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BUILDERS OF THE NATION 
 
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 From the Indian Trail to the Railroad 
 
 National Edition 
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NATIONAL EDITION 
 
 COMPLETE IN TWEIYE VOLUMES 
 
 THE TRAPPER 
 
 By 
 
 A. C. Laut 
 
 Author of Heralds of Empire, etc 
 
 NEWTORK 
 
A 
 
 Copyright, 1902 
 By D. APPLETON & COMPANY 
 
 Copyright, 1908 
 By THE BRAMPTON SOCIETY 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB PAGE 
 
 XII. BA TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER .... 144 
 
 XIII. JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER . . . 160 
 
 XIV. THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 181 
 
 XV. ROOT 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 
 
 Trapper. II. 
 
 " o. n 
 
 -i - __ __ t> U 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS 
 
 A TRAPPER ON HIS GUARD . . . FRONTISPIECE 
 
 From an Original Painting by Frank T. Johnson 
 
 PAGE 
 
 OLD WEDGE FUR PRESS IN USE AT FORT RESOLUTION, 
 
 OP THE SUB-ARCTICS (IN TEXT) .... 144 
 
 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 
 
 Trapper. II. 
 
THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 CHAPTEK 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 conies back from the wilds with a legend of how 
 harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn t be 
 lieve 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 ani 
 mals did not teach the poor bear the art of self-de 
 fence. 
 
 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 Com 
 pany 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. 
 
TYPE OF FUR PRESS. 
 
 Old wedge press in use at Fort Resolution, of the Sub-Arctics. 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 145 
 
 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.* 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 egg 
 shell by something that had risen swift and silent from 
 a lair on the other side of the logs and dealt the climb 
 ing 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 curi 
 ous 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, 
 
 * In further confirmation of Montagnais s bear, the chief fac 
 tor 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. 
 
146 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 coining 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 pour 
 ing 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 car 
 rying 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 Eockies a 
 long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled sinuously over 
 the crests of the foothills; and all game bird and 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR IIUNTER 147 
 
 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 tarn," 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 
 
14:8 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 pres 
 sures 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 foot 
 hill 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 indis- 
 tinguishably 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 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 149 
 
 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 fall 
 ing 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 mo 
 ment 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 hol 
 low 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- 
 
150 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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. 
 
 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, brush 
 ing 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 gargon, was dat bear! " 
 
 Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 151 
 
 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 shim 
 mering 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 Mis 
 souri 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 re 
 gion 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 near 
 by and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to 
 escape the invading badger.* What had dug the hole? 
 Ba tiste thinks that he knows. 
 
 That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is an 
 other kind of hole a roundish pit dug between moss- 
 
 * 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. 
 
152 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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. 
 Pie 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. 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 153 
 
 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 cotton 
 tail 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 
 V lines, wing geese migrating southward for the sea 
 son. 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 
 
154 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 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, " no 
 body 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 in 
 stant 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 - 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 155 
 
 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 im 
 possible 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 strik 
 ing 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 strug 
 gling 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 com 
 rade from the ground. 
 
 The bear had had him on his back between her 
 teeth by the thick chest piece of his double-breasted 
 buck-skin. 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 
 
156 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 sis 
 ters 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 at 
 tacked, that they would never become ravening crea 
 tures 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! 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 157 
 
 ton jours ! the bear ! it is a beast ! always al 
 ways ! " And his hands clinch. 
 
 Then he falls to carving of the little wooden ani 
 mals 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 siezed his gun and prepared to de 
 fend himself against the attack of an enemy; they hur 
 ried 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. Lajimon 
 iere, who was an intrepid hunter, baited her with the 
 butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as he 
 
158 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while try 
 ing to save him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being 
 choked, cried with all his strength: i 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 be 
 fore 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 La 
 jimoniere, 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 Prai 
 ries for many years, but when the first missionaries 
 reached Eed Eiver 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 em 
 ployed his time during the last years of his life in mak- 
 
BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 159 
 
 ing crosses and crucifixes blind as he was, but he never 
 made any chefs d ceuvre" 
 
 Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the 
 bear. And these things are not of the past. Wher 
 ever 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. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 
 
 LONG before sunrise hunters were astir in the moun 
 tains. 
 
