+countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
+Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
+and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
+for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
+from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
+up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.</p>
+
+<p>All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
+choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
+take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
+to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful&mdash;as they always were
+in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
+epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest&mdash;Koot's circuit of snares
+would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
+out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
+numerous, the foragers that prey&mdash;wolf and wolverine and lynx and
+bob-cat&mdash;will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
+snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon&mdash;the Indian's hour of the
+short shadow&mdash;is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
+of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
+to his cabin, and in it&mdash;instead of caching in a tree&mdash;keeps fish or
+bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
+his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.</p>
+
+<p>Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
+Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
+with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
+twine, and traps, and set out in the evening to make the round of his
+snares, unaccompanied by the dog. Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and
+white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in
+the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his
+shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin
+when that strange sense of <i>feel</i> told him that he was being followed.
+What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled&mdash;he called it by name.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet
+as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall.
+By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, or the snowbuntings
+chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to hedge-top, or the saucy
+jay shriek some scolding impudence. A squirrel may chatter out his noisy
+protest at some thief for approaching the nuts which lie cached under
+the rotten leaves at the foot of the tree, or the sun-warmth may set the
+melting snow showering from the swan's-down branches with a patter like
+rain. But at nightfall the frost has stilled the drip of thaw. Squirrel
+and bird are wrapped in the utter quiet of a gray darkness. And the
+marauders that fill midnight with sharp bark, shrill trembling scream,
+deep baying over the snow are not yet abroad in the woods. All is
+shadowless&mdash;stillness&mdash;a quiet that is audible.</p>
+
+<p>Koot turned sharply and whistled and called his dog. There wasn't a
+sound. Later when the frost began to tighten, sap-frozen twigs would
+snap. The ice of the swamp, frozen like rock, would by-and-bye crackle
+with the loud echo of a pistol-shot&mdash;crackle&mdash;and strike&mdash;and break as
+if artillery were firing a fusillade and infantry shooters answering
+sharp. By-and-bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the
+shadows dancing; and the wail of the cougar would be echoed by the
+lifting scream of its mate. But now, was not a sound, not a motion, not
+a shadow, only the noiseless stillness, the shadowless quiet, and the
+<i>feel</i>, the <i>feel</i> of something back where the darkness was gathering
+like a curtain in the bush.</p>
+
+<p>It might, of course, be only a silly long-ears loping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> under cover
+parallel to the man, looking with rabbit curiosity at this strange
+newcomer to the swamp home of the animal world. Koot's sense of <i>feel</i>
+told him that it wasn't a rabbit; but he tried to persuade himself that
+it was, the way a timid listener persuades herself that creaking floors
+are burglars. Thinking of his many snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
+Then it came again, that <i>feel</i> of something coursing behind the
+underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
+short&mdash;and listened&mdash;and listened&mdash;listened to a snow-muffled silence,
+to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
+waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.</p>
+
+<p>The sense of <i>feel</i> that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
+impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
+and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
+shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
+was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
+courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
+to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
+bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
+rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
+log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.</p>
+
+<p>That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
+logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
+fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
+the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
+broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
+lodge. Once<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
+the sniff&mdash;sniff&mdash;sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
+smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
+traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
+fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
+fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
+and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
+answering scream&mdash;a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.</p>
+
+<p>"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
+the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
+knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
+conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
+rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
+hour of the short shadow.</p>
+
+<p>It did not surprise the trapper after he had heard the lifting wail from
+the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
+untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
+lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
+But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
+torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
+rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
+ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of <i>feel</i>, but he couldn't
+make this thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
+padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
+from the sky and gone back to the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
+circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
+mark like that shuffling padded print.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
+Koot told himself.</p>
+
+<p>The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
+as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
+strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
+snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
+indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
+white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
+scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
+readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
+world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
+as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
+ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
+and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
+glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
+grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
+benighted hunters.</p>
+
+<p>This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
+as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
+there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>&mdash;oh!&mdash;I'll be <i>on</i> to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
+dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
+and his ears failed to localize, to <i>real</i>-ize, to visualize what those
+little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
+the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he marched off very matter
+of fact to the next snare.</p>
+
+<p>But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of <i>feel</i> and he had
+glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just above the
+snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade
+something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear-tufts
+caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow-crust. Then
+the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form hardly differing
+from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed to a tiny
+blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell-tale light. The big round
+body mottled gray and white like the snowy tree
+widened&mdash;stretched&mdash;-flattened till it was almost a part of the tossing
+pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had passed far
+beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward and the owl eyes open and
+the big body bunch out like a cat with elevated haunches ready to
+spring.</p>
+
+<p>But by-and-bye the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. They grew
+scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew
+hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming across the
+billowy drifts, something black far ahead bounced up, caught a bunting
+on the wing, and with another bounce disappeared among the trees.</p>
+
+<p>Koot said one word&mdash;"Cat!"&mdash;and the dog was off full cry.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, he had
+known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still hunters
+among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail of their ravages,
+rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even the remains of a fox
+or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from the printings on the white
+page that the still hunter had been hunted full cry by coyote or
+timber-wolf. Against these wolfish foes the cat had one sure refuge
+always&mdash;a tree. The hungry coyote might try to starve the bob-cat into
+surrender; but just as often, the bob-cat could starve the coyote into
+retreat; for if a foolish rabbit darted past, what hungry coyote could
+help giving chase? The tree had even defeated both dog and man that
+first week when Koot could not find the cat. But a dog in full chase
+could follow the trail to a tree, and a man could shoot into the tree.</p>
+
+<p>As the rabbits decreased, Koot set out many traps for the bob-cats now
+reckless with hunger, steel-traps and deadfalls and pits and log pens
+with a live grouse clucking inside. The midwinter lull was a busy season
+for Koot.</p>
+
+<p>Towards March, the sun-glare has produced a crust on the snow that is
+almost like glass. For Koot on his snow-shoes this had no danger; but
+for the mongrel that was to draw the pelts back to the fort, the snow
+crust was more troublesome than glass. Where the crust was thick, with
+Koot leading the way snow-shoes and dog and toboggan glided over the
+drifts as if on steel runners. But in midday the crust was soft and the
+dog went floundering through as if on thin ice, the sharp edge cutting
+his feet. Koot tied little buckskin sacks round the dog's feet and made
+a few more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> rounds of the swamp; but the crust was a sign that warned
+him it was time to prepare for the marten-hunt. To leave his furs at the
+fort, he must cross the prairie while it was yet good travelling for the
+dog. Dismantling the little cabin, Koot packed the pelts on the
+toboggan, roped all tightly so there could be no spill from an upset,
+and putting the mongrel in the traces, led the way for the fort one
+night when the snow-crust was hard as ice.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The moon came up over the white fields in a great silver disk. Between
+the running man and the silver moon moved black skulking forms&mdash;the
+foragers on their night hunt. Sometimes a fox loped over a drift, or a
+coyote rose ghostly from the snow, or timber-wolves dashed from wooded
+ravines and stopped to look till Koot fired a shot that sent them
+galloping.</p>
+
+<p>In the dark that precedes daylight, Koot camped beside a grove of
+poplars&mdash;that is, he fed the dog a fish, whittled chips to make a fire
+and boil some tea for himself, then digging a hole in the drift with his
+snow-shoe, laid the sleigh to windward and cuddled down between
+bear-skins with the dog across his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Daylight came in a blinding glare of sunshine and white snow. The way
+was untrodden. Koot led at an ambling run, followed by the dog at a fast
+trot, so that the trees were presently left far on the offing and the
+runners were out on the bare white prairie with never a mark, tree or
+shrub, to break the dazzling reaches of sunshine and snow from horizon
+to horizon. A man who is breaking the way must keep his eyes on the
+ground; and the ground was so blindingly bright<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> that Koot began to see
+purple and yellow and red patches dancing wherever he looked on the
+snow. He drew his capote over his face to shade his eyes; but the pace
+and the sun grew so hot that he was soon running again unprotected from
+the blistering light.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the afternoon, Koot knew that something had gone wrong. Some
+distance ahead, he saw a black object against the snow. On the unbroken
+white, it looked almost as big as a barrel and seemed at least a mile
+away. Lowering his eyes, Koot let out a spurt of speed, and the next
+thing he knew he had tripped his snow-shoe and tumbled. Scrambling up,
+he saw that a stick had caught the web of his snow-shoe; but where was
+the barrel for which he had been steering? There wasn't any barrel at
+all&mdash;the barrel was this black stick which hadn't been fifty yards away.
+Koot rubbed his eyes and noticed that black and red and purple patches
+were all over the snow. The drifts were heaving and racing after each
+other like waves on an angry sea. He did not go much farther that day;
+for every glint of snow scorched his eyes like a hot iron. He camped at
+the first bluff and made a poultice of cold tea leaves which he laid
+across his blistered face for the night.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who knows the tortures of snow-blindness will understand why
+Koot did not sleep that night. It was a long night to the trapper, such
+a very long night that the sun had been up for two hours before its heat
+burned through the layers of his capote into his eyes and roused him
+from sheer pain. Then he sprang up, put up an ungantled hand and knew
+from the heat of the sun that it was broad day. But when he took the
+bandage off his eyes, all he saw was a black<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> curtain one moment,
+rockets and wheels and dancing patches of purple fire the next.</p>
+
+<p>Koot was no fool to become panicky and feeble from sudden peril. He knew
+that he was snow-blind on a pathless prairie at least two days away from
+the fort. To wait until the snow-blindness had healed would risk the few
+provisions that he had and perhaps expose him to a blizzard. The one
+rule of the trapper's life is to go ahead, let the going cost what it
+may; and drawing his capote over his face, Koot went on.</p>
+
+<p>The heat of the sun told him the directions; and when the sun went down,
+the crooning west wind, bringing thaw and snow-crust, was his compass.
+And when the wind fell, the tufts of shrub-growth sticking through the
+snow pointed to the warm south. Now he tied himself to his dog; and when
+he camped beside trees into which he had gone full crash before he knew
+they were there, he laid his gun beside the dog and sleigh. Going out
+the full length of his cord, he whittled the chips for his fire and
+found his way back by the cord.</p>
+
+<p>On the second day of his blindness, no sun came up; nor could he guide
+himself by the feel of the air, for there was no wind. It was one of the
+dull dead gray days that precedes storms. How would he get his
+directions to set out? Memory of last night's travel might only lead him
+on the endless circling of the lost. Koot dug his snow-shoe to the base
+of a tree, found moss, felt it growing on only one side of the tree,
+knew that side must be the shady cold side, and so took his bearings
+from what he thought was the north.</p>
+
+<p>Koot said the only time that he knew any fear was on the evening of the
+last day. The atmosphere boded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> storm. The fort lay in a valley.
+Somewhere between Koot and that valley ran a trail. What if he had
+crossed the trail? What if the storm came and wiped out the trail before
+he could reach the fort? All day, whisky-jack and snow-bunting and fox
+scurried from his presence; but this night in the dusk when he felt
+forward on his hands and knees for the expected trail, the wild
+creatures seemed to grow bolder. He imagined that he felt the coyotes
+closer than on the other nights. And then the fearful thought came that
+he might have passed the trail unheeding. Should he turn back?</p>
+
+<p>Afraid to go forward or back, Koot sank on the ground, unhooded his face
+and tried to <i>force</i> his eyes to see. The pain brought biting salty
+tears. It was quite useless. Either the night was very dark, or the eyes
+were very blind.</p>
+
+<p>And then white man or Indian&mdash;who shall say which came uppermost?&mdash;Koot
+cried out to the Great Spirit. In mockery back came the saucy scold of a
+jay.</p>
+
+<p>But that was enough for Koot&mdash;it was prompt answer to his prayer; for
+where do the jays quarrel and fight and flutter but on the trail?
+Running eagerly forward, the trapper felt the ground. The rutted marks
+of a "jumper" sleigh cut the hard crust. With a shout, Koot headed down
+the sloping path to the valley where lay the fur post, the low hanging
+smoke of whose chimneys his eager nostrils had already sniffed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h4>OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT&mdash;BEING AN ACCOUNT
+OF MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT, SIKAK THE SKUNK, WENUSK THE BADGER, AND
+OTHERS</h4>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Musquash the Musk-rat</i></p>
+
+<p>Every chapter in the trapper's life is not a "stunt."</p>
+
+<p>There are the uneventful days when the trapper seems to do nothing but
+wander aimlessly through the woods over the prairie along the margin of
+rush-grown marshy ravines where the stagnant waters lap lazily among the
+flags, though a feathering of ice begins to rim the quiet pools early in
+autumn. Unless he is duck-shooting down there in the hidden slough where
+is a great "quack-quack" of young teals, the trapper may not uncase his
+gun. For a whole morning he lies idly in the sunlight beside some river
+where a roundish black head occasionally bobs up only to dive under when
+it sees the man. Or else he sits by the hour still as a statue on the
+mossy log of a swamp where a long wriggling&mdash;wriggling trail marks the
+snaky motion of some creature below the amber depths.</p>
+
+<p>To the city man whose days are regulated by clockwork and electric trams
+with the ceaseless iteration of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> gongs and "step fast there!" such a
+life seems the type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are
+those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures come unsought.
+Perhaps when the great profit-and-loss account of the hereafter is cast
+up, the trapper may be found to have a greater sum total of happiness,
+of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi-millionaire whose life
+was one buzzing round of drive and worry and grind. Usually the busy
+city man has spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his youth
+in study and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's
+work. The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering
+through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand.
+And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without
+bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her
+realm.</p>
+
+<p>On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching so
+lazily over the prarie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp autumn
+air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper at once
+heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as if the light
+green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank bank. But ravines are
+not dank in the clear fall days; and by October the musk-plant has
+wilted dry. This is a fresh living odour with all the difference between
+it and dead leaves that there is between June roses and the dried dust
+of a rose jar. The wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of
+swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere
+in these prairie ravines; and a sense that is part <i>feel</i>, part
+intuition, part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell,
+leads his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bottom of a
+slough.</p>
+
+<p>A covey of teals&mdash;very young, or they would not be so bold&mdash;flackers up,
+wings about with a clatter, then settles again a space farther ahead
+when the ducks see that the intruder remains so still. The man parts the
+flags, sits down on a log motionless as the log itself&mdash;and watches!
+Something else had taken alarm from the crunch of the hunter's moccasins
+through the dry reeds; for a wriggling trail is there, showing where a
+creature has dived below and is running among the wet under-tangle. Not
+far off on another log deep in the shade of the highest flags solemnly
+perches a small prairie-owl. It is almost the russet shade of the dead
+log. It hunches up and blinks stupidly at all this noise in the swamp.</p>
+
+<p>"Oho," thinks the trapper, "so I've disturbed a still hunt," and he sits
+if anything stiller than ever, only stooping to lay his gun down and
+pick up a stone.</p>
+
+<p>At first there is nothing but the quacking of the ducks at the far end
+of the swamp. A lapping of the water against the brittle flags and a
+water-snake has splashed away to some dark haunt. The whisky-jack calls
+out officious note from a topmost bough, as much as to say: "It's all
+right! Me&mdash;me!&mdash;I'm always there!&mdash;I've investigated!&mdash;it's all
+right!&mdash;he's quite harmless!" And away goes the jay on business of state
+among the gopher mounds.</p>
+
+<p>Then the interrupted activity of the swamp is resumed, scolding mother
+ducks reading the riot act to young teals, old geese coming craning and
+craning their long necks to drink at the water's edge, lizards and
+water-snakes splashing down the banks, midgets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> and gnats sunning
+themselves in clouds during the warmth of the short autumn days, with a
+feel in the air as of crisp ripeness, drying fruit, the harvest-home of
+the year. In all the prairie region north and west of Minnesota&mdash;the
+Indian land of "sky-coloured water"&mdash;the sloughs lie on the prairie
+under a crystal sky that turns pools to silver. On this almost
+motionless surface are mirrored as if by an etcher's needle the sky
+above, feathered wind clouds, flag stems, surrounding cliffs, even the
+flight of birds on wing. As the mountains stand for majesty, the
+prairies for infinity, so the marsh lands are types of repose.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not a lifeless repose. Barely has the trapper settled himself
+when a little sharp black nose pokes up through the water at the fore
+end of the wriggling trail. A round rat-shaped head follows this
+twitching proboscis. Then a brownish earth-coloured body swims with a
+wriggling sidelong movement for the log, where roosts the blinking
+owlet. A little noiseless leap! and a dripping musk-rat with long flat
+tail and webbed feet scrabbles up the moss-covered tree towards the
+stupid bird. Another moment, and the owl would have toppled into the
+water with a pair of sharp teeth clutched to its throat. Then the man
+shies a well-aimed stone!</p>
+
+<p>Splash! Flop! The owl is flapping blindly through the flags to another
+hiding-place, while the wriggle-wriggle of the waters tells where the
+marsh-rat has darted away under the tangled growth. From other idle days
+like these, the trapper has learned that musk-rats are not solitary but
+always to be found in colonies. Now if the musk-rat were as wise as the
+beaver to whom the Indians say he is closely akin, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> alarmed
+marauder would carry the news of the man-intruder to the whole swamp.
+Perhaps if the others remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash
+of a gun what man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight
+of every musk-rat from the marsh. But musquash&mdash;little beaver, as the
+Indians call him&mdash;is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened
+from his home as <i>amisk</i>,<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> the beaver. In fact, nature's provision
+for the musk-rat's protection seems to have emboldened the little rodent
+almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of that burnt umber shade
+hardly to be distinguished from the earth. At one moment his sharp nose
+cuts the water, at the next he is completely hidden in the soft clay of
+the under-tangle; and while you are straining for a sight of him
+through the pool, he has scurried across a mud bank to his burrow.</p>
+
+<p>Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws wading through
+swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting from the Chesapeake and
+the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky-coloured water" on the far prairie,
+little musquash still yields 6,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of
+diminishing. A hundred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held
+in esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> Canada sent out
+only 17,000 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did musk-rat grow in
+favour as a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual
+thing for 200,000 musk-rat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay
+Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier furs than
+in the United States, so that the all-fur coat is in greater demand than
+the fur-lined; but in Canada, not less than 2,000,000 musk-rat furs are
+taken every year. In the United States the total is close on 4,000,000.
+In one city alone, St. Paul, 50,000 musk-rat-skins are cured every year.
+A single stretch of good marsh ground has yielded that number of skins
+year after year without a sign of the hunt telling on the prolific
+little musquash. Multiply 50,000 by prices varying from 7 cents to 75
+cents and the value of the musk-rat-hunt becomes apparent.</p>
+
+<p>What is the secret of the musk-rat's survival while the strong creatures
+of the chase like buffalo and timber-wolf have been almost exterminated?
+In the first place, settlers can't farm swamps; so the musk-rat thrives
+just as well in the swamps of New Jersey to-day as when the first white
+hunter set foot in America. Then musquash lives as heartily on owls and
+frogs and snakes as on water mussels and lily-pads. If one sort of food
+fails, the musk-rat has as omnivorous powers of digestion as the bear
+and changes his diet. Then he can hide as well in water as on land. And
+most important of all, musk-rat's family is as numerous as a cat's, five
+to nine rats in a litter, and two or three litters a year. These are the
+points that make for little musquash's continuance in spite of all that
+shot and trap can do.</p>
+
+<p>Having discovered what the dank whiff, half ani<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>mal, half vegetable,
+signified, the trapper sets about finding the colony. He knows there is
+no risk of the little still-hunter carrying alarm to the other
+musk-rats. If he waits, it is altogether probable that the fleeing
+musk-rat will come up and swim straight for the colony. On the other
+hand, the musk-rat may have scurried overland through the rushes.
+Besides, the trapper observed tracks, tiny leaf-like tracks as of little
+webbed feet, over the soft clay of the marsh bank. These will lead to
+the colony, so the trapper rises and parting the rushes not too noisily,
+follows the little footprint along the margin of the swamp.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/illus-228.jpg" width="600" height="399" alt="Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
+Hudson&#39;s Bay Company" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
+Hudson&#39;s Bay Company, beyond tree line; hence the houses are built of
+imported timber, with thatch roofs.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here the track is lost at the narrow ford of an inflowing stream, but
+across the creek lies a fallen poplar littered with&mdash;what? The feathers
+and bones of a dead owlet. Balancing himself&mdash;how much better the
+moccasins cling than boots!&mdash;the trapper crosses the log and takes up
+the trail through the rushes. But here musquash has dived off into the
+water for the express purpose of throwing a possible pursuer off the
+scent. But the tracks betrayed which way musquash was travelling; so the
+trapper goes on, knowing if he does not find the little haycock houses
+on this side, he can cross to the other.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Presently, he almost stumbles over what sent the musk-rat diving just at
+this place. It is the wreck of a wolverine's ravage&mdash;a little wattled
+dome-shaped house exposed to that arch-destroyer by the shrinking of the
+swamp. So shallow has the water become, that a wolverine has easily
+waded and leaped clear across to the roof of the musk-rat's house. A
+beaver-dam two feet thick cannot resist the onslaught of the wolverine's
+claws; how much less will this round nest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> reeds and grass and
+mosses cemented together with soft clay? The roof has been torn from the
+domed house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the domestic
+economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round walls inside, a floor or
+gallery of sticks and grasses, where the family had lived in an air
+chamber above the water, rough walls below the water-line and two or
+three little openings that must have been safely under water before the
+swamp receded. Perhaps a mussel or lily bulb has been left in the
+deserted larder. From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the
+topmost wall will not measure more than two or three feet. If the
+swamp had not dried here, the stupid little musk-rats that escaped the
+ravager's claws would probably have come back to the wrecked house,
+built up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till another
+wolverine came. But a water doorway the musk-rat must have. That he has
+learned by countless assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh
+retreated the musk-rats abandoned their house.</p>
+
+<p>All about the deserted house are runways, tiny channels across oozy
+peninsulas and islands of the musk-rat's diminutive world such as a very
+small beaver might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry patch or
+mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and prods an earth bank with a
+stick. It is as he thought&mdash;hollow; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the
+clay wall where the refugees from this house had scuttled from the
+wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water has shrunk&mdash;that was the
+danger signal to the musk-rat; and there had been a grand moving to a
+deeper part of the swamp. Perhaps, after all, this is a very old house
+not used since last winter.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Going back to the bank, the trapper skirts through the crush of brittle
+rushes round the swamp. Coming sharply on deeper water, a dank, stagnant
+bayou, heavy with the smell of furry life, the trapper pushes aside the
+flags, peers out and sees what resembles a prairie-dog town on
+water&mdash;such a number of wattled houses that they had shut in the water
+as with a dam. Too many flags and willows lie over the colony for a
+glimpse of the tell-tale wriggling trail across the water; but from the
+wet tangle of grass and moss comes an oozy pattering.</p>
+
+<p>If it were winter, the trapper could proceed as he would against a
+beaver colony, staking up the outlet from the swamp, trenching the ice
+round the different houses, breaking open the roofs and penning up any
+fugitives in their own bank burrows till he and his dog and a spear
+could clear out the gallery. But in winter there is more important work
+than hunting musk-rat. Musk-rat-trapping is for odd days before the
+regular hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Opening the sack which he usually carries on his back, the trapper draws
+out three dozen small traps no larger than a rat or mouse trap. Some of
+these he places across the runways without any bait; for the musk-rat
+must pass this way. Some he smears with strong-smelling pomatum. Some he
+baits with carrot or apple. Others he does not bait at all, simply
+laying them on old logs where he knows the owlets roost by day. But each
+of the traps&mdash;bait or no bait&mdash;he attaches to a stake driven into the
+water so that the prisoner will be held under when he plunges to escape
+till he is drowned. Otherwise, he would gnaw his foot free of the trap
+and disappear in a burrow.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If the marsh is large, there will be more than one musk-rat colony.
+Having exhausted his traps on the first, the trapper lies in wait at the
+second. When the moon comes up over the water, there is a great
+splashing about the musk-rat nests; for autumn is the time for
+house-building and the musk-rats work at night. If the trapper is an
+Eastern man, he will wade in as they do in New Jersey; but if he is a
+type of the Western hunter, he lies on the log among the rushes, popping
+a shot at every head that appears in the moonlit water. His dog swims
+and dives for the quarry. By the time the stupid little musk-rats have
+taken alarm and hidden, the man has twenty or thirty on the bank. Going
+home, he empties and resets the traps.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty marten traps that yield six martens do well. Thirty musk-rat
+traps are expected to give thirty musk-rats. Add to that the twenty
+shot, and what does the day's work represent? Here are thirty skins of a
+coarse light reddish hair, such as lines the poor man's overcoat. These
+will sell for from 7 to 15 cents each. They may go roughly for $3 at the
+fur post. Here are ten of the deeper brown shades, with long soft fur
+that lines a lady's cloak. They are fine enough to pass for mink with a
+little dyeing, or imitation seal if they are properly plucked. These
+will bring 25 or 30 cents&mdash;say $2.50 in all. But here are ten skins,
+deep, silky, almost black, for which a Russian officer will pay high
+prices, skins that will go to England, and from England to Paris, and
+from Paris to St. Petersburg with accelerating cost mark till the
+Russian grandee is paying $1 or more for each pelt. The trapper will ask
+30, 40, 50 cents for these, making perhaps $3.50 in all. Then this idle
+fellow's day has totaled up to $9, not a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> bad day's work, considering he
+did not go to the university for ten years to learn his craft, did not
+know what wear and tear and drive meant as he worked, did not spend more
+than a few cents' worth of shot. But for his musk-rat-pelts the man will
+not get $9 in coin unless he lives very near the great fur markets. He
+will get powder and clothing and food and tobacco whose first cost has
+been increased a hundredfold by ship rates and railroad rates, by
+keel-boat freight and pack-horse expenses and <i>portage</i> charges past
+countless rapids. But he will get all that he needs, all that he wants,
+all that his labour is worth, this "lazy vagabond" who spends half his
+time idling in the sun. Of how many other men can that be said?</p>
+
+<p>But what of the ruthless slaughter among the little musk-rats? Does
+humanity not revolt at the thought? Is this trapping not after all
+brutal butchery?</p>
+
+<p>Animal kindliness&mdash;if such a thing exists among musk-rats&mdash;could hardly
+protest against the slaughter, seeing the musk-rats themselves wage as
+ruthless a war against water-worm and owlet as man wages against
+musk-rats. It is the old question, should animal life be sacrificed to
+preserve human life? To that question there is only one answer. Linings
+for coats are more important life-savers than all the humane societies
+of the world put together. It is probable that the first thing the
+prehistoric man did to preserve his own life when he realized himself
+was to slay some destructive animal and appropriate its coat.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Sikak the Skunk</i></p>
+
+<p>Sikak the skunk it is who supplies the best imitations of sable. But
+cleanse the fur never so well, on a damp day it still emits the heavy
+sickening odour that betrays its real nature. That odour is sikak's
+invincible defence against the white trapper. The hunter may follow the
+little four-abreast galloping footprints that lead to a hole among
+stones or to rotten logs, but long before he has reached the
+nesting-place of his quarry comes a stench against which white blood is
+powerless. Or the trapper may find an unexpected visitor in one of the
+pens which he has dug for other animals&mdash;a little black creature the
+shape of a squirrel and the size of a cat with white stripings down his
+back and a bushy tail. It is then a case of a quick deadly shot, or the
+man will be put to rout by an odour that will pollute the air for miles
+around and drive him off that section of the hunting-field. The
+cuttlefish is the only other creature that possesses as powerful means
+of defence of a similar nature, one drop of the inky fluid which it
+throws out to hide it from pursuers burning the fisherman's eyes like
+scalding acid. As far as white trappers are concerned, sikak is only
+taken by the chance shots of idle days. Yet the Indian hunts the skunk
+apparently utterly oblivious of the smell. Traps, poison, deadfalls,
+pens are the Indian weapons against the skunk; and a Cree will
+deliberately skin and stretch a pelt in an atmosphere that is blue with
+what is poison to the white man.</p>
+
+<p>The only case I ever knew of white trappers hunting the skunk was of
+three men on the North Sas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>katchewan. One was an Englishman who had been
+long in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company and knew all the animals
+of the north. The second was the guide, a French-Canadian, and the third
+a Sandy, fresh "frae oot the land o' heather." The men were wakened one
+night by the noise of some animal scrambling through the window into
+their cabin and rummaging in the dark among the provisions. The
+Frenchman sprang for a light and Sandy got hold of his gun.</p>
+
+<p>"Losh, mon, it's a wee bit beastie a' strip't black and white wi' a tail
+like a so'dier's cocade!"</p>
+
+<p>That information brought the Englishman to his feet howling, "Don't
+shoot it! Don't shoot it! Leave that thing alone, I tell you!"</p>
+
+<p>But Sandy being a true son of Scotia with a Presbyterian love of
+argument wished to debate the question.</p>
+
+<p>"An' what for wu'd a leave it eating a' the oatmeal? I'll no leave it
+rampagin' th' eatables&mdash;I wull be pokin' it oot!&mdash;shoo!&mdash;shoo!"</p>
+
+<p>At that the Frenchman flung down the light and bolted for the door,
+followed by the English trader cursing between set teeth that before
+"that blundering blockhead had argued the matter" something would
+happen.</p>
+
+<p>Something did happen.</p>
+
+<p>Sandy came through the door with such precipitate haste that the topmost
+beam brought his head a mighty thwack, roaring out at the top of his
+voice that the deil was after him for a' the sins that iver he had
+committed since he was born.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Wenusk the Badger</i></p>
+
+<p>Badger, too, is one of the furs taken by the trapper on idle days. East
+of St. Paul and Winnipeg, the fur is comparatively unknown, or if known,
+so badly prepared that it is scarcely recognisable for badger. This is
+probably owing to differences in climate. Badger in its perfect state is
+a long soft fur, resembling wood marten, with deep overhairs almost the
+length of one's hand and as dark as marten, with underhairs as thick and
+soft and yielding as swan's-down, shading in colour from fawn to grayish
+white. East of the Mississippi, there is too much damp in the atmosphere
+for such a long soft fur. Consequently specimens of badger seen in the
+East must either be sheared of the long overhairs or left to mat and
+tangle on the first rainy day. In New York, Quebec, Montreal, and
+Toronto&mdash;places where the finest furs should be on sale if anywhere&mdash;I
+have again and again asked for badger, only to be shown a dull matted
+short fawnish fur not much superior to cheap dyed furs. It is not
+surprising there is no demand for such a fur and Eastern dealers have
+stopped ordering it. In the North-West the most common mist during the
+winter is a frost mist that is more a snow than a rain, so there is
+little injury to furs from moisture. Here the badger is prime, long,
+thick, and silky, almost as attractive as ermine if only it were
+enhanced by as high a price. Whether badger will ever grow in favour
+like musk-rat or 'coon, and play an important part in the returns of the
+fur exporters, is doubtful. The world takes its fashions from European
+capitals; and European capi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>tals are too damp for badger to be in
+fashion with them. Certainly, with the private dealers of the North and
+West, badger is yearly becoming more important.</p>
+
+<p>Like the musk-rat, badger is prime in the autumn. Wherever the
+hunting-grounds of the animals are, there will the hunting-grounds of
+the trapper be. Badgers run most where gophers sit sunning themselves on
+the clay mounds, ready to bolt down to their subterranean burrows on the
+first approach of an enemy. Eternal enemies these two are, gopher and
+badger, though they both live in ground holes, nest their lairs with
+grasses, run all summer and sleep all winter, and alike prey on the
+creatures smaller than themselves&mdash;mice, moles, and birds. The gopher,
+or ground squirrel, is smaller than the wood squirrel, while the badger
+is larger than a Manx cat, with a shape that varies according to the
+exigencies of the situation. Normally, he is a flattish, fawn-coloured
+beast, with a turtle-shaped body, little round head, and small legs with
+unusually strong claws. Ride after the badger across the prairie and he
+stretches out in long, lithe shape, resembling a baby cougar, turning at
+every pace or two to snap at your horse, then off again at a hulking
+scramble of astonishing speed. Pour water down his burrow to compel him
+to come up or down, and he swells out his body, completely filling the
+passage, so that his head, which is downward, is in dry air, while his
+hind quarters alone are in the water. In captivity the badger is a
+business-like little body, with very sharp teeth, of which his keeper
+must beware, and some of the tricks of the skunk, but inclined, on the
+whole, to mind his affairs if you will mind yours.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Once a day regularly
+every afternoon out of his lair he emerges for the most comical sorts of
+athletic exercises. Hour after hour he will trot diagonally&mdash;because
+that gives him the longest run&mdash;from corner to corner of his pen,
+rearing up on his hind legs as he reaches one corner, rubbing the back
+of his head, then down again and across to the other corner, where he
+repeats the performance. There can be no reason for the badger doing
+this, unless it was his habit in the wilds when he trotted about leaving
+dumb signs on mud banks and brushwood by which others of his kind might
+know where to find him at stated times.</p>
+
+<p>Sunset is the time when he is almost sure to be among the gopher
+burrows. In vain the saucy jay shrieks out a warning to the gophers. Of
+all the prairie creatures, they are the stupidest, the most beset with
+curiosity to know what that jay's shriek may mean. Sunning themselves in
+the last rays of daylight, the gophers perch on their hind legs to wait
+developments of what the jay announced. But the badger's fur and the
+gopher mounds are almost the same colour. He has pounced on some playful
+youngsters before the rest see him. Then there is a wild scuttling down
+to the depths of the burrows. That, too, is vain; for the badger begins
+ripping up the clay bank like a grisly, down&mdash;down&mdash;in pursuit, two,
+three, five feet, even twelve.</p>
+
+<p>Then is seen one of the most curious freaks in all the animal life of
+the prairie. The underground galleries of the gophers connect and lead
+up to different exits. As the furious badger comes closer and closer on
+the cowering gophers, the little cowards lose heart, dart up the
+galleries to open doors, and try to escape<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> through the grass of the
+prairie. But no sooner is the badger hard at work than a gray form seems
+to rise out of the earth, a coyote who had been slinking to the rear all
+the while; and as the terrified gophers scurry here, scurry there,
+coyote's white teeth snap!&mdash;snap! He is
+here&mdash;there&mdash;everywhere&mdash;pouncing&mdash;jumping&mdash;having the fun of his life,
+gobbling gophers as cats catch mice. Down in the bottom of the burrow,
+the badger may get half a dozen poor cooped huddling prisoners; but the
+coyote up on the prairie has devoured a whole colony.</p>
+
+<p>Do these two, badger and coyote, consciously hunt together? Some old
+trappers vow they do&mdash;others just as vehemently that they don't. The
+fact remains that wherever the badger goes gopher-hunting on an
+unsettled prairie, there the coyote skulks reaping reward of all the
+badger's work. The coincidence is no stranger than the well-known fact
+that sword-fish and thrasher&mdash;two different fish&mdash;always league together
+to attack the whale.</p>
+
+<p>One thing only can save the gopher colony, and that is the gun barrel
+across yon earth mound where a trapper lies in wait for the coming of
+the badger.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The 'Coon</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir Alexander MacKenzie reported that in 1798 the North-West Company
+sent out only 100 raccoon from the fur country. Last year the city of
+St. Paul alone cured 115,000 'coon-skins. What brought about the change?
+Simply an appreciation of the qualities of 'coon, which combines the
+greatest warmth with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> the lightest weight and is especially adapted for
+a cold climate and constant wear. What was said of badger applies with
+greater force to 'coon. The 'coon in the East is associated in one's
+mind with cabbies, in the West with fashionably dressed men and women.
+And there is just as wide a difference in the quality of the fur as in
+the quality of the people. The cabbies' 'coon coat is a rough yellow fur
+with red stripes. The Westerner's 'coon is a silky brown fur with black
+stripes. One represents the fall hunt of men and boys round hollow logs,
+the other the midwinter hunt of a professional trapper in the Far North.
+A dog usually bays the 'coon out of hiding in the East. Tiny tracks,
+like a child's hand, tell the Northern hunter where to set his traps.</p>
+
+<p>Wahboos the rabbit, musquash the musk-rat, sikak the skunk, wenusk the
+badger, and the common 'coon&mdash;these are the little chaps whose hunt
+fills the idle days of the trapper's busy life. At night, before the
+rough stone hearth which he has built in his cabin, he is still busy by
+fire-light preparing their pelts. Each skin must be stretched and cured.
+Turning the skin fur side in, the trapper pushes into the pelt a
+wedge-shaped slab of spliced cedar. Into the splice he shoves another
+wedge of wood which he hammers in, each blow widening the space and
+stretching the skin. All pelts are stretched fur in but the fox. Tacking
+the stretched skin on a flat board, the trapper hangs it to dry till he
+carries all to the fort; unless, indeed, he should need a garment for
+himself&mdash;cap, coat, or gantlets&mdash;in which case he takes out a square
+needle and passes his evenings like a tailor, sewing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RARE FURS&mdash;HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES SAKWASEW THE MINK, NEKIK THE
+OTTER, WUCHAK THE FISHER, AND WAPISTAN THE MARTEN</h3>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Sakwasew the Mink</i></p>
+
+<p>There are other little chaps with more valuable fur than musquash, whose
+skin seldom attains higher honour than inside linings, and wahboos,
+whose snowy coat is put to the indignity of imitating ermine with a
+dotting of black cat for the ermine's jet tip. There are mink and otter
+and fisher and fox and ermine and sable, all little fellows with pelts
+worth their weight in coin of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>On one of those idle days when the trapper seems to be doing nothing but
+lying on his back in the sun, he has witnessed a curious, but common,
+battle in pantomime between bird and beast. A prairie-hawk circles and
+drops, lifts and wheels again with monotonous silent persistence above
+the swamp. What quarry does he seek, this lawless forager of the upper
+airs still hunting a hidden nook of the low prairie? If he were out
+purely for exercise, like the little badger when it goes rubbing the
+back of its head from post to post, there would be a buzzing of wings
+and shrill lonely callings to an unseen mate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the circling hawk is as silent as the very personification of death.
+Apparently he can't make up his mind for the death-drop on some rat or
+frog down there in the swamp. The trapper notices that the hawk keeps
+circling directly above the place where the waters of the swamp tumble
+from the ravine in a small cataract to join a lower river. He knows,
+too, from the rich orange of the plumage that the hawk is young. An
+older fellow would not be advertising his intentions in this fashion.
+Besides, an older hawk would have russet-gray feathering. Is the
+rascally young hawk meditating a clutch of talons round some of the
+unsuspecting trout that usually frequent the quiet pools below a
+waterfall. Or does he aim at bigger game? A young hawk is bold with the
+courage that has not yet learned the wisdom of caution. That is why
+there are so many more of the brilliant young red hawks in our museums
+than old grizzled gray veterans whose craft circumvents the specimen
+hunter's cunning. Now the trapper comes to have as keen a sense of
+<i>feel</i> for all the creatures of the wilds as the creatures of the wilds
+have for man; so he shifts his position that he may find what is
+attracting the hawk.</p>
+
+<p>Down on the pebbled beach below the waterfalls lies an auburn bundle of
+fur, about the size of a very long, slim, short-legged cat, still as a
+stone&mdash;some member of the weasel family gorged torpid with fish,
+stretched out full length to sleep in the sun. To sleep, ah, yes, and as
+the Danish prince said, "perchance to dream"; for all the little fellows
+of river and prairie take good care never to sleep where they are
+exposed to their countless enemies. This sleep of the weasel arouses
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> man's suspicion. The trapper draws out his field-glass. The sleeper
+is a mink, and its sleep is a sham with beady, red eyes blinking a deal
+too lively for real death. Why does it lie on its back rigid and
+straight as if it were dead with all four tiny paws clutched out stiff?
+The trapper scans the surface of the swamp to see if some foolish
+musk-rat is swimming dangerously near the sleeping mink.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the hawk circles lower&mdash;lower!&mdash;Drop, straight as a stone! Its
+talons are almost in the mink's body, when of a sudden the sleeper
+awakens&mdash;awakens&mdash;with a leap of the four stiff little feet and a
+darting spear-thrust of snapping teeth deep in the neck of the hawk! At
+first the hawk rises tearing furiously at the clinging mink with its
+claws. The wings sag. Down bird and beast fall. Over they roll on the
+sandy beach, hawk and mink, over and over with a thrashing of the hawk's
+wings to beat the treacherous little vampire off. Now the blood-sucker
+is on top clutching&mdash;clutching! Now the bird flounders up craning his
+neck from the death-grip. Then the hawk falls on his back. His wings are
+prone. They cease to flutter.</p>
+
+<p>Running to the bank the trapper is surprised to see the little
+blood-sucker making off with the prey instead of deserting it as all
+creatures akin to the weasel family usually do. That means a family of
+mink somewhere near, to be given their first lesson in bird-hunting, in
+mink-hawking by the body of this poor, dead, foolish gyrfalcon.</p>
+
+<p>By a red mark here, by a feather there, crushed grass as of something
+dragged, a little webbed footprint on the wet clay, a tiny marking of
+double dots where the feet have crossed a dry stone, the trapper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> slowly
+takes up the trail of the mink. Mink are not prime till the late fall.
+Then the reddish fur assumes the shades of the russet grasses where they
+run until the white of winter covers the land. Then&mdash;as if nature were
+to exact avengement for all the red slaughter the mink has wrought
+during the rest of the year&mdash;his coat becomes dark brown, almost black,
+the very shade that renders him most conspicuous above snow to all the
+enemies of the mink world. But while the trapper has no intention of
+destroying what would be worthless now but will be valuable in the
+winter, it is not every day that even a trapper has a chance to trail a
+mink back to its nest and see the young family.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly the trail stops. Here is a sandy patch with some tumbled
+stones under a tangle of grasses and a rivulet not a foot away.
+Ah&mdash;there it is&mdash;a nest or lair, a tiny hole almost hidden by the
+rushes! But the nest seems empty. Fast as the trapper has come, the mink
+came faster and hid her family. To one side, the hawk had been dropped
+among the rushes. The man pokes a stick in the lair but finds nothing.
+Putting in his hand, he is dragging out bones, feathers, skeleton
+musk-rats, putrid frogs, promiscuous remnants of other quarries brought
+to the burrow by the mink, when a little cattish <i>s-p-i-t!</i> almost
+touches his hand. His palm closes over something warm, squirming,
+smaller than a kitten with very downy fur, on a soft mouse-like skin,
+eyes that are still blind and a tiny mouth that neither meows nor
+squeaks, just <i>spits!&mdash;spits!&mdash;spits!</i>&mdash;in impotent viperish fury. All
+the other minklets, the mother had succeeded in hiding under the
+grasses, but somehow this one had been left. Will he take it home and
+try<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> the experiment of rearing a young mink with a family of kittens?</p>
+
+<p>The trapper calls to mind other experiments. There was the little beaver
+that chewed up his canoe and gnawed a hole of escape through the door.
+There were the three little bob-cats left in the woods behind his cabin
+last year when he refrained from setting out traps and tied up his dog
+to see if he could not catch the whole family, mother and kittens, for
+an Eastern museum. Furtively at first, the mother had come to feed her
+kittens. Then the man had put out rugs to keep the kittens warm and lain
+in wait for the mother; but no sooner did she see her offspring
+comfortably cared for, than she deserted them entirely, evidently acting
+on the proverb that the most gracious enemy is the most dangerous, or
+else deciding that the kits were so well off that she was not needed.
+Adopting the three little wild-cats, the trapper had reared them past
+blind-eyes, past colic and dumps and all the youthful ills to which live
+kittens are heirs, when trouble began. The longing for the wilds came.
+Even catnip green and senna tea boiled can't cure that. So keenly did
+the gipsy longing come to one little bob that he perished escaping to
+the woods by way of the chimney flue. The second little bob succeeded in
+escaping through a parchment stop-gap that served the trapper as a
+window. And the third bobby dealt such an ill-tempered gash to the dog's
+nose that the combat ended in instant death for the cat.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking over these experiments, the trapper wisely puts the mink back
+in the nest with words which it would have been well for that litle ball
+of down to have understood. He told it he would come back for it next<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+winter and to be sure to have its best black coat on. For the little
+first-year minks wear dark coats, almost as fine as Russian sable.
+Yes&mdash;he reflects, poking it back to the hole and retreating quickly so
+that the mother will return&mdash;better leave it till the winter; for wasn't
+it Koot who put a mink among his kittens, only to have the little viper
+set on them with tooth and claw as soon as its eyes opened? Also mink
+are bad neighbours to a poultry-yard. Forty chickens in a single night
+will the little mink destroy, not for food but&mdash;to quote man's
+words&mdash;for the zest of the sport. The mink, you must remember, like
+other pot-hunters, can boast of a big bag.</p>
+
+<p>The trapper did come back next fall. It was when he was ranging all the
+swamp-lands for beaver-dams. Swamp lands often mean beaver-dams; and
+trappers always note what stops the current of a sluggish stream.