 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 sun 
 down when the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the 
 smothered roar of rivers under ice, the rush of whirl 
 pools 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 supersti 
 tious fears. 
 
 The gnomes, called in trapper s vernacular " hoo- 
 doos " great pillars of sandstone higher than a house, 
 left standing in valleys by prehistoric floods were to 
 160 
 
JOHN COLTERFREE TRAPPER K>1 
 
 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 brush 
 wood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the 
 prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so 
 12 
 
162 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 sharp that French voyageurs gave this queer craft the 
 name Cf canot a bee 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 cafions of 
 the mountain streams. It was usually a common dug 
 out, 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 en 
 folded them, and there was no trace of human pres 
 ence 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 Black- 
 foot 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. 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 103 
 
 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 dam 
 ming 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 con 
 sidered 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 un 
 lucky morning and the men had decided to trap farther 
 up-stream ; for when the mists began to rise, the hunt 
 ers were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver mead 
 ow, they continued paddling up-stream away from the 
 Jefferson. A more hidden watercourse 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 com 
 pressed 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 
 
164 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 pad 
 dling six miles above the Jefferson with daylight grow 
 ing 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 re 
 treat 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 Black- 
 feet? 
 
 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 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 165 
 
 shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an 
 elbow of rock into the narrow course of a creek. In 
 stantly out sprang five or six hundred Blackfeet war 
 riors 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 inter 
 cept them at this narrow pass. The chief stepped for 
 ward, 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 situ 
 ation, 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 mo 
 ment 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, " Col 
 ter, 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 <e made a riddle of." 
 
166 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 war 
 rior 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. Doubt 
 less he regretted having left the well-defended bri 
 gades of the fur companies to hunt alone in the wilder 
 ness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gam 
 bler s vice the more a man has, the more he wants. 
 Had not Colter crossed the Eockies 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 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 1G7 
 
 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 pro 
 visions, 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 meth 
 ods 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 emphati 
 cally 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 de 
 pended on the Indian. Renegades like Bird, the de 
 serter from the Hudson s Bay Company, or Eose, who 
 abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal 
 
168 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 Bonne- 
 ville of the army, whose underlings caused such mur 
 derous slaughter among the Eoot 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 des 
 perado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting In 
 dians like dogs, his crimes were committed under the 
 walls of the American Fur Company s fort. MacLel- 
 lan 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 180G ; 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 In 
 dian hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 169 
 
 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 7 Wester in Canada, all classes of trap 
 pers 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 with 
 holding supplies in its great white northern wilder 
 nesses, 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 ex 
 terminated game, and carried on the same ruthless 
 warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatche 
 wan, 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 com 
 manding figure John Johnston of the Soo, who set 
 tled 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 
 
170 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 tribe s warriors. In vain Johnston sued for her hand. 
 Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his Irish es 
 tates 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 com 
 panies 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 ad 
 venturer. 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 consid 
 ers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted the wil 
 derness 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 At 
 lantic 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 circum 
 stances 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.* 
 
 * Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment 
 if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian ; that 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 171 
 
 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 re 
 cruited 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 Mis 
 souri competition raged from 1810, so that circum 
 stances drove the free trapper westward to the moun 
 tains, 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 nar 
 row defile overtowered by the lonely flat-crowned peak 
 called Crowds Nest Mountain that is, where the fugi 
 tive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet. 
 
 if Johnston had not married Wabogish s daughter and if John 
 ston 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 for 
 get 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 f The writer knows the West from 
 only fifteen years of life and travel there ; yet with that imper 
 fect knowledge cannot recall a single fur post without some tra 
 dition of an unfamed Pocahontas. 
 
172 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 In the United States, the free hunters also ap 
 proached 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 in 
 stance, 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 moun 
 tains 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 edi 
 ble 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 emaci 
 ated 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 
 
JOHN COLTER-FREE TRAPPER 173 
 
 of woods and streams, the white man was " big knife 
 you/ in distinction to the red man carrying only primi 
 tive 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 hunt 
 ing-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. In 
 dian 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 In 
 dians 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 
 
 OFTSE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
174 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 sud 
 den 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 em- 
 barras 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 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 175 
 
 of the drift-wood. Friendly Indians did not conceal 
 themselves,, but came to the river bank waving a buf 
 falo-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 voyayeur 
 through hostile lands. Always the spring floods drift 
 ed 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 com 
 pany 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 ap 
 proached too near. On the high rolling plains, hostiles 
 could be descried at a distance, coming over the hori 
 zon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or emer 
 ging 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. 
 
176 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 Mac- 
 Kenzie 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 expres 
 sion meaning the end of that part of the trip there 
 rose on the west rolling foothills and dark peaked pro 
 files 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, sweep 
 ing up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers 
 sought out the hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where 
 neither pack horse nor canot a lee d esturgeon could 
 follow. How did they do it? Very much the way; 
 
JOHN COLTER-FREE TRAPPER 177 
 
 Simon Frasers 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, . . . other 
 wise 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, help 
 less, 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 
 
178 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 ! 
 
JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 179 
 
 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, corning 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 Eiver. 
 
 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 
 
180 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 small-type foot-note to his book published in London 
 in 1817. 
 
 Two other adventures are on record similar to Col 
 ter s: one of Oskononton s escape by diving under a 
 raft, told in Boss 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 Rela 
 tions. 
 
 And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri 
 a few years later, Colter could scarcely resist the im 
 pulse to go a fourth time to the wilds. But fascina 
 tions stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come 
 to his life he had taken to himself a bride. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 
 
 IN the history of the world only one corporate com 
 pany 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 genera 
 tion, were one long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of 
 ambushed death, of grim purpose, of silent achieve 
 ment. 
 
 Such was the company of " Adventurers of England 
 Trading into Hudson s Bay," as the charter of 1670 
 designated them.* Such is the Hudson s Bay Company 
 to-day still trading with savages in the white wilder 
 ness 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 
 
 * The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter 
 seems to be the only reason for the company s name always hav 
 ing the apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as 
 Hudson Bay. 
 
 181 
 
182 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 changing centuries; but the character of the company s 
 personnel has never changed. Prince Bupert, the first 
 governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James 
 II); and the royal governor by a long line of distin 
 guished public men down to Lord Strathcona, the pres 
 ent governor, and C. C. Chipman, the chief commis 
 sioner 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 un 
 known for the zest of conquering it. It has been to 
 the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged. 
 
 Eadisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who 
 first brought back word of the great wealth in furs 
 round the far northern sea, had been gentlemen ad 
 venturers " rascals " their enemies called them. 
 Prince Eupert, who leagued himself with the French 
 men 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 Hud 
 son s Bay Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, 
 the company s third governor, was as great an adven 
 turer 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 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 183 
 
 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 Parlia 
 ment 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 fast 
 nesses? Visit one of the northern forts as it exists 
 to-day. 
 
 The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The far 
 ther 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 
 
184 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 the south-east here ; and until the spring equinox, bring 
 ing 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 ic welcomed at the northern fur 
 posts by a firing of cannon from the snow-muffled bas 
 tions. Before the stars have faded, chapel services be 
 gin. 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. 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 185 
 
 Dogs unharnessed,, in troop the trappers to the ban 
 quet-hall, flinging packs of tightly roped peltries down 
 promiscuously, to be sorted next day. One Indian en 
 ters 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 stove- 
 1 pipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to 
 the urchin s neck. The old people have more resem 
 blance 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 tooth 
 less requests for something to eat or something to wear, 
 
186 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 bury- 
 ing-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. Else 
 where 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 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 187 
 
 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 hear 
 ing of one such midday feast in Ked Kiver 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 sacri 
 fice by Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old mus 
 kets and Indian masks and scalp-locks, bringing back 
 the days when Eussian traders instigated a massacre 
 at this fort and when white traders flew at each other s 
 throats as Nor 7 Westers struggled with Hudson s Bay 
 for supremacy in the fur trade. 
 