+Frequently it is a beaver colony built across a valley in the mountains,
+or stopping up the outlet of a slough. The trapper was sleeping under
+his canoe on the banks of the river where the swamp tumbled out from the
+ravine. Before retiring to what was a boat by day and a bed by night, he
+had set out a fish net and some loose lines&mdash;which the flow of the
+current would keep in motion&mdash;below the waterfall. Carelessly, next day,
+he threw the fish-heads among the stones. The second morning he found
+such a multitude of little tracks dotting the rime of the hoar frost
+that he erected a tent back from the waterfalls, and decided to stay
+trapping there till the winter. The fish-heads were no longer thrown
+away. They were left among the stones in small steel-traps weighted with
+other stones, or attached to a loose stick that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> would impede flight.
+And if the poor gyrfalcon could have seen the mink held by the jaws of a
+steel-trap, hissing, snarling, breaking its teeth on the iron, spitting
+out all the rage of its wicked nature, the bird would have been avenged.</p>
+
+<p>And as winter deepened, the quality of minks taken from the traps became
+darker, silkier, crisper, almost brown black in some of the young, but
+for light fur on the under lip. The Indians say that sakwasew the mink
+would sell his family for a fish, and as long as fish lay among the
+stones, the trapper gathered his harvest of fur: reddish mink that would
+be made into little neck ruffs and collar pieces, reddish brown mink
+that would be sewed into costly coats and cloaks, rare brownish black
+mink that would be put into the beautiful flat scarf collars almost as
+costly as a full coat. And so the mink-hunt went on merrily for the man
+till the midwinter lull came at Christmas. For that year the mink-hunt
+was over.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Nekik the Otter</i></p>
+
+<p>Sakwasew was not the only fisher at the pool below the falls. On one of
+those idle days when the trapper sat lazily by the river side, a round
+head slightly sunburned from black to russet had hobbled up to the
+surface of the water, peered sharply at the man sitting so still,
+paddled little flipper-like feet about, then ducked down again.
+Motionless as the mossed log under him sits the man; and in a moment up
+comes the little black head again, round as a golf ball, about the size
+of a very large cat, followed by three other little bobbing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> heads&mdash;a
+mother otter teaching her babies to dive and swim and duck from the
+river surface to the burrows below the water along the river bank.
+Perhaps the trapper has found a dead fish along this very bank with only
+the choice portions of the body eaten&mdash;a sure sign that nekik the otter,
+the little epicure of the water world, has been fishing at this river.</p>
+
+<p>With a scarcely perceptible motion, the man turns his head to watch the
+swimmers. Instantly, down they plunge, mother and babies, to come to the
+surface again higher up-stream, evidently working up-current like the
+beaver in spring for a glorious frolic in the cold clear waters of the
+upper sources. At one place on the sandy beach they all wade ashore. The
+man utters a slight "Hiss!" Away they scamper, the foolish youngsters,
+landward instead of to the safe water as the hesitating mother would
+have them do, all the little feet scrambling over the sand with the
+funny short steps of a Chinese lady in tight boots. Maternal care proves
+stronger than fear. The frightened mother follows the young otter and
+will no doubt read them a sound lecture on land dangers when she has
+rounded them back to the safe water higher up-stream.</p>
+
+<p>Of all wild creatures, none is so crafty in concealing its lairs as the
+otter. Where did this family come from? They had not been swimming
+up-stream; for the man had been watching on the river bank long before
+they appeared on the surface. Stripping, the trapper dives in
+mid-stream, then half wades, half swims along the steepest bank, running
+his arm against the clay cliff to find a burrow. On land he could not do
+this at the lair of the otter; for the smell of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> man-touch would be
+left on his trail, and the otter, keener of scent and fear than the
+mink, would take alarm. But for the same reason that the river is the
+safest refuge for the otter, it is the surest hunting for the man&mdash;water
+does not keep the scent of a trail. So the man runs his arm along the
+bank. The river is the surest hunting for the man, but not the safest.
+If an old male were in the bank burrow now, or happened to be emerging
+from grass-lined subterranean air chambers above the bank gallery, it
+might be serious enough for the exploring trapper. One bite of nekik the
+otter has crippled many an Indian. Knowing from the remnants of
+half-eaten fish and from the holes in the bank that he has found an
+otter runway, the man goes home as well satisfied as if he had done a
+good day's work.</p>
+
+<p>And so that winter when he had camped below the swamp for the mink-hunt,
+the trapper was not surprised one morning to find a half-eaten fish on
+the river bank. Sakwasew the mink takes good care to leave no remnants
+of his greedy meal. What he cannot eat he caches. Even if he has
+strangled a dozen water-rats in one hunt, they will be dragged in a heap
+and covered. The half-eaten fish left exposed is not mink's work. Otter
+has been here and otter will come back; for as the frost hardens, only
+those pools below the falls keep free from ice. No use setting traps
+with fish-heads as long as fresh fish are to be had for the taking.
+Besides, the man has done nothing to conceal his tracks; and each
+morning the half-eaten fish lie farther off the line of the man-trail.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-bye the man notices that no more half-eaten fish are on his side
+of the river. Little tracks of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> webbed feet furrowing a deep rut in the
+soft snow of the frozen river tell that nekik has taken alarm and is
+fishing from the other side. And when Christmas comes with a dwindling
+of the mink-hunt, the man, too, crosses to the other side. Here he finds
+that the otter tracks have worn a path that is almost a toboggan slide
+down the crusted snow bank to the iced edge of the pool. By this time
+nekik's pelt is prime, almost black, and as glossy as floss. By this
+time, too, the fish are scarce and the epicure has become ravenous as a
+pauper. One night when the trapper was reconnoitring the fish hole, he
+had approached the snow bank so noiselessly that he came on a whole
+colony of otters without their knowledge of his presence. Down the snow
+bank they tumbled, head-first, tail-first, slithering through the snow
+with their little paws braced, rolling down on their backs like lads
+upset from a toboggan, otter after otter, till the man learned that the
+little beasts were not fishing at all, but coasting the snow bank like
+youngsters on a night frolic. No sooner did one reach the bottom than up
+he scampered to repeat the fun; and sometimes two or three went down in
+a rolling bunch mixed up at the foot of a slide as badly as a couple of
+toboggans that were unpremeditatedly changing their occupants. Bears
+wrestle. The kittens of all the cat tribe play hide and seek. Little
+badger finds it fun to run round rubbing the back of his head on things;
+and here was nekik the otter at the favourite amusement of his
+kind&mdash;coasting down a snow bank.</p>
+
+<p>If the trapper were an Indian, he would lie in wait at the landing-place
+and spear the otter as they came from the water. But the white man's
+craft is deeper.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> He does not wish to frighten the otter till the last
+had been taken. Coming to the slide by day, he baits a steel-trap with
+fish and buries it in the snow just where the otter will be coming down
+the hill or up from the pool. Perhaps he places a dozen such traps
+around the hole with nothing visible but the frozen fish lying on the
+surface. If he sets his traps during a snow-fall, so much the better.
+His own tracks will be obliterated and the otter's nose will discover
+the fish. Then he takes a bag filled with some substance of animal
+odour, pomatum, fresh meat, pork, or he may use the flesh side of a
+fresh deer-hide. This he drags over the snow where he has stepped. He
+may even use a fresh hide to handle the traps, as a waiter uses a
+serviette to pass plates. There must be no man-smell, no man-track near
+the otter traps.</p>
+
+<p>While the mink-hunt is fairly over by midwinter, otter-trapping lasts
+from October to May. The value of all rare furs, mink, otter, marten,
+ermine, varies with two things: (1) the latitude of the hunting-field;
+(2) the season of the hunt. For instance, ask a trapper of Minnesota or
+Lake Superior what he thinks of the ermine, and he will tell you that it
+is a miserable sort of weasel of a dirty drab brown not worth
+twenty-five cents a skin. Ask a trapper of the North Saskatchewan what
+he thinks of ermine; and he will tell you it is a pretty little whitish
+creature good for fur if trapped late enough in the winter and always
+useful as a lining. But ask a trapper of the Arctic about the ermine,
+and he describes it as the finest fur that is taken except the silver
+fox, white and soft as swan's-down, with a tail-tip like black onyx.
+This difference in the fur of the animal explains the wide variety of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+prices paid. Ermine not worth twenty-five cents in Wisconsin might be
+worth ten times as much on the Saskatchewan.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/illus-250.jpg" width="450" height="447" alt="" title="Types of Fur Presses." />
+
+<span class="caption">Fur press in use
+at Fort Good
+Hope, at the
+extreme north
+of Hudson's
+Bay Company's
+territory.</span>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/illus-250b.jpg" width="450" height="430" alt="Types of Fur Presses." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Old wedge press
+  in use at Fort
+  Resolution, of
+  the sub-Arctics.<br /><br />
+
+
+
+
+Types of Fur Presses.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>So it is with the otter. All trapped between latitude thirty-five and
+sixty is good fur; and the best is that taken toward the end of winter
+when scarcely a russet hair should be found in the long over-fur of
+nekik's coat.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Wuchak the Fisher, or Pekan</i></p>
+
+<p>Wherever the waste of fish or deer is thrown, there will be found lines
+of double tracks not so large as the wild-cat's, not so small as the
+otter's, and without the same webbing as the mink's. This is wuchak the
+fisher, or pekan, commonly called "the black cat"&mdash;who, in spite of his
+fishy name, hates water as cats hate it. And the tracks are double
+because pekan travel in pairs. He is found along the banks of streams
+because he preys on fish and fisher, on mink and otter and musk-rat, on
+frogs and birds and creatures that come to drink. He is, after all, a
+very greedy fellow, not at all particular about his diet, and, like all
+gluttons, easily snared. While mink and otter are about, the trapper
+will waste no steel-traps on pekan. A deadfall will act just as
+effectively; but there is one point requiring care. Pekan has a sharp
+nose. It is his nose that brings him to all carrion just as surely as
+hawks come to pick dead bones. But that same nose will tell him of man's
+presence. So when the trapper has built his pen of logs so that the
+front log or deadfall will crush down on the back of an intruder tugging
+at the bait inside, he overlays all with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> leaves and brush to quiet the
+pekan's suspicions. Besides, the pekan has many tricks akin to the
+wolverine. He is an inveterate thief. There is a well-known instance of
+Hudson's Bay trappers having a line of one hundred and fifty marten
+traps stretching for fifty miles robbed of their bait by pekan. The men
+shortened the line to thirty miles and for six times in succession did
+pekan destroy the traps. Then the men set themselves to trap the robber.
+He will rifle a deadfall from the slanting back roof where there is no
+danger; so the trapper overlays the back with heavy brush.</p>
+
+<p>Pekan do not yield a rare fur; but they are always at run where the
+trapper is hunting the rare furs, and for that reason are usually snared
+at the same time as mink and otter.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Wapistan the Marten</i></p>
+
+<p>When Koot went blind on his way home from the rabbit-hunt, he had
+intended to set out for the pine woods. Though blizzards still howl over
+the prairie, by March the warm sun of midday has set the sap of the
+forests stirring and all the woodland life awakens from its long winter
+sleep. Cougar and lynx and bear rove through the forest ravenous with
+spring hunger. Otter, too, may be found where the ice mounds of a
+waterfall are beginning to thaw. But it is not any of these that the
+trapper seeks. If they cross his path, good&mdash;they, too, will swell his
+account at the fur post. It is another of the little chaps that he
+seeks, a little, long, low-set animal whose fur is now glistening bright
+on the deep dark overhairs, soft as down in the thick fawn underhairs,
+wapistan the marten.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When the forest begins to stir with the coming of spring, wapistan stirs
+too, crawling out from the hollow of some rotten pine log, restless with
+the same blood-thirst that set the little mink playing his tricks on
+the hawk. And yet the marten is not such a little viper as the mink.
+Wapistan will eat leaves and nuts and roots if he can get vegetable
+food, but failing these, that ravenous spring hunger of his must be
+appeased with something else. And out he goes from his log hole
+hunger-bold as the biggest of all other spring ravagers. That boldness
+gives the trapper his chance at the very time when wapistan's fur is
+best. All winter the trapper may have taken marten; but the end of
+winter is the time when wapistan wanders freely from cover. Thus the
+trapper's calendar would have months of musk-rat first, then beaver and
+mink and pekan and bear and fox and ermine and rabbit and lynx and
+marten, with a long idle midsummer space when he goes to the fort for
+the year's provisions and gathers the lore of his craft.</p>
+
+<p>Wapistan is not hard to track. Being much longer and heavier than a cat
+with very short legs and small feet, his body almost drags the ground
+and his tracks sink deep, clear, and sharp. His feet are smaller than
+otter's and mink's, but easily distinguishable from those two fishers.
+The water animal leaves a spreading footprint, the mark of the webbed
+toes without any fur on the padding of the toe-balls. The land animal of
+the same size has clear cut, narrower, heavier marks. By March, these
+dotting foot-tracks thread the snow everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>Coming on marten tracks at a pine log, the trapper sends in his dog or
+prods with a stick. Finding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> nothing, he baits a steel-trap with
+pomatum, covers it deftly with snow, drags the decoy skin about to
+conceal his own tracks, and goes away in the hope that the marten will
+come back to this log to guzzle on his prey and sleep.</p>
+
+<p>If the track is much frequented, or the forest over-run with marten
+tracks, the trapper builds deadfalls, many of them running from tree to
+tree for miles through the forest in a circle whose circuit brings him
+back to his cabin. Remnants of these log traps may be seen through all
+parts of the Rocky Mountain forests. Thirty to forty traps are
+considered a day's work for one man, six or ten marten all that he
+expects to take in one round; but when marten are plentiful, the unused
+traps of to-day may bring a prize to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian trapper would use still another kind of trap. Where the
+tracks are plainly frequently used runways to watering-places or lair in
+hollow tree, the Indian digs a pit across the marten's trail. On this he
+spreads brush in such roof fashion that though the marten is a good
+climber, if once he falls in, it is almost impossible for him to
+scramble out. If a poor cackling grouse or "fool-hen" be thrust into the
+pit, the Indian is almost sure to find a prisoner. This seems to the
+white man a barbarous kind of trapping; but the poor "fool-hen," hunted
+by all the creatures of the forest, never seems to learn wisdom, but
+invites disaster by popping out of the brush to stare at every living
+thing that passes. If she did not fall a victim in the pit, she
+certainly would to her own curiosity above ground. To the steel-trap the
+hunter attaches a piece of log to entangle the prisoner's flight as he
+rushes through the underbush. Once caught in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> steel jaws, little
+wapistan must wait&mdash;wait for what? For the same thing that comes to the
+poor "fool-hen" when wapistan goes crashing through the brush after her;
+for the same thing that comes to the baby squirrels when wapistan climbs
+a tree to rob the squirrel's nest, eat the young, and live in the rifled
+house; for the same thing that comes to the hoary marmot whistling his
+spring tune just outside his rocky den when wapistan, who has climbed
+up, pounces down from above. Little death-dealer he has been all his
+life; and now death comes to him for a nobler cause than the stuffing of
+a greedy maw&mdash;for the clothing of a creature nobler than himself&mdash;man.</p>
+
+<p>The otter can protect himself by diving, even diving under snow. The
+mink has craft to hide himself under leaves so that the sharpest eyes
+cannot detect him. Both mink and otter furs have very little of that
+animal smell which enables the foragers to follow their trail. What gift
+has wapistan, the marten, to protect himself against all the powers that
+prey? His strength and his wisdom lie in the little stubby feet. These
+can climb.</p>
+
+<p>A trapper's dog had stumbled on a marten in a stump hole. A snap of the
+marten's teeth sent the dog back with a jump. Wapistan will hang on to
+the nose of a dog to the death; and trappers' dogs grow cautious. Before
+the dog gathered courage to make another rush, the marten escaped by a
+rear knot-hole, getting the start of his enemy by fifty yards. Off they
+raced, the dog spending himself in fury, the marten keeping under the
+thorny brush where his enemy could not follow, then across open snow
+where the dog gained, then into the pine woods where the trail ended on
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> snow. Where had the fugitive gone? When the man came up, he first
+searched for log holes. There were none. Then he lifted some of the
+rocks. There was no trace of wapistan. But the dog kept baying a special
+tree, a blasted trunk, bare as a mast pole and seemingly impossible for
+any animal but a squirrel to climb. Knowing the trick by which creatures
+like the bob-cat can flatten their body into a resemblance of a tree
+trunk, the trapper searched carefully all round the bare trunk. It was
+not till many months afterward when a wind storm had broken the tree
+that he discovered the upper part had been hollow. Into this eerie nook
+the pursued marten had scrambled and waited in safety till dog and man
+retired.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his traps the man finds a peculiarly short specimen of the
+marten. In the vernacular of the craft this marten's bushy tail will not
+reach as far back as his hind legs can stretch. Widely different from
+the mink's scarcely visible ears, this fellow's ears are sharply
+upright, keenly alert. He is like a fox, where the mink resembles a
+furred serpent. Marten moves, springs, jumps like an animal. Mink glides
+like a snake. Marten has the strong neck of an animal fighter. Mink has
+the long, thin, twisting neck which reptiles need to give them striking
+power for their fangs. Mink's under lip has a mere rim of white or
+yellow. Marten's breast is patched sulphur. But this short marten with a
+tail shorter than other marten differs from his kind as to fur. Both
+mink and marten fur are reddish brown; but this short marten's fur is
+almost black, of great depth, of great thickness, and of three
+qualities: (1) There are the long dark overhairs the same as the
+ordinary marten, only darker, thicker,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> deeper; (2) there is the soft
+under fur of the ordinary marten, usually fawn, in this fellow deep
+brown; (3) there is the skin fur resembling chicken-down, of which this
+little marten has such a wealth&mdash;to use a technical expression&mdash;you
+cannot find his scalp. Without going into the old quarrel about species,
+when a marten has these peculiarities, he is known to the trapper as
+sable.</p>
+
+<p>Whether he is the American counterpart to the Russia sable is a disputed
+point. Whether his superior qualities are owing to age, climate,
+species, it is enough for the trapper to know that short, dark marten
+yields the trade&mdash;sable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>UNDER THE NORTH STAR&mdash;WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN</h3>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Of Foxes, Many and Various&mdash;Red, Cross, Silver, Black, Prairie, Kit or
+Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray</i></p>
+
+
+<p>Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and there will
+the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a fox-skin may be as a
+specimen, it has value as a fur only when it belongs to one of three
+varieties&mdash;Arctic, black, and silver. Other foxes&mdash;red, cross, prairie,
+swift, and gray&mdash;the trapper will take when they cross his path and sell
+them in the gross at the fur post, as he used to barter buffalo-hides.
+But the hunter who traps the fox for its own sake, and not as an
+uncalculated extra to the mink-hunt or the beaver total, must go to the
+Far North, to the land of winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the
+best fox-skins.</p>
+
+<p>It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run
+among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most
+shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz
+dog, ears alert as a terrier's and a brush, more like a lady's gray
+feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's fur is
+a grizzled gray shading to mottled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> fawn. The hairs are coarse, horsey,
+indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value to the trader; so
+dainty little swift, who looks as if nature made him for a pet dog
+instead of a fox, is slighted by the hunter, unless kit persists in
+tempting a trap. Rufus the red fellow, with his grizzled gray head and
+black ears and whitish throat and flaunting purplish tinges down his
+sides like a prince royal, may make a handsome mat; but as a fur he is
+of little worth. His cousin with the black fore feet, the prairie fox,
+who is the largest and strongest and scientifically finest of all his
+kind, has more value as a fur. The colour of the prairie fox shades
+rather to pale ochre and yellow that the nondescript grizzled gray that
+is of so little value as a fur. Of the silver-gray fox little need be
+said. He lives too far south&mdash;California and Texas and Mexico&mdash;to
+acquire either energy or gloss. He is the one indolent member of the fox
+tribe, and his fur lacks the sheen that only winter cold can give. The
+value of the cross fox depends on the markings that give him his name.
+If the bands, running diagonally over his shoulders in the shape of a
+cross, shade to grayish blue he is a prize, if to reddish russet, he is
+only a curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>The Arctic and black and silver foxes have the pelts that at their worst
+equal the other rare furs, at their best exceed the value of all other
+furs by so much that the lucky trapper who takes a silver fox has made
+his fortune. These, then, are the foxes that the trapper seeks and these
+are to be found only on the white wastes of the polar zone.</p>
+
+<p>That brings up the question&mdash;what is a silver fox? Strange as it may
+seem, neither scientist nor hunter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> can answer that question. Nor will
+study of all the park specimens in the world tell the secret, for the
+simple reason that only an Arctic climate can produce a silver fox; and
+parks are not established in the Arctics yet. It is quite plain that the
+prairie fox is in a class by himself. The uniformity of his size, his
+strength, his habits, his appearance, distinguish him from other foxes.
+It is quite plain that the little kit fox or swift is of a kind distinct
+from other foxes. His smallness, the shape of his bones, the cast of his
+face, the trick of sitting rather than lying, that wonderful big bushy
+soft tail of which a peacock might be vain&mdash;all differentiate him from
+other foxes. The same may be said of the Arctic fox with a pelt that is
+more like white wool than hairs of fur. He is much smaller than the red.
+His tail is bushier and larger than the swift, and like all Arctic
+creatures, he has the soles of his feet heavily furred. All this is
+plain and simple classification. But how about Mr. Blue Fox of the same
+size and habit as the white Arctic? Is he the Arctic fox in summer
+clothing? Yes, say some trappers; and they show their pelts of an Arctic
+fox taken in summer of a rusty white. But no, vow other trappers&mdash;that
+is impossible, for here are blue fox-skins captured in the depths of
+midwinter with not a white hair among them. Look closely at the skins.
+The ears of one blue fox are long, perfect, unbitten by frost or foe&mdash;he
+was a young fellow; and he is blue. Here is another with ears almost
+worn to stubs by fights and many winters' frosts&mdash;he is an old fellow;
+and he, too, is blue. Well, then, the blue fox may sometimes be the
+white Arctic fox in summer dress; but the blue fox who is blue all the
+year round, varying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> only in the shades of blue with the seasons, is
+certainly not the white Arctic fox.</p>
+
+<p>The same difficulty besets distinction of silver fox from black. The old
+scientists classified these as one and the same creature. Trappers know
+better. So do the later scientists who almost agree with the unlearned
+trapper's verdict&mdash;there are as many species as there are foxes. Black
+fox is at its best in midwinter, deep, brilliantly glossy, soft as
+floss, and yet almost impenetrable&mdash;the very type of perfection of its
+kind. But with the coming of the tardy Arctic spring comes a change. The
+snows are barely melted in May when the sheen leaves the fur. By June,
+the black hairs are streaked with gray; and the black fox is a gray fox.
+Is it at some period of the transition that the black fox becomes a
+silver fox, with the gray hairs as sheeny as the black and each gray
+hair delicately tipped with black? That question, too, remains
+unanswered; for certainly the black fox trapped when in his gray summer
+coat is not the splendid silver fox of priceless value. Black fox
+turning to a dull gray of midsummer may not be silver fox; but what
+about gray fox turning to the beautiful glossy black of midwinter? Is
+that what makes silver fox? Is silver fox simply a fine specimen of
+black caught at the very period when he is blooming into his greatest
+beauty? The distinctive difference between gray fox and silver is that
+gray fox has gray hairs among hairs of other colour, while silver fox
+has silver hair tipped with glossiest black on a foundation of downy
+gray black.</p>
+
+<p>Even greater confusion surrounds the origin of cross and red and gray.
+Trappers find all these different cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs
+grow, those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red becomes
+cross; and what they become at maturity, that they remain, varying only
+with the seasons.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> It takes many centuries to make one perfect rose.
+Is it the same with the silver fox? Is he a freak or a climax or the
+regular product of yearly climatic changes caught in the nick of time by
+some lucky trapper? Ask the scientist that question, and he theorizes.
+Ask the trapper, and he tells you if he could only catch enough silver
+foxes to study that question, he would quit trapping. In all the maze of
+ignorance and speculation, there is one anchored fact. While animals
+turn a grizzled gray with age, the fine gray coats are not caused by
+age. Young animals of the rarest furs&mdash;fox and ermine&mdash;are born in ashy
+colour that turns to gray while they are still in their first nest.</p>
+
+<p>To say that silver fox is costly solely because it is rare is sheerest
+nonsense. It would be just as sensible to say that labradorite, which is
+rare, should be as costly as diamonds. It is the intrinsic beauty of the
+fur, as of the diamonds, that constitutes its first value. The facts
+that the taking of a silver fox is always pure luck, that the luck comes
+seldom, that the trapper must have travelled countless leagues by
+snow-shoe and dog train over the white wastes of the North, that
+trappers in polar regions are exposed to more dangers and hardships than
+elsewhere and that the fur must have been carried a long distance to
+market&mdash;add to the first high value of silver fox till it is not
+surprising that little pelts barely two feet long have sold for prices
+ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> trapper the way to the fortune of
+a silver fox is the same as the road to fortune for all other men&mdash;by
+the homely trail of every-day work. Cheers from the fort gates bid
+trappers setting out for far Northern fields God-speed. Long ago there
+would have been a firing of cannon when the Northern hunters left for
+their distant camping-grounds; but the cannon of Churchill lie rusting
+to-day and the hunters who go to the sub-Arctics and the Arctics no
+longer set out from Churchill on the bay, but from one of the little
+inland MacKenzie River posts. If the fine powdery snow-drifts are
+glossed with the ice of unbroken sun-glare, the runners strap iron
+crampets to their snow-shoes, and with a great jingling of the
+dog-bells, barking of the huskies, and yelling of the drivers, coast
+away for the leagueless levels of the desolate North. Frozen river-beds
+are the only path followed, for the high cliffs&mdash;almost like ramparts on
+the lower MacKenzie&mdash;shut off the drifting east winds that heap
+barricades of snow in one place and at another sweep the ground so clear
+that the sleighs pull heavy as stone. Does a husky fag? A flourish of
+whips and off the laggard scampers, keeping pace with the others in the
+traces, a pace that is set for forty miles a day with only one feeding
+time, nightfall when the sleighs are piled as a wind-break and the
+frozen fish are doled out to the ravenous dogs. Gun signals herald the
+hunter's approach to a chance camp; and no matter how small and mean the
+tepee, the door is always open for whatever visitor, the meat pot set
+simmering for hungry travellers. When the snow crust cuts the dogs'
+feet, buckskin shoes are tied on the huskies; and when an occasional dog
+fags entirely, he is turned adrift from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> traces to die. Relentless
+as death is Northern cold; and wherever these long midwinter journeys
+are made, gruesome traditions are current of hunter and husky.</p>
+
+<p>I remember hearing of one old husky that fell hopelessly lame during the
+north trip. Often the drivers are utter brutes to their dogs, speaking
+in curses which they say is the only language a husky can understand,
+emphasized with the blows of a club. Too often, as well, the huskies are
+vicious curs ready to skulk or snap or bolt or fight, anything but work.
+But in this case the dog was an old reliable that kept the whole train
+in line, and the driver had such an affection for the veteran husky that
+when rheumatism crippled the dog's legs the man had not the heart to
+shoot such a faithful servant. The dog was turned loose from the traces
+and hobbled lamely behind the scampering teams. At last he fell behind
+altogether, but at night limped into camp whining his joy and asking
+dumbly for the usual fish. In the morning when the other teams set out,
+the old husky was powerless to follow. But he could still whine and wag
+his tail. He did both with all his might, so that when the departing
+driver looked back over his shoulder, he saw a pair of eyes pleading, a
+head with raised alert ears, shoulders straining to lift legs that
+refused to follow, and a bushy tail thwacking&mdash;thwacking&mdash;thwacking the
+snow!</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to shoot him," advised one driver.</p>
+
+<p>"You do it&mdash;you're a dead sure aim," returned the man who had owned the
+dog.</p>
+
+<p>But the other drivers were already coasting over the white wastes. The
+owner looked at his sleighs as if wondering whether they would stand an
+additional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> burden. Then probably reflecting that old age is not
+desirable for a suffering dog in a bitingly keen frost, he turned
+towards the husky with his hand in his belt. Thwack&mdash;thwack went the
+tail as much as to say: "Of course he wouldn't desert me after I've
+hauled his sleigh all my life! Thwack&mdash;thwack! I'd get up and jump all
+around him if I could; there isn't a dog-gone husky in all polar land
+with half as good a master as I have!"</p>
+
+<p>The man stopped. Instead of going to the dog he ran back to his sleigh,
+loaded his arms full of frozen fish and threw them down before the dog.
+Then he put one caribou-skin under the old dog, spread another over him
+and ran away with his train while the husky was still guzzling. The fish
+had been poisoned to be thrown out to the wolves that so often pursue
+Northern dog trains.</p>
+
+<p>Once a party of hunters crossing the Northern Rockies came on a dog
+train stark and stiff. Where was the master who had bidden them stand
+while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a blizzard for
+the lost path? In the middle of the last century, one of that famous
+family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown to go north to Red
+River in Canada. He never went back to Georgetown and he never reached
+Red River; but his coat was found fluttering from a tree, a death signal
+to attract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was
+discovered not far off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit
+pest and the rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves
+seldom give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains,
+licking up the stains of the bleed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>ing feet, or hanging spectrally on
+the dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they
+seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where the wolves
+followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family from the North
+down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would
+follow so far?</p>
+
+<p>The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the days, till
+at last the sun, which has rolled across the south in a wheel of fire,
+dwindles to a disk, the disk to a rim&mdash;then no rim at all comes up, and
+it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of endless
+unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the starlight
+brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts
+and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire&mdash;all brighten the
+polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the region chiefly
+hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and Chippewyan half-breeds.
+The regular Northern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose
+their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of "little sticks," meaning
+the land where timber growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs.</p>
+
+<p>The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written across the
+white page of the snow. If there are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern
+grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; for
+the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of feet feathers have a
+habit of floundering under the powdery snow; and up through that powdery
+snow darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel-hunter of birds. If
+there are the deep plunges of the white hare, lynx and fox and mink and
+marten and pekan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> will be plentiful; for the poor white hare feeds all
+the creatures of the Northern wastes, man and beast. If there are little
+dainty tracks&mdash;oh, such dainty tracks that none but a high-stepping,
+clear-cut, clean-limbed, little thoroughbred could make them!&mdash;tracks of
+four toes and a thumb claw much shorter than the rest, with a padding of
+five basal foot-bones behind the toes, tracks that show a fluff on the
+snow as of furred foot-soles, tracks that go in clean, neat, clear long
+leaps and bounds&mdash;the hunter knows that he has found the signs of the
+Northern fox.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, he will camp for the winter. Camping in the Far North means
+something different from the hastily pitched tent of the prairie. The
+north wind blows biting, keen, unbroken in its sweep. The hunter must
+camp where that wind will not carry scent of his tent to the animal
+world. For his own sake, he must camp under shelter from that wind,
+behind a cairn of stones, below a cliff, in a ravine. Poles have been
+brought from the land of trees on the dog sleigh. These are put up,
+criss-crossed at top, and over them is laid, not the canvas tent, but a
+tent of skins, caribou, wolf, moose, at a sharp enough angle to let the
+snow slide off. Then snow is banked deep, completely round the tent. For
+fire, the Eskimo depends on whale-oil and animal grease. The white man
+or half-breed from the South hoards up chips and sticks. But mainly he
+depends on exercise and animal food for warmth. At night he sleeps in a
+fur bag. In the morning that bag is frozen stiff as boards by the
+moisture of his own breath. Need one ask why the rarest furs, which can
+only be produced by the coldest of climates, are so costly?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Having found the tracks of the fox, the hunter sets out his traps baited
+with fish or rabbit or a bird-head. If the snow be powdery enough, and
+the trapper keen in wild lore, he may even know what sort of a fox to
+expect. In the depths of midwinter, the white Arctic fox has a wool fur
+to his feet like a brahma chicken. This leaves its mark in the fluffy
+snow. A ravenous fellow he always is, this white fox of the hungry
+North, bold from ignorance of man, but hard to distinguish from the snow
+because of his spotless coat. The blue fox being slightly smaller than
+the full-grown Arctic, lopes along with shorter leaps by which the
+trapper may know the quarry; but the blue fox is just as hard to
+distinguish from the snow as his white brother. The gray frost haze is
+almost the same shade as his steel-blue coat; and when spring comes,
+blue fox is the same colour as the tawny moss growth. Colour is blue
+fox's defence. Consequently blue foxes show more signs of age than
+white&mdash;stubby ears frozen low, battle-worn teeth, dulled claws.</p>
+
+<p>The chances are that the trapper will see the black fox himself almost
+as soon as he sees his tracks; for the sheeny coat that is black fox's
+beauty betrays him above the snow. Bushy tail standing straight out,
+every black hair bristling erect with life, the white tail-tip flaunting
+a defiance, head up, ears alert, fore feet cleaving the air with the
+swift ease of some airy bird&mdash;on he comes, jump&mdash;jump&mdash;jump&mdash;more of a
+leap than a lope, galloping like a wolf, altogether different from the
+skulking run of little foxes, openly exulting in his beauty and his
+strength and his speed! There is no mistaking black fox. If the trapper
+does not see the black fox scurrying over the snow, the tell-tale
+char<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>acteristics of the footprints are the length and strength of the
+leaps. Across these leaps the hunter leaves his traps. Does he hope for
+a silver fox? Does every prospector expect to find gold nuggets? In the
+heyday of fur company prosperity, not half a dozen true silver foxes
+would be sent out in a year. To-day I doubt if more than one good silver
+fox is sent out in half a dozen years. But good white fox and black and
+blue are prizes enough in themselves, netting as much to the trapper as
+mink or beaver or sable.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The White Ermine</i></p>
+
+<p>All that was said of the mystery of fox life applies equally to ermine.
+Why is the ermine of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Dakota a dirty little
+weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a night, wearing a
+mahogany-coloured coat with a sulphur strip down his throat, while the
+ermine of the Arctics is as white as snow, noted for his courage,
+wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, yes, and take from him? For a
+long time the learned men who study animal life from museums held that
+the ermine's coat turned white from the same cause as human hair, from
+senility and debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying
+climate. But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby
+ermine born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the
+mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat something
+like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. They told
+of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a fresh layer of
+iron-gray fur that turned sulphur<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> white within a few days. They told of
+the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine with the softest and
+whitest coats. That disposed of the senility theory. All the trapper
+knows is that the whitest ermine is taken when the cold is most intense
+and most continuous, that just as the cold slackens the ermine coat
+assumes the sulphur tinges, deepening to russet and brown, and that the
+whitest ermine instead of showing senility, always displays the most
+active and courageous sort of deviltry.</p>
+
+<p>Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is constantly surrounded by
+ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks almost like
+frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest of a poor
+grouse&mdash;eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest fouled so that it
+emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen lying dead from a wound
+in her throat. There is the frightened rabbit loping across the fields
+in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe-begone leaps, trying to shake
+something off that is clinging to his throat till over he tumbles&mdash;the
+prey of a hunter that is barely the size of rabbit's paw. There is the
+water-rat flitting across the rocks in blind terror, regardless of the
+watching trapper, caring only to reach safety&mdash;water&mdash;water! Behind
+comes the pursuer&mdash;this is no still hunt but a straight open chase&mdash;a
+little creature about the length of a man's hand, with a tail almost as
+long, a body scarcely the thickness of two fingers, a mouth the size of
+a bird's beak, and claws as small as a sparrow's. It gallops in lithe
+bounds with its long neck straight up and its beady eyes fastened on the
+flying water-rat. Splash&mdash;dive&mdash;into the water goes the rat!
+Splash&mdash;dive&mdash;into the water goes the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> ermine! There is a great stirring
+up of the muddy bottom. The water-rat has tried to hide in the
+under-tangle; and the ermine has not only dived in pursuit but headed
+the water-rat back from the safe retreat of his house. Up comes a black
+nose to the surface of the water. The rat is foolishly going to try a
+land race. Up comes a long neck like a snake's, the head erect, the
+beady eyes on the fleeing water-rat&mdash;then with a splash they race
+overland. The water-rat makes for a hole among the rocks. Ermine sees
+and with a spurt of speed is almost abreast when the rat at bay turns
+with a snap at his pursuer. But quick as flash, the ermine has
+pirouetted into the air. The long writhing neck strikes like a serpent's
+fangs and the sharp fore teeth have pierced the brain of the rat. The
+victim dies without a cry, without a struggle, without a pain. That long
+neck was not given the ermine for nothing. Neither were those muscles
+massed on either side of his jaws like bulging cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>In winter the ermine's murderous depredations are more apparent. Now the
+ermine, too, sets itself to reading the signs of the snow. Now the
+ermine becomes as keen a still hunter as the man. Sometimes a whirling
+snow-fall catches a family of grouse out from furze cover. The trapper,
+too, is abroad in the snow-storm; for that is the time when he can set
+his traps undetected. The white whirl confuses the birds. They run here,
+there, everywhere, circling about, burying themselves in the snow till
+the storm passes over. The next day when the hunter is going the rounds
+of these traps, along comes an ermine. It does not see him. It is
+following a scent, head down, body close to ground, nose here, there,
+threading the maze which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> the crazy grouse had run. But stop, thinks the
+trapper, the snow-fall covered the trail. Exactly&mdash;that is why the
+little ermine dives under snow just as it would under water, running
+along with serpentine wavings of the white powdery surface till up it
+comes again where the wind has blown the snow-fall clear. Along it runs,
+still intent, quartering back where it loses the scent&mdash;along again till
+suddenly the head lifts&mdash;that motion of the snake before it strikes! The
+trapper looks. Tail feathers, head feathers, stupid blinking eyes poke
+through the fluffy snow-drift. And now the ermine no longer runs openly.
+There are too many victims this time&mdash;it may get all the foolish hidden
+grouse; so it dives and if the man had not alarmed the stupid grouse,
+ermine would have darted up through the snow with a finishing stab for
+each bird.</p>
+
+<p>By still hunt and open hunt, by nose and eye, relentless as doom, it
+follows its victims to the death. Does the bird perch on a tree? Up goes
+the ermine, too, on the side away from the bird's head. Does the mouse
+thread a hundred mazes and hide in a hole? The ermine threads every
+maze, marches into the hidden nest and takes murderous possession. Does
+the rat hide under rock? Under the rock goes the ermine. Should the
+trapper follow to see the outcome of the contest, the ermine will
+probably sit at the mouth of the rat-hole, blinking its beady eyes at
+him. If he attacks, down it bolts out of reach. If he retires, out it
+comes looking at this strange big helpless creature with bold contempt.</p>
+
+<p>The keen scent, the keen eyes, the keen ears warn it of an enemy's
+approach. Summer and winter, its changing coat conceals it. The furze
+where it runs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> protects it from fox and lynx and wolverine. Its size
+admits it to the tiniest of hiding-places. All that the ermine can do to
+hunt down a victim, it can do to hide from an enemy. These qualities
+make it almost invincible to other beasts of the chase. Two joints in
+the armour of its defence has the little ermine. Its black tail-tip
+moving across snow betrays it to enemies in winter: the very intentness
+on prey, its excess of self-confidence, leads it into danger; for
+instance, little ermine is royally contemptuous of man's tracks. If the
+man does not molest it, it will follow a scent and quarter and circle
+under his feet; so the man has no difficulty in taking the little beast
+whose fur is second only to that of the silver fox. So bold are the
+little creatures that the man may discover their burrows under brush, in
+rock, in sand holes, and take the whole litter before the game mother
+will attempt to escape. Indeed, the plucky little ermine will follow the
+captor of her brood. Steel rat traps, tiny deadfalls, frosted bits of
+iron smeared with grease to tempt the ermine's tongue which the frost
+will hold like a vice till the trapper comes, and, most common of all,
+twine snares such as entrap the rabbit, are the means by which the
+ermine comes to his appointed end at the hands of men.</p>
+
+<p>The quality of the pelt shows as wide variety as the skin of the fox;
+and for as mysterious reasons. Why an ermine a year old should have a
+coat like sulphur and another of the same age a coat like swan's-down,
+neither trapper nor scientist has yet discovered. The price of the
+perfect ermine-pelt is higher than any other of the rare furs taken in
+North America except silver fox; but it no longer commands the fabulous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+prices that were certainly paid for specimen ermine-skins in the days
+of the Georges in England and the later Louis in France. How were those
+fabulously costly skins prepared? Old trappers say no perfectly downy
+pelt is ever taken from an ermine, that the downy effect is produced by
+a trick of the trade&mdash;scraping the flesh side so deftly that all the
+coarse hairs will fall out, leaving only the soft under-fur.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR</h3>
+
+
+<p>Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of nature's most
+harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of nature's most
+destructive agents, against traders who were rivals and Indians who were
+hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be himself a type of nature's
+arch-destroyer.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and
+mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the most
+skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the crack of the
+trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his trap, seem the
+only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence that riots with a
+very fulness of life. But such a world is only a dream. The reality is
+cruel as death. Of all the creatures that prey, man is the most
+merciful.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. There
+are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating capacity and
+penned off from the possibility of harming anything weaker than
+themselves. There are the private pets fed equally well, pampered and
+chained safely from harming or being harmed. There are the wild
+creatures roaming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> natural haunts, some two or three days' travel from
+civilization, whose natures have been gradually modified generation by
+generation from being constantly hunted with long-range repeaters.
+Judging from these sorts of wild animals, it certainly seems that the
+brute creation has been sadly maligned. The bear cubs lick each other's
+paws with an amatory singing that is something between the purr of a cat
+and the grunt of a pig. The old polars wrestle like boys out of school,
+flounder in grotesque gambols that are laughably clumsy, good-naturedly
+dance on their hind legs, and even eat from their keeper's hand. And all
+the deer family can be seen nosing one another with the affection of
+turtle-doves. Surely the worst that can be said of these animals is that
+they shun the presence of man. Perhaps some kindly sentimentalist
+wonders if things hadn't gone so badly out of gear in a certain historic
+garden long ago, whether mankind would not be on as friendly relations
+with the animal world as little boys and girls are with bears and
+baboons in the fairy books. And the scientist goes a step further, and
+soberly asks whether these wild things of the woods are not kindred of
+man after all; for have not man and beast ascended the same scale of
+life? Across the centuries, modern evolution shakes hands with
+old-fashioned transmigration.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, members of the deer family sometimes kill their mates in
+fits of blind rage, and the innocent bear cubs fall to mauling their
+keeper, and the old bears have been known to eat their young. These
+things are set down as freaks in the animal world, and in nowise allowed
+to upset the influences drawn from animals living in unnatural
+surroundings, behind iron<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> bars, or in haunts where long-range rifles
+have put the fear of man in the animal heart.</p>
+
+<p>Now the trapper studies animal life where there is neither a pen to keep
+the animal from doing what it wants to do, nor any rifle but his own to
+teach wild creatures fear. Knowing nothing of science and sentiment, he
+never clips facts to suit his theory. On the truthfulness of his eyes
+depends his own life, so that he never blinks his eyes to disagreeable
+facts.</p>
+
+<p>Looking out on the life of the wilds clear-visioned as his mountain air,
+the trapper sees a world beautiful as a dream but cruel as death. He
+sees a world where to be weak, to be stupid, to be dull, to be slow, to
+be simple, to be rash are the unpardonable crimes; where the weak must
+grow strong, keen of eye and ear and instinct, sharp, wary, swift, wise,
+and cautious; where in a word the weak must grow fit to survive
+or&mdash;perish!</p>
+
+<p>The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into the soft fur
+of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch the swooping
+talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself overland risks
+bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home colony. Bird preys on
+worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf on lynx, and bear on all
+creatures that live from men and moose down to the ant and the embryo
+life in the ant's egg. But the vision of ravening destruction does not
+lead the trapper to morbid conclusions on life as it leads so many
+housed thinkers in the walled cities; for the same world that reveals to
+him such ravening slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest
+and the strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of
+cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight,
+of semblance, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> death&mdash;that will defend it from all enemies. The
+ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw an enemy
+off the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one of the most
+helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from foes of the
+air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind the breath of a
+pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a harrying eagle flopping
+head over heels on the ground, and simulate the stillness of inanimate
+objects surrounding it so truly that the passer-by can scarcely
+distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the russet bark of a log. And the
+rabbit's big eyes and ears are not given it for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same reason. Both
+seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it is; and the world
+that they see is red in tooth and claw. But neither grows morbid from
+his vision; for that same vision shows each that the ravening
+destruction is only a weeding out of the unfit. There is too much
+sunlight in the trapper's world, too much fresh air in his lungs, too
+much red blood in his veins for the morbid miasmas that bring bilious
+fumes across the mental vision of the housed city man.</p>
+
+<p>And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper occupy?
+Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red-dyed monster,
+excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the hunter to slay, but
+after all only the most highly developed of the creatures that prey. Is
+this true? Arch-destroyer he may be; but it should be remembered that he
+is the destroyer of destroyers.</p>
+
+<p>Animals kill young and old, male and female.</p>
+
+<p>The true trapper does not kill the young; for that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> would destroy his
+next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with the
+young. He kills the grown males which&mdash;it can be safely said&mdash;have
+killed more of each other than man has killed in all the history of
+trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the pot-hunter, whether
+the sportsman for amusement or the settler supplying his larder, game
+has been exterminated. This is illustrated by all the stretch of country
+between the Platte and the Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been
+hunted only by the trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been.