188 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 " Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fight 
 ers, 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 ? " * 
 
 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 Eockies, 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. " Bi- 
 gosh ! 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 illus 
 trative gesture. " Bien, done ! 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 
 
 * To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white 
 traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly. 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 189 
 
 oP bear sleep in snow. Montagnais, he tumble on hees 
 back ! Mais, messieur, de bear diable ! fore Mon- 
 tagnais 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 forgot 
 ten; and as soon as the Indians recover from post 
 prandial torpor bartering begins. In one of the ware 
 houses 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 mul 
 tiply. 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, 
 
190 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 com 
 promise 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 com 
 mon 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, , J, 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 year 
 ly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000 blue, 100,000 red, half 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OP THE WORLD 191 
 
 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. Buf 
 falo was once the staple of the hunter. What the buf 
 falo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the In 
 dian 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. Ex 
 cept one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares the 
 land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the vary 
 ing 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 inter 
 minable 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 In 
 dian has ever been turned away. The trader advances 
 what the Indian needs and chalks up so many " beaver " 
 against the trapper s next hunt. 
 
192 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 med 
 ical aid; but the first thing Hudson s Bay traders did 
 in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded the Saskatche 
 wan 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 tele 
 graphic 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- 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 193 
 
 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 un 
 wary 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 run 
 way 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, stran 
 gling 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 trot 
 ting 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. 
 14 
 
194 
 
 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 Saskatche 
 wan 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 scarci 
 ty 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 In 
 dian, " beaver " currency must be compared to merchan 
 dise, one beaver buying such a red handkerchief as 
 trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunt 
 ers not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two 
 an axe, from eight to twenty a gun or rifle, according 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 195 
 
 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 trap 
 per ? 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 trap 
 per s compass. For those hunters who have gone west 
 ward 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 un 
 disturbed by storms, snow falls falls falls, without 
 ceasing, heaping the pines with snow mushrooms, blot 
 ting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the 
 notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rus 
 tling 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 
 
196 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper 
 may be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migra 
 tion of game from the grounds to which he has come, 
 or run to earth by the ravenous timber-wolves that pur 
 sue the dog teams for leagues ; but the trapper with In 
 dian 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 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 197 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 
 takes 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 MacKen- 
 zie. In winter, scampering huskies with a running post 
 man 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 hayings 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 
 
 * 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. 
 
198 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 inconve 
 nience to the horse. 
 
 A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white dec 
 orated the leading cart. During the Sioux massacres 
 the fur caravans were unmolested, for the Indians rec 
 ognised 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. 
 
 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 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 \t 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 199 
 
 paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The 
 bowman it is who leaps out first when there is " track 
 ing " 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 pacl~~ +o 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 cer 
 tainty 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 Hol 
 land 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 struc 
 ture 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. 
 
200 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 Once more to the map. With one prong of a com 
 pass 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 Kupert 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 II. B. C.* 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 gre 
 nades 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 situ 
 ated 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 water- 
 
 * The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians there 
 would be no trade. 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 201 
 
 way, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into 
 the land of winter night and micKight sun, extend Hud 
 son 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 Paci 
 fic 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 Gov 
 ernment, 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 for 
 tunes of the hunt vary; but the principal posts not 
 including winter quarters for a special hunt have prob 
 ably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen 
 
202 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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, ca 
 noe 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 sel 
 dom abused.* 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 pa 
 trol a territory as large as Siberia, the company s fac 
 tor is still the chief representative of the law s power. 
 Times without number under the old regime has a Hud 
 son 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 un 
 punished 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 
 
 * Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most 
 conspicuous for his brutality. 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 203 
 
 as surely he knows if he cornr? its any crime that same 
 unbending, fearless white man will pursue and pur 
 sue and pursue guilt to the death. One case is on rec 
 ord 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 flip 
 pancy it might be said " Ay eye for an eye and a tooth 
 for a tooth," as well as " A skin for a skin " which ex 
 plains 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 am 
 phibious 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 ; Blackf eet and Crows, 
 game birds of the foothills that have harried all other 
 tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the moun 
 tains behind them, glorying in war as the finest kind 
 of hunting; mountain tribes Stonies, Kootenais, Sho*- 
 shonies splendid types of manhood because only the 
 fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains; 
 
204 THE STOEY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot low and lazy be 
 cause the great rivers feed them with salmon and they 
 have no need to work. 
 
 Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilder 
 ness the Hudson s Bay Company has ruled for two and 
 a half centuries with smaller loss of life in the aggre 
 gate than the railways of the United States cause in a 
 single year. 
 
 Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trap 
 pers have been assassinated by Indians. Forts have 
 been wiped out of existence. Ten, twenty, thirty tra 
 ders 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 at 
 tending 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 Hanked if 
 he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians 
 than he was. 
 
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 205 
 
 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. 
 
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 jerk 
 ing 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 
 206 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 207 
 
 explored the Missouri-Columbia route; but years be 
 fore 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 Rock 
 ies, 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 chart- 
 less sea and mountains that were a wilderness? How 
 does the wavey know where to find the rush-grown in 
 land pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek re 
 fuge 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 un 
 conscious 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 track 
 ing 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 acute- 
 ness 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 
 
208 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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, mocca 
 sins, 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 cou 
 gar 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 lucif ee gorging himself full of " little white 
 chaps " and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dap 
 ple 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 wher 
 ever 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 209 
 
 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 can 
 vas 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 bar 
 gain with the chief factor over the pelts. At the fur 
 post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunt 
 ing-field, when suddenly menaced by some great dan 
 ger, he would cry out in the Indian tongue words that 
 meant " Great Spirit ! " And it is altogether prob 
 able 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 Minne 
 sota, trappers do not usually go to the wilds alone; but 
 there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that Koot 
 15 
 
210 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 crea 
 tures 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 pre 
 served as stolid a countenance as the rabbit playing 
 dead or simulating a block of wood. Where the foot 
 prints 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 211 
 
 cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back 
 with many a zigzag to the first snare made. If rab 
 bits 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 numer 
 ous, 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 instruc 
 tions 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. Eabbit 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. 
 
212 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 snow- 
 buntings 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 pro 
 test 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 shower 
 ing 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 fusil 
 lade and infantry shooters answering sharp. By-and- 
 bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the 
 shadows dancing; and the wall 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 213 
 
 under cover parallel to the man, looking with rabbit 
 curiosity at this strange newcomer to the swamp home 
 of the animal world. Root s sense of feel told him 
 that it wasn t a rabbit; but he tried to persuade him 
 self that it was, the way a timid listener persuades her 
 self 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 soli 
 tude 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 cour 
 ageous, 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 door 
 way, 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 
 
214 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 be 
 fore the fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moc 
 casins 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 toss 
 ing 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 be 
 fore 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 215 
 
 out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The 
 padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the ani 
 mal 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 baf 
 fled, 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,, memo 
 ries 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 de 
 vouring 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 
 
216 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 heen 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 flat 
 tened 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. 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 
 
 Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the 
 swamp woods, he had known that there were rival hunt 
 ers, 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 re 
 mains 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 sea 
 son 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 buck 
 skin sacks round the dog s feet and made a few more 
 
218 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 cud 
 dled 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 219 
 
 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 heav 
 ing 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 
 
220 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 trap 
 per 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 be 
 side 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 di 
 rections 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 
 
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 221 
 
 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 im 
 agined 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? Eunning 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. 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 
 