+This is illustrated by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land
+south of Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come
+destroying grisly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and
+mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have increased.</p>
+
+<p>But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, something
+more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys <i>animal</i> life&mdash;a
+life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and rapine and
+cruelty&mdash;in order that <i>human</i> life may be preserved, may be rendered
+independent of the elemental powers that wage war against it.</p>
+
+<p>It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against the
+elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors
+conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing Fenris
+wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets of
+life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha hunting
+beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the trapper stands
+forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+obstacles that earth can offer to human will under his feet, finding
+paths through the wilderness for the explorer who was to come after him,
+opening doors of escape from stifled life in crowded centres of
+population, preparing a highway for the civilization that was to follow
+his own wandering trail through the wilds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX" id="APPENDIX"></a>APPENDIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the
+entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life.
+It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian
+mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the
+diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she
+lived at Hamilton Inlet. Having related how she shot a deer, skinning it
+herself, made her snow-shoes and set her rabbit snares, she closes her
+first entry with:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as I sed, I can't write much at a time now, for i am getting
+blind and some mist rises up before me if i sew, read or write a little
+while."</p>
+
+<p>Lydia Campbell's mother was captured by Eskimo. She ran away when she
+had grown up, to quote her own terse diary, "crossed a river on drift
+sticks, wading in shallows, through woods, meeting bears, sleeping under
+trees&mdash;seventy miles flight&mdash;saw a French boat&mdash;took off skirt and waved
+it to them&mdash;came&mdash;took my mother on board&mdash;worked for them&mdash;with the
+sealers&mdash;camped on the ice.</p>
+
+<p>"As there was no other kind of women to marrie hear, the few English men
+each took a wife of that sort and they never was sorry that they took
+them, for they was great workers and so it came to pass that I was one
+of the youngest of them." [Meaning, of course, that she was the daughter
+of one of these marriages.]</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"Our young man pretended to spark the two daughters of Tomas. He was a
+one-armed man, for he had shot away one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> arm firing at a large bird....
+He double-loaded his gun in his fright, so the por man lost one of his
+armes,... he was so smart with his gun that he could bring down a bird
+flying past him, or a deer running past he would be the first to bring
+it down."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"They was holden me hand and telling me that I must be his mother now as
+his own mother is dead and she was a great friend of mine although we
+could not understand each other's language sometimes, still we could
+make it out with sins and wonders."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"April 7, 1894.&mdash;Since I last wrote on this book, I have been what
+people call cruising about here. I have been visiting some of my
+friends, though scattered far apart, with my snow-shoes and axe on my
+shoulders. The nearest house to this place is about five miles up a
+beautiful river, and then through woods, what the french calls a
+portage&mdash;it is what I call pretty. Many is the time that I have been
+going with dogs and komatick 40 or 50 years ago with my husband and
+family to N. W. River, to the Hon. Donald A. Smith and family to keep N.
+Year or Easter."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"My dear old sister Hannah Mishlin who is now going on for 80 years old
+and she is smart yet, she hunts fresh meat and chops holes in the 3 foot
+ice this very winter and catches trout with her hook, enough for her
+household, her husband not able to work, he has a bad complaint."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"You must please excuse my writing and spelling for I have never been to
+school, neither had I a spelling book in my young day&mdash;me a native of
+this country, Labrador, Hamilton's Inlet, Esquimaux Bay&mdash;if you wish to
+know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Lydia Brooks, then
+Blake, after Blake, now Campbell. So you see ups and downs has been my
+life all through, and now I am what I am&mdash;prais the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>"I have been hunting most every day since Easter, and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> some of my
+rabbit snares and still traps, cat traps and mink traps. I caught 7
+rabbits and 1 marten and I got a fix and 4 partridges, about 500 trout
+besides household duties&mdash;never leave out morning and Evening prayers
+and cooking and baking and washing for 5 people&mdash;3 motherless little
+children&mdash;with so much to make for sale out of seal skin and deer skin
+shoes, bags and pouches and what not.... You can say well done old
+half-breed woman in Hamilton's Inlet. Good night, God bless us all and
+send us prosperity.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+"Yours ever true,</p>
+<p class="author">"<span class="smcap">Lydia Campbell.</span>"
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"We are going to have an evening worship, my poor old man is tired, he
+has been a long way to-day and he shot 2 beautyful white partridges. Our
+boy heer shot once spruce partridge."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"Caplin so plentiful boats were stopped, whales, walrusses and white
+bears."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"Muligan River, May 24, 1894.&mdash;They say that once upon a time the world
+was drowned and that all the Esquimaux were drownded but one family and
+he took his family and dogs and chattels and his seal-skin boat and Kiak
+and Komaticks and went on the highest hill that they could see, and
+stayed there till the rain was over and when the water dried up they
+descended down the river and got down to the plains and when they could
+not see any more people, they took off the bottoms of their boots and
+took some little white [seal] pups and sent the poor little things off
+to sea and they drifted to some islands far away and became white
+people. Then they done the same as the others did and the people spread
+all over the world. Such was my poor father's thought.... There is up
+the main river a large fall, the same that the American and English
+gentlemen have been up to see. [Referring to Mr. Bryant, of
+Philadelphia, who visited Grand Falls.] Well there is a large whirlpool
+or hole at the bottom of the fall. The Indians that frequent the place
+say that there is three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> women&mdash;Indians&mdash;that lives under that place or
+near to it I am told, and at times they can hear them speaking to each
+other louder than the roar of the falls." [The Indians always think the
+mist of a waterfall signifies the presence of ghosts.]</p>
+
+<p>"I have been the cook of that great Sir D. D. Smith that is in Canada at
+this time. [In the days when Lord Strathcona was chief trader at
+Hamilton Inlet.] He was then at Rigolet Post, a chief trader only, now
+what is he so great! He was seen last winter by one of the women that
+belong to this bay. She went up to Canada ... and he is gray headed and
+bended, that is Sir D. D. Smith."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"August 1, 1894.&mdash;My dear friends, you will please excuse my writing and
+spelling&mdash;the paper sweems by me, my eyesight is dim now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired
+to make immortal.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the
+former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a
+voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw
+Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right
+arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff.
+With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his
+moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a
+monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this
+trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana
+after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for
+France&mdash;one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur
+trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in
+a network irrespective of flag.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in
+contradistinction to the trappers and <i>voyageurs</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay
+Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne,
+unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his
+too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La
+Perouse's campaign of 1782.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the
+Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
+were not yet so far south.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
+of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern
+continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full
+particulars.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander
+Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.
+Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the
+corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction
+to the North-West.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> The modern Winnipeg.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Franchère, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
+detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering
+the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchère, says
+Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all
+accounts&mdash;Franchère's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's&mdash;are from
+the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the
+massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him
+on account of his race. Franchère became prominent in Montreal, Cox in
+British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where
+the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old
+settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part
+in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth
+century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost
+everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of
+late from the daily journals of two North-West partners&mdash;MacDonald of
+Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,
+and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
+in the American War of Independence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
+white woman on the Columbia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
+MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be
+distinguished from others of blameless lives.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Some say seventy-four.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria
+capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of
+1812.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New
+York.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> More of the <i>voyageurs'</i> romance; named because of a voice
+heard calling and calling across the lake as <i>voyageurs</i> entered the
+valley&mdash;said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover,
+though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the <i>voyageurs'</i> song
+among the hills.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to
+the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's
+enforcement.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> For example, the Deschamps of Red River.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> Chittenden.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more
+circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.</p></div>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of
+Duluth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Especially the Château de Ramezay, where great underground
+vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New
+Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under Château de
+Ramezay.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were
+scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew
+Henry's party&mdash;had all been such wide-ranging foresters.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this
+year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fé.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from
+the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.
+But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs,
+which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay
+occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few
+years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the
+dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt&mdash;which
+tells its own story.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
+factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
+when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
+When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
+the pelt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
+writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
+any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
+field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
+badgers are running.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
+if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
+Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
+had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
+of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
+they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
+and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
+the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
+Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
+proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
+<i>Bois-Brûlés</i>? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
+and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
+single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter
+seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the
+apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white
+traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
+and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
+the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
+there would be no trade.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
+conspicuous for his brutality.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Amisk</i>, the Chippewyan, <i>umisk</i>, the Cree, with much the
+same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he considered the
+variation in Indian language more a matter of dialect than difference in
+meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had any
+difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan,
+and Assiniboine. For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is
+<i>wahboos</i> on the Upper Ottawa, <i>wapus</i> on the Saskatchewan, <i>wapauce</i> on
+the MacKenzie.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> That is, as far as trappers yet know.</p></div>
+
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Trapper, by A. C. Laut
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8612 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Trapper, by A. C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Trapper
+
+Author: A. C. Laut
+
+Illustrator: Arthur Heming
+
+Release Date: May 3, 2010 [EBook #32236]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreaders at
+http://www.fadedpage.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on. (_See
+page 105._)]
+
+
+
+
+_THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES_
+
+_EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK_
+
+THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Story of the West Series.
+
+EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK.
+
+Each Illustrated, 12mo, Cloth.
+
+
++The Story of the Railroad.+
+
+By CY WARMAN, Author of "The Express Messenger." $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Cowboy.+
+
+By E. HOUGH. Illustrated by William L. Wells and C. M. Russell. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Mine.+
+
+Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada.
+
+By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Indian.+
+
+By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, Author of "Pawnee Hero Stories," "Blackfoot
+Lodge Tales," etc. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Soldier.+
+
+By Brevet Brigadier-General GEORGE A. FORSYTH, U. S. A. (retired).
+Illustrated by R. F. Zogbaum. $1.50.
+
++The Story of the Trapper.+
+
+By A. C. LAUT, Author of "Heralds of Empire." Illustrated by Hemment.
+$1.25 net; postage, 12 cents additional.
+
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+  THE STORY
+  OF THE TRAPPER
+
+  BY
+
+  A. C. LAUT
+
+  AUTHOR OF HERALDS OF EMPIRE
+  AND LORDS OF THE NORTH
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR HEMING
+  AND OTHERS_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+  1916
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1902
+
+  BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+  Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+TO ALL WHO KNOW
+
+THE GIPSY YEARNING FOR THE WILDS
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+The picturesque figure of the trapper follows close behind the Indian in
+the unfolding of the panorama of the West. There is the explorer, but
+the trapper himself preceded the explorers--witness Lewis's and Clark's
+meetings with trappers on their journey. The trapper's hard-earned
+knowledge of the vast empire lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by
+later comers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occasional
+records in the documents of fur companies, or reports of military
+expeditions, or here and there in the name of a pass, a stream, a
+mountain, or a fort. His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the
+woods and streams was the expression of a primitive instinct old as the
+history of mankind. The development of the motives which led the first
+pioneer trappers afield from the days of the first Eastern settlements,
+the industrial organizations which followed, the commanding commercial
+results which were evolved from the trafficking of Radisson and
+Groseillers in the North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,
+and the American enterprise which led, among other results, to the
+foundation of the Astor fortunes, would form no inconsiderable part of a
+history of North America. The present volume aims simply to show the
+type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch in a series of
+pictures the checkered life of this adventurer of the wilderness.
+
+The trapper of the early West was a composite figure. From the Northeast
+came a splendid succession of French explorers like La Verendrye, with
+_coureurs des bois_, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders
+pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard, illustrated in
+figures like Garces and others, held out hands which rarely grasped the
+waiting commerce. From the north and northeast there was the steady
+advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in the deeds of the
+Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the leaders of the organized fur trade,
+explorers, traders, captains of industry, carrying the flags of the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern America to the
+Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast the Russian appeared as fur
+trader in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the close of the
+century saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of the fur
+traffic of that coast. The American trapper becomes a conspicuous figure
+in the early years of the nineteenth century. The emporium of his
+traffic was St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance and
+prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase and continued for
+forty years. The complete history of the American fur trade of the far
+West has been written by Captain H. M. Chittenden in volumes which will
+be included among the classics of early Western history. Although his
+history is a publication designed for limited circulation, no student or
+specialist in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his
+faithful and comprehensive work.
+
+In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for the general reader a
+vivid picture of an adventurous figure, which is painted with a
+singleness of purpose and a distinctness impossible of realization in
+the large and detailed histories of the American fur trade and the
+Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the various special relations
+and journals and narratives. The author's wilderness lore and her
+knowledge of the life, added to her acquaintance with its literature,
+have borne fruit in a personification of the Western and Northern
+trappers who live in her pages. It is the man whom we follow not merely
+in the evolution of the Western fur traffic, but also in the course of
+his strange life in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his
+craft against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most picturesque figure
+which is sketched in these pages with the etcher's art that selects
+essentials while boldly disregarding details. This figure as it is
+outlined here will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and
+the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own appeal. A strange
+chapter in history is outlined for those who would gain an insight into
+the factors which had to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft,
+exemplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is painted in
+pictures which breathe the very atmosphere of that life of stream and
+forest which has not lost its appeal even in these days of urban
+centralization. The flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the
+stealthy tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man against
+brute and savage, may be followed throughout a narrative which is
+constant in its fresh and personal interest.
+
+The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and there is still an
+American fur trade; but the golden days are past, and the heroic age of
+the American trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even more
+than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly realized by his
+successors. It is time to tell his story, to show what manner of man he
+was, and to preserve for a different age the adventurous character of a
+Romany of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesqueness and daring
+of his primeval life, and also, judged by more practical standards, a
+figure of serious historical import in his relations to exploration and
+commerce, and even affairs of politics and state.
+
+If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure in the early
+exploitation of an empire, his larger significance may be held of far
+more consequence to us than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in
+his life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple. The record of his
+dealings with the red man and with white competitors is darkened by many
+stains. His return from his lonely journeys afield brought an outbreak
+of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the range, but with all
+this the stern life of the old frontier bred a race of men who did their
+work. That work was the development of the only natural resources of
+vast regions in this country and to the Northward, which were utilized
+for long periods. There was also the task of exploration, the breaking
+the way for others, and as pioneer and as builder of commerce the
+trapper's part in our early history has a significance which cloaks the
+frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden wilds.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+  I.--GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS                             1
+
+  II.--THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT                            8
+
+  III.--THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP                               22
+
+  IV.--THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP            28
+
+  V.--MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS           38
+
+  VI.--THE FRENCH TRAPPER                                    50
+
+  VII.--THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS                                  65
+
+  VIII.--THE MOUNTAINEERS                                    81
+
+  IX.--THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER                             102
+
+  X.--THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS                           117
+
+  XI.--THE INDIAN TRAPPER                                   128
+
+  XII.--BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER                           144
+
+  XIII.--JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER                          160
+
+  XIV.--THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD               181
+
+  XV.--KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT                                 206
+
+  XVI.--OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT     222
+
+  XVII.--THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES THEM          240
+
+  XVIII.--UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN    258
+
+  XIX.--WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR                         275
+
+  APPENDIX                                                  281
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                           FACING
+                                                             PAGE
+
+  WITH EYE AND EAR ALERT THE MAN PADDLES SILENTLY ON   _Frontispiece_
+
+  INDIAN _VOYAGEURS_ "PACKING" OVER LONG _PORTAGE_           30
+
+  TRADERS RUNNING A MACKINAW OR KEEL-BOAT DOWN THE RAPIDS    57
+
+  THE BUFFALO-HUNT                                           78
+
+  THEY DODGE THE COMING SWEEP OF THE UPLIFTED ARM           143
+
+  CARRYING GOODS OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED
+  RED RIVER OX-CARTS                                        198
+
+  FORT MACPHERSON, THE MOST NORTHERLY POST OF THE
+  HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY                                      228
+
+  TYPES OF FUR PRESSES                                      250
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS
+
+
+Fearing nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no law, ruling his
+stronghold of the wilds like a despot, checkmating rivals with a
+deviltry that beggars parallel, wassailing with a shamelessness that
+might have put Rome's worst deeds to the blush,
+fighting--fighting--fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew
+no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever stand as a type of
+the worst and the best in the militant heroes of mankind.
+
+Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon won victories that
+upset the geography of earth. The fur traders never at any time exceeded
+a few thousands in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sallied
+out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent that has bred a new
+race.
+
+Like John Colter,[1] whom Manuel Lisa met coming from the wilds a
+hundred years ago, the trapper strapped a pack to his back, slung a
+rifle over his shoulder, and, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped
+into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else, like Williams of
+the Arkansas, the trapper left the moorings of civilization in a canoe,
+hunted at night, hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding
+down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-current screened by the
+branches of driftwood, and if a sudden halloo of marauders came from the
+distance, cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got away
+under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert
+set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often
+compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
+Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the
+Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who
+brought down their pelts to the mountain _rendezvous_ of Pierre's Hole,
+or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur
+Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling canon walls
+where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too
+sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the
+haft.[2] Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur
+traders clubbed together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of
+the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.
+Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted
+antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
+River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day
+think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut
+off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland
+route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at
+all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,
+Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.
+
+The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence--to go ahead
+without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's
+life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of
+the most thrilling pages in history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart
+Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed
+the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward
+to the region of Hudson Bay.[3] Returning with tales of fabulous wealth
+to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by
+members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence
+secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and
+honourable body--as the company was called--reaped enormous profits from
+the bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,
+half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and
+Severn Rivers, or at York Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of
+Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number
+of licenses for the fur trade in Canada; and the old English company had
+no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but
+waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts
+on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville[4] might march overland from
+Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the
+stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off
+like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient
+company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable
+adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost
+furs.
+
+But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously
+in all parts of the east.
+
+This resulted from two events--England's victory over France at Quebec,
+and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of
+French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which
+limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army
+of some two thousand men--_voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs de
+lard_,[5] famous hunters, traders, and trappers--on their own resources.
+The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and
+MacTavishes--Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal--were quick to
+seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company
+and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off
+Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to
+the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old
+French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against
+all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the
+larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor'
+Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous
+ubiquity.
+
+But at that stage came the other factor--American Independence. Locked
+in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could
+France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles
+and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and
+Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the
+Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase,
+and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its
+fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours
+had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the
+west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for
+furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report
+of the north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had
+stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty
+Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.
+
+Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its
+eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,[6]
+Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river
+named after him,[7] and forced his way across the northern Rockies to
+the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's
+lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At
+Michilimackinac--one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur
+posts--was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old
+French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes
+to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily
+pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado--the fur
+country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by
+the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.
+
+Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get
+possession first.
+
+Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at
+the same time and in the same light. And the war began.
+
+The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the
+Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out
+of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent
+state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening
+that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were
+not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what
+was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America
+and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of
+New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes,
+was not asleep.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired
+to make immortal.]
+
+[Footnote 2: While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the
+former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a
+voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw
+Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right
+arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff.
+With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his
+moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a
+monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this
+trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.]
+
+[Footnote 4: 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana
+after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for
+France--one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur
+trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in
+a network irrespective of flag.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in
+contradistinction to the trappers and _voyageurs_.]
+
+[Footnote 6: This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay
+Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne,
+unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his
+too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La
+Perouse's campaign of 1782.]
+
+[Footnote 7: To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the
+Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT
+
+
+If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur
+country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become
+international history; but three companies were at strife for possession
+of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was
+"beaver"--not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all
+means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth
+company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own
+existence.
+
+From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the
+Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the
+mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York,
+Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory
+west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur
+trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues
+to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company
+lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling
+heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in
+the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not
+yet come.
+
+Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and
+Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,
+Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as
+interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the
+spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the
+full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or
+"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by
+means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.
+Where the water was shallow the _voyageurs_ poled single file, facing
+the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars
+were used.
+
+Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the
+wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they
+were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring
+the deserter back dead or alive--orders that were filled to the letter,
+for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.
+Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
+man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this
+lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their
+return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine
+the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for
+three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
+promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.
+
+Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been
+buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit
+might see the canoes of the French _voyageurs_ going up and down the
+river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,[8] whose death, like that of many
+a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of
+empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in
+vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from
+rival traders;[9] past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;
+past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank with weapons
+ready; up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn--went Lisa,
+stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those thieves and pirates
+and marauders of the western wilderness. Stockades were hastily stuck in
+the ground, banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the two
+usual bastions that could send a raking fire along all four walls; and
+Lisa was ready for trade.
+
+In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded to the water-line
+with furs. The Missouri Company was formally organized,[10] and yearly
+expeditions were sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks of
+the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of the two hundred and
+fifty men employed, fifty were trained riflemen for the defence of the
+trappers; but this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their
+lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years. Among the victims
+was Drouillard, struck down wheeling his horse round and round as a
+shield, literally torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten
+according to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a brave man
+imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing, ammunition, and peltries
+were carried to the Nor' Westers' trading posts north of the
+boundary.[11] Not if the West were to be baptized in blood would the
+traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Missouri men under Andrew
+Henry's leadership moved south-west over the mountains into the region
+that was to become famous as Pierre's Hole.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor remained idle. The same
+year that Lisa organized his Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a
+charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. To
+lessen competition in the great scheme gradually framing itself in his
+mind, he bought out that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade[12] which
+was within the United States, the posts in the British dominions falling
+into the hands of the all-powerful Nor' Westers. Intimate with the
+leading partners of the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid
+rivalry on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third interest in
+his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.
+
+Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected Mr. Astor's proposal
+with a scorn born of unshaken confidence, and at once prepared to
+anticipate American possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor countered
+by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' Westers for his Pacific
+Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall, a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with
+a bumptious idea of authority which was always making other eyes smart,
+was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to round the Horn and at the
+headquarters of the company on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a
+relative of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have left the
+northern traders from some momentary pique; for he soon went back to the
+Canadian companies, became chief factor at Fort Garry,[13] the
+headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time governor of
+Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied Sir Alexander MacKenzie on
+his famous northern trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor
+with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a rollicking winterer
+from The Labrador, with the hail-fellow-well-met-air of an equal among
+the mercurial French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the game,
+independent spirit that made Nor' Westers famous.
+
+Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn--with its crew of twenty, and
+choleric Captain Thorn, and four[14] partners headed by the fussy little
+MacDougall in mutiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks
+always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sailors' way, and
+thirteen _voyageurs_ ever grumbling at the ocean swell that gave them
+qualms unknown on inland waters--little need be said. Washington Irving
+has told this story; and what Washington Irving leaves untold, Captain
+Chittenden has recently unearthed from the files of the Missouri
+archives.
+
+The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6, 1810. The captain had
+been a naval officer, and cursed the partners for their easy familiarity
+with the men before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot of
+scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick _voyageurs_ for a set of
+fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's amiable feelings were
+reciprocated by every Nor' Wester on board.
+
+Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii sighted in February, some
+thirty Sandwich Islanders engaged for service in the new company, and
+the Columbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives were lost
+attempting to run small boats against the turbulent swell of tide and
+current. The place to land, the site to build, details of the new fort,
+Astoria--all were subjects for the jangling that went on between the
+fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain Thorn, till the Tonquin
+weighed anchor on the 1st of June and sailed away to trade on the north
+coast, accompanied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay, and one clerk,
+James Lewis.
+
+The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn continued to dictate a
+wrong-headed course. In spite of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians
+off the ship and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were
+treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over his decks. Once,
+when MacKay was on shore, Thorn lost his temper, struck an impertinent
+chief in the face with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from
+the ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had happened, he
+warned the captain of Indian vengeance and urged him to leave the
+harbour. These warnings the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians,
+and no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost servile.
+
+One morning, when Thorn, and MacKay were yet asleep, a pirogue with
+twenty Indians approached the ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held
+up furs to trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe glided near
+and another band mounted the ship's ladder. Soon the vessel was
+completely surrounded with canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs,
+the squaws laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the ship's
+side. This day the Indians were neither pertinacious nor impertinent in
+their trade. Matters went swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew
+noticed with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and other
+weapons in exchange for their furs and that groups were casually
+stationing themselves at positions of wonderful advantage on the deck.
+MacKay and Thorn were quickly called.
+
+This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.
+
+MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation and again warned the
+captain. Again Thorn slighted the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The
+Indians thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade. Then the
+dour-headed Thorn understood. With a shout he ordered the decks cleared.
+His shout was answered by a counter-shout--the wild, shrill shriekings
+of the Indian war-cry! All the newly-bought weapons flashed in the
+morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first, bending over a pile of goods,
+and rolled down the companion-way with a mortal stab in his back.
+MacKay was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club and
+pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws received him on their
+knives. Thorn had been roused so suddenly that he had no weapon but his
+pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms
+of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the
+wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard
+to the knives of the squaws.
+
+While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and
+Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men
+who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
+and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell
+down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the
+cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This
+sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The
+survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which
+drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.
+
+All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;
+but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the
+Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
+below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians
+launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man--one of
+those who had fallen down the hatch wounded--staggered up to the deck,
+waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of
+booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of
+carrion-birds. Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with
+a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to
+atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants
+of what had been living men but a moment before.
+
+The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,[15] had
+determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to
+escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a
+match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better
+have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where
+they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty
+that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this
+disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
+with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of
+the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri
+and Columbia.
+
+Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men building a fort
+on the Upper Columbia. If these had been the overland party, they would
+have come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who had himself been
+a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador
+was preparing to go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific
+Company; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the apparition of nine
+white men in a canoe flying a British flag.
+
+The North-West Company arrived just three months too late!
+
+David Thompson, the partner at the head of the newcomers, had been
+delayed in the mountains by the desertion of his guides. Much to the
+disgust of Labrador Stuart, who might change masters often but was loyal
+to only one master at a time, MacDougall and Thompson hailed each other
+as old friends. Every respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to
+the Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading rivalry, he
+should have been nothing more than a North-West spy, to be guardedly
+received in a Pacific Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed
+with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with a supply of
+Astoria provisions.
+
+History is not permitted to jump at conclusions, but unanswered
+questions will always cling round Thompson's visit. Did he bear some
+message from the Nor' Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an
+honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon that he shook free of
+Thompson's company on their way back up the Columbia? Why did MacDougall
+lose his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness? How could the
+next party of Nor' Westers take him back into the fold and grant him a
+partnership _ostensibly_ without the knowledge of the North-West annual
+council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?
+
+Early in August wandering tribes brought news of the Tonquin's
+destruction, and Astoria bestirred itself to strengthen pickets, erect
+bastions, mount four-pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's
+North-West training now came out, and he entered on a policy of
+conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his marrying Comcomly's
+daughter. He also perpetrated the world-famous threat of letting
+small-pox out of a bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained
+good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the schooner Dolly was
+built, and New Year's Day of 1812 ushered in with a firing of cannon and
+festive allowance of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of the
+overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale of blundering and
+mismanagement that must have been gall to MacKenzie, the old Nor' Wester
+accompanying them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria in February,
+and two other detachments later.
+
+The management of the overlanders had been intrusted to Wilson Price
+Hunt of New Jersey, who at once proceeded to Montreal with Donald
+MacKenzie, the Nor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-West Company
+was first felt. Rum, threats, promises, and sudden orders whisking them
+away prevented capable _voyageurs_ from enlisting under the Pacific
+Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged, which explains in part
+why these empty braggarts so often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the
+Ottawa in a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake to
+Michilimackinac.
+
+Here the hand of the North-West Company was again felt. Tattlers went
+from man to man telling yarns of terror to frighten _engages_ back. Did
+a man enlist? Sudden debts were remembered or manufactured, and the bill
+presented to Hunt. Was a _voyageur_ on the point of embarking? A swarm
+of naked brats with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt
+finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr. Ramsay Crooks, a
+distinguished Nor' Wester, who afterward became famous as the president
+of the American Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay and the
+Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where the machinations of another
+rival were put to work.
+
+Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part in the Pacific
+Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Missouri traders did not propose to see
+his field invaded. The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis
+in engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was finally ready in
+March, 1811, to set out with his sixty men up the Missouri, Lisa
+resurrected a liquor debt against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter,
+with the fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten dollars a
+quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going overland through the woods
+and meeting Hunt's party farther up-stream, beyond the law.
+
+Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a search party of twenty
+picked _voyageurs_ to go up the Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew
+Henry who had fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake River.
+Traders too often secured safe passage through hostile territory in
+those lawless days by giving the savages muskets enough to blow out the
+brains of the next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by Crooks
+and MacLellan.[16] Perhaps that was his reason for pushing ahead at all
+speed to overtake Hunt before either party had reached Sioux territory.
+
+Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa came, the harder Hunt
+fled. This curious race lasted for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa
+coming up with the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Spaniard
+tampered with Dorion. Had not two English travellers intervened, Hunt
+and Lisa would have settled their quarrel with pistols for two.
+Thereafter the rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping
+to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the mountains.
+
+That overland journey was one of the most pitiful, fatuous, mismanaged
+expeditions in the fur trade. Why a party of sixty-four well-armed,
+well-provisioned men failed in doing what any two _voyageurs_ or
+trappers were doing every day, can only be explained by comparison to a
+bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild prairie creature the bit, and
+it will carry its rider through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left,
+east, and west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as
+helpless as the rider. So with the _voyageur_. Crossing the mountains
+alone in his own way, he could evade famine and danger and attack by
+lifting a brother trader's cache--hidden provisions--or tarrying in
+Indian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the daughter of a
+hostile chief, or creeping so quietly through the woods neither game
+nor Indian scout could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of
+sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into detachments, weak,
+emaciated, stripped naked, on the verge of dementia and cannibalism, now
+shouting to each other across a roaring canon, now sinking in despair
+before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached Astoria after
+nearly a year's wanderings.
+
+Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with re-enforcements of men
+and provisions. More posts were established inland. After several futile
+attempts, despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under direction of
+Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska to trade with the Russians. Word
+came from the North-West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with
+England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was wrecked. Astoria was now
+altogether in the hands of men who had been Nor' Westers.
+
+And what was the alert North-West Company doing?[17]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
+were not yet so far south.]
+
+[Footnote 10: In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
+of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern
+continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full
+particulars.]
+
+[Footnote 11: This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander
+Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.
+Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the
+corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction
+to the North-West.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The modern Winnipeg.]
+
+[Footnote 14: MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Franchere, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
+detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering
+the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchere, says
+Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all
+accounts--Franchere's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's--are from
+the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the
+massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him
+on account of his race. Franchere became prominent in Montreal, Cox in
+British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where
+the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old
+settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part
+in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth
+century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost
+everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of
+late from the daily journals of two North-West partners--MacDonald of
+Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,
+and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP
+
+
+"_It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should
+send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had
+established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William
+(overland) to meet the ship on the coast_," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a
+North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.
+
+This was decided at the North-West council of 1812, held annually on the
+shores of Lake Superior. It was just a year from the time that Thompson
+had discovered the American fort in the hands of former Nor' Westers. At
+this meeting Thompson's report must have been read.
+
+The overland party was to be led by the two partners, John George
+MacTavish and Alexander Henry, the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by
+Donald MacTavish, who had actually been appointed governor of the
+American fort in anticipation of victory. On the Isaac Todd also went
+MacDonald of Garth.[18]
+
+The overland expedition was to thread that labyrinth of water-ways
+connecting Lake Superior and the Saskatchewan, thence across the plains
+to Athabasca, over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through
+Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the Columbia through
+Kootenay plains to Astoria. One has only to recall the roaring canons of
+the northern Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless
+precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this route was than that
+followed by Hunt from St. Louis to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the
+plains and the width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did this,
+but passed down the middle of the Rockies for nearly a thousand miles.
+
+Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to
+England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naive assurance of
+victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger,
+difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the
+terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's
+mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their
+ship. "_A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew_," writes
+MacDonald of Garth, "_a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and
+a rascally crew_." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British
+convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay
+barmaid Jane[19] drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the
+rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency.
+"_We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were
+driven half-way to the Cape of Good Hope; ... at last doubled the cape
+under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our
+sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale_,"
+wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.
+
+It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months
+after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness
+were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the
+Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a
+month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the
+Isaac Todd.
+
+And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army
+of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself
+into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the
+Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving
+rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not
+decamp.
+
+Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor'
+Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the
+bragging _voyageurs_ told those quaking Astorians terrible things of
+what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and
+captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne
+alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns,
+knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant
+courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran
+up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above
+Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at
+forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his conscience with the
+excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the
+Raccoon.
+
+At the end of November a large ship was sighted standing in over the bar
+with all sails spread but no ensign out. Three shots were fired from
+Astoria. There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost Mr. Hunt
+coming back from Alaskan trade on the Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers
+hastily packed their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their
+_voyageurs_ scampering up-stream to hide and await a signal. But
+MacDougall was equal to the emergency. He launched out for the ship,
+prepared to be an American if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'
+Wester if it were the Raccoon with a company partner.
+
+It was the Raccoon, and the British captain addressed the Astorians in
+words that have become historic: "_Is this the fort I've heard so much
+about? D---- me, I could batter it down in two hours with a
+four-pounder!_"
+
+Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above Astoria, with traders
+and marines drawn up under arms to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira
+was broken against the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British
+possession by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired from the
+bastions.
+
+At this stage all accounts, particularly American accounts, have rung
+down the curtain on the catastrophe, leaving the Nor' Westers
+intoxicated with success. But another act was to complete the disasters
+of Astoria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift judgment
+on the revelling Nor' Westers.
+
+The Raccoon left on the last day of 1813. MacDougall had been appointed
+partner in the North-West Company, and the other Canadians re-engaged
+under their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the Pedler, which he
+had chartered after the wreck of Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it
+was too late to do more than carry away those Americans still loyal to
+Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence he made his way to
+Europe. The others were captured off California and they afterward
+scattered to all parts of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of
+Nor' Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger MacTavish, set
+out for the long journey across the mountains and prairie to the
+company's headquarters at Port William. In the flotilla of ten canoes
+went many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came the belated
+Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white flag at its foretop and the
+dissolute old Governor MacTavish holding a high carnival of riot in the
+cabin.
+
+No darker picture exists than that of Astoria--or Fort George, as the
+British called it--under Governor MacTavish's _regime_. The picture is
+from the hand of a North-West partner himself. _"Not in bed till 2 A.
+M.; ... the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... famous fellows for
+grog they are; ... diced for articles belonging to Mr. M.,"_ Alexander
+Henry had written when the Raccoon was in port; and now under Governor
+MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to decency was discarded.
+
+"_Avec les loups il faut hurler_" was a common saying among Nor'
+Westers, and perhaps that very assimilation to the native races which
+contributed so much to success also contributed to the trader's undoing.
+White men and Indians vied with each other in mutual debasement. Chinook
+and Saxon and Frenchmen alike lay on the sand sodden with corruption;
+and if one died from carousals, companions weighted neck and feet with
+stones and pushed the corpse into the river. Quarrels broke out between
+the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the
+underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the
+gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; _seven hours
+rowing one mile_, innocently states the record of another day, _the tide
+running seven feet high past the fort_.
+
+The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled
+horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running
+its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of
+countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.
+Governor MacTavish[20] and Alexander Henry had embarked with six
+_voyageurs_ to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A
+tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of
+the fort.
+
+So perished the conquerors of Astoria!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 18: A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
+in the American War of Independence.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
+white woman on the Columbia.]
+
+[Footnote 20: In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
+MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be
+distinguished from others of blameless lives.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP
+
+
+Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their
+ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many
+dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort
+George.
+
+Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed
+the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their
+towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia
+where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial
+sediment, now raving through a narrow canon, now teased into a white
+whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
+forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,
+and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.
+
+"_A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille_," wrote the mighty
+MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old
+trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "_Nearing the mountains we
+got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here_ (at the
+Great Bend) _we left canoes and began a mountain pass_ (Yellow Head
+Pass).... _The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding
+by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in,
+frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in,
+... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four
+days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the
+Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires
+we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the
+morning."_
+
+They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled
+down-stream to the _portage_ between Athabasca River and the
+Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus
+(Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and
+the _voyageurs_ launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand
+miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort
+William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.
+
+Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a
+million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed
+guard of three hundred men.[22] Coasting along the north shore of Lake
+Superior, the _voyageurs_ came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's
+establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the
+greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the
+Lakes.
+
+"_Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four
+Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps_," writes MacDonald, showing
+to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were
+overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The
+strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had
+been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore
+bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich
+prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under
+the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to
+Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River.
+William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence
+of the furs.
+
+Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was hovering about the
+Sault, the other cruising into the countless recesses of the north
+shore. Against the latter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces,
+boarding her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness, "_pinning
+the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck_." Lying snugly at anchor, the
+victors awaited the coming of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her
+cast anchor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and took both
+schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all apprehension of capture, the
+North-West brigade proceeded eastward to the Ottawa River, and without
+further adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confusion from
+another cause.
+
+At the very time when war endangered the entire route of the Nor'
+Westers from Montreal to the Pacific, the Hudson's Bay Company awakened
+from its long sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in the
+United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans for the control of all
+Canada's fur trade. Like Mr. Astor, he too had been the guest at the
+North-West banquets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard fabulous
+things from those magnates of the north about wealth made in the fur
+trade. Returning to England, Lord Selkirk bought up enough stock of the
+Hudson's Bay Company to give him full control, and secured from the
+shareholders an enormous grant of land surrounding the mouths of the Red
+and Assiniboine rivers.
+
+Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were situated Fort Douglas
+(later Fort Garry, now Winnipeg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay
+Company, and Fort Gibraltar, the North-West post whence supplies were
+sent all the way from the Mandans on the Missouri to the Eskimo in the
+arctics.
+
+Not satisfied with this _coup_, Lord Selkirk engaged Colin Robertson, an
+old Nor' Wester, to gather a brigade of _voyageurs_ two hundred strong
+at Montreal and proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca,
+MacKenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy, blustering,
+bragging company of gaily-bedizened fellows that had turned the streets
+of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end
+of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy revellers! Eighteen of
+them died of starvation in the far, cold north, owing to the conflict
+between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.
+
+Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his
+newly-acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson
+Bay. These people were given lands, and in return expected to defend
+the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers. The Nor' Westers struck back
+by discouraging the colonists, shipping them free out of the country,
+and getting possession of their arms.
+
+Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regiment, New York,
+governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Douglas, at once issued
+proclamations forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers and
+ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the strength of these
+proclamations two or three outlying North-West forts were destroyed and
+North-West fur brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,[23] the North-West
+partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his _Bois-Brules_, a
+ragged half-breed army of wild plain rangers under Cuthbert Grant,
+canter across the two miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a
+volley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To save the post for the
+Hudson's Bay Company, Miles MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped
+out of the country.
+
+But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time till the valiant
+North-West defenders had scattered to their winter posts. Then an armed
+party seized Duncan Cameron not far from the North-West fort, and with
+pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the Nor' Wester.
+Afterward, when Semple, the new Hudson's Bay governor, was absent from
+Fort Douglas and could not therefore be held responsible for
+consequences, the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson who
+had brought the large brigade from Montreal, marched across the prairie
+to Fort Gibraltar, captured Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers'
+stores, and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retaliation for
+MacDonell's expulsion, the North-West partner was shipped down to Hudson
+Bay, where he might as well have been on Devil's Island for all the
+chance of escape.
+
+One company at fault as often as the other, similar outrages were
+perpetrated in all parts of the north fur country, the blood of rival
+traders being spilt without a qualm of conscience or thought of results.
+The effect of this conflict among white men on the bloodthirsty
+red-skins one may guess. The _Bois-Brules_ were clamouring for Cuthbert
+Grant's permission to wipe the English--meaning the Hudson's Bay
+men--off the earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux under Chief
+Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let them defend the Hudson's
+Bay--meaning kill the Nor' Westers.
+
+The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of Fort Gibraltar. That
+post had sent all supplies to North-West forts. If Fort Douglas of the
+Hudson's Bay Company, past which North-West canoes must paddle to turn
+westward to the plains, should intercept the incoming brigade of Nor'
+Westers' supplies, what would become of the two thousand North-West
+traders and _voyageurs_ and _engages_ inland? Whether the Hudson's Bay
+had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers were determined to prevent
+the possibility.
+
+Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms, scouts went
+scouring across the plains to rally the _Bois-Brules_ from Portage la
+Prairie and Souris and Qu'Appelle.[24] Led by Cuthbert Grant, they
+skirted north of the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies
+above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers to mistake this
+armed cavalcade, red with paint and chanting war-songs, for hostiles.
+
+Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the alarm. Ordering a
+field-piece to follow, Governor Semple marched out with a little army of
+twenty-eight Hudson's Bay men. The Nor' Westers thought that he meant to
+obstruct their way till his other forces had captured their coming
+canoes. The Hudson's Bay thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the
+Selkirk settlers.
+
+It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two parties met at the edge
+of a swamp beside a cluster of trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor'
+Westers say that Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and
+tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay say that the
+governor had no sooner got within range than the half-breed scout leaped
+down and fired from the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.
+
+It is well known how the first blood of battle has the same effect on
+all men of whatever race. The human is eclipsed by that brute savagery
+which comes down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In a trice
+twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead. While Grant had turned to
+obtain carriers to bear the wounded governor off the field, poor Semple
+was brutally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who ran from body
+to body, perpetrating the crimes of ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to
+expostulate. The wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft
+velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds crooning the sad
+monotone of a limitless sea, closed over a scene of savages drunk with
+slaughter, of men gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors
+thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the slain.
+
+Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them down-stream to Lake
+Winnipeg, where dwelt the friendly Chief Peguis. On the river they met
+the indomitable Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He
+brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved by the expelled
+governor's account of disorders, Lord Selkirk was hastening north, armed
+with the authority of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in
+full regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted on his barges
+and stores of munition that ill agreed with the professions of a
+peaceful justice.
+
+The time has gone past for quibbling as to the earl's motives in pushing
+north armed like a lord of war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with
+his army of Des Meurons[25] at the Sault. In August Lord Selkirk
+appeared before Port William with uniformed soldiers in eleven boats.
+The justice of the peace set his soldiers digging trenches opposite the
+Nor' Westers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had enough of
+blood. They capitulated without one blow. Selkirk took full possession.
+
+Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the rivers, he sent Captain
+d'Orsennens overland westward to Red River, where Fort Douglas was
+captured back one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the fort
+walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had been just as ruthless on
+the Saskatchewan. Nor' Westers were captured as they disembarked to pass
+Grand Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where Franklin the
+explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreated. One of them was the same John
+George MacTavish who had helped to capture Astoria; another, Frobisher,
+a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse. The Deschamps
+murderers of Seven Oaks fled south, where their crimes brought terrible
+vengeance from American traders.
+
+Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay Company were in a
+curious quandary. Suits enough were pressing in the courts to ruin both
+companies; and for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hudson
+Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth told and the crimes
+probed. There was only one way out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the
+companies amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In April,
+1822, a new fort was built half-way between the sites of Gibraltar and
+Fort Douglas, and given the new name of Fort Garry by Sir George
+Simpson, the governor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thousand
+men thrown out of employment by the union at once crossed the line and
+enlisted with American traders.
+
+The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength that comes from
+victorious conflict--so strong, indeed, that it not only held the
+Canadian field, but in spite of the American law[26] forbidding British
+traders in the United States, reached as far south as Utah and the
+Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with lusty rivals.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 21: Some say seventy-four.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria
+capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of
+1812.]
+
+[Footnote 23: An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New
+York.]
+
+[Footnote 24: More of the _voyageurs'_ romance; named because of a voice
+heard calling and calling across the lake as _voyageurs_ entered the
+valley--said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover,
+though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the _voyageurs'_ song
+among the hills.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.]
+
+[Footnote 26: A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to
+the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's
+enforcement.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS
+
+
+That Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when he pursued the Astorians up
+the Missouri continued to be dogged by misfortune on the west side of
+the mountains. Game was scarce and his half-starving followers were
+scattered, some to the British posts in the north, some to the Spaniards
+in the south, and some to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry
+forced his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Aricara country.
+The British war broke out and the Missouri Company were compelled to
+abandon the dangerous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase
+arms from the British traders, raid the Americans, and scurry back to
+Canada.
+
+When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred Missouri men were again
+in the mountains; but they suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's
+party were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who succeeded to
+Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed over to the Columbia, had all
+his supplies stolen, reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville,
+almost destitute. The British rivals received him with that hospitality
+for which they were renowned when trade was not involved, and gave him
+escort up the Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to Red
+River, thence overland to the Mandan country and St. Louis.
+
+These two disasters marked the wane of the Missouri Company.
+
+But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on land than he must to
+sea again, the indomitable Andrew Henry linked his fortunes with General
+Ashley of St. Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell, Bridger,
+Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sublettes--men who made the Rocky
+Mountain trade famous--Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to the
+mountains the first year and two hundred the next. In that time not less
+than twenty-five lives were lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts
+were obtained and the expeditions were a loss.