 OTHEK LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE KAB- 
 BIT BEING AN ACCOUNT OF MUSQUASH THE MUSK- 
 KAT, 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 round 
 ish 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 clock 
 work and electric trams with the ceaseless iteration of 
 222 
 
MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 223 
 
 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 happi 
 ness, 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 car 
 ries 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 whin* 
 as if the light green musk-plant were growing some 
 where 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 be 
 tween 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 stag 
 nant 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 
 
224 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bot 
 tom 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 re 
 sumed, 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 
 
MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 225 
 
 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 sur 
 face 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 moun 
 tains 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 trap 
 per 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-cov 
 ered 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 
 16 
 
226 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 heaver, as the Indians call him is 
 not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened from, 
 his home as amislc* the beaver. In fact, nature s pro 
 vision for the musk-rat s protection seems to have em 
 boldened 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. hun 
 dred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held in 
 esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of 
 
 * Amisk, the Chippewyan, umisk, the Cree, with much the 
 same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he con 
 sidered 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. 
 
MUSQUASH THE MUSK RAT 227 
 
 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 Hud 
 son s Bay Company fort. In Canada the climate com 
 pels 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 tim 
 ber-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 im 
 portant of all, musk-rat s family is as numerous as a 
 cat s, five to nine rats in a litter, and two or three lit 
 ters 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 ani- 
 
228 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 ob 
 served 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 in 
 flowing 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 ex 
 press 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. 
 
 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 wol 
 verine s claws; how much less will this round nest of 
 
8 I 
 
 c ;r 
 
MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 229 
 
 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 un 
 der water before the swamp receded. Perhaps a mus 
 sel or lily bulb has been left in the deserted larder. 
 From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the top 
 most wall will not measure more than two or three 
 feet. If the swamp had not dried here, the stupid lit 
 tle 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. 
 
230 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 win 
 ter there is more important work than hunting musk- 
 rat. Musk-rat-trapping is for odd days before the regu 
 lar 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 at 
 taches to a stake driven into the water so that the 
 prisoner will be held under when he plunges to es 
 cape till h\ is drowned. Otherwise, he would gnaw 
 his foot free of the trap and disappear in a burrow. 
 
MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 231 
 
 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 splash 
 ing 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 hid 
 den, the man has twenty or thirty on the bank. Go 
 ing 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 
 ton 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 Eng 
 land to Paris, and from Paris to St. Petersburg with 
 accelerating cost mark till the Russian grandee is pay 
 ing $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 
 
232 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 bad day s work, considering he did not go to the uni 
 versity 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 count 
 less rapids. But he will get all that he needs, all that 
 he wants, all that his labour is worth, this " lazy vaga 
 bond " 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 ques 
 tion there is only one answer. Linings for coats are 
 more important life-savers than all the humane socie 
 ties 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 destruc 
 tive animal and appropriate its coat. 
 
SIKAK THE SKUNK 233 
 
 II 
 
 Sikak the Skunk 
 
 Sikak the skunk it is who supplies the best imita 
 tions 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 invinci 
 ble 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 cuttle 
 fish is the only other creature that possesses as power 
 ful 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 oblivi 
 ous 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 hunt 
 ing the skunk was of three men on the North Sas- 
 
234: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 scram 
 bling through the window into their cabin and rum 
 maging 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 Pres 
 byterian love of argument wished to debate the ques 
 tion. 
 
 " An what for wu d a leave it eating a the oat 
 meal? Ill 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 blunder 
 ing 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. 
 
WENUSK THE BADGER 235 
 
 III 
 Wenusk the Badger 
 
 Badger, too, is one of the furs taken by the trap 
 per 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 East 
 ern 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- 
 
236 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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. 
 
 Like the musk-rat, badger is prime in the au 
 tumn. Wherever the hunting-grounds of the ani 
 mals are, there will the hunting-grounds of the trap 
 per be. Badgers run most where gophers sit sun 
 ning themselves on the clay mounds, ready to bolt 
 down to their subterranean burrows on the first ap 
 proach 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. 
 