+
+But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's Bay trappers loaded with
+beaver pelts in the Columbia basin, west of the Rockies. They had become
+separated from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian. Details of
+this bargain will never be known; but when Smith came east he had the
+Hudson's Bay furs. This was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men
+and the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.
+
+Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met their supplies
+annually at a _rendezvous_ in the mountains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad
+valley below the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or
+Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been
+massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin; but that did not
+deter General Ashley himself from going up the Platte, across the divide
+to Salt Lake. Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper, with an
+enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hudson's Bay man left Salt
+Lake, he had no furs; and when General Ashley came away, his packers
+were laden with a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This was
+the second brush between Rocky Mountain and Hudson's Bay, and again the
+mountaineers scored.
+
+The third encounter was more to the credit of both companies. After
+three years' wanderings, Smith found himself stranded and destitute at
+the British post of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,
+his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay sent a punitive
+force to recover his property, gave him a $20,000 draft for the full
+value of the recovered furs, and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth
+Rocky Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each other's rights
+in the valley of the Columbia, but southward the old code prevailed.
+Fitzpatrick, a Rocky Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogden
+at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once plied the argument of
+whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the
+mountains to St. Louis.
+
+The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution
+seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.
+
+Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down
+before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of
+their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of
+Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the
+Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
+rank outrage--particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West
+partners were seized, manacled, and sent to a wilderness--and now the
+Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain
+trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival
+that could outcheat their cheatery.
+
+In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of
+America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who
+have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to
+the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.
+
+In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for
+their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away
+from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild
+Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off
+civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with
+the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were
+lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong
+of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
+Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long
+beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from
+ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
+adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his
+luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet
+weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
+themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,
+tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every
+trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best
+hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed,
+and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of
+the hunt.
+
+Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the
+valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each
+party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky
+Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even
+now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's
+Bay hunters.
+
+The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance
+gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of
+comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky
+Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.
+
+No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never
+lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers
+sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with
+Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a
+kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the
+clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The
+powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the
+Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches,
+and shot from cover.
+
+All the trappers at the _rendezvous_ spurred to the fight, priming guns,
+casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle
+lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew,
+twelve men lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded;
+and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe
+exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of
+Pierre's Hole.
+
+Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky
+fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds
+than the strangers who had shadowed them at the _rendezvous_ came up.
+Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and
+unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by
+tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing
+packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on
+persistently for three months.
+
+Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a
+dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers
+the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become
+serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the
+dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
+leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into
+the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this
+escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs
+and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated
+by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of
+the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.
+
+The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to
+through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks
+and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in
+Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to
+enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company
+all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing
+the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in
+1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the
+American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown
+out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the
+Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
+had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American
+to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.
+
+This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing
+MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and
+became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his
+ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,
+"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,
+for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.
+
+Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the
+artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion
+Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur
+company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union
+in MacKenzie's reign.
+
+Once a free trapper came floating down the Missouri with his canoe full
+of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be
+obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a
+French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately
+vain. Strutting about the court-yard, feeling himself a very prince of
+importance, he saw MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the
+other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than it was wise. The
+_denouement_ was a vision of the flaxen-haired Siegfried sprinting at
+the top of his speed through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie
+flourishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here. The
+outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on sight, and haunted the
+fort gates with a loaded rifle till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a
+mulatto servant to "wing" the fellow with a shot in the shoulder, when
+he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and sent away.
+
+At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built an opposition fort
+just below Union and lay in wait for the coming of the Blackfeet to
+trade with the American Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his
+bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out sallied from Fort
+Union a band in full regalia, with drum and trumpet and piccolo and
+fife--wonders that would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.
+Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages, and what was not
+supposed to be in the Indian country--liquor. When these methods failed
+to outbuy rivals, MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for a
+beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain trappers were forced to
+capitulate, and their post passed over to the American Fur Company.
+
+In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting _finale_ to the
+turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The Deschamps family, who
+had perpetrated the worst butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the
+fight between Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as interpreters
+for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boastful of their murderous record in
+Canada, the father, mother, and eight grown children were usually so
+violent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English gentleman, used to
+quiet their outrage and prevent trouble by dropping laudanum in their
+cups. Once they slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest
+their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came to life defiant
+as ever. At Union was a very handsome young half-breed fellow by the
+name of Gardepie, whose life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take
+from sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free trappers,
+Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one morning at breakfast with all
+the gruesome mutilation of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a
+younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and nerved to the deed with
+alcohol, the Deschamps undertook to avenge their father's death by
+killing all the whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the
+alarm was carried to Fort Union.
+
+Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union. Many trappers had been
+assassinated by a Deschamps. Indians had been flogged by them for no
+other purpose than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort
+Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the Deschamps were
+on the war-path.
+
+The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands and took an oath to
+exterminate the murderous clan. The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's
+control. Seizing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the prairie
+to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain trappers, where the
+murderers were intrenched. All valuables were removed from the fort.
+Time was given for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns were
+turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of crime, the mother,
+rushed out, holding forward the Indian pipe of peace and begging for
+mercy.
+
+She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and fell shot through the
+heart.
+
+At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter and learn if the
+Deschamps were all dead? Treachery was feared. The assailants set fire
+to the fort. In the light of the flames one man was espied crouching in
+the bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot the last of the
+Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion sent him leaping five feet into
+the air to fall back dead, and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the
+burning tower.[29]
+
+Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the
+fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found Francois Deschamps
+backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all
+ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and
+his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without
+shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally
+wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union.
+
+This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict
+among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were
+rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the
+militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured
+furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander
+through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a
+year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers
+who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper
+Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast
+hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the
+fences of settlers.
+
+In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the
+seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis
+against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and
+again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the
+Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the
+Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the
+conflict waged round their forts.
+
+In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort
+Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in
+savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In
+the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort
+Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.
+MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
+breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could
+not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing
+old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the
+friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in
+all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of
+the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young
+children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of
+defence till all were safely back among the whites.
+
+This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway
+of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the
+Saskatchewan.
+
+Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks
+only at the black spot.
+
+In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the
+trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a
+thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
+have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Chittenden.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more
+circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE FRENCH TRAPPER
+
+
+To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the
+town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the
+most picturesque figure in America's history.
+
+Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of
+Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was
+the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you
+may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper.
+
+Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to
+freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the
+young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom
+from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living
+all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the
+farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.
+Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with
+provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to
+$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade
+enough for two years.
+
+At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the
+value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original
+investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
+trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when
+twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see
+a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
+share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only
+beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from
+Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.
+
+Two partners[30] have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from
+the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the
+Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.
+The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship
+was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
+by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even
+death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of
+the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in
+the wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off punishment, or till
+he had lost taste for civilized life and remained in the wilderness,
+_coureur des bois_, _voyageur_, or leader of a band of half-wild
+retainers whom he ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious
+connecting link between the savagery of the New World and the _noblesse_
+of the Old.
+
+Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mississippi; Le Moyne
+d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana to Hudson Bay; La Mothe Cadillac in
+Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Louisiana; La Verendrye exploring from
+Lake Superior to the Rockies; Radisson on Hudson Bay--all won their fame
+as explorers and discoverers in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred
+years before any English mind knew of the Missouri, French _voyageurs_
+had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the regions now called
+Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin were known to New Englanders, the
+French were trapping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two
+centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went to New Mexico to
+spy on Spanish trade.
+
+East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom the French trapper
+shunned--the English colonists and the Iroquois. North of the St.
+Lawrence was a power that he shunned still more--the French governor,
+who had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded and
+trapped without license. But between St. Louis and MacKenzie River was a
+great unclaimed wilderness, whence came the best furs.
+
+Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the French trapper.
+
+There were four ways by which he entered his hunting-ground: (1) Sailing
+from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, he ascended the river in
+pirogue or dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with means
+to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit overland to the Illinois,
+or Ohio, which he rafted down to the Mississippi, and then taking to
+canoe turned north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always a grand
+_rendezvous_ for the French and Indian hunters, to Green Bay on Lake
+Michigan, thence up-stream to Fox River, overland to the Wisconsin, and
+down-stream to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the Soo" to
+Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-ground. Whichever way he went
+his course was mainly up-stream and north: hence the name _Pays d'en
+Haut_ vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay between the
+Missouri and the MacKenzie River.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as
+the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the
+Missouri to St. Louis, or from the _Pays d'en Haut_ to Montreal, few
+escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves
+his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the
+fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to
+exist to the opening of the next hunting season.
+
+It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the
+preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,
+whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the
+green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down
+each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great
+things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the
+proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the
+inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the
+bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.
+
+It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw--for the Pierre
+adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an
+Indian wife--design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the
+French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay
+moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu
+of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned
+head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made
+of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or
+musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.
+
+None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to
+the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of
+the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.
+He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that
+he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,
+while he attends to the trapping that is _gain_ rather than _game_. For
+clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,
+like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly
+deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
+her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the
+marriage means that he has cast off the last vestige of civilization and
+henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.
+
+After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of
+Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,
+he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
+English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,
+he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed
+out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to
+Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of peltries on his rafts and
+canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,
+two, and three hundred dollars a year.
+
+It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,
+with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become _coureur des
+bois_ and _voyageur_, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the
+Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four
+companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the
+Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
+Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and
+the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the
+American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers
+and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English
+Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the
+French trapper still saw life through the glamour of _la gloire_ and
+_noblesse_, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
+starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at
+hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his _chansons_ brought
+over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
+at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a
+prayer to Sainte Anne, the _voyageurs'_ saint, just before his canoe
+took the plunge.
+
+Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
+Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of
+figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value
+of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded
+banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of
+wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,
+clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between
+like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the
+_voyageurs_ hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze
+like a seagull.
+
+Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and
+racing leaps each _voyageur_ knows what to expect. No man asks
+questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod
+pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the
+green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It
+vaults--springs--bounds, with a shiver of live waters under the keel and
+a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as
+wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push
+of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the
+danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another
+lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.
+
+[Illustration: Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids
+of Slave River without unloading.]
+
+But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar
+becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The
+lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;
+and the _voyageurs_ are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.
+Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to _sauter
+les rapides_, as the _voyageurs_ say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps,
+some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the crew, got
+his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.
+One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.
+
+Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a _portage_. Coming back this
+way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.
+If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high
+above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the
+water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is
+"tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all
+dangerous, each _voyageur_ lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps
+across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long _portage_ is
+measured by the number of pipes the _voyageur_ smokes, each lighting up
+meaning a brief rest; and a _portage_ of many "pipes" will be taken at a
+running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine
+miles is the length of one famous _portage_ opposite the Chaudiere Falls
+on the Ottawa.
+
+In winter the _voyageur_ becomes _coureur des bois_ to his new masters.
+Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests
+wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or
+rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow
+steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick;
+sometimes to the _marche donc! marche donc!_ of the driver, with crisp
+tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled
+to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the
+northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a
+belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping
+his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.
+
+These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.
+
+At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining--the
+Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two
+important centres of trade in furs which are not imported--St. Paul and
+St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the
+Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for
+the great companies a hundred years ago.
+
+The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and
+Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes
+seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class
+who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor
+like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber
+ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a
+by-word.
+
+And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something
+of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer
+going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound
+from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the
+captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as
+usual!"
+
+As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those _chansons populaires_, which
+have been sung by every generation of _voyageurs_ since Frenchmen came
+to America, _A La Claire Fontaine_, a song which the French trappers'
+ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle
+lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then--was it
+possible?--these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were
+singing--what? A song of the _Grand Monarque_ which has led armies to
+battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern
+wilds--
+
+  "Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre
+  Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"
+
+Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was
+from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival
+traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself
+more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in
+doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known
+outside the range of human criminals.
+
+Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered
+fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carcass. He
+recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to
+bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The
+man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of
+approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of
+man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across
+the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He
+may even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.
+Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager;
+so the man sets a circle of traps round the carcass.
+
+The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer
+remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been
+there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up,
+sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and
+dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had
+been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind
+and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.
+
+Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full
+stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length
+away.
+
+The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on _le sacre carcajou_.
+Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes
+grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved
+himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and
+spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer
+but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again
+he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the
+deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.
+
+Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or
+wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is
+nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine
+will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had been scented.
+Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on
+doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which
+characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much
+fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the
+badger's or the fox's.
+
+Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker
+and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to
+save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
+wounded, weaklings, and laggards--the wolverine has the nose of a fox,
+with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for
+tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
+intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one
+trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,
+he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,
+but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout
+of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was
+more than he could stand.
+
+In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one
+design--destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock
+yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the
+musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and
+buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to
+the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached
+provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees
+and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the
+wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,
+like a shark behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there
+will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the
+lodge when the man is at the traps.
+
+But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be
+snared--gluttony and curiosity.
+
+After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds that the wolverine has
+been making as regular rounds of the traps as he has himself. It is then
+a question whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the
+hunting-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on James Bay, of
+an Indian hunter and his wife who were literally brought to the verge of
+starvation by a wolverine that nightly destroyed their traps. The
+contest ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred miles from
+the haunts of that "bad devil--oh--he--bad devil--carcajou!" Remembering
+the curiosity and gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest
+steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon or fish, and
+places it where the wolverine tracks run. Around this he sets a circle
+of his traps, tying them securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In
+all likelihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which will cover
+traces of the man-smell.
+
+Night passes. In the morning the man comes to his traps. The meat has
+been taken. All else is as before. Not a track marks the snow; but in
+midwinter meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels for the
+hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the stakes has been pulled up
+and carried off. That is a sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is
+as he thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolverine; but the
+cunning beast had pulled with all his strength, snapped the attached
+sapling, and escaped. A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned
+limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth and hobbles as
+hard as three legs will carry him to the hiding of a bush, or better
+still, to the frozen surface of a river, hidden by high banks, with
+glare ice which will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds
+only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper shape, with the
+spring opened to release the imprisoned leg.
+
+The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the river to study out
+the problem of unclinching the spring.
+
+One more device remains to the man. It is a gun trick. The loaded weapon
+is hidden full-cock under leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel
+is the bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger. The first
+pull will blow the thief's head off.
+
+The trap experience would have frightened any other animals a week's run
+from man's tracks; but the wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows
+he will find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.
+
+Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have the cord gnawed
+through and the bait stolen. A wolverine is not to be easily tricked;
+but its gluttony and curiosity bring it within man's reach.
+
+The man watches until he knows the part of the woods where the wolverine
+nightly gallops. He then procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough
+to balance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off. The gun is
+suspended from some dense evergreen, which will hide the weapon. The
+bait hangs from the trigger above the wolverine's reach.
+
+Then a curious game begins.
+
+One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks round and round the
+tree as if determined to ferret out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.
+
+The next morning the tracks have come to a stand below the meat. If the
+wolverine could only get up to the bait, one whiff would tell him
+whether the man-smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his
+mark is deep printed in the snow.
+
+The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.
+
+The rascal may become so bold in his predatory visits that the man may
+be tempted to chance a shot without waiting.
+
+But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of the cord. There comes a
+night when the wolverine's curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A
+quick clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke blows the
+robber's head into space.
+
+The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.
+
+He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a solitary man ever had;
+but for the consolation of those whose sympathies are keener for the
+animal than the man, it may be said that in the majority of such
+contests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 30: Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of
+Duluth.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Especially the Chateau de Ramezay, where great underground
+vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New
+Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under Chateau de
+Ramezay.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS
+
+
+If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived
+lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a
+snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his
+quest and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was the great
+staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended.
+
+Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for wartime, sinew for bows,
+bone for the shaping of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and
+saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most
+important of all, food that could be kept in any climate for any length
+of time and combined the lightest weight with the greatest
+nourishment--all these were supplied by the buffalo.
+
+From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and from the Alleghanies to
+the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter what wheat is to the farmer.
+Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of a
+favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass the buffalo could thrive
+in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open
+ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the
+herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.
+
+Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the animal
+world, the buffalo had strength to defy all enemies. Of all the
+creatures that prey, only the full-grown grisly was a match against the
+buffalo; and according to old hunting legends, even the grisly held back
+from attacking a beast in the prime of its power and sneaked in the wake
+of the roving herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance
+of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling some
+poor old king worsted in battle and deposed from the leadership of the
+herd, or snapping up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of
+a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that
+made for the persistence of the species. When attacked by a beast of
+prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and
+trample life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excelling all
+foes, wonderful sagacity against attack--these were factors that partly
+explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roaming this continent.
+
+Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not
+be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in
+the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri,
+fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between
+the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west
+and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
+Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where
+the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places--trails
+trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth
+of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel. At fording-places on
+the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri,
+Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo
+have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot,
+virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.
+
+Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only
+running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes
+in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the
+calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring
+hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and
+their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who
+had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death
+ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another
+occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm
+the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a
+howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer
+forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a
+wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the
+fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the
+salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring,
+dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster
+cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths
+as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and
+ploughed as if for ramparts.
+
+The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has
+become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense. From
+Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the
+Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd
+exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen.
+
+What are the facts regarding the buffalo?
+
+In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its
+power, there were sent from St. Louis alone in a single year one hundred
+thousand robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. The hunter
+usually kept an ample supply for his own needs; so that for every robe
+bought by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains.
+St. Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quantities of robes were
+being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million
+would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
+and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for
+three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on
+the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night
+to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers
+related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the
+Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
+Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove
+of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the
+Santa Fe trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of
+thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward
+the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West
+Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a herd
+stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the
+ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo
+drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to
+seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And
+the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.
+
+To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United
+States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord
+Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
+railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the
+buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in
+the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
+pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could
+have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time
+immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds
+only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of
+another.
+
+Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;
+and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter
+who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
+Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the
+valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless
+quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
+savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man--who is the true
+type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the
+odds a hundred to one against himself, and the only advantages over
+brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.
+
+Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was
+worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the
+leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild
+stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on
+the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd
+overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was
+fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering
+over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw,
+and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench.
+
+In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth.
+Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror
+as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first
+intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of
+maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their
+existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a
+rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range
+of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for
+the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the
+point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a
+quick rip meant torture and death.
+
+Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to
+the rear! Then one of the boldest braces himself, circling and guarding
+and wheeling and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head of the
+older rival. That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows
+a bellowing like the rumbling of distant thunder, each keeping his eye
+on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's moves,
+like fencers with foils. When one charges, the other wheels to meet the
+charge straight in front; and with a crash the horns are locked. It is
+then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against
+dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury from sheer
+amazement at the younger's presumption. His guarded charges become blind
+rushes, and he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of piercing
+horns. As soon as the rumbling and pawing began, Colonel Bedson used to
+send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the
+contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does
+not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight no more; and if
+he is not killed, is likely to be mangled, a deposed king, whipped and
+broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he
+drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled.
+
+Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow
+of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is
+off. There is a stampede--myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the
+ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking
+dust of the far horizon--nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too
+weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,
+leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.
+
+After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact
+as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded
+the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a
+fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those
+vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to
+the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through
+the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill,
+always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down,
+scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a
+drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would
+not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But
+he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He
+invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last
+stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.
+
+But the end is inevitable.
+
+While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear;
+and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink
+powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he
+still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the
+rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till
+death comes to the victim.
+
+Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd
+half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo
+leader?
+
+Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains
+region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick
+death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's
+end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were
+always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the
+sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.
+
+In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On
+Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several
+hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than
+elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in
+shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this
+appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city
+parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,
+with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful
+enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the
+hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured
+two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to
+the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of
+idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
+when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores
+had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.
+
+In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June
+before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;
+fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
+were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate
+perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds
+many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual
+hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer--by still-hunting; for
+though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except
+sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long
+as he did not see its cause.
+
+Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper
+might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a
+moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.
+Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he
+could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too
+slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on
+snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A
+wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly;
+and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which
+the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.
+
+The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where
+hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a
+pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.
+But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound
+were a sort of _cheval-de-frise_ or corral converging at the inner end,
+it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming
+of the spring brigades.
+
+When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of
+the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field--not the
+indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest
+buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The greatest of
+these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where
+hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.
+Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort
+Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which
+barred out Canadian traders.
+
+At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used
+to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of
+the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field
+on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed
+away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned
+muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.
+
+The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led
+north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on
+their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them
+westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the
+captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as
+prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had
+closed near enough for the wild rush.
+
+At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to
+saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led
+through the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight
+usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces
+upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where
+the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with
+the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,
+vague, whitish forms--the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless
+as death.
+
+The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd
+scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the
+grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
+land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the
+roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the
+spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only
+emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh
+feeding-ground.
+
+Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered
+the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with
+leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;
+in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,
+marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop
+that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
+sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen
+water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and
+fringed dewlaps dripping--on and on and on--till the tidal wave of life
+had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there
+in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured
+buffalo, freaks in the animal world.
+
+The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a
+sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life
+one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the
+thermometer at forty below--a combination that is sufficient to set the
+teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo
+spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the
+worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,
+you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and
+fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon
+in August.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to ride for the herd.
+There was the trail to the watering-place. There were the salt-licks and
+the wallows and the crushed grass where two young fellows had been
+smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength. There were the bones
+of the poor old deposed king, picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps,
+the lonely outcast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened, a
+picture of dumb woe! To such the hunter's shot was a mercy stroke. Or,
+most interesting of all signs and surest proof that the herd was near--a
+little bundle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat under
+hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound, precisely the colour of
+its own hide.
+
+Poke it! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens! It is a buffalo calf
+left cached by the mother, who has gone to the watering-place or is
+pasturing with the drove. Lift it up! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let
+it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door-mat. The mother has
+told it how to escape the coyotes and wolverines; and the little rascal
+is "playing dead." But if you fondle it and warm it--the Indians say,
+breathe into its face--it forgets all about the mother's warning and
+follows like a pup.
+
+At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws parted from the
+cavalcade and all impedimenta remained behind. The best-equipped man was
+the man with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest buffalo
+from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that galloped swift as wind
+in pursuit, that jerked to a stop directly opposite the brute's
+shoulders and leaped from the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No
+sound came from the hunters till all were within close range. Then the
+captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved his hand, or fired a
+shot, and the hunters charged.
+
+Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered with the fusillade of
+artillery volleys. Bullets fell to earth with the dull ping of an aim
+glanced aside by the adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of
+the buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of "Ah--oh, ah--oh!" Here
+and there French voices screamed "Voila! Les boeufs! Les boeufs!
+Sacre! Tonnerre! Tir--tir--tir--donc! By Gar!" And Missouri traders
+called out plain and less picturesque but more forcible English.
+
+Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the herd; but the second
+volley with the smell of powder and smoke and men started the stampede.
+Then followed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals of any other
+kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through
+sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to
+carry riders in a boundless land!
+
+[Illustration: The buffalo-hunt.
+
+After a contemporary print.]
+
+Riders were unseated and went down in the _melee_; horses caught on the
+horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown
+high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with
+dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; unwary
+hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo
+turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued
+and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.
+
+A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a
+Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the
+time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of
+fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the
+thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same
+gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian
+hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give
+him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly
+unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and
+buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and
+fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast
+covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding--closer and
+closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.
+
+"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the
+officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they
+went over the bluff."
+
+The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals--a
+persistent vindictiveness.
+
+In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.
+
+After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was
+first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every
+buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
+hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin,
+tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the
+Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
+thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo
+sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.
+
+The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the
+buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a
+death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
+whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along
+the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting
+stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the
+wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a
+great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.
+
+"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his
+rifle.
+
+The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled
+pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they
+stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.
+
+The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The
+colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened
+next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run
+till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.
+
+And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a
+stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MOUNTAINEERS
+
+
+It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax
+of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.
+
+The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from
+both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,
+and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of
+another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the
+first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific
+in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of
+the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a
+rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the
+American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the
+Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew
+Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor
+sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,
+and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the
+mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria
+captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of
+the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew
+Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free
+trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.
+
+Their captain came.
+
+Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British
+fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay
+and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's
+American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the
+Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond
+the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his
+force came a tremendous accession--all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers
+thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the
+Hudson's Bay.
+
+If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have
+been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.
+Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been
+jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had
+refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard
+chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of
+nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
+traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley
+and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger--subsequently
+known as the Rocky Mountain traders--swept up the Missouri with brigades
+of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning
+the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending
+line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was
+bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field
+which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.
+
+The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.
+
+It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It
+was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for
+supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
+_rendezvous_, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole
+farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with
+plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians
+met at the annual camp.
+
+Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be
+carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for
+canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain canons with
+sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to
+interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide
+obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a
+blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.
+Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,
+noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting
+especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is
+black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and
+where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one
+for the trapper to shun.
+
+One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers
+found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the
+lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty
+years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before
+the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the
+Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first
+two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile
+Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of
+the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
+others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost
+to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would
+not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of
+trapping.
+
+Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"
+or _Pays d'en Haut_ as the French called it. The French trappers, for
+the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to
+the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the
+smug, indolent, laughing, chattering _voyageur_. The great silences of a
+life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man
+had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and
+elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.
+
+In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,
+carrying supplies enough for the season in a canoe, and drifting
+down-stream with a canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the
+mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies
+had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which
+Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to
+accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to
+the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack
+rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such
+party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
+might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen
+to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.
+
+That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last
+century.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and
+Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like
+foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one
+mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass
+much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all
+the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the
+fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,
+and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and
+the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till
+the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music--the voice of many
+waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool
+heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began
+retracing their way from valley to valley, gathering the furs cached
+during the winter hunt.
+
+Then the cavalcade set out for the _rendezvous_: grizzled men in
+tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,
+men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
+always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;
+long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a
+zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs
+barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
+between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened
+bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half
+a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
+slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for
+mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to
+right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the
+collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after
+the bolters with her ears laid flat.
+
+Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling
+torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that
+stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky
+green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in
+summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced
+masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of
+that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that
+little indurated line running up the side of the cliff--just a
+displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that
+winds in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and
+mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?
+
+"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says
+the mountaineer.
+
+Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been
+enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that
+track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has
+the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above
+tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long
+grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.
+
+Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where
+a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is
+a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
+mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.
+
+Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at
+such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper
+saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when
+she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up
+the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
+kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as
+pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it
+up, out of very sympathy went away.
+
+Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but
+as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead"--the thing jumped from
+side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and
+away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men
+hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."
+
+Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like
+stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are
+tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every
+climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at
+every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,
+or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.
+
+Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching
+themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the
+mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as
+wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden
+chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading
+ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--!
+
+Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous
+enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often
+followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
+These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like
+banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?
+
+A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain
+by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line
+rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the
+inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand
+feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was
+nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail
+from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen
+to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to
+regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.
+But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing
+as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no
+larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer
+looked back over his shoulder.
+
+"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the
+trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his
+words.
+
+"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?"
+
+"Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw
+bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the
+sound."
+
+"And when no sound comes back?"
+
+"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!
+People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the
+sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you
+chills!"
+
+So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon
+riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the
+lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
+mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on
+men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.
+
+If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the
+trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by
+the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
+laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar
+prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the
+hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle
+lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.
+
+Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley
+the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of
+bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
+tinkling.
+
+The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They
+seldom reached their _rendezvous_ before July or August. Three months
+travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a
+day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an
+hour--a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
+latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would
+make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.
+
+Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced
+together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious
+little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream
+often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the
+unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding
+mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a
+trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them afloat, and
+overlaying with moss to save the horses' feet.
+
+But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of
+enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable
+_cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush
+higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg
+where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses
+could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to
+force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,
+there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.
+
+And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the
+bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men
+leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company
+was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,
+and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders
+was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant
+of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for
+the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that
+created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because
+produced by purely American conditions.
+
+Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to
+Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the
+Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came
+the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable
+valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for
+transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white
+hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or
+Oriental fair.
+
+French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo
+down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the
+Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia
+to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America
+from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General
+Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from
+Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous
+gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or
+Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediaeval lords--found
+themselves hobnobbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indian sachems,
+Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
+moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.
+
+Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and
+daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress
+occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
+earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.
+
+The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction
+to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the
+partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps,
+planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh
+information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all
+sections of the mountains for the different brigades.
+
+This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty
+to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On
+the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the
+Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were
+Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the
+Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
+Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew
+the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of
+life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the
+Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as
+successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.
+
+Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips
+had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
+hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in
+friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than
+rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger
+who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept
+over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had
+made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the
+newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when
+hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.
+
+When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the
+region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on
+the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
+beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the
+valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder
+River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to
+trap all through the valley.
+
+But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily
+foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in
+the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
+Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.
+beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be
+misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the
+hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the
+mountaineers to their secret retreats.
+
+Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.
+
+Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,
+Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the
+Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
+winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with
+their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River
+Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping
+from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the
+_rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle
+the spies by trapping from west to east.
+
+Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing
+southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom
+they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward
+on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in
+time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.
+
+Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at
+Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been
+notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;
+possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.
+
+Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers
+Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals
+could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the
+mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer
+dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten
+the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,
+explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under
+him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the _rendezvous_.
+
+But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain passes like cats at
+a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he
+knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to
+the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.
+The Indians still guarded the passes. They must have come upon him at a
+night camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the
+defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a
+single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged
+declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got
+across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of
+the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless--for his hat had
+been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the
+rocks--and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also
+bound for the _rendezvous_.
+
+The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.
+
+The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's
+Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry
+between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain
+men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and
+not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers
+for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great
+companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter
+confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur
+Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly
+Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got
+away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American
+Company.
+
+What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected
+the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what
+was done.
+
+Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked
+body of horsemen northward from Pierre's Hole.
+
+If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their
+hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the
+Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up
+somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay[34] had been so often
+"relieved" of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west,
+their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went
+north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.
+
+Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper
+swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the
+Three Forks of the Missouri.
+
+There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region; and Blackfeet hated
+Vanderburgh with deadly venom because he had once defeated them and
+slain a great warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the
+fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.
+
+But if the Rocky Mountain men could go unscathed among the Blackfeet,
+why, so could the American Fur Company!
+
+And Vanderburgh and Drips went!
+
+Rival traders might not commit murder. That led to the fearful ruin of
+the lawsuits that overtook Nor' Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only
+fifteen years before.
+
+But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet hated Henry Vanderburgh!
+
+Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long file of pack-horses had
+passed, fresh-chopped logs to make a way through blockades of fallen
+pine, the green moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at
+cloudline broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed that way,
+grazed bark where the pack-saddle had brushed a tree-trunk, muddy
+hoof-marks where the young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,
+scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged boot had
+stepped--all these told which way Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led their
+brigade.
+
+Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail! Here the ashes of a
+camp-fire! There a pile of rock placed a deal too carefully for nature's
+work--the cached furs of the fleeing rivals! Besides, what with canon
+and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by which a cavalcade can pass
+through mountains that the simplest novice could have trailed
+Fitzpatrick and Bridger.
+
+Doubtless between the middle of August when Vanderburgh and Drips set
+out on the chase and the middle of September when they ran down the
+fugitives the American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at their own
+cleverness.
+
+They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in the valley of the
+Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds with game enough for two lines of
+traps, which Vanderburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight by
+forced marches this time! The mountaineers sat still for almost a week.
+Then they casually moved down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.
+
+The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the mountaineers leaving a
+trifle too soon? Should the Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh
+remained, moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his traps
+along the Madison. Drips followed the mountaineers.
+
+Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground probably suggested to
+Drips that even an animal will lead off on a false scent to draw the
+enemy away from the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the
+Jefferson.
+
+Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once turned back too, up the
+farthest valley, the Gallatin, then on the way to the first
+hunting-ground westward over a divide to the Madison, where--ill
+luck!--they again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!
+
+How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may guess!
+
+Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers!
+
+Should Vanderburgh stay or follow? Certainly the enemy had been bound
+back for the good hunting-grounds when they had turned to retrace their
+way up the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Vanderburgh
+would forestall the move. He crossed over to the valley where he had
+first found them.
+
+Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunting-grounds, a dead
+buffalo, from which the hunters had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh! If
+Vanderburgh laughed, his laugh was short; for there were signs that the
+buffalo had been slain by an Indian.
+
+The trappers refused to hunt where there were Blackfeet about.
+Vanderburgh refused to believe there was any danger of Blackfeet.
+Calling for volunteers, he rode forward with six men.
+
+First they found a fire. The marauders must be very near. Then a dead
+buffalo was seen, then fresh tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians.
+But buffalo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There could not be
+many Indians.
+
+Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vanderburgh pushed on, entered
+a heavily wooded gulch, paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent,
+descried nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, followed by the
+six volunteers.
+
+Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hundred hostiles sprang
+from ambush. Vanderburgh's horse went down. Three others cleared the
+ditch at a bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aiming his
+gun, and coolly calling out: "Don't run! Don't run!" Two men sent their
+horses back over the ditch to his call, a third was thrown to be slain
+on the spot, and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest Indian,
+when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted deadly vengeance for the
+warrior Vanderburgh had slain years before.
+
+Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the waiting brigade. Refuge
+was taken in the woods, where sentinels kept guard all night. The next
+morning, with scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously
+towards some of their caches. A second night was passed behind barriers
+of logs; and the third day a band of friendly Indians was encountered,
+who were sent to bury the dead.
+
+The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had been torn to pieces and his
+bones thrown into the river.
+
+So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.
+
+As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares;
+for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet,
+the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows
+from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade,
+which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own
+trickery.
+
+Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the
+Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he
+possessed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 32: This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were
+scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew
+Henry's party--had all been such wide-ranging foresters.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this
+year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fe.]
+
+[Footnote 34: By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from
+the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.
+But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs,
+which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.]
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER
+
+
+All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting
+for the signs.
+
+And now the signs had come.
+
+Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy
+with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward,
+leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
+Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant
+pools like layers of mica.
+
+Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a
+new presence--the trapper.
+
+Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress
+him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
+costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
+bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
+mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
+any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
+over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
+jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
+and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.
+
+Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
+takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
+ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
+for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
+thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
+And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
+suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
+of winter woods.
+
+This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
+training does not stop here.
+
+When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
+windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
+breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
+habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
+to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means
+that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
+field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
+and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
+field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
+mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
+closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
+the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
+statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.
+
+And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.
+
+One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
+the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of
+its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
+book of forest-lore.
+
+It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
+corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man,
+that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the
+forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and
+the Upper Missouri.
+
+His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, splits and seams,
+where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must be filled with rosin and
+pitch. A light sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to haul
+the canoe over still water, where the ice first forms. Sled, provisions,
+blanket, and fish-net are put in the canoe, not forgetting the most
+important part of his kit--the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
+point to point all winter, travelling light and taking nothing but
+absolute necessaries, or builds a central lodge, where he leaves full
+store and radiates out to the hunting-grounds, at least four things must
+be in his tool-bag: a woodman's axe; a gimlet to bore holes in his
+snow-shoe frame; a crooked knife--not the sheathed dagger of fiction,
+but a blade crooked hook-shape, somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one
+end--to smooth without splintering, as a carpenter's plane; and a small
+chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden contrivances that
+stretch the pelts.
+
+If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack, the hunter may take
+more tools; but the old trapper prefers to travel light. Fire-arms,
+ammunition, a common hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
+a large sheet of canvas, locally known as _abuckwan_, for a shed tent,
+complete the trapper's equipment. His dog is not part of the equipment:
+it is fellow-hunter and companion.
+
+From the moose must come the heavy filling for the snow-shoes; but the
+snow-shoes will not be needed for a month, and there is no haste about
+shooting an unfound moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and beaver
+are waiting to be trapped. With the dog showing his wisdom by sitting
+motionless as an Indian bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and
+pushes out.
+
+Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-place, where traps would
+be effective, the man paddles silently on. If he travels after
+nightfall, the chances are his craft will steal unawares close to a
+black head above a swimming body. With both wind and current meeting the
+canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches the scent of the sharp-nosed
+swimmer. Otter or beaver, it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over
+bow or stern--over his master's shoulder if necessary, but never
+sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset--the dog brings back his
+quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
+hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
+bales.
+
+While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
+large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
+to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
+and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
+scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
+by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.
+
+Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
+noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
+wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
+lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
+young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
+the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
+scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows--knows, perhaps,
+from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
+amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
+nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
+trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
+very act.
+
+All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
+one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
+at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
+before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
+pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
+found?
+
+Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
+trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
+their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
+peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
+the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
+three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
+after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
+use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
+self-protection. When cold weather comes the beaver is fair game to the
+trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
+strength, a gun, and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes are
+not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that familiarity with the
+woods to enable him to pursue, which the beaver has to enable it to
+escape. And he can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies off
+the scent, the way the beaver does.
+
+Now, as he paddles along the network of streams which interlace Northern
+forests, he will hardly be likely to stumble on the beaver-dam of last
+summer. Beavers do not build their houses, where passers-by will stumble
+upon them. But all the streams have been swollen by fall rains; and the
+trapper notices the markings on every chip and pole floating down the
+full current. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. He knows that the
+rains have floated it over the beaver-dam. Beavers never cut below their
+houses, but always above, so that the current will carry the poles
+down-stream to the dam.
+
+Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guardedly advances within
+sight of the dam. If any old beaver sentinel be swimming about, he
+quickly scents the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow of
+his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs danger to the whole
+community. He swims with his webbed hind feet, the little fore paws
+being used as carriers or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the
+faintest bit in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted question.
+The only definitely ascertained function of that bat-shaped appendage is
+to telegraph danger to comrades. The beaver neither carries things on
+his tail, nor plasters houses with it; for the simple reason that the
+joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only slight sidelong
+wigglings and a forward sweep between his hind legs, as if he might use
+it as a tray for food while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his
+fore paws.
+
+Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the trapper may proceed in
+different ways. He may, after the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake
+the stream across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lowering the
+water, break the conical crowns of the houses on the south side, which
+is thinnest, and slaughter the beavers indiscriminately as they rush
+out. But such hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
+explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some
+years. In the confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind
+clubbing of heads there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor
+and in prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed; and
+if one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under water
+or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
+from that country. Only the degenerate white man practises bad hunting.
+
+The skilled hunter has other methods.
+
+If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the beavers
+have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent pools. The
+trapper gets one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
+loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and drown him, he
+places the trap a few inches under water at the end of a runway or in
+one of the channels. He then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a
+substance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all traces of the
+man-smell. For it the beavers have a curious infatuation, licking
+everything touched by it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into
+a crazy stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own
+foot-tracks.
+
+Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the bank, he
+may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the beaver is still
+taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
+and bark--usually covered with snow--slanting to the ground on one side,
+the ends either posts or logs, and the front an opening between two logs
+wide enough to admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a
+rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the front log, is the
+bait. All traces of the hunter are smeared over with the elusive
+castoreum. One tug at the bait usually brings the front log crashing
+down across the animal's back, killing it instantly.
+
+But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly satisfactory. When
+the poor beaver comes sniffing along the castoreum trail to the
+steel-trap and on the first splash into the water feels a pair of iron
+jaws close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the shelter of
+his house. The log plunges after him, holding him down and back till he
+drowns; and his whereabouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.
+
+But several chances are in the beaver's favour. With the castoreum
+licks, which tell them of some other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate
+or lost cub, they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of the
+trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap, they may retreat back up
+the bank and amputate the imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a
+mutilated paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver may have
+gone entirely inside the snare before the front log falls; and an animal
+whose teeth saw through logs eighteen inches in diameter in less than
+half an hour can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap. Other
+things are against the hunter. A wolverine may arrive on the scene
+before the trapper and eat the finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper
+may discover that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
+ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for three or four years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the ice is thick enough
+for the trapper to cut trenches. Then he returns with a woodman's axe
+and his dog. By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes have
+been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives stakes to prevent the
+beaver taking refuge in the shore vaults. The runways and channels,
+where the beaver have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
+over; but the man and his dog will presently find them.
+
+The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough not to be frozen solid,
+and shallow enough for it to make a mud foundation for the house without
+too much work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would carry away
+any house the beaver could build. A trench across the upper stream or
+stakes through the ice prevent escape that way.
+
+The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling water warns the
+terrified colony that an enemy is near. It may be their greatest foe,
+the wolverine, whose claws will rip through the frost-hard wall as
+easily as a bear delves for gophers; but their land enemies cannot
+pursue them into water; so the panic-stricken family--the old parents,
+wise from many such alarms; the young three-year-olds, who were to go
+out and rear families for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old
+cubbies, big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and the baby
+kittens, just able to forage for themselves and know the soft alder rind
+from the tough old bark unpalatable as mud--pop pell-mell from the high
+platform of their houses into the water. The water is still falling.
+They will presently be high and dry. No use trying to escape up-stream.
+They see that in the first minute's wild scurry through the shallows.
+Besides, what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there by any
+beaver; for there is no bark on. If they only had time now they might
+cut a passage through; but no--this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has
+ditched the ice across.
+
+They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from above--a low,
+exultant, devilish whining. The man has left his dog on guard above the
+dam. At that the little beavers--always trembling, timid fellows--tumble
+over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way of the flowing water
+below the dam. But there a new terror assails them. A shadow is above
+the ice, a wraith of destruction--the figure of a man standing at the
+dam with his axe and club--waiting.
+
+Where to go now? They can't find their bank shelters, for the man has
+staked them up. The little fellows lose their presence of mind and their
+heads and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up the remaining
+open runway. It is a _cul-de-sac_. But what does that matter? They run
+almost to the end. They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes
+away. Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on. He will come
+to them afterward.
+
+The old beavers make no such mistake. They have tried the hollow-log
+trick with an enemy pursuing them to the blind end, and have escaped
+only because some other beaver was eaten.
+
+The old ones know that water alone is safety.
+
+That is the first and last law of beaver life. They, too, see that
+phantom destroyer above the ice; but a dash past is the last chance. How
+many of the beaver escape past the cut in the dam to the water below,
+depends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But certainly, for the
+most, one blow is the end; and that one blow is less cruel to them than
+the ravages of the wolf or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat
+before they kill.
+
+A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above the dam. Where is the
+runway in which the others are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly,
+but begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whimper. The man
+sees that the dog is on the trail of sagging snow, and the sag betrays
+ice settling down where a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole
+across the river end of the runway and drives down stakes. The young
+beavers are now prisoners.
+
+The human mind can't help wondering why the foolish youngsters didn't
+crouch below the ice above the dam and lie there in safe hiding till the
+monster went away. This may be done by the hermit beavers--fellows who
+have lost their mates and go through life inconsolable; or sick
+creatures, infested by parasites and turned off to house in the river
+holes; or fat, selfish ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a
+family. Whatever these solitaries are--naturalists and hunters
+differ--they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor little beavers
+rush right into the jaws of death. Why do they? For the same reason
+probably, if they could answer, that people trample each other to death
+when there is an alarm in a crowd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing at all about their hides
+being valued all the way from fifty cents to three dollars, according to
+the quality; nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm in
+the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets the value for mink,
+otter, marten, bear, and all other skins, one pound of tobacco, one
+kettle, five pounds of shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth;
+nothing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty of their
+hides for a scrap of iron and a great company sending one hundred
+thousand beaver-skins in a single year to make hats and cloaks for the
+courtiers of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding the
+killing of beaver till their number increase.
+
+All the little beaver remembers is that it opened its eyes to daylight
+in the time of soft, green grasses; and that as soon as it got strong
+enough on a milk diet to travel, the mother led the whole family of
+kittens--usually three or four--down the slanting doorway of their dim
+house for a swim; and that she taught them how to nibble the dainty,
+green shrubs along the bank; and then the entire colony went for the
+most glorious, pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
+sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass like a
+goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water all day, diving for the
+roots of the lily-pads. But the old mother is always on guard, for the
+wolves and bears are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
+hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their two-year-old
+brothers; and the wonderful thing is--if a tooth breaks, it grows into
+perfect shape inside of a week.
+
+By August the little fellows are great swimmers, and the colony begins
+the descent of the stream for their winter home. If unmolested, the old
+dam is chosen; but if the hated man-smell is there, new waterways are
+sought. Burrows and washes and channels and retreats are cleaned out.
+Trees are cut and a great supply of branches laid up for winter store
+near the lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just before the
+frost they begin building or repairing the dam. Each night's frost
+hardens the plastered clay till the conical wattled roof--never more
+than two feet thick--will support the weight of a moose.