WENUSK THE BADGER 237 
 
 Once a day regularly every afternoon out of his lair 
 he emerges for the most comical sorts of athletic ex 
 ercises. Hour after hour he will trot diagonally be 
 cause 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 develop 
 ments 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 gal 
 leries 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 
 
238 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 de 
 voured 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 un 
 settled 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 COON 239 
 
 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. 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 
 
 THE BARE FUES HOW THE TEAPPEE TAKES SAKWA- 
 SEW THE MINK, NEKIK THE OTTEE, WUCHAK THE 
 FISHEE, AND WAPISTAN THE MAETEN 
 
 Sakwaseiv the Mink 
 
 THEEE 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 monot 
 onous 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. 
 240 
 
SAKWASEW THE MINK 
 
 But the circling hawk is as silent as the very per 
 sonification 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 inten 
 tions 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 vet 
 erans 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 
 17 
 
242 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 clutch 
 ing 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. 
 
 Eunning 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 foot 
 print on the wet clay, a tiny marking of double dots 
 where the feet have crossed a dry stone, the trapper 
 
SAKWASEW THE MINK 243 
 
 slowly takes up the trail of the mink. Mink arc 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 
 y ear 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 nes t 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 some 
 thing 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 
 
244 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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-tem 
 pered gash to the clog 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 
 
SAKWASEW THE MINK 245 
 
 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 Eussian 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 sin 
 gle 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 cur 
 rent would keep in motion below the waterfall. Care 
 lessly, next day, he threw the fish-heads among the 
 stones. The second morning he found such a multi 
 tude 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 
 
246 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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, spit 
 ting 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 sun 
 burned from black to russet had hobbled up to the sur 
 face of the water, peered sharply at the man sitting so 
 still, paddled little flipper-like feet about, then clucked 
 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 
 
NEKIK THE OTTER 
 
 heads a mother otter teaching her habies 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 fright 
 ened 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 conceal 
 ing 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 be 
 fore 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 
 
24:8 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 hunt 
 ing 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 subter 
 ranean 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 sur 
 prised 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 can 
 not 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 
 
NEKIK THE OTTER 249 
 
 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 tobog 
 gan 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 recon 
 noitring 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 unpre- 
 meditatedly 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. 
 
250 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 He does not wish to frighten the otter till the last has 
 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 tilings: (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 Saskatche 
 wan 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 
 
WUCHAK THE FISHER, OR PEKAN 251 
 
 prices paid. Ermine not worth twenty-five cents in 
 Wisconsin might be worth ten times as much on the 
 Saskatchewan. 
 
 So it is with the otter. All trapped between lati 
 tude 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. 
 
 Ill 
 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 in 
 truder tugging at the bait inside, he overlays all with 
 
252 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 leaves and brush to quiet the pekan s suspicions. Be 
 sides, the pekan has many tricks akin to the wolverine. 
 He is an inveterate thief. There is a well-known in 
 stance 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 short 
 ened the line to thirty miles and for six times in suc 
 cession 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. 
 
WAPISTAN THE MARTEN 253 
 
 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 trap 
 per 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 foot 
 print, 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 trap 
 per sends in his dog or prods with a stick. Finding 
 
254 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 un 
 used 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 al 
 most 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 dis 
 aster 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 
 yushes through the underbush. Once caught in the 
 
WAPISTAN THE MARTEN 255 
 
 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 squir 
 rels 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 wapis 
 tan, 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 div 
 ing 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 
 
256 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 dis 
 covered 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, 
 
WAPISTAN THE MARTEN 257 
 
 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. 
 