+
+All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and not the tail. This has
+been finally determined by observing the Marquis of Bute's colony of
+beavers. If the family--the old parents and three seasons' offspring--be
+too large for the house, new chambers are added. In height the house is
+seldom more than five feet from the base, and the width varies. In
+building a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay, mixing
+this with stones and sticks for the walls, and hollowing out the dome as
+it rises, like a coffer-dam, except that man pumps out water and the
+beaver scoops out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer of clay
+till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have one door or two is
+disputed; but the door is always at the end of a sloping incline away
+from the land side, with a shelf running round above, which serves as
+the living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below water, two
+doors instead of one, platforms like an oven instead of a shelf, are
+probably explained by the continual abrasion of the current. By the time
+the ice forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the winter,
+only coming out to feed on their winter stores and get an airing.
+
+But this terrible thing has happened; and the young beavers huddle
+together under the ice of the canal, bleating with the cry of a child.
+They are afraid to run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
+are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with a glee that is
+fiendish to the little beavers. Then a gust of cold air comes from the
+rear and a pole prods forward.
+
+The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding beavers are, and with
+little terrified yelps they scuttle to the very end of the runway. By
+this time the dog is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
+boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent by scratching with
+a zeal that would burrow to the middle of earth.
+
+The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind end of the channel,
+and cuts a hole above the prison of the beaver. He puts down his arm.
+One by one they are dragged out by the tail; and that finishes the
+little beaver--sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rabbits of
+bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities of man. Only, this
+death is swifter and less painful. A prolonged death-struggle with the
+beaver would probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very often
+the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If the dog attempts to
+capture the frightened runaways by catching at the conspicuous appendage
+to the rear, that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
+tail, while the beaver runs off with two.
+
+Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kittens which they take
+home as pets. When young they are as easily domesticated as a cat, and
+become a nuisance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to the
+hunter, comes what the Indians call "the-sickness-of-long-thinking," the
+gipsy yearning for the wilds. Then extraordinary things happen. The
+beaver are apt to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trapper
+of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers became so restless, he
+feared their escape and put them in cages. They bit their way out with
+absurd ease.
+
+He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole through in a night.
+Thinking to get wire caging, he took them into his lodge, and they
+seemed contented enough while he was about; but one morning he wakened
+to find a hole eaten through the door, and the entire round of
+birch-bark, which he had staked out ready for the gunwales and ribbing
+of his canoe--bark for which he had travelled forty miles--chewed into
+shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream, which is their habit in
+spring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS
+
+
+It is a grim joke of the animal world that the lazy moose is the moose
+that gives wings to the feet of the pursuer. When snow comes the trapper
+must have snow-shoes and moccasins. For both, moose supplies the best
+material.
+
+Bees have their drones, beaver their hermits, and moose a ladified
+epicure who draws off from the feeding-yards of the common herd, picks
+out the sweetest browse of the forest, and gorges herself till fat as a
+gouty voluptuary. While getting the filling for his snow-shoes, the
+trapper also stocks his larder; and if he can find a spinster moose, he
+will have something better than shredded venison and more delicately
+flavoured than finest teal.
+
+Sledding his canoe across shallow lakelets, now frozen like rock, still
+paddling where there is open way, the trapper continues to guide his
+course up the waterways. Big game, he knows, comes out to drink at
+sunrise and sunset; and nearly all the small game frequents the banks of
+streams either to fish or to prey on the fisher.
+
+Each night he sleeps in the open with his dog on guard; or else puts up
+the cotton tepee, the dog curling outside the tent flap, one ear awake.
+And each night a net is set for the white-fish that are to supply
+breakfast, feed the dog, and provide heads for the traps placed among
+rocks in mid-stream, or along banks where dainty footprints were in the
+morning's hoar-frost. Brook trout can still be got in the pools below
+waterfalls; but the trapper seldom takes time now to use the line,
+depending on his gun and fish-net.
+
+During the Indian's white-fish month--the white man's November--the
+weather has become colder and colder; but the trapper never indulges in
+the big log fire that delights the heart of the amateur hunter. That
+would drive game a week's tracking from his course. Unless he wants to
+frighten away nocturnal prowlers, a little, chip fire, such as the
+fishermen of the Banks use in their dories, is all the trapper allows
+himself.
+
+First snow silences the rustling leaves. First frost quiets the flow of
+waters. Except for the occasional splitting of a sap-frozen tree, or the
+far howl of a wolf-pack, there is the stillness of death. And of all
+quiet things in the quiet forest, the trapper is the quietest.
+
+As winter closes in the ice-skim of the large lakes cuts the bark canoe
+like a knife. The canoe is abandoned for snow-shoes and the cotton tepee
+for more substantial shelter.
+
+If the trapper is a white man he now builds a lodge near the best
+hunting-ground he has found. Around this he sets a wide circle of traps
+at such distances their circuit requires an entire day, and leads the
+trapper out in one direction and back in another, without retracing the
+way. Sometimes such lodges run from valley to valley. Each cabin is
+stocked; and the hunter sleeps where night overtakes him. But this plan
+needs two men; for if the traps are not closely watched, the wolverine
+will rifle away a priceless fox as readily as he eats a worthless
+musk-rat. The stone fire-place stands at one end. Moss, clay, and snow
+chink up the logs. Parchment across a hole serves as window. Poles and
+brush make the roof, or perhaps the remains of the cotton tent stretched
+at a steep angle to slide off the accumulating weight of snow.
+
+But if the trapper is an Indian, or the white man has a messenger to
+carry the pelts marked with his name to a friendly trading-post, he may
+not build a lodge; but move from hunt to hunt as the game changes
+feeding-ground. In this case he uses the _abuckwan_--canvas--for a shed
+tent, with one side sloping to the ground, banked by brush and snow, the
+other facing the fire, both tent and fire on such a slope that the smoke
+drifts out while the heat reflects in. Pine and balsam boughs, with the
+wood end pointing out like sheaves in a stook, the foliage converging to
+a soft centre, form the trapper's bed.
+
+The snow is now too deep to travel without snow-shoes. The frames for
+these the trapper makes of ash, birch, or best of all, the
+_mackikwatick_--tamarack--curving the easily bent green wood up at one
+end, canoe shape, and smoothing the barked wood at the bend, like a
+sleigh runner, by means of the awkward _couteau croche_, as the French
+hunter calls his crooked knife.
+
+In style, the snow-shoe varies with the hunting-ground. On forested,
+rocky, hummocky land, the shoe is short to permit short turns without
+entanglement. Oval and broad, rather than long and slim, it makes up in
+width what it lacks in length to support the hunter's weight above the
+snow. And the toe curve is slight; for speed is impossible on bad
+ground. To save the instep from jars, the slip noose may be padded like
+a cowboy's stirrup.
+
+On the prairie, where the snowy reaches are unbroken as air, snow-shoes
+are wings to the hunter's heels. They are long, and curved, and narrow,
+and smooth enough on the runners for the hunter to sit on their rear
+ends and coast downhill as on a toboggan. If a snag is struck midway,
+the racquets may bounce safely over and glissade to the bottom; or the
+toe may catch, heels fly over head, and the hunter land with his feet
+noosed in frames sticking upright higher than his neck.
+
+Any trapper can read the story of a hunt from snow-shoes. Bound and
+short: east of the Great Lakes. Slim and long: from the prairie. Padding
+for the instep: either rock ground or long runs. Filling of hide strips
+with broad enough interspaces for a small foot to slip through: from the
+wet, heavily packed, snow region of the Atlantic coast, for trapping
+only, never the chase, small game, not large. Lace ties, instead of a
+noose to hold the foot: the amateur hunter. _Atibisc_, a fine filling
+taken from deer or caribou for the heel and toe; with _askimoneiab_,
+heavy, closely interlaced, membraneous filling from the moose across the
+centre to bear the brunt of wear; long enough for speed, short enough to
+turn short: the trapper knows he is looking at the snow-shoe of the
+craftsman. This is the sort he must have for himself.
+
+The first thing, then--a moose for the heavy filling; preferably a
+spinster moose; for she is too lazy to run from a hunter who is not yet
+a Mercury; and she will furnish him with a banquet fit for kings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither moose call nor birch horn, of which wonders are told, will avail
+now. The mating season is well past. Even if an old moose responded to
+the call, the chances are his flesh would be unfit for food. It would be
+a wasted kill, contrary to the principles of the true trapper.
+
+Every animal has a sign language as plain as print. The trapper has
+hardly entered the forest before he begins to read this language. Broad
+hoof-marks are on the muskeg--quaking bog, covered with moss--over which
+the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where a horse would sink to the
+saddle. Park-like glades at the heads of streams, where the moose have
+spent the summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water holes to get
+rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and stripped twigs and rubbed
+bark.
+
+Coming suddenly on a grove of quaking aspens, a saucy jay has fluttered
+up with a noisy call--an alarm note; and something is bounding off to
+hiding in a thicket on the far side of the grove. The _wis-kat-jan_, or
+whisky jack, as the white men call it, who always hangs about the moose
+herds, has seen the trapper and sounded the alarm.
+
+In August, when the great, palmated horns, which budded out on the male
+in July, are yet in the velvet, the trapper finds scraps of furry hair
+sticking to young saplings. The vain moose has been polishing his
+antlers, preparatory to mating. Later, there is a great whacking of
+horns among the branches. The moose, spoiling for a fight, in moose
+language is challenging his rivals to battle. Wood-choppers have been
+interrupted by the apparition of a huge, palmated head through a
+thicket. Mistaking the axe for his rival's defiance, the moose arrives
+on the scene in a mood of blind rage that sends the chopper up a tree,
+or back to the shanty for his rifle.
+
+But the trapper allows these opportunities to pass. He is not ready for
+his moose until winter compels the abandoning of the canoe. Then the
+moose herds are yarding up in some sheltered feeding-ground.
+
+It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard. There is the
+tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There are the cast-off antlers
+after the battles have been fought--the female moose being without horns
+and entirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for protection.
+There is the stripped, overhead twig, where a moose has reared on hind
+legs and nibbled a branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
+which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then held down with his
+feet while he browsed. This and more sign language of the woods--too
+fine for the language of man--lead the trapper close on the haunts of a
+moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary moose. He is keen for the
+solitary track of a haughty spinster. And he probably comes on the print
+when he has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one of the herd
+below the hill, where he hides. He knows the trail is that of a
+spinster. It is unusually heavy; and she is always fat. It drags
+clumsily over the snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
+away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she loiters to feed
+and dawdle out of pure indolence.
+
+And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot scent feels. He may win
+his prize with the ease of putting out his hand and taking it--sighting
+his rifle and touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
+breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a week and come back
+empty at his cartridge-belt, empty below his cartridge-belt, empty of
+hand, and full, full of rage at himself, though his words curse the
+moose. He may win his prize in one of two ways: (1) by running the game
+to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or by a still hunt.
+
+The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the man than the moose. Even
+a fat spinster can outdistance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his
+perseverance lasts longer than her strength--for though a moose swings
+out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily tired--the exhausted
+moose is a moose at bay; and a moose at bay rears on her hind legs and
+does defter things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than an
+exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a cleft hoof means
+something sharply split, wherever that spreading hoof lands. And if the
+something wriggles on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon it
+with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she goes on her way
+with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair bristling.
+
+The contest was even and the moose won.
+
+Apart from the hazard, there is a barbarism about this straightaway
+chase, which repels the trapper. It usually succeeds by bogging the
+moose in crusted snow, or a waterhole--and then, Indian fashion, a
+slaughter; and no trapper kills for the sake of killing, for the simple
+practical reason that his own life depends on the preservation of game.
+
+A slight snowfall and the wind in his face are ideal conditions for a
+still hunt. One conceals him. The other carries the man-smell from the
+game.
+
+Which way does the newly-discovered footprint run? More flakes are in
+one hole than the other. He follows the trail till he has an idea of the
+direction the moose is taking; for the moose runs straightaway, not
+circling and doubling back on cold tracks like the deer, but marching
+direct to the objective point, where it turns, circles slightly--a loop
+at the end of a line--and lies down a little off the trail. When the
+pursuer, following the cold scent, runs past, the moose gets wind and is
+off in the opposite direction like a vanishing streak.
+
+Having ascertained the lie of the land, the trapper leaves the line of
+direct trail and follows in a circling detour. Here, he finds the print
+fresher, not an hour old. The moose had stopped to browse and the
+markings are moist on a twig. The trapper leaves the trail, advancing
+always by a detour to leeward. He is sure, now, that it is a spinster.
+If it had been any other, the moose would not have been alone. The rest
+would be tracking into the leader's steps; and by the fresh trail he
+knows for a certainty there is only one. But his very nearness increases
+the risk. The wind may shift. The snowfall is thinning. This time, when
+he comes back to the trail, it is fresher still. The hunter now gets his
+rifle ready. He dare not put his foot down without testing the snow,
+lest a twig snap. He parts a way through the brush with his hand and
+replaces every branch. And when next he comes back to the line of the
+moose's travel, there is no trail. This is what he expected. He takes
+off his coat; his leggings, if they are loose enough to rub with a
+leathery swish; his musk-rat fur cap, if it has any conspicuous colour;
+his boots, if they are noisy and given to crunching. If only he aim
+true, he will have moccasins soon enough. Leaving all impedimenta, he
+follows back on his own steps to the place where he last saw the trail.
+Perhaps the saucy jay cries with a shrill, scolding shriek that sends
+cold shivers down the trapper's spine. He wishes he could get his hands
+on its wretched little neck; and turning himself to a statue, he stands
+stone-still till the troublesome bird settles down. Then he goes on.
+
+Here is the moose trail!
+
+He dare not follow direct. That would lead past her hiding-place and she
+would bolt. He resorts to artifice; but, for that matter, so has the
+moose resorted to artifice. The trapper, too, circles forward, cutting
+the moose's magic guard with transverse zigzags. But he no longer walks.
+He crouches, or creeps, or glides noiselessly from shelter to shelter,
+very much the way a cat advances on an unwary mouse. He sinks to his
+knees and feels forward for snow-pads every pace. Then he is on
+all-fours, still circling. His detour has narrowed and narrowed till he
+knows she must be in that aspen thicket. The brush is sparser. She has
+chosen her resting-ground wisely. The man falls forward on his face,
+closing in, closing in, wiggling and watching till--he makes a horrible
+discovery. That jay is perched on the topmost bough of the grove; and
+the man has caught a glimpse of something buff-coloured behind the
+aspens. It may be a moose, or only a log. The untried hunter would fire.
+Not so the trapper. Hap-hazard aim means fighting a wounded moose, or
+letting the creature drag its agony off to inaccessible haunts. The man
+worms his way round the thicket, sighting the game with the noiseless
+circling of a hawk before the drop. An ear blinks. But at that instant
+the jay perks his head to one side with a curious look at this strange
+object on the ground. In another second it will be off with a call and
+the moose up.
+
+His rifle is aimed!
+
+A blinding swish of aspen leaves and snow and smoke! The jay is off with
+a noisy whistle. And the trapper has leather for moccasins, and heavy
+filling for his snow-shoes, and meat for his larder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But he must still get the fine filling for heel and toe; and this comes
+from caribou or deer. The deer, he will still hunt as he has still
+hunted the moose, with this difference: that the deer runs in circles,
+jumping back in his own tracks leaving the hunter to follow a cold
+scent, while it, by a sheer bound--five--eight--twenty feet off at a new
+angle, makes for the hiding of dense woods. No one but a barbarian would
+attempt to run down a caribou; for it can only be done by the shameless
+trick of snaring in crusted snow, or intercepting while swimming, and
+then--butchery.
+
+The caribou doesn't run. It doesn't bound. It floats away into space.
+
+One moment a sandy-coloured form, with black nose, black feet, and a
+glory of white statuary above its head, is seen against the far reaches
+of snow. The next, the form has shrunk--and shrunk--and shrunk, antlers
+laid back against its neck, till there is a vanishing speck on the
+horizon. The caribou has not been standing at all. It has skimmed out of
+sight; and if there is any clear ice across the marshes, it literally
+glides beyond vision from very speed. But, provided no man-smell crosses
+its course, the caribou is vulnerable in its habits. Morning and
+evening, it comes back to the same watering-place; and it returns to the
+same bed for the night. If the trapper can conceal himself without
+crossing its trail, he easily obtains the fine filling for his
+snow-shoes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Moccasins must now be made.
+
+The trapper shears off the coarse hair with a sharp knife. The hide is
+soaked; and a blunter blade tears away the remaining hairs till the skin
+is white and clean. The flesh side is similarly cleaned and the skin
+rubbed with all the soap and grease it will absorb. A process of beating
+follows till the hide is limber. Carelessness at this stage makes
+buckskin soak up water like a sponge and dry to a shapeless board. The
+skin must be stretched and pulled till it will stretch no more. Frost
+helps the tanning, drying all moisture out; and the skin becomes as soft
+as down, without a crease. The smoke of punk from a rotten tree gives
+the dark yellow colour to the hide and prevents hardening. The skin is
+now ready for the needle; and all odd bits are hoarded away.
+
+Equipped with moccasins and snow-shoes, the trapper is now the winged
+messenger of the tragic fates to the forest world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE INDIAN TRAPPER
+
+
+It is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.
+
+In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with
+a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the
+gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists
+of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like
+clouds of steam, will have cleared; and there will be nothing from
+sky-line to sky-line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.
+
+The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid-day. Then the sun
+casts no man-shadow to scare game from his snares. Black is the flag of
+betrayal in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye, glistening
+on the snow like a black marble, that the trapper detects the white
+hare; and a jet tail-tip streaking over the white wastes in dots and
+dashes tells him the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
+coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts and diving
+below the snow with the forward wriggling of a snake under cover. But
+the moving man-shadow is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's
+eye or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out in the gray
+darkness of morning and must reach his hunting-grounds before high
+noon.
+
+With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts in swift, coasting
+strides, he swings out in that easy, ambling, Indian trot, which gives
+never a jar to the runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
+beneath his tread.
+
+The old musket, which he got in trade from the fur post, is over his
+shoulder, or swinging lightly in one hand. A hunter's knife and
+short-handled woodman's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
+his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy musk-rat gantlets are
+attached to the cord about his neck; so without losing either he can
+fight bare-handed, free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And
+somewhere, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
+_skipertogan_--a skin bag with amulet against evil, matches, touchwood,
+and a scrap of pemmican. As he grows hot, he throws back his hood,
+running bareheaded and loose about the chest.
+
+Each breath clouds to frost against his face till hair and brows and
+lashes are fringed with frozen moisture. The white man would hugger his
+face up with scarf and collar the more for this; but the Indian knows
+better. Suddenly chilled breath would soak scarf and collar wet to his
+skin; and his face would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
+with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the keenest cold; so he
+loosens his coat and runs the faster.
+
+As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in the gray haze. Pine
+groves emerge from the dark, wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and
+domes and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spreading larch
+boughs. Evergreens are edged with white. Naked trees stand like limned
+statuary with an antlered crest etched against the white glare. The
+snow stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that seem to
+heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
+skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
+against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
+circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
+proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.
+
+When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
+Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
+the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
+Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
+arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
+about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
+But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
+length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
+Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
+coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
+talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
+the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
+it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
+the Northern Lights. He does not _see_ these things with the gabbling
+exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
+nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
+description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
+squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist like a
+sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
+months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
+music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
+gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
+tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
+and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.
+
+Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
+mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
+Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
+has seen; though he has not understood.
+
+But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
+of the Great Lakes, in the canons of the Rockies, and across that
+northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
+east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay regions that the
+Indian trapper will find his last hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes
+the white man, and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring
+before Columbus opened the doors of the New World to the hordes of the
+Old; and here Indian trappers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When
+there is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed; but that day is far
+distant for the Hudson Bay region.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is midwinter; and by
+December there is a curious lull in the hunting. All the streams are
+frozen like rock; but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
+yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some foolish fish
+always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice shuts them in. Then a strange
+thing is seen--a kettle of living fish; fish gasping and panting in
+ice-hemmed water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost freezes
+another layer to the ice walls of their prison. The banks of such a pond
+hole are haunted by the otter and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when
+the pond is exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank and
+forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.
+
+The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and fastidious
+choosing--for in trapper vernacular the bear takes a long time to please
+himself--bruin found an upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
+grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes and went to sleep
+under a snow blanket of gathering depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too,
+have gone off to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by a
+wolf-pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to move till this
+ground is eaten over. Nor are many beaver seen now. They have long since
+snuggled into their warm houses, where they will stay till their winter
+store is all used; and their houses are now hidden under great depths of
+deepening snow. But the fox and the hare and the ermine are at run; and
+as long as they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx and
+the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from the scarcity of other
+game and greedy as spring crows.
+
+That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's heels. The pelt of a
+coyote--or prairie wolf--would scarcely be worth the taking. Even the
+big, gray timber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot, except
+for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic wolf would bring better
+price. The enormous black or brown arctic wolf would be more valuable;
+but the value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all these
+worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps as keenly as the
+trapper does; and would eat up a silver fox, that would be the fortune
+of any hunter.
+
+The Indian comes to the brush where he has set his rabbit snares across
+a runway. His dog sniffs the ground, whining. The crust of the snow is
+broken by a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit fur is
+fluffed about. The game has been rifled away. The Indian notices several
+things. The rabbit has been devoured on the spot. That is unlike the
+wolverine. He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a guzzle
+in his own lair. The footprints have the appearance of having been
+brushed over; so the thief had a bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There
+is no trail away from the snare. The marauder has come with a long leap
+and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his dog make a circuit of the
+snare till they come on the trail of the intruder; and its size tells
+the Indian whether his enemy be fox or wolf.
+
+He sets no more snares across that runway, for the rabbits have had
+their alarm. Going through the brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a
+new snare.
+
+Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the drifts to the next trap. It
+is a deadfall. Nothing is in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left
+undisturbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to atoms from very
+wickedness, chewed the bait in two, and spat it out lest there should be
+poison. The fox would have gone in and had his back broken by the front
+log. And there is the same brush work over the trampled snow, as if the
+visitor had tried to sweep out his own trail; and the same long leap
+away, clearing obstruction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
+scent. This time the Indian makes two or three circuits; but the snow is
+so crusted it is impossible to tell whether the scratchings lead out to
+the open or back to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal had
+followed the line of the traps by running just inside the brush, the
+Indian would know. But the midwinter day is short, and he has no time to
+explore the border of the thicket.
+
+Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that number he hardly
+expects game in more than a dozen. If six have a prize, he has done
+well. Each time he stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
+trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with castoreum, or
+pomatum, or bears' grease; sweeping the snow over every spot touched by
+his hand; dragging the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.
+
+Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and the Indian trapper has
+found not a thing in his traps. He only knows that some daring enemy has
+dogged the circle of his snares. That means he must kill the marauder,
+or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt about swift vengeance for
+the loss of a rabbit, he has none when he comes to the next trap. He
+sees what is too much for words: what entails as great loss to the poor
+Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white man. One of his best
+steel-traps lies a little distance from the pole to which it was
+attached. It has been jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
+the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained and covered with
+gray fur as soft and silvery as chinchilla. In the trap is a little paw,
+fresh cut, scarcely frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of
+which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and speculators of stocks,
+and actors of fame. But the wolves, the great, black wolves of the Far
+North, with eyes full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
+had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not an hour before the
+trapper came.
+
+He knows now what his enemy is; for he has come so suddenly on their
+trail he can count four different footprints, and claw-marks of
+different length. They have fought about the little fox; and some of the
+smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the blood-marks, he can
+tell they have got under cover of the shrub growth to the right.
+
+The Indian says none of the words which the white man might say; but
+that is nothing to his credit; for just now no words are adequate. But
+he takes prompt resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
+which somehow is written on the very face of the wilderness as one of
+its necessities, he decides that only life for life will compensate such
+loss. The danger of hunting the big, brown wolf--he knows too well to
+attempt it without help. He will bait his small traps with poison; take
+out his big, steel wolf traps to-morrow; then with a band of young
+braves follow the wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting
+season.
+
+But the animal world knows that old trick of drawing a herring scent
+across the trail of wise intentions; and of all the animal world, none
+knows it better than the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
+of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the same pricking
+forward of sharp, erect ears, the same crouching trot, the same
+sneaking, watchful green eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to
+brush out every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop of the
+gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among wolves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keeping to the open, where
+he can travel fast on the long snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap.
+The man-shadow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then all the
+shadows merge into the purple gloom of early evening; but the Indian
+travels on; for the circuit of traps leads back to his lodge.
+
+The wolf thief may not be far off; so the man takes his musket from the
+case. He may chance a shot at the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves
+run under cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward. The wind
+carries scent of danger from the open, and the brush forms an ambuscade.
+Man tracks, where man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
+clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if he can; and if he
+can't, crouches low till he has passed the exposure.
+
+The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides, wasting not an
+inch of ground, deviating neither to right nor left by as much space as
+a white man takes to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog
+utters a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward towards the
+brush. At the same moment the Indian, who has been keeping his eyes on
+the woods, sees a form rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is
+not surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and the fox trap
+could not have been robbed more than an hour ago. The man thinks he has
+come on the thieves going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means
+him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as he looks the form
+fades into the gloom, and he decides to run on parallel to the
+brushwood, with his gun ready. Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery.
+At the clearing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he is
+heading home there is little danger.
+
+But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes off to the woods
+with wild barking, and the trapper scans the long, white stretch leading
+back between the bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
+grays of twilight.
+
+Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
+wolfish figure looms black against the snow--and stands! The dog prances
+round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
+and the Indian calculates--" After all, there is only one."
+
+What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
+traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
+points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
+mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
+wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.
+
+One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
+through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
+the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
+finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
+meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
+advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
+sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
+The man runs faster now, determined to get abreast of the wolf and
+utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
+distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
+front and shoot.
+
+But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
+wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
+wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
+ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
+thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
+the very real substance of that fox.
+
+The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
+while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
+through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
+lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
+with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
+the trapper's very feet.
+
+Then the man knows that he has been tricked.
+
+The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
+sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
+and prairie hold in deadly fear--fire. Two or three shots ring into the
+darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells him there is one wolf
+less, and the others will hold off at a safe distance. Contrary to the
+woodman's traditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian whips
+out his axe and chops with all his might till he has wood enough for a
+roaring fire. That will keep the rascals away till the pack goes off in
+full cry, or daylight comes.
+
+Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the Indian hastily makes a
+bow, and shoots arrow after arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air,
+hoping to signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear. The sky
+is silver with stars, and moonlight and reflected snowglare, and the
+Northern Lights flicker and wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy
+that dims the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising from his
+fire in a straight column falls at the height of the trees, for the
+frost lies on the land heavy, palpable, impenetrable. And for all the
+frost is thick to the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
+That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air seems to become
+absolutely compressed with the cold; but that same cold freezes out and
+precipitates every particle of floating moisture till earth and sky,
+moon and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.
+
+A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a gale, comes
+through the tightening silence. The intelligent half-breed says this is
+from the Northern Lights. The white man says it is electric activity in
+compressed air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter the
+words of the braves in death chant:
+
+  "If I die, I die valiant,
+  I go to death fearless.
+  I die a brave man.
+  I go to those heroes who died without fear."
+
+Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire arrows into the air. He
+heaps his fire and watches, musket in hand. The light of the moon is
+white like statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-edged trees
+are chiselled clear like statuary; and the silence is of stone. Only
+the snap of the blaze, the crackling of the frosted air, the break of a
+twig back among the brush, where something has moved, and the little,
+low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases; and the dog at last
+lowers his ears and lies quiet. The trapper throws a stick into the
+woods and sends the dog after it. The dog comes back without any
+barkings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have drawn off. Will he
+wait out that long Northern night? He has had nothing to eat but the
+piece of pemmican. The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
+if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run will carry him
+home; but to make speed with the snow-shoes he must run in the open,
+exposed to all watchers.
+
+When an Indian balances motives, the motive of hunger invariably
+prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting in the caribou coat and kicking
+up the dog, the trapper strikes out for the open way leading back to the
+line of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been built for
+shelter against wind. There is another reason for building lodges in a
+hollow. Sound of the hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
+sound of the game carry to the hunter.
+
+And if the game should turn hunter and the man turn hunted! The trapper
+speeds down the snowy slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over
+hummocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping rather than
+running. The frosty air acts as a conductor to sound, and the frost
+films come in stings against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and
+touch are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the first
+breath of peril, uttering a smothered "_woo! woo!_" The trapper tries to
+persuade himself the alarm was only the far scream of a wolf-hunted
+lynx; but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a dome. One
+glance over his shoulder shows him black forms on the snow-crest against
+the sky.
+
+He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox feels before the dogs
+in full cry.
+
+The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted thing with terror crazing
+his blood and the sleuth-hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something
+goes wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-strings, he
+sees that the dog's feet have been cut by the snow crust and are
+bleeding. It is life for life now; the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law,
+that has no new dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
+that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.
+
+One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.
+
+The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exultant bay. The wolf-pack
+are in full cry. The man has rounded the open alley between the trees
+and is speeding down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the pack
+pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite. The moon is behind,
+and the man-shadow flits before on the snow like an enemy heading him
+back. The deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer! He
+feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause. A great drift thrusts
+across his way and the shadow in front runs slower. They are gaining on
+him. He hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings for breath
+are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest of the drift he braces
+himself and goes to the bottom with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.
+
+The slant moonlight throws another shadow on the snow at his heels.
+
+It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and tosses up his arms--an
+Indian trick to stop pursuit. Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man
+that has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with a piercing
+howl.
+
+The man is off and away.
+
+If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men and a body-guard of
+guides hunt down a single quarry, he would be safe enough now. But the
+old musket is slow loading, and speed will serve him better than another
+shot.
+
+Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his instep to his ankle,
+throwing the racquet on edge and clogging him back. Before he can right
+it they are upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face and fight
+to the last breath. His hood falls back, and he wheels with the
+moonlight full in his eyes and the Northern Lights waving their mystic
+flames high overhead. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
+lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-wreathed trees, like
+funeral watchers--watchers of how many brave deaths in a desolate,
+lonely land where no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
+without fear!
+
+The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by burying the red-gummed
+fangs in the victim's throat; in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the
+runner's legs--called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
+ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teaches the Indian to be
+as merciless as he is brave--hunger!
+
+[Illustration: They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm.]
+
+Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the snapping red mouths
+with the butt of his weapon; and the foremost beasts roll under.
+
+But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase now, as much as from
+hunger. Leaping over their dead fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of
+the uplifted arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching for
+the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks to the rear of the
+hunter's fighting shadow. When the man swings his arm and draws back to
+strike, this miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
+dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.
+
+Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf has bitten the knee
+sinews to the bone. The pack leap up, and the man goes down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the heavy snow that fell
+over the northland that night, the Indians travelling to their summer
+hunting-grounds found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones of
+three dead wolves; and farther up the hill were the bleaching remains of
+a fourth.[35]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 35: A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay
+occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few
+years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the
+dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt--which
+tells its own story.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER
+
+
+The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a body-guard of armed guides in
+a field where the hunted have been on the run from the hunter for a
+century, gets a very tame idea of the natural bear in its natural state.
+Bears that have had the fear of man inculcated with longe-range
+repeaters lose confidence in the prowess of an aggressive onset against
+invisible foes. The city man comes back from the wilds with a legend of
+how harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild
+animal ever attacks unless it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear
+would go on its life-long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not
+compel it, or if repeated assault and battery from other animals did not
+teach the poor bear the art of self-defence.
+
+Grisly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the Western
+States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the forts of the
+Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, tell a different tale.
+Their hunting is done in a field where human presence is still so rare
+that it is unknown and the bear treats mankind precisely as he treats
+all other living beings from the moose and the musk-ox to mice and
+ants--as fair game for his own insatiable maw.
+
+Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns--"liars" the city man calls
+them--but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round the fur company
+forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in the artificial ridge of
+a deformed nose that the bear which he slew was a real one with an
+epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
+considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.[36] And the Kootenay
+hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
+of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
+dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
+eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
+other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
+blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
+twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
+wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
+that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
+altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
+girls through fairy books.
+
+That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
+and weaving at the grasses--weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
+mat--without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
+wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
+frill of a sun-bonnet, coming over the face as well as the neck--"to
+keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
+that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
+would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
+the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
+excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
+begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
+of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
+hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
+never lifting the thick frill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
+Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
+south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
+did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
+stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
+building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
+when they made a long overland _portage_, they were three weeks north of
+the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
+travelling light-handed. That is, they were carrying only a little salt
+and tea and tobacco. For the rest, they were depending on their muskets.
+Game had not been plentiful.
+
+Between the prairie and "the Mountains of the Setting Sun"--as the
+Indians call the Rockies--a long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled
+sinuously over the crests of the foothills; and all game--bird and
+beast--will shun a prairie fire. There was no wind. It was the dead hazy
+calm of Indian summer in the late autumn with the sun swimming in the
+purplish smoke like a blood-red shield all day and the serpent line of
+flame flickering and darting little tongues of vermilion against the
+deep blue horizon all night, days filled with the crisp smell of
+withered grasses, nights as clear and cold as the echo of a bell. On a
+windless plain there is no danger from a prairie fire. One may travel
+for weeks without nearing or distancing the waving tide of fire against
+a far sky; and the four trappers, running short of rations, decided to
+try to flank the fire coming around far enough ahead to intercept the
+game that must be moving away from the fire line.
+
+Nearly all hunters, through some dexterity of natural endowment,
+unconsciously become specialists. One man sees beaver signs where
+another sees only deer. For Ba'tiste, the page of nature spelled
+_B-E-A-R_! Fifteen bear in a winter is a wonderfully good season's work
+for any trapper. Ba'tiste's record for one lucky winter was fifty-four.
+After that he was known as the bear hunter. Such a reputation affects
+keen hunters differently. The Indian grows cautious almost to cowardice.
+Ba'tiste grew rash. He would follow a wounded grisly to cover. He would
+afterward laugh at the episode as a joke if the wounded brute had treed
+him. "For sure, good t'ing dat was not de prairie dat tam," he would
+say, flinging down the pelt of his foe. The other trappers with Indian
+blood in their veins might laugh, but they shook their heads when his
+back was turned.
+
+Flanking the fire by some of the great gullies that cut the foothills
+like trenches, the hunters began to find the signs they had been
+seeking. For Ba'tiste, the many different signs had but one meaning.
+Where some summer rain pool had dried almost to a soft mud hole, the
+other trappers saw little cleft foot-marks that meant deer, and prints
+like a baby's fingers that spelled out the visit of some member of the
+weasel family, and broad splay-hoof impressions that had spread under
+the weight as some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
+bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
+length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
+toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
+had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
+crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
+it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
+prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
+not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
+plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
+not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
+off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
+the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
+other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
+knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
+grasses thinned.
+
+Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
+raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things--stories of many bears,
+of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great slabs
+of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
+the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
+earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
+ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
+or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
+creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
+cliffs.
+
+Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
+other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
+beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
+russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
+flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
+thorny brush.
+
+The hawk soaring and dropping--lilting and falling and lifting
+again--might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
+bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
+blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
+down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.
+
+These things might interest the others. They did not interest Ba'tiste.
+Ba'tiste's eyes were for lairs of grass crushed so recently that the
+spear leaves were even now rising; for holes in the black mould where
+great ripping claws had been tearing up roots; for hollow logs and
+rotted stumps where a black bear might have crawled to take his
+afternoon siesta; for punky trees which a grisly might have torn open to
+gobble ants' eggs; for scratchings down the bole of poplar or cottonwood
+where some languid bear had been sharpening his claws in midsummer as a
+cat will scratch chair-legs; for great pits deep in the clay banks,
+where some silly badger or gopher ran down to the depths of his burrow
+in sheer terror only to have old bruin come ripping and tearing to the
+innermost recesses, with scattered fur left that told what had happened.
+
+Some soft oozy moss-padded lair, deep in the marsh with the reeds of the
+brittle cat-tails lifting as if a sleeper had just risen, sets
+Ba'tiste's pulse hopping--jumping--marking time in thrills like the
+lithe bounds of a pouncing mountain-cat. With tread soft as the velvet
+paw of a panther, he steals through the cane-brake parting the reeds
+before each pace, brushing aside softly--silently what might
+crush!--snap!--sound ever so slight an alarm to the little pricked ears
+of a shaggy head tossing from side to side--jerk--jerk--from right to
+left--from left to right--always on the listen!--on the listen!--for
+prey!--for prey!
+
+"Oh, for sure, that Ba'tiste, he was but a fool-hunter," as his comrades
+afterward said (it is always so very plain afterward); "that Ba'tiste,
+he was a fool! What man else go step--step--into the marsh after a
+bear!"
+
+But the truth was that Ba'tiste, the cunning rascal, always succeeded in
+coming out of the marsh, out of the bush, out of the windfall, sound as
+a top, safe and unscratched, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, the
+head swinging pendant to show what sort of fellow he had mastered.
+
+"Dat wan!--ah!--diable!--he has long sharp nose--he was thin--thin as a
+barrel all gone but de hoops--ah!--voila!--he was wan ugly garcon, was
+dat bear!"
+
+Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage brush, bits of skin on
+the spined cactus, the others might vow coyotes had worried a badger.
+Ba'tiste would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. The
+cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant bear; for the bear is an
+epicure that would have meat gamey. To that the others would agree.
+
+And so the shortening autumn days with the shimmering heat of a crisp
+noon and the noiseless chill of starry twilights found the trappers
+canoeing leisurely up-stream from the northern tributaries of the
+Missouri nearing the long overland trail that led to the hunting-fields
+in Canada.
+
+One evening they came to a place bounded by high cliff banks with the
+flats heavily wooded by poplar and willow. Ba'tiste had found signs that
+were hot--oh! so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so fresh
+that it had not yet dried. This was not a region of timber-wolves. What
+had dug that hole? Not the small, skulking coyote--the vagrant of
+prairie life! Oh!--no!--the coyote like other vagrants earns his living
+without work, by skulking in the wake of the business-like badger; and
+when the badger goes down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands
+nearby and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to escape the
+invading badger.[37] What had dug the hole? Ba'tiste thinks that he
+knows.
+
+That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is another kind of
+hole--a roundish pit dug between moss-covered logs and earth wall, a
+pit with grass clawed down into it, snug and hidden and sheltered as a
+bird's nest. If the pit is what Ba'tiste thinks, somewhere on the banks
+of the stream should be a watering-place. He proposes that they beach
+the canoes and camp here. Twilight is not a good time to still hunt an
+unseen bear. Twilight is the time when the bear himself goes still
+hunting. Ba'tiste will go out in the early morning. Meantime if he
+stumbles on what looks like a trail to the watering-place, he will set a
+trap.
+
+Camp is not for the regular trapper what it is for the amateur hunter--a
+time of rest and waiting while others skin the game and prepare supper.
+
+One hunter whittles the willow sticks that are to make the camp fire.
+Another gathers moss or boughs for a bed. If fish can be got, some one
+has out a line. The kettle hisses from the cross-bar between notched
+sticks above the fire, and the meat sizzling at the end of a forked twig
+sends up a flavour that whets every appetite. Over the upturned canoes
+bend a couple of men gumming afresh all the splits and seams against
+to-morrow's voyage. Then with a flip-flop that tells of the other side
+of the flap-jacks being browned, the cook yodels in crescendo that
+"Sup--per!--'s--read--ee!"
+
+Supper over, a trap or two may be set in likely places. The men may take
+a plunge; for in spite of their tawny skins, these earth-coloured
+fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
+indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
+fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
+Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
+"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.
+
+On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
+Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
+spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
+wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
+whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
+crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
+hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
+he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
+with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering <big>V</big> lines, wing
+geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
+great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
+wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
+flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
+overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
+mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
+autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
+fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.
+
+Unless it is raining, the _voyageurs_ do not erect their tent; for they
+will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
+the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
+And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
+of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
+chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
+able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
+care. When the hunter came suddenly on them, over the old hen went,
+flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
+for shelter--when--lo!--of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
+she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
+stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
+fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
+they died of starvation and their bones bleached in the rusted steel.
+
+That story has such small relish for Ba'tiste that he hitches farther
+away from the others and lies back flat on the ground close to the
+willow under-tangle with his head on his hand.
+
+"For sure," says Ba'tiste contemptuously, "nobody doesn't need no tree
+to climb here! Sacre!--cry wolf!--wolf!--and for sure!--diable!--de beeg
+loup-garou will eat you yet!"
+
+Down somewhere from those stars overhead drops a call silvery as a
+flute, clear as a piccolo--some night bird lilting like a mote on the
+far oceans of air. The trappers look up with a movement that in other
+men would be a nervous start; for any shrill cry pierces the silence of
+the prairie in almost a stab. Then the men go on with their yarn telling
+of how the Blackfeet murdered some traders on this very ground not long
+ago till the gloom gathering over willow thicket and encircling cliffs
+seems peopled with those marauding warriors. One man rises, saying that
+he is "goin' to turn in" and is taking a step through the dark to his
+canoe when there is a dull pouncing thud. For an instant the trappers
+thought that their comrade had stumbled over his boat. But a heavy
+groan--a low guttural cry--a shout of "Help--help--help Ba'tiste!" and
+the man who had risen plunged into the crashing cane-brake, calling out
+incoherently for them to "help--help Ba'tiste!"
+
+In the confusion of cries and darkness, it was impossible for the other
+two trappers to know what had happened. Their first thought was of the
+Indians whose crimes they had been telling. Their second was for their
+rifles--and they had both sprung over the fire where they saw the third
+man striking--striking--striking wildly at something in the dark. A low
+worrying growl--and they descried the Frenchman rolling over and over,
+clutched by or clutching a huge furry form--hitting--plunging with his
+knife--struggling--screaming with agony.
+
+"It's Ba'tiste! It's a bear!" shouted the third man, who was attempting
+to drive the brute off by raining blows on its head.
+
+Man and bear were an indistinguishable struggling mass. Should they
+shoot in the half-dark? Then the Frenchman uttered the scream of one in
+death-throes: "Shoot!--shoot!--shoot quick! She's striking my
+face!--she's striking my face----"
+
+And before the words had died, sharp flashes of light cleft the
+dark--the great beast rolled over with a coughing growl, and the
+trappers raised their comrade from the ground.
+
+The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
+piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
+uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
+fore paw.
+
+Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.
+
+"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done
+to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"
+
+Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
+fainted because of what his hands felt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
+those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
+how many others whose treachery will never be known.
+
+But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
+flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
+foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
+in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
+of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
+doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
+was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
+post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
+set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.
+
+Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
+attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
+creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
+ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
+baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:
+
+"S--s--sz!--" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear--it is an
+animal!--the bear!--it is a beast!--toujours!--the bear!--it is a
+beast!--always--always!" And his hands clinch.
+
+Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
+sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.
+
+Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
+the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
+death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbe Dugast, of St. Boniface,
+Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
+Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
+overdrawn, I quote the Abbe's words:
+
+"At a little distance Madame Lajimoniere and the other women were
+preparing the tents for the night, when all at once Bouvier gave a cry
+of distress and called to his companions to help him. At the first
+shout, each hunter seized his gun and prepared to defend himself against
+the attack of an enemy; they hurried to the other side of the ditch to
+see what was the matter with Bouvier, and what he was struggling with.
+They had no idea that a wild animal would come near the fire to attack a
+man even under cover of night; for fire usually has the effect of
+frightening wild beasts. However, almost before the four hunters knew
+what had happened, they saw their unfortunate companion dragged into the
+woods by a bear followed by her two cubs. She held Bouvier in her claws
+and struck him savagely in the face to stun him. As soon as she saw the
+four men in pursuit, she redoubled her fury against her prey, tearing
+his face with her claws. M. Lajimoniere, who was an intrepid hunter,
+baited her with the butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as
+he dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while trying to save
+him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being choked, cried with all his
+strength: 'Shoot; I would rather be shot than eaten alive!' M.
+Lajimoniere pulled the trigger as close to the bear as possible,
+wounding her mortally. She let go Bouvier and before her strength was
+exhausted made a wild attack upon M. Lajimoniere, who expected this and
+as his gun had only one barrel loaded, he ran towards the canoe, where
+he had a second gun fully charged. He had hardly seized it before the
+bear reached the shore and tried to climb into the canoe, but fearing no
+longer to wound his friend, M. Lajimoniere aimed full at her breast and
+this time she was killed instantly. As soon as the bear was no longer to
+be feared, Madame Lajimoniere, who had been trembling with fear during
+the tumult, went to raise the unfortunate Bouvier, who was covered with
+wounds and nearly dead. The bear had torn the skin from his face with
+her nails from the roots of his hair to the lower part of his chin. His
+eyes and nose were gone--in fact his features were indiscernible--but he
+was not mortally injured. His wounds were dressed as well as the
+circumstances would permit, and thus crippled he was carried to the Fort
+of the Prairies, Madame Lajimoniere taking care of him all through the
+journey. In time his wounds were successfully healed, but he was blind
+and infirm to the end of his life. He dwelt at the Fort of the Prairies
+for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
+1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
+priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
+time during the last years of his life in making crosses and crucifixes
+blind as he was, but he never made any _chefs d'oeuvre_."
+
+Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
+things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
+the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
+I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
+1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
+only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
+death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
+country--and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
+ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
+whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not--whether, in a word, it
+is altogether _humane to hunt bears_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 36: In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
+factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
+when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
+When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
+the pelt.]
+
+[Footnote 37: This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
+writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
+any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
+field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
+badgers are running.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER
+
+
+Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.
+
+The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
+tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
+with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.
+
+The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
+nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.
+
+Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
+Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
+stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
+the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
+ice, the rush of whirlpools through the blackness of some far canon, the
+crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
+multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
+startling the silences--these things filled the Indian with
+superstitious fears.
+
+The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"--great pillars of
+sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
+floods--were to the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
+awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
+quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
+The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
+echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
+swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.
+
+Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.
+
+Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
+every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
+in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
+east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
+stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
+the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
+the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
+camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
+down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
+the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
+cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
+white man's language, mystery.
+
+Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
+the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
+in safety.
+
+Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
+built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
+covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
+prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so sharp that French
+_voyageurs_ gave this queer craft the name "_canot a bec
+d'esturgeon_"--that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
+American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
+would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed canons of the mountain
+streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
+other light timber, with such an angular narrow prow that it could take
+the sheerest dip and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat
+would fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men pushed
+out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now on that, using
+the reversible double-bladed paddles which only an amphibious boatman
+can manage. The two men shot out in mid-stream, where the mists would
+hide them from each shore; a moment later the white fog had enfolded
+them, and there was no trace of human presence but the trail of dimpling
+ripples in the wake of the canoe.
+
+No talking, no whistling, not a sound to betray them. And there were
+good reasons why these men did not wish their presence known. One was
+Potts, the other John Colter. Both had been with the Lewis and Clark
+exploring party of 1804-'05, when a Blackfoot brave had been slain for
+horse-thieving by the first white men to cross the Upper Missouri.
+Besides, the year before coming to the Jefferson, Colter had been with
+the Missouri Company's fur brigade under Manuel Lisa, and had gone to
+the Crows as an emissary from the fur company. While with the Crows, a
+battle had taken place against the Blackfeet, in which they suffered
+heavy loss owing to Colter's prowess. That made the Blackfeet sworn
+enemies to Colter.
+
+Turning off the Jefferson, the trappers headed their canoe up a side
+stream, probably one of those marshy reaches where beavers have formed a
+swamp by damming up the current of a sluggish stream. Such quiet waters
+are favourite resorts for beaver and mink and marten and pekan. Setting
+their traps only after nightfall, the two men could not possibly have
+put out more than forty or fifty. Thirty traps are a heavy day's work
+for one man. Six prizes out of thirty are considered a wonderful run of
+luck; but the empty traps must be examined as carefully as the
+successful ones. Many that have been mauled, "scented" by a beaver scout
+and left, must be replaced. Others must have fresh bait; others, again,
+carried to better grounds where there are more game signs.
+
+Either this was a very lucky morning and the men were detained taking
+fresh pelts, or it was a very unlucky morning and the men had decided to
+trap farther up-stream; for when the mists began to rise, the hunters
+were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver meadow, they continued
+paddling up-stream away from the Jefferson. A more hidden water-course
+they could hardly have found. The swampy beaver-runs narrowed, the
+shores rose higher and higher into rampart walls, and the dark-shadowed
+waters came leaping down in the lumpy, uneven runnels of a small canon.
+You can always tell whether the waters of a canon are compressed or not,
+whether they come from broad, swampy meadows or clear snow streams
+smaller than the canon. The marsh waters roll down swift and black and
+turbid, raging against the crowding walls; the snow streams leap clear
+and foaming as champagne, and are in too great a hurry to stop and
+quarrel with the rocks. It is altogether likely these men recognised
+swampy water, and were ascending the canon in search of a fresh
+beaver-marsh; or they would not have continued paddling six miles above
+the Jefferson with daylight growing plainer at every mile. First the
+mist rose like a smoky exhalation from the river; then it flaunted
+across the rampart walls in banners; then the far mountain peaks took
+form against the sky, islands in a sea of fog; then the cloud banks were
+floating in mid-heaven blindingly white from a sun that painted each
+canon wall in the depths of the water.
+
+How much farther would the canon lead? Should they go higher up or not?
+Was it wooded or clear plain above the walls? The man paused. What was
+that noise?
+
+"Like buffalo," said Potts.
+
+"Might be Blackfeet," answered Colter.
+
+No. What would Blackfeet be doing, riding at a pace to make such thunder
+so close to a canon? It was only a buffalo herd stampeding on the annual
+southern run. Again Colter urged that the noise _might_ be from Indians.
+It would be safer for them to retreat at once. At which Potts wanted to
+know if Colter were afraid, using a stronger word--"coward."
+
+Afraid? Colter afraid? Colter who had remained behind Lewis and Clark's
+men to trap alone in the wilds for nearly two years, who had left Manuel
+Lisa's brigade to go alone among the thieving Crows, whose leadership
+had helped the Crows to defeat the Blackfeet?
+
+Anyway, it would now be as dangerous to go back as forward. They plainly
+couldn't land here. Let them go ahead where the walls seemed to slope
+down to shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an elbow of
+rock into the narrow course of a creek. Instantly out sprang five or six
+hundred Blackfeet warriors with weapons levelled guarding both sides of
+the stream.
+
+An Indian scout had discovered the trail of the white men and sent the
+whole band scouring ahead to intercept them at this narrow pass. The
+chief stepped forward, and with signals that were a command beckoned the
+hunters ashore.
+
+As is nearly always the case, the rash man was the one to lose his head,
+the cautious man the one to keep his presence of mind. Potts was for an
+attempt at flight, when every bow on both sides of the river would have
+let fly a shot. Colter was for accepting the situation, trusting to his
+own wit for subsequent escape.
+
+Colter, who was acting as steersman, sent the canoe ashore. Bottom had
+not grated before a savage snatched Potts's rifle from his hands.
+Springing ashore, Colter forcibly wrested the weapon back and coolly
+handed it to Potts.
+
+But Potts had lost all the rash courage of a moment before, and with one
+push sent the canoe into mid-stream. Colter shouted at him to come
+back--come back! Indians have more effective arguments. A bow-string
+twanged, and Potts screamed out, "Colter, I am wounded!"
+
+Again Colter urged him to land. The wound turned Pott's momentary fright
+to a paroxysm of rage. Aiming his rifle, he shot his Indian assailant
+dead. If it was torture that he feared, that act assured him at least a
+quick death; for, in Colter's language, man and boat were
+instantaneously "made a riddle of."
+
+No man admires courage more than the Indian; and the Blackfeet
+recognised in their captive one who had been ready to defend his comrade
+against them all, and who had led the Crows to victory against their own
+band.
+
+The prisoner surrendered his weapons. He was stripped naked, but neither
+showed sign of fear nor made a move to escape. Evidently the Blackfeet
+could have rare sport with this game white man. His life in the Indian
+country had taught him a few words of the Blackfoot language. He heard
+them conferring as to how he should be tortured to atone for all that
+the Blackfeet had suffered at white men's hands. One warrior suggested
+that the hunter be set up as a target and shot at. Would he then be so
+brave?
+
+But the chief shook his head. That was not game enough sport for
+Blackfeet warriors. That would be letting a man die passively. And how
+this man could fight if he had an opportunity! How he could resist
+torture if he had any chance of escaping the torture!
+
+But Colter stood impassive and listened. Doubtless he regretted having
+left the well-defended brigades of the fur companies to hunt alone in
+the wilderness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gambler's
+vice--the more a man has, the more he wants. Had not Colter crossed the
+Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
+fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
+revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
+that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
+more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
+coming up the Missouri with a brigade of hunters, and for the third
+time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
+Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
+by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
+instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
+things--to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
+wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The free trappers formed a class by themselves.
+
+Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
+on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
+like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
+boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
+free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
+where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
+but the one that paid the highest prices. For the _mangeurs de lard_, as
+they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
+the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
+or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
+had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.
+
+The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
+He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
+Indian--whisky--among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
+terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
+Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
+Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame,
+might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
+these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
+companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
+Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
+among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the
+term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
+Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
+in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
+for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
+dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
+Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day--before they joined
+the Astorians--and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
+the true type of free trapper.
+
+The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
+behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
+might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
+Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
+region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
+dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
+Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
+years before the Astorians came in 1811.
+
+One crime the free trappers may be charged with--a reckless waste of
+precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
+hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
+hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest game while the mothers
+were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
+follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
+away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
+of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
+game.
+
+Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
+Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
+classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
+After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
+permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
+"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
+wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
+passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
+where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
+ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
+very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
+held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the company,
+was able to say only two years ago, "the fur trade is quite as large as
+ever it was."
+
+Among free hunters, Canada had only one commanding figure--John Johnston
+of the Soo, who settled at La Pointe on Lake Superior in 1792, formed
+league with Wabogish, "the White Fisher," and became the most famous
+trader of the Lakes. His life, too, was almost as eventful as Colter's.
+A member of the Irish nobility, some secret which he never chose to
+reveal drove him to the wilds. Wabogish, the "White Fisher," had a
+daughter who refused the wooings of all her tribe's warriors. In vain
+Johnston sued for her hand. Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his
+Irish estates and prove his devotion by buying as vast estates in
+America. Johnston took the old chief at his word, and married the
+haughty princess of the Lake. When the War of 1812 set all the tribes by
+the ears, Johnston and his wife had as thrilling adventures as ever
+Colter knew among the Blackfeet.
+
+Many a free trapper, and partner of the fur companies as well, secured
+his own safety by marrying the daughter of a chief, as Johnston had.
+These were not the lightly-come, lightly-go affairs of the vagrant
+adventurer. If the husband had not cast off civilization like a garment,
+the wife had to put it on like a garment; and not an ill-fitting garment
+either, when one considers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted
+the wilderness like oases in a desert almost contemporaneous with the
+fur trade. If the trapper had not sunk to the level of the savages, the
+little daughter of the chief was educated by the nuns for her new
+position. I recall several cases where the child was sent across the
+Atlantic to an English governess so that the equality would be literal
+and not a sentimental fiction. And yet, on no subject has the western
+fur trader received more persistent and unjust condemnation. The heroism
+that culminated in the union of Pocahontas with a noted Virginian won
+applause, and almost similar circumstances dictated the union of fur
+traders with the daughters of Indian chiefs; but because the fur trader
+has not posed as a sentimentalist, he has become more or less of a
+target for the index finger of the Pharisee.[38]
+
+North of the boundary the free trapper had small chance against the
+Hudson's Bay Company. As long as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself
+chiefly recruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the
+Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of the Mississippi;
+but after the Mackinaw was absorbed by the aggressive American Fur
+Company, the free hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Missouri
+competition raged from 1810, so that circumstances drove the free
+trapper westward to the mountains, where he is hunting in the twentieth
+century as his prototype hunted two hundred years ago.
+
+In Canada--of course after 1870--he entered the mountains chiefly by
+three passes: (1) Yellow Head Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the
+narrow gap where the Bow emerges to the plains--that is, the river where
+the Indians found the best wood for the making of bows; (3) north of the
+boundary, through that narrow defile overtowered by the lonely
+flat-crowned peak called Crows Nest Mountain--that is, where the
+fugitive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet.
+
+In the United States, the free hunters also approached the mountains by
+three main routes: (1) Up the Platte; (2) westward from the Missouri
+across the plains; (3) by the Three Forks of the Missouri. For instance,
+it was coming down the Platte that poor Scott's canoe was overturned,
+his powder lost, and his rifles rendered useless. Game had retreated to
+the mountains with spring's advance. Berries were not ripe by the time
+trappers were descending with their winter's hunt. Scott and his
+famishing men could not find edible roots. Each day Scott weakened.
+There was no food. Finally, Scott had strength to go no farther. His men
+had found tracks of some other hunting party far to the fore. They
+thought that, in any case, he could not live. What ought they to do?
+Hang back and starve with him, or hasten forward while they had
+strength, to the party whose track they had espied? On pretence of
+seeking roots, they deserted the helpless man. Perhaps they did not come
+up with the advance party till they were sure that Scott must have died;
+for they did not go back to his aid. The next spring when these same
+hunters went up the Platte, they found the skeleton of poor Scott sixty
+miles from the place where they had left him. The terror that spurred
+the emaciated man to drag himself all this weary distance can barely be
+conceived; but such were the fearful odds taken by every free trapper
+who went up the Platte, across the parched plains, or to the head waters
+of the Missouri.
+
+The time for the free trappers to go out was, in Indian language, "when
+the leaves began to fall." If a mighty hunter like Colter, the trapper
+was to the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant of woods
+and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
+red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
+slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
+questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
+of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
+important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
+the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
+hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
+all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
+provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
+to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
+was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
+the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.
+
+Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
+himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
+thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
+squaw all the pemmican white men could use.
+
+Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
+trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
+the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
+piece of string--_babiche_ (leather cord, called by the Indians
+_assapapish_)--fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
+dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
+marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher--a
+hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for his next year's
+canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood--some man wanted this tree
+for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
+beaver-marsh--some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
+other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
+told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
+could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
+were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
+If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
+tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
+the inside of a punky trunk and the shooting flames were a rallying
+call.
+
+In the most perilous regions the trapper travelled only after nightfall
+with muffled paddles--that is, muffled where the handle might strike the
+gunwale. Camp-fires warned him which side of the river to avoid; and
+often a trapper slipping past under the shadow of one bank saw hobgoblin
+figures dancing round the flames of the other bank--Indians celebrating
+their scalp dance. In these places the white hunter ate cold meals to
+avoid lighting a fire; or if he lighted a fire, after cooking his meal
+he withdrew at once and slept at a distance from the light that might
+betray him.
+
+The greatest risk of travelling after dark during the spring floods
+arose from what the _voyageurs_ called _embarras_--trees torn from the
+banks sticking in the soft bottom like derelicts with branches to
+entangle the trapper's craft; but the _embarras_ often befriended the
+solitary white man. Usually he slept on shore rolled in a buffalo-robe;
+but if Indian signs were fresh, he moored his canoe in mid-current and
+slept under hiding of the driftwood. Friendly Indians did not conceal
+themselves, but came to the river bank waving a buffalo-robe and
+spreading it out to signal a welcome to the white man; when the trapper
+would go ashore, whiff pipes with the chiefs and perhaps spend the night
+listening to the tales of exploits which each notch on the calumet
+typified. Incidents that meant nothing to other men were full of
+significance to the lone _voyageur_ through hostile lands. Always the
+spring floods drifted down numbers of dead buffalo; and the carrion
+birds sat on the trees of the shore with their wings spread out to dry
+in the sun. The sudden flacker of a rising flock betrayed something
+prowling in ambush on the bank; so did the splash of a snake from
+overhanging branches into the water.
+
+Different sorts of dangers beset the free trapper crossing the plains to
+the mountains. The fur company brigades always had escort of armed guard
+and provision packers. The free trappers went alone or in pairs,
+picketing horses to the saddle overlaid with a buffalo-robe for a
+pillow, cooking meals on chip fires, using a slow-burning wormwood bark
+for matches, and trusting their horses or dog to give the alarm if the
+bands of coyotes hovering through the night dusk approached too near. On
+the high rolling plains, hostiles could be descried at a distance,
+coming over the horizon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or
+emerging from the "coolies"--dried sloughs--like wolves from the earth.
+Enemies could be seen soon enough; but where could the trapper hide on
+bare prairie? He didn't attempt to hide. He simply set fire to the
+prairie and took refuge on the lee side. That device failing, he was at
+his enemies' mercy.
+
+On the plains, the greatest danger was from lack of water. At one season
+the trapper might know where to find good camping streams. The next year
+when he came to those streams they were dry.
+
+     "After leaving the buffalo meadows a dreadful scarcity of water
+     ensued," wrote Charles MacKenzie, of the famous MacKenzie clan. He
+     was journeying north from the Missouri. "We had to alter our course
+     and steer to a distant lake. When we got there we found the lake
+     dry. However, we dug a pit which produced a kind of stinking liquid
+     which we all drank. It was salt and bitter, caused an inflammation
+     of the mouth, left a disagreeable roughness of the throat, and
+     seemed to increase our thirst.... We passed the night under great
+     uneasiness. Next day we continued our journey, but not a drop of
+     water was to be found, ... and our distress became
+     insupportable.... All at once our horses became so unruly that we
+     could not manage them. We observed that they showed an inclination
+     towards a hill which was close by. It struck me that they might
+     have scented water.... I ascended to the top, where, to my great
+     joy, I discovered a small pool.... My horse plunged in before I
+     could prevent him, ... and all the horses drank to excess."
+
+"_The plains across_"--which was a western expression meaning the end of
+that part of the trip--there rose on the west rolling foothills and dark
+peaked profiles against the sky scarcely to be distinguished from gray
+cloud banks. These were the mountains; and the real hazards of free
+trapping began. No use to follow the easiest passes to the most
+frequented valleys. The fur company brigades marched through these,
+sweeping up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers sought out the
+hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where neither pack horse nor _canot
+a bec d'esturgeon_ could follow. How did they do it? Very much the way
+Simon Fraser's hunters crawled down the river-course named after him.
+"Our shoes," said one trapper, "did not last a single day."
+
+     "We had to plunge our daggers into the ground, ... otherwise we
+     would slide into the river," wrote Fraser. "We cut steps into the
+     declivity, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, with which
+     some of the men ascended in order to haul it up. .. Our lives hung,
+     as it were, upon a thread, as the failure of the line or the false
+     step of the man might have hurled us into eternity.... We had to
+     pass where no human being should venture.... Steps were formed like
+     a ladder on the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another
+     and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended
+     from the top to the foot of immense precipices, and fastened at
+     both extremities to stones and trees."
+
+He speaks of the worst places being where these frail swaying ladders
+led up to the overhanging ledge of a shelving precipice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such were the very real adventures of the trapper's life, a life whose
+fascinations lured John Colter from civilization to the wilds again and
+again till he came back once too often and found himself stripped,
+helpless, captive, in the hands of the Blackfeet.
+
+It would be poor sport torturing a prisoner who showed no more fear than
+this impassive white man coolly listening and waiting for them to
+compass his death. So the chief dismissed the suggestion to shoot at
+their captive as a target. Suddenly the Blackfoot leader turned to
+Colter. "Could the white man run fast?" he asked. In a flash Colter
+guessed what was to be his fate. He, the hunter, was to be hunted. No,
+he cunningly signalled, he was only a poor runner.
+
+Bidding his warriors stand still, the chief roughly led Colter out
+three hundred yards. Then he set his captive free, and the exultant
+shriek of the running warriors told what manner of sport this was to be.
+It was a race for life.
+
+The white man shot out with all the power of muscles hard as iron-wood
+and tense as a bent bow. Fear winged the man running for his life to
+outrace the winged arrows coming from the shouting warriors three
+hundred yards behind. Before him stretched a plain six miles wide, the
+distance he had so thoughtlessly paddled between the rampart walls of
+the canon but a few hours ago. At the Jefferson was a thick forest
+growth where a fugitive might escape. Somewhere along the Jefferson was
+his own hidden cabin.
+
+Across this plain sped Colter, pursued by a band of six hundred
+shrieking demons. Not one breath did he waste looking back over his
+shoulder till he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
+from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
+was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
+redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
+who was only a hundred yards behind.
+
+There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
+renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
+spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
+more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
+every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
+He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
+man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!
+
+This is an Indian _ruse_ to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
+of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
+of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
+his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
+pinned the savage through the body to the earth.
+
+That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
+rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.
+
+In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
+where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
+up with his head among branches of trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
+log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
+man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
+wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
+country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
+Bighorn River.
+
+Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
+subsisted entirely on roots and berries.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
+Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
+were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
+that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
+in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
+episode for history in a small-type foot-note to his book published in
+London in 1817.
+
+Two other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
+Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
+the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
+of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
+beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.
+
+And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
+Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
+wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
+to his life--he had taken to himself a bride.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 38: Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
+if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
+Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
+had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
+of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
+they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
+and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
+the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
+Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
+proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
+_Bois-Brules_? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
+and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
+single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD
+
+
+In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
+empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
+lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
+corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
+stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
+armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
+three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
+long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
+of silent achievement.
+
+Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
+Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.[39] Such is the Hudson's
+Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
+the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
+trade to his cousin Prince Rupert.
+
+Governors and chief factors have changed with the changing centuries;
+but the character of the company's personnel has never changed. Prince
+Rupert, the first governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James
+II); and the royal governor by a long line of distinguished public men
+down to Lord Strathcona, the present governor, and C. C. Chipman, the
+chief commissioner or executive officer. All have been men of noted
+achievement, often in touch with the Crown, always with that passion for
+executive and mastery of difficulty which exults most when the conflict
+is keenest.
+
+Pioneers face the unknown when circumstances push them into it.
+Adventurers rush into the unknown for the zest of conquering it. It has
+been to the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged.
+
+Radisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who first brought back word
+of the great wealth in furs round the far northern sea, had been
+gentlemen adventurers--"rascals" their enemies called them. Prince
+Rupert, who leagued himself with the Frenchmen to obtain a charter for
+his fur trade, had been an adventurer of the high seas--"pirate" we
+would say--long before he became first governor of the Hudson's Bay
+Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, the company's third governor, was
+as great an adventurer as he was a general.
+
+Latterly the word "adventurer" has fallen in such evil repute, it may
+scarcely be applied to living actors. But using it in the old-time sense
+of militant hero, what cavalier of gold braid and spurs could be more of
+an adventurer than young Donald Smith who traded in the desolate wastes
+of Labrador, spending seventeen years in the hardest field of the fur
+company, tramping on snow-shoes half the width of a continent, camping
+where night overtook him under blanketing of snow-drifts, who rose step
+by step from trader on the east coast to commissioner in the west? And
+this Donald Smith became Lord Strathcona, the governor of the Hudson's
+Bay Company.
+
+Men bold in action and conservative in traditions have ruled the
+company. The governor resident in England is now represented by the
+chief commissioner, who in turn is represented at each of the many
+inland forts by a chief factor of the district. Nominally, the
+fur-trader's northern realm is governed by the Parliament of Canada.
+Virtually, the chief factor rules as autocratically to-day as he did
+before the Canadian Government took over the proprietary rights of the
+fur company.
+
+How did these rulers of the wilds, these princes of the fur trade, live
+in lonely forts and mountain fastnesses? Visit one of the northern forts
+as it exists to-day.
+
+The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The farther north the fort,
+the more typical it is of the fur-trader's realm.
+
+For six, seven, eight months of the year, the fur-trader's world is a
+white wilderness of snow; snow water-waved by winds that sweep from the
+pole; snow drifted into ramparts round the fort stockades till the
+highest picket sinks beneath the white flood and the corner bastions are
+almost submerged and the entrance to the central gate resembles the
+cutting of a railway tunnel; snow that billows to the unbroken reaches
+of the circling sky-line like a white sea. East, frost-mist hides the
+low horizon in clouds of smoke, for the sun which rises from the east in
+other climes rises from the south-east here; and until the spring
+equinox, bringing summer with a flood-tide of thaw, gray darkness hangs
+in the east like a fog. South, the sun moves across the snowy levels in
+a wheel of fire, for it has scarcely risen full sphered above the
+sky-line before it sinks again etching drift and tip of half-buried
+brush in long lonely fading shadows. The west shimmers in warm purplish
+grays, for the moist Chinook winds come over the mountains melting the
+snow by magic. North, is the cold steel of ice by day; and at night
+Northern Lights darting through the polar dark like burnished spears.
+
+Christmas day is welcomed at the northern fur posts by a firing of
+cannon from the snow-muffled bastions. Before the stars have faded,
+chapel services begin. Frequently on either Christmas or New Year's day,
+a grand feast is given the tawny-skinned _habitues_ of the fort, who
+come shuffling to the main mess-room with no other announcement than the
+lifting of the latch, and billet themselves on the hospitality of a host
+that has never turned hungry Indians from its doors.
+
+For reasons well-known to the woodcraftsman, a sudden lull falls on
+winter hunting in December, and all the trappers within a week's journey
+from the fort, all the half-breed guides who add to the instinct of
+native craft the reasoning of the white, all the Indian hunters ranging
+river-course and mountain have come by snow-shoes and dog train to spend
+festive days at the fort. A great jangling of bells announces the
+huskies (dog trains) scampering over the crusted snow-drifts. A babel of
+barks and curses follows, for the huskies celebrate their arrival by
+tangling themselves up in their harness and enjoying a free fight.
+
+Dogs unharnessed, in troop the trappers to the banquet-hall, flinging
+packs of tightly roped peltries down promiscuously, to be sorted next
+day. One Indian enters just as he has left the hunting-field, clad from
+head to heel in white caribou with the antlers left on the capote as a
+decoy. His squaw has togged out for the occasion in a comical medley of
+brass bracelets and finger-rings, with a bear's claw necklace and ermine
+ruff which no city connoisseur could possibly mistake for rabbit. If a
+daughter yet remain unappropriated she will display the gayest
+attire--red flannel galore, red shawl, red scarf, with perhaps an apron
+of white fox-skin and moccasins garnished in coloured grasses. The
+braves outdo even a vain young squaw. Whole fox, mink, or otter skins
+have been braided to the end of their hair, and hang down in two plaits
+to the floor. Whitest of buckskin has been ornamented with brightest of
+beads, and over all hangs the gaudiest of blankets, it may be a
+musk-ox-skin with the feats of the warrior set forth in rude drawings on
+the smooth side.
+
+Children and old people, too, come to the feast, for the Indian's
+stomach is the magnet that draws his soul. Grotesque little figures the
+children are, with men's trousers shambling past their heels,
+rabbit-skin coats with the fur turned in, and on top of all some old
+stovepipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to the urchin's
+neck. The old people have more resemblance to parchment on gnarled
+sticks than to human beings. They shiver under dirty blankets with every
+sort of cast-off rag tied about their limbs, hobbling lame from frozen
+feet or rheumatism, mumbling toothless requests for something to eat or
+something to wear, for tobacco, the solace of Indian woes, or what is
+next best--tea.
+
+Among so many guests are many needs. One half-breed from a far wintering
+outpost, where perhaps a white man and this guide are living in a
+chinked shack awaiting a hunting party's return, arrives at the fort
+with frozen feet. Little Labree's feet must be thawed out, and sometimes
+little Labree dies under the process, leaving as a legacy to the chief
+factor the death-bed pledge that the corpse be taken to a distant tribal
+burying-ground. And no matter how inclement the winter, the chief factor
+keeps his pledge, for the integrity of a promise is the only law in the
+fur-trader's realm. Special attentions, too, must be paid those old
+retainers who have acted as mentors of the fort in times of trouble.
+
+A few years ago it would not have been safe to give this treat inside
+the fort walls. Rations would have been served through loop-holes and
+the feast held outside the gates; but so faithfully have the Indians
+become bound to the Hudson's Bay Company there are not three forts in
+the fur territory where Indians must be excluded.
+
+Of the feast little need be said. Like the camel, the Indian lays up
+store for the morrow, judging from his capacity for weeks of morrows.
+His benefactor no more dines with him than a plantation master of the
+South would have dined with feasting slaves. Elsewhere a bell calls the
+company officers to breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 1, supper at 7.
+Officers dine first, white hunters and trappers second, that difference
+between master and servant being maintained which is part of the
+company's almost military discipline. In the large forts are libraries,
+whither resort the officers for the long winter nights. But over the
+feast wild hilarity reigns.
+
+A French-Canadian fiddler strikes up a tuneless jig that sets the
+Indians pounding the floor in figureless dances with moccasined heels
+till midday glides into midnight and midnight to morning. I remember
+hearing of one such midday feast in Red River settlement that prolonged
+itself past four of the second morning. Against the walls sit old folks
+spinning yarns of the past. There is a print of Sir George Simpson
+behind one _raconteur's_ head. Ah! yes, the oldest guides all remember
+Sir George, though half a century has passed since his day. He was the
+governor who travelled with flags flying from every prow, and cannon
+firing when he left the forts, and men drawn up in procession like
+soldiers guarding an emperor when he entered the fur posts with
+_coureurs_ and all the flourish of royal state. Then some story-teller
+recalls how he has heard the old guides tell of the imperious governor
+once provoking personal conflict with an equally imperious steersman,
+who first ducked the governor into a lake they were traversing and then
+ducked into the lake himself to rescue the governor.
+
+And there is a crucifix high on the wall left by Pere Lacomb the last
+time the famous missionary to the red men of the Far North passed this
+way; and every Indian calls up some kindness done, some sacrifice by
+Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old muskets and Indian masks and
+scalp-locks, bringing back the days when Russian traders instigated a
+massacre at this fort and when white traders flew at each other's
+throats as Nor' Westers struggled with Hudson's Bay for supremacy in the
+fur trade.
+
+"Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fighters, they did not know
+how to stop. Mais, sacre, they were fools, those white men after all!
+Instead of hiding in ambush to catch the foe, those white men measured
+off paces, stood up face to face and fired blank--oui--fired blank! Ugh!
+Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, most like, he was
+wound'! Ugh, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?"[40]
+
+Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless. That enormous
+bear-skin stretched to four pegs on the wall brings up Montagnais, the
+Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest
+bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one
+hand dragging the enormous skin and the other holding the place which
+his nose no longer graced.
+
+"Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez
+ici--bien--so--I tole you 'bout heem," begins some French-Canadian
+trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
+"Bigosh! He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go
+stumble t'rough snow--how you call dat?--hill, steep--steep! Oui, by
+Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de--de gran'
+rapeed, see?" emphasizing the snow-slide with illustrative gesture.
+"Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem
+fall--so--see? Tonnerre! Bigosh! for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
+Sacre! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg ol' bear sleep in snow.
+Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear--diable!
+'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg
+loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man--he not scare--he say wan leetle
+prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'--sacre--dat grab hees
+knife out hees belt--sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her
+breat'--diable!--for sure he fin' de place her heart beat--Tonnerre!
+Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat
+bear! Dat bes' t'ing do--for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best
+t'ing do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she
+no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over
+too--leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
+dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"
+
+And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
+credit of Montagnais's heroism.
+
+But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
+the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
+of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
+peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
+spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
+plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
+frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
+beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
+a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
+chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
+can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
+musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
+season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
+prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
+heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.
+
+The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
+arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
+hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
+the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
+beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
+gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
+the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
+more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
+effected.
+
+But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
+dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.
+
+South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
+beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
+shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
+stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
+1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.
+
+First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
+five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth
+from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox
+worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's
+Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000
+blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the
+trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and
+white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against
+the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other
+game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur
+taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be
+that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the
+hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the
+Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the
+white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and
+seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares
+the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is
+plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.
+
+Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to
+the store counter where begins interminable dickering. Montagnais's
+squaw has only fifty "beaver" coin, and her desires are a hundredfold
+what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating
+down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk
+a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to
+have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At
+the termination of each bargain, so many coins pass across the counter.
+Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver
+enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of
+Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
+The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many "beaver"
+against the trapper's next hunt.
+
+Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a
+disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an
+easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor
+the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no competition,
+whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer,
+for which the Indian has as keen an appetite, both for the exigencies of
+hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first
+thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
+the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
+The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they
+considered the more dangerous.
+
+Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
+coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
+according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
+the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
+ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
+Christmas.
+
+Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
+steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
+constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
+light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
+but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
+handled differently.
+
+Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
+like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
+slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
+quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snowbird or
+rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
+forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
+snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
+unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
+the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
+full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
+suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
+down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
+springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
+strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
+bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.
+
+If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
+the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
+which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
+dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
+worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
+the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
+ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its
+spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his
+hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little
+ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the
+knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been
+teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its
+tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that
+frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like
+ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife. But alas for the
+resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm
+tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little
+stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper
+comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble
+up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the
+ermine.
+
+Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
+a leading fort would amount to:
+
+  Bear of all varieties      400
+  Ermine, medium             200
+  Blue fox                     4
+  Red fox                     91
+  Silver fox                   3
+  Marten                   2,000
+  Musk-rat               200,000
+  Mink                     8,000
+  Otter                      500
+  Skunk                        6
+  Wolf                       100
+  Beaver                   5,000
+  Pekan (fisher)              50
+  Cross fox                   30
+  White fox                  400
+  Lynx                       400
+  Wolverine                  200
+
+The value of these furs in "beaver" currency varied with the fashions of
+the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the
+locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver
+equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500
+rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no
+set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the
+annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.
+
+To understand the values of these furs to the Indian, "beaver" currency
+must be compared to merchandise, one beaver buying such a red
+handkerchief as trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunters
+not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two an axe, from eight to
+twenty a gun or rifle, according to its quality. And in one old trading
+list I found--vanity of vanities--"one beaver equals looking-glass."
+
+Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
+which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
+on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
+and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
+fort with the harvest of winter furs.
+
+Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
+trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
+the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
+trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
+river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
+drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
+have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
+forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
+mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
+falls--falls--falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
+mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
+notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
+to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
+woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
+of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
+the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
+of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
+the shady side--that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
+that a wanderer use his eyes--which the white man seldom does--the limbs
+of the northern trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
+be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
+grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
+timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
+with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.
+
+One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
+Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
+hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
+allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
+chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
+was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in the lodge.
+Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
+placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
+through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
+enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
+half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
+Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
+older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
+by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
+dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
+stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
+her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
+fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
+withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
+explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had
+been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
+the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
+dead.[41]
+
+The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
+monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
+habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
+the outside world.
+
+Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
+railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
+canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
+the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
+scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
+across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
+the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
+bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
+the leagueless world of the Far North.
+
+Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
+a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
+crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
+bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
+the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
+the huskies can gallop.
+
+Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
+ox-carts that used to screech and creak and jolt over the rutted prairie
+roads between Winnipeg and St. Paul. More than 1,500 Hudson's Bay
+Company carts manned by 500 traders with tawny spouses and black-eyed
+impish children, squatted on top of the load, left Canada for St. Paul
+in August and returned in October. The carts were made without a rivet
+of iron. Bent wood formed the tires of the two wheels. Hardwood axles
+told their woes to the world in the scream of shrill bagpipes. Wooden
+racks took the place of cart box. In the shafts trod a staid old ox
+guided from the horns or with a halter, drawing the load with collar
+instead of a yoke. The harness was of skin thongs. In place of the ox
+sometimes was a "shagganippy" pony, raw and unkempt, which the imps
+lashed without mercy or the slightest inconvenience to the horse.
+
+A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white decorated the leading
+cart. During the Sioux massacres the fur caravans were unmolested, for
+the Indians recognised the flags and wished to remain on good terms with
+the fur traders.
+
+Ox-carts still bring furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts, and screech
+over the corduroyed swamps of the MacKenzie; but the railway has
+replaced the caravan as a carrier of freight.
+
+[Illustration: Carrying goods over long _portage_ in MacKenzie River
+region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts.]
+
+Hudson's Bay Company steamers now ply on the largest of the inland
+rivers with long lines of fur-laden barges in tow; but the canoe
+brigades still bring the winter's hunt to the forts in spring. Five to
+eight craft make a brigade, each manned by eight paddlers with an
+experienced steersman, who is usually also guide. But the one ranking
+first in importance is the bowman, whose quick eye must detect signs of
+nearing rapids, whose steel-shod pole gives the cue to the other
+paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The bowman it is who
+leaps out first when there is "tracking"--pulling the craft up-stream by
+tow-line--who stands waist high in ice water steadying the rocking bark
+lest a sudden swirl spill furs to the bottom, who hands out the packs to
+the others when the waters are too turbulent for "tracking" and there
+must be a "_portage_," and who leads the brigade on a run--half trot,
+half amble--overland to the calmer currents. "Pipes" are the measure of
+a _portage_--that is, the pipes smoked while the _voyageurs_ are on the
+run. The bowman it is who can thread a network of water-ways by day or
+dark, past rapids or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
+mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
+meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
+pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.
+
+The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
+these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.
+
+Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
+vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
+and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
+meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
+whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
+wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
+structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
+the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
+servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
+one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.
+
+Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
+Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
+arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
+string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
+befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
+Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
+right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
+ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
+Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
+soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
+the letters H. B. C.[42] Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
+court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
+presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
+hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
+made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
+assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
+harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
+diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
+post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
+of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
+and rampart.
+
+Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
+an American Siberia--the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
+waterway, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
+winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
+think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
+mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
+not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
+was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
+world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
+a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
+Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
+dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
+without raising a sand bar.
+
+The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
+of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
+Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.
+
+Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.
+
+Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
+after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
+curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
+surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
+only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
+Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
+company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
+shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
+principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
+probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one
+hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
+in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
+Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
+employed as traders, packers, _coureurs_, canoe men, hunters, and
+guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
+Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
+wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
+life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
+this power was seldom abused.[43] Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
+might use lash and triangle and branding along the northern coast; but
+officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
+terms of justice with their men.
+
+The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
+than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
+company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
+Times without number under the old _regime_ has a Hudson's Bay officer
+set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
+to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
+unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
+savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.
+
+Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
+when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
+But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
+unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt
+to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
+within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
+before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
+vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
+the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says
+the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
+eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
+skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.
+
+And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?
+
+Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
+whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
+and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
+from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
+domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
+desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
+glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
+Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
+that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
+and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
+tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
+them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
+tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies--splendid types of manhood
+because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains;
+coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot--low and lazy because the great
+rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work.
+
+Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay
+Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life
+in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a
+single year.
+
+Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been
+assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten,
+twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But,
+then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single
+year.
+
+When fighting rivals long ago, it is true that the Hudson's Bay Company
+recognised neither human nor divine law. Grant the charge and weigh it
+against the benefits of the company's rule. When Hearne visited
+Chippewyans two centuries ago he found the Indians in a state
+uncontaminated by the trader; and that state will give the ordinary
+reader cold shivers of horror at the details of massacre and
+degradation. Every visitor since has reported the same tribe improved in
+standard of living under Hudson's Bay rule. Recently a well-known
+Canadian governor making an itinerary of the territory round the bay
+found the Indians such devout Christians that they put his white retinue
+to shame. Returning to civilization, the governor was observed attending
+the services of his own denomination with a greater fury than was his
+wont. Asked the reason, he confided to a club friend that he would be
+_blanked_ if he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians than
+he was.
+
+Some of the shiftless Indians may be hopelessly in debt to the company
+for advanced provisions, but if the company had not made these advances
+the Indians would have starved, and the debt is never exacted by seizure
+of the hunt that should go to feed a family.
+
+Of how many other creditors may that be said? Of how many companies that
+it has cared for the sick, sought the lost, fed the starving, housed the
+homeless? With all its faults, that is the record of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 39: The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter
+seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the
+apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.]
+
+[Footnote 40: To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white
+traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.]
+
+[Footnote 41: It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
+and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
+the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.]
+
+[Footnote 42: The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
+there would be no trade.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
+conspicuous for his brutality.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT
+
+
+Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
+to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
+disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
+liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
+misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
+that he _feels_ his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
+as _that_--jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
+gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
+instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
+when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
+storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.
+
+So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
+steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
+of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
+valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
+destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
+still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
+valley--but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
+and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first _explored_ the
+Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
+trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
+Company was the first Canadian to _explore_ the lower Columbia; but
+before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
+ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
+wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
+mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
+the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
+on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
+her young?
+
+Something, which may be the result of generations of accumulated
+observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
+the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
+guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
+and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
+reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
+brute. It is not sharp-sightedness--though no man is sharper of sight
+than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing--though the trapper
+learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
+is not touch--in the sense of tactile contact--any more than it is touch
+that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
+presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
+senses, a sixth sense--a sense of _feel_, without contact--a sense on
+which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
+This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of _feel_, his weapon
+against the instinct of the brute. What part it plays in the life of
+every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
+found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
+trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
+and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
+from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
+trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
+hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
+coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
+supplied by "wahboos--little white chap," which is the Indian name for
+rabbit.
+
+And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
+chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
+runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
+of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
+and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
+the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
+and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
+so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
+sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimming over the snow for all
+the world like a bouncing football done up in gray fur--all members of
+the cat tribe running wherever the "little white chaps" run.
+
+So when the lull fell on the hunt and the mink trapping was well over
+and marten had not yet begun, Koot gathered up his traps, and getting a
+supply of provisions at the fur post, crossed the white wastes of
+prairie to lonely swamp ground where dwarf alder and willow and
+cottonwood and poplar and pine grew in a tangle. A few old logs
+dovetailed into a square made the wall of a cabin. Over these he
+stretched the canvas of his tepee for a roof at a sharp enough angle to
+let the heavy snow-fall slide off from its own weight. Moss chinked up
+the logs. Snow banked out the wind. Pine boughs made the floor, two logs
+with pine boughs, a bed. An odd-shaped stump served as chair or table;
+and on the logs of the inner walls hung wedge-shaped slabs of cedar to
+stretch the skins. A caribou curtain or bear-skin across the entrance
+completed Koot's winter quarters for the rabbit-hunt.
+
+Koot's genealogy was as vague as that of all old trappers hanging round
+fur posts. Part of him--that part which served best when he was on the
+hunting-field--was Ojibway. The other part, which made him improvise
+logs into chair and table and bed, was white man; and that served him
+best when he came to bargain with the chief factor over the pelts. At
+the fur post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field,
+when suddenly menaced by some great danger, he would cry out in the
+Indian tongue words that meant "O Great Spirit!" And it is altogether
+probable that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was
+worshipping the same Being. When he swore--strange commentary on
+civilization--he always used white man's oaths, French _patois_ or
+straight English.
+
+Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the Rockies,
+Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not usually go to the
+wilds alone; but there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that
+Koot had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog that had drawn
+his provisions from the fort on a sort of toboggan sleigh.
+
+The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write their daily
+record for those who can read. All over the white swamp were little deep
+tracks; here, holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks as
+from the bound--bound--bound of something soft; then, again, where the
+thicket was like a hedge with only one breach through, the footprints
+had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
+have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
+form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
+from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light--the
+rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
+which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
+trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
+pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
+countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
+Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
+and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
+for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
+from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
+up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.
+
+All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
+choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
+take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his
+cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
+to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful--as they always were
+in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
+epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest--Koot's circuit of snares
+would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
+out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
+numerous, the foragers that prey--wolf and wolverine and lynx and
+bob-cat--will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
+snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon--the Indian's hour of the
+short shadow--is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
+of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
+to his cabin, and in it--instead of caching in a tree--keeps fish or
+bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
+his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.
+
+Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
+Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
+with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
+twine, and traps, and set out in the evening to make the round of his
+snares, unaccompanied by the dog. Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and
+white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in
+the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his
+shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin
+when that strange sense of _feel_ told him that he was being followed.
+What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled--he called it by name.
+
+In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet
+as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall.
+By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, or the snowbuntings
+chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to hedge-top, or the saucy
+jay shriek some scolding impudence. A squirrel may chatter out his noisy
+protest at some thief for approaching the nuts which lie cached under
+the rotten leaves at the foot of the tree, or the sun-warmth may set the
+melting snow showering from the swan's-down branches with a patter like
+rain. But at nightfall the frost has stilled the drip of thaw. Squirrel
+and bird are wrapped in the utter quiet of a gray darkness. And the
+marauders that fill midnight with sharp bark, shrill trembling scream,
+deep baying over the snow are not yet abroad in the woods. All is
+shadowless--stillness--a quiet that is audible.
+
+Koot turned sharply and whistled and called his dog. There wasn't a
+sound. Later when the frost began to tighten, sap-frozen twigs would
+snap. The ice of the swamp, frozen like rock, would by-and-bye crackle
+with the loud echo of a pistol-shot--crackle--and strike--and break as
+if artillery were firing a fusillade and infantry shooters answering
+sharp. By-and-bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the
+shadows dancing; and the wail of the cougar would be echoed by the
+lifting scream of its mate. But now, was not a sound, not a motion, not
+a shadow, only the noiseless stillness, the shadowless quiet, and the
+_feel_, the _feel_ of something back where the darkness was gathering
+like a curtain in the bush.
+
+It might, of course, be only a silly long-ears loping under cover
+parallel to the man, looking with rabbit curiosity at this strange
+newcomer to the swamp home of the animal world. Koot's sense of _feel_
+told him that it wasn't a rabbit; but he tried to persuade himself that
+it was, the way a timid listener persuades herself that creaking floors
+are burglars. Thinking of his many snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
+Then it came again, that _feel_ of something coursing behind the
+underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
+short--and listened--and listened--listened to a snow-muffled silence,
+to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
+waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.
+
+The sense of _feel_ that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
+impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
+and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
+shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
+was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
+courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
+to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
+bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
+rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
+log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.
+
+That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
+logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
+fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
+the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
+broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
+lodge. Once his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
+the sniff--sniff--sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
+smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
+traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
+fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
+fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
+and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
+answering scream--a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.
+
+"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
+the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
+knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
+conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
+rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
+hour of the short shadow.
+
+It did not surprise the trapper after he had heard the lifting wail from
+the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
+untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
+lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
+But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
+torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
+rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
+ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of _feel_, but he couldn't
+make this thing out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
+padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
+from the sky and gone back to the sky.