 18 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 UNDER THE NORTH STAR WHERE FOX AND ERMINE 
 
 RUN 
 
 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 
 258 
 
OF FOXES, MANY AND VARIOUS 259 
 
 fawn. The hairs arc 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 nonde 
 script 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 
 
260 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 pro 
 duce 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 won 
 derful 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 w r hite 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 
 
OF FOXES, MANY AND VARIOUS 2f)l 
 
 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 un 
 learned trapper s verdict there are as many species 
 as there are foxes. Black fox is at its best in mid 
 winter, 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 deli 
 cately 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 mid 
 winter? 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 differ 
 ent cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs grow, those 
 
262 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER 
 
 pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red be 
 comes cross; and what they become at maturity, that 
 they remain, varying only with the seasons.* 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 trap 
 ping. 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 sur 
 prising that little pelts barely two feet long have 
 sold for prices ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the 
 
 * That is, as far as trappers yet know. 
 
OF FOXES, MANY AND VARIOUS 263 
 
 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 dis 
 tant 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 Church 
 ill on the bay, but from one of the little inland Mac- 
 Kenzie Eiver 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 ap 
 proach 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 travel 
 lers. When the snow crust cuts the dogs feet, buck 
 skin shoes are tied on the huskies; and when an occa 
 sional dog fags entirely, he is turned adrift from the 
 
264 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 traces to die. Eelentless 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 affec 
 tion for the veteran husky that when rheumatism 
 crippled the clog 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 power 
 less 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 
 
OF FOXES, MANY AND VARIOUS 2C5 
 
 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 
 Eockies 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 bliz 
 zard 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 Eiver 
 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 at 
 tract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost 
 trader was discovered not far off in the snow. Un 
 less 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- 
 
266 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 ing feet, or hanging spectrally on the dim frosty hori 
 zon 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 North 
 ern 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 
 
OF FOXES, MANY AND VARIOUS 267 
 
 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? 
 
268 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 char- 
 
THE WHITE ERMINE 269 
 
 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. 
 
 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 mahog 
 any-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 
 
270 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 contin 
 uous, 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 courage 
 ous sort of deviltry. 
 
 Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is con 
 stantly 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, try 
 ing 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 
 
THB WHITE ERMINE 271 
 
 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 er 
 mine 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 be 
 comes 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, bury 
 ing 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 
 
272 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 the crazy grouse had run. But stop, thinks the trap 
 per, 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, re 
 lentless 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 hid 
 den 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 at 
 tacks, 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 
 
THE WHITE ERMINE 273 
 
 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 in 
 vincible 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 ene 
 mies in winter: the very intentncss on prey, its ex 
 cess of self-confidence, leads it into danger; for in 
 stance, 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 bur 
 rows 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 dead 
 falls, 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, mo^t 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 sul 
 phur 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 
 19 
 
274 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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. 
 
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 drean. 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 pots fed equally 
 well, pampered and chained safely from harming or 
 being harmed. There are the wild creatures roaming 
 
 275 
 
276 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 natural haunts, some two or throe days travel from 
 civilization, whose natures have been gradually modi 
 fied 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 affec 
 tion 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 transmi 
 gration. 
 
 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 
 
WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 277 
 
 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 hut his own to teach wild 
 creatures fear. Knowing nothing of science and senti 
 ment, 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 
 
278 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 
 
WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 279 
 
 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 he safely said have killed 
 more of each other than man has killed in all the 
 history of trapping. Wherever regions have heen 
 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 Sas 
 katchewan. 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 Innnan 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 w r hich the trapper stands forth as a con 
 queror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the 
 
280 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 obstacles that earth can offer to human will under Ms 
 feet, finding paths through the wilderness for the ex 
 plorer who was to come after him, opening doors of 
 escape from stifled life in crowded centres of popula 
 tion, preparing a highway for the civilization that was 
 to follow his own wandering trail through the wilds. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 WHEN in Labrador and Newfoundland a fews 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 Decem 
 ber, 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 
 
 281 
 
282 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 
 
APPENDIX 283 
 
 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 today 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 Koma- 
 ticks 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 Amer 
 ican 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 
 
284: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 
 
 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 " 
 
 (3) 
 
 THE END 
 
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