+
+Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
+circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
+mark like that shuffling padded print.
+
+"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
+Koot told himself.
+
+The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
+as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
+strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
+snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
+indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
+white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
+scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
+readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
+world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
+as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
+ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
+and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
+glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
+grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
+benighted hunters.
+
+This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
+as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
+there--oh!--I'll be _on_ to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
+dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
+and his ears failed to localize, to _real_-ize, to visualize what those
+little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
+the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he marched off very matter
+of fact to the next snare.
+
+But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of _feel_ and he had
+glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just above the
+snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade
+something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear-tufts
+caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow-crust. Then
+the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form hardly differing
+from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed to a tiny
+blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell-tale light. The big round
+body mottled gray and white like the snowy tree
+widened--stretched---flattened till it was almost a part of the tossing
+pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had passed far
+beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward and the owl eyes open and
+the big body bunch out like a cat with elevated haunches ready to
+spring.
+
+But by-and-bye the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. They grew
+scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew
+hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming across the
+billowy drifts, something black far ahead bounced up, caught a bunting
+on the wing, and with another bounce disappeared among the trees.
+
+Koot said one word--"Cat!"--and the dog was off full cry.
+
+Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, he had
+known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still hunters
+among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail of their ravages,
+rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even the remains of a fox
+or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from the printings on the white
+page that the still hunter had been hunted full cry by coyote or
+timber-wolf. Against these wolfish foes the cat had one sure refuge
+always--a tree. The hungry coyote might try to starve the bob-cat into
+surrender; but just as often, the bob-cat could starve the coyote into
+retreat; for if a foolish rabbit darted past, what hungry coyote could
+help giving chase? The tree had even defeated both dog and man that
+first week when Koot could not find the cat. But a dog in full chase
+could follow the trail to a tree, and a man could shoot into the tree.
+
+As the rabbits decreased, Koot set out many traps for the bob-cats now
+reckless with hunger, steel-traps and deadfalls and pits and log pens
+with a live grouse clucking inside. The midwinter lull was a busy season
+for Koot.
+
+Towards March, the sun-glare has produced a crust on the snow that is
+almost like glass. For Koot on his snow-shoes this had no danger; but
+for the mongrel that was to draw the pelts back to the fort, the snow
+crust was more troublesome than glass. Where the crust was thick, with
+Koot leading the way snow-shoes and dog and toboggan glided over the
+drifts as if on steel runners. But in midday the crust was soft and the
+dog went floundering through as if on thin ice, the sharp edge cutting
+his feet. Koot tied little buckskin sacks round the dog's feet and made
+a few more rounds of the swamp; but the crust was a sign that warned
+him it was time to prepare for the marten-hunt. To leave his furs at the
+fort, he must cross the prairie while it was yet good travelling for the
+dog. Dismantling the little cabin, Koot packed the pelts on the
+toboggan, roped all tightly so there could be no spill from an upset,
+and putting the mongrel in the traces, led the way for the fort one
+night when the snow-crust was hard as ice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moon came up over the white fields in a great silver disk. Between
+the running man and the silver moon moved black skulking forms--the
+foragers on their night hunt. Sometimes a fox loped over a drift, or a
+coyote rose ghostly from the snow, or timber-wolves dashed from wooded
+ravines and stopped to look till Koot fired a shot that sent them
+galloping.
+
+In the dark that precedes daylight, Koot camped beside a grove of
+poplars--that is, he fed the dog a fish, whittled chips to make a fire
+and boil some tea for himself, then digging a hole in the drift with his
+snow-shoe, laid the sleigh to windward and cuddled down between
+bear-skins with the dog across his feet.
+
+Daylight came in a blinding glare of sunshine and white snow. The way
+was untrodden. Koot led at an ambling run, followed by the dog at a fast
+trot, so that the trees were presently left far on the offing and the
+runners were out on the bare white prairie with never a mark, tree or
+shrub, to break the dazzling reaches of sunshine and snow from horizon
+to horizon. A man who is breaking the way must keep his eyes on the
+ground; and the ground was so blindingly bright that Koot began to see
+purple and yellow and red patches dancing wherever he looked on the
+snow. He drew his capote over his face to shade his eyes; but the pace
+and the sun grew so hot that he was soon running again unprotected from
+the blistering light.
+
+Towards the afternoon, Koot knew that something had gone wrong. Some
+distance ahead, he saw a black object against the snow. On the unbroken
+white, it looked almost as big as a barrel and seemed at least a mile
+away. Lowering his eyes, Koot let out a spurt of speed, and the next
+thing he knew he had tripped his snow-shoe and tumbled. Scrambling up,
+he saw that a stick had caught the web of his snow-shoe; but where was
+the barrel for which he had been steering? There wasn't any barrel at
+all--the barrel was this black stick which hadn't been fifty yards away.
+Koot rubbed his eyes and noticed that black and red and purple patches
+were all over the snow. The drifts were heaving and racing after each
+other like waves on an angry sea. He did not go much farther that day;
+for every glint of snow scorched his eyes like a hot iron. He camped at
+the first bluff and made a poultice of cold tea leaves which he laid
+across his blistered face for the night.
+
+Any one who knows the tortures of snow-blindness will understand why
+Koot did not sleep that night. It was a long night to the trapper, such
+a very long night that the sun had been up for two hours before its heat
+burned through the layers of his capote into his eyes and roused him
+from sheer pain. Then he sprang up, put up an ungantled hand and knew
+from the heat of the sun that it was broad day. But when he took the
+bandage off his eyes, all he saw was a black curtain one moment,
+rockets and wheels and dancing patches of purple fire the next.
+
+Koot was no fool to become panicky and feeble from sudden peril. He knew
+that he was snow-blind on a pathless prairie at least two days away from
+the fort. To wait until the snow-blindness had healed would risk the few
+provisions that he had and perhaps expose him to a blizzard. The one
+rule of the trapper's life is to go ahead, let the going cost what it
+may; and drawing his capote over his face, Koot went on.
+
+The heat of the sun told him the directions; and when the sun went down,
+the crooning west wind, bringing thaw and snow-crust, was his compass.
+And when the wind fell, the tufts of shrub-growth sticking through the
+snow pointed to the warm south. Now he tied himself to his dog; and when
+he camped beside trees into which he had gone full crash before he knew
+they were there, he laid his gun beside the dog and sleigh. Going out
+the full length of his cord, he whittled the chips for his fire and
+found his way back by the cord.
+
+On the second day of his blindness, no sun came up; nor could he guide
+himself by the feel of the air, for there was no wind. It was one of the
+dull dead gray days that precedes storms. How would he get his
+directions to set out? Memory of last night's travel might only lead him
+on the endless circling of the lost. Koot dug his snow-shoe to the base
+of a tree, found moss, felt it growing on only one side of the tree,
+knew that side must be the shady cold side, and so took his bearings
+from what he thought was the north.
+
+Koot said the only time that he knew any fear was on the evening of the
+last day. The atmosphere boded storm. The fort lay in a valley.
+Somewhere between Koot and that valley ran a trail. What if he had
+crossed the trail? What if the storm came and wiped out the trail before
+he could reach the fort? All day, whisky-jack and snow-bunting and fox
+scurried from his presence; but this night in the dusk when he felt
+forward on his hands and knees for the expected trail, the wild
+creatures seemed to grow bolder. He imagined that he felt the coyotes
+closer than on the other nights. And then the fearful thought came that
+he might have passed the trail unheeding. Should he turn back?
+
+Afraid to go forward or back, Koot sank on the ground, unhooded his face
+and tried to _force_ his eyes to see. The pain brought biting salty
+tears. It was quite useless. Either the night was very dark, or the eyes
+were very blind.
+
+And then white man or Indian--who shall say which came uppermost?--Koot
+cried out to the Great Spirit. In mockery back came the saucy scold of a
+jay.
+
+But that was enough for Koot--it was prompt answer to his prayer; for
+where do the jays quarrel and fight and flutter but on the trail?
+Running eagerly forward, the trapper felt the ground. The rutted marks
+of a "jumper" sleigh cut the hard crust. With a shout, Koot headed down
+the sloping path to the valley where lay the fur post, the low hanging
+smoke of whose chimneys his eager nostrils had already sniffed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT--BEING AN ACCOUNT
+     OF MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT, SIKAK THE SKUNK, WENUSK THE BADGER, AND
+     OTHERS
+
+
+I
+
+_Musquash the Musk-rat_
+
+Every chapter in the trapper's life is not a "stunt."
+
+There are the uneventful days when the trapper seems to do nothing but
+wander aimlessly through the woods over the prairie along the margin of
+rush-grown marshy ravines where the stagnant waters lap lazily among the
+flags, though a feathering of ice begins to rim the quiet pools early in
+autumn. Unless he is duck-shooting down there in the hidden slough where
+is a great "quack-quack" of young teals, the trapper may not uncase his
+gun. For a whole morning he lies idly in the sunlight beside some river
+where a roundish black head occasionally bobs up only to dive under when
+it sees the man. Or else he sits by the hour still as a statue on the
+mossy log of a swamp where a long wriggling--wriggling trail marks the
+snaky motion of some creature below the amber depths.
+
+To the city man whose days are regulated by clockwork and electric trams
+with the ceaseless iteration of gongs and "step fast there!" such a
+life seems the type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are
+those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures come unsought.
+Perhaps when the great profit-and-loss account of the hereafter is cast
+up, the trapper may be found to have a greater sum total of happiness,
+of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi-millionaire whose life
+was one buzzing round of drive and worry and grind. Usually the busy
+city man has spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his youth
+in study and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's
+work. The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering
+through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand.
+And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without
+bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her
+realm.
+
+On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching so
+lazily over the prarie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp autumn
+air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper at once
+heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as if the light
+green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank bank. But ravines are
+not dank in the clear fall days; and by October the musk-plant has
+wilted dry. This is a fresh living odour with all the difference between
+it and dead leaves that there is between June roses and the dried dust
+of a rose jar. The wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of
+swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere
+in these prairie ravines; and a sense that is part _feel_, part
+intuition, part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell,
+leads his footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bottom of a
+slough.
+
+A covey of teals--very young, or they would not be so bold--flackers up,
+wings about with a clatter, then settles again a space farther ahead
+when the ducks see that the intruder remains so still. The man parts the
+flags, sits down on a log motionless as the log itself--and watches!
+Something else had taken alarm from the crunch of the hunter's moccasins
+through the dry reeds; for a wriggling trail is there, showing where a
+creature has dived below and is running among the wet under-tangle. Not
+far off on another log deep in the shade of the highest flags solemnly
+perches a small prairie-owl. It is almost the russet shade of the dead
+log. It hunches up and blinks stupidly at all this noise in the swamp.
+
+"Oho," thinks the trapper, "so I've disturbed a still hunt," and he sits
+if anything stiller than ever, only stooping to lay his gun down and
+pick up a stone.
+
+At first there is nothing but the quacking of the ducks at the far end
+of the swamp. A lapping of the water against the brittle flags and a
+water-snake has splashed away to some dark haunt. The whisky-jack calls
+out officious note from a topmost bough, as much as to say: "It's all
+right! Me--me!--I'm always there!--I've investigated!--it's all
+right!--he's quite harmless!" And away goes the jay on business of state
+among the gopher mounds.
+
+Then the interrupted activity of the swamp is resumed, scolding mother
+ducks reading the riot act to young teals, old geese coming craning and
+craning their long necks to drink at the water's edge, lizards and
+water-snakes splashing down the banks, midgets and gnats sunning
+themselves in clouds during the warmth of the short autumn days, with a
+feel in the air as of crisp ripeness, drying fruit, the harvest-home of
+the year. In all the prairie region north and west of Minnesota--the
+Indian land of "sky-coloured water"--the sloughs lie on the prairie
+under a crystal sky that turns pools to silver. On this almost
+motionless surface are mirrored as if by an etcher's needle the sky
+above, feathered wind clouds, flag stems, surrounding cliffs, even the
+flight of birds on wing. As the mountains stand for majesty, the
+prairies for infinity, so the marsh lands are types of repose.
+
+But it is not a lifeless repose. Barely has the trapper settled himself
+when a little sharp black nose pokes up through the water at the fore
+end of the wriggling trail. A round rat-shaped head follows this
+twitching proboscis. Then a brownish earth-coloured body swims with a
+wriggling sidelong movement for the log, where roosts the blinking
+owlet. A little noiseless leap! and a dripping musk-rat with long flat
+tail and webbed feet scrabbles up the moss-covered tree towards the
+stupid bird. Another moment, and the owl would have toppled into the
+water with a pair of sharp teeth clutched to its throat. Then the man
+shies a well-aimed stone!
+
+Splash! Flop! The owl is flapping blindly through the flags to another
+hiding-place, while the wriggle-wriggle of the waters tells where the
+marsh-rat has darted away under the tangled growth. From other idle days
+like these, the trapper has learned that musk-rats are not solitary but
+always to be found in colonies. Now if the musk-rat were as wise as the
+beaver to whom the Indians say he is closely akin, that alarmed
+marauder would carry the news of the man-intruder to the whole swamp.
+Perhaps if the others remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash
+of a gun what man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight
+of every musk-rat from the marsh. But musquash--little beaver, as the
+Indians call him--is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened
+from his home as _amisk_,[44] the beaver. In fact, nature's provision
+for the musk-rat's protection seems to have emboldened the little rodent
+almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of that burnt umber shade
+hardly to be distinguished from the earth. At one moment his sharp nose
+cuts the water, at the next he is completely hidden in the soft clay of
+the under-tangle; and while you are straining for a sight of him
+through the pool, he has scurried across a mud bank to his burrow.
+
+Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws wading through
+swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting from the Chesapeake and
+the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky-coloured water" on the far prairie,
+little musquash still yields 6,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of
+diminishing. A hundred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held
+in esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of Canada sent out
+only 17,000 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did musk-rat grow in
+favour as a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual
+thing for 200,000 musk-rat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay
+Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier furs than
+in the United States, so that the all-fur coat is in greater demand than
+the fur-lined; but in Canada, not less than 2,000,000 musk-rat furs are
+taken every year. In the United States the total is close on 4,000,000.
+In one city alone, St. Paul, 50,000 musk-rat-skins are cured every year.
+A single stretch of good marsh ground has yielded that number of skins
+year after year without a sign of the hunt telling on the prolific
+little musquash. Multiply 50,000 by prices varying from 7 cents to 75
+cents and the value of the musk-rat-hunt becomes apparent.
+
+What is the secret of the musk-rat's survival while the strong creatures
+of the chase like buffalo and timber-wolf have been almost exterminated?
+In the first place, settlers can't farm swamps; so the musk-rat thrives
+just as well in the swamps of New Jersey to-day as when the first white
+hunter set foot in America. Then musquash lives as heartily on owls and
+frogs and snakes as on water mussels and lily-pads. If one sort of food
+fails, the musk-rat has as omnivorous powers of digestion as the bear
+and changes his diet. Then he can hide as well in water as on land. And
+most important of all, musk-rat's family is as numerous as a cat's, five
+to nine rats in a litter, and two or three litters a year. These are the
+points that make for little musquash's continuance in spite of all that
+shot and trap can do.
+
+Having discovered what the dank whiff, half animal, half vegetable,
+signified, the trapper sets about finding the colony. He knows there is
+no risk of the little still-hunter carrying alarm to the other
+musk-rats. If he waits, it is altogether probable that the fleeing
+musk-rat will come up and swim straight for the colony. On the other
+hand, the musk-rat may have scurried overland through the rushes.
+Besides, the trapper observed tracks, tiny leaf-like tracks as of little
+webbed feet, over the soft clay of the marsh bank. These will lead to
+the colony, so the trapper rises and parting the rushes not too noisily,
+follows the little footprint along the margin of the swamp.
+
+Here the track is lost at the narrow ford of an inflowing stream, but
+across the creek lies a fallen poplar littered with--what? The feathers
+and bones of a dead owlet. Balancing himself--how much better the
+moccasins cling than boots!--the trapper crosses the log and takes up
+the trail through the rushes. But here musquash has dived off into the
+water for the express purpose of throwing a possible pursuer off the
+scent. But the tracks betrayed which way musquash was travelling; so the
+trapper goes on, knowing if he does not find the little haycock houses
+on this side, he can cross to the other.
+
+[Illustration: Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
+Hudson's Bay Company, beyond tree line; hence the houses are built of
+imported timber, with thatch roofs.]
+
+Presently, he almost stumbles over what sent the musk-rat diving just at
+this place. It is the wreck of a wolverine's ravage--a little wattled
+dome-shaped house exposed to that arch-destroyer by the shrinking of the
+swamp. So shallow has the water become, that a wolverine has easily
+waded and leaped clear across to the roof of the musk-rat's house. A
+beaver-dam two feet thick cannot resist the onslaught of the wolverine's
+claws; how much less will this round nest of reeds and grass and
+mosses cemented together with soft clay? The roof has been torn from the
+domed house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the domestic
+economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round walls inside, a floor or
+gallery of sticks and grasses, where the family had lived in an air
+chamber above the water, rough walls below the water-line and two or
+three little openings that must have been safely under water before the
+swamp receded. Perhaps a mussel or lily bulb has been left in the
+deserted larder. From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the
+topmost wall will not measure more than two or three feet. If the
+swamp had not dried here, the stupid little musk-rats that escaped the
+ravager's claws would probably have come back to the wrecked house,
+built up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till another
+wolverine came. But a water doorway the musk-rat must have. That he has
+learned by countless assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh
+retreated the musk-rats abandoned their house.
+
+All about the deserted house are runways, tiny channels across oozy
+peninsulas and islands of the musk-rat's diminutive world such as a very
+small beaver might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry patch or
+mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and prods an earth bank with a
+stick. It is as he thought--hollow; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the
+clay wall where the refugees from this house had scuttled from the
+wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water has shrunk--that was the
+danger signal to the musk-rat; and there had been a grand moving to a
+deeper part of the swamp. Perhaps, after all, this is a very old house
+not used since last winter.
+
+Going back to the bank, the trapper skirts through the crush of brittle
+rushes round the swamp. Coming sharply on deeper water, a dank, stagnant
+bayou, heavy with the smell of furry life, the trapper pushes aside the
+flags, peers out and sees what resembles a prairie-dog town on
+water--such a number of wattled houses that they had shut in the water
+as with a dam. Too many flags and willows lie over the colony for a
+glimpse of the tell-tale wriggling trail across the water; but from the
+wet tangle of grass and moss comes an oozy pattering.
+
+If it were winter, the trapper could proceed as he would against a
+beaver colony, staking up the outlet from the swamp, trenching the ice
+round the different houses, breaking open the roofs and penning up any
+fugitives in their own bank burrows till he and his dog and a spear
+could clear out the gallery. But in winter there is more important work
+than hunting musk-rat. Musk-rat-trapping is for odd days before the
+regular hunt.
+
+Opening the sack which he usually carries on his back, the trapper draws
+out three dozen small traps no larger than a rat or mouse trap. Some of
+these he places across the runways without any bait; for the musk-rat
+must pass this way. Some he smears with strong-smelling pomatum. Some he
+baits with carrot or apple. Others he does not bait at all, simply
+laying them on old logs where he knows the owlets roost by day. But each
+of the traps--bait or no bait--he attaches to a stake driven into the
+water so that the prisoner will be held under when he plunges to escape
+till he is drowned. Otherwise, he would gnaw his foot free of the trap
+and disappear in a burrow.
+
+If the marsh is large, there will be more than one musk-rat colony.
+Having exhausted his traps on the first, the trapper lies in wait at the
+second. When the moon comes up over the water, there is a great
+splashing about the musk-rat nests; for autumn is the time for
+house-building and the musk-rats work at night. If the trapper is an
+Eastern man, he will wade in as they do in New Jersey; but if he is a
+type of the Western hunter, he lies on the log among the rushes, popping
+a shot at every head that appears in the moonlit water. His dog swims
+and dives for the quarry. By the time the stupid little musk-rats have
+taken alarm and hidden, the man has twenty or thirty on the bank. Going
+home, he empties and resets the traps.
+
+Thirty marten traps that yield six martens do well. Thirty musk-rat
+traps are expected to give thirty musk-rats. Add to that the twenty
+shot, and what does the day's work represent? Here are thirty skins of a
+coarse light reddish hair, such as lines the poor man's overcoat. These
+will sell for from 7 to 15 cents each. They may go roughly for $3 at the
+fur post. Here are ten of the deeper brown shades, with long soft fur
+that lines a lady's cloak. They are fine enough to pass for mink with a
+little dyeing, or imitation seal if they are properly plucked. These
+will bring 25 or 30 cents--say $2.50 in all. But here are ten skins,
+deep, silky, almost black, for which a Russian officer will pay high
+prices, skins that will go to England, and from England to Paris, and
+from Paris to St. Petersburg with accelerating cost mark till the
+Russian grandee is paying $1 or more for each pelt. The trapper will ask
+30, 40, 50 cents for these, making perhaps $3.50 in all. Then this idle
+fellow's day has totaled up to $9, not a bad day's work, considering he
+did not go to the university for ten years to learn his craft, did not
+know what wear and tear and drive meant as he worked, did not spend more
+than a few cents' worth of shot. But for his musk-rat-pelts the man will
+not get $9 in coin unless he lives very near the great fur markets. He
+will get powder and clothing and food and tobacco whose first cost has
+been increased a hundredfold by ship rates and railroad rates, by
+keel-boat freight and pack-horse expenses and _portage_ charges past
+countless rapids. But he will get all that he needs, all that he wants,
+all that his labour is worth, this "lazy vagabond" who spends half his
+time idling in the sun. Of how many other men can that be said?
+
+But what of the ruthless slaughter among the little musk-rats? Does
+humanity not revolt at the thought? Is this trapping not after all
+brutal butchery?
+
+Animal kindliness--if such a thing exists among musk-rats--could hardly
+protest against the slaughter, seeing the musk-rats themselves wage as
+ruthless a war against water-worm and owlet as man wages against
+musk-rats. It is the old question, should animal life be sacrificed to
+preserve human life? To that question there is only one answer. Linings
+for coats are more important life-savers than all the humane societies
+of the world put together. It is probable that the first thing the
+prehistoric man did to preserve his own life when he realized himself
+was to slay some destructive animal and appropriate its coat.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 44: _Amisk_, the Chippewyan, _umisk_, the Cree, with much the
+same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he considered the
+variation in Indian language more a matter of dialect than difference in
+meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had any
+difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan,
+and Assiniboine. For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is
+_wahboos_ on the Upper Ottawa, _wapus_ on the Saskatchewan, _wapauce_ on
+the MacKenzie.]
+
+
+II
+
+_Sikak the Skunk_
+
+Sikak the skunk it is who supplies the best imitations of sable. But
+cleanse the fur never so well, on a damp day it still emits the heavy
+sickening odour that betrays its real nature. That odour is sikak's
+invincible defence against the white trapper. The hunter may follow the
+little four-abreast galloping footprints that lead to a hole among
+stones or to rotten logs, but long before he has reached the
+nesting-place of his quarry comes a stench against which white blood is
+powerless. Or the trapper may find an unexpected visitor in one of the
+pens which he has dug for other animals--a little black creature the
+shape of a squirrel and the size of a cat with white stripings down his
+back and a bushy tail. It is then a case of a quick deadly shot, or the
+man will be put to rout by an odour that will pollute the air for miles
+around and drive him off that section of the hunting-field. The
+cuttlefish is the only other creature that possesses as powerful means
+of defence of a similar nature, one drop of the inky fluid which it
+throws out to hide it from pursuers burning the fisherman's eyes like
+scalding acid. As far as white trappers are concerned, sikak is only
+taken by the chance shots of idle days. Yet the Indian hunts the skunk
+apparently utterly oblivious of the smell. Traps, poison, deadfalls,
+pens are the Indian weapons against the skunk; and a Cree will
+deliberately skin and stretch a pelt in an atmosphere that is blue with
+what is poison to the white man.
+
+The only case I ever knew of white trappers hunting the skunk was of
+three men on the North Saskatchewan. One was an Englishman who had been
+long in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company and knew all the animals
+of the north. The second was the guide, a French-Canadian, and the third
+a Sandy, fresh "frae oot the land o' heather." The men were wakened one
+night by the noise of some animal scrambling through the window into
+their cabin and rummaging in the dark among the provisions. The
+Frenchman sprang for a light and Sandy got hold of his gun.
+
+"Losh, mon, it's a wee bit beastie a' strip't black and white wi' a tail
+like a so'dier's cocade!"
+
+That information brought the Englishman to his feet howling, "Don't
+shoot it! Don't shoot it! Leave that thing alone, I tell you!"
+
+But Sandy being a true son of Scotia with a Presbyterian love of
+argument wished to debate the question.
+
+"An' what for wu'd a leave it eating a' the oatmeal? I'll no leave it
+rampagin' th' eatables--I wull be pokin' it oot!--shoo!--shoo!"
+
+At that the Frenchman flung down the light and bolted for the door,
+followed by the English trader cursing between set teeth that before
+"that blundering blockhead had argued the matter" something would
+happen.
+
+Something did happen.
+
+Sandy came through the door with such precipitate haste that the topmost
+beam brought his head a mighty thwack, roaring out at the top of his
+voice that the deil was after him for a' the sins that iver he had
+committed since he was born.
+
+
+III
+
+_Wenusk the Badger_
+
+Badger, too, is one of the furs taken by the trapper on idle days. East
+of St. Paul and Winnipeg, the fur is comparatively unknown, or if known,
+so badly prepared that it is scarcely recognisable for badger. This is
+probably owing to differences in climate. Badger in its perfect state is
+a long soft fur, resembling wood marten, with deep overhairs almost the
+length of one's hand and as dark as marten, with underhairs as thick and
+soft and yielding as swan's-down, shading in colour from fawn to grayish
+white. East of the Mississippi, there is too much damp in the atmosphere
+for such a long soft fur. Consequently specimens of badger seen in the
+East must either be sheared of the long overhairs or left to mat and
+tangle on the first rainy day. In New York, Quebec, Montreal, and
+Toronto--places where the finest furs should be on sale if anywhere--I
+have again and again asked for badger, only to be shown a dull matted
+short fawnish fur not much superior to cheap dyed furs. It is not
+surprising there is no demand for such a fur and Eastern dealers have
+stopped ordering it. In the North-West the most common mist during the
+winter is a frost mist that is more a snow than a rain, so there is
+little injury to furs from moisture. Here the badger is prime, long,
+thick, and silky, almost as attractive as ermine if only it were
+enhanced by as high a price. Whether badger will ever grow in favour
+like musk-rat or 'coon, and play an important part in the returns of the
+fur exporters, is doubtful. The world takes its fashions from European
+capitals; and European capitals are too damp for badger to be in
+fashion with them. Certainly, with the private dealers of the North and
+West, badger is yearly becoming more important.
+
+Like the musk-rat, badger is prime in the autumn. Wherever the
+hunting-grounds of the animals are, there will the hunting-grounds of
+the trapper be. Badgers run most where gophers sit sunning themselves on
+the clay mounds, ready to bolt down to their subterranean burrows on the
+first approach of an enemy. Eternal enemies these two are, gopher and
+badger, though they both live in ground holes, nest their lairs with
+grasses, run all summer and sleep all winter, and alike prey on the
+creatures smaller than themselves--mice, moles, and birds. The gopher,
+or ground squirrel, is smaller than the wood squirrel, while the badger
+is larger than a Manx cat, with a shape that varies according to the
+exigencies of the situation. Normally, he is a flattish, fawn-coloured
+beast, with a turtle-shaped body, little round head, and small legs with
+unusually strong claws. Ride after the badger across the prairie and he
+stretches out in long, lithe shape, resembling a baby cougar, turning at
+every pace or two to snap at your horse, then off again at a hulking
+scramble of astonishing speed. Pour water down his burrow to compel him
+to come up or down, and he swells out his body, completely filling the
+passage, so that his head, which is downward, is in dry air, while his
+hind quarters alone are in the water. In captivity the badger is a
+business-like little body, with very sharp teeth, of which his keeper
+must beware, and some of the tricks of the skunk, but inclined, on the
+whole, to mind his affairs if you will mind yours. Once a day regularly
+every afternoon out of his lair he emerges for the most comical sorts of
+athletic exercises. Hour after hour he will trot diagonally--because
+that gives him the longest run--from corner to corner of his pen,
+rearing up on his hind legs as he reaches one corner, rubbing the back
+of his head, then down again and across to the other corner, where he
+repeats the performance. There can be no reason for the badger doing
+this, unless it was his habit in the wilds when he trotted about leaving
+dumb signs on mud banks and brushwood by which others of his kind might
+know where to find him at stated times.
+
+Sunset is the time when he is almost sure to be among the gopher
+burrows. In vain the saucy jay shrieks out a warning to the gophers. Of
+all the prairie creatures, they are the stupidest, the most beset with
+curiosity to know what that jay's shriek may mean. Sunning themselves in
+the last rays of daylight, the gophers perch on their hind legs to wait
+developments of what the jay announced. But the badger's fur and the
+gopher mounds are almost the same colour. He has pounced on some playful
+youngsters before the rest see him. Then there is a wild scuttling down
+to the depths of the burrows. That, too, is vain; for the badger begins
+ripping up the clay bank like a grisly, down--down--in pursuit, two,
+three, five feet, even twelve.
+
+Then is seen one of the most curious freaks in all the animal life of
+the prairie. The underground galleries of the gophers connect and lead
+up to different exits. As the furious badger comes closer and closer on
+the cowering gophers, the little cowards lose heart, dart up the
+galleries to open doors, and try to escape through the grass of the
+prairie. But no sooner is the badger hard at work than a gray form seems
+to rise out of the earth, a coyote who had been slinking to the rear all
+the while; and as the terrified gophers scurry here, scurry there,
+coyote's white teeth snap!--snap! He is
+here--there--everywhere--pouncing--jumping--having the fun of his life,
+gobbling gophers as cats catch mice. Down in the bottom of the burrow,
+the badger may get half a dozen poor cooped huddling prisoners; but the
+coyote up on the prairie has devoured a whole colony.
+
+Do these two, badger and coyote, consciously hunt together? Some old
+trappers vow they do--others just as vehemently that they don't. The
+fact remains that wherever the badger goes gopher-hunting on an
+unsettled prairie, there the coyote skulks reaping reward of all the
+badger's work. The coincidence is no stranger than the well-known fact
+that sword-fish and thrasher--two different fish--always league together
+to attack the whale.
+
+One thing only can save the gopher colony, and that is the gun barrel
+across yon earth mound where a trapper lies in wait for the coming of
+the badger.
+
+
+IV
+
+_The 'Coon_
+
+Sir Alexander MacKenzie reported that in 1798 the North-West Company
+sent out only 100 raccoon from the fur country. Last year the city of
+St. Paul alone cured 115,000 'coon-skins. What brought about the change?
+Simply an appreciation of the qualities of 'coon, which combines the
+greatest warmth with the lightest weight and is especially adapted for
+a cold climate and constant wear. What was said of badger applies with
+greater force to 'coon. The 'coon in the East is associated in one's
+mind with cabbies, in the West with fashionably dressed men and women.
+And there is just as wide a difference in the quality of the fur as in
+the quality of the people. The cabbies' 'coon coat is a rough yellow fur
+with red stripes. The Westerner's 'coon is a silky brown fur with black
+stripes. One represents the fall hunt of men and boys round hollow logs,
+the other the midwinter hunt of a professional trapper in the Far North.
+A dog usually bays the 'coon out of hiding in the East. Tiny tracks,
+like a child's hand, tell the Northern hunter where to set his traps.
+
+Wahboos the rabbit, musquash the musk-rat, sikak the skunk, wenusk the
+badger, and the common 'coon--these are the little chaps whose hunt
+fills the idle days of the trapper's busy life. At night, before the
+rough stone hearth which he has built in his cabin, he is still busy by
+fire-light preparing their pelts. Each skin must be stretched and cured.
+Turning the skin fur side in, the trapper pushes into the pelt a
+wedge-shaped slab of spliced cedar. Into the splice he shoves another
+wedge of wood which he hammers in, each blow widening the space and
+stretching the skin. All pelts are stretched fur in but the fox. Tacking
+the stretched skin on a flat board, the trapper hangs it to dry till he
+carries all to the fort; unless, indeed, he should need a garment for
+himself--cap, coat, or gantlets--in which case he takes out a square
+needle and passes his evenings like a tailor, sewing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+     THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES SAKWASEW THE MINK, NEKIK THE
+     OTTER, WUCHAK THE FISHER, AND WAPISTAN THE MARTEN
+
+
+I
+
+_Sakwasew the Mink_
+
+There are other little chaps with more valuable fur than musquash, whose
+skin seldom attains higher honour than inside linings, and wahboos,
+whose snowy coat is put to the indignity of imitating ermine with a
+dotting of black cat for the ermine's jet tip. There are mink and otter
+and fisher and fox and ermine and sable, all little fellows with pelts
+worth their weight in coin of the realm.
+
+On one of those idle days when the trapper seems to be doing nothing but
+lying on his back in the sun, he has witnessed a curious, but common,
+battle in pantomime between bird and beast. A prairie-hawk circles and
+drops, lifts and wheels again with monotonous silent persistence above
+the swamp. What quarry does he seek, this lawless forager of the upper
+airs still hunting a hidden nook of the low prairie? If he were out
+purely for exercise, like the little badger when it goes rubbing the
+back of its head from post to post, there would be a buzzing of wings
+and shrill lonely callings to an unseen mate.
+
+But the circling hawk is as silent as the very personification of death.
+Apparently he can't make up his mind for the death-drop on some rat or
+frog down there in the swamp. The trapper notices that the hawk keeps
+circling directly above the place where the waters of the swamp tumble
+from the ravine in a small cataract to join a lower river. He knows,
+too, from the rich orange of the plumage that the hawk is young. An
+older fellow would not be advertising his intentions in this fashion.
+Besides, an older hawk would have russet-gray feathering. Is the
+rascally young hawk meditating a clutch of talons round some of the
+unsuspecting trout that usually frequent the quiet pools below a
+waterfall. Or does he aim at bigger game? A young hawk is bold with the
+courage that has not yet learned the wisdom of caution. That is why
+there are so many more of the brilliant young red hawks in our museums
+than old grizzled gray veterans whose craft circumvents the specimen
+hunter's cunning. Now the trapper comes to have as keen a sense of
+_feel_ for all the creatures of the wilds as the creatures of the wilds
+have for man; so he shifts his position that he may find what is
+attracting the hawk.
+
+Down on the pebbled beach below the waterfalls lies an auburn bundle of
+fur, about the size of a very long, slim, short-legged cat, still as a
+stone--some member of the weasel family gorged torpid with fish,
+stretched out full length to sleep in the sun. To sleep, ah, yes, and as
+the Danish prince said, "perchance to dream"; for all the little fellows
+of river and prairie take good care never to sleep where they are
+exposed to their countless enemies. This sleep of the weasel arouses
+the man's suspicion. The trapper draws out his field-glass. The sleeper
+is a mink, and its sleep is a sham with beady, red eyes blinking a deal
+too lively for real death. Why does it lie on its back rigid and
+straight as if it were dead with all four tiny paws clutched out stiff?
+The trapper scans the surface of the swamp to see if some foolish
+musk-rat is swimming dangerously near the sleeping mink.
+
+Presently the hawk circles lower--lower!--Drop, straight as a stone! Its
+talons are almost in the mink's body, when of a sudden the sleeper
+awakens--awakens--with a leap of the four stiff little feet and a
+darting spear-thrust of snapping teeth deep in the neck of the hawk! At
+first the hawk rises tearing furiously at the clinging mink with its
+claws. The wings sag. Down bird and beast fall. Over they roll on the
+sandy beach, hawk and mink, over and over with a thrashing of the hawk's
+wings to beat the treacherous little vampire off. Now the blood-sucker
+is on top clutching--clutching! Now the bird flounders up craning his
+neck from the death-grip. Then the hawk falls on his back. His wings are
+prone. They cease to flutter.
+
+Running to the bank the trapper is surprised to see the little
+blood-sucker making off with the prey instead of deserting it as all
+creatures akin to the weasel family usually do. That means a family of
+mink somewhere near, to be given their first lesson in bird-hunting, in
+mink-hawking by the body of this poor, dead, foolish gyrfalcon.
+
+By a red mark here, by a feather there, crushed grass as of something
+dragged, a little webbed footprint on the wet clay, a tiny marking of
+double dots where the feet have crossed a dry stone, the trapper slowly
+takes up the trail of the mink. Mink are not prime till the late fall.
+Then the reddish fur assumes the shades of the russet grasses where they
+run until the white of winter covers the land. Then--as if nature were
+to exact avengement for all the red slaughter the mink has wrought
+during the rest of the year--his coat becomes dark brown, almost black,
+the very shade that renders him most conspicuous above snow to all the
+enemies of the mink world. But while the trapper has no intention of
+destroying what would be worthless now but will be valuable in the
+winter, it is not every day that even a trapper has a chance to trail a
+mink back to its nest and see the young family.
+
+But suddenly the trail stops. Here is a sandy patch with some tumbled
+stones under a tangle of grasses and a rivulet not a foot away.
+Ah--there it is--a nest or lair, a tiny hole almost hidden by the
+rushes! But the nest seems empty. Fast as the trapper has come, the mink
+came faster and hid her family. To one side, the hawk had been dropped
+among the rushes. The man pokes a stick in the lair but finds nothing.
+Putting in his hand, he is dragging out bones, feathers, skeleton
+musk-rats, putrid frogs, promiscuous remnants of other quarries brought
+to the burrow by the mink, when a little cattish _s-p-i-t!_ almost
+touches his hand. His palm closes over something warm, squirming,
+smaller than a kitten with very downy fur, on a soft mouse-like skin,
+eyes that are still blind and a tiny mouth that neither meows nor
+squeaks, just _spits!--spits!--spits!_--in impotent viperish fury. All
+the other minklets, the mother had succeeded in hiding under the
+grasses, but somehow this one had been left. Will he take it home and
+try the experiment of rearing a young mink with a family of kittens?
+
+The trapper calls to mind other experiments. There was the little beaver
+that chewed up his canoe and gnawed a hole of escape through the door.
+There were the three little bob-cats left in the woods behind his cabin
+last year when he refrained from setting out traps and tied up his dog
+to see if he could not catch the whole family, mother and kittens, for
+an Eastern museum. Furtively at first, the mother had come to feed her
+kittens. Then the man had put out rugs to keep the kittens warm and lain
+in wait for the mother; but no sooner did she see her offspring
+comfortably cared for, than she deserted them entirely, evidently acting
+on the proverb that the most gracious enemy is the most dangerous, or
+else deciding that the kits were so well off that she was not needed.
+Adopting the three little wild-cats, the trapper had reared them past
+blind-eyes, past colic and dumps and all the youthful ills to which live
+kittens are heirs, when trouble began. The longing for the wilds came.
+Even catnip green and senna tea boiled can't cure that. So keenly did
+the gipsy longing come to one little bob that he perished escaping to
+the woods by way of the chimney flue. The second little bob succeeded in
+escaping through a parchment stop-gap that served the trapper as a
+window. And the third bobby dealt such an ill-tempered gash to the dog's
+nose that the combat ended in instant death for the cat.
+
+Thinking over these experiments, the trapper wisely puts the mink back
+in the nest with words which it would have been well for that litle ball
+of down to have understood. He told it he would come back for it next
+winter and to be sure to have its best black coat on. For the little
+first-year minks wear dark coats, almost as fine as Russian sable.
+Yes--he reflects, poking it back to the hole and retreating quickly so
+that the mother will return--better leave it till the winter; for wasn't
+it Koot who put a mink among his kittens, only to have the little viper
+set on them with tooth and claw as soon as its eyes opened? Also mink
+are bad neighbours to a poultry-yard. Forty chickens in a single night
+will the little mink destroy, not for food but--to quote man's
+words--for the zest of the sport. The mink, you must remember, like
+other pot-hunters, can boast of a big bag.
+
+The trapper did come back next fall. It was when he was ranging all the
+swamp-lands for beaver-dams. Swamp lands often mean beaver-dams; and
+trappers always note what stops the current of a sluggish stream.
+Frequently it is a beaver colony built across a valley in the mountains,
+or stopping up the outlet of a slough. The trapper was sleeping under
+his canoe on the banks of the river where the swamp tumbled out from the
+ravine. Before retiring to what was a boat by day and a bed by night, he
+had set out a fish net and some loose lines--which the flow of the
+current would keep in motion--below the waterfall. Carelessly, next day,
+he threw the fish-heads among the stones. The second morning he found
+such a multitude of little tracks dotting the rime of the hoar frost
+that he erected a tent back from the waterfalls, and decided to stay
+trapping there till the winter. The fish-heads were no longer thrown
+away. They were left among the stones in small steel-traps weighted with
+other stones, or attached to a loose stick that would impede flight.
+And if the poor gyrfalcon could have seen the mink held by the jaws of a
+steel-trap, hissing, snarling, breaking its teeth on the iron, spitting
+out all the rage of its wicked nature, the bird would have been avenged.
+
+And as winter deepened, the quality of minks taken from the traps became
+darker, silkier, crisper, almost brown black in some of the young, but
+for light fur on the under lip. The Indians say that sakwasew the mink
+would sell his family for a fish, and as long as fish lay among the
+stones, the trapper gathered his harvest of fur: reddish mink that would
+be made into little neck ruffs and collar pieces, reddish brown mink
+that would be sewed into costly coats and cloaks, rare brownish black
+mink that would be put into the beautiful flat scarf collars almost as
+costly as a full coat. And so the mink-hunt went on merrily for the man
+till the midwinter lull came at Christmas. For that year the mink-hunt
+was over.
+
+
+II
+
+_Nekik the Otter_
+
+Sakwasew was not the only fisher at the pool below the falls. On one of
+those idle days when the trapper sat lazily by the river side, a round
+head slightly sunburned from black to russet had hobbled up to the
+surface of the water, peered sharply at the man sitting so still,
+paddled little flipper-like feet about, then ducked down again.
+Motionless as the mossed log under him sits the man; and in a moment up
+comes the little black head again, round as a golf ball, about the size
+of a very large cat, followed by three other little bobbing heads--a
+mother otter teaching her babies to dive and swim and duck from the
+river surface to the burrows below the water along the river bank.
+Perhaps the trapper has found a dead fish along this very bank with only
+the choice portions of the body eaten--a sure sign that nekik the otter,
+the little epicure of the water world, has been fishing at this river.
+
+With a scarcely perceptible motion, the man turns his head to watch the
+swimmers. Instantly, down they plunge, mother and babies, to come to the
+surface again higher up-stream, evidently working up-current like the
+beaver in spring for a glorious frolic in the cold clear waters of the
+upper sources. At one place on the sandy beach they all wade ashore. The
+man utters a slight "Hiss!" Away they scamper, the foolish youngsters,
+landward instead of to the safe water as the hesitating mother would
+have them do, all the little feet scrambling over the sand with the
+funny short steps of a Chinese lady in tight boots. Maternal care proves
+stronger than fear. The frightened mother follows the young otter and
+will no doubt read them a sound lecture on land dangers when she has
+rounded them back to the safe water higher up-stream.
+
+Of all wild creatures, none is so crafty in concealing its lairs as the
+otter. Where did this family come from? They had not been swimming
+up-stream; for the man had been watching on the river bank long before
+they appeared on the surface. Stripping, the trapper dives in
+mid-stream, then half wades, half swims along the steepest bank, running
+his arm against the clay cliff to find a burrow. On land he could not do
+this at the lair of the otter; for the smell of the man-touch would be
+left on his trail, and the otter, keener of scent and fear than the
+mink, would take alarm. But for the same reason that the river is the
+safest refuge for the otter, it is the surest hunting for the man--water
+does not keep the scent of a trail. So the man runs his arm along the
+bank. The river is the surest hunting for the man, but not the safest.
+If an old male were in the bank burrow now, or happened to be emerging
+from grass-lined subterranean air chambers above the bank gallery, it
+might be serious enough for the exploring trapper. One bite of nekik the
+otter has crippled many an Indian. Knowing from the remnants of
+half-eaten fish and from the holes in the bank that he has found an
+otter runway, the man goes home as well satisfied as if he had done a
+good day's work.
+
+And so that winter when he had camped below the swamp for the mink-hunt,
+the trapper was not surprised one morning to find a half-eaten fish on
+the river bank. Sakwasew the mink takes good care to leave no remnants
+of his greedy meal. What he cannot eat he caches. Even if he has
+strangled a dozen water-rats in one hunt, they will be dragged in a heap
+and covered. The half-eaten fish left exposed is not mink's work. Otter
+has been here and otter will come back; for as the frost hardens, only
+those pools below the falls keep free from ice. No use setting traps
+with fish-heads as long as fresh fish are to be had for the taking.
+Besides, the man has done nothing to conceal his tracks; and each
+morning the half-eaten fish lie farther off the line of the man-trail.
+
+By-and-bye the man notices that no more half-eaten fish are on his side
+of the river. Little tracks of webbed feet furrowing a deep rut in the
+soft snow of the frozen river tell that nekik has taken alarm and is
+fishing from the other side. And when Christmas comes with a dwindling
+of the mink-hunt, the man, too, crosses to the other side. Here he finds
+that the otter tracks have worn a path that is almost a toboggan slide
+down the crusted snow bank to the iced edge of the pool. By this time
+nekik's pelt is prime, almost black, and as glossy as floss. By this
+time, too, the fish are scarce and the epicure has become ravenous as a
+pauper. One night when the trapper was reconnoitring the fish hole, he
+had approached the snow bank so noiselessly that he came on a whole
+colony of otters without their knowledge of his presence. Down the snow
+bank they tumbled, head-first, tail-first, slithering through the snow
+with their little paws braced, rolling down on their backs like lads
+upset from a toboggan, otter after otter, till the man learned that the
+little beasts were not fishing at all, but coasting the snow bank like
+youngsters on a night frolic. No sooner did one reach the bottom than up
+he scampered to repeat the fun; and sometimes two or three went down in
+a rolling bunch mixed up at the foot of a slide as badly as a couple of
+toboggans that were unpremeditatedly changing their occupants. Bears
+wrestle. The kittens of all the cat tribe play hide and seek. Little
+badger finds it fun to run round rubbing the back of his head on things;
+and here was nekik the otter at the favourite amusement of his
+kind--coasting down a snow bank.
+
+If the trapper were an Indian, he would lie in wait at the landing-place
+and spear the otter as they came from the water. But the white man's
+craft is deeper. He does not wish to frighten the otter till the last
+had been taken. Coming to the slide by day, he baits a steel-trap with
+fish and buries it in the snow just where the otter will be coming down
+the hill or up from the pool. Perhaps he places a dozen such traps
+around the hole with nothing visible but the frozen fish lying on the
+surface. If he sets his traps during a snow-fall, so much the better.
+His own tracks will be obliterated and the otter's nose will discover
+the fish. Then he takes a bag filled with some substance of animal
+odour, pomatum, fresh meat, pork, or he may use the flesh side of a
+fresh deer-hide. This he drags over the snow where he has stepped. He
+may even use a fresh hide to handle the traps, as a waiter uses a
+serviette to pass plates. There must be no man-smell, no man-track near
+the otter traps.
+
+While the mink-hunt is fairly over by midwinter, otter-trapping lasts
+from October to May. The value of all rare furs, mink, otter, marten,
+ermine, varies with two things: (1) the latitude of the hunting-field;
+(2) the season of the hunt. For instance, ask a trapper of Minnesota or
+Lake Superior what he thinks of the ermine, and he will tell you that it
+is a miserable sort of weasel of a dirty drab brown not worth
+twenty-five cents a skin. Ask a trapper of the North Saskatchewan what
+he thinks of ermine; and he will tell you it is a pretty little whitish
+creature good for fur if trapped late enough in the winter and always
+useful as a lining. But ask a trapper of the Arctic about the ermine,
+and he describes it as the finest fur that is taken except the silver
+fox, white and soft as swan's-down, with a tail-tip like black onyx.
+This difference in the fur of the animal explains the wide variety of
+prices paid. Ermine not worth twenty-five cents in Wisconsin might be
+worth ten times as much on the Saskatchewan.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Fur press in use
+  at Fort Good
+  Hope, at the
+  extreme north
+  of Hudson's
+  Bay Company's
+  territory.
+
+  Old wedge press
+  in use at Fort
+  Resolution, of
+  the sub-Arctics.
+
+  Types of Fur Presses.]
+
+So it is with the otter. All trapped between latitude thirty-five and
+sixty is good fur; and the best is that taken toward the end of winter
+when scarcely a russet hair should be found in the long over-fur of
+nekik's coat.
+
+
+III
+
+_Wuchak the Fisher, or Pekan_
+
+Wherever the waste of fish or deer is thrown, there will be found lines
+of double tracks not so large as the wild-cat's, not so small as the
+otter's, and without the same webbing as the mink's. This is wuchak the
+fisher, or pekan, commonly called "the black cat"--who, in spite of his
+fishy name, hates water as cats hate it. And the tracks are double
+because pekan travel in pairs. He is found along the banks of streams
+because he preys on fish and fisher, on mink and otter and musk-rat, on
+frogs and birds and creatures that come to drink. He is, after all, a
+very greedy fellow, not at all particular about his diet, and, like all
+gluttons, easily snared. While mink and otter are about, the trapper
+will waste no steel-traps on pekan. A deadfall will act just as
+effectively; but there is one point requiring care. Pekan has a sharp
+nose. It is his nose that brings him to all carrion just as surely as
+hawks come to pick dead bones. But that same nose will tell him of man's
+presence. So when the trapper has built his pen of logs so that the
+front log or deadfall will crush down on the back of an intruder tugging
+at the bait inside, he overlays all with leaves and brush to quiet the
+pekan's suspicions. Besides, the pekan has many tricks akin to the
+wolverine. He is an inveterate thief. There is a well-known instance of
+Hudson's Bay trappers having a line of one hundred and fifty marten
+traps stretching for fifty miles robbed of their bait by pekan. The men
+shortened the line to thirty miles and for six times in succession did
+pekan destroy the traps. Then the men set themselves to trap the robber.
+He will rifle a deadfall from the slanting back roof where there is no
+danger; so the trapper overlays the back with heavy brush.
+
+Pekan do not yield a rare fur; but they are always at run where the
+trapper is hunting the rare furs, and for that reason are usually snared
+at the same time as mink and otter.
+
+
+IV
+
+_Wapistan the Marten_
+
+When Koot went blind on his way home from the rabbit-hunt, he had
+intended to set out for the pine woods. Though blizzards still howl over
+the prairie, by March the warm sun of midday has set the sap of the
+forests stirring and all the woodland life awakens from its long winter
+sleep. Cougar and lynx and bear rove through the forest ravenous with
+spring hunger. Otter, too, may be found where the ice mounds of a
+waterfall are beginning to thaw. But it is not any of these that the
+trapper seeks. If they cross his path, good--they, too, will swell his
+account at the fur post. It is another of the little chaps that he
+seeks, a little, long, low-set animal whose fur is now glistening bright
+on the deep dark overhairs, soft as down in the thick fawn underhairs,
+wapistan the marten.
+
+When the forest begins to stir with the coming of spring, wapistan stirs
+too, crawling out from the hollow of some rotten pine log, restless with
+the same blood-thirst that set the little mink playing his tricks on
+the hawk. And yet the marten is not such a little viper as the mink.
+Wapistan will eat leaves and nuts and roots if he can get vegetable
+food, but failing these, that ravenous spring hunger of his must be
+appeased with something else. And out he goes from his log hole
+hunger-bold as the biggest of all other spring ravagers. That boldness
+gives the trapper his chance at the very time when wapistan's fur is
+best. All winter the trapper may have taken marten; but the end of
+winter is the time when wapistan wanders freely from cover. Thus the
+trapper's calendar would have months of musk-rat first, then beaver and
+mink and pekan and bear and fox and ermine and rabbit and lynx and
+marten, with a long idle midsummer space when he goes to the fort for
+the year's provisions and gathers the lore of his craft.
+
+Wapistan is not hard to track. Being much longer and heavier than a cat
+with very short legs and small feet, his body almost drags the ground
+and his tracks sink deep, clear, and sharp. His feet are smaller than
+otter's and mink's, but easily distinguishable from those two fishers.
+The water animal leaves a spreading footprint, the mark of the webbed
+toes without any fur on the padding of the toe-balls. The land animal of
+the same size has clear cut, narrower, heavier marks. By March, these
+dotting foot-tracks thread the snow everywhere.
+
+Coming on marten tracks at a pine log, the trapper sends in his dog or
+prods with a stick. Finding nothing, he baits a steel-trap with
+pomatum, covers it deftly with snow, drags the decoy skin about to
+conceal his own tracks, and goes away in the hope that the marten will
+come back to this log to guzzle on his prey and sleep.
+
+If the track is much frequented, or the forest over-run with marten
+tracks, the trapper builds deadfalls, many of them running from tree to
+tree for miles through the forest in a circle whose circuit brings him
+back to his cabin. Remnants of these log traps may be seen through all
+parts of the Rocky Mountain forests. Thirty to forty traps are
+considered a day's work for one man, six or ten marten all that he
+expects to take in one round; but when marten are plentiful, the unused
+traps of to-day may bring a prize to-morrow.
+
+The Indian trapper would use still another kind of trap. Where the
+tracks are plainly frequently used runways to watering-places or lair in
+hollow tree, the Indian digs a pit across the marten's trail. On this he
+spreads brush in such roof fashion that though the marten is a good
+climber, if once he falls in, it is almost impossible for him to
+scramble out. If a poor cackling grouse or "fool-hen" be thrust into the
+pit, the Indian is almost sure to find a prisoner. This seems to the
+white man a barbarous kind of trapping; but the poor "fool-hen," hunted
+by all the creatures of the forest, never seems to learn wisdom, but
+invites disaster by popping out of the brush to stare at every living
+thing that passes. If she did not fall a victim in the pit, she
+certainly would to her own curiosity above ground. To the steel-trap the
+hunter attaches a piece of log to entangle the prisoner's flight as he
+rushes through the underbush. Once caught in the steel jaws, little
+wapistan must wait--wait for what? For the same thing that comes to the
+poor "fool-hen" when wapistan goes crashing through the brush after her;
+for the same thing that comes to the baby squirrels when wapistan climbs
+a tree to rob the squirrel's nest, eat the young, and live in the rifled
+house; for the same thing that comes to the hoary marmot whistling his
+spring tune just outside his rocky den when wapistan, who has climbed
+up, pounces down from above. Little death-dealer he has been all his
+life; and now death comes to him for a nobler cause than the stuffing of
+a greedy maw--for the clothing of a creature nobler than himself--man.
+
+The otter can protect himself by diving, even diving under snow. The
+mink has craft to hide himself under leaves so that the sharpest eyes
+cannot detect him. Both mink and otter furs have very little of that
+animal smell which enables the foragers to follow their trail. What gift
+has wapistan, the marten, to protect himself against all the powers that
+prey? His strength and his wisdom lie in the little stubby feet. These
+can climb.
+
+A trapper's dog had stumbled on a marten in a stump hole. A snap of the
+marten's teeth sent the dog back with a jump. Wapistan will hang on to
+the nose of a dog to the death; and trappers' dogs grow cautious. Before
+the dog gathered courage to make another rush, the marten escaped by a
+rear knot-hole, getting the start of his enemy by fifty yards. Off they
+raced, the dog spending himself in fury, the marten keeping under the
+thorny brush where his enemy could not follow, then across open snow
+where the dog gained, then into the pine woods where the trail ended on
+the snow. Where had the fugitive gone? When the man came up, he first
+searched for log holes. There were none. Then he lifted some of the
+rocks. There was no trace of wapistan. But the dog kept baying a special
+tree, a blasted trunk, bare as a mast pole and seemingly impossible for
+any animal but a squirrel to climb. Knowing the trick by which creatures
+like the bob-cat can flatten their body into a resemblance of a tree
+trunk, the trapper searched carefully all round the bare trunk. It was
+not till many months afterward when a wind storm had broken the tree
+that he discovered the upper part had been hollow. Into this eerie nook
+the pursued marten had scrambled and waited in safety till dog and man
+retired.
+
+In one of his traps the man finds a peculiarly short specimen of the
+marten. In the vernacular of the craft this marten's bushy tail will not
+reach as far back as his hind legs can stretch. Widely different from
+the mink's scarcely visible ears, this fellow's ears are sharply
+upright, keenly alert. He is like a fox, where the mink resembles a
+furred serpent. Marten moves, springs, jumps like an animal. Mink glides
+like a snake. Marten has the strong neck of an animal fighter. Mink has
+the long, thin, twisting neck which reptiles need to give them striking
+power for their fangs. Mink's under lip has a mere rim of white or
+yellow. Marten's breast is patched sulphur. But this short marten with a
+tail shorter than other marten differs from his kind as to fur. Both
+mink and marten fur are reddish brown; but this short marten's fur is
+almost black, of great depth, of great thickness, and of three
+qualities: (1) There are the long dark overhairs the same as the
+ordinary marten, only darker, thicker, deeper; (2) there is the soft
+under fur of the ordinary marten, usually fawn, in this fellow deep
+brown; (3) there is the skin fur resembling chicken-down, of which this
+little marten has such a wealth--to use a technical expression--you
+cannot find his scalp. Without going into the old quarrel about species,
+when a marten has these peculiarities, he is known to the trapper as
+sable.
+
+Whether he is the American counterpart to the Russia sable is a disputed
+point. Whether his superior qualities are owing to age, climate,
+species, it is enough for the trapper to know that short, dark marten
+yields the trade--sable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+     UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN
+
+
+I
+
+_Of Foxes, Many and Various--Red, Cross, Silver, Black, Prairie, Kit or
+Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray_
+
+Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and there will
+the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a fox-skin may be as a
+specimen, it has value as a fur only when it belongs to one of three
+varieties--Arctic, black, and silver. Other foxes--red, cross, prairie,
+swift, and gray--the trapper will take when they cross his path and sell
+them in the gross at the fur post, as he used to barter buffalo-hides.
+But the hunter who traps the fox for its own sake, and not as an
+uncalculated extra to the mink-hunt or the beaver total, must go to the
+Far North, to the land of winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the
+best fox-skins.
+
+It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run
+among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most
+shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz
+dog, ears alert as a terrier's and a brush, more like a lady's gray
+feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's fur is
+a grizzled gray shading to mottled fawn. The hairs are coarse, horsey,
+indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value to the trader; so
+dainty little swift, who looks as if nature made him for a pet dog
+instead of a fox, is slighted by the hunter, unless kit persists in
+tempting a trap. Rufus the red fellow, with his grizzled gray head and
+black ears and whitish throat and flaunting purplish tinges down his
+sides like a prince royal, may make a handsome mat; but as a fur he is
+of little worth. His cousin with the black fore feet, the prairie fox,
+who is the largest and strongest and scientifically finest of all his
+kind, has more value as a fur. The colour of the prairie fox shades
+rather to pale ochre and yellow that the nondescript grizzled gray that
+is of so little value as a fur. Of the silver-gray fox little need be
+said. He lives too far south--California and Texas and Mexico--to
+acquire either energy or gloss. He is the one indolent member of the fox
+tribe, and his fur lacks the sheen that only winter cold can give. The
+value of the cross fox depends on the markings that give him his name.
+If the bands, running diagonally over his shoulders in the shape of a
+cross, shade to grayish blue he is a prize, if to reddish russet, he is
+only a curiosity.
+
+The Arctic and black and silver foxes have the pelts that at their worst
+equal the other rare furs, at their best exceed the value of all other
+furs by so much that the lucky trapper who takes a silver fox has made
+his fortune. These, then, are the foxes that the trapper seeks and these
+are to be found only on the white wastes of the polar zone.
+
+That brings up the question--what is a silver fox? Strange as it may
+seem, neither scientist nor hunter can answer that question. Nor will
+study of all the park specimens in the world tell the secret, for the
+simple reason that only an Arctic climate can produce a silver fox; and
+parks are not established in the Arctics yet. It is quite plain that the
+prairie fox is in a class by himself. The uniformity of his size, his
+strength, his habits, his appearance, distinguish him from other foxes.
+It is quite plain that the little kit fox or swift is of a kind distinct
+from other foxes. His smallness, the shape of his bones, the cast of his
+face, the trick of sitting rather than lying, that wonderful big bushy
+soft tail of which a peacock might be vain--all differentiate him from
+other foxes. The same may be said of the Arctic fox with a pelt that is
+more like white wool than hairs of fur. He is much smaller than the red.
+His tail is bushier and larger than the swift, and like all Arctic
+creatures, he has the soles of his feet heavily furred. All this is
+plain and simple classification. But how about Mr. Blue Fox of the same
+size and habit as the white Arctic? Is he the Arctic fox in summer
+clothing? Yes, say some trappers; and they show their pelts of an Arctic
+fox taken in summer of a rusty white. But no, vow other trappers--that
+is impossible, for here are blue fox-skins captured in the depths of
+midwinter with not a white hair among them. Look closely at the skins.
+The ears of one blue fox are long, perfect, unbitten by frost or foe--he
+was a young fellow; and he is blue. Here is another with ears almost
+worn to stubs by fights and many winters' frosts--he is an old fellow;
+and he, too, is blue. Well, then, the blue fox may sometimes be the
+white Arctic fox in summer dress; but the blue fox who is blue all the
+year round, varying only in the shades of blue with the seasons, is
+certainly not the white Arctic fox.
+
+The same difficulty besets distinction of silver fox from black. The old
+scientists classified these as one and the same creature. Trappers know
+better. So do the later scientists who almost agree with the unlearned
+trapper's verdict--there are as many species as there are foxes. Black
+fox is at its best in midwinter, deep, brilliantly glossy, soft as
+floss, and yet almost impenetrable--the very type of perfection of its
+kind. But with the coming of the tardy Arctic spring comes a change. The
+snows are barely melted in May when the sheen leaves the fur. By June,
+the black hairs are streaked with gray; and the black fox is a gray fox.
+Is it at some period of the transition that the black fox becomes a
+silver fox, with the gray hairs as sheeny as the black and each gray
+hair delicately tipped with black? That question, too, remains
+unanswered; for certainly the black fox trapped when in his gray summer
+coat is not the splendid silver fox of priceless value. Black fox
+turning to a dull gray of midsummer may not be silver fox; but what
+about gray fox turning to the beautiful glossy black of midwinter? Is
+that what makes silver fox? Is silver fox simply a fine specimen of
+black caught at the very period when he is blooming into his greatest
+beauty? The distinctive difference between gray fox and silver is that
+gray fox has gray hairs among hairs of other colour, while silver fox
+has silver hair tipped with glossiest black on a foundation of downy
+gray black.
+
+Even greater confusion surrounds the origin of cross and red and gray.
+Trappers find all these different cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs
+grow, those pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red becomes
+cross; and what they become at maturity, that they remain, varying only
+with the seasons.[45] It takes many centuries to make one perfect rose.
+Is it the same with the silver fox? Is he a freak or a climax or the
+regular product of yearly climatic changes caught in the nick of time by
+some lucky trapper? Ask the scientist that question, and he theorizes.
+Ask the trapper, and he tells you if he could only catch enough silver
+foxes to study that question, he would quit trapping. In all the maze of
+ignorance and speculation, there is one anchored fact. While animals
+turn a grizzled gray with age, the fine gray coats are not caused by
+age. Young animals of the rarest furs--fox and ermine--are born in ashy
+colour that turns to gray while they are still in their first nest.
+
+To say that silver fox is costly solely because it is rare is sheerest
+nonsense. It would be just as sensible to say that labradorite, which is
+rare, should be as costly as diamonds. It is the intrinsic beauty of the
+fur, as of the diamonds, that constitutes its first value. The facts
+that the taking of a silver fox is always pure luck, that the luck comes
+seldom, that the trapper must have travelled countless leagues by
+snow-shoe and dog train over the white wastes of the North, that
+trappers in polar regions are exposed to more dangers and hardships than
+elsewhere and that the fur must have been carried a long distance to
+market--add to the first high value of silver fox till it is not
+surprising that little pelts barely two feet long have sold for prices
+ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the trapper the way to the fortune of
+a silver fox is the same as the road to fortune for all other men--by
+the homely trail of every-day work. Cheers from the fort gates bid
+trappers setting out for far Northern fields God-speed. Long ago there
+would have been a firing of cannon when the Northern hunters left for
+their distant camping-grounds; but the cannon of Churchill lie rusting
+to-day and the hunters who go to the sub-Arctics and the Arctics no
+longer set out from Churchill on the bay, but from one of the little
+inland MacKenzie River posts. If the fine powdery snow-drifts are
+glossed with the ice of unbroken sun-glare, the runners strap iron
+crampets to their snow-shoes, and with a great jingling of the
+dog-bells, barking of the huskies, and yelling of the drivers, coast
+away for the leagueless levels of the desolate North. Frozen river-beds
+are the only path followed, for the high cliffs--almost like ramparts on
+the lower MacKenzie--shut off the drifting east winds that heap
+barricades of snow in one place and at another sweep the ground so clear
+that the sleighs pull heavy as stone. Does a husky fag? A flourish of
+whips and off the laggard scampers, keeping pace with the others in the
+traces, a pace that is set for forty miles a day with only one feeding
+time, nightfall when the sleighs are piled as a wind-break and the
+frozen fish are doled out to the ravenous dogs. Gun signals herald the
+hunter's approach to a chance camp; and no matter how small and mean the
+tepee, the door is always open for whatever visitor, the meat pot set
+simmering for hungry travellers. When the snow crust cuts the dogs'
+feet, buckskin shoes are tied on the huskies; and when an occasional dog
+fags entirely, he is turned adrift from the traces to die. Relentless
+as death is Northern cold; and wherever these long midwinter journeys
+are made, gruesome traditions are current of hunter and husky.
+
+I remember hearing of one old husky that fell hopelessly lame during the
+north trip. Often the drivers are utter brutes to their dogs, speaking
+in curses which they say is the only language a husky can understand,
+emphasized with the blows of a club. Too often, as well, the huskies are
+vicious curs ready to skulk or snap or bolt or fight, anything but work.
+But in this case the dog was an old reliable that kept the whole train
+in line, and the driver had such an affection for the veteran husky that
+when rheumatism crippled the dog's legs the man had not the heart to
+shoot such a faithful servant. The dog was turned loose from the traces
+and hobbled lamely behind the scampering teams. At last he fell behind
+altogether, but at night limped into camp whining his joy and asking
+dumbly for the usual fish. In the morning when the other teams set out,
+the old husky was powerless to follow. But he could still whine and wag
+his tail. He did both with all his might, so that when the departing
+driver looked back over his shoulder, he saw a pair of eyes pleading, a
+head with raised alert ears, shoulders straining to lift legs that
+refused to follow, and a bushy tail thwacking--thwacking--thwacking the
+snow!
+
+"You ought to shoot him," advised one driver.
+
+"You do it--you're a dead sure aim," returned the man who had owned the
+dog.
+
+But the other drivers were already coasting over the white wastes. The
+owner looked at his sleighs as if wondering whether they would stand an
+additional burden. Then probably reflecting that old age is not
+desirable for a suffering dog in a bitingly keen frost, he turned
+towards the husky with his hand in his belt. Thwack--thwack went the
+tail as much as to say: "Of course he wouldn't desert me after I've
+hauled his sleigh all my life! Thwack--thwack! I'd get up and jump all
+around him if I could; there isn't a dog-gone husky in all polar land
+with half as good a master as I have!"
+
+The man stopped. Instead of going to the dog he ran back to his sleigh,
+loaded his arms full of frozen fish and threw them down before the dog.
+Then he put one caribou-skin under the old dog, spread another over him
+and ran away with his train while the husky was still guzzling. The fish
+had been poisoned to be thrown out to the wolves that so often pursue
+Northern dog trains.
+
+Once a party of hunters crossing the Northern Rockies came on a dog
+train stark and stiff. Where was the master who had bidden them stand
+while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a blizzard for
+the lost path? In the middle of the last century, one of that famous
+family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown to go north to Red
+River in Canada. He never went back to Georgetown and he never reached
+Red River; but his coat was found fluttering from a tree, a death signal
+to attract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was
+discovered not far off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit
+pest and the rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves
+seldom give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains,
+licking up the stains of the bleeding feet, or hanging spectrally on
+the dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they
+seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where the wolves
+followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family from the North
+down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would
+follow so far?
+
+The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the days, till
+at last the sun, which has rolled across the south in a wheel of fire,
+dwindles to a disk, the disk to a rim--then no rim at all comes up, and
+it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of endless
+unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the starlight
+brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts
+and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire--all brighten the
+polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the region chiefly
+hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and Chippewyan half-breeds.
+The regular Northern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose
+their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of "little sticks," meaning
+the land where timber growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs.
+
+The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written across the
+white page of the snow. If there are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern
+grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; for
+the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of feet feathers have a
+habit of floundering under the powdery snow; and up through that powdery
+snow darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel-hunter of birds. If
+there are the deep plunges of the white hare, lynx and fox and mink and
+marten and pekan will be plentiful; for the poor white hare feeds all
+the creatures of the Northern wastes, man and beast. If there are little
+dainty tracks--oh, such dainty tracks that none but a high-stepping,
+clear-cut, clean-limbed, little thoroughbred could make them!--tracks of
+four toes and a thumb claw much shorter than the rest, with a padding of
+five basal foot-bones behind the toes, tracks that show a fluff on the
+snow as of furred foot-soles, tracks that go in clean, neat, clear long
+leaps and bounds--the hunter knows that he has found the signs of the
+Northern fox.
+
+Here, then, he will camp for the winter. Camping in the Far North means
+something different from the hastily pitched tent of the prairie. The
+north wind blows biting, keen, unbroken in its sweep. The hunter must
+camp where that wind will not carry scent of his tent to the animal
+world. For his own sake, he must camp under shelter from that wind,
+behind a cairn of stones, below a cliff, in a ravine. Poles have been
+brought from the land of trees on the dog sleigh. These are put up,
+criss-crossed at top, and over them is laid, not the canvas tent, but a
+tent of skins, caribou, wolf, moose, at a sharp enough angle to let the
+snow slide off. Then snow is banked deep, completely round the tent. For
+fire, the Eskimo depends on whale-oil and animal grease. The white man
+or half-breed from the South hoards up chips and sticks. But mainly he
+depends on exercise and animal food for warmth. At night he sleeps in a
+fur bag. In the morning that bag is frozen stiff as boards by the
+moisture of his own breath. Need one ask why the rarest furs, which can
+only be produced by the coldest of climates, are so costly?
+
+Having found the tracks of the fox, the hunter sets out his traps baited
+with fish or rabbit or a bird-head. If the snow be powdery enough, and
+the trapper keen in wild lore, he may even know what sort of a fox to
+expect. In the depths of midwinter, the white Arctic fox has a wool fur
+to his feet like a brahma chicken. This leaves its mark in the fluffy
+snow. A ravenous fellow he always is, this white fox of the hungry
+North, bold from ignorance of man, but hard to distinguish from the snow
+because of his spotless coat. The blue fox being slightly smaller than
+the full-grown Arctic, lopes along with shorter leaps by which the
+trapper may know the quarry; but the blue fox is just as hard to
+distinguish from the snow as his white brother. The gray frost haze is
+almost the same shade as his steel-blue coat; and when spring comes,
+blue fox is the same colour as the tawny moss growth. Colour is blue
+fox's defence. Consequently blue foxes show more signs of age than
+white--stubby ears frozen low, battle-worn teeth, dulled claws.
+
+The chances are that the trapper will see the black fox himself almost
+as soon as he sees his tracks; for the sheeny coat that is black fox's
+beauty betrays him above the snow. Bushy tail standing straight out,
+every black hair bristling erect with life, the white tail-tip flaunting
+a defiance, head up, ears alert, fore feet cleaving the air with the
+swift ease of some airy bird--on he comes, jump--jump--jump--more of a
+leap than a lope, galloping like a wolf, altogether different from the
+skulking run of little foxes, openly exulting in his beauty and his
+strength and his speed! There is no mistaking black fox. If the trapper
+does not see the black fox scurrying over the snow, the tell-tale
+characteristics of the footprints are the length and strength of the
+leaps. Across these leaps the hunter leaves his traps. Does he hope for
+a silver fox? Does every prospector expect to find gold nuggets? In the
+heyday of fur company prosperity, not half a dozen true silver foxes
+would be sent out in a year. To-day I doubt if more than one good silver
+fox is sent out in half a dozen years. But good white fox and black and
+blue are prizes enough in themselves, netting as much to the trapper as
+mink or beaver or sable.
+
+
+II
+
+_The White Ermine_
+
+All that was said of the mystery of fox life applies equally to ermine.
+Why is the ermine of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Dakota a dirty little
+weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a night, wearing a
+mahogany-coloured coat with a sulphur strip down his throat, while the
+ermine of the Arctics is as white as snow, noted for his courage,
+wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, yes, and take from him? For a
+long time the learned men who study animal life from museums held that
+the ermine's coat turned white from the same cause as human hair, from
+senility and debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying
+climate. But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby
+ermine born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the
+mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat something
+like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. They told
+of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a fresh layer of
+iron-gray fur that turned sulphur white within a few days. They told of
+the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine with the softest and
+whitest coats. That disposed of the senility theory. All the trapper
+knows is that the whitest ermine is taken when the cold is most intense
+and most continuous, that just as the cold slackens the ermine coat
+assumes the sulphur tinges, deepening to russet and brown, and that the
+whitest ermine instead of showing senility, always displays the most
+active and courageous sort of deviltry.
+
+Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is constantly surrounded by
+ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks almost like
+frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest of a poor
+grouse--eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest fouled so that it
+emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen lying dead from a wound
+in her throat. There is the frightened rabbit loping across the fields
+in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe-begone leaps, trying to shake
+something off that is clinging to his throat till over he tumbles--the
+prey of a hunter that is barely the size of rabbit's paw. There is the
+water-rat flitting across the rocks in blind terror, regardless of the
+watching trapper, caring only to reach safety--water--water! Behind
+comes the pursuer--this is no still hunt but a straight open chase--a
+little creature about the length of a man's hand, with a tail almost as
+long, a body scarcely the thickness of two fingers, a mouth the size of
+a bird's beak, and claws as small as a sparrow's. It gallops in lithe
+bounds with its long neck straight up and its beady eyes fastened on the
+flying water-rat. Splash--dive--into the water goes the rat!
+Splash--dive--into the water goes the ermine! There is a great stirring
+up of the muddy bottom. The water-rat has tried to hide in the
+under-tangle; and the ermine has not only dived in pursuit but headed
+the water-rat back from the safe retreat of his house. Up comes a black
+nose to the surface of the water. The rat is foolishly going to try a
+land race. Up comes a long neck like a snake's, the head erect, the
+beady eyes on the fleeing water-rat--then with a splash they race
+overland. The water-rat makes for a hole among the rocks. Ermine sees
+and with a spurt of speed is almost abreast when the rat at bay turns
+with a snap at his pursuer. But quick as flash, the ermine has
+pirouetted into the air. The long writhing neck strikes like a serpent's
+fangs and the sharp fore teeth have pierced the brain of the rat. The
+victim dies without a cry, without a struggle, without a pain. That long
+neck was not given the ermine for nothing. Neither were those muscles
+massed on either side of his jaws like bulging cheeks.
+
+In winter the ermine's murderous depredations are more apparent. Now the
+ermine, too, sets itself to reading the signs of the snow. Now the
+ermine becomes as keen a still hunter as the man. Sometimes a whirling
+snow-fall catches a family of grouse out from furze cover. The trapper,
+too, is abroad in the snow-storm; for that is the time when he can set
+his traps undetected. The white whirl confuses the birds. They run here,
+there, everywhere, circling about, burying themselves in the snow till
+the storm passes over. The next day when the hunter is going the rounds
+of these traps, along comes an ermine. It does not see him. It is
+following a scent, head down, body close to ground, nose here, there,
+threading the maze which the crazy grouse had run. But stop, thinks the
+trapper, the snow-fall covered the trail. Exactly--that is why the
+little ermine dives under snow just as it would under water, running
+along with serpentine wavings of the white powdery surface till up it
+comes again where the wind has blown the snow-fall clear. Along it runs,
+still intent, quartering back where it loses the scent--along again till
+suddenly the head lifts--that motion of the snake before it strikes! The
+trapper looks. Tail feathers, head feathers, stupid blinking eyes poke
+through the fluffy snow-drift. And now the ermine no longer runs openly.
+There are too many victims this time--it may get all the foolish hidden
+grouse; so it dives and if the man had not alarmed the stupid grouse,
+ermine would have darted up through the snow with a finishing stab for
+each bird.
+
+By still hunt and open hunt, by nose and eye, relentless as doom, it
+follows its victims to the death. Does the bird perch on a tree? Up goes
+the ermine, too, on the side away from the bird's head. Does the mouse
+thread a hundred mazes and hide in a hole? The ermine threads every
+maze, marches into the hidden nest and takes murderous possession. Does
+the rat hide under rock? Under the rock goes the ermine. Should the
+trapper follow to see the outcome of the contest, the ermine will
+probably sit at the mouth of the rat-hole, blinking its beady eyes at
+him. If he attacks, down it bolts out of reach. If he retires, out it
+comes looking at this strange big helpless creature with bold contempt.
+
+The keen scent, the keen eyes, the keen ears warn it of an enemy's
+approach. Summer and winter, its changing coat conceals it. The furze
+where it runs protects it from fox and lynx and wolverine. Its size
+admits it to the tiniest of hiding-places. All that the ermine can do to
+hunt down a victim, it can do to hide from an enemy. These qualities
+make it almost invincible to other beasts of the chase. Two joints in
+the armour of its defence has the little ermine. Its black tail-tip
+moving across snow betrays it to enemies in winter: the very intentness
+on prey, its excess of self-confidence, leads it into danger; for
+instance, little ermine is royally contemptuous of man's tracks. If the
+man does not molest it, it will follow a scent and quarter and circle
+under his feet; so the man has no difficulty in taking the little beast
+whose fur is second only to that of the silver fox. So bold are the
+little creatures that the man may discover their burrows under brush, in
+rock, in sand holes, and take the whole litter before the game mother
+will attempt to escape. Indeed, the plucky little ermine will follow the
+captor of her brood. Steel rat traps, tiny deadfalls, frosted bits of
+iron smeared with grease to tempt the ermine's tongue which the frost
+will hold like a vice till the trapper comes, and, most common of all,
+twine snares such as entrap the rabbit, are the means by which the
+ermine comes to his appointed end at the hands of men.
+
+The quality of the pelt shows as wide variety as the skin of the fox;
+and for as mysterious reasons. Why an ermine a year old should have a
+coat like sulphur and another of the same age a coat like swan's-down,
+neither trapper nor scientist has yet discovered. The price of the
+perfect ermine-pelt is higher than any other of the rare furs taken in
+North America except silver fox; but it no longer commands the fabulous
+prices that were certainly paid for specimen ermine-skins in the days
+of the Georges in England and the later Louis in France. How were those
+fabulously costly skins prepared? Old trappers say no perfectly downy
+pelt is ever taken from an ermine, that the downy effect is produced by
+a trick of the trade--scraping the flesh side so deftly that all the
+coarse hairs will fall out, leaving only the soft under-fur.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 45: That is, as far as trappers yet know.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR
+
+
+Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of nature's most
+harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of nature's most
+destructive agents, against traders who were rivals and Indians who were
+hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be himself a type of nature's
+arch-destroyer.
+
+Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and
+mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the most
+skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the crack of the
+trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his trap, seem the
+only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence that riots with a
+very fulness of life. But such a world is only a dream. The reality is
+cruel as death. Of all the creatures that prey, man is the most
+merciful.
+
+Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. There
+are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating capacity and
+penned off from the possibility of harming anything weaker than
+themselves. There are the private pets fed equally well, pampered and
+chained safely from harming or being harmed. There are the wild
+creatures roaming natural haunts, some two or three days' travel from
+civilization, whose natures have been gradually modified generation by
+generation from being constantly hunted with long-range repeaters.
+Judging from these sorts of wild animals, it certainly seems that the
+brute creation has been sadly maligned. The bear cubs lick each other's
+paws with an amatory singing that is something between the purr of a cat
+and the grunt of a pig. The old polars wrestle like boys out of school,
+flounder in grotesque gambols that are laughably clumsy, good-naturedly
+dance on their hind legs, and even eat from their keeper's hand. And all
+the deer family can be seen nosing one another with the affection of
+turtle-doves. Surely the worst that can be said of these animals is that
+they shun the presence of man. Perhaps some kindly sentimentalist
+wonders if things hadn't gone so badly out of gear in a certain historic
+garden long ago, whether mankind would not be on as friendly relations
+with the animal world as little boys and girls are with bears and
+baboons in the fairy books. And the scientist goes a step further, and
+soberly asks whether these wild things of the woods are not kindred of
+man after all; for have not man and beast ascended the same scale of
+life? Across the centuries, modern evolution shakes hands with
+old-fashioned transmigration.
+
+To be sure, members of the deer family sometimes kill their mates in
+fits of blind rage, and the innocent bear cubs fall to mauling their
+keeper, and the old bears have been known to eat their young. These
+things are set down as freaks in the animal world, and in nowise allowed
+to upset the influences drawn from animals living in unnatural
+surroundings, behind iron bars, or in haunts where long-range rifles
+have put the fear of man in the animal heart.
+
+Now the trapper studies animal life where there is neither a pen to keep
+the animal from doing what it wants to do, nor any rifle but his own to
+teach wild creatures fear. Knowing nothing of science and sentiment, he
+never clips facts to suit his theory. On the truthfulness of his eyes
+depends his own life, so that he never blinks his eyes to disagreeable
+facts.
+
+Looking out on the life of the wilds clear-visioned as his mountain air,
+the trapper sees a world beautiful as a dream but cruel as death. He
+sees a world where to be weak, to be stupid, to be dull, to be slow, to
+be simple, to be rash are the unpardonable crimes; where the weak must
+grow strong, keen of eye and ear and instinct, sharp, wary, swift, wise,
+and cautious; where in a word the weak must grow fit to survive
+or--perish!
+
+The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into the soft fur
+of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch the swooping
+talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself overland risks
+bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home colony. Bird preys on
+worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf on lynx, and bear on all
+creatures that live from men and moose down to the ant and the embryo
+life in the ant's egg. But the vision of ravening destruction does not
+lead the trapper to morbid conclusions on life as it leads so many
+housed thinkers in the walled cities; for the same world that reveals to
+him such ravening slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest
+and the strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of
+cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight,
+of semblance, of death--that will defend it from all enemies. The
+ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw an enemy
+off the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one of the most
+helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from foes of the
+air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind the breath of a
+pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a harrying eagle flopping
+head over heels on the ground, and simulate the stillness of inanimate
+objects surrounding it so truly that the passer-by can scarcely
+distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the russet bark of a log. And the
+rabbit's big eyes and ears are not given it for nothing.
+
+Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same reason. Both
+seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it is; and the world
+that they see is red in tooth and claw. But neither grows morbid from
+his vision; for that same vision shows each that the ravening
+destruction is only a weeding out of the unfit. There is too much
+sunlight in the trapper's world, too much fresh air in his lungs, too
+much red blood in his veins for the morbid miasmas that bring bilious
+fumes across the mental vision of the housed city man.
+
+And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper occupy?
+Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red-dyed monster,
+excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the hunter to slay, but
+after all only the most highly developed of the creatures that prey. Is
+this true? Arch-destroyer he may be; but it should be remembered that he
+is the destroyer of destroyers.
+
+Animals kill young and old, male and female.
+
+The true trapper does not kill the young; for that would destroy his
+next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with the
+young. He kills the grown males which--it can be safely said--have
+killed more of each other than man has killed in all the history of
+trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the pot-hunter, whether
+the sportsman for amusement or the settler supplying his larder, game
+has been exterminated. This is illustrated by all the stretch of country
+between the Platte and the Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been
+hunted only by the trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been.
+This is illustrated by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land
+south of Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come
+destroying grisly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and
+mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have increased.
+
+But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, something
+more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys _animal_ life--a
+life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and rapine and
+cruelty--in order that _human_ life may be preserved, may be rendered
+independent of the elemental powers that wage war against it.
+
+It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against the
+elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors
+conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing Fenris
+wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets of
+life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha hunting
+beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the trapper stands
+forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the
+obstacles that earth can offer to human will under his feet, finding
+paths through the wilderness for the explorer who was to come after him,
+opening doors of escape from stifled life in crowded centres of
+population, preparing a highway for the civilization that was to follow
+his own wandering trail through the wilds.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the
+entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life.
+It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian
+mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the
+diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she
+lived at Hamilton Inlet. Having related how she shot a deer, skinning it
+herself, made her snow-shoes and set her rabbit snares, she closes her
+first entry with:
+
+"Well, as I sed, I can't write much at a time now, for i am getting
+blind and some mist rises up before me if i sew, read or write a little
+while."
+
+Lydia Campbell's mother was captured by Eskimo. She ran away when she
+had grown up, to quote her own terse diary, "crossed a river on drift
+sticks, wading in shallows, through woods, meeting bears, sleeping under
+trees--seventy miles flight--saw a French boat--took off skirt and waved
+it to them--came--took my mother on board--worked for them--with the
+sealers--camped on the ice.
+
+"As there was no other kind of women to marrie hear, the few English men
+each took a wife of that sort and they never was sorry that they took
+them, for they was great workers and so it came to pass that I was one
+of the youngest of them." [Meaning, of course, that she was the daughter
+of one of these marriages.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Our young man pretended to spark the two daughters of Tomas. He was a
+one-armed man, for he had shot away one arm firing at a large bird....
+He double-loaded his gun in his fright, so the por man lost one of his
+armes,... he was so smart with his gun that he could bring down a bird
+flying past him, or a deer running past he would be the first to bring
+it down."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They was holden me hand and telling me that I must be his mother now as
+his own mother is dead and she was a great friend of mine although we
+could not understand each other's language sometimes, still we could
+make it out with sins and wonders."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"April 7, 1894.--Since I last wrote on this book, I have been what
+people call cruising about here. I have been visiting some of my
+friends, though scattered far apart, with my snow-shoes and axe on my
+shoulders. The nearest house to this place is about five miles up a
+beautiful river, and then through woods, what the french calls a
+portage--it is what I call pretty. Many is the time that I have been
+going with dogs and komatick 40 or 50 years ago with my husband and
+family to N. W. River, to the Hon. Donald A. Smith and family to keep N.
+Year or Easter."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My dear old sister Hannah Mishlin who is now going on for 80 years old
+and she is smart yet, she hunts fresh meat and chops holes in the 3 foot
+ice this very winter and catches trout with her hook, enough for her
+household, her husband not able to work, he has a bad complaint."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You must please excuse my writing and spelling for I have never been to
+school, neither had I a spelling book in my young day--me a native of
+this country, Labrador, Hamilton's Inlet, Esquimaux Bay--if you wish to
+know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Lydia Brooks, then
+Blake, after Blake, now Campbell. So you see ups and downs has been my
+life all through, and now I am what I am--prais the Lord."
+
+"I have been hunting most every day since Easter, and to some of my
+rabbit snares and still traps, cat traps and mink traps. I caught 7
+rabbits and 1 marten and I got a fix and 4 partridges, about 500 trout
+besides household duties--never leave out morning and Evening prayers
+and cooking and baking and washing for 5 people--3 motherless little
+children--with so much to make for sale out of seal skin and deer skin
+shoes, bags and pouches and what not.... You can say well done old
+half-breed woman in Hamilton's Inlet. Good night, God bless us all and
+send us prosperity.
+
+  "Yours ever true,
+
+  "LYDIA CAMPBELL."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We are going to have an evening worship, my poor old man is tired, he
+has been a long way to-day and he shot 2 beautyful white partridges. Our
+boy heer shot once spruce partridge."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Caplin so plentiful boats were stopped, whales, walrusses and white
+bears."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Muligan River, May 24, 1894.--They say that once upon a time the world
+was drowned and that all the Esquimaux were drownded but one family and
+he took his family and dogs and chattels and his seal-skin boat and Kiak
+and Komaticks and went on the highest hill that they could see, and
+stayed there till the rain was over and when the water dried up they
+descended down the river and got down to the plains and when they could
+not see any more people, they took off the bottoms of their boots and
+took some little white [seal] pups and sent the poor little things off
+to sea and they drifted to some islands far away and became white
+people. Then they done the same as the others did and the people spread
+all over the world. Such was my poor father's thought.... There is up
+the main river a large fall, the same that the American and English
+gentlemen have been up to see. [Referring to Mr. Bryant, of
+Philadelphia, who visited Grand Falls.] Well there is a large whirlpool
+or hole at the bottom of the fall. The Indians that frequent the place
+say that there is three women--Indians--that lives under that place or
+near to it I am told, and at times they can hear them speaking to each
+other louder than the roar of the falls." [The Indians always think the
+mist of a waterfall signifies the presence of ghosts.]
+
+"I have been the cook of that great Sir D. D. Smith that is in Canada at
+this time. [In the days when Lord Strathcona was chief trader at
+Hamilton Inlet.] He was then at Rigolet Post, a chief trader only, now
+what is he so great! He was seen last winter by one of the women that
+belong to this bay. She went up to Canada ... and he is gray headed and
+bended, that is Sir D. D. Smith."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"August 1, 1894.--My dear friends, you will please excuse my writing and
+spelling--the paper sweems by me, my eyesight is dim now----"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Trapper, by A. C. Laut
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